Natural Flights of the Human Mind

by Clare Morrall

  ‘Don’t want you mixing with the wrong sort,’ he would say.

  By the time he was twelve, Andy was never at home in the summer. His life was one long round of visits to his friends.

  Pete stood on the side and watched, wondering how Andy did it, why the other children were pleased to have him in charge. Pete rarely spoke to anyone else, or joined in their games. They didn’t seem to notice him.

  Just once, as he stood on the edge of a game of football, holding his red bucket full of round white shells, a shorter boy with curly hair and freckles came and stood by him. Pete didn’t know he was there at first. When he noticed him, he glanced quickly away and waited for him to move, but he didn’t. Only after a long time did Pete look round at him again, his head barely moving, hoping he wouldn’t be noticed.

  But the boy caught his eye. ‘Stupid football,’ he said.

  Pete was shocked. He waited for something to happen, for the boy to explode into flames or to sink into the sand. Football was sacred in Pete’s family. They had to worship Aston Villa, bow down to the players, spend fifty per cent of their free time discussing it. Not even his mother would dare to call football stupid.

  Nothing happened.

  ‘I’m Brian,’ said the boy. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Peter,’ he said.

  ‘What shall we do, then, Peter?’

  He liked the way he was accepted as Peter and not shortened to Pete. He felt less babyish, more an individual.

  He’s never forgotten that holiday. Sometimes he can go through every conversation he had with Brian. Word by word, he’s kept it all. Maybe what he remembers isn’t right, stored in a faulty filing cabinet, but it still comforts him, even now. Pete was eight and Brian was nine. His family were camping. One day, when it was cold and drizzly, Brian’s mum asked Pete’s mum if he could spend the day with them.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said his mum, and it seemed to Pete that a small light of pleasure glowed in her normally clouded grey eyes, her hollow cheeks flushing a little. Then she looked nervously at Dad.

  Pete’s dad hesitated, looking at Brian, eyeing his mum. Pete held his breath. They must be poor, he thought, because they’re camping and not in a hotel, and he knew his dad wouldn’t think much of that. But, for some reason, he was less aggressive on that day. He shrugged. ‘He can go if he wants to,’ he said, and went back to Hercule Poirot, sprawling across the sofa in the hotel lounge, his great hairy arms coarse and flabby against the pale pink brocade of the furniture.

  They had two tents. A big one for Brian’s mum and dad and a little one for Brian. The boys played in Brian’s tent all day: spies; plotting Andy’s downfall; the Incredible Hulk, changing shape as their shadows swelled on the sides of the tent. It was too small to stand up, so they crawled everywhere. Straker remembers the sound of the wind flapping the canvas, the light rain pattering across it, the musty smell. They had tomato sandwiches for lunch and fish and chips out of newspaper for tea. It was a great day.

  Then Pete went back to his family and the hotel, which was quiet and disapproving. He knew his father didn’t think much of tents, that he considered it important to be respectable, to look smart and imitate the other people in the hotel. Pete couldn’t understand why his father wanted to behave like them, trying to eat the same meals or drink the same wine. He wouldn’t even order until he’d heard someone’s request at the next table. Sometimes they had to wait ages while he pretended to read the menu, waiting for a lead from another guest.

  Andy didn’t speak to Pete again until they went home. But it was the best holiday Pete had ever had. He met Brian every day on the beach and they did all the activities that he had observed Andy doing with other children. Swimming, running, exploring rock pools, catching crabs in their nets. He can still smell the tent today. It catches him unawares every now and again, and it shocks him. It’s as if it all happened yesterday, while more recent events have gone straight out of the back door of his mind.

  Felicity is talking to Sangita. She is oddly articulate. ‘We’re the same really, aren’t we? On our own, never getting married. We can be young for ever.’

  Sangita: ‘I wouldn’t have married anyway.’

  Felicity hesitates. ‘No, nor me. There was a man once, Eddie, but he was much older than me. I didn’t like him much. My aunt Lucy said I should of married him while I had the chance, because he was worth a fortune, but he wasn’t nice. He couldn’t stop touching me. My mum said he wasn’t right for me.’

  ‘I was only sixteen.’

  ‘I was only eighteen.’

  There is a pause. Sangita isn’t good at conversation.

  Felicity starts again: ‘I might of got married later, I suppose. Once I’d given up my modelling. But I’d’ve been rich then. Wouldn’t need to marry for money. Wouldn’t need to marry at all, but if I met someone kind and nice, who loved me…you know, a boy-next-door sort of person.’

  ‘I was already in love.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘Just someone.’

  More silence.

  ‘Do you remember apple crumble?’ says Felicity. ‘For school dinners. With custard.’

  ‘I sometimes miss the peacocks,’ says Sangita.

  ‘Peacocks?’

  ‘They were in the back garden. Six of them. My dad loved them. I think the neighbours would have come over the wall and strangled them if we went away for a holiday. They were so noisy.’

  ‘Did they have those pretty feathers?’

  ‘Oh, yes, the male ones. I always carried one with me to give to him—Rob Willow. When my parents came up after the crash, they’d been away for several days. I keep worrying that someone probably got the peacocks.’

  A pause.

  Felicity: ‘We’re lucky, really. We’ll always be young and beautiful. Anyone who looks at my photos will see me at my best.’

  Sangita doesn’t reply.

  ‘Frozen in time, that’s us. No wrinkles, no fat, no arthritis. My mum would’ve been pleased.’

  Maggie says nothing.

  When the first flushed light comes up over the sea, pushing its way round the curve of the earth and arriving ahead of the sun, Straker wakes to find himself still sitting at the table, his legs and back aching. He stands up and stretches out his arms, yawning loudly, feeling cramped and exhausted. His mind echoes with the voices of Sangita and Felicity. They’re still in his mind, inexperienced, unformed, talking about nothing.

  Suleiman comes down the steps from the light room, padding lightly, his tail rigidly upright. Straker opens a tin of Rabbit and Game, and Magnificent appears from nowhere, apparently summoned home from his adventures on the headland by the smell on the wind. They like rabbit. It tells them that there is another life, away from the sea, where not all food tastes of salt.

  Suleiman looks at Magnificent’s food and thinks it’s better than his, so he moves over. Magnificent doubles round behind him and they change bowls. Straker turns on the kettle, picks up two doughnuts and goes upstairs to the light room.

  This is the best time of day. The sun is rising into a high blue dome of empty sky. The sea is less turbulent beneath this emptiness, and the world seems to pause. Straker nearly always wakes just before dawn and goes upstairs for this period of nothingness. Yesterday is forgotten, today has not yet started. He feels a newness, a freshness, as if he can start again and the past has never happened. This feeling usually lasts for five minutes before the seventy-eight come racing back into his mind, tumbling over each other in their desire to be noticed.

  He can see two container ships on the horizon, silent and stationary, waiting. They frequently wait there, sometimes for several days, but he doesn’t know why. They won’t be able to see him—the lighthouse must be little more than a tiny grey speck in the distance. He imagines them out there, rolling in the waves, a handful of people in a great mausoleum of a boat, and wonders what they’re doing. Eating, sleeping, playing cards? Do they take their wives along? Do they watch the sea like him a
nd see the patterns of the waves, and take their thoughts from the sea, or do they ignore it all and pretend they’re at home, living the same dull routine that they always do? Do they feel invisible or important, taking whatever it is they take from one side of the world to another? Does normal life go on without them? Would anyone notice if they never touched land again?

  Straker does seventy-five press-ups, his knees creaking more than usual, then eats his doughnuts. He goes downstairs, washes, changes his socks, and runs down to the front door, shutting it behind him. He takes his bicycle out of the keeper’s cottage, but then leans it against a wall and goes to look at the edge of the cliff. No change. No sharp, bright, clean break.

  He returns to the bike, gets on it, stops, gets off, stands silently and tries to sort out his thoughts.

  He’s going to take the sails off Miss Doody’s roof. He should never have interfered. She came all the way out here to say that, so she must have meant it.

  He starts to cycle, but there’s something wrong with the reasoning, however much he tries to analyse her intentions. Why would she want to leave holes in her roof so that the rain comes in? What does she really want? Should he go? Shouldn’t he go?

  He has no idea, and wonders if she does. There’s something so irrational about all this that he can’t work it out. Thoughts should be logical. They should run on straight lines so that you can see the beginning and the end.

  He stops thinking and climbs down the cliff to his boat, which is just beginning to float on the rising tide. There’s a powerful swell, and it takes some time, with the boat rocking alarmingly, to get the right balance before he starts rowing. But he can control it. He’s stronger than the wind.

  He moors alongside the pier as usual, and climbs up the ladder to the flagpole. The harbour is deserted. Too early in the morning, but he can see a woman pinning out washing further along the beach. She pushes her clothes line up with a prop and the washing comes instantly alive, ballooning out towards the sea, filling with invisible bodies, flapping triumphantly over the pebbles. He can’t recognise her from this distance, and wonders if she’s like him, unable to sleep.

  The three gnomes are missing from the bench, and he imagines them at home in their beds. Do they lie alongside wives who don’t know them? Wives who spend all their days away from the men, glad to see them out of the house for the day? Do they talk when they come together for meals?

  Does anyone talk? He sometimes hears people’s voices, but it always seems as if they have nothing to say.

  ‘How much are those apples?’

  ‘One twenty a kilo.’

  ‘Kilos? Ridiculous. What’s wrong with pounds?’

  ‘The nectarines look nice.’

  ‘Did you pay the milkman?’

  ‘Can we buy some Mars bars?’

  Nobody listens to anyone else. What’s it all for? He must have done it once himself, along with the rest of the world, although he has great difficulty remembering details from his previous life. It now feels as if he’d only been acting, doing things without thinking because everyone else did them.

  He walks up the hill to Miss Doody’s house, his thoughts churning away too fast as he argues with himself. He is not at all sure he’s doing the right thing. He tries counting, backwards from two hundred, in sevens, but he arrives at four too quickly and nothing has changed. When he reaches the gate, he stands outside for a while and studies the cottage. The sails don’t look so bad. Their whiteness glows in the early sunshine, and they look somehow as if they are in the right place, a piece of the bright morning hiding the dilapidated structure of the cottage.

  They haven’t completely stayed in place. One end has come away and is flapping in the breeze, catching against the lilac tree. But the noise is not hostile. It feels right for the neglected nature of the place, and the sail billows out bravely, refusing to be contained.

  He climbs the tree at the side, calculating the strength needed to counteract the wind. A wood-pigeon bursts out from the top of the tree, flapping wildly, threatening his balance. He steadies himself before carrying on.

  Once on the roof, he hesitates and discovers that he doesn’t want to do this. He looks round at his previous handiwork, and it’s not bad. The bricks have stayed in place, even after the heavy wind in the night, and most of the nails have held.

  He sits there for some time in the sun, starting to relax at last, tiredness creeping up on him. The sky is filling up with clouds, but the flashes of sun are warm and comfortable. He can see the lighthouse in the distance.

  Maggie is still not talking, but she’s there, somewhere close, listening, judging in silence.

  ‘Here’s to you, Pete,’ says Justin, drinking heavily from a can of lager. ‘You and me and Francis. Best mates.’

  ‘You don’t kill your best mate,’ says Francis.

  ‘He didn’t kill us, did you, Pete? It was an accident.’

  ‘Yes, an accident.’

  Maggie can send her reproach through the air without speaking.

  A long silence. ‘OK. Not an accident,’ I say.

  Justin takes another swig of lager. ‘Could have happened to anyone. Could have happened to me.’

  ‘It didn’t, though, did it? It was me.’

  Francis joins Justin in his generosity. ‘Wrong time, wrong circumstances, all came together at the wrong moment. Bad luck.’ He and Justin laugh together. Cold and unreal. A dead laugh.

  ‘No, not bad luck. Bad attitude. I can’t escape judgement.’

  Maggie is there. She always was. ‘OK, Straker, step one. Confession. Well done.’

  ‘Leave me alone, Maggie. I don’t need you. I can work it out for myself.’

  ‘I am your conscience.’

  I know.

  The wood-pigeon flaps back and wakes him up. He breathes heavily for a while, trying to calm himself, waiting for the sweat to dry. Maggie is closer to him than usual. She’s eating into his mind, forcing him to confront things he doesn’t want to confront. He licks his lips and tastes the fear that he’s fighting to control.

  Go away, Maggie. I need to do this in my own time. Leave me alone.

  If I want to stay, Straker, I’ll stay.

  He needs to make a decision. What he would like to do is nail down the part of the sail that is flapping, then go away. He might as well finish the job properly. At least the sails stop the leaks and that will give her time to do some work inside. Then he can go back to his lighthouse and pick up his rhythms again.

  Curiously, he’s brought a hammer and nails with him as well as pliers. Did he know he was going to do this?

  He climbs over to the loose part and folds it down neatly. He can see where it’s come away from some rotted wood, so he feels along until he finds a stronger part and hammers it down, furtively looking over his shoulder, unable to shake off the feeling that he shouldn’t be here.

  The nails go in easily. He pulls at the sail, but it holds. He puts the hammer into his pocket and eases his way back over the roof.

  ‘Straker!’

  He stumbles and nearly falls. This cannot be happening.

  ‘What in the world’s going on?’

  She’s standing below, looking up at him, her face red and angry, in the same brilliantly blue blouse that she was wearing yesterday. Her hair glitters in the sun, shiny, almost metallic, hard and threatening.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  He freezes, trying to shrink back into himself, make himself as small as he can, willing himself to disappear.

  ‘Have you got some hidden agenda?’

  He doesn’t know what to do.

  ‘Get off my roof, Straker!’

  Chapter 10

  Anne was standing by the open train door watching a BR man in uniform approach. Where was Jerry? It didn’t take that long to buy a newspaper. She was trying not to worry, but her legs were trembling.

  ‘On or off?’ said the man. He was wearing a turban and had a black bushy beard, streaked with grey. When he ope
ned his mouth to speak, she could see that he had long, protruding teeth that made him look slightly menacing.

  ‘No!’ she said urgently. ‘My husband!’

  ‘Train’s due out,’ said the guard. He was very tall, standing too close and towering above her.

  ‘I know,’ said Anne. ‘He’s only gone to get—There he is!’

  She watched Jerry shuffle across the platform, and relief flooded into her like the warmth of a cup of tea. Jerry running was an unusual sight, his hollow angular body struggling against its innate lack of rhythm. Even in her anxiety, she felt a stab of affection. He was academic, not athletic, she thought fondly.

  The man turned and watched Jerry hurrying up to the carriage. ‘Come on, sir,’ he said. ‘Can’t hold the train up just for you. Next time you must arrive early if you want to buy a newspaper.’ Unexpectedly he smiled, and the menace evaporated. He held the door while they both got on.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Jerry. ‘I just got caught behind a—’

  But the man wasn’t interested. He slammed the door and moved on up the train.

  They swayed through the carriage until they found two seats opposite each other. ‘This’ll do,’ said Jerry, and sank down, still struggling to get his breath. He put the newspaper on the table.

  ‘I don’t know why you bothered,’ said Anne. ‘You’ll have time to read it later.’

  ‘You know I like a crossword on a train journey.’

  He sat back, gave a sigh of relief and folded the Guardian on to the back page. ‘Ah,’ he said, after a few seconds. ‘Of course,’ and he wrote in his first answer.

  Anne watched him for a while, knowing he didn’t want her to say anything. When she decided that he was comfortable with his crossword, and possibly wouldn’t speak again until they reached Birmingham, she settled back and got her knitting out of her bag. She hadn’t forgotten to bring that. She held it up to admire. It was a navy jumper with a ship on the front, for Jeremy, her fourth grandchild, whom they had been to see today. She was very proud of the jumper. All her children had had one, and now she was knitting for the next generation. This was the ninth, each one a slightly different colour but the same design. She had photographs of every child wearing this jumper. There was a line of them up the side of the stairs. The children hated them. ‘Take them down, Mum,’ they had all said, at one time or another. ‘They look like flying fish. They’re in very bad taste.’