Natural Flights of the Human Mind

by Clare Morrall

  There was once, a long time ago, a history teacher called Mr Hardcastle, who’d believed in him. ‘Apply to university, Peter,’ he’d said, his penetrating eyes peering out over his red, porous nose. ‘You’re good at drawing the truth from historical documents. Do something useful.’

  Mr Hardcastle had appeared in Straker’s mind recently, while he was walking out of the village towards the library. Thirty minutes’ walk there, an hour’s research, thirty minutes back. He stopped as if the teacher was there in front of him, tall, skeletal, drooping over his pile of exercise books. His look was one of such reproach that Straker felt he was being cut open with a scalpel. He could feel the flesh above his heart being parted, folded outwards, exposed to the passing breeze. He struggled to breathe, to speak to Mr Hardcastle, but nothing came out.

  ‘Go to university, Peter.’

  If only, if only—

  Seventy-eight people would still be alive.

  Unless they’d had another accident instead. This thought eases the sharp pain slightly. One person might have walked under a bus the next day. Another could have died of a heart-attack within six months. He had just speeded the whole thing up. Got rid of them in one easy step.

  He doesn’t know Doody’s at the door. He’s listening to the wind when he comes downstairs. It rattles the window of his sleep room, usually randomly but today it seems more organised. Gusts are coming at regular intervals, cannon balls fired at the lighthouse. Somewhere out to sea there’s an intelligence, someone who wants to destroy him, and knows how to wear down his resistance.

  He’s timed the bangs—15 seconds apart. 78 bangs would take 1170 seconds—19 minutes, 30 seconds. He has been sitting on his mattress and counting. The nearer he gets to 78, the more alarming it becomes. A roll-call in his head, a funeral bell tolling into the wind. He’ll go to 50, he decides, and then stop counting. But 50 comes and goes. 60, 70, 77. He leaps up in panic and runs down the stairs, his feet clattering on the concrete steps, the number 78 chasing behind him.

  ‘You!’ she says, as he opens the door.

  He looks at her in confusion, waiting for the number to catch him up and explode over his head. What does she mean? He isn’t the seventy-eighth. Is she the seventy-eighth—alive after all? Has the number gone down to seventy-seven and nobody’s bothered to tell him?

  She’s too close and he steps back, but she moves forward and fills the space. She’s wearing a brilliant peacock-blue blouse that hangs loosely over her stomach, flapping in the wind, and patterned leggings that end half-way down her legs, making them look unnaturally thin. She’s waving a finger, pointing at him, but he doesn’t understand. It’s not the seventy-eight that frightens him, not the words she’s saying or the stabbing finger. It’s the anger.

  He’s seen people like this before. Twenty-four years ago, on the first day of the inquest. He’d returned to his own house after a few suffocating weeks with his parents, but for the first time in his adult life, he missed his father’s confident presence. Straker came out of his house, and was confronted by a bewildering crowd of people and their anger. He knew they were there because he’d seen them from the window, but he wasn’t prepared for the noise. There were journalists with cameras, calling out questions, and a group of policemen attempting to hold back the people so that he could get into the waiting car, but the women were the most frightening.

  ‘Murderer!’ they screamed.

  ‘String him up!’

  He heard the words, but couldn’t take in any of them.

  There was a woman at the front with a little boy in a pushchair. He was wrapped in an all-in-one blue suit, with the hood up, fastened firmly round his chubby face. He was sucking a dummy and gazing out serenely, unmoved by the commotion around him.

  His mother had shoulder-length ginger hair, thick with tangled ringlets. She might have been huge, or it might only have been her mouth. Perhaps she was pretty when she was at home feeding her baby, perhaps the father of her child loved her. But now her lipsticked mouth was open and cavernous, forming all sorts of words that children shouldn’t hear. And her eyes were wild and rolling. There were other women there, but she dominated the scene.

  ‘Get in!’ yelled the solicitor from the car. A policeman grabbed Pete by the head and pushed him on to the back seat.

  The door closed. They were safe, shielded from the anger. The car edged its way through the crowd, which parted reluctantly to let it through.

  Journalists ran alongside for a while, their cameras flashing optimistically.

  The last face Pete saw was that of the ginger-haired woman, her eyes bulging with anger, her scarlet mouth spitting at him. He could just see the boy in the pushchair, who had gone to sleep. He’s started to worry about that child recently. Was he deaf? What chance did he have with a mother like that?

  Streaks of red poured down one window.

  ‘Blood!’ said Pete. ‘Where’s it come from?’

  ‘Tomatoes,’ said his solicitor. ‘They’re throwing tomatoes.’ He sounded quietly proud, as if this was the high point of his career.

  Miss Doody’s hair is blonde, dyed, presumably, and there are no ringlets, just straight, dangling, unevenly cut chunks. But there’s something about her face, the pointing finger, that makes Straker remember. There’s a terror building up inside him, pulsing down his legs, along his arms, into his fingertips, his toes, the tips of his ears. The scar on his face is throbbing. He sees her angry face without hearing the words. She seems to be repeating the word ‘roof’.

  He shuts the door.

  Standing on the other side, he shivers into the emptiness, temporarily paralysed by fear. He starts to count. Backwards from seventy-eight. He stops shaking. Numbers going down, bodies decreasing, people being resurrected, into the twenties, below twenty, single figures—

  After a time, she stops shouting and starts throwing things at the door. Whatever she’s using, it doesn’t make much impression. Then that stops too. There’s a silence. The cat-flap rattles and Suleiman climbs through, looking annoyed, ruffled. He stares at Straker, as if it were his fault, then races past him, up the stairs.

  Straker waits for a long time, aching into the emptiness. He remembers the other silence in the garden, under the hawthorn, which he shared with her. Is it happening again? Him inside, her out? No. Today, they’re so far apart they’re at opposite ends of the world.

  Gradually, as his numbers go into minus figures, sensation returns to his legs, so he climbs the stairs, putting a greater distance between him and her, right up to the light room, and the balcony. The expanse of the sea opens up before him, empty and vast, blending with the horizon so they become part of each other with no defining line. The rhythm of the waves racing towards him, the inevitability of their progress, soothes him. He stands there for a long time and clears his mind.

  His original instincts were correct. She’s furious that he attempted to help. It seems obvious now. He should have known that she’s not someone who needs help and anything he offers is inevitably going to be wrong. Tomorrow he’ll go back and remove the sails.

  Wayne is crying again.

  ‘Stop whingeing,’ says Katie. ‘You’re always crying.’

  ‘Poor little thing,’ says Felicity, and her voice has become softer, childish again.

  Wayne: ‘I want my mummy.’

  Katie: ‘We all want our mummies. You’re only saying that because you want some sympathy.’

  How old are these children?

  ‘Nine years old, all of them. You should know that.’ Maggie knows everything. ‘Thirty-three children. A whole third-year class from Piccadilly Street Junior. You wiped them out.’

  Alan is there too. ‘It’s the best age. Close to you, not ready to be a teenager.’

  Maggie: ‘How do you run a school with a whole class missing? Have you thought about that? A third of the year not there. Does it affect their budget? What do they do with an empty classroom and the spare teacher? How do they work out the numbers w
hen they all go up to senior school?’

  ‘Please, Maggie. Give me a break.’

  Silence.

  Her silences are more confusing than her accusations.

  He follows the progress of a wave as it rolls in towards the rocks, but something distracts him. Lowering his gaze, he can see Miss Doody, sitting on the cliff with her back to the lighthouse. Her legs are sticking out in front of her awkwardly, like two pieces of string, ending in sandals with ridiculously high heels. There are two crutches on the grass beside her.

  Instinctively, he steps back. Has she seen him? He stands with his back against the light for some time, then returns to the railings. She’s still there, unmoving, looking out to sea. Is she going to go away, or will she stay there for ever? Panic starts to bubble away inside him again. He doesn’t know what to do.

  He tries to watch the sea, but now there is something sinister about the way the waves never stop. Every time one reaches the rocks, there is another just behind, leaping along, waiting to take its place. Nothing alters, nothing breaks the pattern. Why is she here? What does she want from him? Has she walked all this way on crutches? Can’t she see that he has no time for her? What happens if she doesn’t go away?

  What does she want?

  He steps forward to the railings. He doesn’t want her to see him, so he moves cautiously, but her position hasn’t changed. He goes back in, out again, in again. He’s sweating with fear, but the wind cools the sweat and he starts to shiver.

  He returns downstairs to the room he uses as a study and sits at the battered table, which is covered with books and papers. He finds a pile of letters and makes himself read them through.

  Dear Mr Straker,

  Further to your enquiry of 26 May, I enclose details to the best of my knowledge. My parents have been greatly missed by three generations of our family…

  I would be interested in reading your research on the 1979 crash…

  Wayne’s parents moved out of the area after the crash…

  He reads each letter several times, but can’t take them in. Just the first lines, forcing himself to concentrate, but they become random symbols, running in and out of his mind without meaning. He doesn’t know how long he sits there, but it feels like hours. Eventually he stands up, stretches his legs, and runs up and down a flight of stairs several times, timing himself. Six seconds up. Five seconds down. Faster: five seconds up. Three seconds down. He runs up to the balcony again and leans over the railings.

  She’s still there. She’s not going to go away.

  He will ignore her. Presumably she’ll disappear in the end. He doesn’t need to go downstairs for days. He has enough food in here to survive. Stale doughnuts, bottled water, teabags, crisps, apples, bread and cheese.

  He stares at her one last time. She appears very alone, separated from the rest of the world by her anger. She needs a hat. She doesn’t know that the temperature is deceptive. It may not seem warm in the wind, but she’ll burn. He examines the way she sits there, her shoulders drooping, somehow deflated, and sees that her anger has gone. She seems diminished without it, as if she doesn’t exist. A carrier-bag with nothing to carry.

  There’s a photo on his desk of one of the children, Katie Flambard, sent by her mother two months ago. She’s on the beach, kneeling in the sand, digging with a blue plastic spade. She’s smiling at the camera, her blonde wispy hair frizzled by the salty air. Shiny patches of pink appear on the bony tops of her shoulders where she’s starting to burn.

  Maggie, a whisper from his dreams: ‘Another failure, Straker?’

  He returns to his living room, picks up a stale doughnut and a packet of tomato-ketchup-flavoured crisps on the way and walks heavily downstairs. When he unlocks the front door, he assumes she will hear him and come charging towards him, shouting. Nothing happens.

  She doesn’t move. When he reaches her, he sits down next to her. He doesn’t think she sees him at first, but when she does, she’s not surprised. He’s irritated by her acceptance of the fact that he would eventually come out to meet her, so he doesn’t do anything.

  After a while, he hands her the doughnut and the packet of crisps, thinking she will probably throw them into the sea. But she doesn’t. She takes the doughnut and bites into it without a word. The jam oozes out and streaks on to her cheeks. She wipes it off with her hand, then licks her fingers. They are short and stubby, and she doesn’t wear any rings.

  ‘It’s stale,’ she says, after two mouthfuls.

  He nods.

  ‘You’re supposed to eat them on the day you buy them.’

  She starts on the crisps and he can hear them crunching in her mouth. He keeps buying tomato-ketchup flavour by mistake because the packets are red like the ready-salted. He doesn’t like them and there’s an ever-growing pile in the store room he uses for rubbish. She seems to enjoy them, and he considers running back up and bringing her all of the packets.

  ‘I haven’t tried that flavour before,’ she says, as if they were in the middle of a conversation. She eats politely, not putting in too much at a time, closing her mouth as she chews. ‘They’re disgusting.’

  They didn’t eat like that in his family. His father had had a voracious appetite and would keep eating until there was nothing left. His mother struggled to feed him. She made enormous casseroles so that he could fill his plate over and over again, but he still complained that there wasn’t enough. Pete and his brother used to watch him eat, see his mouth working non-stop like a cement-mixer. You could hear his jaw click as he chewed, and the food going round and round. When he spoke, they could see it in his open mouth, half recognisable, half blended. Then he would rush to swallow so that he could take another forkful. They had to eat at the table in the dining room, but their father was allowed to have a tray on his lap while he listened to the wireless. He would comment on the news as he ate, giving further glimpses of the breaking-down stage.

  ‘That girl’ll be dead when they find her,’ he pronounced, into the stillness of the living room.

  ‘Never trust a policeman,’ he said, as he downed a roast potato. ‘They’re all crooked.’

  They finished long before him and came to listen to the wireless. Their mother ran backwards and forwards with refills for him. The house was too big, the distance too great for this. They had a hall twenty yards long, with wood panelling and chandeliers hanging from the high ceiling.

  ‘Self-made man,’ he said, with satisfaction about some successful industrialist. ‘Same as me.’

  They watched, fascinated, as he speared a piece of steak with his fork, and bit a huge mouthful off the side.

  ‘Is that it?’ says Miss Doody. ‘Don’t you have anything more substantial?’

  I didn’t invite you to dinner, he thinks.

  ‘It’s my roof,’ she says. ‘I want to do it. I told Jonathan that I couldn’t afford to pay someone, but he doesn’t listen. Just because he earns pots of money, he thinks the whole world is stinking rich. He forgets too easily.’

  She stops talking for a while. The wind blows her hair back towards the mainland. He can see darker roots below the blonde.

  ‘I inherited the cottage from my godfather. Just like that. I didn’t know anything about it until it landed in my lap. I was going to sell it. Jonathan offered to pay for the roof, but he won’t do it really. He wants things to be a sound investment. He would take one look at the cottage and tell me it needs knocking down. Then he’d tell me to build a new house or sell the land. He wouldn’t care. It’d just be an investment or a useful windfall. He only thinks in terms of money.’

  Her voice is less harsh when she’s talking properly. He sits further back than her so that she doesn’t keep looking at him. But he has to strain sometimes to hear what she says.

  ‘The thing is, I like the cottage. I don’t see why I shouldn’t do it up. It would be all mine. Not like where I live now—in a school.’

  He knew she was a teacher. It was obvious.

  ‘I can saw
and hammer and paint. It’s my job. Why can’t I do the roof?’

  He wishes she wouldn’t keep going on about the roof. He’ll take the sails down tomorrow.

  ‘Children have no respect. I had one boy ready to punch me. Year six, eleven years old, his fist just under my nose. I could see the flicker of indecision in his eyes. Yes or no. Of course he would have been expelled, but that wouldn’t have saved my nose, would it? It might have been worth it, I suppose, if I’d never had to see him again. Useless headmaster. Thinks I’m stupid. Wants to call me “dear”, pat me on the head. He might do that to Doris the Lion Tamer, although I can’t see her taking it. Was that your cat?’

  Does she always talk like this? Too many words, not enough links, too loose a chain.

  ‘I shouldn’t have come. I suppose it was pretty stupid coming out here on my crutches. It’s not broken, the ankle. I had it X-rayed. Just sprained. “Rest it,” they said, but it’s so boring. Haven’t you got anything else to eat?’

  He’s not sure. He has to think. What does she like? Ricotta and spinach cannelloni? Alphabet spaghetti?

  ‘I found you from the post office. Tall man with a beard, doesn’t talk. The woman who works there was useless, but someone else knew you. Said you lived in a lighthouse. I wish it was me. Never having to talk to anyone.’

  You’d have problems with that.

  Tell her your name, Straker.

  ‘People are so stupid, they drive me crazy.’

  He realises that it’s a long time since he last spoke out loud. Do you lose the ability if you don’t keep it oiled?

  ‘And you can always be higher than everyone else.’

  He clears his throat. That makes a noise. Encouraged, he opens his mouth.

  ‘I spend a lot of time on my school roof. You can watch without being seen.’

  He hesitates, shuts his mouth, opens it again.

  ‘Jonathan says they might be antique tiles. They could be worth a fortune.’