faint traces of my skin. But was all this some kind of unconscious ruse? I knew that I had identified this young doctor with my safe escape from the Cessna. How far was my attraction to her self-serving, the grave’s-love of an infatuated patient? All the same, I wanted to warn her of the danger threatening this small town. However grotesque, my vision of the imminent holocaust had gained a powerful conviction in my mind. Perhaps in moments of extreme crisis we stepped outside the planes of everyday time and space and were able to catch a glimpse of all events that had ever occurred in both past and future.
‘Miriam, wait. Before I go … has there ever been a major disaster in Shepperton? A factory explosion, or a crashing airliner?’
When she shook her head, looking at me with a suddenly professional interest, I pointed through the window at the calm sky, at the park filled with bland summer light where the crippled children played, circling each other like aircraft with outstretched arms. ‘After the crash I had a premonition that there was going to be some kind of disaster – perhaps even a nuclear accident. There was an enormous glow in the sky, an intense light. Come with me …’ I tried to take her arm. ‘I’ll look after you.’
She placed her hands on my chest, her fingers overlaying the bruise-marks. She had not revived me. ‘It’s nothing, Blake, nothing unusual. It’s common for the dying to see bright lights. At the end the brain tries to rally itself, to free itself from the body. I suppose it’s where we get our ideas of the soul.’
‘I wasn’t dying!’ Her fingers stung my ribs. I was tempted to seize her by the neck, force her to take a long look at my still erect penis. ‘Miriam, look at me – I swam from the aircraft!’
‘Yes, you did, Blake. We saw you.’ She touched me again, reminding herself that I was still with her. Confused by her feelings for me, she said: ‘Blake, while you were trapped in the cockpit I actually prayed for you. We weren’t sure you were alone. Just before you escaped there seemed to be two people there.’
I remembered the deep light that suffused the air above the town, as if some fiercely incandescent vapour had been about to ignite. Had there been someone else in the Cessna’s cockpit? Just beyond the margin of my vision there seemed to be the figure of a seated man.
‘I swam from the aircraft,’ I repeated doggedly. ‘Some fool gave me artificial respiration. Who was it!’
‘No one. I’m certain.’ She straightened the clutter of pens on her desk, so many confusing pointers, watching me with the same expression I had seen on her mother’s face. I realized that she was attracted to me but at the same time almost disgusted, as if fascinated by something in an open grave.
‘Miriam …’ I wanted to reassure her.
But in a sudden access of lucidity she came towards me, buttoning her white coat.
‘Blake, haven’t you grasped yet what happened?’ She stared into my eyes, willing a dull pupil to get the point. ‘When you were trapped in the cockpit you were under water for more than eleven minutes. We all thought you’d died.’
‘Had I?’
‘Yes!’ Almost shouting, she angrily struck my hand. ‘You died …! And then came alive again!’
‘The girl’s mad!’
I slammed the clinic door behind me.
Across the park a white flag signalled an urgent message. The section of the Cessna’s tailplane hung from the upper boughs of the dead elm, whipped to and fro by the wind. Fortunately the police had still failed to find me, and none of the tennis players was showing any interest in the downed aircraft. I drummed my fists on the roofs of the parked cars, annoyed with Miriam St Cloud – this likeable but confused woman doctor showed all the signs of turning into a witch. I decided to lose myself among the afternoon housewives and catch the first bus back to the airport.
At the same time I found that I was laughing out loud at myself – the abortive flight had been a double fiasco. Not only had I crashed and nearly killed myself, but the few witnesses who might have tried to save me had developed a vested interest in believing that I had died. The notion of my death in some deranged way fulfilled a profound need, perhaps linked with their sterile lives in this suffocating town – anyone who came within its clutches was unconsciously assumed to have ‘died’.
Thinking of Dr Miriam – I would have liked to show her just how dead I was, and seed a child between those shy hips – I strode past the war memorial and open-air swimming-pool. The town centre consisted of little more than a supermarket and shopping mall, a multi-storey car-park and filling station. Shepperton, known to me only for its film studios, seemed to be the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere. Young mothers steered small children in and out of the launderette and supermarket, refuelled their cars at the filling-station. They gazed at their reflections in the appliance-store windows, exposing their handsome bodies to these washing machines and television sets as if setting up clandestine liaisons with them.
As I stared at this array of thighs and breasts I was aware of my nervous sex, set off by the crash, by Miriam St Cloud and the blind child. All my senses seemed to be magnified – scents collided in the air, the shop-fronts flashed gaudy signs at me. I was moving among these young women with my loins at more than half cock, ready to mount them among the pyramids of detergent packs and free cosmetic offers.
Over my head the sky brightened, bathing the placid roofs in an auroral light, transforming this suburban high street into an avenue of temples. I felt queasy and leaned against the chestnut tree outside the post office. I waited for this retinal illusion to pass, unsure whether to halt the passing traffic and warn these ruminating women that they and their offspring were about to be annihilated. Already I was attracting attention. A group of teenagers stopped as I blinked and clenched my fists. They laughed at my grotesque costume, the priest’s shiny black suit and the white sneakers.
‘Blake – wait for me!’
As I swayed helplessly, surrounded by these tittering youths, I heard Father Wingate shouting at me. He crossed the street, holding back the cars with a strong hand, his forehead glaring like a helmet in the overbright air. He ordered the teenagers away and then stared at me with the same expression of concern and anger, as if I were some deviant usurper he was bound by a strange tie to assist.
‘Blake, what are you looking at? Blake—!’
Trying to escape the light, and this odd clergyman, I jumped an ornamental rail and ran off down the side-street of sedate bungalows behind the post office. Father Wingate’s voice faded behind me, lost among the car horns and overhead aircraft. Here everything was calmer. The pavements were deserted, the well-tended gardens like miniature memorial parks consecrated to the household gods of the television set and dishwasher.
The light faded as I reached the northern outskirts of the town. Two hundred yards beyond an untilled field ran the broad deck of the motorway. A convoy of trucks was turning off into the nearby exit ramp, each pulling a large trailer that carried a wood and canvas replica of an antique aircraft. As this caravan of aerial fantasies entered the gates of the film studios, dusty dreams of my own flight, I crossed the perimeter road and set off for the pedestrian bridge that spanned the motorway.
