Natural Flights of the Human Mind

by Clare Morrall

  She was pleased to go and leave Jonathan and Celia together. They would enjoy plotting about money. They had a lot in common.

  The only recollection she has now of Jonathan being truly happy is when he was winning at Monopoly. He glowed. He made no concessions, no easy terms if you landed on Mayfair with a hotel, or if someone wanted to buy Bond Street from him. He asked outrageous prices, so no one except him ever had complete sets for houses. He was born to be a moneymaker.

  Doody knows that she can’t afford to keep the cottage.

  It doesn’t matter. Six months ago she didn’t have it, and in six months’ time she won’t have it again. She’ll just return to where she was. When her ankle’s better, she’ll go down and find an estate agent. The land must be worth something. The cottage is too neglected anyway, and probably needs to be knocked down. Why would she want something that’s going to drain her limited money supply? What’s the point?

  She hobbles around the house irritably, frustrated by her limitations. She’s been to the hospital and had her foot X-rayed, but it’s not broken, just sprained. It still hurts, though, and she left the car in Hillingham, so she can’t go out much. Normally at half-term she goes round the second-hand bookshops, looking for first editions. She’s wasting all her free time—

  She’s concerned about the car. Did she lock it securely? There’ll be vandals in Hillingham—people aren’t more honest because they live in the country. She spends time with her Biggles collection, taking the books out and dusting them, holding them, reading random sections. It’s so much easier to like an unreal person than a real one. There’s no mess. You can be sure that he won’t just disappear when you’re not looking.

  She concentrates on her writing. By now, Mandles has crashed into the sea and swum to a deserted beach, somewhere on the Devon coast. He is limping badly, having sprained his ankle in the wreckage.

  The sun was at its yenith, a brilliant, pulsating art of suffocating heat—

  Outside, it’s grey and windy, thick clouds lowering over the school, the poplar trees on the edge of the playground twisting furiously in the gale. She worries about the rain coming into her cottage through the holes in the roof.

  Every now and again, tiny traces of doubt tiptoe into her mind. Should she be doing something more useful with her time? But she loves the way her mind works when she writes—clearly, logically—and that she can organise everything. People do what she wants them to do. It gives her a control that she has never managed to master in her own life, however hard she tries, or angry she gets. Surely writing children’s books is a legitimate occupation.

  Philip Hollyhead, the headmaster, eventually comes to see her. He hovers on the doorstep. ‘Just came to see how you are, Doody.’

  Instant caring. It’s taken him nearly a week to walk the hundred yards from his house to hers. ‘Come in,’ she says, and hobbles into the kitchen ahead of him. ‘I’ll make you some tea.’

  ‘It’s not necessary.’ He talks to her with a detached indifference, as if she doesn’t matter.

  ‘What’s that got to do with it? Just sit down.’

  He sits down. She should have been a teacher. She likes telling people what to do—especially if they obey—and Philip is usually compliant because he’s used to it. His wife, Doris the Lion Tamer, gives orders all the time, and he slips easily into a nonchalant resignation to her demands. It infuriates Doody and makes her more determined to annoy him.

  ‘So, how’s the leg?’

  ‘It hurts,’ she says. ‘That’s why I’m limping.’

  He pauses, but she won’t say any more if he doesn’t ask.

  He looks uncomfortable at the kitchen table. He rarely comes into her house, and she knows how much he would like to examine the evidence of her existence, but she won’t let him. She watches him steadily, and he’s nervous about letting his eyes wander while he is being watched. He’s about fifty-five, and probably contemplating an early retirement. His hair is receding towards its own retirement, and the strands left at the back are an unrealistic solid brown. He probably gives it a rinse once a week, somehow avoiding dyeing the bald bits.

  ‘I’ve inherited a cottage,’ Doody says, as she plugs in the kettle.

  He looks pleased to have something to talk about. ‘What good news. Where is it?’

  ‘In Devon, on the coast, near the village of Hillingham. I expect you know it.’

  He doesn’t, of course, but she likes to make him feel ignorant. ‘How exciting. Will you move down there?’ He lays his hands in front of him on the table and examines his fingernails. She can see that he’s wondering if she’ll give up her job.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’ll sell it.’

  ‘Oh.’

  They’ve worked together for the last seven years, since Philip took over as headmaster. He’s been there longer than his predecessors, and Doody knows him better than she did any of the others, but he is no good at conversation. He treats her as if she’s not his intellectual equal. She’s tempted to prove him wrong, but it’s more fun to let him believe she’s stupid. That way, she keeps the element of surprise, the excitement of knowing she can shock him at any time.

  ‘How many sugars, Philip?’

  ‘None for me,’ he says, with a faint grimace. ‘Doris never allows it.’

  He once asked Doody to call him ‘Headmaster’ or ‘Mr Hollyhead’ in front of the children. ‘It’s a matter of respect,’ he said. ‘For the children’s benefit.’

  ‘All right, Philip. I’ll think about it.’ Now she makes a point of calling him Philip wherever they are.

  She hops to the kettle as it boils and pours the water into the teapot. ‘It was nice of you to come and see me.’

  ‘It’s always a pleasure to see you, Imogen.’

  ‘You’ll have to take the teapot to the table. I’ll probably spill it.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ He gets to his feet immediately. ‘How did you hurt your leg, did you say?’

  ‘I fell off the roof.’ It sounds better than getting caught in hawthorn. She hasn’t told him the details yet. He hasn’t seemed interested.

  ‘Oh,’ he says, and she knows he isn’t listening.

  She pours his cup of tea and pushes it over to him.

  ‘I was wondering,’ he says, after a pause, ‘are you going to be able to mow the field in the next few weeks? The children like playing out on the grass now the weather’s better. Should I find someone else to do it?’

  ‘No, I’ll be fine soon.’ She fiddles with the spoon in the sugar bowl, scooping up the sugar and letting it all fall out. She wants to distract him. ‘Is that Charlie Miller out there?’ she says, peering past him with a worried expression.

  He turns in alarm. Doody lifts the spoon of sugar to his cup, hesitates, then pours it in. ‘Oh, no, sorry. It’s a magpie on the roof.’

  He turns back and regards her suspiciously. ‘There’s not much resemblance between Charlie Miller and a magpie.’

  ‘A trick of light,’ she says, watching him sip tea.

  ‘Could you keep your cottage for weekends or holidays?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s too much trouble.’

  ‘This is a very good cup of tea, Doody,’ he says.

  She dreams of Oliver d’Arby. She walks through the front door of the cottage and out into the back garden where he’s playing the cello. The deep dark tones reach inside her and stir up something in a long-forgotten secret place. She becomes aware of tears sliding down her cheeks, dripping off her chin. She’s incensed that he should make her cry, and rushes up behind him.

  ‘Stop it!’ she shouts. ‘Stop it!’

  He stops abruptly in the middle of the tune and turns to face her. He’s tall and thin with a grey and black grizzled beard and a long scar from the corner of his eye to his chin.

  She wakes up and decides that, as soon as she can walk properly, she’ll go down to Hillingham and find an estate agent. It won’t matter if she doesn’t make much money from the sale. Every
penny is welcome. She’s only a school caretaker.

  The doctor told her not to put any pressure on the foot, but after three weeks of boredom, she finds she can limp adequately. The hospital has lent her some crutches, which she only needs for longer stretches. She catches the train and takes a taxi. More money dripping away.

  When she goes in through the gate (her gate, not Oliver d’Arby’s), she sees the flattened pathway to the house, the hawthorn bush where she fell, the tangle of wild and tamed flowers, and feels again the sense of ownership that she felt before. She’s never owned a house, never had possessions. Everything has been borrowed, scrounged, donated. Markets, Salvation Army, Oxfam.

  Then she looks up at the roof. She rubs her eyes and looks again. Somebody has been up there. Two large sheets of off-white plastic have been draped over the main part, either nailed down or held in place by bricks and stones.

  For a while, she can’t work it out. Were they there last time and she didn’t notice? But she went up on the roof, crawled along it looking for gaps. Someone else has been up there. He hasn’t even done a good job. One edge has come away completely from the side and is flapping noisily in the wind.

  She knows who it is. How dare he come here without her? It’s her house. She’s the one to save it, not him.

  The woman in the post office smiles at her as she goes up to the counter. She’s small and suntanned and wrinkled, like a sultana. The place is empty. Just Doody standing at the counter with nothing to buy.

  ‘I want to find a man,’ she starts.

  The woman keeps smiling. ‘Oh, I don’t think we can help you here. Aren’t there agencies for that sort of thing?’

  Doody stares at her. Is she deaf, stupid or making some kind of joke? ‘I want his name.’

  ‘Whose name?’ The woman fiddles with some forms and looks genuinely perplexed.

  ‘The man. Very tall and thin, with messy hair and a beard. Looks like he’s out of an old black-and-white horror film.’

  Someone comes into the post office and stands behind her, so that she finds herself part of a queue. There’s immediate pressure on her to hurry up.

  ‘Hello, Mrs Whittaker,’ says the post-mistress. ‘Lovely weather—just right for June.’

  ‘Bit windy for me,’ says the woman. Doody refuses to acknowledge her, or take part in this conversation. She was here first.

  ‘He has a scar,’ she says, her voice shaking with the effort of staying calm, ‘and he’s not chatty.’

  ‘That’ll be Mr Straker,’ says the voice behind her, comfortable and knowledgeable. Doody turns to look at her. She’s elderly, her curly grey hair pinned back with an array of grips. She peers at Doody over the top of her glasses. ‘Who are you?’

  Doody concentrates on being pleasant until she’s got the information she wants. ‘Straker,’ she says. ‘Where does he live?’

  ‘He lives in the lighthouse.’

  ‘You won’t get anything out of him,’ says the woman behind the counter. ‘He never talks.’

  ‘Never? That’s impossible.’

  ‘Well, he manages it.’ She looks very smug.

  Doody ignores her and turns back to Mrs Whittaker. ‘He’s the lighthouse keeper?’

  ‘Oh, no. There’s a new lighthouse on the next headland. Mr Straker just lives in the old one.’

  Doody pauses to think about this. He lives in a lighthouse. He has a scar and he doesn’t talk. Is he real? ‘How do I get to the lighthouse?’

  ‘It’s a long way. You can take a number twenty bus to the beginning of the path and then walk about a mile across the cliff.’

  ‘Could I take a taxi to get closer?’

  Mrs Whittaker shakes her head and a grip falls out. ‘There’s no road. You’d never get a taxi driver to do it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t go out there on your own,’ says the post-mistress.

  ‘Why not?’ Doody remembers her fears about this man on the day she hurt her ankle. Was she right to have worried?

  ‘I’m told he’s killed someone. That’s why he doesn’t talk.’ Her voice deepens and drops to barely above a whisper.

  Doody experiences a great desire to argue with her. She laughs and talks more loudly. ‘Rubbish. I’ve already met him. He’s perfectly normal.’ Not true, but she refuses to acknowledge the nagging worry she can feel at the base of her stomach.

  Mrs Whittaker puts her hand on Doody’s arm gently. ‘Just be careful, my dear, that’s all. If even half of what they say about him is true, you would be unwise to put yourself at risk.’

  Her touch is hot and clammy, and Doody steps back with distaste, anxious to break the contact. She compares it to Straker’s cool, competent hands untangling her ankle three weeks ago, and knows which she wants to trust. ‘So why isn’t he in prison, then?’

  Mrs Whittaker raises her eyebrows a fraction. ‘Maybe he has been.’

  Doody smiles brightly. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll ask him who he’s killed. That’ll show I’m on to him.’

  ‘He won’t tell you,’ says the post-mistress.

  ‘How do you know? He might talk to me.’ Doody makes a silent promise to herself. She will somehow make him talk—about anything—just to prove she can do it.

  ‘No,’ says Mrs Whittaker, shaking her head. ‘He won’t talk.’

  ‘I’ll let you know,’ says Doody, and limps out of the post office.

  So she has to walk a mile. No problem. She has crutches. The ankle’s getting better.

  Half-way to the lighthouse, she regrets her decision. Her shoulders ache from the crutches, the bad foot throbs, the good foot is developing blisters and there’s a fierce wind that seems determined to prevent her moving forward.

  She pauses to think. Should she go back? But she’s half-way there and still fired up by her decision to confront him. She can rest when she reaches the lighthouse. She refuses to give up. There’s an added incentive now that she’s talked to the smug, elderly natives of Hillingham. She’ll get him to talk even if they can’t manage it.

  Of course, he might murder her instead. Beneath her public performance, there’s a jittery awareness that he is more sinister than she’s acknowledged. But he’s had his chance to kill her off and didn’t take it. On the contrary, he helped her. Surely that should count for something. Unless he has some secret plot that he has yet to reveal and intends her to come out to the lighthouse alone. Is that why he put those sheets on her roof?

  She dismisses the theory almost immediately. He is too stupid. A murderer would be clever and calculating.

  Anyway, she would know if she was being manipulated.

  This walk to the lighthouse is like running a marathon. Ambitious and exhausting, but as you approach the finish, you find a fresh energy, a second wind, a rush of adrenaline to give the final push. The closer she gets, the more excited she becomes. She wonders it he might be out, but persuades herself that it’s unlikely.

  She stands at the bottom of the lighthouse and peers up. It is old and neglected, long dark patches emerging through the paint at the bottom, and streaks of rust dripping down from the window-frames over the red and white stripes. The light at the top has a neat, circular green roof, topped by a perfect half-sphere that makes it look like a mosque. There are green railings on the edges of the balcony that surrounds the light. They’re all rusting too.

  A cat rubs against her leg and nearly pushes her over. She struggles to remain upright. ‘Hey, show some manners.’

  The door opens unexpectedly and there he is, exactly as he looked last time, same beard, same blue eyes, same wellington boots.

  ‘You!’ she shouts at him.

  He takes a step backwards with an appalled expression.

  ‘I know your name. Straker. Remember me? I’m the one who owns a cottage. The one with the roof.’

  He stares at her and says nothing.

  ‘Who said you could go up on my roof? Did I ask you to? Did I give you permission? Is it your roof or mine?’ She feels better. The tiredness and the
aching have gone. ‘If I’d wanted you to go on my roof,’ she points her finger at him and waves it wildly in the rhythm of her words, ‘I’d have asked you. What gives you the right to—’

  The door closes in front of her, squeaking in protest. She can’t believe what she’s seeing. ‘Open the door again!’ she shouts. ‘How dare you do this to me?’

  The door remains closed. She tries knocking on it with her fists. ‘Open the door. I was talking to you.’

  She can’t make an impression. The wood is too thick and it absorbs the energy of her arms, so the blows don’t make a satisfying enough sound, and it hurts her hands.

  ‘Open the door!’ she shrieks. She picks up some stones and hurls them against it, one at a time, but the sound is still too small. They bounce back and fall ineffectually to the ground.

  After a few minutes, she walks a distance away and sits down on the grass facing the sea, her back to the lighthouse. It’s very windy.

  She’s trying hard not to cry.

  Chapter 6

  Straker is not interested in the rows of televisions in the window of Curry’s or the newspaper headlines where they line the shelves at the entrance to Sainsbury’s. What he needs to know is all in the past. The facts will never change, the lives can’t go on, so he’s desperate to find out about them and make them real. The voices in his dreams must have something to say. If he can just hang on to them, they can go on existing, be living people and not just figures in grainy newspaper pictures. Every time he receives an answer to a letter, it’s like a new mark on someone’s portrait. A crease in the dress, a shaft of sunlight on a cheekbone, a glint in the eye behind the glasses. He knows Felicity’s father is not telling the truth, but there’s something there—maybe a trace of truth in his lies.