Chapter Sixteen #3
I nodded, but didn’t reply, because that was when the stunt pilots started up our replica Lancasters’ engines. We’ve only got three operating – nothing compared to the twenty-four planes that 96 often sent up – but even so, the noise was deafening.
Slowly, one hand on the railing, I pressed my other to my forehead.
My skin was clammy.
My head was splitting.
Below me, Nick and Felix were with the rest of their crew, done for the night and watching the moving planes. Ana, meanwhile, was up on a podium with a megaphone, giving the extras working as groundcrew a final briefing on what she needed from them.
Reaching the control tower’s landing, I tuned out, distracted by how woozy the lights were suddenly making me: brightening, then dimming, then brightening again.
‘Claude?’ said Emma, peering into my face. ‘You ok?’
Which was when the pyrotechnicians ignited the runway torches.
Not answering Emma, I turned, drawn by the sudden whoosh of light.
At the foot of the stairs, Rusty went nuts, barking and straining to give chase to the flares, so much more excited by them than she was by that bird.
The flares didn’t look the same as the ones I saw from the attic.
They were too uniform.
Too perfect.
I didn’t have time to think about that though.
Everything else happened.
The guttural roar of the planes intensified, deafeningly, as though multiplying by … eight.
My eyes swam.
The world wavered.
And, through it all, cut the piercing screech of that bird, who was no way, no how awake.
That’s when I started falling, tumbling backwards, my veins flooding with panic.
I saw Emma, staring after me, her eyes widening in alarm.
I heard Nick, above the roaring in my ears, shouting my name.
I opened my mouth, my throat filling with a scream.
But I didn’t let it go.
My neck snapped back, throwing my stare to the starlit sky, and I was no longer falling, but up at the top of the stairs again, with a blonde-haired woman whose fine-boned face felt instantly familiar.
On my body, I wore a uniform still, only it wasn’t tailored, the fabric was faded, and my legs were covered in woollen stockings rather than sheer tights.
I was about to fall all over again, I felt a rush of surety about that, and didn’t want to do it twice, so I reached out, grabbing the blonde woman’s arm.
‘What are you doing?’ said Prim, as Iris grabbed on to her.
‘I’m not sure,’ said Iris, frowning at her own impulse.
Releasing Prim’s arm, she looked down at her feet, steady beneath her, not going anywhere.
They’d felt like they’d been about to, though.
As Prim had passed her, and she’d turned towards the noise of the planes, her whole body had flooded with adrenalin: the strongest sensation of somehow already being in the process of falling.
‘I was about to slip,’ she said.
‘No you weren’t.’
‘I felt like I was.’
Prim narrowed her eyes. ‘Have you been drinking Clare’s brandy?’
‘No.’
‘I should hope not,’ said Prim, carrying on inside.
Iris remained where she was, her frown deepening.
She really had felt like she’d been tumbling.
Slowly, she looked over towards Mabel’s Fury, now taxiing towards the runway, and, reached up, touching her hand to her head.
She wasn’t sure what made her do that, either.
Or probe her skull for a bruise.
There was no bruise.
Of course there wasn’t.
She hadn’t fallen.
And yet, as she pressed harder on her scalp, she was filled with a certain sense of a moment hurdled.
A pain missing.
‘How bad’s the pain?’ Nick asks me, still on the phone to 999.
‘I’m not sure,’ I say. ‘I can’t really feel it.’
‘You heard that?’ Nick says, into his phone.
They heard it.
‘The ambulance is on its way,’ he tells me.
I open my mouth to protest again.
I don’t need an ambulance, I intend to say.
But, ‘Can you come too?’ I ask Nick instead.
‘Of course I’ll come,’ he tells me.
And I realise, as he tightens his grasp around mine, that, for the first time since last Friday, he’s holding my hand.
‘The strangest thing just happened to me,’ Iris said to Clare, once the squadron was gone, Browning was fetching tea, and they were alone in the control room. ‘I can’t make any sense of it.’
‘Sense of what?’ said Clare, leaning back in her chair.
‘Outside with Prim. I nearly fell, except I stopped myself before I realised it was even going to happen. Then it was as though … Well … ’ She broke off, trying to think how to explain it. ‘It somehow already had. Or –’ she bit her lip – ‘was.’
She half expected Clare to dismiss her.
Scoff, like Prim had.
But Clare didn’t dismiss her.
And it wasn’t in her nature to scoff.
‘Maybe it has happened,’ she said, her fingers moving to her neck, lacing through the chain holding Hans’s ring. ‘Maybe it is.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She frowned. ‘Lately though, I keep wondering whether this is all as new for us as we accept it is.’ She ran her thumb around the circle of Hans’s band of gold. ‘I find myself unsurprised by so much.’
‘Because of your powers, you mean?’ said Iris, which might have been a joke.
Except she didn’t feel like joking.
‘They’re not powers,’ Clare said, not joking either. ‘Just a certain sense of … recognition, I suppose. Truth.’ She looked across at Iris, her eyes still puffy from her earlier tears. ‘I rather think we might have all fallen before.’