The Unlimited Dream Company Read online

  ‘The vestry roof – was it damaged in the storm?’

  ‘Yes, sadly.’ She leaned through the window and waved to someone on the lawn below. ‘The police are here.’

  I leapt from the bed and stood naked behind her. Two uniformed policemen were crossing the lawn with Dr Miriam. As the three handicapped children played around the sergeant, he pointed to the cattle feeding in the meadow across the river. Obviously he knew that the Cessna had flown across the park on its way south from London Airport, but was unaware that the aircraft lay in the water no more than fifty feet from him. Its white ghost hovered below the sunlit surface.

  ‘Blake …’ Mrs St Cloud tried to calm me. ‘They won’t bother you.’

  Confused, I was trying to decide whether to run for it, or bluff my way past the police. Miriam had stepped on to the narrow beach and stood there in her white coat, as if shielding the aircraft from the policemen while she made up her mind about me. The children followed her, squealing with forced excitement at the water, these threatening waves around their feet. They ran with outstretched arms, Rachel a small blind aircraft in formation between Jamie and David. Jamie rooted his leg-irons in the wet sand and squinted at the sky, hooting to the rhythm of the Cessna’s tailplane as it switched to and fro in the branches of the dead elm.

  Mrs St Cloud caressed my shoulders, but I was looking at her daughter. Hands deep in her pockets, she gazed up at the window, shrewdly weighing my future in her steady eyes. She had released her hair from its tight bun, and this captive fleece now played freely around her shoulders, testing the river air like the eager birds I had seen in my dream. What beautiful and barbarous creature would she have become, some chimeric being to shock the morning air?

  ‘They’re going.’ Mrs St Cloud waved to the sergeant. ‘Heaven knows why they were here.’

  I watched the policemen salute and walk back to their car. Mrs St Cloud was looking at the bruises on my chest. As she fondled my body, her eyes raiding my skin, I knew she was unaware of taking part in the unconscious conspiracy to guard me. The witnesses of my crash had constituted themselves as a protective family. Stark was my ambitious older brother, Miriam my bride. But if Mrs St Cloud had cast herself in the role of my mother, why was she so openly attracted to my sex? I remembered the tolerant way in which Miriam had watched her mother undress me the previous evening, well aware of her aroused sexuality.

  Taking advantage of her, I pressed her hands to the bruises on my ribs. Her slim fingers barely spanned the blue profiles.

  ‘Mrs St Cloud – while I lay on the beach you were standing here. Did you see anyone revive me?’

  She stroked my shoulder blades as if feeling for the stumps of my wings. ‘No, I don’t think anyone dared to. Blake, I was too frightened to think. You were in the water for so long. I know I attacked you – I was angry with you for being alive, when I’d already accepted that you were dead.’

  ‘I’m not dead!’ Angered, I pushed her away. ‘I ought to leave!’

  ‘No … You can’t leave now. Miriam says she’ll find you a job at the clinic’

  She lowered her eyes to the floor as I placed my arms around her waist. I steered her from the window, like a naked mesmerist with a middle-aged woman in trance. After I undressed her we lay together on the bed. She hid her face against my chest, but I knew that she could smell my acrid odour, the tang of condor’s sebum which the strong sunlight brought from my skin. As I embraced her, placing my bruised mouth on her lips, I was proud of this harsh odour. She tried to push me back, gagging on the stench, her eyes fixed on my bruised skin. Kneeling across her, and placing her legs around my waist, I remembered the huge wings that had carried me above the night sky. I imagined myself and Mrs St Cloud copulating on the air. I knew that there were four of us present, locked in a sexual act that transcended our species – she and I, the great condor, and the man or woman who had revived me and whose mouth and hands I could still feel in my skin.

  ‘Blake … you’re not dead!’

  Mrs St Cloud seized my hips. Her gasping mouth was smeared with blood milked from my lips. I wrestled with this middle-aged woman, pressing her broad shoulders into the pillow, my bloody mouth around her lips and nostrils, and sucked the air from her throat. No longer concerned with her sex, I was trying to fuse our bodies, merge our hearts and lungs, our spleens and kidneys into a single creature. I knew then that I would stay in this small town until I had mated with everyone there – the women, men and children, their dogs and cats, the cage-birds in their front parlours, the cattle in the water-meadow, the deer in the park, the flies in this bedroom – and fused us together into a new being.

  Mrs St Cloud struggled, knees kicking at my thighs. With my arms around her chest I crushed her lungs. Unable to breathe, she fell back. Feebly, her heels struck at my calves. As we sank together my mind cleared into a dream of birds, the four of us fusing on the wing …

  Beside me Mrs St Cloud lay exhausted, lungs pumping the sunlit air through her bloodied mouth. She lay on her back, a shaking hand searching for mine, her freckled legs stretched out as if they were dead. Dark bruises were coming through the raw skin of her breasts and stomach.

  I waited beside her, aware that I had nearly killed this woman, who had been saved only by my self-suffocation. Sitting up, she touched my chest, feeling for my diaphragm as if to make sure that I had begun to breathe again. As she dressed she stood beside the bed with her bloodied mouth and chest. She looked down at me without hostility, well aware of what she had done.

  I realized that she took for granted that I had tried to kill her, this mother who had given birth to a violent and barbarous infant, wrestling me from her body.

  Before she left she paused by the window. Almost absent-mindedly, she said: ‘There’s a vulture on the lawn. Two of them. Look, Blake – white vultures.’

  CHAPTER 12

  ‘Did You Dream Last Night?’

  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 secti
on 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.