C by Tom Mccarthy

Author:Tom Mccarthy [Mccarthy, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Europe, World War I, World War; 1914-1918, Fiction, Historical, War & Military, Radio Waves, Military, Technology, Radio Operators, History
ISBN: 9780099547020
Google: sffWkooUVHQC
Amazon: 0307388212
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2011-09-06T07:00:00+00:00

i

By September, more than two-thirds of the pilots and observers who made up the 104th when Serge arrived have been killed. The ones who remain undergo a similar set of transformations to the landscapes in Pietersen’s photographs. Their faces turn to leather—thick, nickwax-smeared leather each of whose pores stands out like a pothole in a rock surface—and grow deep furrows. Eyelids twitch; lips tremble and convulse in nervous spasms. Arriving back from flights, they stumble from their machines with the effects of acceleration and deceleration, of ungradated transit through modes of gravity alternately positive and negative, sculpted in the open mouths, sucked-in cheeks and swollen tongues that they present to the airfield’s personnel for the next few hours. Clown Bodners, Serge tells himself. Sometimes they laugh uncontrollably, as though a passing shell had whispered to them the funniest joke imaginable, although often it’s hard to tell if they’re laughing or crying. The engines’ pulses have bored through their flesh and bones and set up small vibrating motors in their very core: their hands struggle to hold teacups still, light cigarettes, unbutton jackets …

“It’s the flying circuses,” Clegg croaks shakily to the mess orderly in front of Serge one afternoon. “The Jastas. They move up and down the front in huge formations. When they get all around you there’s not that much you can do. They come at you from everywhere …”

“I’m rigging my plane up against them,” Stanley, a recent arrival, tells them.

“How?” ask Serge and Clegg in unison.

“Pike principle,” answers Stanley, enigmatically.

“You mean the fish?” Serge says.

“No, pikestaffs,” Stanley tuts. “You’ll see.”

The following day he wheels out of the Bessoneau an SE5 to which no fewer than seven Lewis guns have been attached. They poke out of the machine in every conceivable direction; there’s even one hanging below the tail.

“To guard against the bites of sharks,” Stanley explains as he taps this last one.

“How will you operate them all?” Serge asks.

“I’ll dart from one gun to another, depending on where they’re coming at me from. I’ll learn to play the whole contraption like an instrument—an organ, say: you can’t be at all the stops and pedals at the same time, but you can still make it do its thing when you know how …”

Walpond-Skinner nixes Stanley’s pikery:

“If the RFC had wanted three-hundred-and-sixty-degree bullet dispensers, they’d have built them. Your task is to fly. Two guns for each machine—that’s it!”

Stanley is killed a week later. Serge inherits his copy of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and finds, in the very first one, Widsun’s line about being the world’s fresh ornament, herald to the spring and so on. The phrase that his mind snags on, though, comes from a later sonnet, number 65: the line about love shining bright in black ink. He keeps on hearing it: as he reads copy orders, wipes tar from his face, or watches the dark water flowing by the Floaters. Clegg and Watson, meanwhile, scoop fish from the river and, placing them in a glass tank in the mess, study their formations.

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