SHORT STORY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 57, 26 July 1940, Page 12

SHORT STORY

BILL 8 PLITS A LIP

Sydney

Brookes

Written for ‘"‘The Listener"

story of the queer and sudden transformation of Bill, it is necessary to go back as far as the days when Bill was learning to walk, and hold a fork, dress himself, and run into his mother’s pantry when father came home drunk. Few remember these days in their own experience, which is a pity, for if Bill, for example, had remembered them, he might have been able to put right a wrong that happened then. But Bill forgot, like the rest of us, and the fault stayed a fault. All he retained was a vague and formless memory of times that were unaccountably full of that great happiness that comes to all children whether their fathers are boors or Beau Gestes; and of times that were often overwhelmingly full of tears and tension and unpleasantness that is better not recalled too vividly. He was otherwise quite normal. He had no politics. "All Governments are bad," said Bill, when asked his opinion on anything to do with society. He was not subtle. Far from it. It was not cynicism that made him class humanity as stupid and all the manifestations of humanity’s egregious spirit as evil, It was simply acceptance of something which appeared to him to be a fact. These things perhaps had once puzzled him, as they puzzle 5 ee find the beginnings of this

everyone. But Bill had resolved: his human problems by classing all things as objectionable, except getting brown in summer and keeping warm with strenuous games in winter, and this simple solution of his relationships ‘with other people left him with an entirely uncomplicated attitude to life in general. But if Bill’s philosophy was faultless in this fashion, if his philosophy was based on such a perfect and simple and complete state of disillusion, he still had a chink in his armour, and for that we must blame his father. T least his father is most directly to blame. His father was a bit of a swine. For that, no doubt, someone else is to blame, and for someone else we can probably blame someone else; but the direct responsibility for’ Bill’s one glaring fault must lie with his father. His father made his mother’s life more or less a hell, and his mother could not therefore devote the necessary quiet and peaceful. moments. to the education of Bill. through the elementary stages of human behaviour, * It is a strange thing. that men and women who have been acting in certain fixed. ways through all the long ages of their evolution still have to be taught certain. essentials, A bird is born, and can fly when its parents decide that the time has come to push it out of the nest.’For animals, simple and natural reactions come with-. out much parental teaching, as far as IT can see (although I deny all claims to special knowledge on ‘this. matter),

But human beings are decidedly slow in the’ uptake. People have been using table utensils for long enough, but children are not yet born either with knives or forks in their hands, or with any inherited ability in using them. ~ Bill was no exceptiom. We have seen that he was a normal person in nearly all respects. Bill had to be taught. His mother managed to teach him most of the essentials. But in one very important matter she failed, poor woman. She did not teach Bill to breathe through his nose. On all occasions, awake or asleep, Bill breathed most emphatically through his mouth. It gave him some appearance of vacuity; but he was not vacant. It gave him’ an appearancevof weakness and indecision. In fact he was neither vacant nor weak of mind. He just’ breathed through his mouth, PROOF that Bill’s mind was fashioned for quick and deterrnined decisions may be found in his behaviour when war was declared: last year. ’ "All Governmenté are essentially bad," he said again, "but that Government is worse than this Government, so I ghall fight. for this Government." He did not take much notice of the newspapers when they said he must go and fight for his kith and kin, because his mother was dead and his father should have been; and he did not heed the cries that he should go and fight for his country, for he owned none of it and all his life had worked very hard for the small corner on which he was permitted to

sleep and eat. Bill’s mind was decidedly direct. He discounted all these things, partly because they seemed superfluous, and partly because it was the newspapers in which he read them, and partly because he had not ever thought of them himself, things being what they were, and could therefore find no reason for believing very strongly in . them. But he made his choice between the two sides and chose his own, having reduced the. probiem to a simple and regrettably necessary choice between something partly good and something else mostly evil. O Bill went off to the war, and it was not longer than usual before he wore wings on his sleeve and drank his beer quite naturally in the private bar out of long glasses, where previously it had seemed an ordinary procedure to have it in the public out of handles. Bill managed quite well in aeroplanes, He did not have the extra bit of fire necessary for a successful fighter pilot, but there was no cause for him to disprove his ability behind the long nose of a Hurricane. Bill naturally graduated into a bomber squadron, and quite unconcernedly kept his place in the flights each time, quite unassumedly took his turn in the on the target, came home with, any of the others who were left, and landed at his base with no more excitement in him than the pleasure of anticipating a warm. feed. Time after time he went across with them, and time after time came back. Bill’s tactics under pressure were invariably . the same and _ invariably effective. He simply flew straight on, and left his gunners to worry about any(Continued on next page)

(Continued from previous page) thing not within the immediate frontal range of his vision, VERYONE thought that Bill was a bit of a lad. He was in a fair way to making a reputation as an airman of some dash and vigour; which was quite wrong. Bill went off with his load of bombs with the same sensations as came to him at home when he left for work with his papers in an attaché case. He went, and he did the job, and he came back. As a bomber pilot he was perfect, just as he had been the perfect bank clerk. Not hasty, not too slow, deliberate but never dumb, thorough, but not finicky. As a unit in the squadron he was also ideal; just as he had been the ideal citizen of the modern state. Not too dull, but never revolutionary; not uncritical, but never throwing stones at his betters. Bill, it might have been thought, would go far, for he had a surprising habit of coming back always, and of always landing a bomb on something that mattered to the enemy. But you and I know his fault, and it was to be his undoing. Bill breathed through his mouth, a E had been on active service some three months, and remained all that time intact in mind and body, when he found one day, as winter was turning through spring into summer, that his lips were tilmed over with dry skin, and that the edges were frayed and ragged. He carefully smeared them with ointment, found himself comfortable once more, and went about his business, The dry spell continued. The weather became warmer. Bill’s lower lip cracked, This was where the trouble really started. Try as he might, Bill could not persuade that crack to close. He tried a softening ointment, but was advised against it by a nurse and tried instead a healing mixture that left a film over the place. This seemed to having effect, and after two weeks of discomfort Bill felt at last that the trouble was under control, But there are moments when the best of men are caught napping. In the mornings, or in the middle of the night when he might be called at any hour, Bill would blink himself awake, stretch, wriggle in the bunk, and... yawn. And every time he yawned he would feel the little crack in his lip split open once again. He would swear softly at this, paint some more stuff over it, and go about his business slightly worried at the time it was taking to heal. By the middle of the day he might have it half under control again, and then Bill would see a gull fleeing the monstrous bird he piloted, or a submarine ducking to the depths for safety from him, or anti-aircraft bursts puffing white, high and wide from him — and Bill would laugh. He had a quiet sense of humour, had Bill; but he also had a cracked lip, and every time he forgot himself and laughed the lip cracked again, IN FTER*a month of it, the trouble began to get under his skin. Never before had anything worried him for so long. External threats affected him not at all. He dismissed them. Internal troubles had never come to him. His lips had cracked before, because he always breathed through his mouth, but never before had they taken more than a couple of days to heal. Days and weeks went by and Bill began to wake up in

the. mornings and worry like. hell about his lips. The crack was not large, or unpleasant to look at. Bill was in no way disfigured, but it would not heal. Nothing had ever really beaten. Bill before. Even when he had found, as he was growing up, that society was in general a decidedly unfriendly system, he had decided to ignore it and got along all right as a result. But here was something which defied all his efforts either to remember it, mend it, or forget it. He lost some of his assurance, and, although no one else noticed it, it became more of an effort for him to plug on through the clouds and pom-poms and searchlights, find his target, drop his cargo, and turn deliberately home. It all came to a head at high noon on a fine summer’s day not long ago. HEY had been to Hamburg and bombed the devil’s own delight out of the oil tanks. Bill felt a little’more pleased with himself when they’d banked clear of the flare and smoke of the explosions, and climbed up and away out over the clean sea again. He even looked back, for a change, and under the wings of the ’plane behind him watched the smoke curling lazily up to the blue and wondered with mild satisfaction what sort of inferno they had left below its stately column. But he did not smile, for he remembered the lip in time. They were not far clear of the coast when shadows blinked across the sun in the south and Bill looked up to see a flight of the black twin-engined fighters coming at them. They held their flight positions and flew on, a neat, precise echelon, pointed in front and fan-

ning out to. a.base, with the fighters diving at them and banking off to come again; with their guns spitting at the enemy when he came too close, and their bulky fuselages steady to the sharp tearing bursts of his machine-gun fire. One of the enemy went down, and one of Bill’s friends. The Messerschmitts drew off, climbed into the sun again, and came back reinforced two-fold with fresh vultures come for the kill. Peering back through his glasshouse, Bill saw the trace of bullets from his rear gun rip into the wing of an enemy ’plane, watched it zip along the srfrface, and hold steady for a split second in an engine housing. The ‘plane tipped, wobbled furiously; a spurt of white smoke came from the cowling, a spurt of black. Into the air flew some queershaped metal thing, that skied and twisted and finally fell to the sea, and from the gap it made black smoke eddied, and flames, and there was another gone. Over his nose Bill saw two more fighters dive out of the line of the fire of the ’planes behind him, and he waited for his forward gunner to get them in his sights. From behind him somewhere he felt the ’plane rock and shudder clumsily as cannon shells found a mark; but he steadied her up and watched quietly while the rattle of his own guns announced a threat to the diving brutes in front. Down they went, and looped unscathed to come up underneath, and Bill felt a splinter in the softness of his calf as their bullets cut through from below. In turn they came under him and let him have it, and in turn they banked at his port wing tip, close enough it seemed for a man to jump across the

small space between them. But the second one had delayed his bank too long, and the rear gunner caught him as his "plane poised-at the top of its flight, wings spread out against the glare of the sun, a perfect target. Every round went home, and Bill, out of the corner of an eye, saw him start to fall, while he watched the other coming on for a frontal attack, with a third following and the sky behind them, so it seemed, black with wings. A GREAT temptation came to Bill to throw his ’plane into a dive that would thrust them under this arrowflighted danger from above. He held it back, and was thinking hard thoughts of men and their manners when behind him one of the crew stirred in his place, cursed loudly. "To hell,’ came the voice, clear above the roar and rattle, "My bloody foot’s gone to sleep." Bill laughed, loud and long and a little viciously, and while he laughed, one after "another the enemy ’planes came in and spat fire at them, and below was the sea, blue and smooth and flat like a mirror in a blue-tiled bathroom, and above them the sky and the sun, and the ’planes one after another. And as he laughed Bill’s lip cracked suddenly and painfully. For an instant he went blind with anger at himself and the lip, and in that instant he lifted the great bulk of the ’plane straight at the nearest enemy, smothered it in a great flash of exploding petrol and smashing struts, threw it aside, and tossed away into another. "Damn this lip," said Bill, as the world spun round, and the sun went out, (THE END)