News from the Clouds

by Robert Llewellyn

  Eventually Ed nodded and I walked to the rear of the craft, grabbed the wooden propeller and gave it as big a turn as I could manage. The engine fired up right away and I closed my eyes until I got out of the wash.

  I hand-gestured for him to turn and take off the way he’d landed, the power lines were too close the other way and I didn’t think Ed was firing on all cylinders. He seemed to be more bamboozled about the Yuneec than I was and my head was spinning.

  I climbed into the cockpit and strapped in, shoved everything back in the box beside me, put my hand on the flat black dash and watched as everything pinged to life.

  I then applied my thumb to the power control and the floppy blades started to spin up, very quickly returning to their fully extended shape.

  I hard-turned the Yuneec at about quarter power, which was already too much. The plane lurched forward with such force I nearly lost control. I could see the field before me and I watched Ed take to the air, and the sight was a great relief. I half expected to see him still sat in the grounded microlight with his mouth hanging open.

  As soon as I was lined up I pushed the power upwards, probably no more than half but due to the incredible power of the motor and the ever extending sweep of the flexible propellers I rocketed forward with neck-breaking rapidity.

  Before I was halfway prepared, I was airborne and rapidly catching up with Ed. I backed off on the power slightly, going well to his right so as not to cause too much of a shock.

  We both banked to the right and turned to face north, then I opened up a bit and overtook him with such ease it was ridiculous. In the Yuneec that I’d flown into the cloud I’d have been hard-pressed to fly faster than Ed, in this Yuneec it was hard to fly slowly enough.

  I slowed down again and dropped to my right. Once I’d levelled up with Ed I pulled in as close as I could.

  We were still only at about 500 feet and I wanted to fly higher, I didn’t want people seeing us from the ground. I could see Ed looking over toward me as I flew beside him. I motioned to him as best I could, pointing upwards. I then climbed steeply to 3,000 feet and levelled out, looking around to see where he was.

  I couldn’t see him and I knew this was dangerous; he could be behind me or below me so I had to take care. I continued to fly at around 70 miles an hour, straight and true, due north.

  About five minutes later I noticed Ed pull up alongside me. I could see him talking into his headset. I guessed he was talking to a tower control of some nearby airfield.

  I glanced down at the Oxfordshire countryside below. We were just crossing the a40 to the east of Witney and I could see the parkland of Blenheim Palace in the distance. At least we were heading in the right direction.

  A few minutes later and I could make out the main runway at Enstone. A huge wave of relief overcame me. I kept looking around for other aircraft, which was now dangerous as any number of planes could be climbing out of the airfield and because I had no radio I had no idea where they might be. I could only hope that Ed’s communication with Enstone ground control had warned them I was flying blind.

  I slowly started to descend as we got closer. I was hoping all along that Ed was well behind me, it was very basic CAA rules that the plane with radio contact should remain behind the craft with no comms, keeping it in sight at all times. It made sense for the plane with the radio, it made life very hard for someone with no clue as to what was going on.

  I peered out to my right to make sure Ed wasn’t around. I couldn’t see him and the sky seemed clear. I then banked hard to the right and climbed. Within a heartbeat I was at over 3,000 feet and I could see Ed’s microlight flying toward the runway.

  I turned again and circled around him. I was dizzy with excitement and kind of lost the plot, the joy of the power and manoeuvrability of the Yuneec made it almost impossible not to show off.

  I levelled off just behind him and watched him glide down to the runway. I then turned again with the intention of getting into position to come into land. However, it seemed like a second or two later I could see Chipping Norton on my right – that was a good four or five miles away. I glanced down at the dash; I was doing 370 miles per hour.

  I slowed, turned and started my descent. By the time I reached the runway I could see Ed waiting on the side, standing next to his microlight with a phone in his hands. As I landed and slowed I realised he’d been filming my descent on his Nexus S.

  Once I had slowed to a crawl, I made my way to Ed’s hangar on the far side of the airfield, thankfully as far away from the flying club building as it was possible to get.

  I was hoping there weren’t going to be too many people hanging around.

  I passed a neat row of stationary aircraft parked on the side of the taxiway and turned into the big hangar.

  No one.

  I slid the power controller to off, waited for a few seconds for the motor to stop spinning and breathed out.

  I was back.

  35

  I sat in the corner of the hangar for some time. In fact I think I may have dozed off.

  Someone kicked my foot.

  ‘Gav, wake up, mate.’ It was Ed.

  I looked up groggily. ‘What is it?’

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked. His microlight was nowhere to be seen, he was standing in front of me wearing a T-shirt and jeans. ‘Why are you sleeping?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I mumbled, my mouth feeling like it was full of dead stuff.

  Ed rubbed his hands over his face. ‘Look, this is all too weird. We’ve got to get the freak Yuneec under wraps, mate.’

  ‘I know.’ I groaned as I slowly got back on my feet.

  Ed walked to the back of the large hangar and started hauling a huge sheet of dusty material toward the Yuneec.

  ‘Loads of people are going to turn up for a fly after lunch, you know that.’

  I yawned and stumbled toward him.

  ‘I feel like I’ve got jet lag,’ I said.

  ‘Gimme a hand you fuckwit,’ said Ed, and he started to unfurl the large sheet of cloth. ‘If people see that prop, well, I just don’t want to be around. What the fuck have you done to this plane?’

  ‘I haven’t done anything.’

  ‘Mate, that thing,’ said Ed pointing toward the Yuneec, ‘that thing flies like a Spitfire. It’s so fucking fast, it used to be the most puny little toy, now it’s a fucking fighter jet. How did you do it?’

  I grabbed the opposite end of the large sheet and started to drag it over the Yuneec.

  ‘I didn’t do anything. I flew into a weird low-level cloud, came out again and it was all different.’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ said Ed. ‘Bloody aliens did it.’

  ‘Yes,’ I nodded, ‘that’s right, aliens did it, Ed, that’s really helpful.’

  With a bit of a struggle we covered the Yuneec and before long it looked like all the other planes in the hanger, covered in sheets and parked up.

  ‘I just spent half an hour in the control tower with old Ron trying to explain,’ said Ed when we’d wrapped the Yuneec as best we could. ‘He saw your aerobatics when we were coming in to land. I managed to bluff over it, it’s just as well Ron is a bit thick, but he wants to know what happened to your radio.’

  ‘I want to know what happened to it. It’s not in the plane. Everything’s changed. I’ve just flown something like 150 miles at speeds I could never have hoped to achieve before and for whatever reason the batteries are still good. Well, I think they’re good, there’s no charge port and no battery level monitor. It just flies. What am I supposed to think?’

  ‘You look like shit, too,’ said Ed.

  ‘Thanks,’ I replied, rubbing my face to try and wake up. ‘I’m supposed to be at a meeting in Basingstoke. Everything’s gone tits up.’

  I lifted part of the cover an
d leant into the cockpit, pulled the odd assortment of things out of the wooden box in the Yuneec cockpit and walked out of the hangar.

  The sun was bright outside, I could hear the distant buzz of light aircraft engines, everything was normal and yet it felt weird. The noise hurt my ears.

  I followed Ed across the grass to where his microlight was parked. Next to it was his battered old Land Rover. I had never discovered, and I still don’t know what Ed actually does for a living. Beth says he’s a trustafarian, whatever that is. He has a lovely house outside Oddington, he has his microlight, his old Landy and a few classic cars he keeps in a barn.

  ‘Get in, I’ll take you home,’ said Ed as he started up the rattling old diesel engine. The noise of the thing made my ears actually hurt.

  I climbed in the passenger seat and strapped myself in. Ed doesn’t drive his Land Rover like a farmer, he drives it like a man who wants to die young.

  I found the noise quite distressing and uncomfortable. I’d been in it before but when he started it up that time the noise really grated against my eardrums.

  We drove the few miles from Enstone Airfield to Kingham, through the middle of Chipping Norton, which was busy with a farmers’ market. Of course, the farmers’ market was on.

  I didn’t say anything on the journey and neither did Ed, there was nothing to say.

  I thanked him profusely when he dropped me outside the house and he roared off down the road leaving a haze of dirty grey smoke behind him.

  As the noise died down I turned and faced our house. It looked weird and yet it hadn’t been more than a couple of hours since I left.

  I found my key among the stuff in the box and let myself in.

  ‘Beth?’ I called when I closed the front door behind me. Nothing. My voice seemed to echo around the small interior.

  I had a piss, washed my face, went upstairs and looked in at my office. It was all just the same as when I’d left. I pondered for a moment, I could switch everything on and check my e-mails, but I was sure my eyes wouldn’t stay open.

  A few moments later I must have collapsed on the bed because when I woke up, I discovered it was the following day.

  After stumbling about in a state of profound confusion I ascertained that Beth had been in the house, she’d slept in the spare bed but I hadn’t heard a thing.

  I had a shower, got some clean clothes on and went down to the kitchen. It was very tidy, which was a relief. Beth had a tendency to ‘leave it for later’ when she went to work that had grated with me in the past. This time I was almost disappointed that it wasn’t messier.

  I made myself a cup of tea, sat at the kitchen table and looked out onto our small garden and the long wall of the barn conversion.

  Everything was normal and yet I felt utterly confused. I knew we’d had a row, I’d left, flown to Basingstoke, get lost in a cloud, came out and something very weird had taken place.

  It was only as I sat with my cup of tea in the deep silence of our little house that I realised something must have happened, something which contradicted everything I believed in, everything I understood.

  Machines don’t simply reinvent themselves when they fly through clouds, they just don’t. Ask anyone. It doesn’t happen. And yet it had happened and I knew it had happened, the proof was currently tucked away under a tarpaulin in Ed’s hanger at Enstone Airfield.

  I was feeling tense, my heart started racing even though I was sitting down doing nothing. Something had happened to me but I didn’t know what it was.

  I checked the date on my phone. Monday 16th May, 2011. I shook my head as I looked at the date. It was correct, of course it was Monday 16th, I’d left the house on the morning of Sunday 15th, flown off, gone through the cloud, come back, fallen asleep and now it was the 16th.

  I suddenly remembered the box. I couldn’t remember where I’d put it, the magic wooden box that just materialised in the plane when I was in the cloud.

  I wandered about the house with my cup of tea looking for it. It was only a two-bedroomed house so it didn’t take long.

  After not finding it anywhere obvious I went up to the small top room that we used as my office and there it was, sitting on the floor next to my desk.

  I sat in my chair and looked down into it. Everything had been in it: my phone, iPad, shoes and the very strange-looking lightweight body stocking thing.

  I lifted everything out and spread it around the floor. Just inexplicable, how did all this stuff get into the box? How did the box get into the Yuneec? As I was reaching for the weird boots I noticed something else in the box I hadn’t seen before. Resting on the bottom was a small square of some kind of material. A handkerchief-sized square of creamy material that looked decidedly odd. Not plastic, not silk and yet it was slightly reflective. I tried to pick it up but it was so incredibly fine it just wafted away from my fingers when I put my hand near it.

  I put one finger in my mouth to wet it and tried to use that to pick it up. When the damp tip of my finger got near it I thought my eyes were deceiving me. The material moved away from my finger as if it were frightened, it moved as if I was trying to push two negative poles of a magnet together.

  Eventually, after drying my finger and using both hands to kind of grasp the material into a ball, I lifted it out of the box. I could only register that I had lifted it with my eyes, I couldn’t feel the material with my hands. It was so fine I couldn’t feel anything on my skin.

  I stared at this bizarre material for a long time. I felt it was telling me something but I didn’t know what.

  Then my eyes fell on the book. It was lying on the floor beside me. Then I looked at the weird boots. For some reason that’s still beyond me. I looked at the piece of material, then the book, then the boots and then back at the piece of material.

  I think I may have been waiting for some kind of memory to be stirred by the presence of these objects. Nothing.

  I picked up the book and opened it.

  It was my writing. My handwriting is fairly poor which I know isn’t unusual, everyone uses keyboards and no one writes by hand anymore. Well, I don’t. The first few pages were very laboriously written with loads of mistakes but after about ten pages, whoever wrote it, and I can only assume it was me, got a lot better at it.

  For the remainder of that day I did nothing except drink tea, urinate and read. I read the whole thing from cover to cover, constantly amazed, constantly rubbing my head trying to remember any of the events that I’d written down so carefully.

  If this was some kind of hoax or practical joke it made no sense. Why would anyone go to such absurd lengths to make me, a humble engineer and scientifically minded sceptic, believe that time travel was remotely possible and that we lived in a pan-dimensional multiverse?

  String theory. I beg your bloody pardon.

  However, I was so engrossed I completely lost track of time and before I knew it I heard the front door open. I checked my phone, it was 5.30 in the evening.

  I put the book into the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet I kept in the built-in cupboard in the top room, covered it with the weird boots I’d found myself wearing and covered that with the strange body suit.

  Then I went downstairs to face the music.

  Thankfully, the music was more gentle folk than thrash metal.

  ‘Hey,’ I said.

  ‘Hello, Gavin,’ replied Beth. She smiled at me. ‘Sorry…’

  I held up my hand to silence her, it was a gentle movement that surprised her as much as it surprised me. I looked her in the eye and it was only as I was doing so I realised how rarely I’d done this before.

  ‘Please don’t apologise. I was being a prick. I’m the one who should say sorry.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Beth, clearly taken aback by what I was saying, which made me surprised. To be honest, it wasn’t that
hard to connect with her but I’d always found it near impossible in the past.

  ‘You’re back early,’ she said.

  ‘I cancelled the meeting. I don’t want to go to any more meetings.’

  ‘Blimey, what’s happened?’ said Beth, not taking her eyes off me but dumping her bag on the floor near the front door. This bag dump routine used to make me quite tense. Beth was very often in the position of not knowing where her bag, phone, laptop, phone charger, keys, purse, hairbrush, glasses or any number of other vital support items were at any given time.

  Now I barely noticed that the bag was right in front of the door ready to trip up the unwary visitor.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said as I followed her into the kitchen. The same kitchen where we’d had a huge row the day before, and yet the memory of that row seemed so distant.

  I put it down to some kind of bug. I never normally sleep that much, and reading the book I’d clearly written hadn’t helped my equilibrium.

  Instead of standing by the kitchen door ready for a quick exit as I often did during moments of tension, I walked right into the kitchen and sat at the table.

  ‘I just feel different. I don’t want to work as manically as I have been. I want to take a bit of time, smell the roses.’

  ‘Smell the roses,’ Beth repeated slowly, her face lighting up with a big grin. I know I grinned back. I couldn’t help it. It had been quite a while since anything I said had made Beth grin.

  ‘Yes. I want to stand in a garden and sniff roses.’

  ‘Gavin, you’ve never been in a garden, you don’t know what a garden is,’ she said. It was true and she was laughing as she said it, but it wasn’t a cruel laugh, it was a charmed but incredulous laugh.

  ‘I know, but I think I want to try doing things like gardening, and I’m sorry about yesterday morning,’ I said. ‘I was a prick.’

  ‘No, you were your normal annoying self, but I was being a nightmare. I’m sorry too.’

  I was glad I was sitting because, for all my many failings in our relationship, I always apologised and Beth never did. Well, she never did before this moment.