I needed to shed this skin.
I clambered from the grave, brushing aside the cloud of petals that fell from my shoulders, and ran through the grass towards the river. Birds rose on all sides, hundreds of starlings and finches, the fleeing residents of a demented aviary. People were flocking to the park, attracted by this bright Sunday morning, summer doubling itself in the brilliant flowers. Young couples lay together on the grass. A father and his son flew a huge box kite. A troupe of amateur actors in Shakespearian costume rehearsed on the green, and the local arts society was setting up an open-air show, the modest paintings drowned by the raucous shrieking of a macaw.
Suffocating in the overheated sunlight, I ran down to the river. I knocked over a small girl tottering after a white dove. Setting her on her feet, I placed the bird in her hands, and sprinted past the tennis courts. The balls flicked at me on the ends of whips, stinging my eyes. Hoping to see Miriam St Cloud, I ran through the dead elms. A party of sunbathers sitting on the grassy slope cheered me on. I leapt through them, my skin on fire, and dived over a barking dog into the cool water.
CHAPTER 15
I Swim as a Right Whale
I lay in a house of glass, sinking through endless floors of descending water. Above me was an illuminated vault, an inverted gallery of transparent walls suspended from the surface of the river. Carried by the welcoming water, diatoms jewelled the shoals of fish who had come to greet me. I searched for my legs and arms, but they had vanished, transformed into a powerful tail and fins.
I swam as a right whale.
Cooled by the healing stream, this realm free of dust and heat, I propelled myself towards the sun, and broke the surface in a burst of foam. As I hung in the air, showing myself to the hundreds of people on the bank, I heard the startled cries of the children. I lay back and struck the water, driving the sunlight into a frantic maze. Again I leapt at the surface, and hurled the spray from my magnificent shoulders across the delighted children. As I turned in the air the tennis players came through the trees to cheer me on. A fisherman reached into his net and tossed a gudgeon towards me, a silver bullet I caught between my teeth.
As I performed for them, the whole of Shepperton came to watch me. Miriam St Cloud and her mother stood on the lawn of their Tudor mansion, awed by my sleek beauty. Father Wingate unpacked his specimen case on the beach, hoping that my exploding wake would dislodge another rare fossil for him. Stark stood protectively at the end of his amusement pier, nervous that I might shatter its rusting pillars. Urging them to join me, I raced in circles through the surging water, chased my tail for the children, blew spouts of foam through the sunfilled spray, porpoised to and fro across the river in shallow leaps that stitched the air and water into a table-lace of foam.
Below me the drowned Cessna sat upon the river bed on its podium of light. Tempted to escape from it for ever, I swam downstream towards the marina, where the razor-keels of the yachts dipped and cut at my spine. Once I eluded them, I would make my way down the Thames to the open sea, to the polar oceans with their cooling icebergs.
But as I looked back at Shepperton for the last time I was moved by the sight of its entire population standing on the bank. They were all hoping that I would return, the tennis players and Shakespearian actors, the small children and the kite-fliers with their box kite collapsed like an empty gift in their arms, the young lovers and middle-aged couples, Miriam St Cloud and her mother beckoning to me like figures in a dream.
I turned and raced back to them, delighted by their cheers. A young man threw away his shirt and trousers, and plunged head-first into the charged water. Crossed by a dozen bars of light, he broke the surface, transformed into a svelte and handsome swordfish.
Next, a woman in tennis gear slipped down the spray-damp grass and dived into the water. In the rush of bubbles she swerved past me as a graceful sturgeon. Laughing at each other, an elderly woman and her husband let themselves be pushed from the bank by a party of teenagers, then emerged from a cloudburst of foam as a pair of dignified groupers. A dozen children jumped into the rushing water, darted away from me as a shoal of silver minnows.
All along the beach, people were stepping into the water. A father and mother waded through the waves, each holding a child, and were transformed into a family of golden carp. Two teenage girls sat on the beach, their legs in the shallows, delighted by the elegant tails that extended lazily from their submerged waists. Happily they removed their shirts, reclining mermaids with bare breasts. They let themselves be drawn into the water that I swirled gently over them with my huge tail, a lacy quilt tossed across two naked lovers. As their hair dissolved in the foam they became two playful dolphins, and slipped away through the water crowded with scrambling pikelets and minnows. An overweight woman in a flowered dress collapsed breathlessly in the water and surged away as a stately manatee. The troupe of Shakespearian actors stepped self-consciously into the unsettled stream, the women raising their crinolines from the sand-stained foam, then sank through the surface, transformed into the players of an underwater pageant, a school of angel fish ruffed with translucent gills and plumed with delicate tendrils.
A few people still hesitated on the bank. I leapt through the crowded waves, urging them to leave the suffocating air. The party of tennis players threw aside their rackets and dived into the water, whipped away as handsome white sharks. The butcher and his attractive wife tottered down the grassy slope, immersed themselves and sailed off as immense sea-turtles with rolling carapaces.
Almost all Shepperton had joined me in this new realm. I cruised along the bank, past the discarded kite and tennis rackets, the still playing radios and forgotten picnic hampers. Only one group remained, watching me from their familiar positions, Miriam St Cloud and her mother, Father Wingate on the beach, Stark and the three children. But their faces were without expression, veiled by the spray as if in a deep dream from which I was excluded.
At that moment I knew that they were not yet ready to join me, and that it was they who were the sleepers.
Leaving them, I drifted downwards into the sunlit water. Led by the swordfish, a huge congregation surrounded me, shoals of porpoise and salmon, groupers and rainbow trout, dolphins and manatees. Drawing the sun’s rays with me, I sank towards the river bed. Together we would lift the aircraft and carry it downstream to the estuary of the Thames and the open sea, a coronation coach in which I would lead the inhabitants of this small town to the great deeps of their real lives.
The sunlight faded. A few inches from me, through the water-dimmed windshield, a once-human face grimaced at me. A drowned man wearing an aviator’s helmet, his mouth fixed in a death-gape, lay across the controls, arms swaying towards me in the current that flowed through the cabin door.
Terrified by this wavering embrace, I turned and swam blindly into the tail of the aircraft. The air rushed from my lungs in the violent water. No longer a whale, I struck out for the surface through the hundreds of scattering fish. Torn from the aircraft, a fragment of white fabric sailed upwards through the water. Following it, I fought my way to the surface. In a last exhausted race for the sun I seized the air.
I woke in the insect-filled meadow, lying on the wet flowers that filled the grave. A few steps away the three handicapped children watched me from among the poppies. I was drenched in the sweat that soaked my jacket and trousers, and too tired to speak to them. A strange headache was leaving me. I breathed unevenly, as if for the first time, and tried to focus my eyes on the vivid birds and flowers within the meadow. I was aware again of my bruised mouth and chest, as if the dead occupant of the aircraft I had glimpsed in my dream had tried to drown me.
But for all the reality of the meadow, I knew that this warm grass, these dragon-flies and poppies belonged to another dream, and that my fever-vision of swimming as a right whale had been another window into my real life.
I rose to my feet and brushed the petals from my suit. The children moved away through the grass, subdued by whatev
er they had seen. The strangled starling lay among the dead daisies. Jamie turned on his shackles, avoiding my eyes, but his small face was puckered with concern, as if he wanted to guide me through the ordeal of my vision. In his hands he held a dead sparrow, another purse to be hidden in the grave.
When they had gone I walked alone through the late afternoon, my damp suit covered with a coat of rainbows, a confetti of petals, celebrating my marriage with the meadow.
People were leaving the river on their way home, the tennis players and young parents with their children, the old women and their husbands. Their faces were lit by an energy I had never seen before. As they passed me I noticed that all their clothes were damp, as if they had been caught in a sudden shower.
CHAPTER 16
A Special Hunger
It was now, after this second vision, that I and Miriam St Cloud first began to understand what was taking place in Shepperton. When I left the park and approached the Tudor mansion Miriam was waiting for me on the lawn. She watched me walk towards her across the spray-soaked grass, shaking her head at this irresponsible patient wilfully putting his health at risk. I knew that she was no longer frightened of me, but still half-hoped that I would leave her once-placid town for ever.
‘Blake, can’t you get rid of these birds?’ She pointed to the screeching sea-birds which circled the foam-flecked water, as if they were players in a discarded fantasy I had left lying around untidily. A flock of petrels and cormorants had joined the fulmars, and a dozen of the heavy-winged predators hungrily raked the river with their beaks, hunting with a kind of plaintive and distracted hysteria for the fish I had conjured from my vision. But those fish now swam in the sun-filled lagoons of my head.
‘Blake, do you want me to drive you to the station?’ Shielding her eyes from the birds, Miriam blocked my way with her strong body. ‘Is there any point in your staying here?’
For all her aggressive stance, she was as angry and concerned for me as a young wife would be. I was sure that in some way she had witnessed my vision, perhaps as no more than a sudden glimpse into that real world which I was slowly unfolding as I drew back the curtains that muffled Shepperton and the rest of this substitute realm. When I took off my drenched jacket her hands ran across my chest and back, searching for any fresh injuries.
‘I’ve been swimming in the river,’ I told her. ‘You should have come in.’
‘The water was lovely, I suppose. You’re lucky to be alive – there was a swordfish there.’
‘Did you see the whale?’
She shook her head, staring in an almost desperate way at the screaming fulmars. ‘Frightening creatures-you brought them here, you know. I’ve had to give Mother a sleeping draught.’
Steering me towards the house, she said calmly: ‘Blake, I did see something. Perhaps there was a whale … there was some magnificent creature swimming up and down, as if he was trying to come ashore. Lost whales often swim up the Thames.’
She took my arm and helped me across the hall to the staircase, her arms closely around me. As I stripped in the bedroom she folded my clothes with quick hands, like a wife eager to get her husband into bed. Was she already aware of my determination to mate with everyone in Shepperton? I stood naked in front of her, the bruises on my chest and mouth more prominent than ever in the electric light. Smiling in a reassuring way at her unembarrassed stare, I gazed frankly at her body, with its dizzying scents. In my mind I dedicated each of our sexual acts to the crippled children, to the young women and the old, to the trees and birds and fish, to my transformation of this riverside town.
‘Miriam, was anyone else in the water with me?’
‘A few people-five or six-some of the tennis players. And one of the local butchers, amazingly.’
‘No more than that?’
‘Blake …’ Although I was naked she let me embrace her, pressing her hands against my shoulders. ‘We’ve all been so exhausted – first your crash, and the whole nightmare of your escape. Then the storm last night, the strange birds and all these fish … portents of God only knows what. Half the time I don’t know whether I’m seeing or dreaming.’
‘Miriam – am I dead?’
‘No!’ She slapped my right cheek, then held my face tightly in her hands. ‘Blake, you’re not dead. I know you’re not. Poor man, that crash. There are things coming out of your head that frighten me, you’re crossing space and time at some kind of angle to the rest of us. Something’s happened here, you ought to get away from Shepperton altogether …’
My arms steadied her. ‘No, I have to stay. There’s a lot I want to find out.’
‘Then see Father Wingate. I know that’s all nonsense, but I can’t think of anything else that might help you.’
‘Father Wingate handed his church over to me this morning.’
‘Why? What does he imagine you’re going to do with it?’
‘Conduct a marriage ceremony – of a special kind?’
Laughing, she moved my hands from her breasts, as if nervous that I might transform her into a thousand-breasted Diana. ‘That’s strange. Do you know, Blake, as a schoolgirl I often had a fantasy of being married in an airliner – I think I was in love with a pilot I saw at Orly while changing planes with my parents. For some reason I was terribly keen on the idea of a wedding ceremony held ten miles up in the air.’
‘Miriam, I’ll rent an aircraft.’
‘Again? By the way, Stark’s a pilot – of a sort. Like you.’
‘But not a real one.’
‘Are you, Blake?’
I had recovered my strength after the swim, and could easily have lifted her from the floor on to the bed. But I was thinking of my own dream of flight. Had she really had a childhood fantasy of being married in the air, or had I imposed it upon her? A sickly cyclamen sun touched her hair, the trees in the park, the grass in the water-meadow, my blood itself irrigating all the secret possibilities of our lives. I wanted to mate with Miriam St Cloud on the wing, sail with her along the cool corridors of the sky, swim with her down this small river to the open sea, drown the currents of our love in the ebb and flow of oceanic tides …
‘Blake—!’
Gasping for breath, she struggled from me. She tore her arms free and struck out at my face with her hard fists. For a moment, as she sucked at the air, she stared at me with real terror. When she ran to the door I felt my bruised mouth, aware that I had begun to crush the life from her lungs as I had done from her mother’s.
Later, sitting naked in a high-backed chair by the window, I looked down at the river in the dusk, at the now cerise water through which I had leapt as a right whale, my sleek body dressed in foam like the lace ruffs of the Shakespearian actors. What disturbed me was not my apparent attempt to smother Miriam St Cloud, but that I no longer wished to escape from Shepperton. Already I felt committed to the people here, almost as if I was their pastor. The unseen powers who had saved me from the aircraft had in turn charged me to save these men and women from their lives in this small town and the limits imposed on their spirits by their minds and bodies. In some way my escape from the Cessna, whose drowned wraith I could see in the dark water below the window, had gained me entry to the real world that waited behind the shutter of every flower and feather, every leaf and child. My dreams of flying as a bird among birds, of swimming as a fish among fish, were not dreams but the reality of which this house, this small town and its inhabitants were themselves the consequential dream.
As the night air soothed my bruised chest I sensed the power flowing from my body, filling the river and the park. I was sorry to have frightened Miriam – I wanted her to be the vessel of my transforming lust, and our marriage to be not a rape but a private coronation. I watched a shoal of animalcula swarming in a halo around the Cessna, marine creatures from some warm pelagic deep which had crossed the oceans to swim up the Thames and release their light for me.
As for the corpse in the Cessna, this imaginary body no longer frightened me. I even
welcomed its challenge, the duel between us for the domination of this river and town.
All night the people of Shepperton continued to stroll along the river bank. They gazed at the vivid foliage in the park that seemed to glow in the darkness like the forest at the fringes of a tropical city. Father Wingate walked along the beach by the illuminated water, fanning himself with his straw hat. He had recovered from our confrontation in the church and patrolled the shoreline as if to make sure that I was allowed to rest. Once again I felt the presence of my first real family. Together they were encouraging me to fulfil myself and make the most of whatever powers I possessed.
However, when the housekeeper brought me a tray of food I found myself unable to touch the roast meat she had prepared. Although I had eaten nothing for forty-eight hours, I was hungry only for the flesh of my own species. And I would take that flesh, not with my bruised mouth, but with my entire body, with my insatiate skin.
CHAPTER 17
A Pagan God
The next morning, at the start of my third day in Shepperton, I began work at Dr Miriam’s clinic. As I set off across the park I reflected that for all her deference to me, and my own messianic delusions, the job was a menial one-I was to clean the corridors and waiting-room, run errands for the nurses. While I dressed I thought of rejecting the job and giving myself more time to explore Shepperton, but Mrs St Cloud’s devoted presence, hovering protectively around the untouched breakfast tray, soon unsettled me. She gazed at me in a smiling, but drugged way, as if still affected by the sedative her daughter had given to her the previous evening. In her mind was I her infant son, born to this middle-aged woman from the bed of her dead husband? I was still trying to think of myself as her child, and felt vaguely prudish about our sex together. From the window I watched her talking in the drive to a young delivery man. Her evident interest in him confused me, and I almost felt rejected by her. She was complimenting him on something, her hands touching his shoulders. Clearly I had let an unsuspected dimension into Mrs St Cloud’s suburban life.
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