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don’t because you’re happy.
    “The reason you’re happy is you’ve got a small oxygen leak. You don’t suspect anything’s wrong; your reactions are slower, but you think they’re normal. Then you get a bit feebler; you don’t move your head around as much as you should. You aren’t in pain—you don’t even feel the cold now. You don’t want to kill anyoneanymore—all that feeling has been leaking away with the oxygen. You feel happy.
    “And then one of two things happens. Either a 109 drops on you with a quick burst and a whouf of flame and then it’s all over, nice and clean. Or else, nothing at all happens, and you carry on climbing through the thin blue air, staring at the sun through your fingers, frost on your Perspex but all warm inside, all happy and not a thought in your head, until your hand drops in front of you, and then your head drops and you don’t even notice it’s curtains …”
    What possible answer could you make to that, Jean thought. You couldn’t shout “Don’t do it!” as if Prosser were a suicide on a parapet. You couldn’t very well say it all sounded brave and beautiful to you, even if that was exactly what it did sound like. You just had to wait for him to say the next thing.
    “Sometimes I think they oughtn’t to let me back to flying. I can see myself doing that one day. When I’ve had enough. Have to do it over the sea, of course, otherwise you might land in someone’s allotment. Might stop them Digging for Victory.”
    “That wouldn’t do.”
    “No, that wouldn’t do at all.”
    “And … and you haven’t had enough.” Jean intended this as a gentle question, but she seemed to panic halfway through and it came out bossy and certain. Prosser’s tone hardened in reply.
    “Well, you’re a good listener, little missie, aren’t you, but you don’t know the first thing. You don’t know the first thing.”
    “At least I know that I don’t,” Jean said, rather to her surprise; and to his, for the sting went out of his tone at once. He carried on, in a sort of reverie.
    “It really is quite different up there, you see. I mean, when you’ve flown as much as I have, you find you can suddenly get completely browned off, just in a minute or so. Something to do with nerves, I suppose—you’ve been tense for so long, and then if you relax a bit, it feels like forever. You should talk to some of those flying-boat chappies if you want to hear funny stories.”
    Did she want to hear funny stories? Not if they were about sweet jars and dandelion clocks; but Prosser didn’t give her the chance to say no.
    “Chum of mine, he was on Catalinas. They can be on duty twenty, twenty-two hours at a stretch. Up at midnight, breakfast, take off two in the morning, not back till eight or nine at night. Flying over the same bit of sea for hours on end: that’s what it feels like. Not even steering—they’ve handed over to George most of the time. Just staring at the sea, looking for subs and waiting for the next brew-up. That’s when your eyes start playing tricks. This chum of mine said he was once out in the Atlantic, nothing much happening, when suddenly he pulled the stick right back. Thought there was a mountain ahead.”
    “Perhaps it was one of those clouds that looks like a mountain.”
    “No. After he’d flattened out and they’d all effed him for spilling their brew-up, he had a good look round. Nothing, not a cloud in the sky, absolutely clear … And then another bloke I talked to, he had it even odder. Guess what? He was four hundred and fifty miles off the west coast of Ireland, tooling along, he looks down, and what does he see? He sees a fellow on a motorbike, riding along like it was Sunday afternoon.”
    “In the air?”
    “Course not. Don’t be daft. You can’t ride along in the air. No, he was obeying the traffic regulations and going along in a straight line on the top of the waves. Goggles, leather gauntlets, exhaust smoke coming out the