The Unlimited Dream Company (10 page)

A strange glaze came over everything. The crowd had moved back, the women with their children drifting away through the powdery light. Miriam St Cloud still faced me across the street, but she seemed to recede from me, lost in a profound fugue. I was aware of Father Wingate somewhere to my left. He watched me with unwavering eyes, one hand encouraging me forward. Like all the others in the now silent shopping mall, he resembled a sleepwalker about to cross the threshold of the dream.

Leaving them, I set off towards the supermarket and library. There were fewer people on the pavements, ghostly mannequins in the still bright light, one by one slipping away to their luminous gardens. Over everything presided the immense organic fountain of the banyan tree, alone retaining its clear outlines. Around it the whole of Shepperton began to fade. The trees and parkland, the houses behind me, were now blurred images of themselves, the last traces of their tenuous reality evaporating in the warm sun.

Abruptly, the light cleared. I was standing in the middle of the park. Everything stood out with an unprecedented clarity – each flower and petal, each leaf of the chestnut trees seemed to have been fashioned separately to fit the focus of my eyes. The roof-tiles of the houses hundreds of yards away, the mortar of the brickwork, each pane of glass had been jewelled to an absolute clarity.

Nothing moved. The wind had dropped, and the birds had vanished. I was alone in an empty world, a universe created for myself and assigned to my care. I was aware that this was the first real world, a quiet park in a suburb of an empty and still unpopulated universe which I was the first to enter and
into which I might lead the inhabitants of that shadow Shepperton I had left behind.

At last I was without fear. I strolled calmly across the park, looking back at the footprints behind me, the first to mark this vivid grass.

I was king of nothing. I took off my clothes and threw them among the flowers.

Behind me, hooves tapped. A fallow deer watched me from among the silver birch. As I moved towards it, happy to greet my first companion, I saw other deer, roe and fallow, young and old, moving through the forest. A herd of these gentle creatures had followed me across the park. Watching them approach me, I knew that they were the third family of that trinity of living beings, the mammals, birds and fish, which together ruled the earth, air and water.

It only remained for me now to meet the creatures of the fire …

Antlers sprang from my head, seizing the air through the sutures of my skull. I cropped at the soft pelt of the grass, watching the young females. My herd gathered around me, quietly feeding together. But for the first time a nervous air shivered the leaves and flowers. An almost electric unease hung over the silent park, unsettling the warm sunlight. As I led my herd towards the safety of the deserted town I touched a small female, then mounted her in an anxious spasm. We mated in the dappled light, broke apart and cantered together, the sweat and semen on our flanks mingling as we ran.

Following me, the herd crossed the road and entered the empty streets, hooves tapping among the abandoned cars. I paused at their head, excited by the spoor of unseen predators who might watch me from these silent windows and ornamental gardens, ready to seize my throat and hurl me to the ground. I took another female and mounted her by the war memorial, my semen flicking across the chiselled
names of these long-dead clerks and labourers. I moved nervously between the lines of cars. Again and again I coupled with the females, mounting one and then breaking away to take another. Our reflections bucked in the plate-glass windows among the pyramids of cans and appliances, the tableaux of dishwashers and television sets, sinister instruments that threatened my family. My semen splashed the windows of the supermarket, streamed across the sales slogans and price reductions. Calming the females, I led them through the quiet side-streets, coupled with each one and left her cropping contentedly in a secluded garden.

But as I steered them to their places, repopulating this suburban town with my nervous semen, I felt that I was also their slaughterer, and that these quiet gardens were the pens of a huge abattoir where in due course I would cut their throats. I saw myself suddenly not as their guardian but as a brutal shepherd, copulating with his animals as he herded them into their slaughter-pens.

Yet out of that smell of death and semen hanging over the deserted town came the beginnings of a new kind of love. I felt gorged and excited, aware of my powers to command the trees and the wind. The vivid foliage around me, the tropical flowers and their benign fruits, all flowed from my infinitely fertile body.

Thinking of the one female I had not yet mounted, I set off through the quiet streets to the park. I remembered Miriam St Cloud gazing raptly at her wedding gown. As I passed the naked mannequin behind its semen-stained window I could scent Miriam’s sweet spoor, leading towards the river and the mansion behind the dead elms. I wanted to show myself off to her, my animal body with its reeking pelt and giant antlers. I would mount her on the lawn below her mother’s window, and we would mate in sight of the drowned aircraft.

Already the afternoon light had begun to fade, turning the park into a place of uneasy lights and shadows. But I could see Miriam standing on the sloping grass by her house, watching me as I sped through the trees in a series of ever more powerful leaps. I could see her astonishment at my pride and magnificence.

Then, as I approached the dead elms, a figure stepped from the dark bracken and barred my path. For a moment I saw the dead pilot in his ragged flying suit, his skull-like face a crazed lantern. He had come ashore to find me, able to walk no further than these skeletal trees. He blundered through the deep ferns, a gloved hand raised as if asking who had left him in the drowned aircraft.

Appalled, I fled towards the safety of the secret meadow. When I reached the grave I lay down and hid my antlers among the dead flowers.

When I woke, a sombre light filled the meadow. Dusk had crossed the park, and the street-lamps of Shepperton shone through the trees. My antlers had gone, my semen-spattered hooves and powerful loins. Incarnated again as myself, I sat in the twilit grave. Around me the secret arbour of the crippled children glowed like an illuminated side-chapel in a forgotten jungle cathedral. I squeezed the sweat from my suit. The fabric was smeared with blood and excrement, as if I had spent the afternoon driving a herd of violent beasts.

I stared down at the grave of flowers, at the hundreds of dead tulips and daisies which the children had gathered. They had added more pieces of the Cessna – another section of the starboard wing-tip, fragments of fabric torn from the fuselage and washed ashore. All too closely, the structure already resembled the original aircraft, reconstituting itself around me.

Through the deep grass the faces of the three children glowed like pensive moons. David’s worried eyes gazed out below his huge forehead, still waiting for those absent sections of his brain to catch up with them. Rachel’s small features flickered among the dark poppies, a forgotten flame. Now and then Jamie hooted at the air, reminding the sky and the trees that he still existed. They were sad at being excluded from my new world. Had they realized that I could change my form, like a pagan god, into that of any creature I chose? Had they seen me as lord of the deer, strutting at the head of my herd, copulating on the run?

I stood up and waved them away. ‘David, take Rachel home. Jamie, it’s your time to sleep.’

For their own sake I was concerned that they should not come too close to me.

Leaving them in the dark grass by the grave, I walked through the meadow to the river. The night water seethed with fish – silver-backed eels, pike and golden carp, groupers and small sharks. Phosphorescing animalcula swarmed in dense shoals. I stepped on to the sand, and let the charged water swirl across my tennis shoes, washing away the blood and dung. A huge fish crept into the shallows at my feet. Its eyes watchfully upon me, it devoured the fragments, then withdrew silently into the deep.

White pelicans sat on the roof of the conservatory. The evening air was lit from below by the plumage of thousands of birds, and by the vivid petals of the tropical flowers that had wreathed themselves around the dead elms, together forming an immense corona like the one I had first glimpsed as I climbed from the aircraft.

‘I am the fire …’ And the earth, air and water. Of these four realms of the real world, three I had already entered. I had stepped through three doors, through the birds, the fish and the mammals. Now it only remained for me to enter the fire. But as what strange creature, born to the flame?

A hurricane lamp flared across the metal railings of the amusement pier, illuminating the thousands of fish in the river. Lamp in hand, Stark jumped from the catwalk on to the pontoon of a steel lighter he had moored against the pier. This ancient craft, which he had floated free from some forgotten creek, was fitted with dredging equipment, winch and crane. Ignoring the heavy-backed fish, the tuna and small sharks that leapt from the water around his ankles, Stark inspected the metal jib and rusty hawsers.

So he still intended to raise the Cessna, and mount it as the prize exhibit in his threadbare circus. He turned his lamp on me, and struck my face with the beam as if gently chiding me for leaving the drowned aircraft unguarded. I could see
his canny expression, and that he knew we were engaged in a special kind of duel.

Leaving him, I walked up to the house. The French windows were open to the warm evening, and the lights in the drawing-room shone down over the dust-sheets that covered the settees and tables. The wicker furniture in the conservatory, the long dining-table, the chairs and sideboards had been carefully draped, lamps and telephones disconnected.

Had Miriam and her mother decided to leave, so appalled by the spell I had cast over Shepperton and by my transformation of myself into a beast that they had closed their house and made their escape while I slept in the meadow? Thinking of Miriam, and of her place in the centre of my grand design, I ran up the darkened staircase. My own room was untouched, but Miriam’s bedroom had been attacked by a demented housebreaker. Someone had hurled her doctor’s coat over the dressing-table mirror, emptied her medical case across the bed and shaken the contents on to the floor. Vials and syringes, a stethoscope and prescription pad lay in the broken glass at my feet.

Macaws fluttered shaggily through the darkness as I left the drive. Beyond the trees by the swimming-pool I could see a faint light swaying through the windows of the church. The stained-glass panelling of the east window had been removed, exposing the candle-lit vaulting of the roof.

The vestry door hung open, the display cases with their fossil remains lit by the moon. Although he had abandoned his church to me, Father Wingate had worked hard that day, assembling the primitive flying creature whose ancient bones he had found on the beach. With its out-stretched arms, its slender legs and delicate feet, bones jewelled by time, it more than ever resembled a small winged man – perhaps myself, who had lain these millions of years in the bone-bed of the Thames, sleeping there until it was time to be freed by the falling aircraft. Perhaps the Cessna had been stolen by
another pilot, that spectral figure I had seen lost among the dead elms. Had I taken his identity, stepping out on to the beach from my resting-place in the river-bank?

A silver stick of candles burned on the floor of the nave, where only the previous day Father Wingate and I had wrestled the pews against the wall. Behind the cloth-draped altar a ladder rose to the east window, from which all the stained glass had been pulled down and thrown to the floor below.

Mrs St Cloud stood by the altar in her dressing-gown, gesturing uncertainly to the flickering light. Miriam sat calmly on the scuffed floor, one hand moving among the pieces of broken glass. Under the nursing sister’s cape I could see the embroidered skirt of a wedding dress which she tried to hide from me, the costume of a novitiate bride. She picked casually at the fragments of stained glass, the sections of ruby halo and disciple’s robes, cross and stigmata, the pieces of a vast jigsaw she had already begun to reassemble.

‘Blake, can you help me …?’ Mrs St Cloud took my arm, her eyes avoiding mine as if they might burn her pupils. ‘Father Wingate’s gone berserk. Miriam’s trying to put all this glass together. She’s been sitting here for hours.’ She gazed helplessly at the looted church and then turned to her daughter. ‘Miriam, come back to the house, dear. People will think you’re some kind of mad nun.’

‘It’s not cold, Mother. I’m perfectly happy.’ Miriam looked up from her jigsaw with an easy smile. She seemed calm but deliberately detaching herself from everything around her, preparing herself for whatever violent promise I held out for them all. Yet as she gazed admiringly at my grimy suit I could see that it was only by an effort of will that she suppressed her wish to attack me.

‘Miriam, there’s the clinic tomorrow … there are your patients to look after.’ Mrs St Cloud pushed me forward to the circle of broken glass. ‘Blake, she’s decided to give up the clinic.’

‘Mother, I think Blake is more than capable of looking after the patients. He has the hands of a true healer …’

I was about to step through the fragments of glass and hold her in my arms, reassure her that I wanted only to take her with me into that real world whose doors I was unlocking. Then I realized that she was sitting there, not merely to reassemble the broken window, but to protect herself from me within this mystic circle, as if I were some vampiric force to be held back by these archaic signs and symbols.

I said to Mrs St Cloud: ‘You’ve closed the house – are you leaving Shepperton?’

Confused, she hid her hands in her dressing-gown. ‘Blake, I don’t know. For some reason I’m sure that we’re all going to leave soon, perhaps within a few days. Do you feel that, Blake? Have you seen the birds? And the strange fish? Nature seems to be … Blake?’

She waited for me to speak, but I was looking at her daughter, moved by Miriam’s fear of me and by her courage, by her determination to face whatever powers I might hold over her. However, I already knew that when they left Shepperton, Miriam and her mother, Father Wingate, Stark and the three children would do so only with me.

Later, while I rested in my bedroom above the river, I thought of my third vision that afternoon, of my lordship of the deer. Although I had not eaten for three days I felt gorged and pregnant, not by some false womb in my belly, but by a true pregnancy in which every cell of my flesh, every gland and nerve in my brain, every bone and muscle, was swelling with new life. The thousands of fish crowding the dark water, the lantern-like plumage of the birds in the park also seemed gorged, as if we were all taking part in an invisible reproductive orgy. I felt that we had abandoned our genital organs and were merging together, cell to cell, in the body of the night.

I was certain now that my vision that afternoon had not
been a dream but another doorway into that realm to which my unseen guardians were guiding me. I had become first a bird, then a fish and a mammal, each a partner in a greater being to be born from my present self. However barbaric I might seem, a minor pagan deity presiding over this suburban town in a shabby suit stained with semen and blood, I felt a powerful sense of discipline and duty. I knew that I should never abuse my powers, but conserve them for those goals which had yet to reveal themselves to me.

Already, like the local spirit of some modest waterfall or doorway, I could change myself from one creature to another. I knew that I had been transformed into a household god, not a cosmic being of infinite power pervading the entire universe, but a minor deity no more than a mile or so in diameter, whose sway extended over no more than this town and its inhabitants, and whose moral authority I had still to define and win. I thought of the corona of destruction I had seen hovering over the roof-tops, and my conviction that I would one day slaughter all these people. I was certain that I had no wish to harm them, but only to lead them to the safety of a higher ground somewhere above Shepperton. These paradoxes, like my frightening urge to copulate with young children and old men, had been placed before me like a series of tests.

Whatever happened, I would be true to my obsessions.

No longer needing to sleep, I sat by the window. Was all sleep no more than an attempt by the infant in its cot, the bird in its nest, by old and young alike, to reach that further shore where I had run with the deer that afternoon? Below me the river flowed towards London and the sea. The hull of the drowned Cessna was lit by the White dolphins that crowded the water, turning the river into a midnight oceanarium filled from my bloodstream. Motes of light flickered from every leaf in the midnight forest, miniature beacons within the dismembered constellations of myself. Looking out at the sleeping town, I vowed to guide its
inhabitants to the same happy end, assemble them into the mosaic of their one real being in the same way that Miriam St Cloud put together the pieces of stained glass, transform them into rainbows cast by my body upon every bird and flower.