Natural Flights of the Human Mind (16 page)

He raises an eyebrow. ‘You know all about it, then?’

‘That’s because of Biggles,’ she says.

‘Who?’ he says, as if this is the first time she has mentioned Biggles. The man is unbelievable.

‘They’re children’s books,’ she says. ‘There are hundreds of them—I’ve read them all.’

He looks puzzled.

‘Didn’t you ever read when you were younger?’

He shakes his head. ‘No. My family weren’t keen on reading.’ He thinks for a few seconds in silence. ‘Except Agatha Christie.’

‘Similar period,’ she says.

She bends down and looks under the wheels. There are yellow wooden triangles placed in front of each one, with rope attached.

‘Chocks,’ she says, pleased with her specialist knowledge.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I don’t think they’ll be necessary.’

She climbs on to the wing and eases herself into the cockpit again. Placing her feet against the rudder-pedals, she leans over the side of the fuselage so that she can see Straker. ‘Go on,’ she says. ‘Try the propeller.’

He reaches up to one of the arms of the propeller and pulls it down sharply. It moves a quarter of a turn, with an uncomfortable clonk, and then jams. ‘It’s not going to work.’

‘No thanks to you,’ she says, frustrated by her inability to bring the aeroplane to life in any way.

They cover up the cockpits again and lock the barn, walking back down the road without a word. There’s a glow of excitement inside Doody, despite Straker’s lack of enthusiasm. It’s spinning around, churning up all kinds of emotions, soaring up into an unrealistically blue sky.

10 Richardson Close,
Walkers Heath,
Birmingham
.

Dear Mr Straker
,

Who are you? Why have you suddenly decided to write to me out of the blue? I don’t believe one word of your letter! The crash has got nothing to do with you! You weren’t there, were you? Do you have any idea what it’s like to lose a son in a crash? Robbie was nine years old, my life was destroyed by that crash, or
tragic accident
as you call it. I haven’t been able to live a normal life for over twenty-four years! Twenty-four years! My husband Jimmy left me after two years. Went off to Australia on his own, though I can’t say I blame him. Nothing was ever normal ever again, I couldn’t go upstairs to bed without going into Robbie’s room to check on him. I couldn’t cook meals without planning what he wouldn’t eat. He only ate egg and chips, so I went on doing chips every day. Swelled up like a balloon. Jimmy refused to talk about it. We couldn’t even have a row about it. I just sat in the living room and watched the videos we’d got of Robbie growing up. He was our whole life!

It’s taken me twenty-four years to get over it! Twenty-four years! I’ve been on medication most of that time. In and out of hospital with depression, breakdowns, alcoholism—you name it, I’ve had it. And now twenty-four years later when I finally begin to sort myself out, get a job, what happens? Your letter comes through my letter-box! And whoosh, bang, wallop, here we go again! My hands are shaking and I want a drink!

How dare you do this to me!! Go away, don’t ever contact me again! It’s nothing to do with you, it’s private!

Unless you were on that train? Were you, or do you know more about it than you’re telling me? You’re not him, are you? Peter Butler? The mass murderer who got away with it because an ignorant coroner said there wasn’t enough evidence. We all know what that means. He knew you were guilty but couldn’t prove it
.

If I’d found you at the beginning, you wouldn’t be writing letters now. Disappeared into thin air, didn’t you? Money I suppose, a rich father and a new identity. But you’ve given the game away, haven’t you? Don’t think I’ve given up!! Don’t get the idea time heals. It’s the anniversary soon. Quarter of a century. I’m not the only one, you know! There are lots of us. Lots and lots
.

So, Mr Peter Straker, if you’re Peter Butler, you’d better watch your back! Because believe me I will find you!!

Carmen Halliwell

It’s impossible to accommodate seventy-eight people in your head at any one time. When they talk to each other in Straker’s dreams, most of them get lost in the background. They don’t make any noise, but he knows they’re there. All those school-children shuffling, whispering words he can’t hear, restless, fidgeting. You can’t keep children still. Not even dead children. Robbie must be there among them. Does he know his mother is close by, on the trail? Would he even recognise her after all this time?

Sangita’s parents have written to Straker. They’ve described how they drove up to Birmingham to identify her, puzzled by her journey to Birmingham, shocked by her collection of posters of Rob Willow, unable to believe what had happened to her. They returned home to their little part of India,
partitioned off from the rest of England by the stone lions on either side of the gates, fountains in the garden, peacocks in the back (still alive) and lived the next twenty-four years in a condition of numbed bewilderment. Straker’s letter of enquiry brought them back to life, made them want to talk about their daughter again.

He files their letter next to Carmen Halliwell’s.

He now knows that everyone recognised Felicity—she was on the front page of the
Sun
. But there was no one really to claim her.

Straker pairs them up in his mind. It makes it all neater. Mike and Alan, Justin and Francis, Sangita and Felicity.

Except Maggie, who stands alone. Who has left him and no longer attacks him. Who has taken half of him away with her. He shouldn’t have written the letter. He should have gone on in ignorance of her life.

They wander about in his mind, entering and leaving as they wish. His mind, but their choices. A record that keeps going round, caught in an endless groove, the speed uncertain. An old record, a seventy-eight.

When Pete was a child, he and Andy were given a gramophone—the type that you had to wind up, with needles as thick as nails. There were several records with it, but he only remembers ‘Sailing On The Robert E. Lee’ and ‘There Was An Old Woman Who Swallowed A Fly’.

Pete and Andy thought it was wonderful for a time, and Andy used to bring all his friends home to play with it. They had a large toy room at the top of the house, filled with every toy that a boy could want, chosen by their father whenever he felt the need to walk into a shop and order the entire contents. There was a train set, mapped out on a huge table with stations, tunnels, sidings, turntables; a rocking horse, life-sized, stirrups, leather saddle, real horse’s hair for tail and mane; shelves of books,
stamp collections, ludo, cribbage, chess sets, jigsaw puzzles, magician sets. Funny about the books. There were so many but Pete can’t remember ever reading them. Did they have Biggles?

When Pete was about five, Andy became obsessed by Enid Blyton, eventually bringing in friends to make his own Famous Five.

‘What about me?’ asked Pete.

‘You’ve got to be the robber,’ said Andy.

‘I don’t want to,’ he said. ‘I want to be the Famous Five.’

‘Well, you can’t. We can only have five, and that’s the rest of us.’

Pete looked around at Andy’s friends and counted. ‘But there are only four of you.’

‘The fifth is Timmy, the dog, I told you that.’

‘Why can’t I be Timmy?’ He’d have liked that. He’d make a good dog.

Andy and his friends stood in front of Pete in silence while he went down on all fours and pretended to wag his tail. He tried barking, the harsh sound scraping his throat.

‘You can’t,’ said Andy. ‘We already have a dog.’

His friend Eric produced a fluffy toy dog from behind his back. ‘Woof, woof,’ he said, and pushed the dog into Pete’s face. Pete fell over backwards.

They all laughed.

‘I’m not going to be your stupid robber,’ said Pete, and ran out of the room. He could hear them all laughing behind him.

He went downstairs to find his mother. It wasn’t easy to find people in this house. There were so many floors, so many rooms. It must have been difficult for his mother to keep out of the way of the cleaners all day, so she often took a rest in her bedroom. Pete was never allowed to go in if she was in bed, so he sometimes sat outside the door, pretending that she was there and that he was having a conversation with her, even though it was only inside his head.

He tried this on the Famous Five day, sitting at the top of the stairs, hearing the gramophone upstairs, telling his mother about Andy and his friends. He thought he would quite like to be a dog. Regular meals, walks every day with someone who liked you, no homework, no cleaning teeth, sleeping all day if you wanted to.

‘What are you doing here?’

It was his father, unexpectedly at home in the middle of the day.

Pete stared at him.

‘Answer my question, Pete. Why are you here?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

A strange eerie moan came from his mother’s room. Pete stood up and watched his father. He didn’t react.

‘Outside, my lad, now.’

‘What was that noise?’

‘What noise? I didn’t hear anything. Off you go.’

There was another moan and then a dreadful, piercing scream.

The door to his mother’s room opened, and a woman Pete had never seen before in his life ran out. She stopped abruptly when she saw his father. ‘Telephone for an ambulance, Mr Butler. Hurry.’

Pete’s father stood completely motionless. Pete had never seen him so still before.

‘Hurry, Mr Butler. She needs a Caesarian.’

Pete’s father looked appalled. ‘Are you sure?’ he said.

‘Of course I’m sure. Hurry—time is of the essence.’

He turned and ran down the stairs without another word.

Pete could hear the gramophone start to play in the toy room upstairs.

Several more loud screams came from his mother’s room. Pete stood and looked at the lady who had come out. She wore a white apron, and there was blood on her hands. His mother had swallowed a fly—perhaps she’ll die.

She looked down at Pete, paused, and unexpectedly smiled. ‘Your little brother or sister’s on its way,’ she said.

Little brother or sister? What on earth was she talking about?

There were more screams, and the lady turned back to the room. Pete could hear her talking urgently, presumably to his mother. He wondered where the fly had come from.

He stayed there for a long time, hearing the siren as an ambulance drove up outside. Two men rushed up the stairs and took his mother away on a stretcher. The lady went with her, but his father didn’t. He spent a long time in his study, talking on the telephone, asking for a tray at tea time. Pete went into his mother’s room when she had gone and tried to work out what had happened. The bed was stripped back, and there was blood on the mattress. It seemed very easy to die.

Upstairs, the gramophone was still going:

The gramophone was winding down. The words stretched and distorted, until someone started winding it up again. The music started to go faster and faster—

They didn’t get a little brother or sister. Pete waited for weeks, but no one ever turned up. Their mother came home and everything went back to normal.

Straker doesn’t sleep much the night after the aeroplane. Whenever he dozes, he wakes with a violent jump after about ten minutes. He is dreaming of flying, the power of the engine under his feet and hands, showing someone the instruments—‘Altimeter, artificial horizon…’ It’s not Doody he’s telling.

He wasn’t ready for the aeroplane.

Sitting in the cockpit, he was shocked by the familiarity of it all. The controls were more primitive, but they felt the same. His hands on the stick in front of him, his feet on the rudders, checking the oil pressure, the compass, finding the throttle on his left. He felt as if he could just take off, hear the roar of the engine in his ears, smell the oil.

All those years ago, while his life on the ground had been wandering aimlessly in circles, flying was the one thing he could do that gave him a sense of authority and purpose. Now, briefly, for the first time in years, he had experienced the memory of that freedom, the belief that he could be in control.

‘You’re a pilot, aren’t you?’

He looked down at her, round the cockpit he was sitting in, and knew that he shouldn’t be in an aeroplane. The horror he had experienced when he first saw it hit him again. He climbed out as quickly as he could. With a few words, she had whipped away his control and sent him back loose into the world where he had no right to rest his feet.

What had happened over twenty-four years ago must all be somewhere in his brain, perfect and deadly in its accuracy, in brilliant, blood-red technicolour. It’s just waiting for the best moment. Someone will press the right button, the film will start to play, and he will have to watch it all over again. Again and again—

A fear is growing inside him that he is nearly at that point. He has entered the cinema, the lights have gone down—

During the night Suleiman comes and sits on him. Straker feels his comforting weight, and hears him start to purr. He puts out a hand, and Suleiman obligingly rubs his head against it.
Straker scratches his ears. They lie there together for some time, waiting for dawn, wondering if it’s worth pretending to sleep.

‘Don’t think you can sleep, Straker. We’re all out here.’

‘Who?’

‘Guess.’

‘I can’t. Tell me who you are.’

‘Think about it. There’s me and five men and three women.’

‘Have you talked to me before?’

‘Yes.’

A woman’s voice: ‘No.’

First voice: ‘You wouldn’t know. We’re here and we’re not here. We just haven’t joined in the conversations.’

The woman’s voice: ‘We’re not important.’

First voice: ‘Yes, we are. That’s the point. We didn’t know we were important then for all sorts of reasons, but we were really. Everyone’s important.’

‘Who are you? Were you on the train?’

‘Of course we were. How many did I say?’

‘One plus three plus five. Nine.’

‘What do you know about nine?’

‘The square of three. All the digits in the nine times table add up to nine. 2 × 9 equals 18.1+8 equals 9.3 × 9 equals 27.2 + 7 equals 9.’

‘You’re missing the point, Straker. Think nine. Nine. Nine.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Yes, you do.’

Suddenly, unexpectedly, I understand. ‘You’re the nine unidentified ones.’

Congratulations all round. Nine voices talking together
.

‘Tell me who you are. I want to identify you. I would like to have names for you, characters, places in the world.’

‘We can’t tell you who we are.’

‘You must.’

‘We don’t know. We’re nobody. We only exist as nine. Dead bodies, non-people.’

‘Someone somewhere must have lost you. Someone who doesn’t know what happened to you.’