Natural Flights of the Human Mind

by Clare Morrall

  Geraldine shrugs. ‘Who knows? I just think we owe it to ourselves to find out what we can while we’ve got the chance. I suppose there will always be unanswered questions—nobody can know everything. But I’d like to see him again.’

  ‘Do you think we’ll recognise him?’ Carmen has a folder full of blurred newspaper pictures in her bag, but she knows he won’t look the same.

  ‘Was he evil or stupid? That’s what I want to know.’

  ‘I don’t see how he can go on living a normal life. How would you live with yourself?’

  Geraldine looks at her. ‘So what are you saying? He should be dead? Kill himself for our sakes?’

  Carmen flushes. ‘I don’t know.’ She fights down the flames of her internal fire. ‘Well, why not? It doesn’t seem right that he should be all right when our children aren’t.’

  ‘I lost a whole class of children. You never recover from that either. But I’m not sure that knowing he was dead would make it any easier.’

  They weren’t your children, thinks Carmen. It’s not the same.

  ‘What I have discovered,’ says Geraldine, ‘is that I want him to be evil.’

  Carmen nods slowly. ‘He is evil.’

  ‘The trouble is, he may not be.’

  ‘He must be. All that blood on his hands.’

  ‘He might regret it.’

  No way, thinks Carmen.

  There’s shouting from ahead, and they see that the younger ones have already reached the lighthouse. They’re standing at the bottom, looking up.

  ‘They might have waited until we all got there,’ says Carmen.

  ‘They probably feel they’ve waited long enough.’

  They walk a little faster, half carrying Mrs Mehta between them, until they are all congregated at the base of the lighthouse.

  ‘He’s not here,’ says James Taverner.

  Kieran tries the handle on the door, and it swings open. ‘We could go in,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t know…’ says Geraldine, but nobody takes any notice. They race inside and up the stairs. Carmen and Geraldine follow. They can hear the footsteps of the others pounding up the stairs above them, stamping in their anxiety to be there first.

  ‘Oh, well,’ says Carmen. ‘What have we got to lose?’

  ‘Suppose we have the wrong person?’ Geraldine seems genuinely worried. ‘Thirty-two people hounding an innocent man.’

  ‘Too late to worry about that,’ says Carmen, and they start climbing the stairs.

  12.15 p.m.

  Doody and Straker prepare some lunch in the cottage kitchen. The hens prowl broodily round the wall on their frieze, clucking in silence. Doody fills a jug of water at the sink and puts two glasses out with the plates and knives. Straker gets the breadboard, unwraps some pâté and puts it on a plate.

  Doody thinks about what Straker has just told her. ‘So you think you crashed the car on purpose?’

  ‘That’s how I remember it.’

  ‘You wanted to die.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it didn’t work.’

  ‘No. I just got up and crawled out. Apart from a few bruises, I was completely unhurt. The car didn’t catch fire.’

  She half smiles. ‘Bad luck, then. Couldn’t even kill yourself properly.’

  ‘No. I had another go the next day.’

  She is about to sit down, but stops and looks at him. His beard is shorter than it was when she first met him, and neater. He’s started to trim it and she hadn’t noticed. He looks younger than when she first met him.

  ‘You mean you did it deliberately? The real crash? The aeroplane?’

  ‘Well—the evidence is fairly incriminating, isn’t it?’

  ‘But that was different. I mean, there were other people involved.’

  ‘If I’d tried it once, I could have tried it again.’ He looks past her. ‘I was a fool. No common sense, no concept of responsibility.’

  She sits down and looks at the plate in front of her. Oliver d’Arby’s china. White with two blue circles round the rim. ‘My sister committed suicide.’

  His eyes turn to her in surprise. ‘I didn’t know you had a sister.’

  ‘I haven’t. She’s dead.’

  He watches her. ‘Why did she do it?’

  ‘I couldn’t understand it at the time. She was very clever, a gifted child, everybody said. Maybe she couldn’t keep it up. I suppose it must be a huge strain, having to be the best all the time. You’re not allowed to be lazy, or careless. Everyone’s expectations must be so high, and if things don’t go right, they’re all so disappointed. I think she tried to explain it to me once, but I wasn’t listening. We didn’t get on.’

  ‘So she was too clever and I was too stupid.’ His voice is low and exhausted. ‘I can’t remember what was going on in my mind—only the despair, the feeling that there was no way out.’

  ‘But you had an easy way out. You could have gone to work.’

  ‘I know. It doesn’t make sense, does it? I told them I would work. But that wasn’t really what it was about. I couldn’t seem to do anything right—nothing would please them…’ He pauses and smiles bleakly. ‘I was like a self-indulgent, spoilt child, I suppose.’

  ‘But you still don’t know what happened on the next day when you crashed the plane. It could have been completely different.’

  He is silent, and they start to eat their lunch. Doody needs to consider what he’s just told her before she can make any comment. She likes the fact that they can think together but they don’t need to share the words.

  Did she share any silence with Harry? Even in the last few weeks when he seemed depressed, Doody had talked to him all the time, filling the spaces, trying to make the flat homely and comfortable with her life, her thoughts, her existence. Somewhere he would want to come home to.

  Except he didn’t.

  Harry and Imogen had talked non-stop to start with. About everything in the world. It was as if neither of them had talked before and they just poured it out, endlessly. Did they listen to each other? At the time, she had thought they did, but perhaps she was wrong, and they were just concentrating on their own thoughts. Maybe they had both found it so exciting to have a person to talk to that they forgot they should have been listening as well.

  The liberating thing about Straker is that she doesn’t have to try. There is nothing that she must do or say. She can talk to him or not and he accepts both.

  ‘How old are you?’ she asks.

  He looks up in surprise. ‘I’m not quite sure. I’ll have to work it out.’

  ‘Well, you’re good at numbers. Think of a number, double it, multiply by three, divide by two, take away the number you first thought of.’

  He shakes his head and smiles. ‘Fifty-three,’ he says.

  ‘Ten years older than me.’

  ‘Really?’ He bites into his roll. She watches him chew. She normally can’t bear people eating, hearing food rolling round in their mouths, breaking up, liquefying, watching them swallow, seeing it go down their throats. All horribly intimate and physical. But every time she sits with Straker, she doesn’t mind. It seems perfectly natural, as if she’s eating and all the noises and movements are her own.

  Biggles doesn’t seem important any more.

  ‘It’s an impressive record,’ she says. ‘Surviving two crashes in as many days.’

  1 p.m.

  They swarm over the lighthouse, crowding into the tiny rooms, overflowing from one level to the next, squeezing past each other on the stairs. The young ones race up to the light room and lean over the railing.

  ‘What a way to see the world every time you wake up.’

  ‘Cold in the winter.’

  ‘You can see for miles.’

  They have to shout to make themselves heard. The wind is booming overhead and tugging at their T-shirts and jackets.

  ‘Does it seem completely upright to you?’

  They try to stand up straight and gauge the vertical position o
f the lighthouse against the church tower in the background.

  ‘It’s an optical illusion.’

  ‘No, it’s not right.’

  ‘You’re imagining it. It’s fine.’

  ‘It makes me feel sick. I’m sure it’s leaning over, like the Tower of Pisa.’

  ‘Look how close we are to the edge of the cliff. That can’t be right.’

  ‘Do you reckon it’s going to fall over?’

  ‘I’m sure of it. I’m an architect. I know about these things. Believe me, the edge of the cliff is too close. It’ll be much more eroded lower down—undermining the foundations.’

  They look at each other, alarmed. ‘Is it safe?’

  In the room below, Carmen and the older ones are peering round curiously. They move awkwardly, with the embarrassment of intruders, but at the same time they want to see how he lives, to find proof that they have the right man.

  ‘Look,’ says Geraldine, picking up several files from the floor. She puts them on the desk and opens them. Photographs spill out, news cuttings, letters from them to Peter Straker, lists of names, communications from experts, times, dates…

  ‘There you are,’ says Jack Tilly. ‘What more evidence do you want? It’s him all right.’

  ‘We knew he had all this information. We gave him most of it. He could still be what he says he is, a writer,’ says Geraldine.

  Carmen doesn’t believe this. She never has. She knows that Peter Straker is Pete Butler. In her mind they are the same person. She felt it from the first moment she received his letter and she trusts her instincts on this, absolutely.

  ‘But where is he?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Carmen. ‘That’s what I want to know.’ The thought that they might miss him altogether haunts her. They have found the lighthouse, his home, his notes. All they want is the man.

  ‘We could just wait here for him to return.’

  Carmen hesitates and looks at her watch. One fifteen. She makes a decision. ‘Let’s go and have lunch. We’ll all feel better when we’ve eaten, and we can ask in the village if anyone knows where he is. We can always come back.’

  She calls the young ones down from the light room and they emerge from the stairs dishevelled by the wind and excited.

  ‘Phew!’ says Jeremy Ainsworth, breathing deeply. ‘Great place to live.’

  Something like a groan begins somewhere deep within the building. It starts softly, a delicate whine of protest, polite still and controlled, then it rises in volume and becomes a shriek, more violent, like the protest of a man screaming in agony. Gradually, the sound subsides, settles back into the low groan, then stops. Everyone is motionless, looking round with shocked horror.

  ‘What was that?’ says Kieran into the silence.

  ‘The lighthouse is dying,’ says Stuart. ‘It’s about to collapse.’

  Jack Tilly bolts for the stairs. ‘I’m out of here,’ he says.

  ‘Well, probably not quite that soon,’ says Stuart, watching Tilly’s departing back. There’s a shout of laughter, mixed with relief, then they all dash after him, tumbling over each other in their anxiety to escape.

  They drive back into the village, subdued, grappling with the discovery of Straker’s notes, the crumbling lighthouse, the realisation that they are in the right place and that they have been breathing the same air as the man they have all been hating for twenty-five years.

  Chapter 28

  2 p.m.

  Doody marches through the cottage gate and turns towards the field and the aeroplane that Tony is about to fly away. Straker follows her reluctantly, wishing it was all over and the Tiger Moth gone.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ she says, turning round to wait for him. ‘I’m going to keep it.’

  Naturally.

  ‘It’s a dream, isn’t it? Why should I sell my dream?’

  ‘Because it’s cheaper.’

  She stops walking. Straker is learning to recognise that dangerous glint in her eyes, the rigid set of her mouth and the way she stands, hands hanging loose at her sides, deliberately not clenched. ‘So why shouldn’t I do something extravagant? I’ve spent most of my life getting things wrong without meaning to. This cottage is the best thing that ever happened to me. Aren’t I allowed to make my own mistakes for once and not just wait for circumstances to get me anyway?’ She stops, takes a breath and relaxes now that she’s said it all. ‘If I can’t have Biggles, I want the real thing.’

  Surely Biggles has already been disposed of in the sea.

  ‘It’s not just the cost of learning to fly. You have to keep paying out for maintenance.’

  She glares at him. ‘Stop being so practical. You live in a lighthouse. You should be more visionary.’

  A large crowd of people is walking up the road behind them, some on the cobbled pavement, but most on the road. Straker and Doody stop to let them pass.

  Straker is still thinking about the crash. He wishes he could remember more, bring back what was going on in his mind just before it happened.

  Unexpectedly, he feels Doody’s hand on his arm. He waits for her to remove it, assuming it is a mistake, but it stays there. He can feel the warmth from her seeping through and penetrating his skin.

  ‘You can’t change things, you know.’ Her voice is unusually gentle.

  He raises his eyes.

  ‘It happened. Nothing stops that, whatever you were thinking at the time.’

  ‘I don’t know what I was thinking.’

  ‘You probably weren’t that stupid. Crashing a car with just you in it isn’t the same thing as destroying a train full of people. Most potential suicides don’t decide to take everyone else with them.’

  ‘I wish I could remember. What sort of person was I? I can only see myself now.’

  ‘And you wouldn’t do it now. That’s the important thing. I used to worry about Harry. Maybe if I’d done it better, he wouldn’t have gone. But that’s just how it is. You pick yourself up and carry on walking.’

  ‘An open door,’ says Straker. ‘You don’t have to look through it every time you go past.’

  Doody stares at him. ‘That’s right,’ she says. ‘That’s it exactly.’

  Straker moves over to let the group of people pass, but Doody remains standing in the road, refusing to allow them more space. He examines their feet. There are trainers, normal for the sailing lot, and smart shoes—suede, leather. Older styles too, with flat heels, one-inch heels, three-inch heels, even higher in one case, although these are stumbling to keep upright on the road, which is not much smoother than the cobblestone pavement. It’s the diversity of ages and styles that is disconcerting. They don’t look as if they ought to be together.

  Straker becomes aware that the feet have stopped walking, and they’re all around him and Doody. There’s an odd silence.

  ‘Straker?’

  Who are they? How can they possibly know his name? He raises his eyes to their faces.

  In front of the group, there’s a woman who reminds him of Doody. She has that same aggressive way of standing and staring at him that makes everything his fault. She moves closer and he tries to back away, but there’s only a stone wall behind him.

  ‘Who’s asking?’ says Doody.

  ‘Who are you?’ says the woman, half turning her face to her.

  ‘I asked first.’

  ‘Is your name Straker?’

  ‘It might be.’

  The woman turns back to Straker. ‘I don’t think so,’ she says slowly.

  He looks at the woman’s face. She has pale, almost transparent skin, and her short, spiky hair is so black that it’s difficult to see any individual strands of hair. Her unnaturally bright eyes, heavily rimmed with black makeup, are staring at him with an intense, hungry expression. She’s prettier than Doody, and thinner, but there’s a hardness about her that’s almost familiar—although not quite. He realises that Doody’s anger must be cultivated and controlled, because it’s nothing in comparison to the reality of this woman’
s anger.

  ‘I’m Straker.’

  She smiles unpleasantly. The people round them are breathing, listening, waiting.

  ‘Does the name Carmen Halliwell mean anything to you?’ she says.

  He knows the name, but he can’t think clearly enough to work it out.

  ‘Or Pete Butler?’

  He swallows hard.

  ‘I’ll tell you who we are. Listen to the names, Straker. Think about them. Kieran and Stuart Fisher, sons of Alan Fisher. Jack Tilly, father of Felicity. Felicity Tilly. Jeremy Ainsworth, grandson of Jerry and Anne. James Taverner, grandson of—’

  ‘Maggie,’ he says. ‘Maggie!’

  There’s a sudden silence, as if they are taken by surprise. There appear to be hundreds of them now, crowding round together, although no one actually touches him. Straker is finding it difficult to breathe.

  ‘Yes,’ says a calm voice. ‘Maggie. She was my grandmother.’

  Straker looks at his face. A tall young man with a ponytail, somehow very strong and confident. He’s undoubtedly a Taverner, a younger version, one of those faces in the photographs that Straker pored over in Simon’s flat. It is possible to see Maggie in him. And Simon. Looking at his face, Straker believes he can see the loss, the absence of something.

  ‘What about the others?’ shouts another voice. ‘My Helen.’

  Then all the voices join in. ‘Yes, what about Leroy?’

  ‘Paul!’

  ‘Johnny!’

  They are all names he knows. He’s conscious of the fury of the names, throwing themselves at him, slamming him against the wall. He tries to push them away, and feels Doody’s reaction as she moves closer.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she says. ‘Clear off! How dare you come here and harass us?’

  He wants to tell her that he understands what’s happening. He doesn’t recognise any of them, but he knows who they all are. He’s been diverted by other memories and briefly forgotten Simon Taverner’s computer—the conversations on it, the plans they were making…

  ‘What do you want from me?’ he says at last, struggling to make his voice work properly. Half of him is afraid and the other half is strangely liberated, as if this is what he’s been waiting for all these years, a chance to confront them, to explain, or give them something back. If he dies here, now, it won’t matter. It would be fair. After all, there’s no real justice for someone who’s killed people. How can there be? You can’t bring them back. There’s nothing you can do. Once it’s done, it’s done.