Page 9 of The Dark of the Moon
She laughs. ‘I think it can be a curse at any age. Dan and I know all about sleepless nights. And, as you know, Finn has his own routine too. He sleeps deeply at first, now we’ve got him on the melatonin to help him actually get to sleep at all. But if he wakes, even in the wee small hours before the dawn, he needs to move. As you’ve seen, the trampolining seems to help him. It’s a distraction, I suppose, from a brain that’s on hyperdrive all his waking hours. He prefers being outside in the dark to the daylight. Less visual stimulation makes things a bit calmer for him. So we let him go outside and jump. It gives us a few more hours before the day begins.’ Her neutral tone is forced, a little wary. Then she adds, more defensively, ‘I suppose you probably think that’s bad parenting. But we’ve given up trying to parent Finn conventionally.’
‘I don’t think anything of the sort,’ I reply evenly. ‘I’m sure an unconventional approach is entirely appropriate when Finn is an unconventional child. There’s nothing wrong with moonlighttrampolining. If it weren’t for my missing leg, I’d probably be tempted to have a go myself – it looks rather liberating.’
She looks relieved. ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘It’s just that Dan and I are so used to the disapproving looks we get when we can’t control our child in public. People always seem to assume we’re terrible parents. As if we didn’t already feel inadequate enough as it is. The trouble is, Finn looks normal to people, until suddenly he isn’t – it’s like walking on eggshells every waking moment. But we’ve learned over the years to take the path of least resistance, for our own sanity as well as his – it’s less important to fulfil society’s expectations of you than it is to maintain a relationship with your child where you can help him.’
I hear the tremor in her voice, see again the exhaustion that lies behind her eyes in spite of her resolutely cheerful demeanour. ‘It can’t be easy,’ I say levelly.
I feel bad that my presence here is another burden for Kendra and Dan. She insists it’s no trouble at all having me to stay, but I can see the extra effort they’re going to on my behalf. The over-rich cheeses and fancy pâtés they feel they have to buy for me play havoc with my digestion and give me terrible heartburn. To be honest, I prefer the Marmite sandwiches. Finn and I have that in common.
I just hope she’s getting enough out of writing down my story to make all that extra effort worth her while.
‘Shall we continue?’ I say, nodding at her tape recorder and the notebooks she uses to jot down my story.
She looks grateful. ‘Yes, thank you, Philly. Whenever you’re ready ...’
I had loved my job as a ferry pilot, but Amy’s disappearance shook me to the core. We all missed her most dreadfully. The world had been a better place for having her in it. It certainly felt likea worse place without her. The possibility that she’d been killed by friendly fire made it so much harder to bear. I began having terrible nightmares, dreaming that the planes I was flying were being shot down in flames, my heart thumping with the sensation of plummeting out of control, hearing the sound of screeching metal as the aircraft was torn apart around me. Amy’s face would flash before me, smiling just as she’d done on that last morning at the Blackpool aerodrome. She seemed to be trying to tell me something, but at first I couldn’t make out the words. Then her smile turned to a look of terror, and I realised she was begging me to come and find her. I’d jolt awake, tears running down my cheeks and my chest constricting with helplessness.
I was exhausted by day, afraid to go to sleep by night in case the dreams came back.
I was struggling to do my job as well, and not just because of the lack of sleep. I’d be flying some aircraft or other and suddenly I would find that I couldn’t breathe, overwhelmed by a sense of panic that came out of nowhere. After one of these attacks of panic, I managed to regain control of my breathing only to find I’d pushed the joystick forward and put the plane into a nosedive, heading straight towards a cluster of houses beside the railway line I’d been following. I pulled back, just managing to regain height in time to prevent a terrible accident. It left me shaken, doubting myself. I never let it happen again, erring on the side of caution in all my deliveries, focusing all my attention on keeping my breathing under control, as well as whichever plane I was handling. But the joy I’d once had for flying had become obscured by doubts and fears, grey clouds of depression and grief blanketing the elation of soaring into the blue. I’m sure some of the other girls were struggling too, although we never shared how we were feeling with one another. Compared with what people across the Channel in Europe were confronted with, day in, day out, the dangers we faced were nothing really.
About a year later, I was killing time in the mess on another damp January day, trying to distract myself by doing the crossword as usual, when Agnieszka brandished the newspaper she’d been reading at me from across the table. ‘Here’s a challenge for you, Philly,’ she said. ‘TheTelegraph’s going to run a puzzle-solving competition. They’re setting one to be done under test conditions up in town. Some chap’s offering £100 to be donated to charity, supporting the Services, if anyone can solve it in under twelve minutes. You should go and do it.’ She pushed the paper over to me, tapping a finger on the relevant section. Like mine, her nails held faint traces of engine oil from whichever machine she’d been tinkering with in the hangar earlier.
I read the article. Apparently, disgruntledTelegraphreaders had been complaining that the puzzles they were printing were growing too easy, and so this challenge was being set to prove them wrong. I checked the date they’d set for the test. I’d be off duty that day. And it might make a nice change, going up to town again. For the past year, since Amy’s death, I hadn’t joined in the other girls’ outings, despite their repeated efforts to cheer me up with invitations to join them for a jaunt to the club or a show. I decided to put my name down.
Agnieszka was off duty too that day, so we went up to town together and made our way to Fleet Street. ‘Show them how it’s done,’ she said, waving me through the doors of theTelegraphoffices before I could change my mind and chicken out. ‘The honour of the Attagirls rests upon your shoulders!Powodzenia!Good luck!’
I joined the queue of about twenty-five people lining the corridor. Eventually, we were shown into a large room, not unlike a school exam hall, where desks had been set up. At each place, a single sheet of paper lay face down with a stubby pencil placed on top of it. A man stood at the front of the room with a stopwatch.
‘On the paper before you is printed a crossword puzzle,’ he said, once everyone had shuffled in and found a place to sit. ‘You will have a maximum of twelve minutes in which to complete it.Before we begin, please write your name and address on the back of the sheet.’
The silence in the room was broken only by the scratching of pencils on paper.
‘All ready?’ he asked. ‘Then I shall count down five seconds and you may turn the sheet over and begin. Five, four, three, two, one ...’
My mind was completely focused as I worked on solving the clues, enjoying slotting the answers into the blank squares. Some were easy enough.Silencer.Bogie.Agenda. Others were more cryptic. I hesitated momentarily overNewark– ‘Is this town ready for a flood?’ – then filled in the last of the blanks to make 21 downSennight. Done! I looked up from my work. A couple of the others seemed to have finished already and I exchanged a faint smile with the man diagonally across from me as he, too, set down his pencil.
‘And stop! Time’s up.’ The invigilator clicked his stopwatch. ‘Right, that’s the test over. Please leave your paper on the table so that your answers can be checked. A few of you seem to have completed the puzzle. Whether anyone has managed to do so correctly, and whether the donation can therefore be made to charity, will be announced in tomorrow’s paper.’
I went to meet Agnieszka in a nearby café. ‘Well?’ she asked. ‘How did you get on?’
I shrugged. ‘It was easy enough. I did it within the twelve minutes.’
She laughed. ‘I knew you would, you’re such a brain-box. What a lark!’ She loved dropping in colloquial English expressions wherever she could practise using them.
I thought nothing more of it until, a couple of weeks later, a rather strange missive dropped through the letterbox of my digs. It said that, as a result of my successful solving of the test crossword in under twelve minutes, I was invited to report to an address in Londonthe following Monday afternoon. I should bring my kit-bag and be prepared for a reassignment of my duties. Beneath the signature were printed two even more intriguing words: Military Intelligence.
I sat on the top deck of the bus from Paddington as it jolted its way through the bomb-torn streets to Green Park. The Ritz wore its cladding of sandbags with an air of stolid defiance. As I got off, a pair of smartly dressed women coming out of the door brushed past me in a cloud of perfume and cigarette smoke. I shouldered my kit-bag and crossed the road, checking the address on the letter for the umpteenth time to make sure I was in the right place. The doorway of the building was nondescript, but it seemed I was expected and I was ushered in, told to leave my bag at the front desk, and shown along a labyrinthine series of corridors and stairwells to a small office on the third floor.
I knocked and entered the room, where a smiling major I presumed to be from the Army Intelligence Corps sat behind a polished table with a pile of folders before him. He checked the name on the top one, then extended a hand for me to shake. ‘Miss Buchanan. Please take a seat.’ I noticed he didn’t offer his own name.
My interview must have lasted about an hour, I suppose. He’d clearly done his homework. He asked me about theTelegraphcrossword and whether I enjoyed doing such puzzles. He enquired about my schooling in Scotland, about the offer of a place at Cambridge University and about my duties in the ATA. He asked about my parents and my brothers. Then he asked which languages I spoke.
‘Polish – although I understand more than I can actually speak. Schoolgirl French and German. But none of them exactly fluently,’ I replied apologetically. I had no idea what I was being tested for, but I didn’t want to disappoint the major. He seemed a kindly man.And my competitive streak had kicked in at the sight of those other folders in the pile beneath mine.
‘Splendid, splendid,’ he said, smiling and nodding, making a note on a pad of lined paper. ‘To be honest, we really need someone who can speak mathematics more than any other language. Arithmetic was never my strong point. It’s all Greek to me!’
There was no opportunity for me to ask any questions of my own. It appeared the interview was over and that I had been successful. There was no explanation, no offer made for me to accept or reject. He simply stood up, shook my hand again and gave me a movement order, along with a rail warrant to be swapped at Euston Station for a ticket. ‘Get the train to Bletchley. Ask for directions to Bletchley Park. They’ll take things from there.’
