Natural Flights of the Human Mind (19 page)

When he left school with five O levels and two failed A levels, he didn’t keep in contact with any of the boys from his year. He hung around at home for some time, watching television late at night, falling out of bed at lunchtime. Nobody suggested work to him, although his dad occasionally asked him to come down to the scrapyard and help.

He hated it, working with the lads who had left school at fifteen, who lifted great weights effortlessly and manipulated machinery with nonchalant ease. They wore their strength with casual pride, unashamed by their lack of qualifications.

Pete felt stupid and uncoordinated when he was with them, unable to match their skills. Whenever he walked away, before he had even covered twenty yards, a great burst of laughter rose up behind him, a balloon of mirth that was only released once his restraining presence had been removed. It happened every time. It couldn’t be a coincidence. So he stopped going.

When he was twenty-one, his dad gave him his house and a generous allowance. When he was twenty-five, he gave him a Piper Warrior, a four-seater single-engine aeroplane, and flying lessons. Pete learned to fly, and for the first time in his life, he felt that success was attainable. Meanwhile, he discovered alcohol, clubs and people who liked him because he was generous. He had a social life. He knew that if his money supply dried up, his friends would probably melt away, but his drinking warmed him and he was no longer alone.

He tried not to think about the pointlessness of his existence. Only at night, frustrated and unable to sleep, did he acknowledge the lack of direction and hope as depression came rolling in on silent waves.

When Andy came in to dinner with them several days after
the accident, he sat down opposite Pete and filled his plate. ‘How are you?’ he said. ‘Arm any better?’

Pete shrugged. ‘It’s OK.’ Andy had already been to see him in hospital, and joked about his injuries. ‘You could have a career as a gangster with a scar like that,’ he said. ‘The one-armed bandit.’

‘Jealousy will get you nowhere,’ said Pete, struggling to keep up with the lighthearted manner of the conversation. ‘I’m expecting the arm to get better.’

They had not discussed the crash.

Andy ate enthusiastically for a time, then looked up at him again. ‘So?’ he said. ‘What really happened?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The papers are saying it was your fault.’

‘Ignore them,’ mumbled his father, through his apple crumble and custard. ‘They don’t know nothing.’

‘Anything,’ said Andy, turning to his father, smiling.

His father took another spoonful. ‘Whatever,’ he said.

He wouldn’t have answered like that if Pete had said it.

‘So, tell me your story.’

Andy was studying Pete intensely, as if he could read his mind. Pete tried to look away, but found himself paralysed by his brother’s silent interrogation, unable to think.

‘There isn’t a story,’ he mumbled, wanting to glance down at his dish on the table.

‘Of course there’s a story. You need to be able to show the journalists that they’re making it all up.’

Pete still couldn’t answer him. ‘I can’t remember,’ he said at last. ‘I don’t know what happened.’

But Andy persisted: ‘You must have some idea. Do you think it was a mechanical failure, or were you careless in some way? What were you doing so close to the railway?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Pete again.

There was a long silence. ‘Well,’ said Andy, ‘I suppose the memory blanks out as a protection. It’s not something you’d
want to keep remembering, is it?’ He turned to his mother. ‘Shall we go for a drive in the car after lunch?’ he said to her.

‘Good idea,’ said his father. He was always happy for his wife to be removed from under his feet.

‘Terrible business,’ said Andy. ‘It’s not just the ones who died, is it? It’s the ones who were injured as well.’

Pete limped out of the dining room, trying not to fall over his feet. He was twenty-eight years old, but felt as if he were still twelve, stumbling over his untied shoelaces in his anxiety to escape the threatening presence of the boys in his form who instinctively knew he wasn’t one of them.

Andy took his mother for a drive in his E-type Jaguar.

Pete sat in his room, desperate and aching for a drink, his mind unable to focus on anything else, not even having the energy to resent Andy and his rapport with his mother. But each time he reached out for the bottle, smelt the alcohol, his mind jumped back to that moment when he woke up, surrounded by mangled metal, bricks, bodies, blood. So he was sick instead.

When Andy and his mother returned, he dropped her off outside the house, but didn’t come in. Pete watched him drive away, crunching down the gravel drive, and if he had known then that he would never see him again, he might have felt slightly less resentful.

Straker wakes in the hollow of the night, the bleakest hour, the darkest corner. For a long time he lies awake, listening, and wonders why there’s nothing to hear. Where are they all? He can hear his heart beating, the cats dreaming of mice, but there is no other sound.

Why was he so angry with Doody? It was the aeroplane that set it off—not her. She will probably never speak to him again.

What is this hard, leaden pain inside him?

‘Maggie?’ he says softly, hoping she’s there.

There is no Maggie. No Felicity, no Mike, no Francis.

Are they in collusion with each other? Are they all waiting with Maggie to see what he will do? Does everything depend on his response to her, his willingness to leave his place of safety and venture out for the first time in twenty-four years? Must he go? Could he do it?

He feels Magnificent sit up on the end of his bed, move around, scratch for a few frantic seconds. He curls down again, shuffles for a while, purrs briefly and goes back to sleep.

How would he get to the station? How would he know where to get off the train? What if Simon Taverner is not in?

What does Maggie want him to say?

The silence wraps itself round him—no other living person exists for hundreds of miles. He’s protected from the real world by this cushion of nothingness, and has no desire to cut it away. The voices of the victims have never disturbed that comforting blanket. They have just crept in underneath and reinforced the remoteness of everything else.

He misses them.

He goes to the cottage early next Saturday, determined to face her, convinced she will tell him to leave.

She needs him to help her work on the cottage. She has no choice.

She’s not rational. She won’t even consider his usefulness.

He goes to Sainsbury’s on his way, and buys some food, which he leaves on the front doorstep. He goes round to the back.

He works for about half an hour.

‘Straker! Where are you?’

He puts down the tools and walks round to the front, where he finds her standing with her hands on her hips. Her loose silky top is bright pink and covered with blue elephants. Her hair is hanging down on her shoulders and looks freshly
washed. The ends almost fall into curls, rather than the uneven chunks he remembers.

‘What are you doing here?’

He can’t reply.

‘Well, I never thought I’d see you again.’

He watches her. She’s not as furious as he expected. She’s trying to be, but her words lack the searing heat that he remembers from their first meeting.

‘Can I trust you?’ she asks, pushing her chin forward, challenging him with her eyes.

‘You are completely safe with me,’ he says, trying to sound calm and steady.

‘How can I be sure you’re not going to murder me?’

‘I don’t murder people.’

She raises her eyebrows. ‘Not counting the first seventy-eight, you mean?’

There is no answer to this.

She picks up the two Sainsbury’s bags and holds them out from her body as if they are contaminated. ‘What’s in here?’

Isn’t it obvious?

‘Did you bring them?’

He nods, not sure what she’s annoyed about.

‘Charity now, is it?’

He stares at her.

‘Or do you think you own me?’

He turns away and walks round to the back windows. She follows, but he ignores her and continues rubbing down the woodwork.

‘Look, Straker,’ she says, and her voice is more friendly, ‘I’m sure you mean well, but I can afford to feed myself. I’m not entirely destitute. Unlike you, I have a job. Do I look as if I’m starving?’

No, she doesn’t look as if she’s starving.

‘You probably think you’re being kind, but I don’t want to know about kindness. I don’t believe in it. You don’t have to
help me with the cottage if you don’t want to. Only if you’re interested, and if you are, I’ll feed you. Get it?’

He nods, because she seems to be expecting him to. ‘I’ll take the bags away, then,’ he says.

But, oddly, she doesn’t seem happy with that either. ‘Not much point now, is there? We might as well eat it as it’s here.’

She contradicts herself at every turn, so everything he does is wrong, and can’t be undone. It’s good food. Not chocolate or biscuits, but fruit juice, muesli, wholemeal bread, butter, cold meat, oranges, apples, peaches, grapes. He’d thought she would be pleased.

‘You must do something about the electricity,’ he says, when they stop to eat. ‘Everything would be much easier if we could use a drill.’

‘You can buy cordless drills.’

‘They’re expensive.’

He decides not to offer to buy one. ‘And you need a fridge.’

She’s quiet for a while. ‘I phoned Jonathan last night,’ she says.

She’s mentioned Jonathan before. Who is he? Is that what all the fuss about Maggie and wives was about? Is he going to turn up later today and want to know what Straker’s doing here?

‘My brother,’ she says. ‘He’s an awful pain, but he’ll know what to do to get the electricity on.’ She pauses. ‘He wants to look at the plane.’

‘Why?’

‘Jonathan knows about everything. He used to read fact-finders when he was little, and he hasn’t changed. Facts, figures, money. Oh, and he watches television a lot. He likes the food programmes.’

Straker feels uncomfortable about all this. ‘I’ll go before he comes, then.’

She is surprised. ‘Why? He won’t mind you.’

How does she know her brother won’t react like the boys at
school? They only had to see him to decide that there was something wrong with him. ‘Watch it, Butler,’ they would say, and kick him as they passed, just for being there. Is Jonathan going to be any different? He will probably object to Straker in the same way as they did. Just because he’s here.

‘You might like him,’ she says. ‘He’s odd too.’

She has to meet Jonathan by the gate leading to the barn at two o’clock. ‘We need to be on time,’ she says. ‘He will be.’

‘Where’s he coming from?’

‘London.’

‘He can’t be that precise with the time, then.’

‘Oh, yes, he can. You don’t know Jonathan.’

Straker doesn’t want to stay, but Doody insists that he waits with her. ‘He won’t be late,’ she says.

At exactly two o’clock, a silver Audi TT drives up the road, and pulls in beside them. A tall, dark-haired man, dressed in a grey pin-striped suit and a white shirt, steps out and stands uncertainly on the grass verge. His tie has red and orange zigzags down it, bright and cheerful against his sober suit. He is out of place here, a man of the city, who never comes into contact with grass except when he pays the gardener.

‘Imogen,’ he says, as if he had not really been expecting to see her. ‘You’re on time.’

‘Of course,’ she says. They make no physical contact. No acknowledgement that they are connected except for the use of each other’s name.

He eyes the pathway. ‘Is that where we have to go?’

‘Yes. Sorry about the weeds.’

‘Never mind the weeds. Is it muddy?’ He looks down at his shoes which are black and shiny, obviously very expensive. Everything about him indicates wealth.

‘No. Not very, anyway. When did it last rain?’ she says, turning to Straker.

He shrugs. He doesn’t feel that he belongs in this conversation. Jonathan hasn’t noticed him, and doesn’t even make an acknowledgement when Doody talks to him. He is invisible. That’s fine with him.

The sight of Jonathan negotiating the gate promises an interesting spectacle, but he manages to climb over with some elegance. They walk up the path, Doody and Jonathan in front and Straker behind.

‘Will you be back in time for the dinner party?’ says Doody. ‘Who’s folding the napkins?’

Jonathan doesn’t reply. He doesn’t say anything else until they open the barn and he steps in. ‘Well,’ he says, after a while, and there is excitement in his voice, ‘what a wonderful thing.’ He sounds genuinely impressed.

Straker waits outside and listens, keeping his eyes away from the aeroplane. His hands are shaking, and he puts them into his pockets. He hears himself talking to someone: ‘It’s a Piper Warrior.’

Jonathan and Doody come out of the barn, and walk over to where Straker is standing.

‘I know a few people who would be most interested in this,’ says Jonathan.

‘I don’t know if I want several people to be interested,’ says Doody. ‘It’s my plane, not yours.’

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he says. ‘This is too important a find to hide away. It could be worth a fortune.’

‘But is it definitely mine?’

‘Oh, yes,’ he says, taking a letter out of his pocket. ‘The solicitors have confirmed it. Don’t know why they didn’t mention it in the first place. After I phoned them, they had to do some research of their own. But it’s definitely yours. He left you everything.’

‘Nice to know they write to tell you and not me.’

‘Piers Sackville has written to you as well. The letter’s probably at your home address.’

‘Piers, eh? You’re good friends, then.’

Jonathan doesn’t reply.

Doody grins at Straker. ‘Don’t you wish you had a secret benefactor?’ she says.

Straker thinks of his father, knowing how it feels to have someone give him money. He’s not sure if it’s such a good thing.

They stand together in an uncomfortable group, uncertain what to say to each other. Jonathan walks out and examines the overgrown field. ‘Pretty good,’ he says. ‘You own this field and the one on the left as you come up the path. Prime land. You could sell it to the adjoining farms, or for building. They could make quite a nice little housing estate here.’