Natural Flights of the Human Mind (23 page)

Then one day his father came to find him when he was sitting in the library pretending to read a magazine about boats.

‘Pete,’ he said, without any preliminaries, ‘I’ve found you somewhere to go.’

‘What do you mean, go?’

‘Well, you can’t stay here for the rest of your life.’

Why not? ‘I’ll go home, then.’

His father shook his head and looked at him with a glance that he presumably thought was wise. Pete had seen it many times before when his father was right and Pete was wrong. ‘No good, son. They’ll never leave you alone. I’ve put the house on the market.’

Pete thought that he should be annoyed, but couldn’t manage any emotion. Did his father have the right to do this? He’d paid for it, but given it to Pete as a present. ‘How much for?’

His father put back his head and laughed, a great booming, tycoon laugh. ‘That’s my son,’ he said. Pete didn’t believe in the laughter. He could see that it was unreal. Always had been. He watched his father from his new perspective and thought what an unpleasant character he was.

‘I’ve bought you a lighthouse,’ he said.

Pete stared at him. ‘A lighthouse?’ He couldn’t understand what he was talking about.

‘Yes, Pete, a lighthouse. You can go there in disguise, give yourself an alias, and nobody will know who you are.’

‘Why?’

‘Why do you think?’

He had no idea. ‘You want to get rid of me.’

His father laughed again, loudly, and Pete could see that that was exactly why he wanted him to go. ‘Of course not, Pete. But we can’t all go on living like this, under siege, afraid
to go out in case they molest us, or follow us. You have to think of me and your mother.’

‘Why?’

He didn’t manage such a confident laugh this time. ‘I’m a businessman. I have work to go to. If you stay here, we can’t get on with anything.’

Shame about me, thought Pete. Shame about all those dead people.

‘It’s a decommissioned lighthouse. North coast of Devon. Grow a beard, take a different name, they’ll never recognise you.’

‘How do you get food in lighthouses?’

‘Oh, it’s not one of those sort. It’s on land. Just a bit remote, really. Long way from people. Just the kind of thing you need. You’ll like it there.’

How did he know what Pete would like? What did he know about his son? Pete looked at him, and saw that he was just a man. Taller and wider than most people, but still just a man. Not even worth hating. Why had Pete always been afraid of him? ‘All right,’ he said.

They smuggled Pete out in the back of a small delivery van, covered with a blanket, pretending he didn’t exist. They changed cars twice, stopping in strange out-of-the-way places where the next car was waiting for them with the engine running, until they eventually reached the M5 in a BMW. It all seemed a bit melodramatic—there weren’t men out there waiting to abduct him, or murder him—but his father obviously enjoyed the cinema-like way of doing things. It made him believe in himself and his importance. They didn’t talk at all, until they were on the final stretch and needed to consult the map. His father was a bit put out by the last mile when they had to leave the road. He must have expected them to put down Tarmac once they knew he was coming.

When they arrived, he turned off the engine. They sat in the car and looked at the lighthouse. It towered above them, red
and white stripes gleaming, the green canopy at the top ornate and somehow mystical. Inside the car, they could feel the force of the wind, buffeting the windscreen, exposing the sharp edges of the grass. Pete got out of the car and looked up. He felt dwarfed by its height, and excited by its bleakness.

His father got out too. He gestured to a keeper’s cottage. ‘You can live in there,’ he said. ‘There’s some basic furniture.’ Pete didn’t want him to come in with him and his father didn’t suggest it.

He held out his hand and gave Pete a set of keys. Pete removed from the boot his small, nearly empty case—he hadn’t been able to think what he needed for his exile. He just wanted to forget he had ever existed in any other life. His father unloaded four bags of groceries from Fortnum and Mason.

‘Just something to keep you going for a bit,’ he muttered. He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the nearest village. ‘You can do your shopping over there. There’s a new Sainsbury’s. It’s a long way, but it’ll give you something to do. I’ve made out a standing order—should be enough to live on. If you need anything let me know. Money no object, of course.’

Of course. Money solves everything.

He stood in front of Pete. ‘Well, son…’ Pete looked at him. He wasn’t going to help him. ‘You’ll be OK. Just give it time. They’ll all forget in the end. These things have a habit of dying down eventually.’ His manner was hesitant. He didn’t seem to know what to say.

He was useless once you took away the outer layer. There was nothing underneath. A blank. A non-person. As Pete stood there, watching him, he saw him shrink. This man, who had been such a huge influence in Pete’s life, had been caught out, wrongfooted by his son’s behaviour. Money hadn’t solved the problem, and he didn’t know what else to use. His resources had dried up.

‘Well, son…’ he said again. He leaned towards his son and, for one terrible moment, Pete thought he was going to
hug him. But he stopped just in time. ‘Goodbye,’ he said, and held out his hand.

They shook hands as if they were strangers who had only just met, and then he got into the car. Pete stood outside the lighthouse with his small suitcase and the Fortnum and Mason food and watched his father’s car bouncing back to the road. He hasn’t seen or heard from him since.

Straker sits on the train and watches the scenery passing. His father hadn’t approved of public transport. ‘Dirty,’ he would say. ‘If you don’t have to share with the rest of the world, then don’t. That’s what money buys you.’

Straker has not thought of his parents properly for twenty-four years, but finds that a new space has opened up inside his mind. Tentatively, he explores this unexpected pathway, unwilling to experiment very far, conscious that any wrong move will result in a jolt of pain. Did his father intend never to speak to him again? Had he expected twenty-four years to pass without any contact? Has he forgotten his son altogether, or have the years just passed by mistake? Does his mother ever think of him? Are they even still alive?

Opposite Straker, there’s a young mother with two children. She is reading to them from a book called
Mrs Pepperpot
. The little boy sits nestled on her lap, dozing off while she reads. The girl, who is older, is leaning against her, studying the pictures. On the other side of the gangway, there is a man reading a newspaper, his legs crossed so that one sways out into the aisle, and two middle-aged women, who are playing Scrabble on a tiny board where the pieces slot into little holes. They are talking about a wedding.

‘Lovely flowers,’ says one.

‘Didn’t like the bridesmaids’ dresses, though. Salmon pink doesn’t suit everyone. How about that?
EXPORT
—triple word score. Excellent.’

‘Seventeen times three. Fifty-one points. Well done. I thought Sally was lovely in the pink…’

Three young men in pin-striped suits lurch up the aisle towards the buffet car.

All trains must look like this. If there was a crash, these people would die. They would become Maggie, Sangita, Mike…He examines all the people around him and tries to imagine them dead. Would they then become more real? Would they take on a life in his head like all the others? Should dead people become more real than live ones?

When Straker reaches Birmingham, he looks for a newsagent and buys an
A–Z
. He gets caught in a hustling, driving mass of people and follows them along until he comes out into daylight. Finding a corner away from shop entrances, he examines the map.

Simon A. Taverner apparently lives not far from the city centre. If Straker can get the direction right, and cross the big traffic systems, it must be only about two miles to the flat. He’d intended to take a taxi, but he walks that far every day.

He stands and stares up at the block of flats. They look expensive and difficult to penetrate. Perhaps they have security men, or a caretaker. There’s a row of bells with names beside them. Should he ring and say, ‘Let me in, I’m the man who murdered your wife’? That’s what Maggie suggested. It doesn’t seem an ideal introduction. But, then, what is?

While he stands there, a woman approaches, carrying bags from Safeway. She puts the shopping down and punches out a series of numbers on the dial to the side of the door. Straker watches her and memorises the pattern. Looking ahead, impatient for the door to open, she doesn’t see him. She picks up her shopping and pushes through the unlocked door, disappearing inside.

He goes up to the panel and reproduces the pattern of her
numbers. C3562X. Easy to memorise. Three and two on the outside. Add them for five, then multiply for six. The door doesn’t make any sound, but when he pushes, it opens immediately. He goes in and lets it lock behind him.

Inside, there are two lifts, one for even-numbered floors, the other for odd. The hall is carpeted, and dark. Not quite as luxurious as promised from outside.

He takes the lift to the sixth floor, but twenty-two is on the one below. He finds the stairs, walks down, and stands in front of number twenty-two, then waits for a very long time, not sure how to proceed. Several times, he turns to go away, but doesn’t quite lift up his feet to do it. Why is he here?

Then, abruptly, not allowing himself to think about it, he puts up his hand and rings the doorbell. He can hear it chiming inside.

Nothing happens and he starts to breathe again. He can’t talk to a man who’s not in. He’s about to walk away, when he realises that if he doesn’t talk to Maggie’s husband now, he will have to repeat the same journey another day. The thought of returning is exhausting, so he puts up his hand and rings the bell again.

This time he can hear something, a shuffling, a muttering, a clinking of keys and the door opens slightly. It is restricted by a chain. Straker can just see the face of an elderly man with grey eyes and a florid complexion. ‘Yes?’ he says.

‘Mr Taverner?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mr Simon Taverner?’

‘Yes?’ He opens the door a little wider. He has a friendly face, the face of a man who has lived a long time, and is not afraid of what might confront him on his doorstep.

Straker likes the look of him—he’s a comfortable man. ‘My name is Peter Straker.’

Taverner freezes visibly with shock. He doesn’t speak for some time, conflicting emotions drifting across his face. He
studies Straker intently, his frank gaze penetrating and painful.

Finally, he relaxes and produces a half-smile. ‘I see,’ he says, taking the chain off the door and opening it properly. ‘You’d better come in.’

Steve sat in the aeroplane, unable to believe that this was really happening. Pete occupied the seat next to him, handling the controls as calmly as if he were driving a car. Justin and Francis shared the back seat and stared out of the windows nonchalantly, unaware of the excitement that was bubbling away inside Steve’s chest. He had known them for less than a day, and here he was, in a private aircraft, joy-riding in a far more sophisticated way than any of his mates at school had experienced. Their talk of stolen Minis suddenly seemed rather childish.

So much had happened in the last two days that he felt breathless. One minute, there he was with his mum, who used to be OK, and his stepfather, Roger, who was never OK. Things had not been right since Roger had burst into their house, propping up his golf clubs against the fish tank in the kitchen, leaving his racing bike in the hall for everyone to fall over. Rugby or football on television whenever possible.

‘Why don’t you come cycling with me one of these days?’ said Roger, almost every night. ‘You’d be surprised how good it can make you feel.’

‘The only thing that would make me feel g-g-good would be getting my house b-b-back to myself,’ said Steve, deliberately knocking over Roger’s fresh orange juice.

‘Oops,’ said Roger, fetching a cloth. ‘I can understand how you feel,’ he said gently, mopping up the juice.

You’re only pretending, Steve wanted to shout. Your nice-ness isn’t real. But he said nothing and walked out of the kitchen without finishing his breakfast.

Everything had changed since the wedding six months ago. Steve had watched his mum become distracted, lose her softness and, at the same time, throw herself at Roger, ready to do anything to please him. Steve couldn’t understand it. She no longer seemed like his mum.

‘Please be back by six for supper, Stevie. Roger likes us to eat together as a family.’

Family? Not in a million years.

‘Just going for a drink, Stevie,’ his mum had called up the stairs two days ago. ‘Back in an hour.’ More like a hundred drinks, thought Steve, more like four hours. He hated them drinking. Roger didn’t change much—if anything, his voice softened, and he became even more caring. But his mum changed. She alternated between laughing wildly and singing. Steve couldn’t bear the sound of her voice when she was like that. He had to fight an overwhelming urge to slap her face, to force out the wild looseness that took her over.

They returned late, talking at high speed. He could hear them coming through the front door, his mum giggling and Roger shushing her. The crash as she walked into Roger’s bike. He saw the light come on in the hall.

‘Come on, Barbara,’ he heard Roger say. ‘Let’s go into the kitchen. We don’t want to wake up Steve.’

Why should you care? thought Steve.

He lay for a while, looking at the light from the hall reflected on his ceiling. I have to go to school tomorrow, he thought. Why didn’t his mum think of his needs any more? It hadn’t been like this when Dad was home. Their house was like everyone else’s then, his mum quiet and in during the evenings, chatting to him before he went to bed.

A shout of laughter came from the kitchen, quickly suppressed. Why did she laugh so much now? Roger seemed to have some strange power over her. He could make her perform to satisfy his own desires, change her personality and transform her into this drunken, hysterical woman.

Another crash came from the kitchen and more laughter. The golf clubs this time.

Steve swung his legs out of bed. He wasn’t going to stand for this any longer. He went downstairs and threw open the kitchen door. ‘D-d-do you know what t-t-time it is?’ he said, making his voice as deep as possible. Then he stopped.

Roger was backed up against the fridge-freezer and his mum was leaning against him, her blouse undone and her skirt discarded on the floor behind them. She was wearing stockings and suspenders, her plump legs bulging out over the top of the stockings. She looked ridiculous.

They both turned to him, their faces rigid with disbelief. Then, slowly, Roger eased himself out and straightened his clothes, picking up the skirt from the floor in one smooth movement and handing it to Steve’s mum.

‘Steve,’ he said, in the friendly voice Steve hated, ‘is everything all right?’

Steve tried to speak, but when he moved his mouth, nothing came out. He seemed to have lost all his saliva.

His mum stepped into her skirt, but made no attempt to be pleasant. ‘How dare you?’ she said slowly, as she struggled to pull up the zip, her voice low and icy.

‘Barbara…’ said Roger, laying a restraining hand on her arm.

But she took no notice. ‘Don’t I have any privacy in my own house? As if it isn’t bad enough to come home and have you scowling at me all the time, disapproving of everything I say or do, being rude to the man I chose to marry. This is my house, too, you know. Go straight back to bed, Steven, and don’t let me see you again until the morning.’

Steve stared at her, unable to think. It was as if his mother had turned into another person, talking in a foreign language. She used to be nice to him. He looked at Roger, who grinned half-heartedly.

‘We’ll talk in the morning,’ he said. ‘It’s all a bit late now.’

Steve turned and left the kitchen.

But at the bottom of the stairs, he changed his mind and stopped. He groped for his shoes under the hall table and pulled them on. Then he grabbed a coat, and walked out into the night, shutting the door behind him.

Half an hour later, he wished he hadn’t been quite so hasty. It was very cold in his pyjamas, even with a coat over the top. There must be places you can go, he thought, if you can’t live at home. But he had no idea where. He went round to the back gardens and found a neighbour’s shed that wasn’t locked. He huddled down under a shelf of seedlings and curled himself up tightly for warmth, then dozed, waking with a sudden jump every now and again.

Six hours later, when his mum and Roger had left for work, he broke the window of the downstairs loo and crept indoors. It occurred to him that he needn’t have spent the night outside, because they would have assumed he was still in bed and left him there. They wouldn’t want an argument before work. Moving swiftly round the house, he packed some clothes, took as much food as he could carry and stole twenty pounds, sixty-seven pence—Roger’s beer money, which he kept in a butter dish at the back of the fridge. Then he walked away, believing he would never return.

He met Justin and Francis and Pete outside a nightclub, at the end of a long, frightening day. He’d been walking past, nervous, panicky, wondering where he would sleep, but was diverted by the music blasting out on to the pavement. It was the Village People—‘YMCA’—a single that he’d played over and over on the record-player in his bedroom. He was suddenly overwhelmed by a desire to go home. The three men got out of a taxi. Two of them looked drunk, unsteady on their feet, loose-limbed and disjointed. The third stood slightly apart, remote, somehow unconnected with the others. One
of the drunken men swayed towards Steve and almost knocked him over.

‘Get out of the way,’ he said.

Steve stepped back, scared by the attention that was being paid to him, but someone was right behind him and he trod on his foot. He turned round, terrified, and found himself facing the second man, who leered at him, breathing alcoholic fumes directly into his face. He leaned forward and was sick all over Steve.

‘Now look what you’ve made me do,’ he said, shaking his head with confusion.

The third man came up to them and sighed heavily. ‘Justin, you’re disgusting,’ he said, pulling him out of the way. Steve avoided his eyes. He tried to work out his chances of dodging round all three men and running.

‘I’m Pete. Who are you?’ Steve brought his eyes back round and stared up into the man’s very blue eyes, which were fixed on him steadily.

‘S-S-S-Steve.’

‘OK, Steve. We’d better get you cleaned up. Come with me.’ He led the way to the door of the nightclub and then stopped. ‘How old are you?’

Steve knew he had to be careful. ‘F-f-f—eighteen.’

Pete roared with laughter, longer than seemed necessary, as if he didn’t know how to stop. ‘OK, eighteen-year-old Steve. Follow me.’ He guided Steve in front of him, but at arm’s length. The bouncers nodded at Pete with respect, but stepped back with disgust as Steve went past them.

‘Phew!’ said one, waving the air in front of his nose.

‘Hope you know what you’re doing, Pete,’ said the other.

‘Thanks, lads,’ said Pete, and Steve saw him hand over a twenty-pound note.

Pete’s friends followed them in and he led them to the toilets. ‘Come on, Steve, we’ll have to do the best we can to clean you up.’

He directed Steve to the basins and gave him a handful of paper towels. ‘You too, Justin,’ he said to the third man. ‘Otherwise we’ll never get a cab home.’

Steve tried to clean himself by wetting the towels and wiping them over his coat.

‘Look,’ said Pete to Steve, ‘let’s get a taxi. I’ll pay the fare. Then you can get your mum to wash these disgusting clothes.’

Steve tried to imagine his mum’s face when he arrived. All he could see was her bare flesh bulging over those stockings. He could still hear her talking to him very slowly and nastily. He wanted to cry. ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s all right.’

Pete seemed annoyed. ‘She’ll be wondering where you are.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Steve.

Pete hesitated. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back to my place. We’re having a party. You can have a bath there. Call us a cab, Francis.’

‘Right,’ said Francis, and disappeared.

The taxi driver didn’t want to take them, but Pete seemed to have so much money stuffed into his wallet that he eventually agreed. He drove fast and carelessly. Nobody in the taxi spoke.

Pete’s house was amazing. It was carpeted throughout in white, with black walls, and there were life-sized Disney characters everywhere he looked. Mickey Mouse by the front door, Bambi hanging from a chandelier, Pinocchio on the landing half-way up the stairs. The ceilings were tiled with mirrors. In the bathroom, the mirrors were on every surface, including the floor. Steve stood in the middle and saw hundreds of images of himself reflecting each other back, all soiled with sick, all stinking. Shere Khan looked at him disapprovingly from the end of the bath.

Pete turned the taps on. ‘Help yourself,’ he said, and wandered off, shutting the door behind him.

Steve stepped into the enormous bath, and lay back. The hot water was wonderful after his day on the streets, and he let it
soak into his skin, feeling his whole body relax. He nearly dozed, but jerked awake when he remembered where he was. He wondered if his mum was feeling guilty. Let her, he thought. After a while, he climbed out and wrapped himself in a fluffy black towel. He didn’t think he should put his clothes back on, so he went to find Pete. He found the three men lounging on sofas in front of a huge television screen, surrounded by empty beer cans, laughing at
Fawlty Towers
. Two women were squashed together on one sofa with Grumpy the dwarf and Cinderella.

Pete was gazing up at the ceiling, his eyes unfocused, not laughing with the others. Steve froze for a moment when he saw him, shocked by the bleakness of his expression. It was as if he was not really there, unaware of what was going on around him. Then he turned and saw Steve, his face slipping back into amiability. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Have a drink.’

‘Um…’ said Steve. ‘I haven’t got any clothes.’

Pete nodded. ‘Down the corridor, third door on the right. Help yourself.’

Steve found a room whose sole purpose was to store clothes—rows of shirts, suits, shoes, socks, underwear, jumpers, T-shirts. It was like walking into a shop where you didn’t have to pay. Winnie-the-Pooh smiled at him from the side of the door. After much indecision, Steve chose a yellow T-shirt and some beige trousers. They were a bit big for him, but he found a belt, which held them up. He went back to the living room and sat down behind the others, trying to make sense of what was happening.

‘What’s your name?’ asked one of the women, who was wearing a long, green dress that shimmered as she moved.

Steve opened his mouth.

‘He’s called Steve,’ said Pete, without turning his head.

She smiled at Steve. ‘My name’s Ellen, sweetheart,’ she said. ‘Would you like something to eat? Some popcorn?’

She thinks I’m a kid, he thought. He couldn’t take his eyes off her.

She looked over his head at Pete. ‘How old is he?’

Pete shrugged. ‘Says he’s eighteen.’

She studied Steve’s face and he had to turn away. He could feel her closeness, smell her perfume, a female smell that both alarmed and excited him. ‘He’s having you on. You’re not eighteen, are you, Steve?’

Steve couldn’t respond. He sat and studied the floor.

Pete answered for him again: ‘Leave him alone. He’s all right. Reminds me of myself at his age. He’s older than he looks, I expect.’

Ellen withdrew from Steve and went to whisper to Pete. Steve could just hear their conversation.

‘Pete—he’s under age.’

‘So?’

‘We might be accused of kidnapping him.’

Pete’s voice rose indignantly then fell again. ‘He wanted to come. I gave him a choice.’

‘What about his family? They must be wondering where he is.’

‘No—there’s something wrong there. He doesn’t want to go home.’

‘I think you should take him anyway.’

‘No way. I like him. He can stay with us tonight. We’ll take him home tomorrow—have a look at the family.’

‘You’re crazy.’

He drained his bottle of beer. ‘Probably.’

Steve breathed a sigh of relief and settled back into a chair. He needn’t worry until tomorrow now. Feeling very daring, he opened a can of lager. The smell was unpleasantly familiar, reminding him of his mother’s recent behaviour, but he couldn’t feel anything strange happening to him as he sipped it. Everything seemed normal.

The party seemed to go on all night, but they all succumbed to sleep in the end, sprawled around the room. Steve kept his eyes on Pete and Ellen, in case she decided to send him away.
Pete finally stretched out on his back on a sofa, breathing heavily through his mouth. His eyes stayed open, but he didn’t move, so Steve curled up on the floor by his feet and slept.