Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [3]
Metz flew extremely low over the North Sea in an effort to sneak under British radar. At first the weather was on his side: it was very murky. It cleared, however, just before he reached the coast of East Anglia, and he was spotted by a coast-guard station just north of Great Yarmouth. (He could hardly have been missed; he nearly took the station’s radio mast off.) Seven minutes from his target, he came under attack by three Spitfires.
That target was RAF Beckford, and Metz’s plan was simple: he would dive his plane onto the damned place and purge it with fire. That he himself would die was no matter. To all intents and purposes, he’d been dead for almost two years already. This had to do with the photograph that he’d propped up in the copilot’s seat, the beautiful young flier with the tumbling hair. The boy had joined the squadron in the autumn of 1942, and for six months Metz had experienced an agonizing happiness. He’d felt a need to nurture and protect that went against the grain of himself. The friction had been delicious.
Then, in May 1943, the boy had been killed. Metz, frozen at the controls of his own plane, with his flight engineer screaming in his headphones, had watched it happen. Had watched the two British Hurricanes following his darling’s smoking machine down like frenzied sharks following a blood leak, triangulating the bullets in as if there were an infinity of bullets. Had watched the boy’s plane do a half cartwheel into the sea and simply cease to exist. Joy and love gone, bang, just like that, swallowed into the crinkled gray texture of the English sea. The Hurricanes were from RAF Beckford; Metz intended to end his war with a vengeance.
Flying solo, he had no way of defending himself from the Spitfires. Flying at so ridiculously low a height, he had very limited options for evasive action. So he stuck grimly to his course, watching the Norfolk landscape race toward and under him while his plane took an absurd number of hits and disintegrated around him. Just before he overflew a hamlet called Bratton Morley (did he glimpse a bulbous woman lifting her shocked face and falling over?), his starboard engine caught fire.
Metz didn’t make it to Beckford, although he got close. Two miles from the air base, he plunged, burning, into a sizable tract of forest known locally as Abbots Wood. He had almost certainly died by the time the ancient and heavy English trees ripped the wings from his fuselage. Jolting in the smoking cockpit, he tobogganed through the woods and plunged into a stretch of water called Perch Lake.
The woods were wet and sullen after the long winter. It didn’t take long for the crews from Beckford and Borstead to hose and beat the smoldering out. They hadn’t the equipment to lift the remains of the plane from the lake, so Metz was left sitting next to the shattered photograph of his lover under fifteen feet of silty water. Four months later, a courting couple were put off their stroke when his black and gassy body parts bobbed to the surface.
THE VIOLENT OUTRAGE overhead went away and was replaced by human noise: Win, howling Ruth’s name, punctuated by the various aliases of God. Ruth tried to call back, tried to say that she was all right, but found that she had no voice. The next thing was the banging of the gate and young Tommy Slender running to the back door, going, “Gor, bogger! Missus? Ruthie? You seen that? That Jerry? Come over just now? That near on took our chimbley off!”
Ruth got her elbows under her and looked down the garden path.