Ever After by Graham Swift Page A

box—somewhat belying its lavish dimensions—were fuselage and wing parts and, attached to thin strips from which they could be snapped off, a host of intricately detailed smaller fixtures: propellor, wing flaps, undercarriage and so on—even, complete with moulded flying-jacket and helmet, a little, rigidly alert pilot.
    I wish I could remember the name of the plane. I ought to. It was a rather stocky-looking fighter plane, once in service with the U.S. Navy. But what I remember is the box and the almost CinemaScope vividness of the scene emblazoned on its lid. We are high in the air, amidst a tight attacking formation of the nameless aircraft, one of which is caught in fine close-up—diving angle, gunsablaze—at centre-picture. Below us is the blue sheen of the Pacific, and on it the Japanese fleet taking frantic evasive action: flashing guns, smoke, curving wakes. In the distance, a skirmish between our planes and the defending fighters, one of which, gashed with flame, spirals towards the sea.
    The compound symbolism of this offering was not lost on a boy capable of reading and digesting
Hamlet
.
    “You see what you can do with plastic, pal? This is a
scale
-model. Everything’s an exact replica of the real thing.…” He went on, as if he were talking not about plastic but about some kind of protoplasm.
    And I did not have to ask, though I did ask, with an ingenuous and reverent hesitancy, and received from Sam a dry-voiced reply and a melting look, as if we were on the verge of a breakthrough: “Was this the plane that Ed …?”
    We spread the pieces on the table. He interpreted the little leaflet of instructions. His face, with its clean, naïve features that would age so well (how did this man ever succeed in business?) hung close to mine. It was obvious that he was having to restrain himself from assembling the model himself.
    “Well, kid—all yours. Make a good job of it.”
    And make a good job of it I did. How I pleased him by not rejecting this bribe but giving it my devoted attention. What pains I took to assemble each piece in the correct order and not to smear the glue. And this diligence had its strangely revelatory side. Under my hands, something came to life: a piece of history, a fragment of former time viewed down the wrong end of a telescope. When I fitted the little pilot into his cockpit—duly painted in advance: pink for the face, brown for his leather jacket—I felt that I was like the hand of fate itself. I could see very clearlyan inexorable truth. The man thought he was in control of the plane, but it was the plane that was in control of the man. This was how things stood. The man didn’t belong to himself. The man was plucked up from his real place and set down in the plane no less ruthlessly than I took his miniature counterpart and glued him down by his backside. The man was a fleshy anomaly, entirely at the mercy of his winged carapace. He might as well have been made of plastic.
    When the plane was assembled, fastidiously painted in authentic camouflage and affixed with its markings transfers, I hung it by a length of thread from the ceiling in my bedroom. This seemed both an appropriate aerial perch and to suggest the status of a treasured icon—I would look at it last thing at night and first thing in the morning.
    But it didn’t remain there for long.
    The following morning, in fact, a warm Sunday morning, I took it down. Below me, on the paved terrace at the rear of the house, overlooked by my bedroom, Sam and my mother were lounging in deck-chairs, a late breakfast over. There was, I remember, a peculiar calm about this Sunday morning—the rustle of papers, the clink of coffee cups—a feeling of probation served, as if we had reached a pitch of domestic equilibrium not achieved before.
    I held the lovingly constructed aircraft in one hand and with the other applied a lighted match to the propeller. Plastic, as Sam liked to drive home, does not oxidize or decompose and