Wish You Were Here by Graham Swift Page B

It still seems to him, even now that he’s done it several times, like something impossible, a trick, even somehow wrong: that you could get into an aeroplane, then get out again a few hours later and there’d be—this completely different world.
    It was Ellie who, a bit to his surprise, had been seriously up for it. Not just what she wanted, but, so she’d said, what they deserved, what they should definitely do. It was their world too. Everyone else did it.
    ‘So how about it, Jacko?’ She’d ruffled his hair. ‘Live a little.’
    If he’d known, on those afternoons when he leant against the pick-up, rolling a cigarette, looking around him. If he’d only had an inkling.
    And had Tom had any inkling? Or was it, in his case, even something that had pushed him? Up that track. The world. And he’d seen it, apparently. Lived a little. Basra. Palm trees there too.
    Later, Jack would receive a thing called his Service Record.
    *
    On that grey morning Jack hadn’t just seen in his mind’s eye blue, hot, summer skies, he’d seen himself floating, flying in them.
    It had been during their last time in St Lucia, in one of those periods of sweaty, anxious restlessness that could sometimes come over him. He’d wanted to shake off the mood. He’d wanted to say to himself, ‘Hey, lighten up, you’re on holiday.’ ‘Lighten up’ was a phrase of Ellie’s, often used by her in the days when they’d been about to move to the Isle of Wight, like a motto for their future—‘Lighten up, Jacko’—and now he’d use it, from time to time, like a reminder, on himself.
    He’d wanted even to demonstrate to Ellie that he had indeed become a new, lighter, gladder, luckier man, and it was thanks not just to luck but to Ellie’s really rather amazing sticking by him. He’d anyway finally done something that Ellie had been urging him to do, daring him to do—as a joke, it seemed, because he was never really going to. On the other hand, she’d placed a bet on it, which she hadn’t withdrawn: a bottle of champagne at dinner, which in this place would cost a small fortune. And it was something that could be done at pretty well any time of the day. You spent a lot of time, in fact, watching other people do it.
    He’d gone down to the beach and the little spindly jetty, where there were some grinning boys in caps and T-shirts, and a couple of motor boats in their charge—who’d strap you into this harness with a long rope running to the back of one of the boats and, attached to your shoulders, though it had yet to open, a big, curved, striped, oblong parachute. Like a giant version of one of Ellie’s plastic hairgrips. And they’d rev the motor andpower off, and you couldn’t help but be lifted off and up, way up high, above the water.
    He’d said, ‘Okay, Ell, moment’s come. Ready to stump up?’ And he’d just walked down there, in his shorts and shades. He’d had the sense not to wear his cap (and it was a Lookout cap too). He’d just walked down, trying to do it at the easiest saunter.
    And then, moments later, to his surprise, he really was up there, just dangling—being pulled along, but somehow just floating too—with this great taut tugging thing above him, trying to drag him still higher, and the boat below and in front of him, with its white wake and the boys waving at him, like some little separate toy that had nothing, perhaps, to do with him. And all the people dotted on the beach and under the palms and sun umbrellas and round the blue-lagoon pools looking as if someone had just sprinkled them there. And Ellie somewhere among them, on her lounger, no doubt waving at him too, but it seemed silly, somehow, to try and spot her and wave back.
    He hadn’t felt frightened and, strangely, he hadn’t even felt very excited—or triumphant, given that he’d won the bet now, he’d actually done it. When he walked up later from the beach, Ellie had said, ‘My hero.’ Had he felt like a hero? No. He’d