The Unlimited Dream Company Read online

  ‘Rachel …! I won’t hurt you! Jamie …!’

  Then I saw that they had meant another tenant to share the grave with the dead flowers. The wooden cross had been shaped into the rough image of an aircraft, its wings and tail marked with white crayon.

  But was it my Cessna they were burying?

  I looked behind me at the secret meadow. The children had vanished. For the first time I sensed a premonition that I might be dead.

  Yet from that afternoon, in the deserted arbour, sprang my determination to prove that had I ever been dead, had I drowned in the stolen aircraft, I would now for ever be alive.

  CHAPTER 9

  The River Barrier

  ‘Am I dead?’

  I spoke quietly into the grave, waiting for it to reply. Angrily I stared at the aircraft on its cross, and at the suffocating rhododendrons.

  ‘Am I dead and mad?’

  Why was I so affected by this infantile game played by three handicapped children? I kicked the flowers from the grave, pushed through the dusty foliage and stepped back into the park. Immediately the light trapped below the trees rushed towards me, happy to find something living to seize upon. It played cheerfully on the lapels of my suit, flashed and tripped around my white shoes.

  I was certain that I had not died. The bruised grass behind my feet, the spent light reflected from the river, the cropping deer and the ragged bark of the dead elms convinced me that everything here was real, and not the invention of a dying man trapped in his submerged aircraft. I knew that I had never lost consciousness. I had climbed from the aircraft before it sank, and remembered standing between the wings as the water swirled around my legs.

  I strode towards the river, waving my arms to ward off the light that crowded around me, an over-enthusiastic claque. My premonition of disaster reflected a fear that I had invented everything around me – this town, these trees and houses, even the grass-stains on the heels of Miriam St Cloud – and that I had invented myself.

  I was alive now, but at some point had I died? If I had been trapped in the aircraft for eleven minutes, why had no one come to my rescue? This group of intelligent people, a doctor among them, had been frozen in their positions on the river-bank, as if I had switched off their clock-time until I escaped from the Cessna. I remembered lying on the wet grass, my chest crushed by a pair of unknown hands. Had my heart failed briefly, bequeathing to my exhausted brain a presumption of death on which the three children had played with such effect?

  I was not dead. I stood on the bank, looking at the calm water and at the untroubled afternoon light. A small dinghy had been pulled on to the beach. I stepped on to the sand and eased the craft into the water. Casting off, I fixed the oars and paddled across the quiet stream.

  The cool tide ran with light, masking the black water below the surface. I pressed on upstream, and approached the St Clouds’ Tudor mansion. The river drummed against the boat, clicking against the cutwater, computing some urgent total.

  I was now in the centre of the Thames. Below me, through the opalescent surface, I saw the white ghost of the Cessna. Quickly I shipped the oars and seized the gunnel. The aircraft rested on the river-bed twenty feet away from me, sitting squarely on its undercarriage as if parked in a submarine hangar. The pilot’s door was open, and swung to and fro in the current. I was surprised by the immense span of the aircraft’s wings, the outstretched fins of a huge ray.

  A shoal of silver fish swarmed around the Cessna, swerving along the wings and fuselage. The reflected light from their speckled bodies lit up the cockpit, for a moment revealing the figure of a drowned man at the controls.

  I paddled with one hand, shoulders over the side of the dinghy, my mouth and chin touching the water, ready to drink the acid of my own death. The cockpit was only a dozen feet below me, intermittently lit by the watery sunlight. Wavering shadows crossed the instrument panel and cockpit floor.

  Again I saw the dark figure at the controls – my own shadow cast through the water!

  Exhausted, I sat among the oars on the floor of the dinghy. In the meadow facing me the cattle cropped peacefully at the deep grass. The bank was only a few oar-strokes away, charmed by the gentle tresses of the water-willows. Here I would go ashore. Now that I had confirmed that I was alone in the aircraft I could leave Shepperton for ever. The walk through this quiet meadow with its contented cattle would revive me before I returned to the airport.

  Cooling my hands in the water, I paddled towards the bank. The river busied itself around the dinghy, swarming with thousands of particles, hydra and amoeboid forms, the debris of insects and small plants, minute algae and ciliated creatures. Clouds of waterborne dust swerved through my fingers, on the threshold of life, the animate and the inanimate forming an unbroken spectrum, girding me within their rainbows.

  I raised a handful of water to the sun and examined the festering particles. The excited congregation of a miniature cathedral, they crowded the vivid water. I wanted to shrink myself to a mote of dust, plunge into this pool I held in my own cyclopean hands, soar down these runs of light to the places where life itself was born from this colloquy of dust.

  Without looking up, I waited for the dinghy to run aground. As the last drops of water fell from my hands I raised my eyes to the opposite shore.

  Surrounding me was the immense back of an open river, the silver deck of a sun-filled Mississippi whose banks formed a distant horizon. A thin fringe of trees marked the Shepperton shore, and I could barely make out the half-timbered frontage of the Tudor mansion. Two minute figures stood on the lawn, their faces little more than fading points of light.

  Determined to cross the river, whatever illusions might unsettle my mind, I seized the oars and began to pull away strongly. The water surged around the dinghy, and I felt the craft move forwards. Over my shoulder I watched the Walton shore recede further from me, but I pressed on without pausing. The cuts on my knuckles re-opened, but I was certain that if I continued to row I would break through the perimeter my mind had built around itself. I rallied my spirits, a Columbus urging on his faithless crew, Pizzarro navigating the silent, dreaming Amazon.

  My hands slipped on the bloodied oars. I stood up, alone on this universe of water, and drove the dinghy forward with one blade. Both shore-lines had vanished below the horizon. My blood fell from my hands and stained the water. The clots drifted away in long ribbons, pennants celebrating this Homeric journey.

  The light had begun to fade. Exhausted, I threw the oar on to the floor of the dinghy. The setting sun had reached the horizon, and the once clear air was now misty and opaque. Faint clouds hovered over the ribboned water, as if strange sea-birds were about to form themselves from the blood and breath of my efforts, chimeras that would feed ravenously on my flesh.

  Giving up my attempt to cross the river, I began to row again, setting out on the long journey back to the Shepperton shore. Rushing towards me, the dead elms rose from the bank as if propelled into the air on enormous lifts, the tailplane began its semaphore, the Tudor mansion loomed above the water. With a final swerve, the lawn lurched on to the beach.

  I was ten feet from the bank. Miriam St Cloud and her mother stood on the grass in the dusk, the pale lanterns of their faces held together as if to form a beacon for me. As I stepped ashore, stumbling in the wet sand, they came down on to the beach and took my arms. The scent of their bodies lay heavy over the dark flowers.

  ‘Blake, stand still. You can lean against us, we’re quite real.’

  Miriam wiped my bloodied knuckles. Her face was deliberately without expression, that of a doctor tending a child that has wilfully endangered itself. I could see that she was trying to separate herself from me, seal the door of her emotions in case I involved her in my nightmare.

  Mrs St Cloud steered me towards the house. I expected her to abuse me, and I was surprised by her tenderness. All her earlier hostility had gone, and she embraced me with warm arms, holding my head with a firm hand against her shoulder a
s if comforting her small son.

  Had they watched me all evening, paddling desperately by myself only a few feet from where they stood, a child playing his game of Columbus?

  ‘Everything’s ready for you, Blake,’ she told me. ‘We’ve prepared your room, and we want you to sleep for us now.’

  CHAPTER 10

  The Evening of the Birds

  That evening, as I lay asleep in the master-bedroom of the St Clouds’ mansion, the first of what I then thought were dreams came to me.

  I was flying across a night sky, above a town which I recognized as Shepperton. Below me was the silver back of the river, its long double bend embracing the boatyards and chandlers by Walton Bridge, the Tudor mansion and the amusement pier with its Ferris wheel. I was following the southerly course I had taken earlier that day in the Cessna. I crossed the film studios, where the antique aircraft sat on the dark grass, and then the raised embankment of the motorway. In the moonlight its concrete surface formed an endless waiting runway. Behind their drawn curtains the inhabitants of this small town lay asleep.

  Their dreaming minds sustained me in my flight.

  As I passed above their heads I knew that I was flying, not as a pilot in an aircraft, but as a condor, bird of good omen. I was no longer asleep in the bedroom of the St Clouds’ mansion. Although aware of my human mind, and exhilarated like no bird by the plunging air and the spearlike branches of the dead elms, I realized that I now had the visible form of a bird. I sailed grandly through the cold air. I could see my huge wings and the fluted rows of ice-white feathers, and feel the powerful muscles across my chest. I raked the sky with the claws of a great raptor. A coarse plumage encased me, reeking with an acrid odour that was not the scent of a mammal. I tasted the foul spoor-lines that stained the night air. I was no graceful aerial being, but a condor of violent energy, my cloaca encrusted with excrement and semen. I was ready to mate with the wind.

  My cries crossed the rushing air. I circled the Tudor mansion. Hovering by the windows of my bedroom I saw my empty bed, the sheets flung back as if some deranged creature had struggled with ungainly wings to free itself. I swerved across the lawn and chased my moonlit shadow among the flower-beds, touched the water with my talons and sent two plumes of vivid spray above the drowned Cessna.

  Eager for the sleeping townspeople to join me, I flew over the silent houses, crying to the windows. On the tiled roof of the hairdressing salon a white form huddled. One wing feebly touched the air, as this lyre-bird struggled free from the sleeping mind of the middle-aged spinster lying in her bedroom below. I circled above her, urging this sensitive creature to trust the air. Across the London road, above the butcher’s shop, two falcons clambered along the sloping tiles. The male tested his wings, free spirit of the genial tradesman who lay asleep in the deep double bed above a night store hung with sides of beef and pork. Already his wife had broken free. She strutted across the roof, testing her eager beak on the scents of the night air.

  Encouraging them to follow me, I flew up and down the moonlit street, crying softly to these first companions I had raised from their sleep. Timorously the lyre-bird extended her wings and leapt into the night. She fell towards the garden below, about to impale herself on a television aerial, then seized the air and climbed up to join me. But I was not yet ready to mate with her on the wind.

  All over Shepperton birds were appearing on the rooftops, raised by my cries from the sleeping minds of the people below, husbands and wives wearing their brilliant new night plumage, parents with their excited nestlings, ready to mount the air together. As I soared above them I could hear their eager cries and feel the beat of their wings overtaking mine. A dense spiral of flying forms rose into the night, an ascending carousel of wakening sleepers. Pairs of whooper swans rose from the apartments above the supermarket, secretary birds lifted from the bungalows by the film studios, golden eagles from the grand houses by the river, a flock of waxwings and house-sparrows from the tents of a sleeping scout-troop beside the motorway.

  Followed by this concourse of birds, I flew across the park to the river. The night air was white with thousands of flying creatures. Together we circled the mansion. Miriam St Cloud lay asleep in her bedroom, unaware of the eager suitors I had brought with me. Crying to her, I soared to and fro above the dark garden, hoping to rouse her from her dream.

  I wanted us all to mate with her on the wind.

  Around me the night air was filled with buffeting and screaming birds. The huge flock was filled with lust, driven frantic by this dreaming young woman. I felt their beaks and talons scramble at my wings as they tried to merge themselves with my plumage, share with me Miriam St Cloud’s sleeping body. Their wings beat the air away from me, suffocating me in a vacuum of feathers.

  Losing my grip on the sky, I fell towards the amusement pier, fighting my way free from this tornado of screaming birds. Exhausted, I reached the spire of the church and alighted on the roof. As I furled my wings, I was aware of the immense weight of my body, and of the great feathered arms that crushed my chest and drew me back towards sleep.

  Beneath my claws the lead panels gave way. Unable to spread my wings, I fell backwards into the dark space below, and struck the tiled floor of a small room.

  I lay exhausted between my ungainly wings, surrounded by tables on which the partly dismembered skeletons of strange creatures were displayed. Beside a microscope on an inclined desk I saw what seemed to be the skeleton of a winged man. His long arms reached out as if to seize me and bear me away to the necropolis of the wind.

  CHAPTER 11

  Mrs St Cloud

  I woke to feel a mouth press gently against my lips, a hand caress my chest. River light flooded the room, pouring through the high windows that faced the bed. The morning sun had crossed the water-meadow and glared down at me as if it had been trying to wake me since dawn.

  When I sat up Mrs St Cloud was watching me calmly from the window. She stood where I had first seen her after the Cessna’s crash, one arm raised to the brocade curtains, but all her nervousness had gone and she seemed more like the capable older sister of her daughter. Had she kissed me while I slept?

  ‘Did you sleep, Blake? You’ve brought us some unusual weather. There was an extraordinary storm last night – we’ve all been dreaming of birds.’

  ‘I woke once …’ Remembering my night-dream and its exhausting climax, I was surprised by how refreshed I felt. ‘I heard nothing.’

  ‘Good. We wanted you to rest.’ She sat on the bed and touched my shoulder, gazing at me in a maternal way. ‘It was exciting, though, some sort of electrical storm, we could hear thousands of birds rushing through the air. There’s been a fair amount of damage. But I imagine, Blake, that all the strange weather you need is inside your head.’

  I noticed that she had let a small but glamorous wave into her hair, as if she were expecting a lover. I was thinking of my dream, the vision of night-flying with its nightmare ending, when I had been suffocated within a vacuum of beating wings and fallen through the roof of the church into a strange room of bones. The authenticity of the vision unnerved me. I could remember my swerves and plunges through the air over the moonlit town as vividly as the flight of the Cessna from London Airport. The crying of the lust-crazed birds, my own weeping for Miriam St Cloud, the wild power of the plummeting bodies, the cloacal violence of these primitive creatures together seemed more real than this civilized and sun-filled room.

  I raised my injured hands, which Dr Miriam had bandaged before I slept. The ragged lint, and the chafed skin of my forearms and elbows was pitted with small black particles, as if I had been grappling with a flint-covered pillow. I vaguely remembered running from the church in the moonlight. The harsh smell of the birds, the coarse beauty of the air hung about my body, the acrid odour of sea-birds feeding on still-living flesh. I was surprised that Mrs St Cloud had not noticed the odour.

  She sat beside me, stroking my shoulder. Wary of her, I lay back against the pillo
w, surveying the bedroom into which the mother and daughter had carried me after my futile attempt to cross the river. What made me uneasy was that they had both been expecting me, as if I had lived in this house for years as one of the family and had just returned from a boating accident.

  How could they have been certain that I would return? The two women had undressed me with an uncanny sense of physical intimacy, as if they were unveiling a treasure they were about to share. I watched Mrs St Cloud move around the bed, take my suit from the wardrobe and brush the lapels as if concerned for the pressures of my skin on the fabric, the traces of my body left on this hand-me-down serge. I felt my bruised ribs and mouth – both still as tender as they had been the previous afternoon – and thought of my dream. It had been no more than the sleeping fantasy of a fallen aviator, but my power over the birds, the way in which I had conjured them from the darkened rooftops, gave me a sudden sense of authority. After the years of failure, of never finding a life that fitted my secret notion of myself, I had briefly touched the edge of some kind of fulfilment. I had flown as a condor, the superior of the birds. I remembered my sexual authority over them all, and wished that Miriam St Cloud had seen me as this greatest of the raptors. Then I would have enticed her into the sky, as some shy albatross. But for that sudden panic of aerial lust, and the collapsing roof of the church, I would have mated with her on the deep bed of the night air.

  Thinking of my fall, I asked Mrs St Cloud: ‘Is there a museum here? With a collection of bones?’

  She laid the priest’s suit across the bed, smiling as she stroked the fabric. ‘Why, Blake – are you going to leave yours to it? As a matter of fact, there is, in the vestry of the church. Father Wingate’s a keen palaeontologist. The Thames here apparently produces the most unusual specimens. Prehistoric creatures, fossil fish –’ she pushed my hair from my forehead ‘ – not to mention marooned pilots.’