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, dolphin- aria, stunt flying, it’s all the same to them, they’re forever 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 determin- ation to prove that had I ever been dead, had I drowned in the stolen aircraft, I would now for ever be alive.
‘Am I dead?’
I spoke quietly
