Midland

by James Flint

  Jamie grinned. ‘Sean is referring to the fact,’ he said, ‘that Rick and I know he has promised Emily a flying lesson. And since I also know he’ll never get round to asking her himself, I’ve come to ask her for him.’

  Sean grimaced. ‘Thanks Jamie.’

  ‘My pleasure. So come on Emily. What about it? We’ve got a good few hours of daylight left.’

  Everyone looked at Emily, but before she could speak, Margaret intervened.

  ‘Emily, there’s no way you’re going up in one of those machines.’

  That pretty much made up Emily’s mind for her. ‘Of course I am Mum. This is Sean and Rick’s business. They make these things. They’re perfectly safe.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ Jamie said. ‘Caitlin, you’ll come too, won’t you?’ he continued. ‘Sean tells me you’ve been up before.’

  Caitlin stared at him. In the general hubbub her presence had almost been forgotten, but there she was standing apart from the group, smoking yet another cigarette.

  ‘Sure. Whatever. Let’s go.’

  ‘Hurray!’ shouted Rufus, jumping up and down with excitement. But Alex shook his head.

  ‘Sorry buddy, we’re staying here. Your mother’s right. Too dangerous.’

  ‘But Dad …’

  ‘No buts. Grandpa’s promised to bring the box of Lego down for you to play with while your mum and I go out for a walk.’

  —————

  Rick, Jamie and Caitlin took the truck and led the way; Emily followed with Sean and Matthew in the Wolds’ old Renault 4. The car had been sitting in the garage under a tarpaulin for some years, but after she’d moved back from London her parents had had it serviced and taxed so that she’d be able to get around on her own.

  ‘Bit weird, isn’t it, for us all to be going flying the day after a funeral?’ Matthew observed from the back seat.

  Sean didn’t turn around. ‘Jamie thought it would take everyone’s mind off things.’

  Sensing where her brother was headed, Emily decided to ask the obvious question before he did. At least she could do it with tact.

  ‘Sean, if you don’t mind me asking, is Caitlin okay?’

  ‘Yeah, I think so. Why?’

  Emily glanced at him. The choppy swirl of his curls was highlighted by the low winter sun, which flashed into the car through gaps in the denuded hedgerows.

  ‘I mean, what with her staying with us …’

  ‘She’s staying with you?’

  ‘Yes. She came last night. You didn’t know?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s odd. She said you’d all had a row about the will, and she’d walked out.’

  ‘That’s news to me. Jamie came back to my place and crashed out right after the ceremony. And as far as I know no one’s even seen the will yet. I don’t know how relevant it’ll be, anyway. From what I’ve been told by Dad’s lawyers, the probate could take years to conclude.’

  ‘Really?’ Emily said, beginning to wish she’d never asked. ‘That’s weird.’

  ‘Par for the course, I think. Look, don’t worry about it. We’re here now. Time to do something more fun.’

  They had reached the track that led to Sean’s house. Emily turned in and trundled the Renault past the little gables of St Leonard’s Church, then at Sean’s direction pulled into the field adjacent to the dark blue drier barn, where Jamie and Rick were already laying out the paramotors and their canopies on the grass. Caitlin stood leaning against the Toyota, Peruvian hat in her hands, blonde hair fidgeting in the breeze.

  ‘You made it!’ called Jamie, as they got out of the car. ‘Well done. We thought you might have chickened out.’

  Emily put a hand on her hip and feigned shock. ‘Thanks very much! Before you know it matey I’ll be giving you pointers, just you wait and see.’

  ‘Not scared then?’ he called back.

  She grinned. ‘Terrified!’

  Sean fetched a helmet from the truck and took her over to the nearer of the two contraptions. Positioning her in front of it, he picked up the two cords that linked the harness to the wing, each of which terminated in a triangular plastic handle, and draped them over her shoulders.

  ‘Okay. These are your main controls,’ he said, threading his arms beneath hers and taking the handles in his hands so that he could demonstrate. ‘They’ll hang off the harness about where they are now, and you pull the one on the side you want to turn. So it’s pull right to turn right, and pull left to turn left. Got it?’

  Emily nodded and Sean handed her the throttle.

  ‘This controls the prop. Don’t think of it in terms of speed, think in terms of altitude. Pull the trigger to go up, release it to go down. And this red button here? If you really want to stop, hit that and the engine will cut out. Then you’ll just start floating down to the ground. But try only to do it when you’re pointing at a decent place to land.’

  ‘Right. Pull: up. Release: down. Red: stop.’

  ‘Great. Let’s get you into the harness.’

  Sean and Rick were hoisting the paramotor onto Emily’s back when the whine of an engine a little further down the meadow signalled that Caitlin was preparing for take-off. They turned to watch as she pulled forward on her canopy. It twitched, raised an edge, then scooped itself aloft; craning her head to track its progress she walked forward until it was directly overhead, then gunned the motor and began to run. For a few paces she thudded heavily along and then her feet lifted free of the ground altogether and she was taking great long bounds in the empty air, bounds that took her clear of the tall hawthorn hedge that ran along the far side of the field and up into the sky.

  ‘Wow,’ said Emily, as Caitlin carved a turn around the barn.

  ‘See how it’s done? When the paraglider’s right overhead, that’s when you’ve really got to hit the gas and run like crazy. And don’t stop running, not until you’ve cleared that hedge. Got it?’

  ‘Got it.’

  ‘Brilliant.’ He blinked at her a couple of times, quickly leant in and planted a kiss on her cheek, then – blushing – retreated just as swiftly and made an ‘O’ with forefinger and thumb.

  ‘Good luck!’

  Emily smiled thinly and pulled the throttle, applying more force than she meant to. The propeller screamed into life and shoved her hard between the shoulders; she stumbled but recovered and now found herself moving forward with the canopy rising fast behind.

  ‘Look up! Look up!’ Sean’s voice, now coming through the intercom, startled her with its immediacy. She lifted her head, felt the helmet cut into the back of her neck, and saw the bright nylon edge of the wing drift into her field of vision.

  ‘Run!’

  And run she did. Accelerating hard, she allowed the machine to push her forward and suddenly it was easy, the weight was gone, she’d been transformed, and her toes were lifting free of the turf. In her surprise she eased off the trigger and at once her trainers thumped back down to the ground.

  ‘Keep going! Don’t stop!’

  She squeezed again and took another two or three giant steps, completing what amounted to a giant bounce. The hedge loomed in front of her. She put out a foot and it crashed through the tangle of hawthorn. And then she was over it and her next step struck into a void. Up she went as if borne upon a wave of pure exhilaration, and it wasn’t until Sean told her to ease off the gas and level off her trajectory that the fear hit. Then, looking down, she had time to realise that she was high in the air – very high in the air – and that there was nothing at all between her and the field below.

  Her legs dangled uselessly beneath her. Her right hand was gripping the harness so hard that her fingers had blanched and gone numb. A stave of telephone wires slid under her shoes. She didn’t know where she was going, what to do next. The thought of moving her hands up to the control bars filled her with unspeakable dread. She was going to die.

  ‘How do I turn again?’ she yelled into the mike.

  ‘Don’t worry about that,’ Sean’
s voice came back. ‘If you carry on as you are you’ll come round in a circle – it’s the bias caused by the propeller. Just concentrate on getting your bum into the seat.’

  The seat. She’d forgotten about the seat. The harness was fitted with one – less an actual seat than a sort of ledge that she could use to displace her weight from its present concentration on the straps slicing painfully into her armpits.

  To get her backside onto it, however, meant releasing her grip, and that was hard to do: she was frozen with fear, dangling like a dead cat from her shoulders while the paramotor eased her in a circle just as Sean had promised. Over the neighbouring field, back over the telephone wires, over the barn, round by the river and back past the church, and all the time the notion that she should shift her position even a millimetre seemed utterly absurd.

  ‘I’m scared, Sean.’

  ‘I know you’re scared. But don’t worry. You can’t fall. The worst that can happen is that you let go of the throttle and parachute to the ground.’

  ‘Or crash into those telegraph wires.’

  ‘That’s not going to happen. Just concentrate on your breathing, okay? Do that for me. Breathe in, and breathe out. Breathe in … and breathe out.’ Sean repeated this two or three times. ‘Feel any better?’

  Thirty metres up, Emily nodded. The focus on her breathing was helping, and now that her inactivity had resulted in nothing more dramatic than a couple of gentle laps of the meadow she was beginning to gain some confidence. She counted to three and slowly released her fingers, which complained as the blood flooded back into their joints.

  There was no disaster. The paraglider didn’t suddenly spiral out of control. Everything stayed fairly calm and stable, and she felt confident enough to work her hand up her chest and fumble for the shoulder strap. Got it. Okay. That’s good. Now, move her right buttock just a little … She relaxed her shoulder, dropped her arm, and groped around until she’d managed to trap the edge of the seat between the heel of her hand and the butt of the trigger. When she had it tight she hauled with all her strength on the shoulder strap, pulling the seat forward and shoving back with her bum.

  It worked. Suddenly the harness was taking all of her weight, and a pressure she’d been only half aware of was released from her groin and armpits as the shoulder straps slackened. Her circulation returned, along with a rush of euphoria.

  ‘I did it!’ she screamed, completely jubilant.

  ‘Well done!’ Sean’s voice crackled over the intercom. ‘That’s a bit more like it. Feel good?’

  ‘I think so.’ Now that she was sitting down her situation felt entirely different. It was still scary, but in a way that was exciting rather than petrifying. She reached for the control wires and pulled a couple of breaths deep into her lungs. ‘Wow. I’m flying. I’m really flying!’

  ‘Do you want to try a turn?’ Sean asked.

  ‘Okay.’ She looked about herself: the phone wires were some way away, and she was clear of the barn. Steadying her nerves, she gave a cautious tug on the right-hand control wire.

  ‘Harder than that! You want to pull it down all the way to your waist.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ She gave the line a hefty yank; the canopy above her dipped and she swung out in an arc.

  ‘Whoooah! This is awesome!’

  She made a quarter-turn and then returned the controller to shoulder level. As the canopy straightened she swung back, pendulum-like, to the perpendicular.

  The intercom buzzed. ‘Looks like you’re getting the hang of it.’

  ‘Oh very funny.’

  Down on the ground Matthew had wandered over to join Sean. ‘She’s getting on all right, isn’t she?’ he asked.

  ‘Not too bad.’

  ‘Caitlin’s amazing though. Has she flown a lot?’

  ‘Yeah, quite a few times. It’s actually pretty easy to tootle about like this; otherwise we’d never let people up by themselves without lots more training. Things get more challenging as you go higher.’

  Then, as they watched, something odd happened. Caitlin’s canopy twitched violently, almost folding in half. It quickly recovered its shape and continued on its way, but with harness and propeller swinging free in an eccentric fashion. Eccentric, because Caitlin was no longer attached to them. While her craft hummed away on its own, she was falling rapidly to earth.

  GULL

  TONY NOLAN WAS STANDING in his socks on the patio at the back of his house in Shelfield, knocking dried mud off his wellingtons, his antler-handled walking stick leant against the large concrete planter beside him.

  ‘Are you coming Sean?’ he shouted back into the house, before perching on the lip of the planter and tugging the boots onto his feet. He was just getting to grips with the second one when his son emerged.

  ‘Take your time, won’t you?’ Tony said.

  ‘I couldn’t find my gloves,’ Sean explained.

  ‘Gloves? What do you need gloves for? It’s not that bloody cold.’

  ‘It might be once we get up the hill.’

  ‘Who said we’re going up the hill?’

  ‘Just a wild guess.’

  Tony huffed his heel into place, levered himself upright, and set off in the direction of the paddock. At the edge of the patio he paused, leant his stick against his shoulder, and lit a Bolivar with a long-stemmed wooden match from a box he kept in the pocket of his Barbour for that purpose. This task accomplished, he snapped the match and flicked the two halves into a rose bed and then walked on, Sean bobbing at his side, a trail of sculpted tufts of smoke unfurling on the brittle air behind him.

  In the paddock he made a small detour via the little stable block, pausing to inspect some work that had been done to patch up the shingles on the northern wall and murmuring something to Sean about poor-quality materials costing you twice as much in the end. Then he struck out for the gate that let onto the footpath behind the paddock fence and back down to the lane. Once through that it was only a short walk to the stile affording access to the arable field beyond, a field that stretched all the way to the foot of Round Hill, which was indeed their destination.

  Tony, however, wasn’t about to let himself be so easily second-guessed. His son’s assurance had annoyed him, as had the generally cocksure manner Sean had displayed since his recent graduation, and to regain the initiative he cut across the field away from the hill and through the plough churn. This quickly caked their boots and made for heavy going as they took a turn around the eastern edge of the wood, coloured at this time of year only by the coppery carpet of leaves and the metallic highlights of moss and lichen that encrusted the trees’ bare branches.

  Eventually they reached Inkberrow Lane and followed it along what was now the north side of the wood, stamping the clay from their treads as they went and leaving manure-like trails on the pale grey tarmac in the process. As they neared the centre of the wood the narrow verge widened back into a clearing that in turn dwindled into a track leading south, and parked here were eight or nine distressed trucks and caravans. It was a travellers’ camp, and one which showed few signs of life beyond the laundry hanging limply on the van-to-tree washing lines and the actions of an emaciated tomcat who was sitting on a stained plastic picnic table washing his face with his paw.

  Tony’s cigar was down to the nub now, and as they passed between the vehicles he dropped it underfoot and pressed it into the dirt. At that moment the door on one of the buses popped open and a heavy man wearing boots, jeans and a vest heaved out, pulling a plaid shirt up around his shoulders.

  ‘Morning John,’ Tony called. ‘Didn’t mean to wake you up.’

  The man started, but grinned when he saw who it was.

  ‘Morning Mr Nolan,’ he said. ‘What brings you this way?’

  ‘Just out for a stroll. Have you met my son Sean?’

  ‘I don’t reckon I have.’ John ambled over to them, and as he approached Sean could see that one of his eyes was strangely glazed and slightly smaller than the other. He shook the m
an’s hand, which was as chapped and abraded as an old leather glove.

  ‘Pleased to make your acquaintance, young man.’

  He offered them tea but Tony declined, and he and Sean continued up the track through the woods.

  ‘I didn’t know you knew the travellers,’ Sean remarked, when they were some way into the trees.

  ‘There’s plenty you don’t know,’ Tony said, and he eased his pace off a little now that he felt back in control.

  The ground rose and the path wound to and fro until, quite abruptly, it stopped and they emerged onto a grassy ride, sliced through the wood to allow a line of telegraph poles to carry its wires clear of entangling branches. The shooting season was just commencing, and around them the birds ran thick along the ground, growing hungry now that the harvest was over and the days were growing colder and getting used to people coming this way on foot to bring them feed.

  The ride took them over the crest of the contour and down the other side, and they followed the line of poles until the trees closed in again, the grass became hatched by muddy wheel ruts, and the track reappeared. Then they were out of the wood and crossing a patch of set-aside thick with fescue and meadow grass. During the summer this had towered ambitiously and harboured a dense peppering of wildflowers between its swaying peaks, but it had since been twisted into flattened swirls by the wild autumn weather. Ahead stood a smart aluminium gate, and beyond it Round Hill: they had come full circle.

  They climbed the hill slowly. Even though this northern approach offered the gentlest gradients of any of the summit routes, Tony began to wheeze as they passed the ancient hawthorn that occupied a peculiar scooped-out hollow, like a tiny cwm, about halfway up the slope. Having already suffered one detour, Sean said nothing about the fact that he’d guessed where they were going; he also said nothing when his father lit up a Dunhill the moment they reached the small stone circle that sat on the hill’s flat top like a rusted iron crown.

  While Tony smoked Sean let his eyes run over the view to the southwest. The Warwickshire plain undulated away from them between the escarpment of Guy’s Cliffe – curling like a crooked arm to their left – and the woods they’d just walked through, the space between these two margins crayoned in with a classic English patchwork of hedgerows and fields. This in turn was sliced into segments by lanes as sinuous as streams and pinned to its spot on the earth by the silage towers of Glancey’s farm, standing like some ancient monument at the centre of it all.