Tom McCarthy - C

“I dream of going down in flames each night,” Clegg mumbles. “It’s always the same: the bed’s on fire. It starts at its foot, and moves up. I try to tip the whole thing back, then stall and side-slip down, but it never works.”

“You could put it out by wetting yourself,” Serge tells him.

The men all burst into laughter again, but this time it’s hollow. They’re all terrified of becoming carboneezay, flamers. Candles are now banned on board the houseboat lest, by setting fire to its wooden beams, they allow the “orange death” that stalks them in the sky to catch up with them even on the ground; paraffin lamps have been replaced by electric bulbs inside the mess; even sparking up cigarettes causes the men to shudder as they flip the lighter’s lid shut with a kind of angry vehemence. Of all the pilots and observers, Serge alone remains unhaunted by the prospect of a fiery airborne end. He’s not unaware of it: just unbothered. The idea that his flesh could melt and fuse with the machine parts pleases him. When they sing their song about taking cylinders out of kidneys, he imagines the whole process playing itself out backwards: brain and connecting rod merging to form one, ultra-intelligent organ, his back quivering in pleasure as pumps and pistons plunge into it, heart and liver being spliced with valve and filter to create a whole new, streamlined mechanism. Sometimes he dreams he’s growing wings and, waking up, prods at his breastbone, trying to discern an outward swelling in it; each rib feels like a strut. He shakes after flights just like the others, but he doesn’t mind: the vibrations make him feel alive. He buzzes with kinetic potency as he carries them to Vitriers, to Cécile, where they make the brass knobs above her bedstead shake and bore their way on into her flesh too…

Cécile’s place is unheated. By October, evenings there are cold. He brings her a dead observer’s jacket to keep warm in.

“If he was killed, how come his jacket came back?” she asks, slipping it over her bare skin.

“Oh, he came back too,” Serge answers. “Just not alive. Look, you can see the bullet holes.”

Her eyes peer down her nose while her hand presses the leather to her stomach.

“On the left side,” he helps her out.

“Ah yes,” she purrs, poking her finger through a hole. “Direct dans la poitrine.”

She keeps it on while they make love again. Serge, kneeling behind her with his face pressed into collar fur, imagines the bullet piercing the jacket’s leather and travelling onwards through both the observer and Cécile, then, broken down into a million particles, lodging in him not only harmlessly but also beneficially, as though he were both its and the other two’s final destination, the natural conclusion of a process whose trajectory conjoined them all. Afterwards, he picks one of her stockings from the floor and, holding it up to his face, stretches its fabric.

“What are you doing?” she asks.

“If you could spare this, it would really keep me warm up in the air.”

“Your legs will be too big for it,” she says.

“It’s not for my legs,” he says. “I’d wear it on my head, beneath the helmet.”

Cécile shrugs. A clunking sound comes from the street outside. People are moving stuff around all the time these days: chests of drawers, tables, bathtubs, cookers, sinks. The German ordnance has been falling closer and closer to the town, destroying outlying villages and pitching their inhabitants up on the doorsteps of relatives who themselves are beginning, as stray shells start breaching civic limits, to gather together family heirlooms or at least saleable objects, tie them to carts and trundle down potholed roads towards imagined safety. Those who’ve stayed lug buckets and cylinders from house to pump and shop to house: the water and gas pipes feeding half the populace have been destroyed. Drains and sewers have been snapped and dragged up from beneath the ground to spew their mess across the cobblestones. Even a graveyard on the edge of town has been blown up; the stench of unearthed corpses carries through air whose coldness crystallises and preserves it. Serge can see the graveyard from Cécile’s window. Beyond it, two dead horses lie with swollen stomachs in a field. Beyond them, past the rubble of the farmhouse that once marked the field’s boundary, blackened and splintered tree-stumps litter a winter landscape that he couldn’t imagine ever having been another way.

One afternoon in January, Walpond-Skinner gathers the men together in the red-gabled house’s main room and informs them that a major push is being prepared. Serge, Gibbs and several other pilots and observers are taken off flying duties above the front and sent ten miles back to practise Contact Patrol work. This turns out to consist of flying low over advancing infantry who have mirrors attached to their backs, sounding a klaxon from the cockpit to solicit from the ground flares which, in turn, indicate positions and accomplishments. Bengal lights mean a wood has been captured, Aldis ones a trench, and Hucks a battery-or is it Aldis for battery and Hucks for woods? And is a copse a wood? How many trees…? Serge suspects, even as they learn the signals and run through the klaxon sequences, that the system’s flawed. The mock-battles that they act out over unmined, undefended fields usually manage to degenerate into confusion. In the week he spends there, three machines crash: two of them into each other, pilots glare-blinded by mirrors…

Serge finds it hard to sleep. It’s not the gentle rocking of the houseboat that he misses so much as the front’s sounds all around him: they’ve become his nightly lullaby. He can still hear the howitzers from here, of course, but they’re too distant-and besides, their sound is drowned out by the noise of Crossleys carrying troops eastward: convoy after convoy of them, trundling past the window of his cabin in an unbroken supply chain. Infantry march by round the clock as well, the rhythm of their step setting off in Serge’s head the lead-up lines from Sonnet 65:

Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back,

Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?

Returning to the 104th at the week’s end, he whoops for joy as the poplars, Bessoneaus and grazing cows appear beneath his wing, then runs along the path that leads through the wood (or copse) to the river and, throwing himself on the bed, flips Stanley’s book open so that he can read 65’s riposte line, already firmly scrawled across his memory, with his own eyes:

O none, unless this miracle have might,

That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

“So when’s the big day, then?” he asks Walpond-Skinner.

“Firstly, Carrefax, it’s ‘big day, sir’-or, strictly speaking, ‘big day, sir, then.’ ”

“Sir, then,” Serge corrects himself. “Then when-?”

“And secondly, that’s privileged information. I would tell you that it’s mine to know and yours to wonder about-if I knew myself, that is, which I’m afraid I don’t. The moles have to finish their work first.”

“Moles, sir?”

“The tunnellers. They’re digging all the way through no man’s land, so they can lay explosives underneath the trenches, gun emplacements and what have you. Got to proceed slowly: make sure it doesn’t cave in, make sure they keep quiet, listen out for Germans counter-tunnelling beneath them, all that sort of thing…”

Serge becomes fascinated with these tunnellers, these moles. He pictures their noses twitching as they alternately dig and strap on stethoscopes that, pressing to the ground, they listen through for sounds of netherer moles undermining their undermining. If they did hear them doing this, he tells himself, then they could dig an even lower tunnel, undermine the under-undermining: on and on forever, or at least for as long as the volume and mass of the globe allowed it-until earth gave over to a molten core, or, bypassing this, they emerged in Australia to find there was no war there and, unable to return in time for action, sat around aimlessly blinking in the daylight…