Jasmine Nights Read Free Page B

anything.’
    In the tiled hall, near the front door, he glanced at his face in the mirror. His dark hair had grown again; his face looked pretty much the same.
    Lucky bastard .
    Selfish bastard. He could at least have answered Jilly’s letter.
    Lucky first of all to have been wearing the protective gloves all of them were supposed to put on when they flew, and he so often hadn’t, preferring the feel of the joystick in his fingers. Lucky to have been picked up quickly by an ambulance crew and not burned to a crisp strapped into his cockpit. Luckiest of all to have been treated by Kilverton. Kilverton, who looked, with his stumpy hands and squat body, like a butcher, was a plastic surgeon of genius.
    He owed his life to this man. He’d gone to him with his face and hands black and smelling of cooked meat – what they now called airman’s burns, because they were so common. The determined and unsentimental Kilverton, a visiting surgeon, had placed him in a saline bath and later taken him into theatre, where he’d meticulously jigsawed tiny strips of skin taken from Dom’s buttock to the burns on the side of his face. All you could see now was a row of pinpricks about an inch long and two inches above his left ear. His thick black hair had already covered them.
    Last week Kilverton had called Dom into his chaotic consulting room and boasted freely about him to two awestruck young doctors.
    ‘Look at this young man.’ He turned on the Anglepoise lamp on his desk so they could all get a better look at him. Dom felt the gentleness of those fat fingers, the confidence they gave you. One of the other chaps in the ward had said it was like getting ‘a pep pill up your arse’.
    ‘I defy you to even know he’s been burned – no keloid scars, the skin tone around the eyes is good.’
    ‘So why was he so lucky?’ one of the doctors asked, his own young skin green with fatigue under the lamp. They’d had five new serious cases in the day before, a bomber crew who’d bought it off the French coast.
    ‘A combination of factors.’ Kilverton’s eyes swam over his half-glasses. ‘A Mediterranean skin helps – all that olive oil. His mother’s French, his father’s English.’
    Dom had smiled. ‘A perfect mongrel.’
    ‘The rest,’ Kilverton continued, ‘is pure chance. Some men just burn better than others.’
    Dom had gone cold at this.
    Thompson had died in East Grinstead, after being treated with tannic acid, a form of treatment Kilverton had said was barbaric and had fought to ban. Collins, poor bastard, burned alive in his cockpit on his first training run. He was nineteen years old.
    The same flames, the surgeon had continued in his flat, almost expressionless voice, the same exposure to skin-and tissue-destroying heat, and yet some men became monsters, although he did not use that word; he’d said ‘severely disabled’ or some other slightly more tactful thing. Having the right skin was, he said, a freak of nature, like being double-jointed or having a cast-iron stomach.
    To illustrate his point, he’d lifted a pot of dusty geraniums from the windowsill.
    ‘It’s like taking cuttings from this: some thrive, some die, and the bugger of it is we don’t yet know exactly why. As for you . . .’ he looked directly at Dom again, ‘you can go home now. I’ll see you in six weeks’ time.’
    Dom had pretended to be both interested and grateful, and of course he was, but sometimes at night he sweated at the thought of this luckiness. Why had he lived and others died? Privately, it obsessed him.
    ‘Can I fly again?’ It was all he wanted now. ‘Can you sign me off?’
    ‘I’ll see you in six weeks.’ Kilverton switched off his light. He was shrugging on his ancient mackintosh, standing near the door waiting to leap into another emergency.
    ‘I want to fly again.’ The obsession had grown and grown during the period of his convalescence.
    ‘Look, lad.’ Kilverton had glared at him from the door.