The Unlimited Dream Company (4 page)

A cool stream ran between the poplars, waiting to balm and soothe my skin. Beyond the water-meadow there were yachts and power cruisers moored along the river banks. For ten minutes I had been following the perimeter road, waiting for the right moment to make a second attempt to escape from Shepperton. Lined with chestnut and plane trees, the quiet streets of bungalows and small houses formed a series of green arbours, the entrances to a friendly labyrinth. Here and there a diving board rose above the hedges. Small swimming pools sat in the gardens, water sparkling flintily as if angry at being confined within these domesticated tanks, confused by these obsessively angled floors into which it had been lovingly decanted. I visualized these pools, plagued by small children and their lazy mothers, secretly planning their revenge.

It was plainly not by chance that I had crash-landed my burning aircraft into this riverside town. On all sides Shepperton was surrounded by water – gravel lakes and reservoirs, the settling beds, canals and conduits of the local water authority, the divided arms of the river fed by a maze of creeks and streams. The high embankments of the reservoirs formed a series of raised horizons, and I realized that I was wandering through a marine world. The dappled light below the trees fell upon an ocean floor. Unknown to themselves, these modest suburbanites were exotic marine creatures with the dream-filled minds of aquatic mammals. Around these placid housewives with their tamed appliances everything was suspended in a profound calm. Perhaps the glimmer of threatening light I had seen over Shepperton was a premonitory reflection of this drowned suburban town?

I had reached the hotels near the marina. High above the St Clouds’ Tudor mansion the tailplane of the Cessna hung from the dead elm, signalling intermittently as if already bored with its message.

I crossed the road and approached the untended ticket kiosk of the amusement pier. The freshly painted gondolas of the Ferris wheel, the unicorns and winged horses of the miniature carousel gleamed hopefully in the afternoon light, but I guessed that the only people who came to this dilapidated funfair were a few midnight couples.

Behind the kiosk were the almost empty cages of a modest zoo. Two threadbare vultures sat in their hutch, ignoring a dead rabbit on the floor, dreams of the Andes lost behind their sealed eyes. A marmoset slept on his shelf, and an elderly chimpanzee endlessly groomed himself, sensitive fingernails searching his navel as if trying to pick the combination of this umbilical lock, ever-hopeful internal émigré.

As I gazed consolingly at his gentle face a large and flamboyantly decorated vehicle emerged from the gates of the film studios, set off rapidly down the road in a dusty clatter and swerved into the forecourt by the ticket kiosk. A hearse converted to carry surf-board and hang-gliding equipment, it was emblazoned with winged emblems and gilded fish. The blond-haired man who had been painting the gondolas stared at me in a self-conscious way from behind the steering wheel, then pulled off an antique flying helmet. He stepped from the vehicle and busied himself in the ticket kiosk, affecting not to notice me.

However, when I walked out to the end of the pier I heard his feet ringing on the metal slats.

‘Blake … be careful there!’ He waved me away from the flimsy rail, fearing that his rusting hulk might collapse under us. ‘Are you all right? This is where you came down.’

He looked at me with some sympathy, but at the same time he stood well back from me, as if at any moment I might do
something bizarre. Had he watched my attempt to cross the motorway?

‘That was a spectacular landing …’ He stared at the strong current flowing below our feet. ‘I know you’re a stunt pilot, but you must have been rehearsing that for years.’

‘You’re a fool!’ I wanted to hit him. ‘I nearly killed myself!’

‘Blake, I know! I’m sorry – but I suppose we rehearse that too …’ He played with the antique goggles and helmet, suddenly embarrassed by this rival show of flying gear. ‘I’m working on a picture at the studios – the remake of
Men with Wings
. I play one of the test pilots.’ He gestured deprecatingly at the Ferris wheel. ‘All this is a long-term investment, or was meant to be. It needs something to give it a lift. In fact, I’m surprised more people aren’t here this afternoon. It’s rather funny, Blake, that you’re the only one who’s come …’

He reached up to one of the gondolas and swung himself into the air, showing off his muscular physique not so much to intimidate me – I could have knocked him down without any effort – as to win some kind of physical respect. His manner was aggressive but ingratiating, his mind already hard at work trying to think up some means of putting my crash to his advantage. As he gazed wistfully at the river, at the vanished traces of my accident swept away by the sunlit back of the Thames, I could see that he regretted being unable to exploit the derelict pier’s chance proximity to my crash-landing.

‘Stark, tell me – you saw me swim ashore?’

‘Of course.’ As if to forestall any criticism of his lack of action, he explained hurriedly: ‘I was going to dive in, Blake, but suddenly there you were, somehow you’d climbed out of the plane.’

‘Father Wingate helped me on to the beach. Did you see anyone try to revive me? Mouth to mouth respiration …?’

‘No – why do you ask?’ Stark was peering at me with a
surprising look of intelligence in his actor’s face. ‘Don’t you remember, Blake?’

‘I’d like to thank him, whoever it was.’ Casually, I added: ‘How long was I in the aircraft?’

Stark was listening to the restive vultures in their cage. The huge birds were clambering around the bars, trying to seize a piece of the sky. I studied Stark’s unsettled eyes, the fine hairs that stood like needles around his lips. Had he revived me? I visualized his handsome mouth locked against my own, strong teeth cutting my gums. In many ways Stark resembled a muscular, blond-haired woman. I felt attracted to him, not by some deviant homosexual urge the crash had jerked loose from my psyche, but by an almost brotherly intimacy with his body, with his thighs and shoulders, arms and buttocks, as if we had shared a bedroom through our childhoods. I was the younger but stronger brother, the yardstick against which Stark would for ever measure himself. I could embrace him whenever I chose, force his hands against my bruised ribs to see if he had tried to attack me, test the bite of his mouth.

Confused by my stare, Stark turned his back on the river. ‘How long were you under? Three or four minutes. Perhaps more.’

‘Ten minutes?’

‘That’s a long time, Blake. You’d hardly be here.’ His composure returned, he watched me shrewdly, curious to see what I would do next. He played with the antique flying helmet, dangling this film prop in front of me as if toying with the suspicion that we were both actor-pilots. Yet I had flown a real plane against the sky, a powered aircraft, not one of his passive hang-gliders collaborating with the wind.

Along the perimeter road the police car approached, headlamps inflaming the afternoon sunlight. When it stopped by the kiosk I saw that Father Wingate was sitting in the rear seat behind the two policemen. He stared at me
through the closed window with the pensive gaze of someone who had quietly turned himself in to the police.

As I waited for him to point me out to the officers Stark took my arm. ‘Blake, I’m driving to London – I’ll give you a lift across the river.’

I sat in the passenger seat of the hearse, wearing my funeral mute’s costume, hiding my face behind the folded canopy of the hang-glider. I listened to the cluttering of the marmoset, the guttural screeching of the vultures. For some reason my arrival had frayed their nerves. In the rear-view mirror I could see Father Wingate watching me from the back seat of the police car, like a fellow conspirator keeping his own counsel, careful to give away nothing of his involvement with me.

Stark stood by the kiosk with the two policemen, warning them away from the rusty pier and shrugging as they pointed to the sky above the film studios.

So the police were still searching for a witness. As I watched the film actor shake his head I was convinced that despite all the uncertainties of the afternoon neither Stark nor Father Wingate, neither Miriam St Cloud nor any of the others who had seen my crash would betray me to the police.

At last I was about to escape from this suffocating town. I sat impatiently beside Stark as we queued to cross Walton Bridge. It was now late afternoon, and the bridge approaches were filled with traffic returning from London. Although Walton lay to the south of Shepperton, even further from the airport, at least it would spring me from this zone of danger. I was thinking of Stark’s decision not to betray me to the police – my apparent return from the dead had temporarily silenced the film actor as it had Dr Miriam, her mother and the fossil-hunting clergyman. Once I left, however, I was certain that Stark would leak the story to a newspaper or television company, particularly when he discovered that I had stolen the Cessna.

But for some reason of his own Stark was deeply impressed by my being a pilot. My spectacular arrival, a real crash as opposed to the contrived mishaps of his film, had tapped some barely formed but powerful dream. He pointed to the almost stationary traffic, the lines of cars stalled in clouds of sunlit exhaust.

‘By rights, Blake, you should be a thousand feet above all this. I took some flying lessons once, but I wasn’t ready for it. Have you tried hang-gliding?’

I was looking at the dead elms above the park. Around the bend of the river the Cessna’s tailplane flicked its message at me. The freshly painted gondolas of the Ferris wheel hung from the sky, toys waiting to be picked up by passing balloonists.

‘My real interest is man-powered flight. One day I want to carry out the first world circumnavigation.’

‘A man-powered circumnavigation?’ Stark rolled his eyes,
eager to humour me. Was he really unaware that he had saved me from the police? ‘I’d like to help you, Blake – you could start here in Shepperton.’

‘Shepperton?’

‘Nowhere better from the publicity point of view. After your crash this morning they’d happily adopt you as their local pilot, you could start a flying school, possibly as a tie-in with the studios. Besides, people around here are obsessed with anything like that – safari parks, dolphinaria, stunt flying, it’s all the same to them, they’re for ever dressing up as beefeaters or Hanoverian infantry and re-enacting the Battle of Austerlitz. I’ve decided to build up the zoo. If I could raise your aircraft I’d exhibit it as a show-piece.’

‘No …’

‘Why not? Perhaps your insurance company would sell it to me?’

‘Leave it where it is!’

‘Blake, of course …’ Surprised by my passion, Stark held my arm to calm me. ‘Of course I’ll leave it. The river can take it out to the sea. I know how you feel.’

We were now creeping forward across the central span of the bridge. A hundred brake-lights throbbed at my eyes as the drivers stopped and started. An arm’s length away, the girders of the bridge moved past, so slowly that I could count the rivets under the flaking paint.

Once again I was sure that we were making no progress. Far from nearing the Walton shore, we were farther away than ever, the lines of cars and buses extending ahead of us like huge conveyor belts. Behind me the Shepperton bank, with its marine contractors and boat-yards, seemed five hundred yards away.

The river swayed. I gasped and lay back in my seat, aware of the vehicles pressing towards me on all sides, moving but immobile, their lights draining my eyes. I waited for the illusion to pass, trapped on this mile-long metal causeway.

‘Blake, we’re moving! It’s all right!’

I knew better.

As I opened the door I felt Stark’s hand on my bruised chest. Knocking him away with my elbow, I leapt from the hearse. I straddled the waist-high barrier, jumped on to the pedestrian walkway and ran down the slope towards the safety of the Shepperton shore.

Five minutes later, when the river was behind me, I sat down on a bench by the deserted tennis courts. Relieved now of the fear that I had carried across the bridge, I massaged my bruised chest. At least I knew that Stark had not tried to revive me – the hands that marked my ribs were larger, the size and strength of my own.

I looked up at the dead elms, and at the distant streets and houses. For some reason known only to the interior of my head I was trapped in this riverside town, around which my mind had drawn a strict perimeter, bounded on the north by the motorway, on the west and south by the winding course of the Thames. I watched the traffic moving eastwards to London, certain now that if I tried to leave by this last door of the horizon the same queasy perspectives would unravel in front of me.

Two teenage girls and their mother approached the courts, rackets in hand. They eyed me warily, puzzled by the sight of this young priest in his tennis shoes, no doubt drunk on the communion wine. I was tempted to spend the afternoon playing tennis with these women. For all my exhaustion, I was gripped by the same powerful but indiscriminate sexual urge that I had felt for all the people I had met in Shepperton since my crash, for Stark, for the blind child and the young doctor, even for the priest. In a hot reverie I stared at the mother and her daughters, as if they were naked, not in my eyes, but in their own. I wanted to lure them with the promise of a confessional conducted between the baseline returns, mate with each of them among the cross-court volleys, mount them as they crouched at the net.

Why had I trapped myself in Shepperton? Perhaps I was still thinking of the passenger in the aircraft, some mechanic I had overpowered when I seized the Cessna, and unconsciously was refusing to leave until I freed his body. Had this unknown passenger tried to kill me in a last desperate convulsion? I seemed to remember us wrestling together in the submerged cockpit of the Cessna, his hands crushing the air from my chest, mouth clamped on mine as he sucked the last breath from me to keep himself alive for a few final seconds …

The women had stopped playing. Balls in hand, they watched me silently, mannequins in a dream. From the scuffed earth at my feet, the dust rising into the air, I realized that I had been mimicking this titanic underwater combat, wrestling with myself in front of these women.

Unnerved by their strange gaze, I shouted some obscenity at them and set off across the park.

The sun, which all day had hung directly over the river like a forgotten spotlight, now lay above the film studios to the north-west of Shepperton. The foliage in the park was more sombre, and the light below the trees seemed to be trapped for a few last hours, unable to replenish itself. Somewhere nearby, in a small meadow beside the park hidden from me by a dark wall of rhododendrons, the three children played together. David’s heavy feet thudded through the grass, Jamie hooted away, blind Rachel issued her brisk little instructions.

Remembering this likeable trio, I decided to join them in their game. I pushed through the rhododendrons into the meadow, a narrow tract of forgotten ground that ran down to the river beside a small stream. I watched the children playing in the deep grass. In their make-believe world they walked in single file towards a flower-bed freshly dug in a secret arbour among the trees. The good-humoured mongol
was in the lead, followed by Rachel and Jamie carrying bouquets of faded tulips.

They stood solemnly beside the flower-bed. Rachel knelt down, searched the broken earth with her quick hands and laid the tulips among the display of daisies and buttercups. I saw then that the flower-bed was a grave, and that these three handicapped children were holding a funeral service for the dead tulips they had found in the park-keeper’s refuse bins. They had set up a modest crosspiece of sticks and decorated it with bits of coloured glass and silver paper.

Touched by this little rite, I stepped into the arbour. Alarmed, the children turned to face me. Rachel threw the last of the tulips into the grave, her cheeks pinched white as she fumbled for David’s hands. Before I could speak they darted off through the long grass, Jamie hooting a bird-alarm.

‘Rachel …! I won’t hurt you! Jamie …!’

Then I saw that they had meant another tenant to share the grave with the dead flowers. The wooden cross had been shaped into the rough image of an aircraft, its wings and tail marked with white crayon.

But was it my Cessna they were burying?

I looked behind me at the secret meadow. The children had vanished. For the first time I sensed a premonition that I might be dead.

Yet from that afternoon, in the deserted arbour, sprang my determination to prove that had I ever been dead, had I drowned in the stolen aircraft, I would now for ever be alive.