Jasmine Nights Read Free Page A

complaints from the neighbours, who said they’d expected convalescents, not larrikins. Hearing his mother’s polite, anxious laugh, he’d fought the temptation to hang his head like a guilty boy; early that morning he’d been 10,000 feet above the Bristol Channel, zooming over the grazing sheep, the little patchwork fields, the schools, the church steeples, the whole sleeping world, and it had been bloody marvellous. Tiny Danielson, one of his last remaining friends from the squadron, had wangled a Tiger Moth kept in a hangar near Gloucester. Dom’s hands had shaken as he’d buckled on the leather flying helmet for the first time in months, his heart thumping as he carefully taxied down the runway with its scattering of Nissen huts on either side, and then, as he’d lifted off into the clear blue yonder, he’d heard himself shout with joy.
    Wonderful! Wonderful! Wonderful! He was flying again! He was flying again! In hospital, the idea that he might have to go back to a desk job had made him sweat with terror. He’d worried that he’d be windy, that his hands wouldn’t be strong enough now, but he’d had no trouble with the controls, and the little aircraft felt as whippy as a sailing craft under his fingers. The air was stingingly cold, there was a bit of cumulus cloud to the left, and he felt suddenly as if a jumble of mismatched pieces inside him had come together again.
    Hearing his shout of pleasure, Tiny had echoed it, and a few minutes later clapped him on the shoulder.
    ‘Down now, I think, old chap – we don’t want to get court-martialled.’
    A noisy breakfast followed – toast, baked beans, brick-coloured tea – shared with Tiny and a pilot wearing a uniform so new that it still had the creases in it. Nobody asked him any questions about the hospital; no one made a fuss – economy of emotion was the unspoken rule here. In the mess, there was even a ‘shooting a line’ book that fined you for any morbid or self-congratulatory talk. And that was good, too. Four of his closest friends were dead now, five missing presumed dead, one captured behind enemy lines. He was five months shy of his twenty-third birthday.
    ‘You’ll notice a few changes.’ His mother, light-footed and giddy with happiness, had almost danced up the drive. ‘We’ve been planting carrots and onions where the roses were. You know, “dig for victory” and all zat. Oh, there’s so much to show you.’
    She took him straight up the stairs so he could put his suitcase in his old room. The bed looked inviting with its fresh linen sheets and plumped pillows. A bunch of lavender lay on the bedside table. He gazed briefly at the schoolboy photographs of him that she’d framed. The scholarship boy at Winchester, flannelled and smirking in his first cricket XI; and there a muddied oaf, legs planted, squinting at the camera, Jacko sitting beside him beaming. Jacko, who he’d persuaded to join up, who he’d teased for being windy, who he’d last seen clawing at his mask in a cauldron of flame, screaming as the plane spiralled down like a pointless piece of paper and disappeared into the sea.
    He must go up to London and talk to Jilly, Jacko’s fiancée, about him soon. He dreaded it; he needed it.
    His mother touched his arm.
    ‘Come downstairs,’ she said quickly. ‘Plenty of time to unpack later.’
    A whiff of formaldehyde as they passed his father’s study on the way down. On the leather desk, the same gruesome plastic model of a stomach and intestines that Dom had once terrified his sister with, by holding it up at her bedroom door, a green torch shining behind it; the same medical books arranged in alphabetical order.
    ‘He’ll be home after supper.’ His mother’s smile wavered for a second. ‘He’s been operating day and night.’
    ‘Things any better?’ slipped out. He’d meant to ask it casually over a drink later.
    ‘Not really,’ she said softly. ‘He’s never home – he works harder now if