Natural Flights of the Human Mind (7 page)

He turns in alarm. Doody lifts the spoon of sugar to his cup, hesitates, then pours it in. ‘Oh, no, sorry. It’s a magpie on the roof.’

He turns back and regards her suspiciously. ‘There’s not much resemblance between Charlie Miller and a magpie.’

‘A trick of light,’ she says, watching him sip tea.

‘Could you keep your cottage for weekends or holidays?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s too much trouble.’

‘This is a very good cup of tea, Doody,’ he says.

She dreams of Oliver d’Arby. She walks through the front door of the cottage and out into the back garden where he’s playing the cello. The deep dark tones reach inside her and stir up something in a long-forgotten secret place. She becomes aware of tears sliding down her cheeks, dripping off her chin. She’s incensed that he should make her cry, and rushes up behind him.

‘Stop it!’ she shouts. ‘Stop it!’

He stops abruptly in the middle of the tune and turns to face her. He’s tall and thin with a grey and black grizzled beard and a long scar from the corner of his eye to his chin.

She wakes up and decides that, as soon as she can walk properly, she’ll go down to Hillingham and find an estate agent. It won’t matter if she doesn’t make much money from the sale. Every penny is welcome. She’s only a school caretaker.

The doctor told her not to put any pressure on the foot, but after three weeks of boredom, she finds she can limp adequately. The hospital has lent her some crutches, which she only needs for longer stretches. She catches the train and takes a taxi. More money dripping away.

When she goes in through the gate (her gate, not Oliver d’Arby’s), she sees the flattened pathway to the house, the hawthorn bush where she fell, the tangle of wild and tamed flowers, and feels again the sense of ownership that she felt before. She’s never owned a house, never had possessions. Everything has been borrowed, scrounged, donated. Markets, Salvation Army, Oxfam.

Then she looks up at the roof. She rubs her eyes and looks again. Somebody has been up there. Two large sheets of off-white plastic have been draped over the main part, either nailed down or held in place by bricks and stones.

For a while, she can’t work it out. Were they there last time and she didn’t notice? But she went up on the roof, crawled along it looking for gaps. Someone else has been up there. He hasn’t even done a good job. One edge has come away completely from the side and is flapping noisily in the wind.

She knows who it is. How dare he come here without her? It’s her house. She’s the one to save it, not him.

The woman in the post office smiles at her as she goes up to the counter. She’s small and suntanned and wrinkled, like a sultana. The place is empty. Just Doody standing at the counter with nothing to buy.

‘I want to find a man,’ she starts.

The woman keeps smiling. ‘Oh, I don’t think we can help you here. Aren’t there agencies for that sort of thing?’

Doody stares at her. Is she deaf, stupid or making some kind of joke? ‘I want his name.’

‘Whose name?’ The woman fiddles with some forms and looks genuinely perplexed.

‘The man. Very tall and thin, with messy hair and a beard. Looks like he’s out of an old black-and-white horror film.’

Someone comes into the post office and stands behind her, so that she finds herself part of a queue. There’s immediate pressure on her to hurry up.

‘Hello, Mrs Whittaker,’ says the post-mistress. ‘Lovely weather—just right for June.’

‘Bit windy for me,’ says the woman. Doody refuses to acknowledge her, or take part in this conversation. She was here first.

‘He has a scar,’ she says, her voice shaking with the effort of staying calm, ‘and he’s not chatty.’

‘That’ll be Mr Straker,’ says the voice behind her, comfortable and knowledgeable. Doody turns to look at her. She’s elderly, her curly grey hair pinned back with an array of grips. She peers at Doody over the top of her glasses. ‘Who are you?’

Doody concentrates on being pleasant until she’s got the information she wants. ‘Straker,’ she says. ‘Where does he live?’

‘He lives in the lighthouse.’

‘You won’t get anything out of him,’ says the woman behind the counter. ‘He never talks.’

‘Never? That’s impossible.’

‘Well, he manages it.’ She looks very smug.

Doody ignores her and turns back to Mrs Whittaker. ‘He’s the lighthouse keeper?’

‘Oh, no. There’s a new lighthouse on the next headland. Mr Straker just lives in the old one.’

Doody pauses to think about this. He lives in a lighthouse. He has a scar and he doesn’t talk. Is he real? ‘How do I get to the lighthouse?’

‘It’s a long way. You can take a number twenty bus to the
beginning of the path and then walk about a mile across the cliff.’

‘Could I take a taxi to get closer?’

Mrs Whittaker shakes her head and a grip falls out. ‘There’s no road. You’d never get a taxi driver to do it.’

‘I wouldn’t go out there on your own,’ says the post-mistress.

‘Why not?’ Doody remembers her fears about this man on the day she hurt her ankle. Was she right to have worried?

‘I’m told he’s killed someone. That’s why he doesn’t talk.’ Her voice deepens and drops to barely above a whisper.

Doody experiences a great desire to argue with her. She laughs and talks more loudly. ‘Rubbish. I’ve already met him. He’s perfectly normal.’ Not true, but she refuses to acknowledge the nagging worry she can feel at the base of her stomach.

Mrs Whittaker puts her hand on Doody’s arm gently. ‘Just be careful, my dear, that’s all. If even half of what they say about him is true, you would be unwise to put yourself at risk.’

Her touch is hot and clammy, and Doody steps back with distaste, anxious to break the contact. She compares it to Straker’s cool, competent hands untangling her ankle three weeks ago, and knows which she wants to trust. ‘So why isn’t he in prison, then?’

Mrs Whittaker raises her eyebrows a fraction. ‘Maybe he has been.’

Doody smiles brightly. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll ask him who he’s killed. That’ll show I’m on to him.’

‘He won’t tell you,’ says the post-mistress.

‘How do you know? He might talk to me.’ Doody makes a silent promise to herself. She will somehow make him talk—about anything—just to prove she can do it.

‘No,’ says Mrs Whittaker, shaking her head. ‘He won’t talk.’

‘I’ll let you know,’ says Doody, and limps out of the post office.

So she has to walk a mile. No problem. She has crutches. The ankle’s getting better.

Half-way to the lighthouse, she regrets her decision. Her shoulders ache from the crutches, the bad foot throbs, the good foot is developing blisters and there’s a fierce wind that seems determined to prevent her moving forward.

She pauses to think. Should she go back? But she’s half-way there and still fired up by her decision to confront him. She can rest when she reaches the lighthouse. She refuses to give up. There’s an added incentive now that she’s talked to the smug, elderly natives of Hillingham. She’ll get him to talk even if they can’t manage it.

Of course, he might murder her instead. Beneath her public performance, there’s a jittery awareness that he is more sinister than she’s acknowledged. But he’s had his chance to kill her off and didn’t take it. On the contrary, he helped her. Surely that should count for something. Unless he has some secret plot that he has yet to reveal and intends her to come out to the lighthouse alone. Is that why he put those sheets on her roof?

She dismisses the theory almost immediately. He is too stupid. A murderer would be clever and calculating.

Anyway, she would know if she was being manipulated.

This walk to the lighthouse is like running a marathon. Ambitious and exhausting, but as you approach the finish, you find a fresh energy, a second wind, a rush of adrenaline to give the final push. The closer she gets, the more excited she becomes. She wonders it he might be out, but persuades herself that it’s unlikely.

She stands at the bottom of the lighthouse and peers up. It is old and neglected, long dark patches emerging through the paint at the bottom, and streaks of rust dripping down from the window-frames over the red and white stripes. The light at the top has a neat, circular green roof, topped by a perfect half-sphere that makes it look like a mosque. There are green railings on the edges of the balcony that surrounds the light. They’re all rusting too.

A cat rubs against her leg and nearly pushes her over. She struggles to remain upright. ‘Hey, show some manners.’

The door opens unexpectedly and there he is, exactly as he looked last time, same beard, same blue eyes, same wellington boots.

‘You!’ she shouts at him.

He takes a step backwards with an appalled expression.

‘I know your name. Straker. Remember me? I’m the one who owns a cottage. The one with the roof.’

He stares at her and says nothing.

‘Who said you could go up on my roof? Did I ask you to? Did I give you permission? Is it your roof or mine?’ She feels better. The tiredness and the aching have gone. ‘If I’d wanted you to go on my roof,’ she points her finger at him and waves it wildly in the rhythm of her words, ‘I’d have asked you. What gives you the right to—’

The door closes in front of her, squeaking in protest. She can’t believe what she’s seeing. ‘Open the door again!’ she shouts. ‘How dare you do this to me?’

The door remains closed. She tries knocking on it with her fists. ‘Open the door. I was talking to you.’

She can’t make an impression. The wood is too thick and it absorbs the energy of her arms, so the blows don’t make a satisfying enough sound, and it hurts her hands.

‘Open the door!’ she shrieks. She picks up some stones and hurls them against it, one at a time, but the sound is still too small. They bounce back and fall ineffectually to the ground.

After a few minutes, she walks a distance away and sits down on the grass facing the sea, her back to the lighthouse. It’s very windy.

She’s trying hard not to cry.

Straker is not interested in the rows of televisions in the window of Curry’s or the newspaper headlines where they line the shelves at the entrance to Sainsbury’s. What he needs to know is all in the past. The facts will never change, the lives can’t go on, so he’s desperate to find out about them and make them real. The voices in his dreams must have something to say. If he can just hang on to them, they can go on existing, be living people and not just figures in grainy newspaper pictures. Every time he receives an answer to a letter, it’s like a new mark on someone’s portrait. A crease in the dress, a shaft of sunlight on a cheekbone, a glint in the eye behind the glasses. He knows Felicity’s father is not telling the truth, but there’s something there—maybe a trace of truth in his lies.

There was once, a long time ago, a history teacher called Mr Hardcastle, who’d believed in him. ‘Apply to university, Peter,’ he’d said, his penetrating eyes peering out over his red, porous nose. ‘You’re good at drawing the truth from historical documents. Do something useful.’

Mr Hardcastle had appeared in Straker’s mind recently, while he was walking out of the village towards the library. Thirty minutes’ walk there, an hour’s research, thirty minutes back. He stopped as if the teacher was there in front of him, tall, skeletal, drooping over his pile of exercise books. His look was one of such reproach that Straker felt he was being cut open with a scalpel. He could feel the flesh above his heart being parted, folded outwards, exposed to the passing breeze. He struggled to breathe, to speak to Mr Hardcastle, but nothing came out.

‘Go to university, Peter.’

If only, if only—

Seventy-eight people would still be alive.

Unless they’d had another accident instead. This thought eases the sharp pain slightly. One person might have walked under a bus the next day. Another could have died of a heart-attack within six months. He had just speeded the whole thing up. Got rid of them in one easy step.

He doesn’t know Doody’s at the door. He’s listening to the wind when he comes downstairs. It rattles the window of his sleep room, usually randomly but today it seems more organised. Gusts are coming at regular intervals, cannon balls fired at the lighthouse. Somewhere out to sea there’s an intelligence, someone who wants to destroy him, and knows how to wear down his resistance.

He’s timed the bangs—15 seconds apart. 78 bangs would take 1170 seconds—19 minutes, 30 seconds. He has been sitting on his mattress and counting. The nearer he gets to 78, the more alarming it becomes. A roll-call in his head, a funeral bell tolling into the wind. He’ll go to 50, he decides, and then stop counting. But 50 comes and goes. 60, 70, 77. He leaps up in panic and runs down the stairs, his feet clattering on the concrete steps, the number 78 chasing behind him.

‘You!’ she says, as he opens the door.

He looks at her in confusion, waiting for the number to catch him up and explode over his head. What does she mean? He isn’t the seventy-eighth. Is she the seventy-eighth—alive after all? Has the number gone down to seventy-seven and nobody’s bothered to tell him?

She’s too close and he steps back, but she moves forward and fills the space. She’s wearing a brilliant peacock-blue blouse that hangs loosely over her stomach, flapping in the wind, and patterned leggings that end half-way down her legs,
making them look unnaturally thin. She’s waving a finger, pointing at him, but he doesn’t understand. It’s not the seventy-eight that frightens him, not the words she’s saying or the stabbing finger. It’s the anger.

He’s seen people like this before. Twenty-four years ago, on the first day of the inquest. He’d returned to his own house after a few suffocating weeks with his parents, but for the first time in his adult life, he missed his father’s confident presence. Straker came out of his house, and was confronted by a bewildering crowd of people and their anger. He knew they were there because he’d seen them from the window, but he wasn’t prepared for the noise. There were journalists with cameras, calling out questions, and a group of policemen attempting to hold back the people so that he could get into the waiting car, but the women were the most frightening.

‘Murderer!’ they screamed.

‘String him up!’

He heard the words, but couldn’t take in any of them.

There was a woman at the front with a little boy in a pushchair. He was wrapped in an all-in-one blue suit, with the hood up, fastened firmly round his chubby face. He was sucking a dummy and gazing out serenely, unmoved by the commotion around him.

His mother had shoulder-length ginger hair, thick with tangled ringlets. She might have been huge, or it might only have been her mouth. Perhaps she was pretty when she was at home feeding her baby, perhaps the father of her child loved her. But now her lipsticked mouth was open and cavernous, forming all sorts of words that children shouldn’t hear. And her eyes were wild and rolling. There were other women there, but she dominated the scene.

‘Get in!’ yelled the solicitor from the car. A policeman
grabbed Pete by the head and pushed him on to the back seat.

The door closed. They were safe, shielded from the anger. The car edged its way through the crowd, which parted reluctantly to let it through.

Journalists ran alongside for a while, their cameras flashing optimistically.

The last face Pete saw was that of the ginger-haired woman, her eyes bulging with anger, her scarlet mouth spitting at him. He could just see the boy in the pushchair, who had gone to sleep. He’s started to worry about that child recently. Was he deaf? What chance did he have with a mother like that?

Streaks of red poured down one window.

‘Blood!’ said Pete. ‘Where’s it come from?’

‘Tomatoes,’ said his solicitor. ‘They’re throwing tomatoes.’ He sounded quietly proud, as if this was the high point of his career.

Miss Doody’s hair is blonde, dyed, presumably, and there are no ringlets, just straight, dangling, unevenly cut chunks. But there’s something about her face, the pointing finger, that makes Straker remember. There’s a terror building up inside him, pulsing down his legs, along his arms, into his fingertips, his toes, the tips of his ears. The scar on his face is throbbing. He sees her angry face without hearing the words. She seems to be repeating the word ‘roof’.

He shuts the door.

Standing on the other side, he shivers into the emptiness, temporarily paralysed by fear. He starts to count. Backwards from seventy-eight. He stops shaking. Numbers going down, bodies decreasing, people being resurrected, into the twenties, below twenty, single figures—

After a time, she stops shouting and starts throwing things at the door. Whatever she’s using, it doesn’t make much
impression. Then that stops too. There’s a silence. The cat-flap rattles and Suleiman climbs through, looking annoyed, ruffled. He stares at Straker, as if it were his fault, then races past him, up the stairs.

Straker waits for a long time, aching into the emptiness. He remembers the other silence in the garden, under the hawthorn, which he shared with her. Is it happening again? Him inside, her out? No. Today, they’re so far apart they’re at opposite ends of the world.

Gradually, as his numbers go into minus figures, sensation returns to his legs, so he climbs the stairs, putting a greater distance between him and her, right up to the light room, and the balcony. The expanse of the sea opens up before him, empty and vast, blending with the horizon so they become part of each other with no defining line. The rhythm of the waves racing towards him, the inevitability of their progress, soothes him. He stands there for a long time and clears his mind.

His original instincts were correct. She’s furious that he attempted to help. It seems obvious now. He should have known that she’s not someone who needs help and anything he offers is inevitably going to be wrong. Tomorrow he’ll go back and remove the sails.

Wayne is crying again
.

‘Stop whingeing,’ says Katie. ‘You’re always crying.’

‘Poor little thing,’ says Felicity, and her voice has become softer, childish again
.

Wayne: ‘I want my mummy.’

Katie: ‘We all want our mummies. You’re only saying that because you want some sympathy.’

How old are these children?

‘Nine years old, all of them. You should know that.’ Maggie knows everything. ‘Thirty-three children. A whole third-year class from Piccadilly Street Junior. You wiped them out.’

Alan is there too. ‘It’s the best age. Close to you, not ready to be a teenager.’

Maggie: ‘How do you run a school with a whole class missing? Have you thought about that? A third of the year not there. Does it affect their budget? What do they do with an empty classroom and the spare teacher? How do they work out the numbers when they all go up to senior school?’

‘Please, Maggie. Give me a break.’

Silence
.

Her silences are more confusing than her accusations
.

He follows the progress of a wave as it rolls in towards the rocks, but something distracts him. Lowering his gaze, he can see Miss Doody, sitting on the cliff with her back to the lighthouse. Her legs are sticking out in front of her awkwardly, like two pieces of string, ending in sandals with ridiculously high heels. There are two crutches on the grass beside her.

Instinctively, he steps back. Has she seen him? He stands with his back against the light for some time, then returns to the railings. She’s still there, unmoving, looking out to sea. Is she going to go away, or will she stay there for ever? Panic starts to bubble away inside him again. He doesn’t know what to do.

He tries to watch the sea, but now there is something sinister about the way the waves never stop. Every time one reaches the rocks, there is another just behind, leaping along, waiting to take its place. Nothing alters, nothing breaks the pattern. Why is she here? What does she want from him? Has she walked all this way on crutches? Can’t she see that he has no time for her? What happens if she doesn’t go away?

What does she want?

He steps forward to the railings. He doesn’t want her to see
him, so he moves cautiously, but her position hasn’t changed. He goes back in, out again, in again. He’s sweating with fear, but the wind cools the sweat and he starts to shiver.

He returns downstairs to the room he uses as a study and sits at the battered table, which is covered with books and papers. He finds a pile of letters and makes himself read them through.

Dear Mr Straker
,

Further to your enquiry of 26 May, I enclose details to the best of my knowledge. My parents have been greatly missed by three generations of our family…

I would be interested in reading your research on the 1979 crash…

Wayne’s parents moved out of the area after the crash…

He reads each letter several times, but can’t take them in. Just the first lines, forcing himself to concentrate, but they become random symbols, running in and out of his mind without meaning. He doesn’t know how long he sits there, but it feels like hours. Eventually he stands up, stretches his legs, and runs up and down a flight of stairs several times, timing himself. Six seconds up. Five seconds down. Faster: five seconds up. Three seconds down. He runs up to the balcony again and leans over the railings.

She’s still there. She’s not going to go away.

He will ignore her. Presumably she’ll disappear in the end. He doesn’t need to go downstairs for days. He has enough food in here to survive. Stale doughnuts, bottled water, teabags, crisps, apples, bread and cheese.

He stares at her one last time. She appears very alone, separated from the rest of the world by her anger. She needs a hat. She doesn’t know that the temperature is deceptive. It may not seem warm in the wind, but she’ll burn. He examines the way she sits there, her shoulders drooping, somehow deflated,
and sees that her anger has gone. She seems diminished without it, as if she doesn’t exist. A carrier-bag with nothing to carry.

There’s a photo on his desk of one of the children, Katie Flambard, sent by her mother two months ago. She’s on the beach, kneeling in the sand, digging with a blue plastic spade. She’s smiling at the camera, her blonde wispy hair frizzled by the salty air. Shiny patches of pink appear on the bony tops of her shoulders where she’s starting to burn.

Maggie, a whisper from his dreams: ‘Another failure, Straker?’

He returns to his living room, picks up a stale doughnut and a packet of tomato-ketchup-flavoured crisps on the way and walks heavily downstairs. When he unlocks the front door, he assumes she will hear him and come charging towards him, shouting. Nothing happens.

She doesn’t move. When he reaches her, he sits down next to her. He doesn’t think she sees him at first, but when she does, she’s not surprised. He’s irritated by her acceptance of the fact that he would eventually come out to meet her, so he doesn’t do anything.

After a while, he hands her the doughnut and the packet of crisps, thinking she will probably throw them into the sea. But she doesn’t. She takes the doughnut and bites into it without a word. The jam oozes out and streaks on to her cheeks. She wipes it off with her hand, then licks her fingers. They are short and stubby, and she doesn’t wear any rings.

‘It’s stale,’ she says, after two mouthfuls.

He nods.

‘You’re supposed to eat them on the day you buy them.’

She starts on the crisps and he can hear them crunching in her mouth. He keeps buying tomato-ketchup flavour by mistake because the packets are red like the ready-salted. He doesn’t like them and there’s an ever-growing pile in
the store room he uses for rubbish. She seems to enjoy them, and he considers running back up and bringing her all of the packets.

‘I haven’t tried that flavour before,’ she says, as if they were in the middle of a conversation. She eats politely, not putting in too much at a time, closing her mouth as she chews. ‘They’re disgusting.’