Overhead the gulls had begun to circle again. Led by the fulmars, they surrounded the church, heavy wings brushing the spire, trying to dash the last of the numerals from the clock face and put an end to past time in Shepperton. Droppings spattered the cars and gravestones. Unsettled, the parishioners backed away toward the swimming-pool.
‘Father Wingate!’ The retired soldier with the shooting stick called out. ‘Do you need our help, Father?’ But the priest paid no attention to him. Below the straw hat his strong face had shrunk into itself. As the gulls shrieked and dived the parishioners scattered among the parked cars.
When the last of them had gone Father Wingate left the vicarage and strode across to the church. Throwing his cigarette among the gravestones, he nodded to me in a matter-of-fact way.
‘Fair enough – I thought you’d come.’ He stared at my clerical suit, almost hoping not to recognize me. ‘You’re Blake, the pilot who landed here yesterday? I remember your hands.’
CHAPTER 13
The Wrestling Match
Despite this welcome, the priest made no effort to be friendly. The strain of physical aggression I had noticed after my rescue the previous day was still present. As we approached the church he forced me to walk behind him. I sensed that Father Wingate would have liked to wrestle me to the ground among the lurid flowers springing from my heels. He kicked the blossoms out of his way, lunging at them like a bad-tempered goal-keeper. As I tried to avoid him my feet slipped in the rain-soaked feathers.
Father Wingate held my shoulders. He stared at my bruised mouth, aligning me against some set of specifications in his mind.
‘Blake, you look dazed. Perhaps you haven’t yet come down to earth.’
‘The storm kept me awake.’ I pushed his hands away from me. Under the floral shirt he was sweating heavily. Unlike his parishioners he did not smell of the birds. But then nor had I seen him in my dream.
Testing him, I asked: ‘Did you see the birds?’
He nodded sagely to himself, acknowledging that I had scored a point. ‘As it happens, I did.’ He gestured towards the clock tower with his Panama hat. ‘There were some strange ones aloft last night. According to my housekeeper the whole of Shepperton slept with an aviary inside its head.’
‘Then you saw the same dream?’
Father Wingate unlocked the doors of the church. ‘So it was a dream …? I’m relieved to hear you say so, Blake.’ He stepped through the doors and beckoned me to follow him. ‘Right – we’ll get this over with.’
As I peered into the nave through the warm, musty air Father Wingate tossed his straw hat on to the font. He turned in the dim light, as if about to attack me. When I stepped back he lifted one end of the nearest pew. He dragged the oak form across the aisle, scattering the hymn books across the tiled floor.
‘Blake, take the other end. Let’s put our backs into it.’
I lifted the pew, able to see little more than the priest’s floral shirt in the thin light. I could hear him breathing hoarsely, like an animal in its burrow working up to some private crisis. Together we carried the heavy seat to the west wall of the nave, then returned for the next pew. Father Wingate moved with the impatient energy of a scene-shifter given five minutes to clear the church. Had he rented the building to the film company for some scene in their aviation spectacular? He tossed the worn velvet cushions out of his way, shouldered the lectern to the vestry door, stacked a dozen prayer-books on to his left arm and tipped them into a tea-crate behind the font. At any moment I expected a studio pantechnicon to drive up with a contingent of set designers and actors in flying gear, ready to transform this parish church into a Flanders aid station, a front-line chapel gutted by the forces of darkness.
Father Wingate returned from the vestry with two dust-sheets and closed the doors of the organ loft. He pulled the candles from the silver sticks, and draped the altar and crucifix with a white sheet.
‘Blake, are you still here? Don’t stand there dreaming about your birds. Roll back the carpets.’
As we moved around the murky nave, dismantling the interior of his church, I watched the priest at work. Sweat filled the deep seams of his face, and fell in bright drops to the scuffed tiles under our feet. During a brief break he sat with arms and legs outstretched along one of the pews. A large man, I decided, in the grip of some small obsession, using me as a short cut to deal with his own problems. He looked up at the stained-glass windows, as if calculating how to pull them down on to the floor of the nave.
For all his energy, did he understand what he was doing? Had he too seen that premonitory vision of the holocaust? It occurred to me that he was responding in the most sensible way, packing off everything that could be moved to safe-keeping, clearing the pews to one side so that the nave could be used as a refuge, a real first-aid station against that death from the sky.
But his brusque handling of the prayer-books and hymnals, of the gilt-framed portraits of saints and apostles which he heaped into the wooden crate, convinced me that he had some other motive, some scheme in which I was to play a role. Father Wingate was clearing the decks of his life with too much relish.
Without thinking, I found myself rising to his physical challenge. We moved from pew to pew, dragging these lengths of spent timber against the walls. I pulled off my jacket, exposing the bruises on my chest. As we struggled with the heavy forms I knew that I was wrestling with this fifty-year-old priest, matching my wrists and shoulders against his. Separated by the length of each pew, we jockeyed for position on the damp tiles, straining at the huge stiff snake we held between us.
Carried away by the sweat that smeared the stone floor, and by the smell of our bodies, I happily watched the blood spring from my knuckles. An almost homo-erotic excitement had seized me. I dragged the last of the pews across the open nave, twisting it out of the priest’s hands as he tried to keep up with me. Like a son showing off his strength and stamina, I wanted him to admire me.
‘Good, Blake … I’m exhausted. Good.’
Breathing harshly, Father Wingate leaned against his thighs in the centre of the dust-filled nave. Flecks of my blood stained his floral shirt. He was still unsure who I was and what had brought me to Shepperton, but he looked up at me with the sudden affection of a man who has wrestled with a stranger he discovers to be his own son. From that moment I felt a complete trust in this renegade priest.
Later, when I had swept the floor of the nave, Father Wingate unlocked the doors and let the fresh morning air clear the dust from the church. He watched the wind stir the sheets draped over the altar and font, flick the pages of the discarded hymn books. Unimpressed by this act of self-vandalism, he calmly replaced the straw hat on his head. He slipped an arm around my shoulders to support himself, and let me lead the way to the vestry.
His hands did not fit the bruises on my chest. Once again I felt a surge of warmth for him, a regret that he had not brought me back to life. Never before had I known a sense of dependency upon a man older than myself, a pride in his confidence in me. Now I was the returning prodigal, the young flying priest, not only his son fallen from the sky but his successor.
Already the elements of strange ceremonies and bizarre rituals were taking shape in my mind.
Father Wingate opened the vestry door. Immediately I saw the bright sunlight that shone through the large hole in the roof, illuminating the broken tiles on the floor and the specimen cases that filled the room. Behind their glass panels lay shards and knobs of worn bone, all that was left of some ancient fossil beach.
‘Before I leave I’ll have the roof repaired for you.’ Father Wingate knelt among the tiles and picked up a bloodied feather. ‘A huge bird fell through here during the storm. One of the condors must have escaped from Stark’s zoo – he’s careless with those creatures of his.’
I took the feather from him and raised it to my mouth, tasting again the smell of the night air, the sebum of my wings. Father Wingate led me to the laboratory table, equipped with
a microscope and lens stand. In my vision I had seen the complete skeleton of a winged creature, but mounted below the lens was a single splinter of bone the shape of a small trowel, its gnarled profiles and pitted seams exposed by the light. Barely a bone, it was so old that it had begun to revert to its mineral origins, a node of calcified time memorializing a brief interval of life millions of years earlier.
Father Wingate placed me over the lens, in which the bone swam like an ancient planet.
‘I found this on the beach within seconds of your arrival, Blake. The wave from your aircraft must have dislodged it, in a way you’re its co-discoverer. It’s certainly my most remarkable find yet. I’m guilty of keeping it to myself. But for a few days … Anyway, let me introduce one aviator to another. This will have to be confirmed, of course, but I’m almost sure that it’s part of the fore-limb of a primitive flying fish – you can see the point of attachment for its wing membrane. A true flying fish, a precursor even of archaeopteryx, the most ancient known bird.’
He stared at his treasure, a hand reassuringly on my arm as if aware of the link between my own nearly fatal flight and the long journey which this winged forbear of mine had taken through geological time to reach our rendezvous on this specimen table. Sunlight fell through the roof, touching this bone, the relic of a new aerial sainthood.
‘Father Wingate, tell me – why are you leaving?’
The priest stared at me, surprised that I should need to ask. He placed his large hands on the display cases. ‘Blake, this is now my real work – even if you’d not come I would have had to give all my time to it. By the way, I shouldn’t have tired you out. I know the next few days are going to test you.’
I looked up at the ragged hole in the roof through which I had fallen in my dream. I turned to Father Wingate, suddenly needing to describe my strange vision, my fears of having died and the way in which I had marooned myself in Shepperton.
‘The crash, Father, you were there. Dr Miriam says I was under the water for at least ten minutes. For some reason I feel that I’m still trapped in the aircraft.’
‘You’re not, Blake! You freed yourself.’ He held my shoulders tightly, almost trying to provoke me to stand up for myself. ‘Blake, it’s why I’ve closed the church. How it happened, I don’t know. But I do know that you survived. In fact I almost believe that it was not death you survived but life. You survived life …’
‘I didn’t die.’
‘Believe me, Blake, since yesterday I’ve felt that it’s not you who are alive but we here who are dead. Seize every chance you have, however strange.’
I thought of the car-park outside the clinic, and my near-rape of Rachel.
‘Yesterday, Father, I tried to rape that blind girl – why, I don’t know.’
‘I saw you – but you stopped yourself. For all we know, vices in this world may well be metaphors for virtues in the next. Perhaps you can take us all through that doorway, Blake. I’ve felt the same demented impulses …’
He was staring through the lens at the fragment of his winged fish. I took the bottle of communion wine from the brass table behind him, deciding to get away from this church. I had made this sympathetic but confused priest into my father, another member of the family I had constituted around myself from the witnesses of my crash. I had seen these fossils before. Each of the bones I remembered clearly, etched by the moonlight as I lay on the floor among these specimen cases, listening to the screaming of the birds as they struck in their sexual frenzy at the church tower. I remembered the shin bones of the archaic boar, and the barely human skull of a primitive valley dweller who had lived by this river a hundred thousand years earlier, the breast bone of an antelope and the crystalline spine of a fish – together the elements of a strange chimera. I remembered too the terrifying skeleton of the winged man.
On an easel by the laboratory table, its fine paper marked by splashes of water, was the drawing on which Father Wingate had been working when I crashed. He had completed the sketch as the aircraft sank, his reconstruction of this winged creature, which I too had become as I swam ashore, part man, part fish and part bird.
CHAPTER 14
The Strangled Starling
Vivid blossoms swarmed among the graves, their semen-gorged petals feasting on the sun. Drunk on the communion wine, I set off across the park, the half-empty bottle in one hand. Beyond the deserted tennis courts lay the river, an over-excited mirror waiting to play a trick on me. Everywhere the air had become a vibrant yellow drum. A heavy sunlight freighted the foliage of the trees. Each leaf was a shutter about to swing back and reveal a miniature sun, one window in the immense advent calendar of nature.
I could see the same intense light in the eyes of the deer that followed me towards the clinic, in the mercurous bark of the silver birch, in the inert trunks of the dead elms. But for the first time I felt no fear. My meeting with Father Wingate had made me understand what it was like to feel a father’s confidence, part of the same assurance I had drawn from Mrs St Cloud. Both of them I had touched with my blood. It was this sure heart’s ground under my feet, my fixed place at last in time and space, that gave the air its vibrancy.
Already I was convinced that the light came as much from me as from the sun.
Calming myself, I reached the empty car-park of the clinic. A few old people sat on the terrace of the geriatric unit, watching with interest as I emerged bottle in hand from the trees. The clinic had shut for the day. I had hoped to see Dr Miriam, partly to tell her of Father Wingate’s closure of the church – her waiting-room would be fuller than usual the next day with mourning parishioners in a psychosomatic swoon – but also to show off to her my new confidence.
Bottle to my lips, I stared at the signposts outside the clinic, with their lists of diseases like destinations. I waved the bottle encouragingly at the elderly patients. By coupling with them, with the fallow deer in the park, with the magpies and starlings, I could release the light waiting behind the shutter of reality each of them bore before him like a shield. By annealing my body to theirs, by fusing myself to the trunks of the silver birches and dead elms, I would raise their tissues to the fever-point of their true radiance.
The bottle shattered at my feet, spilling the last of the wine across my tennis shoes. Blearily I gazed round for something to do, someone I could bother with my messianic delusions. Beyond the clinic the children were playing in their private meadow, moving in their timeless dream through the overlit grass. David’s broad head drifted among the poppies, square balloon bearing the image of his amiable face. Behind him came Rachel, smiling serenely as she raced through the blood-tipped flowers. Jamie whooped along with his pivoting stride, face raised to the sun as if seeing his expression in its mirror.
Delighted to be with them, I left the car-park and stumbled towards the meadow. The children animated the deep grass with their secret games. Recognizing me, they let out hoots of delight. They swerved around me, squealing as I blundered after them with my arms raised like an aircraft’s wings. I saw a white flag flash between Jamie’s legs.
‘I’m behind you, Rachel …! Jamie, I’m flying over you …!’
I lunged through the grass after them, aware that I was not really playing. If I caught one of these children …
Luckily they slipped past me, trailing the white flag like a snare, and disappeared through the arbour towards the river.
I entered this shady bower and approached the grave, this ambiguous memorial to the flowers. I could see how hard the three children had worked, and just how much my arrival had inspired them. Dead daisies and poppies filled the grave, and the wooden cross was decorated by a strip of white metal, part of the wing-tip of the Cessna torn away by the current and washed ashore.
Intoxicated by the scent of the dead flowers, I decided to rest in this luxurious grave. The sun was now overhead, and the warmth trapped within this secluded meadow had agitated thousands of insects. Cicadas chittered and screeched, dragonflies leaked electric g
limmers on to the stifling air. On a branch of a silver birch ten feet from me sat an unusual visitor to this riverside town, a scarlet macaw whose resplendent plumage barely held its own in the spectrum of excited light. The meadow lay engorged upon itself, swollen by every sap-filled leaf.
Grandly, I lay back among the flowers. As the sun warmed my bruised chest I felt the surge of sexual energy that had pursued me all day. I thought of Dr Miriam and her mother, and of the three children. I needed to couple with them, with the swaying elders and the warm ground, rid myself like a golden snake of my glowing skin. Again I was sure that this abundant life had sprung from my own body, broadcast from my pores and from the hand-shaped bruises around my ribs.
Two fallow deer had entered the meadow and were muzzling the warm grass. In my mind I entered the bodies of these timid creatures. I dreamed of repopulating Shepperton, seeding in the wombs of its unsuspecting housewives a retinue of extravagant beings, winged infants and chimerized sons and daughters, plumed with the red and yellow feathers of macaws. Antlered like the deer, and scaled with the silver skins of rainbow trout, their mysterious bodies would ripple in the windows of the supermarket and appliance stores.
Searching for the communion wine, I rooted among the flowers. My hand came up with a feathery purse, hidden here by the children. I remembered that Dr Miriam had given me no money for my return fare to the airport. About to open the purse, I found myself holding the still warm body of a strangled starling. I stared at its speckled feathers and limp neck, listening to Jamie’s exaggerated hooting beyond the trees. Irritated by the sunlight, my skin had broken out in an attack of hives. Weals like the stings of invisible hornets rose on my arms and chest, as if another creature was trying to share my skin.
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