The Unlimited Dream Company (6 page)

Vultures—! As I ran down the staircase, buttoning the priest’s jacket around my chest, I guessed that the carrion birds had escaped from Stark’s zoo, attracted by the odours released from the corpse still trapped in the Cessna. I stood on the terrace by the conservatory, expecting to see the white vultures dismembering the passenger’s body. The lawn glistened like chopped glass. A fierce storm had disturbed the night. Pools of water lay in the sunlight among the gravel paths. Along the Shepperton shoreline the leaves of the plane trees and silver birch had been washed of all dust. By contrast, the water-meadow on the opposite bank seemed yellow and faded.

‘Pelicans …’ Relieved, I watched the two ungainly birds waddle across the lawn. Presumably the storm had brought them inland, though the open sea was fifty miles away. They dipped their heavy bills among the gladioli, uncertain what they were doing in the grounds of this Tudor mansion, among these ornamental trees and flowerbeds.

On the beach below me was a more sinister arrival. A large fulmar was gutting a pike, its talons tearing apart the bloodied flesh. With its beaked bill and strong body, this arctic predator resembled nothing that flew over the placid valley of the Thames.

I picked a stone from the pathway and hurled it at the beach. The fulmar took off down river, lazily trailing the pike’s viscera. The damp sand carried its reflection, slick with the fish’s blood running into the water.

I stepped on to the beach, which was littered with driftwood and hundreds of coarse feathers. A canvas bag filled with Father Wingate’s archaeological tools still lay on
the sand, beside a fresh crevice in the pebble bank exposed by the splash-wave of the plunging Cessna. Some six feet long and ten inches deep, this stony shelf was wide enough to take a man. I was tempted to see if it would fit me, and imagined myself lying in it, like Arthur at Avalon or some messiah sleeping for ever in his riverine tomb.

Ten feet from me the sand glittered with silver light, a dissolving mirror leaking into the river. A gondola of the Ferris wheel lay in the shallow water among the Edwardian pillars. Dislodged by the night’s storm, a section of Stark’s amusement pier had collapsed into the river, carrying part of the merry-go-round with it. A small winged horse lay among the debris on the wet beach.

I remembered my dream, and the bodies of the frantic birds colliding above the fairground as they scrambled around me in the whirling air. Soon after dawn the river had disgorged this antique Pegasus on to the same beach where I had swum ashore. I approached the horse and pulled it on to the bank. The fresh paint silvered my hands, leaving a speckled trail across the sand.

As I wiped the paint on to the grass, the pelicans watched me from the flowerbeds. The same vivid light flared from their plumage. The foliage of the willows and ornamental firs seemed to have been retouched by a psychedelic gardener with a taste for garish colours. A magpie swooped across the overlit lawn, feathers brilliant as a macaw’s.

Stimulated by this display of light, I stared into the stained water. The storm had disturbed the river, and a congregation of eels swarmed in the shallows. Heavy-bodied fish moved about in the deeper water, as if they had made their home in the drowned fuselage of the Cessna. I thought of Mrs St Cloud and our strange and violent sex together, and of the birth we had mimicked of an adult child. Already, responding to the nervous irritation of this Sunday morning light, I felt a new surge of sexual potency.

As I left the St Clouds’ garden and entered the park I
passed a fallow deer rubbing its muzzle against a silver birch. Only half-playfully, I tried to seize its hind-quarters, feeling the same sexual attack towards this timid creature that I felt even for the trees and the soil underfoot. I wanted to celebrate the light that covered the still drowsing town, spill my semen over the polite fences and bijou gardens, burst into the bedrooms where these account executives and insurance brokers lazed over their Sunday papers and copulate at the foot of their beds with their night-sweet wives and daughters.

But was I still trapped in Shepperton?

For the next hour, while the streets were deserted, I carried out a complete circuit of the town. Following the line of the motorway, where my first escape attempt had been baulked, I set off towards London, where the open fields gave way to a series of quiet lakes and water-filled gravel pits linked by causeways of sand. Leaving behind the last of the houses on the east of Shepperton, I climbed through a hedge and walked across a field of poppies to the nearest of the lakes.

An abandoned gravel conveyor and the rusting shells of two cars lay in the shallow pools. As I approached them, the air swayed around me. Ignoring this, I pressed on. Suddenly the perspectives of lakes and causeways inverted warningly. The muddy ground swerved around me, and then fled away on all sides, while a distant cluster of nettles on a concrete outcrop rushed towards me, gathering around my legs as if to embrace me.

Without a second thought I there and then gave up all attempts to escape from Shepperton. My mind was still not ready to take its leave of this nondescript suburb.

However, if I was trapped here, I at least would assign myself absolute freedom to do whatever I chose.

Calm now, I crossed the field and returned to the town. As I re-entered the quiet streets the first residents were cleaning their cars and trimming their hedges. A party of
freshly scrubbed children was setting off for their Sunday School. They walked past the overbright gardens, unaware that I was following them, caged satyr in tennis sneakers ready to seize their little bodies. At the same time I felt a strange tenderness for them, as if I had known them all my life. They and their parents were also prisoners of this town. I wished that they could learn to fly, steal light aircraft …

A kite rose from a garden near the film studios, a paper and bamboo rectangle on which a child had painted a bird’s head, the beaky profile of a condor. Following its path across the skyline, I noticed a mansard roof I had seen in my dream. There were the same stepped faces on which a pair of ospreys had slithered, the dormer window with its decorated lintel.

Beyond the perimeter fence of the film studios the antique aircraft were drawn up on the grass by the canvas hangars. There were Spads and Fokker triplanes, a huge stringed biplane of the interwar years, and several wooden mock-ups of Spitfires. None of them had been here when I first flew over Shepperton, but I had seen them on the night grass during my dream.

Looking around me, I realized that I had also seen these houses before. The lower floors were unfamiliar, but each of the roofs and chimneys, the television aerials I had nearly impaled myself upon, I recognized clearly. A man in his fifties with his teenage daughter emerged from an apartment house, watching me warily as if unsure whether I was about to beg from them. I remembered the striped canvas awning of the topmost balcony, the pair of mating hawks I had urged into the night sky.

I was certain that the daughter recognized me. When I waved to her she stared at me in an almost fixated way. Her father stepped into the road, warning me off.

Trying to calm them, I raised my bandaged hands and blood-stained knuckles.

Tell me – did you dream last night? Did you dream of flying?’

The father shouldered me aside and held tightly to his daughter’s arm. On their way to church, they had obviously not expected my messianic presence outside their front door. As they hurried away my nostrils caught beneath the heavy scent of cologne the acrid but familiar odour that still clung to their freshly bathed bodies.

Two middle-aged couples passed me with their adult children. I strolled along with them, to their irritation sniffing at them from the gutter.

‘What about you – did any of you dream of flying?’

I smiled at them, excusing my shabby parson’s suit and white shoes, but I could smell the same tangy odour, the stench of aviaries.

I followed them into the town, trailing their aerial spoor. A dozen large sea-birds circled above the shopping centre, a species of deep-water gull that the storm had brought up the river. On the roof of the supermarket a raven perched, two golden orioles clambered over the ornamental fountain by the post office. On all sides a confused avian life had materialized on this quiet Sunday morning above the heads of these church-going people. Attracted by their acrid scent, duped into recognizing the townsfolk as members of their own species, the birds swirled into the shopping mall. The heavy gulls stumbled across the decorative tiles, wings flurried among the polished shoes. An embarrassed woman laughed nervously at a gull trying to alight on her hat, a stiff-backed old man in brown tweed shook his shooting stick at a raven eager to perch on his shoulder. Children ran laughing among the orioles that leapt from their hands, plumage flaming among the television sets and washing machines in the appliance-store windows.

Badgered by the birds, we moved through the centre of the town, past the overbright foliage in the park, to the church by the open-air swimming-pool. Here at last the birds lifted
away, as if repelled by the immense numbers of feathers that lay on the roofs of the cars parked by the churchyard, torn loose during some dizzying aerial tournament.

To everyone’s surprise, the church was closed, its doors chained and padlocked. Puzzled, the parishioners stood among the gravestones, prayer-books in hand. The old man raised his stick to the clock tower. Several of the Roman numerals had fallen from the dial, and the hands had stopped at a few minutes past two o’clock. The flagstones around the church were covered with feathers, as if some huge pillow had burst upon the spire.

‘Are you the curate?’ A young wife I had followed from the town centre gathered enough courage together to point to my suit. I could see she was unable to reconcile its clerical cut with my muddied tennis shoes and blood-stained hands. ‘The service should begin at eleven. What have you done with Father Wingate?’

As her husband drew her away the old man in the tweed suit stepped forward and touched my shoulder with the handle of his shooting stick. He peered at me with the gaze of the retired soldier still suspicious of all civilians. ‘Aren’t you the pilot? You came down in the river yesterday. What are you doing here?’

The parishioners gathered around me, a frustrated congregation. My presence on the ground unsettled them. They would have preferred me safely in the air. Could they sense radiating from my mind those inverted perspectives which had trapped me in this small town?

Raising my bandaged fists, I stepped through them to the doors of the church, lifted the heavy knocker and struck three times. I was irritated by these timid people in their well-pressed suits and flowered dresses, with their polite religion. I was tempted to break down the doors and drive them into their pews, pen them there while I performed some kind of obscene act in the aisle – press the blood from my hands against their bleeding Christ, expose myself, urinate
in the font, anything to shake them out of their timidity and teach them a fierce and violent dread.

I wanted to scream at them: ‘Birds are gathering here in Shepperton, chimeras more marvellous than anything dreamed of in your film studios!’

I pointed to the fulmars circling the church spire. ‘The birds! Can you see them?’

While they backed away from me through the gravestones I noticed that an unusual vegetation was springing through the cobbles around the porch, as if from my heels. I was surrounded by a small grove of gladiolus-like plants each some two feet high, with sword-shaped leaves and a trumpet of milk-crimson blossom the colour of blood and semen within its green flute.

I gestured to the parishioners, who stood with their prayer-books and disappointed faces, their embarrassing odour of birds. I was about to urge them to pick the flowers, but they were now looking at the doorway of the vicarage, where Father Wingate stood, quietly smoking a cigarette. He was wearing, not his cassock, but a Panama hat and flowered shirt, the garb of a stockbroker self-consciously starting his vacation. Although his congregation smiled expectantly, waving their prayer-books, he ignored them and locked the door of the vicarage behind him.

Smoking his cigarette, he concentrated his gaze on me. His strong forehead was crossed by a deep frown, as if he had recently received a severe blow to his confidence in the world around him – the news of a close friend’s inoperable cancer, perhaps, or the death of a favourite niece. He seemed so preoccupied that I almost believed he had forgotten he was the priest of this parish and was absent-mindedly waiting for me to conduct my own service.

Overhead the gulls had begun to circle again. Led by the fulmars, they surrounded the church, heavy wings brushing the spire, trying to dash the last of the numerals from the clock face and put an end to past time in Shepperton.
Droppings spattered the cars and gravestones. Unsettled, the parishioners backed away toward the swimming-pool.

‘Father Wingate!’ The retired soldier with the shooting stick called out. ‘Do you need our help, Father?’ But the priest paid no attention to him. Below the straw hat his strong face had shrunk into itself. As the gulls shrieked and dived the parishioners scattered among the parked cars.

When the last of them had gone Father Wingate left the vicarage and strode across to the church. Throwing his cigarette among the gravestones, he nodded to me in a matter-of-fact way.

‘Fair enough – I thought you’d come.’ He stared at my clerical suit, almost hoping not to recognize me. ‘You’re Blake, the pilot who landed here yesterday? I remember your hands.’

Despite this welcome, the priest made no effort to be friendly. The strain of physical aggression I had noticed after my rescue the previous day was still present. As we approached the church he forced me to walk behind him. I sensed that Father Wingate would have liked to wrestle me to the ground among the lurid flowers springing from my heels. He kicked the blossoms out of his way, lunging at them like a bad-tempered goal-keeper. As I tried to avoid him my feet slipped in the rain-soaked feathers.

Father Wingate held my shoulders. He stared at my bruised mouth, aligning me against some set of specifications in his mind.

‘Blake, you look dazed. Perhaps you haven’t yet come down to earth.’

‘The storm kept me awake.’ I pushed his hands away from me. Under the floral shirt he was sweating heavily. Unlike his parishioners he did not smell of the birds. But then nor had I seen him in my dream.

Testing him, I asked: ‘Did you see the birds?’

He nodded sagely to himself, acknowledging that I had scored a point. ‘As it happens, I did.’ He gestured towards the clock tower with his Panama hat. ‘There were some strange ones aloft last night. According to my housekeeper the whole of Shepperton slept with an aviary inside its head.’

‘Then you saw the same dream?’

Father Wingate unlocked the doors of the church. ‘So it was a
dream
…? I’m relieved to hear you say so, Blake.’ He stepped through the doors and beckoned me to follow him. ‘Right – we’ll get this over with.’

As I peered into the nave through the warm, musty air Father Wingate tossed his straw hat on to the font. He turned in the dim light, as if about to attack me. When I stepped back he lifted one end of the nearest pew. He dragged the oak form across the aisle, scattering the hymn books across the tiled floor.

‘Blake, take the other end. Let’s put our backs into it.’

I lifted the pew, able to see little more than the priest’s floral shirt in the thin light. I could hear him breathing hoarsely, like an animal in its burrow working up to some private crisis. Together we carried the heavy seat to the west wall of the nave, then returned for the next pew. Father Wingate moved with the impatient energy of a scene-shifter given five minutes to clear the church. Had he rented the building to the film company for some scene in their aviation spectacular? He tossed the worn velvet cushions out of his way, shouldered the lectern to the vestry door, stacked a dozen prayer-books on to his left arm and tipped them into a tea-crate behind the font. At any moment I expected a studio pantechnicon to drive up with a contingent of set designers and actors in flying gear, ready to transform this parish church into a Flanders aid station, a front-line chapel gutted by the forces of darkness.

Father Wingate returned from the vestry with two dust-sheets and closed the doors of the organ loft. He pulled the candles from the silver sticks, and draped the altar and crucifix with a white sheet.

‘Blake, are you still here? Don’t stand there dreaming about your birds. Roll back the carpets.’

As we moved around the murky nave, dismantling the interior of his church, I watched the priest at work. Sweat filled the deep seams of his face, and fell in bright drops to the scuffed tiles under our feet. During a brief break he sat with arms and legs outstretched along one of the pews. A large man, I decided, in the grip of some small obsession, using me as a short cut to deal with his own problems. He
looked up at the stained-glass windows, as if calculating how to pull them down on to the floor of the nave.

For all his energy, did he understand what he was doing? Had he too seen that premonitory vision of the holocaust? It occurred to me that he was responding in the most sensible way, packing off everything that could be moved to safe-keeping, clearing the pews to one side so that the nave could be used as a refuge, a real first-aid station against that death from the sky.

But his brusque handling of the prayer-books and hymnals, of the gilt-framed portraits of saints and apostles which he heaped into the wooden crate, convinced me that he had some other motive, some scheme in which I was to play a role. Father Wingate was clearing the decks of his life with too much relish.

Without thinking, I found myself rising to his physical challenge. We moved from pew to pew, dragging these lengths of spent timber against the walls. I pulled off my jacket, exposing the bruises on my chest. As we struggled with the heavy forms I knew that I was wrestling with this fifty-year-old priest, matching my wrists and shoulders against his. Separated by the length of each pew, we jockeyed for position on the damp tiles, straining at the huge stiff snake we held between us.

Carried away by the sweat that smeared the stone floor, and by the smell of our bodies, I happily watched the blood spring from my knuckles. An almost homo-erotic excitement had seized me. I dragged the last of the pews across the open nave, twisting it out of the priest’s hands as he tried to keep up with me. Like a son showing off his strength and stamina, I wanted him to admire me.

‘Good, Blake … I’m exhausted. Good.’

Breathing harshly, Father Wingate leaned against his thighs in the centre of the dust-filled nave. Flecks of my blood stained his floral shirt. He was still unsure who I was and what had brought me to Shepperton, but he looked up
at me with the sudden affection of a man who has wrestled with a stranger he discovers to be his own son. From that moment I felt a complete trust in this renegade priest.

Later, when I had swept the floor of the nave, Father Wingate unlocked the doors and let the fresh morning air clear the dust from the church. He watched the wind stir the sheets draped over the altar and font, flick the pages of the discarded hymn books. Unimpressed by this act of self-vandalism, he calmly replaced the straw hat on his head. He slipped an arm around my shoulders to support himself, and let me lead the way to the vestry.

His hands did not fit the bruises on my chest. Once again I felt a surge of warmth for him, a regret that he had not brought me back to life. Never before had I known a sense of dependency upon a man older than myself, a pride in his confidence in me. Now I was the returning prodigal, the young flying priest, not only his son fallen from the sky but his successor.

Already the elements of strange ceremonies and bizarre rituals were taking shape in my mind.

Father Wingate opened the vestry door. Immediately I saw the bright sunlight that shone through the large hole in the roof, illuminating the broken tiles on the floor and the specimen cases that filled the room. Behind their glass panels lay shards and knobs of worn bone, all that was left of some ancient fossil beach.

‘Before I leave I’ll have the roof repaired for you.’ Father Wingate knelt among the tiles and picked up a bloodied feather. ‘A huge bird fell through here during the storm. One of the condors must have escaped from Stark’s zoo – he’s careless with those creatures of his.’

I took the feather from him and raised it to my mouth, tasting again the smell of the night air, the sebum of my wings. Father Wingate led me to the laboratory table, equipped with a microscope and lens stand. In my vision I
had seen the complete skeleton of a winged creature, but mounted below the lens was a single splinter of bone the shape of a small trowel, its gnarled profiles and pitted seams exposed by the light. Barely a bone, it was so old that it had begun to revert to its mineral origins, a node of calcified time memorializing a brief interval of life millions of years earlier.

Father Wingate placed me over the lens, in which the bone swam like an ancient planet.

‘I found this on the beach within seconds of your arrival, Blake. The wave from your aircraft must have dislodged it, in a way you’re its co-discoverer. It’s certainly my most remarkable find yet. I’m guilty of keeping it to myself. But for a few days … Anyway, let me introduce one aviator to another. This will have to be confirmed, of course, but I’m almost sure that it’s part of the fore-limb of a primitive flying fish – you can see the point of attachment for its wing membrane. A true flying fish, a precursor even of archaeopteryx, the most ancient known bird.’

He stared at his treasure, a hand reassuringly on my arm as if aware of the link between my own nearly fatal flight and the long journey which this winged forbear of mine had taken through geological time to reach our rendezvous on this specimen table. Sunlight fell through the roof, touching this bone, the relic of a new aerial sainthood.

‘Father Wingate, tell me – why are you leaving?’

The priest stared at me, surprised that I should need to ask. He placed his large hands on the display cases. ‘Blake, this is now my real work – even if you’d not come I would have had to give all my time to it. By the way, I shouldn’t have tired you out. I know the next few days are going to test you.’

I looked up at the ragged hole in the roof through which I had fallen in my dream. I turned to Father Wingate, suddenly needing to describe my strange vision, my fears of
having died and the way in which I had marooned myself in Shepperton.

‘The crash, Father, you were there. Dr Miriam says I was under the water for at least ten minutes. For some reason I feel that I’m still trapped in the aircraft.’

‘You’re not, Blake! You freed yourself.’ He held my shoulders tightly, almost trying to provoke me to stand up for myself. ‘Blake, it’s why I’ve closed the church. How it happened, I don’t know. But I do know that you survived. In fact I almost believe that it was not death you survived but life. You survived
life
 …’

‘I didn’t die.’

‘Believe me, Blake, since yesterday I’ve felt that it’s not you who are alive but we here who are dead. Seize every chance you have, however strange.’

I thought of the car-park outside the clinic, and my near-rape of Rachel.

‘Yesterday, Father, I tried to rape that blind girl – why, I don’t know.’

‘I saw you – but you stopped yourself. For all we know, vices in this world may well be metaphors for virtues in the next. Perhaps you can take us all through that doorway, Blake. I’ve felt the same demented impulses …’

He was staring through the lens at the fragment of his winged fish. I took the bottle of communion wine from the brass table behind him, deciding to get away from this church. I had made this sympathetic but confused priest into my father, another member of the family I had constituted around myself from the witnesses of my crash. I had seen these fossils before. Each of the bones I remembered clearly, etched by the moonlight as I lay on the floor among these specimen cases, listening to the screaming of the birds as they struck in their sexual frenzy at the church tower. I remembered the shin bones of the archaic boar, and the barely human skull of a primitive valley dweller who had lived by this river a hundred thousand years earlier, the
breast bone of an antelope and the crystalline spine of a fish – together the elements of a strange chimera. I remembered too the terrifying skeleton of the winged man.

On an easel by the laboratory table, its fine paper marked by splashes of water, was the drawing on which Father Wingate had been working when I crashed. He had completed the sketch as the aircraft sank, his reconstruction of this winged creature, which I too had become as I swam ashore, part man, part fish and part bird.