The Unlimited Dream Company (12 page)

Sitting naked on the war memorial, I decided to enjoy this public holiday. The entire population of Shepperton was already in the streets, celebrating a jubilee. A huge crowd dressed in its summer finery moved around the centre of the town, turning the modest high street into the flower-bedecked rambla of a tropical city. People strolled arm in arm, pointing up to the vines and jewelled moss that hung from the telephone wires, to the hundreds of coconut and date palms. Children swung from the branches of the banyan tree, teenagers climbed into the arbours of orchids and gourds into which the abandoned cars had been transformed. Tapioca plants ran riot in the gardens, overrunning the roses and dahlias.

And the birds were everywhere. The air was a paint-pot of extravagant colours hurled across the sky. Parakeets chittered on every window-sill, rails screeched from the jungle decks of the multi-storey car-park, screamers trumpeted around the fuel pumps in the filling-station.

Looking at them all, I again felt the need to fly.

Beside me a ten-year-old boy clambered up the steps of the war memorial and tried to press a model aircraft into my hands, hoping that I would bless it. Ignoring him I read the names of the dead of two world wars, artisans and bank cashiers, car salesmen and dubbing mixers. I wished that I could raise them from their graves and invite them to the carnival, call them from their resting places on long-forgotten beaches and battlefields. As well, there were those nearer to hand in the cemetery behind the church.

I jumped down from the memorial and moved through the crowd, happy to see them all in such good humour. Outside
the railway station the last of the office-workers were once again making a half-hearted attempt to set off for London. But as I approached they gave up all thought of work. Ties loosened, jackets over their shoulders, they strolled through the holiday throng, their sales conferences and committee meetings forgotten.

There was a flurry of activity by the bank. The crowd stepped back, watching quietly as two embarrassed cashiers set up a large trestle-table by the entrance. The younger of the girls shrugged her shoulders in an almost hysterical way as the manageress emerged with a metal cash-box. A tall, refined woman with a scholar’s forehead, she opened the box to expose thousands of bank-notes – francs, dollars, pounds sterling, marks and lire – packed together in bundles. As her assembled staff crowded the entrance, watching with fascinated disbelief, she plunged her sensitive hands into the deep notes and began to set out the bundles on the table.

Something blundered into me, a man’s excited body, but for the swimming trunks as naked as my own. Stark stepped past me, pushing the people aside. Bird-net forgotten in one hand, he stared at the bank-notes, swaying on his feet like a mesmerized lover.

Able neither to touch the money nor to take his eyes from it, he murmured: ‘Blake, dear man, you’ve got them eating out of your hand …’

With a friendly wave to the spectators, beckoning them towards the money she had laid out, the bank manageress returned to her office. No one moved, unable to accept this most mysterious of all gifts. Stark stepped forward, swinging his net like a gladiator. He looked back at me with a wild, conspiratorial eye, obviously assuming that I had contrived all this by some extrordinary sleight of hand. Quickly he loaded a dozen bundles into his net, then turned and strolled off casually through the crowd.

Still undecided, people pressed around the trestle-table. The owner of the television rental bureau picked up a bundle
of dollar bills and tossed them to a teenage girl, as if throwing a sweet to a child. In a bravura gesture he took out his wallet and emptied the contents across the table.

All around me people were suddenly giving each other money, tossing coins and cheque-books, credit cards and lottery tickets on to the green baize, happy gamblers betting everything on the certainties of their new life. Beside me a young gypsy with a grubby infant in her arms opened her purse and took out a single pound note. She pushed it shyly into my palm, smuggling a secret message to an unknown lover. Charmed by her, and eager to give her something in return, I rubbed the note between my semen-tacky hands and passed it to her son, who thoughtfully unwrapped it to reveal a tiny humming-bird that hovered in a scarlet blur an inch from his nose.

‘Blake … here’s a million lire.’

‘Take all this, Blake – there’s more than a thousand dollars. Enough to start your flying school …’

Everyone was handing me money and credit cards, clapping delightedly as I gave them back birds and flowers, sparrows and robins, roses and honeysuckle. Happy to amuse them, I spread my arms across the table, touching the wallets and cheque-books, then stepped aside with a flourish. Among the scattered coins a peacock appeared and majestically spread his tail.

In the shopping mall the managers and their assistants were bringing out their goods and giving them away to the passers-by. Again and again I saw Stark, in a heaven of excitement, pushing a loaded supermarket trolley from one store to the next. He had parked his hearse in the side-street by the post office. Shouting to the children to help him, he manhandled two television sets and a deep freezer into the rear of the vehicle, scattered fistfuls of bank-notes from the loaded bird-net.

I let him get on with it, pleased to see him fulfilled. One person at least was needed to show some appreciation of these
material objects. Agreeing with me, an amiable crowd followed Stark, urging him on as he loaded the hearse with video-recorders and stereo-players. In a mood of good-humoured irony people gave him money, a man took off his gold wrist-watch and pressed it into Stark’s hand, a woman clasped her pearl necklace below his chin.

All over Shepperton a happy exchange of gifts was taking place. Along the once quiet suburban streets, now invaded by the tropical forest, people were setting out tables and kitchen chairs, arranging displays of dish-washers and bottles of Scotch, silver tea-sets and cine-cameras, like so many stalls at a village fête. Several families had moved their entire household effects into the street. They stood by their bedroom suites, rolls of wall-to-wall carpeting, piles of kitchen utensils, like happy emigrants about to abandon this small town and return to the simple life of the encroaching jungle. Laughing housewives gave away their last stocks of food, pressed loaves of bread, jars of relish, fresh steaks and legs of pork through the windows of passing cars and buses.

Amazed by all this generosity, the last of the visitors to Shepperton drove off through the narrowing gaps in the bamboo palisades by Walton Bridge and on the airport road. Loaded with their booty, they looked back at Shepperton like raiders leaving a town that has ransacked itself. Even the nonplussed drivers of two police cars which strayed into the high street left loaded with gifts, the rear seats of their petal-strewn vehicles filled with a burglar’s treasure of silverware and cutlery, jewel cases and cash-boxes, the fall-out of this mysterious festival of gift-making.

Watching them proudly, I knew that I wanted to stay with these people for ever.

I was ready to fly again.

It was now noon. The air was still, but a strange wind was blowing into my face. My skin was swept by a secret air, as if every cell in my body was waiting at the end of a miniature runway. The sun hid itself behind my naked body, dazzled by the tropical vegetation that had invaded this modest suburban town. Pausing to rest, the crowd began to settle itself. Mothers and their infants sat on the appliances in the shopping mall, children perched on the branches of the banyan tree, elderly couples relaxed in the rear seats of the abandoned cars. There was a sense of intermission. As I walked across the street to the multi-storey car-park, followed by a troupe of children, I was the only adult still moving about.

And none of them was aware that I was naked.

They were all, I knew, waiting for the next turn in my performance. In their words, they were waiting for me to ‘dream’ them again. I strolled through these relaxing family groups, who before my arrival would have thought of nothing more adventurous than filming themselves nude in their gardens. I felt proud that they were prepared to entrust all the burgeoning possibilities of their lives to me. Having given away the contents of their larders, they would soon be hungry, a hunger not to be satisfied by the mangoes and breadfruit hanging from the jungle foliage around them. Somehow I was sure that when the time came they would be fed from my flesh, just as I in turn would be fed from theirs.

Surrounded by the children, I climbed to the roof of the car-park and walked across to the concrete ledge. Far away,
beyond the park, the swordfish leapt from the river, straining to catch my eye, a signal that I should begin the dream time. All the forces of a benevolent nature seemed to be concentrated on me as I stood here with the sun at my side. The bamboo groves at the foot of Walton Bridge and along the airport and London roads were thicker now, heavy palisades at which the incoming traffic was forced to stop. Passengers climbed from their cars, wary of approaching the cactus and prickly pear. I knew that I had only a little time left to me. Within a few hours Stark would call the television companies, and the camera crews would descend on Shepperton, followed by an army of botanists, social scientists and mental health inspectors.

I felt something pressed into my hand. The small boy who had followed me from the war memorial stood at my elbow, squinting up at me with an encouraging smile.

‘Shall I make it fly for you?’ When he nodded eagerly I raised the plastic model and launched it into the air. As people ducked, the aircraft swerved between the telephone lines, plunged towards the ground and turned into a darting swallow that swooped across the roof of the post office.

There was a delighted whoop from the children sitting on the roof behind me. Immediately half a dozen model aircraft were pushed into my hands by their clamouring owners. Replicas of world war fighters and bombers, they spun from my fingers when I whirled them across the street, erratic darts that soared away as crested swifts, starlings and wagtails.

While the children ran squealing across the roof only little Jamie was left, standing shyly on his leg-irons with some home-made aircraft hidden in his hands. David was trying to wave him back, his eyes worried under the massive forehead, concerned that this amateur effort would never merit its transformation into a bird.

Did they alone, these crippled children, know that I was naked?

‘Jamie, give it to me. I can make anything fly – don’t you believe me?’

Had he brought me another dead bird? But as he opened his hands I saw that he held a small fragment of the Cessna’s wing, a riveted panel from the section they had dragged on to the beach that morning.

‘Jamie!’ I tried to cuff his head, angry with this crippled child for playing this macabre game with me, but he darted away on his leg-iron.

From the street below there was a warning shout, then a ripple of giggles from the children in the banyan tree.

‘Down here, Blake,’ someone called. ‘Your first student.’

Walking along the centre of the flower-strewn high street came Miriam St Cloud, dressed in a grotesque but magnificent wedding gown. Pinned together from a hundred yards of white tulle, it resembled a costume worn in some Hollywood spectacular of the 1930s. The huge train stretched behind her, its hem ruffed like the tail-plumage of a bird, carried by little Rachel. Her blind eyes were shut as if dreaming of flight. From Miriam’s shoulders the side-panels of the dress formed a pair of immense soft wings waiting to take the air.

Miriam paused in the street below me, a great white bird searching for her sky. At first I thought she was in some kind of religious trance, a profound fugue from which I would never retrieve her. She gazed round at the flowers and vines that covered the supermarket and appliance stores, at the birds on the portico of the filling-station, the timid fallow deer watching her from the blossom-wreathed fuel pumps, as if wondering which of these was to be her groom.

‘Dr Miriam, he’s on the roof …’

‘Above you, doctor …’

People called to her from the parked cars, pointing to me as I stood out against the sky on the roof of the car-park. But when Miriam looked up at me I could see that she was
completely awake, trying in the most sensible way not to be impressed by all this luxuriance, by this hanging garden of orchids and bougainvilia. I was pleased that she admired my powers over the air and the birds, my command of the forest, even though she still suspected that I was some kind of interloper in the proper order of the natural universe.

At the same time I knew that she was at last achieving the secret ambition she had set for herself, this adolescent dream of an aerial wedding. Holding the skirt of the wedding gown in one hand, she walked calmly through the watching crowd, unembarrassed to be seen indulging this pleasant whim in front of her patients.

Yet even then, as she strode firmly towards the entrance of the car-park, I was sure that she was challenging me in her quiet way, and still believed that my powers were limited, infinitely smaller than those of her presiding deity. Was she testing me here, to see if I could teach her to fly?

While she climbed the stairway everyone was silent. From the surrounding streets the last of the townspeople left their houses and came towards us below the jungle canopies. Even Stark was resting from his happy pillage of the town. He sat on the roof of his hearse outside the post office, surrounded by looted appliances and a colourful autumn leaf-fall of bank-notes. He waved to me with a confident smile, certain that whatever I might choose to do next would astonish everyone. I liked him for his complete guilelessness.

At the end of the high street, by the war memorial, Father Wingate was fanning his face with his straw hat. He and Mrs St Cloud had come across the park with the chauffeur and housekeeper, pushing the wheelchairs of three elderly patients from the geriatric unit. They stood together, the priest reassuring Mrs St Cloud that I was in no danger, two provincial parents eclipsed by their son’s extraordinary achievements but none the less proud of him.

There was a scuffle behind me. David broke away from the other children and ran up to me. Below his swollen forehead
his eyes were unsettled. He knew that he alone had not been let into the secret of the day’s happiness. In his hands he held a tattered white rag, a peace offering for Jamie’s heartless prank.

‘Blake … it’s for you.’

‘David, that’s a treasure.’

I recognized a remnant of my flying suit, a ragged section of the left shoulder and waist-band. I pulled it over my head and hips. Dressed in this fragment of my past, I turned to face Miriam St Cloud. She had reached the stairhead and now walked towards me in her wedding gown, ready for her marriage with the air.

Already the wind was moving across the roof of the car-park, lifting the train and wings of Miriam’s dress, eager to carry her into the air.

‘Blake, can you hold me?’

Steadying herself, she reached for my hands, the shy wife of a gymnastic prodigy unsure what was about to take place but certain that all would be well. I could smell the warm scent of her body, and see the sweat staining the armpits of the wedding dress.

‘Blake, you’re wearing your flying suit … it’s in rags.’

‘There’s enough of it left, Miriam. Now, hold my hands.’

I wanted only to set her free, to fly with her from this town in which we were trapped. I wanted to pass on to her all my powers so that she could escape even if I could not.

I gripped her wrists and led her to the edge of the roof. Seeing the ground five floors below her, Miriam stumbled and released the train. Her hands flurried at the air until they found my shoulders.

The crowd was silent, people sitting under the trees. Even the town’s policeman had stopped with his bicycle. Thousands of birds were falling helplessly from the sky, their wings confused by the air that failed to support them. Stranded on the rooftops, they waved feebly to each other.
Macaws and parakeets sprawled in the gutters of the supermarket. Flamingos lay splay-legged on the proscenium of the filling-station. Sparrows and robins plummeted from the still air.

A new kind of sky now covered the town.

I felt an electric fever move below my skin, as I had done during my previous visions, and I knew that once again I was moving through the doorway of my own body into a realm ruled by a different time and space.

‘Blake, can we …?’

‘Yes, Miriam, we can fly.’

We stood together on the edge of the parapet, our feet over the sill. Miriam held my hands and looked down at the street below, fearful that we would dash ourselves to death among the parked cars. But at the last moment she turned to me with complete confidence, a wish to see me again triumph over the death I had already defied.

‘Blake,
fly
…!’

I slipped my hand around her waist, and stepped forward with her into the open air.