sort out the sounds. For this Michael is grateful. He cannot quite comprehend what’s happening here — what is the nature of the exchange he’s having with Claude Evenrude? Confessional? Therapeutic? Or perhaps the beginning of a wonderful friendship, in which case the Marseillaise should be bugling about . . He senses acutely these disordered minds rubbing up against his own, a curious sort of. . contact, from which the only respite comes when he addresses Claude, so he says, At Withernsea there were mines bobbing off the beach and rusty coils of Danaert wire scraping over the shingle — it made an eerie tinny noise, schlockenspiel might cover it. . ’though I used to think of skeletons turning over on bare bed springs, trying to get comfortable — never getting comfortable. We went bathing all the same, and larked as best we could in the muddy water. The coastline there’s eroding all the time, big chunks of the cliffs falling away. Reminded me of a walking holiday I’d taken in Suff olk with some pals before the war —. Claude interrupts: I thrived on it, man, thrived on it — I’d done without sleep plenty before, when the booze has you in its grip. . well, it’s exactly like being in the Army. See, the Army says it’s welding you all into a single disciplined individual, but that’s so much crummy BS. It ain’t some new hyper-organism on the social scene — I’ll tellya what the Army’s like, it’s like liquor: it’s got no agency or consciousness of its own ’cause it’s a cup fulla cosmic nothingness — we crawl through the mud for it, and we shed our blood for it, this bloodless presence. . Michael says, We put up in a pub a few miles from Dunwich, which is an ancient port that went under the waves during a big blow in the twelve hundreds. Really, all south-east England’s like that — none of these would-be invaders should trouble themselves. . simply sit tight, let the sea do their work for them. The locals said you could hear the drowned church bells ringing on stormy nights. . Well, I’d my doubts, but it was a spooky spot, no mistaking. When we went digging along the cliffs, we turned up a human skeleton. Some of us thought it’d be a terrific wheeze to smuggle the thing into this chap Folger’s bed back at the pub. Thing was, he was a perfectly decent chap and we all liked him very much, but he suffered from a nervous disposition — which was why I s’pose we did it. When he went up to his room that night after rather too many pints, put on the light and saw this skull on his pillow —. Claude sings, Oh roister-doister li’l oyster, Down in the slimy sea, You ain’t so diff ’rent lyin’ on your shell bed, To the likes of l’il old me, But roister-doister you’re somewhat moister, Than I would like to be. . Then he says: Number one in your Lucky Strike Hit Parade. . and continues: She sailed from Frisco on the same day as the Trinity Test and no one’s gonna tell me that was a coincidence. Michael comments, It was bruited about that Oppenheimer made a little speech when the fireball went up — some stuff about being a destroyer of worlds he’d got from a Hindu holy book. For myself, I always thought this sounded like the most dreadful rubbish — I mean he called the test Trinity, for heaven’s sake, so he must have felt it. . the battering of the three-person’d God. And Claude says, She was torpedoed by a Japanese sub, the I-58, at twenty-four minutes before midnight on the twenty-ninth of July 1945, sailing from Guam to Leyte in the Philippines. There were 1, 196 naval personnel on board — there were green-hands and gunneys, gyrenes, swabbies, snipes, skivvy-wavers and shave-tails, and every one of ’em had played his little part in the solution of the Godly integral and the fulfilment of Satan’s diff erential. They’d all kinds of shit on board the Indy when she sailed from Tinian — I knew, ’cause, being a logistics man myself, I took an interest. But there wasn’t truly anything of interest ’less you count pogey bait or two-hundred-andfive pounds of fuckin’ celery, or all the extra vests and life-rafts they had on board that tub — which turned out to be useless in the event, ’cause there was hardly any time to deploy them between the torpedoes hitting and the whole kit and caboodle going down — including all the ice cream they’d churned up for their dumb gedunk stand. Quartermaster showed it to me with tremendous pride: all the flavours they could make, pineapple, strawberry, tutti-fuckin’frutti. . I told him: knock it off, willya, all this makes me think about is making ice cream with my old man, cranking that handle round annaround out on the back porch ’til our arms were aching and our noggins were dripping with sweat. . Anyways, I swear, when she was going down. . and the skin angels were flapping across the red-hot deck. . and there were still more of ’em trying to get airborne from the fantail, I saw him rooted there, not a scratch or a smut on him, but he was bawling like a little kid ’cause there was all this molten ice cream flowing round his ankles. . You’d not’ve thought it possible, Michael says, to smell human flesh burning at sixteen thousand feet, but I swear by all that’s sacred, it is. Once the TIs had been dropped and the whole target area had been ringed with incendiaries, and we came bucketing in, well. . first you could smell benzol and burning rubber, and then. . well, closest thing’s frying bacon, I s’pose — never had any stomach for it since. Bucketing in we’d go — Jerry’d have his three-ring circus set up: one of ack-ack, then the searchlights, then more ack-ack. . The bomb aimer’d be making love to me, guiding my shaking hands: Left. . Left. . Steady. . Steady. . That was the worst time on any run, obviously — formation falling apart as planes were hit and spiralled away, flak bursts everywhere. Steady. . Steady. . they’d keep it up like that, mostly because we all knew pilots went to pieces over the target, got frozen on the stick — and I was never much of a flyer anyway, certainly not a natural. Those big firestorms, they sucked the oxygen out of the atmosphere — you’d be struggling to keep the kite level, stopping the heat from the fires pushing you up, when suddenly you’d hit a queer air pocket and you’d be fighting to prevent her dropping. All the time the spooning’d continue: Steady. . Steady. . Left. . Left. . Funny thing was, last tour I flew — my nerves were utterly shot by then, had the shakes so bad I couldn’t fill my pipe for hours after we got down. But when we were up there, coming into the target area, the nervous system I’d so abused sort of. . befriended me, and in a very Christian manner turned off the sound altogether, so there was radio silence — Michael taps his forehead with his pipe — in my bonce and the flak bursts became these cotton-wool puff s lit up from within — rather beautiful, really. And the Lancs looked like so many soft-winged moths drawn irresistibly to the light. . the smoke down below like a sheet. . thrown over a lit-up bush. . Only thing I could hear was the spooning: Steady. . Steady. . then, Bombs gone! And he’d be shouting, Corkscrew! Corkscrew! Hard left! Hard left! and, as I’d drag the bus round, it’d all come back in a rush: the roar of the engines, the crash of the flak, and the whooshing headwind that rose and rose until it became a scream. . Claude says, The ocean was rough enough, I guess — a long heavy swell that came whooshing along her sides. The cloud was low — dense but broken in places, I could see a hangnail of a moon. But, like I said, I always loved the sea. Oh, Lordy, Lordy! — Claude claps his hands to his face and