Natural Flights of the Human Mind (12 page)

He doesn’t seem to understand her.

‘Up the tree. I want to see inside.’

He shakes his head.

‘Yes.’ The tree appears easy to climb with lots of lower branches, plenty of footholds. She makes a start. Her ankle hurts, but not too much. He doesn’t do anything, just watches.

It’s a waste of time. She still can’t see inside. She can pick out the shape of something very large, machinery perhaps, but it’s impossible to identify. She climbs down. ‘Do you know what’s inside?’

He shakes his head, but she’s not sure if she believes him. ‘Number twenty-one,’ she says. ‘Stroke seven.’

He looks puzzled, so she leads him round to the doors and points: 21/7. The edges of the numbers are flaking, but they’re still strong and readable, imprinted into the lichen dark of the wood.

He nods. ‘Twenty-one,’ he says.

She starts to feel angry again. ‘Well, if you’re going to talk, why can’t you say something more useful? We go all this way in silence, no explanation from you, and then you tell me something I already know.’

He’s watching her. His blue eyes are studying her face, searching for something, waiting for a reaction. She gives up. ‘So, how are we going to carry the tiles back?’

At the gate of her cottage, Doody watches Straker pushing his Sainsbury’s trolley up the road, on his way back to the barn. ‘We’ll probably go to prison for this,’ she says, as he rumbles it over the cobbles, but he ignores her.

She feels tired and deflated. They’ve been into the village, where he showed her the boathouse and his trolley, but they didn’t meet anyone. The entire population seemed to have retired indoors.

‘I don’t know how you get away with it,’ she said. ‘Alarms are supposed to go off if you take a trolley off the premises.’

His face was blank, but she’s beginning to read his expressions—when he doesn’t want to respond and when he really doesn’t know.

She sits down outside the cottage and nibbles a digestive biscuit. An aeroplane drones overhead. She pulls her notebook and a pencil out of her bag and sits on the grass.

The lighthouse had red and white strips and dark green railings round the light at the top, and was surrounded by acres of deserted scrub.

She pauses, feeling the chill of the wind, conscious of a bird watching her from a nearby tree. What is she doing here? The country is not her natural environment. She’s more familiar with concrete.

Doody’s sister, Celia, was a gifted child. She did her O levels and A levels early. At seventeen, she went to Cambridge to do a maths degree.

She had white-blonde hair, perfectly straight, grey eyes rimmed with green, long fair curly eyelashes. She experimented with makeup for a while, but there was no need. Either way, she was beautiful. Even Imogen could see that.

She was brilliant. She was in all the school teams—hockey, netball, rounders, tennis. She could do mental arithmetic like a computer, memorise whole sections of text for exams. Grade eight piano and violin, a Mozart concerto with the youth orchestra. She nearly made the junior Olympic gymnastics team when she was younger. She won cross-country races,
reached the finals of an under-sixteen national tennis tournament when she was twelve.

Their house was full of trophies and shields and cups and photographs of Celia smiling her innocent, victorious smile, holding another award, shaking hands with important people Imogen didn’t recognise.

Celia was also not nice, but Imogen was the only one who knew that, because Celia was too clever to let anyone else see it.

Imogen wasn’t nice either. They shared the loft, a dark room with open rafters and walls sloping into the roof. Celia’s half was next to the dormer window, and her bed was always tidy, with its pretty flowered quilt cover and matching valance. Her nighties were folded precisely and put under the pillow, so that when she got ready for bed she always looked immaculate. White and clean and innocent.

Imogen’s corner was dark and cluttered. She didn’t put things away, and her clothes were creased and unwashed, her bed crumpled and unmade. She liked to drop her dirty underwear in the middle of the floor so Celia would have to walk over it.

‘Imogen,’ she would say. ‘Knickers.’

Imogen would face the wall and make her breathing calm and even. Dead to the world. Can’t pick up her own knickers.

Celia had different approaches. Sometimes she would step over them as if they weren’t there. At others, she would pick them up with the edge of her finger and thumb and throw them on to Imogen’s face. Imogen had to go on breathing calmly, wrapped in her own knickers or bra, pretending to be asleep.

Sometimes Celia stood in the middle of the floor. ‘Imogen,’ she would say gently, and her voice would be so sweet, so genuine that Imogen couldn’t stop herself rolling over and opening her eyes half-way. She usually avoided looking at Celia, because her smile was irresistible. But however hard she
tried not to, Imogen would go tumbling down into the trap Celia laid for her.

‘What?’

‘Could you clear up in the morning?’ Celia’s voice was so friendly—Imogen couldn’t resist the offer of friendship. ‘I thought we could make the room really nice and tidy over the weekend.’

Imogen grunted. Celia smiled and, although she didn’t want to, Imogen started to like her again. She tried to fight it, but Celia had a way of making you feel special. She was letting you into her charmed world and offering you something unique.

People tried to be nice to Imogen, but it was a struggle when Celia and Jonathan were around. Jonathan was so much younger than them, and everybody thought he was sweet until he became a teenager and grew his unwashed hair down his back, never changed his socks and didn’t have a bath for weeks on end. He talked to people in a patronising way, but they didn’t mind because it meant he kept his distance, and keeping a distance from Jonathan in those days was a good idea. It wasn’t much of a problem for Imogen, because she’d married and left home by that time. She didn’t go to see Jonathan or her mother. Jonathan occasionally came to see her. They had nothing to say to Imogen. She had nothing to say to them.

Everyone loved Celia. They fell at her feet and worshipped her. But after their father died, she changed. They all had to move schools, because there was no way of paying the fees, and Celia found this difficult. She didn’t make any new friends, and her old ones moved on without her. Two years later, she went to Cambridge and was only home in the holidays. She seemed to shine and dazzle in the same way as always, but Imogen could see it wasn’t real. She stayed in bed longer in the mornings. Everyone thought she was working hard in her bedroom, but she wasn’t.

She sat at her desk with books open, a half-written page in
front of her, but she didn’t work. She didn’t do anything. She just sat. She didn’t even pretend to Imogen any more that she liked her.

‘Celia, dear,’ said their mother at lunch, ‘could you help Jonathan with his maths? They haven’t explained anything to him properly.’

Imogen could have helped him. She was good at maths, but her mother never asked her.

‘Imogen, could you run down to the shop and buy some more bread?’

Celia got the interesting tasks; Imogen got the boring ones.

Later, in their room, Celia wouldn’t go to bed. She sat at her desk all night, as far as Imogen could tell, until the early morning. Then she slid into her bed, fell deeply asleep and didn’t wake until midday.

‘Turn the light off,’ said Imogen, several times.

Mostly, Celia ignored her, but once she came over to her bed and grabbed her hair very tightly.

‘Ow!’ shrieked Imogen, but Celia pushed her face into the pillow, so Imogen’s cry was muffled.

‘Shut up,’ Celia hissed into her ear.

‘Get off.’ Imogen tried to move away from her, but she was too close.

‘You don’t know what it’s like, everyone expecting you to be successful all the time, never being allowed to make mistakes.’

You don’t know what it’s like when nobody expects you to be successful, thought Imogen.

‘Maybe I just don’t want to be brilliant any more. Maybe I’m tired. What if they’re wrong and I can’t do it? What then?’

Imogen lay still, suspecting she wasn’t required to answer.

‘I don’t see why I should be expected to perform just to please them.’

She can’t do it any more, thought Imogen. The work’s too difficult for her. ‘Why don’t you tell them?’

This was not the reaction that Celia wanted.

‘I know what you’re up to.’ Imogen could sense the movement of Celia’s lips almost touching her cheek. It made her feel sick.

‘I know how you go around when I’m not here—sucking up to people, running me down, pretending you’re better than me.’

‘I don’t,’ Imogen whispered into the pillow.

‘You’re useless.’ Celia yanked her hair even tighter. It sent shocks of pain down her arms. ‘Don’t ever forget that. You will never take my place. You’re stupid, thick, ugly and fat.’

Imogen moaned. ‘Let go.’

‘Repeat after me. Imogen is stupid, thick, ugly and fat.’

She knew it was true, but she didn’t want to say it. ‘No,’ she whispered.

‘Yes.’ She pulled even harder. Imogen’s head jerked backwards and Celia put her face right in front of her eyes. Imogen tried to turn away but she was pulling too hard. She could feel Celia’s breath on her face, the smell of the cauliflower cheese they’d had for supper. Imogen could see one eye, grey and hard, like a brittle, shiny marble. She could see Celia’s nose, the open pores round the base, her loose, twisted mouth, only an inch from hers.

Imogen started to cry. Celia pulled harder. ‘Go on.’

‘I’m stupid, thick, ugly, fat.’

She let go suddenly and Imogen nearly bumped her head, but Celia turned away just in time. ‘You disgust me,’ she said.

Imogen cried silently into her pillow. She didn’t want Celia to see she was upset. The light stayed on all night.

The next day, Imogen got out her supplies of yew berries, brought from the old house, kept safe in a tin under her bed. The tin had a picture of Sindy on top, so there was no chance that Celia would be interested in it. She squashed the berries and waited. They would have carrots for supper some day soon. She would offer to mash them.

Imogen wished so hard that Celia would die that she believed it would happen. She could see herself at the funeral. Imogen, her mother and Jonathan. No more money to inherit than last time.

Two days later, she came home from school to an empty house. Her mother was temping at that time, twenty storeys up in an office block. She liked it there and felt part of a team, she said. All typing away together. That was her last job. Jonathan must have been at a friend’s house. Imogen took three custard creams (they were allowed only two) and made some orange squash. She put it on the tray that someone had given Celia when she went off to Cambridge, which she didn’t like. Little pink pigs chasing each other round the edges. Big, fat, pink pig in the middle. Imogen carried it up to the bedroom.

She opened the door, balancing the tray in one hand, her schoolbag in the other.

She didn’t see Celia at first. She put the tray down, kicked her shoes off and went to turn on the light. It was early November. The day was grey and dingy. Something brushed against her face and she turned irritably. It was one of Celia’s feet, hanging with the rest of her from a rope tied to a rafter.

Imogen rubbed her cheek where Celia had kicked her. What’s she doing up there? she thought. She might have told me she was in.

Straker is taking too long to get back. He’s probably got caught and is sitting at the police station, refusing to confess unless they give him paper and a pencil.

The wind has strengthened and there are dashes of rain in the gusts. Imogen thinks of the playing-field, which needs to be done now. She’s cold and miserable. She writes a note for Straker and leaves it on the doorstep, held down by a stone. ‘Sorry. Had to go. Things to do. Back on Saturday.’

Maybe, she thinks, she won’t be back on Saturday. She hasn’t decided.

Then she walks round the corner to her car and drives away. There’s no sign of him in the mirror. She keeps looking back until she leaves the village.

22 Westside Tower,
Edgbaston,
Birmingham 15.
14 June 2004

Dear Mr Straker
,

I apologise for not having written earlier, but I still find it upsetting to have to think back more than twenty-four years. It should feel like a very long time ago, but I’m afraid the crash seems as vivid to me now as it was then. I wasn’t on the train, of course. I was one of the ones waiting at home, watching the television, appalled at the disaster, expecting Maggie to appear at the door any minute, not realising she was on the train. Even now, after all this time, if I hear a ring at the door, I expect to see her coming straight in, full of energy, shoes off, ready to cook. We had a personal code. If either of us was late, we would ring three times and then come in, calling hello. It was so that we wouldn’t startle each other, or perhaps it was just a habit that developed over the years without conscious thought. Just the pleasure of coming home, I suppose, and coming together again
.

I was unsure about the validity of your project initially, and I have given it considerable thought. The idea of a book about famous crashes worried me. I was unhappy about the sensationalist nature of the project. However, on further reflection, I can see much to commend it. A celebration of the people who survived would be valuable, but also recognition of the dead. A chance for them to be heard. I like that. I would like Maggie to go on in the minds of those who read it
.

I understand you want some details about Maggie. This has caused me great confusion. It is very difficult to know where to start. There were two sides to her, her working life and her family life. There were many other facets to her as well, of course, but you will not want to hear them. Some things should be kept private, I believe
.

Maggie was a social worker, as I’m sure you will have discovered from the records. She was greatly loved by her work colleagues and by the families she helped. That was mentioned in the newspaper reports, but I imagine they say something similar about everyone who dies. In her case, I can confidently assure you that it was true. Hundreds of people came to the funeral, and I think I managed to talk to every one of them. I certainly hope that I did. They all had the same story to tell. Maggie had helped people through their difficult times, and I was stunned by their tears and their obvious affection. I realise that this sounds as if she were perfect, and of course she was not, but she did have an inner warmth and a genuine desire to reach all sorts of people. I still meet people today whose lives were transformed by her generosity. Of course, we are now a generation on, so children have grown up and people’s lives have improved, but they still like to believe that Maggie played a part in their progress. Not everyone was saved by her, of course, but I think she gave something even to those who still struggle in today’s fast, exhausting world
.

On the subject of her family, we had two girls, Hilary and Philippa, and at the time of Maggie’s death, we had four grandchildren. Three boys and a girl. There are great-grand-children now, and it is a constant source of regret to me that they will never know her. They can only visualise her from the pictures and my reminiscences. Maggie was very keen on the aural tradition. She had stories to tell about her grandparents, which took us right back to the nineteenth century. I think it would be true to say that she was the heart of our family
.

Some people are able to give more than others, don’t you
think? They are good parents, but then they find it easy to make room for grandchildren—they have an endless supply of affection, always making room for more people, building extensions, as it were, so that they can invite more people in. I’m afraid I’m not as good as Maggie. Less tolerant, more selfish. I try, but I need her push behind me. She made me a better person than I really am
.

I hope I have given you enough useful information about her. Probably not, because I do ramble. I seem to become increasingly sentimental as I grow older. I can’t decide if this is a good thing or not. Let me know if you need more. I enclose a few photographs if you are interested. I would like to purchase the book if it makes it into print. It’s a good idea
.

Please send me the details when appropriate
.

Yours sincerely
,

Simon A. Taverner

When the tide is out, Straker climbs down the rocks below the lighthouse and walks along the beach away from Hillingham. Strings of brown seaweed lie wet and glistening on the high-tide mark, guarded by clouds of hovering flies, which leap into the air in a frenzy as he crosses through them. The pebbles slope down steeply to a small shelf of sand that only appears at low tide.

The wind is fresh and he walks fast, counting his strides. There’s no one else around so early in the morning, except the birds. Fulmars, gulls and kittiwakes sweep into the air, hurling themselves at the cliff behind him, screeching into the bleakness of the morning. Crunching over the shingle, he believes himself to be invisible. The birds don’t react to him. He’s an irrelevance in their precise balancing act between the sea and the sky. They skim the surface of the sea, dive for fish and rise again to hover in the wind, watching and waiting. One or two
land on the beach. They stand there, uncharismatic with their wings folded, looking past Straker with disdain.

The seventy-eight are with him, as always. Sometimes he wants to forget them, throw them back into their rightful position of non-existence. Then he feels their personalities, asserting themselves again as he welcomes them back. He fears for the nine unidentified bodies, worries that their anonymity has caused them to disappear too easily into the wind.

When he’s walked for fifteen minutes, he stops and stands motionless for a few seconds, unsure what to do next, then sits down.

The wind tugs at his hair. He can hear the pull of the tide as it drains to its lowest point, somehow drawing back the water from under the stones. Trying to suck the beach dry. The gulls fly past, round him, through him. If he stays here for long enough, the tide will come up, the days will pass, and seaweed will attach itself to him. The hard edges of his bones will be softened and smoothed. The kittiwakes will nest in his hair and raise their young.

He’s tempted to do it. He closes his eyes, rests his head on his knees. Dreams come like the birds flying past, throwing themselves at him, careless with his presence. He smells the salt on his skin, the heat of the dreams.

‘Straker…’ Maggie’s voice has changed. She’s not angry, just upset—suddenly vulnerable. ‘Why did you write to Simon? After all this time?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose I wanted to find out.’

‘Find out what?’

‘I wanted to know if you were still real.’

‘Don’t I remind you every night that I’m real? Don’t I come to every dream?’

‘Most nights, yes. Not every dream.’

‘You don’t know that, Straker. Think about it. I might be there all the time, listening, thinking.’

‘Why do you come, Maggie? What do you want from me?’

‘If I didn’t talk to you, I wouldn’t exist.’

‘But you do exist.’

‘Do I?’

‘Yes. You still exist to Simon. He thinks of you now as much as he did at the time of the accident.’

‘Simon is eighty-three years old, Straker. Old men live in the past. It’s easier than facing the hard present. And when he goes, I do.’

‘No, Maggie. You can’t go.’

‘Why not? Why should I keep talking to you once Simon has died? What’s the point?’

It has never occurred to me before that Maggie might go. Empty dreams without her there to order things, to put everything into perspective
.

‘Scared, Straker? Can’t you manage without me?’

‘Of course I can.’ I don’t know. There is a tight, prickly fear creeping along my veins, my arteries, my nerve-ends
.

‘You were wrong to write to Simon. Why should he have to go over it again?’

‘I just wanted to make some contact with him. I wanted to feel the way it was, and how he fitted with you.’

There is a long pause. Maggie’s voice is quiet. ‘We fitted well together. Very well.’

‘And you have great-grandchildren.’

‘They will never know me.’

‘They already know you, because Simon has taught them.’

‘Sentimental rubbish.’ But her voice is not confident, and it frightens me
.

‘Maggie—I just wanted to make you more real.’

‘You’re fooling yourself. I’m not real.’

I shiver at her words. I want her to change back, to become
the eternal mother again, telling me what to do, making me think as she wants me to think. ‘Don’t leave me, Maggie.’

‘Maybe I will. Maybe not.’

I think of Simon’s words. Building new extensions, letting more people in. Did she have a limitless capacity to expand? Would the time have come when there was no room for even one more person? Were her kindness and hospitality real or was she pretending, building up an outer image to please everyone? Creating an earth mother of boundless love and energy to satisfy Simon?

What is real?

There is no sound from Maggie
.

Don’t leave me, Maggie, please don’t leave me
.

I am cold and tired and lost. I want her to come back
.

Straker is woken by voices.

‘It’s all right, Jen. There’s no one else here.’

‘Lee—’

‘Jen—’

They are teenagers, but like children, walking hand in hand along the shingle, stopping to gaze into each other’s eyes, then picking up shells. What are they doing here so early in the morning?

‘Watch this,’ he says, picking up a flat stone and skimming it across the surface of the sea. It bounces three times, then gets swamped by an incoming wave.

She claps her hands. ‘Cool. Do it again.’ She’s about sixteen, wearing jeans and a bright red jumper. Her hair is dark and curly, tied back into a pony-tail, and she’s very pretty. The cold of the air has sharpened her features, brought a pink flush to her cheeks.

He’s a bit older, perhaps eighteen, also in jeans, with a leather bomber jacket over a T-shirt. He has two earrings in one ear and a nose-ring.

Straker freezes and watches them, waiting for them to pass without noticing, hoping that he’s as invisible as he would like to be.

But they don’t go past. Jen runs towards the sea, trying to throw a stone like Lee, but after she has thrown it, she spins round and round, shrieking like a child, until she staggers and nearly falls over.

Lee catches her, holds her upright, and then they stop everything as his arms go round her, and they kiss—a deep, passionate kiss. His hands move down the line of her back and slide smoothly under her jumper. He knows what he’s doing; it’s obvious that he’s done it before. She leans against him, pulling herself as close as she can, her back arching as they rock together.

Stop! Straker wants to shout. Don’t do it, Jen. You’re only sixteen (or less). You might get pregnant, catch dreadful diseases. He won’t marry you. Wait. There are better things ahead.

He doesn’t say any of it. He creaks slowly to his feet, intending to creep away, hoping they won’t see him.

Jen sees Straker over Lee’s shoulder. She goes rigid and screams. Lee turns and sees Straker. All three stand motionless for four seconds, the wind whistling round them. A gull swoops low over their heads and Straker turns and runs.

‘Clear off!’ shouts Lee.

‘Dirty old man!’ yells Jen. ‘You’re disgusting!’ She’s worse than him. More vicious, more shrill. She’s still shouting as Straker runs away.

They don’t run after him. He pauses briefly to look back and they’re lying on the pebbles, their feet only a few inches from the returning sea, their hands and bodies intertwined, inseparable, just one more heaving mass among the crabs and flies and seaweed. A sculpture of lust in a landscape of sea.

Straker looks at his watch and starts to go faster, counting seconds. He needs to get back to the lighthouse in ten minutes and twenty-three seconds if he’s to improve on the last run.

When he climbs the cliff back to the lighthouse, he sees that two more long dark cracks have appeared down one side, facing the sea.

It takes two days to mend the roof, working between the showers, and Straker is pleased at how easily the tiles fit into their new environment. It will be necessary to replace some of the wooden beams as soon as possible, though, and he starts making calculations—when he can get some wood, how much it will cost, how he’ll need to remove the tiles again to do it. He takes the old sails back to the boathouse, returns to the lighthouse, carrying on in his normal routines, and waits for Saturday. He doesn’t know if he should go and see her again.

He reads Simon’s letter through five times every day, wanting to write back to him and reveal the truth. There’s an unfamiliar feeling inside him, a fear that reality is catching up with him, forcing him in directions he’s not sure he can go. He goes out in the pouring rain to count the cracks in the lighthouse, examines the doors, some of which won’t close properly. Two upstairs doors jam, so he runs up and down with stones heavy enough to prop them open or shut. He measures the distance from the lighthouse to the edge of the cliff. Another foot has gone. He sets himself new targets for rowing, running, climbing to the top of the lighthouse and back. Numbers run through his mind, queuing up, calculating against each other—square roots, multiplication, division—clicking on endlessly, fighting each other for attention. They don’t have the calming effect that he expects.

At night, he doesn’t dream. The sleep is long and deep, and he wakes up with an empty mind.