It was still a normal day.
SIX
Iate Acouple of hot dogs on the gallery and was back at the Dove by two. Now the day was really coming to the boil. On the airport it was just plain hot, but across die bay in Kingston, sitting in its bowl between the hills, the air in the narrow streets would be like breathing under a sweaty electric blanket. Out in the box-top shacks of the nameless town built on the city dump up by the oil refinery, there would be sudden, vicious fights over a choice piece of rubbish. And up in the rich suburbs beyond Half Way Tree, dignified elderly gardeners would move listlessly among the mangoes, feeling the long sharp edges of their machetes and thinking of the owner's wife asleep in the air-conditioned room upstairs.
Kingston, the perfect natural harbour – except that it's on the south coast and die cool summer breeze comes from the north. So it only blows – no, it doesn't blow, just breathes politely – on the private beaches and modern houses and big hotels of die north coast. So move up there, man; nobody's stopping you. All you need is the money. And you think you're going to get rich in Kingston? Haul your rice, man; emigrate. Maybe London isn't paved with gold, but it's cool, man. Yes, you'll find out how cool.
Perhaps the heat was getting at me, too. The Dove was too hot to touch without gloves and there was a faint haze over the fuel tank vents, so I was wasting petrol by evaporation. Well, I hadn't paid for it, anyway.
Customer number three was late. He always was, but he was still the only regular income I had. A young Venezuelan businessman named Diego Ingles who'd got the idea that his company would buy him a brand-new twin-engined aeroplane the moment he'd qualified to fly it. He hired me twice a week for twin-engine instruction.
Personally I had my doubts that his company could go crazy enough to hand him a £35,000 aeroplane, but perhaps it couldhappen. He obviously came of a genuine aged-in-the-money family back in Caracas, and that counts for a lot in Venezuelan business circles. Anyway, it was his money and my pocket.
All that apart, he was a nice young lad: in his early twenties, shortish and slightly tubby, with a flat cheerful face, a bush of dark hair and the politely rakish manner of an old Spanish family upbringing.
He finally appeared at twenty past, with a long graceful apology which boiled down to the fact that he'd only just got out of bed, and not even his own.
With die heat and the tall thunderclouds building up on the Blue Mountains I wanted to get away from the airport, so we skipped the circuits-and-landings and I gave bun a dead-reckoning navigation exercise out to the Pedro Cays, about eighty miles to the south-west. No radio to be used: he had to do it on maps and weather reports alone.
It wasn't his favourite type of flying: quiet, steady, accurate. Like most of Latin America he believed that aviation was a branch of sports-car racing. I'd had to keep taunting him about becoming a 'fair-weather pilot' to keep him looking at -and believing – his instruments, maps, and forecasts. This time I was feeling irritable enough to taunt him into making a near-perfect landfall over North-east Cay within a minute of his ETA.
I remembered to tell him I'd noticed.
He smiled very charmingly and asked: 'So perhaps you think I am good enough?'
I looked at him. 'For what? You could probably get your licence up-rated to a "B", so you could fly this size of thing privately. That's if you've been doing any book-work. D'you want me to arrange a test?'
'Not quite that, Señor. I mean – doyou believe in me? Can I use an aeroplane like this – anywhere – at any time?'
'Nobody can. You still think an aeroplane's a miracle with a starter button. Some weather, even the birds are walking.'
'I understand there may be risks, Señor, but…' He took his right hand off the wheel and fluttered it delicately.
'Just try and remember,' I said slowly, 'that if God had intended men to fly He'd have given us wings. So all flying isflying in the face of nature. It's unnatural, wicked, and stuffed with risks all the time. The secret of flying is learning to minimise the risks.'
'Or perhaps – the secret of life is to choose your risks?' He smiled disarmingly. 'But I think you were a fighter pilot, and yet you talk of minimising risks?'
'That's where I learnt it. Don't fall for the King-Arthur-of-the-air stuff about fighter pilots. Clean knightly combats and all that. It's the one trade where the whole point is to catch a man by surprise and shoot him in the back. That's how the top men made their scores. And if theycouldn't catch a man like that, they didn't tangle with him.'
'Ah, now I know, Señor.'He ducked his head gracefully. 'So I should catch the weather by surprise and shoot it in the back. And also I see why the unromantic English make such good pilots.'
He was laughing at me, but as long as he remembered… I said: 'So what about a licence test?'
'I will talk to Caracas about it. But the important thing is thatyou believe I am good enough. That is my true examination.' It takes generations of high Spanish blood to laugh at a man so courteously.
I put my pipe in my mouth and said: 'You may still find a licence is useful. In fact, licences are useful in all walks oflife.'
'Señor?'
'Just an old saying the unromantic RAF had: only birds can fornicateand fly. And birds don't booze.'
The thunderclouds had finally, mercifully, split and drenched Kingston for half an hour by the time we got back over Palisadoes. Steam was rising gently off the suburbs behind the town: even the air in the cockpit felt fresh and green.
We tried three landings, including one with an engine stopped and abandoning the approach at 200 feet and going round again. He handled it pretty well; he wasn't going to get killed in an emergency – that was his best time. It would be the small things that killed him: a bit of fluff in a carburettor and a slipped connection in a radio and a twenty-degree shiftin wind – incredible coincidences of bad luck like that, in a time when the millions of flights every year make a million-to-one chance a tenfold statistical certainty.
He would die in a clear, still blue sky – because he still believed he had aright to be there. Because he wouldn't believe he was a trespasser who had to keep awake and alert every single damn minute.
I was wrong, of course, as I usually am about people. But only in a way.
We landed finally around half-past four and I charged him for two hours – and he paid me cash on the nail, which was a Spanish courtesy I appreciated. He also offered to drive me back to Kingston in his Jaguar E-type, which was a Spanish courtesy I turned down fast. Anyway, it was about time I filled in my log-books.
I parked myself in the rearmost passenger seat, closest to the open door, and started the paperwork. It should have been easy; just as the San Juan trip, the St Kitt's trip, and today's nights. Easy – except for that check four, creeping closer flying hour by flying hour.
Well, that was easy, too: clip ten minutes in the hour off the San Juan flight – would the Air Registration Board ever cross-check Kingston tower's times against San Juan's? Would they even get to hear of the St Kitts'side-trip at all? Hell, I could save nearly four hours, in all.
In all three logs: one for the aeroplane, one for each engine, because an engine can move around in its lifetime. You hand in an engine for overhaul and get a reconditioned one in exchange – and the logbook with it. And you just hope the previous pilot hasn't done something that doesn't show in the log: pushed the throttle through the gate too often, run at high boost and low revs… faked the hours.
Reluctantly, I wrote down both the San Juan and St Kitts'trips – clipping just ten minutes in the hour off each.
Then I counted the day's takings. It came exactly to £75 – three hours' work. Leaving a profit of £8 8s. – until you counted my East Street rent, a little food and booze, and keeping the jeep in near-running order. And remembered the otherdays with the Dove grounded through lack of spares, weather, or just work.