As I pushed my way through the crowd it was clear that everyone in Shepperton had declared a local holiday. Even the school had closed. The teachers stood outside the gates, waving to the last of the children who ran screaming towards the banyan tree. Meanwhile the shopkeepers were making the most of this flood of customers. Lines of dishwashers, stereo players and television sets stood in the sun outside the appliance stores, children and birds playing among the cabinets. The manager of the furniture emporium and his assistants were setting out an open-air warehouse of cocktail cabinets, settees and bedroom suites. Exhausted by this jostling bazaar, housewives lay back like thankful tourists on the deep mattresses.
By the entrance to the sweet-shop a group of children were helping themselves to the chocolates and candy-bars laid out on a counter, stuffing their pockets with this undreamt treasure. I waited for the owner to chase them away with his broom, but he lounged good-naturedly in his doorway, throwing peanuts to the macaws.
Across the street was the railway station, where a commuter train was about to leave. The driver waited, head out of his cab, and shouted to the passengers who were still talking to each other on the platform. Secretaries and typists, dark-suited executives carrying their briefcases, they were already hours late on their daily journey to London.
‘Blake, you haven’t got any …’ A small girl with chocolate-smeared cheeks offered me a handful of sweets. I listened to the hum of the electric engines, tempted to push through the crowd and run for the train. Within minutes I could make my escape forever from Shepperton.
Thanking the child, I walked towards the station. But as I looked out along the steel tracks that ran through the gravel lakes to the east of Shepperton I felt a deep sense of lassitude come over me, a complete loss of concern for the outside world. I wanted to remain here, and explore these talents with which I had been entrusted since my crash. Already I knew that my powers might not extend beyond the boundaries of this small town.
There was an angry shout from the driver. Baffled, he shook his head at these renegade passengers. The empty train pulled away from the station. The passengers wandered along the platform, still talking in a relaxed way to each other. The executives threw their briefcases on to the grassy bank, took off their jackets and loosened their ties. They lit cigarettes for the secretaries and lay back on the warm turf, these once disciplined commuters who should already have spent the morning at their advertising agencies and newspaper offices.
Behind them, a few feet from the abandoned briefcases, a small grove of needle-leaved plants had sprung up against the fence. As I turned my back on the station the first eyes were straying to these cannabis plants and the afternoon day-dreams to come.
Happy to leave them to it, I continued my tour of Shepperton. The town was changing under my eyes. Near the film studios people were out in their gardens. Fathers and sons were hard at work building elaborate kites, as if about to take part in some aerial festival. The once immaculate lawns and flower-beds were overrun with tropical plants. Palmettos, banana trees and glossy rubber plants jostled for a place in the vivid light. Lilies and bizarre fungi covered the grass like marine plants on a drained sea-bed. The air was filled with the racket of unfamiliar birds. Screamers trumpeted from the roof of the supermarket, white storks rattled their bills as they surveyed the town from the proscenium of the filling-station. Around a swimming-pool strutted three emperor penguins, chased by a squealing child.
No one was at work. People had left open their front doors and strolled along the centre of the roads, the men bare-chested in running shorts, the women in their brightest summer gear. Married couples exchanged partners in the most sensible and amiable way, husbands taking the arms of their neighbours’ wives and daughters. At one street corner a party of middle-aged spinsters called out teasingly to the passing young men.
Seeing these happy pairings, I thought of the cheerful promiscuity to come. I felt a growing sexual need, not only for the young women brushing against me in the crowded streets, but also for the children who followed me, even for the five-year-olds with their candy-filled hands. Confused by this sinister paedophiliac drive, I was barely aware that I had taken one little girl by the hand, the pretty child with the serious, dark-eyed face who was still trying to give me her supply of free sweets, no doubt concerned by my gaunt expression.
Muttering thickly to her, I decided to take her to the park. I thought of the secret bower and the soft bed of flowers within the grave. Even if the crippled children saw us together – and in a depraved way I wanted them to for their own sake – no one would believe them.
As I steered the child through the crowd, repelled by myself but pulled along by the girl’s firm hand, I saw Father Wingate crossing the street towards me. He carried his straw hat in one hand, which he waved from side to side like the flight controller on the deck of a carrier signalling a bad landing. I could see that he knew all too well what was going through my mind. At the same time I felt that he did not altogether disapprove, and in some way had grasped the secret logic of this perverse act.
‘Come in here …’ Trying to avoid Father Wingate, I pulled the child into the doorway of the hairdressing salon. Every chair was filled, the line of assistants working like conjurors at the bizarre headstyles, a splendid confusion of feathers and flared perukes, wings of back-brushed hair, like the plumage of an aviary.
Next door to the salon, the local boutique was thronged with customers, as if every woman in Shepperton had set her heart on a new wardrobe. Racks of wedding dresses stood out on the sidewalk, and in the window the manageress was hoisting a magnificent lace gown over the hips of a plastic mannequin, apparently confident that this was the one garment every woman would select as her first choice. Sure enough, there was a mêlée of customers jostling each other good-humouredly for a view of the wedding dress. There were exaggerated sighs of delight, ironic titters of appreciation as these housewives and secretaries, waitresses and middle-aged executives pulled the gowns from the racks and held them up to each other. They buffeted around me, pressing the gowns to their shoulders and shouting cheerfully at me. I felt that I was in a festival town filled with my brides.
Holding tightly to the crushed hand of the little girl, I remembered the white plumage of the birds clamouring around me, driven mad by lust. The women swayed against me, their voices shriller, creatures of a demented zoo quivering in rut. I shielded my eyes from the overbright sun. A huge macaw with electric blue plumage screeched past my head. Its talons tore methodically at the blood-striped awning. A small boy with the eyes of an insane dwarf whirled a rattle in my face.
Forced against the plate-glass window, I lifted the girl in my arms, tasting her damp, frightened breath in my mouth. I stumbled against a trestle table, and a tray of costume jewellery and wedding tinsel fell to the ground. The women pushed towards me, joined by the crowd packed into the shopping mall, excited visitors on a saint’s day surging about for a glimpse of a holy man.
Trying to clear my head, I looked up at the banyan tree that blocked the road. Dozens of children swung from the branches, their figures lit by the glowing foliage as if in some animated stained-glass window. Orioles and parakeets flexed their wings between the children, their lurid plumage leaking across the noisy air.
The hot bodies of the women pressed against my skin, their scent inflaming the bruises on my chest. I felt an uneasy sexual euphoria come over me, the intoxication of some strange hunger. The wedding dresses swayed around me in the heat, swinging together from the hangers the women held before their faces.
Through a gap in the crowd I saw Miriam St Cloud step from her sports car and stare in an almost mesmerized way at the plundered racks of wedding gowns. As I tottered among the women, a bull played by these female matadors each with her wedding cape, Miriam seemed confused and uncertain, the last of my brides who had arrived too late for the ceremony. Did she realize that I had cured her patients so that I could marry them? I knew then that I would soon m
ate with Miriam St Cloud and with everyone here, with the young men and young women, with the children and the infants in their prams. I might never eat again, but their bodies would feed me their sweat and odour.
Terrified now, the little girl pulled herself from me and ran off through the crowd, chasing her friends among the washing machines and television sets. Almost swooning, I raised my fists against an excited mother who lifted her child to scream into my face. I tripped on the lace train of a wedding gown and fell to the ground at her feet. Exhausted by the noise, I lay there in a happy delirium, knowing that I was about to kicked to death by my brides.
Powerful hands seized my waist and lifted me on to the trestle table. Father Wingate held me in his arms, steadying me against the window. With one foot he swept aside the costume jewellery, and then forced the women back. Under his flowered shirt I could smell the horse-like sweat of his armpits. He watched me with an expression both angry and tender, a father about to strike his son’s mouth. I knew that he alone was aware of my resolving destiny, of the immanent future which I was about to enter.
‘Blake …’ His voice seemed to come down from the sky.
I swayed against him. ‘Call Dr Miriam. I need …’
‘No. Not now.’ He pressed my head to his chest, forcing me to breathe his sweat, determined that I should not retreat from whatever vision he had seen me approaching.
‘Blake, take your world,’ he whispered harshly. ‘Look at it, it’s around you here.’ He placed his hands on my bruised ribs, pressing his hard fingers into the imprint of those other hands which had first revived me.
‘Stand up, Blake. Now, see!’
I felt his mouth against my bruised lips, tasted his teeth and the stale tobacco of his spit.
CHAPTER 20
The Brutal Shepherd
A strange glaze came over everything. The crowd had moved back, the women with their children drifting away through the powdery light. Miriam St Cloud still faced me across the street, but she seemed to recede from me, lost in a profound fugue. I was aware of Father Wingate somewhere to my left. He watched me with unwavering eyes, one hand encouraging me forward. Like all the others in the now silent shopping mall, he resembled a sleepwalker about to cross the threshold of the dream.
Leaving them, I set off towards the supermarket and library. There were fewer people on the pavements, ghostly mannequins in the still bright light, one by one slipping away to their luminous gardens. Over everything presided the immense organic fountain of the banyan tree, alone retaining its clear outlines. Around it the whole of Shepperton began to fade. The trees and parkland, the houses behind me, were now blurred images of themselves, the last traces of their tenuous reality evaporating in the warm sun.
Abruptly, the light cleared. I was standing in the middle of the park. Everything stood out with an unprecedented clarity – each flower and petal, each leaf of the chestnut trees seemed to have been fashioned separately to fit the focus of my eyes. The roof-tiles of the houses hundreds of yards away, the mortar of the brickwork, each pane of glass had been jewelled to an absolute clarity.
Nothing moved. The wind had dropped, and the birds had vanished. I was alone in an empty world, a universe created for myself and assigned to my care. I was aware that this was the first real world, a quiet park in a suburb of an empty and still unpopulated universe which I was the first to enter and into which I might lead the inhabitants of that shadow Shepperton I had left behind.
At last I was without fear. I strolled calmly across the park, looking back at the footprints behind me, the first to mark this vivid grass.
I was king of nothing. I took off my clothes and threw them among the flowers.
Behind me, hooves tapped. A fallow deer watched me from among the silver birch. As I moved towards it, happy to greet my first companion, I saw other deer, roe and fallow, young and old, moving through the forest. A herd of these gentle creatures had followed me across the park. Watching them approach me, I knew that they were the third family of that trinity of living beings, the mammals, birds and fish, which together ruled the earth, air and water.
It only remained for me now to meet the creatures of the fire …
Antlers sprang from my head, seizing the air through the sutures of my skull. I cropped at the soft pelt of the grass, watching the young females. My herd gathered around me, quietly feeding together. But for the first time a nervous air shivered the leaves and flowers. An almost electric unease hung over the silent park, unsettling the warm sunlight. As I led my herd towards the safety of the deserted town I touched a small female, then mounted her in an anxious spasm. We mated in the dappled light, broke apart and cantered together, the sweat and semen on our flanks mingling as we ran.
Following me, the herd crossed the road and entered the empty streets, hooves tapping among the abandoned cars. I paused at their head, excited by the spoor of unseen predators who might watch me from these silent windows and ornamental gardens, ready to seize my throat and hurl me to the ground. I took another female and mounted her by the war memorial, my semen flicking across the chiselled names of these long-dead clerks and labourers. I moved nervously between the lines of cars. Again and again I coupled with the females, mounting one and then breaking away to take another. Our reflections bucked in the plate-glass windows among the pyramids of cans and appliances, the tableaux of dishwashers and television sets, sinister instruments that threatened my family. My semen splashed the windows of the supermarket, streamed across the sales slogans and price reductions. Calming the females, I led them through the quiet side-streets, coupled with each one and left her cropping contentedly in a secluded garden.
But as I steered them to their places, repopulating this suburban town with my nervous semen, I felt that I was also their slaughterer, and that these quiet gardens were the pens of a huge abattoir where in due course I would cut their throats. I saw myself suddenly not as their guardian but as a brutal shepherd, copulating with his animals as he herded them into their slaughter-pens.
Yet out of that smell of death and semen hanging over the deserted town came the beginnings of a new kind of love. I felt gorged and excited, aware of my powers to command the trees and the wind. The vivid foliage around me, the tropical flowers and their benign fruits, all flowed from my infinitely fertile body.
Thinking of the one female I had not yet mounted, I set off through the quiet streets to the park. I remembered Miriam St Cloud gazing raptly at her wedding gown. As I passed the naked mannequin behind its semen-stained window I could scent Miriam’s sweet spoor, leading towards the river and the mansion behind the dead elms. I wanted to show myself off to her, my animal body with its reeking pelt and giant antlers. I would mount her on the lawn below her mother’s window, and we would mate in sight of the drowned aircraft.
Already the afternoon light had begun to fade, turning the park into a place of uneasy lights and shadows. But I could see Miriam standing on the sloping grass by her house, watching me as I sped through the trees in a series of ever more powerful leaps. I could see her astonishment at my pride and magnificence.
Then, as I approached the dead elms, a figure stepped from the dark bracken and barred my path. For a moment I saw the dead pilot in his ragged flying suit, his skull-like face a crazed lantern. He had come ashore to find me, able to walk no further than these skeletal trees. He blundered through the deep ferns, a gloved hand raised as if asking who had left him in the drowned aircraft.
Appalled, I fled towards the safety of the secret meadow. When I reached the grave I lay down and hid my antlers among the dead flowers.
CHAPTER 21
I Am the Fire
When I woke, a sombre light filled the meadow. Dusk had crossed the park, and the street-lamps of Shepperton shone through the trees. My antlers had gone, my semen-spattered hooves and powerful loins. Incarnated again as myself, I sat in the twilit grave. Around me the secret arbour of the crippled children glowed like an illuminated side-chapel in a forg
otten jungle cathedral. I squeezed the sweat from my suit. The fabric was smeared with blood and excrement, as if I had spent the afternoon driving a herd of violent beasts.
I stared down at the grave of flowers, at the hundreds of dead tulips and daisies which the children had gathered. They had added more pieces of the Cessna – another section of the starboard wing-tip, fragments of fabric torn from the fuselage and washed ashore. All too closely, the structure already resembled the original aircraft, reconstituting itself around me.
Through the deep grass the faces of the three children glowed like pensive moons. David’s worried eyes gazed out below his huge forehead, still waiting for those absent sections of his brain to catch up with them. Rachel’s small features flickered among the dark poppies, a forgotten flame. Now and then Jamie hooted at the air, reminding the sky and the trees that he still existed. They were sad at being excluded from my new world. Had they realized that I could change my form, like a pagan god, into that of any creature I chose? Had they seen me as lord of the deer, strutting at the head of my herd, copulating on the run?
I stood up and waved them away. ‘David, take Rachel home. Jamie, it’s your time to sleep.’
For their own sake I was concerned that they should not come too close to me.
Leaving them in the dark grass by the grave, I walked through the meadow to the river. The night water seethed with fish – silver-backed eels, pike and golden carp, groupers and small sharks. Phosphorescing animalcula swarmed in dense shoals. I stepped on to the sand, and let the charged water swirl across my tennis shoes, washing away the blood and dung. A huge fish crept into the shallows at my feet. Its eyes watchfully upon me, it devoured the fragments, then withdrew silently into the deep.
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