Natural Flights of the Human Mind

by Clare Morrall

  I hope I have given you enough useful information about her. Probably not, because I do ramble. I seem to become increasingly sentimental as I grow older. I can’t decide if this is a good thing or not. Let me know if you need more. I enclose a few photographs if you are interested. I would like to purchase the book if it makes it into print. It’s a good idea.

  Please send me the details when appropriate.

  Yours sincerely,

  Simon A. Taverner

  When the tide is out, Straker climbs down the rocks below the lighthouse and walks along the beach away from Hillingham. Strings of brown seaweed lie wet and glistening on the high-tide mark, guarded by clouds of hovering flies, which leap into the air in a frenzy as he crosses through them. The pebbles slope down steeply to a small shelf of sand that only appears at low tide.

  The wind is fresh and he walks fast, counting his strides. There’s no one else around so early in the morning, except the birds. Fulmars, gulls and kittiwakes sweep into the air, hurling themselves at the cliff behind him, screeching into the bleakness of the morning. Crunching over the shingle, he believes himself to be invisible. The birds don’t react to him. He’s an irrelevance in their precise balancing act between the sea and the sky. They skim the surface of the sea, dive for fish and rise again to hover in the wind, watching and waiting. One or two land on the beach. They stand there, uncharismatic with their wings folded, looking past Straker with disdain.

  The seventy-eight are with him, as always. Sometimes he wants to forget them, throw them back into their rightful position of non-existence. Then he feels their personalities, asserting themselves again as he welcomes them back. He fears for the nine unidentified bodies, worries that their anonymity has caused them to disappear too easily into the wind.

  When he’s walked for fifteen minutes, he stops and stands motionless for a few seconds, unsure what to do next, then sits down.

  The wind tugs at his hair. He can hear the pull of the tide as it drains to its lowest point, somehow drawing back the water from under the stones. Trying to suck the beach dry. The gulls fly past, round him, through him. If he stays here for long enough, the tide will come up, the days will pass, and seaweed will attach itself to him. The hard edges of his bones will be softened and smoothed. The kittiwakes will nest in his hair and raise their young.

  He’s tempted to do it. He closes his eyes, rests his head on his knees. Dreams come like the birds flying past, throwing themselves at him, careless with his presence. He smells the salt on his skin, the heat of the dreams.

  ‘Straker…’ Maggie’s voice has changed. She’s not angry, just upset—suddenly vulnerable. ‘Why did you write to Simon? After all this time?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose I wanted to find out.’

  ‘Find out what?’

  ‘I wanted to know if you were still real.’

  ‘Don’t I remind you every night that I’m real? Don’t I come to every dream?’

  ‘Most nights, yes. Not every dream.’

  ‘You don’t know that, Straker. Think about it. I might be there all the time, listening, thinking.’

  ‘Why do you come, Maggie? What do you want from me?’

  ‘If I didn’t talk to you, I wouldn’t exist.’

  ‘But you do exist.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes. You still exist to Simon. He thinks of you now as much as he did at the time of the accident.’

  ‘Simon is eighty-three years old, Straker. Old men live in the past. It’s easier than facing the hard present. And when he goes, I do.’

  ‘No, Maggie. You can’t go.’

  ‘Why not? Why should I keep talking to you once Simon has died? What’s the point?’

  It has never occurred to me before that Maggie might go. Empty dreams without her there to order things, to put everything into perspective.

  ‘Scared, Straker? Can’t you manage without me?’

  ‘Of course I can.’ I don’t know. There is a tight, prickly fear creeping along my veins, my arteries, my nerve-ends.

  ‘You were wrong to write to Simon. Why should he have to go over it again?’

  ‘I just wanted to make some contact with him. I wanted to feel the way it was, and how he fitted with you.’

  There is a long pause. Maggie’s voice is quiet. ‘We fitted well together. Very well.’

  ‘And you have great-grandchildren.’

  ‘They will never know me.’

  ‘They already know you, because Simon has taught them.’

  ‘Sentimental rubbish.’ But her voice is not confident, and it frightens me.

  ‘Maggie—I just wanted to make you more real.’

  ‘You’re fooling yourself. I’m not real.’

  I shiver at her words. I want her to change back, to become the eternal mother again, telling me what to do, making me think as she wants me to think. ‘Don’t leave me, Maggie.’

  ‘Maybe I will. Maybe not.’

  I think of Simon’s words. Building new extensions, letting more people in. Did she have a limitless capacity to expand? Would the time have come when there was no room for even one more person? Were her kindness and hospitality real or was she pretending, building up an outer image to please everyone? Creating an earth mother of boundless love and energy to satisfy Simon?

  What is real?

  There is no sound from Maggie.

  Don’t leave me, Maggie, please don’t leave me.

  I am cold and tired and lost. I want her to come back.

  Straker is woken by voices.

  ‘It’s all right, Jen. There’s no one else here.’

  ‘Lee—’

  ‘Jen—’

  They are teenagers, but like children, walking hand in hand along the shingle, stopping to gaze into each other’s eyes, then picking up shells. What are they doing here so early in the morning?

  ‘Watch this,’ he says, picking up a flat stone and skimming it across the surface of the sea. It bounces three times, then gets swamped by an incoming wave.

  She claps her hands. ‘Cool. Do it again.’ She’s about sixteen, wearing jeans and a bright red jumper. Her hair is dark and curly, tied back into a pony-tail, and she’s very pretty. The cold of the air has sharpened her features, brought a pink flush to her cheeks.

  He’s a bit older, perhaps eighteen, also in jeans, with a leather bomber jacket over a T-shirt. He has two earrings in one ear and a nose-ring.

  Straker freezes and watches them, waiting for them to pass without noticing, hoping that he’s as invisible as he would like to be.

  But they don’t go past. Jen runs towards the sea, trying to throw a stone like Lee, but after she has thrown it, she spins round and round, shrieking like a child, until she staggers and nearly falls over.

  Lee catches her, holds her upright, and then they stop everything as his arms go round her, and they kiss—a deep, passionate kiss. His hands move down the line of her back and slide smoothly under her jumper. He knows what he’s doing; it’s obvious that he’s done it before. She leans against him, pulling herself as close as she can, her back arching as they rock together.

  Stop! Straker wants to shout. Don’t do it, Jen. You’re only sixteen (or less). You might get pregnant, catch dreadful diseases. He won’t marry you. Wait. There are better things ahead.

  He doesn’t say any of it. He creaks slowly to his feet, intending to creep away, hoping they won’t see him.

  Jen sees Straker over Lee’s shoulder. She goes rigid and screams. Lee turns and sees Straker. All three stand motionless for four seconds, the wind whistling round them. A gull swoops low over their heads and Straker turns and runs.

  ‘Clear off!’ shouts Lee.

  ‘Dirty old man!’ yells Jen. ‘You’re disgusting!’ She’s worse than him. More vicious, more shrill. She’s still shouting as Straker runs away.

  They don’t run after him. He pauses briefly to look back and they’re lying on the pebbles, their feet only a few inches from the returning sea, the
ir hands and bodies intertwined, inseparable, just one more heaving mass among the crabs and flies and seaweed. A sculpture of lust in a landscape of sea.

  Straker looks at his watch and starts to go faster, counting seconds. He needs to get back to the lighthouse in ten minutes and twenty-three seconds if he’s to improve on the last run.

  When he climbs the cliff back to the lighthouse, he sees that two more long dark cracks have appeared down one side, facing the sea.

  It takes two days to mend the roof, working between the showers, and Straker is pleased at how easily the tiles fit into their new environment. It will be necessary to replace some of the wooden beams as soon as possible, though, and he starts making calculations—when he can get some wood, how much it will cost, how he’ll need to remove the tiles again to do it. He takes the old sails back to the boathouse, returns to the lighthouse, carrying on in his normal routines, and waits for Saturday. He doesn’t know if he should go and see her again.

  He reads Simon’s letter through five times every day, wanting to write back to him and reveal the truth. There’s an unfamiliar feeling inside him, a fear that reality is catching up with him, forcing him in directions he’s not sure he can go. He goes out in the pouring rain to count the cracks in the lighthouse, examines the doors, some of which won’t close properly. Two upstairs doors jam, so he runs up and down with stones heavy enough to prop them open or shut. He measures the distance from the lighthouse to the edge of the cliff. Another foot has gone. He sets himself new targets for rowing, running, climbing to the top of the lighthouse and back. Numbers run through his mind, queuing up, calculating against each other—square roots, multiplication, division—clicking on endlessly, fighting each other for attention. They don’t have the calming effect that he expects.

  At night, he doesn’t dream. The sleep is long and deep, and he wakes up with an empty mind.

  ‘Your mother and I will stand by you,’ his father announced, positioning himself in front of the marble fireplace. One of the logs newly placed on the fire cracked violently and sent out sparks, which bounced on to the back of his father’s trousers. His mother jumped up from the sofa and patted his trousers with a cushion.

  ‘Get off, woman,’ he shouted. He believed he was immortal, that a few sparks couldn’t touch him. Pete believed that too.

  His mother sat down again. She was a small woman, but she nearly disappeared altogether on that day, her hands clasped tightly round her knees, her grey head leaning forward at an uncomfortable angle, ever-anxious, nodding in time with her husband’s words. Her body was bowed, as if she’d spent her whole life scrubbing floors. In fact, she had. They had two cleaners, but every day after they’d gone, she could be found on her knees polishing the parquet, sweeping the stairs, scrubbing the stone floor in the kitchen. Today she wouldn’t look Pete in the eye.

  ‘I have appointed a solicitor for you, Pete. He’s the best. Anthony Sullivan. Expensive, but we can afford it. No point in having money if you don’t use it when you need to.’

  ‘It was an accident,’ Pete said, for the thousandth time, wanting to believe it. ‘I just lost control.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’ As usual, he didn’t seem interested. ‘I’ve made an appointment for this afternoon. Three thirty. Got to go to his place. Wouldn’t come here. Says he won’t be needed for the inquest, but it’s best to play it safe in case it goes further.’

  Pete was twenty-eight and they were the same height, but his father still seemed enormous. Pete felt that he was shrinking next to him, unable to stop himself disappearing.

  ‘And when this nonsense is out of the way, you get started on a proper career. A man of your age should be married with children in a respectable career. Sort out what you want to be—doctor, lawyer, accountant. Tell me what you want and I’ll pay. You’re never too old to train for something. Look at me. Washing cars at fifteen, married to your mother at twenty, millionaire at forty.’

  Watching him there in front of the fire, absorbed in his own greatness, Pete discovered with a jolt that he hated him. It rushed into him like a strong taste in his mouth, the bitterness of it infecting every part of his body. Pete saw his father’s height, his huge weight, his florid complexion and Savile Row suit, and realised that he’d never even liked him. The man who’d always towered above him, manipulated his life, made decisions for him, was a fraud. He had so much money he didn’t know what to do with it, and so much power that he had no idea how to use it.

  ‘I don’t want to see the solicitor,’ said Pete. He wanted to say, ‘I’ve changed my mind. It wasn’t an accident,’ but he couldn’t.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ said his father, walking to the door. ‘The car’ll be out the front at three o’clock.’ He went out, slamming the door behind him out of habit.

  Pete stood where he was, facing the fireplace. ‘Mum,’ he said.

  She still wouldn’t look at him.

  ‘I don’t want to—’

  ‘All those people,’ she said suddenly, in a low voice. Pete had never heard her speak like that before. Her voice was usually high-pitched and nervous, fluttering around the room, agreeing with her husband, never settling on anything, too restless and unconfident to find a sane pitch of her own. Something had changed. There was a new intensity about her, as if she’d just discovered something unexpected inside herself.

  Pete tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come out.

  Then she lifted her head and looked at him. Her eyes were unusually large. He’d never noticed before how blue they were. How could he not know the colour of his mother’s eyes? ‘Seventy-seven people have died,’ she said. ‘Maybe seventy-eight. Over a hundred injured.’

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  ‘Because of you.’

  He understood then, more clearly than he’d ever seen anything before, that she would never forgive him. He could see that it hurt her to force herself to look at him.

  He couldn’t speak. There was nothing to say.

  She rose from the sofa, a small, slight woman who had spent a lifetime in the shadow of her husband. She’d found courage in herself to condemn carelessness in her son, to reject the child she’d delivered and nourished and nurtured for twenty-eight years. She looked at him once more, then turned and walked out of the room.

  Everything that had anchored Pete’s life slipped out of sight. The ropes that held him to the ground were loosened, the gravity that kept him upright in the world ceased to operate and he floated away. He was adrift without a rudder.

  He had never before been so terrified.

  ‘Hi, Pete. Remember me?’

  ‘Of course I remember you, Francis. How could I forget?’

  ‘Easily done, old man. Easy come, easy go—’

  Justin interrupts: ‘But we don’t really go, do we? That’s the point.’

  Francis: ‘Give us a break, man. Lighten up. Hang loose.’

  I can’t decide if he believes in all these clichés or if he’s trying to be funny. Did he always talk like this and I didn’t notice?

  Francis: ‘So there you go. Here and not here. Courtesy of Pete, stuck in 1979, destined never to grow old.’

  ‘Immortality.’ Justin sounds interested. ‘Maybe you did us a favour, Pete.’

  ‘With a bit of help from my friends. I didn’t do it singlehandedly.’

  Francis jumps in quickly. ‘It was your booze, your old man’s cash, your aeroplane.’

  Justin’s voice alters, becomes more thoughtful. ‘Should have been good, shouldn’t it? The four of us in all that empty sky. How can you make a mistake when you’re surrounded by space? You’d think we’d have missed everything, wouldn’t you?’

  Francis: ‘Everybody’s got to come down to earth. Gravity. Physics. Common sense.’

  I want to ask them again. Can you remember what happened? But I don’t, because I don’t want them to tell me.

  ‘We didn’t have to come down precisely where we did, did we?’ says Justin. ‘It could have been a field, or
the sea or—’ He stops.

  Francis chuckles. ‘That’s it, really, though. Field, water, roads, houses, people. Doesn’t make any difference to us. Either way, we’re dead.’

  Justin: ‘Except Pete.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Francis, after a pause. ‘Did all right, mate, didn’t you? Back to the old girlfriend, back to Daddy with all the money—’

  Girlfriend? Did I have a girlfriend? I can’t remember anyone.

  ‘Mel,’ says Justin. ‘Alison, Liz, Helen, Pippa…’

  ‘Daisy, Katie, Melinda, Ellen…’

  ‘All those girls waiting for us to come back down. Wonder if they cried.’

  ‘Bound to. They’d never have found anyone as handsome, clever, witty…’

  ‘Experienced, able to give them a good time…’

  ‘Good times…’

  Straker goes shopping. Four bottles of Coca-Cola, an enormous bar of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, sardines for Suleiman and Magnificent, toilet-cleaner, fabric conditioner and two loaves of thick-sliced Mighty White. He feels the need for the comfort of toast.

  He works on the garden, washes his clothes and hangs them outside the lighthouse, letting them blow in the salt wind. He is trying to avoid thinking. He is waiting for Saturday and the return of Mrs Doody.

  Chapter 13

  Harry sat alone on the train and pretended to look out of the window. He had moved twice. The first time, he’d found a nearly empty carriage and sat down in a corner, looking out of the window, willing everyone to walk on past and find seats elsewhere. Within two minutes a crowd of children appeared from nowhere and flooded the entire carriage. He rose immediately, struggling to breathe, his knees trembling, walked to the end of the carriage and into the next. There he found a space that was not surrounded by people. But just before the train left, a middle-aged woman in a red coat climbed in, carrying a Debenham’s carrier-bag, a large gnome and a medium-sized poodle.