Forecast (3 page)

“Big head, strong skull, head
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butt like a bull.”

Cringing as he slid onto his bed, he waited with unbearable dread for Dunmore to react. He’d been in the room not forty five seconds and he was about to be torn to shreds. He felt the top bunk rock and two black boots swung down from the mattress close to his head, followed by something quite unexpected. Dunmore threw his head back and laughed. It made Burch laugh too, though he wasn’t quite sure why he was laughing. Dunmore stopped, resuming in brief bursts, before hopping down off his bed, where he crouched down beside Burch. “Get up!”

Burch stopped laughing. The fear returned. “Why?”

“Get up!”

“What if I say no?”

“Get up, man, I wanna show you something.”

Reluctantly, Burch got off his bed and saw Dunmore pointing at photographs on the wall above his pillows. “They’re me babies.”

Burch expected to see photographs of children smiling for their imprisoned father with little messages scribbled on the back in the messy handwriting of infants. Instead, as he moved closer, he saw a dozen hot
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air balloons in a variety of unique designs.

“What d’ya think?”

“They’re…balloons.”

“No, they’re escape.”

Burch frowned. “You’re going to break out of prison in a hot-air balloon?”

Dunmore slapped the back of his head. “I ain’t gonna get far in a fucking balloon, am I? Nah, escape of the mind. On bad days, I imagine I’m on a balloon. It’s quiet, nobody around, jus’ me and nature. It helps.”

Burch saw a sensitive side to his cellmate and that put him at ease. Dunmore looked like a bad character, but he had been proved wrong. Dunmore was a simple man with a simple obsession, which provided him with focus and inspiration. It gave his life purpose and every man needed purpose. At that point, Burch had no real purpose, both on the inside and the outside. Ballooning. It sounded so exotic. And one thing Burch loved more than anything else was nature. He had turned to vegetarianism at a young age, had visited every wildlife park in Britain and had even taken part in a practical conservation project for CSV Action Earth as part of his community service after he’d been arrested for drink driving. He looked back at the pictures of balloons, his eye trained on one balloon in particular shaped as a Marlboro cigarette; a standard one-hundred-and-twenty -thousand cubic feet. The beige butt of the Marlboro sat at the top with the tip at the bottom. Large flames coming from the propane tanks created the impression the cigarette was being lit. Burch craved a smoke. He craved to be taken far away in a hot
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air balloon out into the countryside.

A few days before his release, Burch lay reading his book on his bunk when Dunmore returned to the room in a grump. No sooner had he climbed up onto his bed than he flew into a rage. “Where’s me fucking balloon?” he yelled, his voice so loud it made Burch jump. The bed rumbled and Dunmore climbed down. “What the fuck have you done with it big head?”

Burch could not find the words to defend himself. “I…what? Sorry, I don’t…”

Dunmore hauled Burch to his feet by the scruff of his collar and forced his head round to the clean rectangle patch of wall where a photograph had spent years collecting dust and a Marlboro balloon missing.

“Where is it?” he yelled.

Unable to get a word in, Burch realised he’d never been so frightened in all his life.

Bruised and cut, two black eyes and a broken nose, Burch walked out of prison with stooped shoulders and his head held high. He never looked back. His mother had come to collect him. She needn’t have bothered. She lectured him all the way home about sorting his life out. He didn’t listen much, too absorbed with his souvenir – the photograph of a Marlboro balloon. All he could think about was his first packet of smokes and his first flight in a hot
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air balloon, unable to wait for either.

His first ballooning experience was one to remember but not one to cherish. After a turbulent liftoff in a ninety
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thousand-cubic-foot balloon, they drifted into an invisible wind current and, under the duress of the strong breeze, were swept across the countryside of Great Britain. Despite the settling words of the pilot – she’d observed the frightened look on her passenger’s face – Burch couldn’t relax. It had nothing to do with the dreadful roar of the propane tanks or the fear of bad weather or the inability to control the balloon’s direction and speed or the idea of crashing. It had taken him forty years to realise that he had an unrestrained fear of heights.

Instead, he started designing hot-air balloons, his inspiration coming from the Marlboro photograph, which he’d had enlarged and framed on the wall of his basement, which served as a studio for his work. He lived with his mother in the decaying neighbour-hood of Stanhope. In between working in his basement at night and sleeping at intervals during the day, he attended to his mother because she got ill all the time and demanded a lot of his time. It was one thing after another; hip replacement, pneumonia, bowel cancer op, flu. For years she had been onto him about finding a real job, complaining that his balloon doodles were a waste of time. Then she developed Alzheimer’s and forgot to remember to nag him. The news came as a shock to Burch. But it meant he could concentrate on his career without the party of a moaning mother.

After his first success with a balloon called
Agatha
, a unique marrow
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shaped balloon, he began to network as his reputation preceded him and he started to get in with the right people. Then, something magical happened. Never had he been headhunted for a special project before, not until a smartly dressed man came knocking at his door claiming to be in need of his skills. The man said he would pay handsomely and that Burch’s work would be marvelled over in the aviation world for decades to come. His name was Brad Sutcliffe. Burch needed the project. It would ignite his career. But he worried Sutcliffe would find out about his shady past and change his mind at the last minute. He had no idea that Sutcliffe was an articulate, prudent man and had already done his home-work. He had studied Burch’s resume a hundred times over before approaching him in person. Burch possessed the knowledge, the experience, the drive, though something about his brief time in prison left Sutcliffe suspicious. To be certain, he’d ordered a police reference check on Burch where he learnt about his time in prison. However, that had been a long time ago, enough time for a person to change their ways, Sutcliffe felt. Everyone did something illegal when they were young, he appreciated that. Burch was uneducated. He was unmarried. But he lived with his sick mother and took care of her single
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handedly and that said a lot about a man.

“Well, you think you’re up to the challenge?” asked Sutcliffe.

“You want me to build the biggest ever zero
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pressure helium balloon that is resistant to the extreme cold and can withstand the conditions of the stratosphere?”

“That’s right.”

“I have to say, that’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in all my life.” Burch laughed, a nervous laugh, while he considered the offer. “On one condition,” he said.

Sutcliffe was expecting the designer to ask for more money, to have the balloon named after him in his honour, to be present at interviews, something that would give him worldwide recognition for his involvement.

“I want to fly with you, up there,” he said. “I want to be part of your crew. You agree to that and you’ve got yourself a balloon.”

As soon as he said it, he wondered why. Heights frightened him and he hated ballooning. And Sutcliffe had explained that they would be flying into the stratosphere, some twenty five miles high. Then again, throughout his life Burch had always been a nobody. Flying a balloon into space would make him a somebody.

‘I will need to discuss it with Simon Matthews, my business partner. I’ll be in touch.’

Sutcliffe called the next day and said that he and Matthews had agreed, but there would be extensive training and several seminars to attend, and his payment for designing the balloon would need to be scaled down, though he added that the financial repercussions of success would surpass that of his initial fees. Burch agreed and put his nose to the grind immediately, working tirelessly day and night. Designing a space balloon was no easy enterprise. It took him a few years to come up with a super
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thin, one
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of
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its
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kind helium balloon put together with a transparent polyethylene material, making it more manoeuvrable and less susceptible to bad weather.

Outside the Moorland Links Hotel, Burch found an empty space in the far corner of the car park and filled it with his old van. Ignoring the rain, he darted between the parked media vehicles and ran across the lawn to the hotel entrance, fixing his necktie over a crumpled white shirt. A beautiful woman wearing a business suit with long, black hair and tanned skin caught his eye. She was wearing large sunglasses and was leaning against a pillar in a slight pose. He smiled at her. She didn’t see him. Never mind. He had no time for women anyway. He entered the hotel foyer and hurried straight to the Chandelier Ballroom.

The swell of the English Channel was making Claris Faraday feel boat
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sick. The Wight
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Link ferry from Yarmouth on the Isle of Wight, which crossed the Solent to Lymington on the mainland, was only a thirty
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minute crossing, but she couldn’t take much more. The sea was ferociously alive, the rain coming down like sharp arrows and several people on the observation deck had fallen prey to the spiteful venom of seasickness. When the boat finally docked at the Ferry Terminal Marina in Lymington Harbour, Faraday was pale and lightheaded, though she had managed to prevent herself from throwing up by the pure force of will. Now she was on country road A358 heading towards the Moorland Links Hotel. Just ten miles to Plymouth, the sign stated.

Tears were streaking down Faraday’s face like the heavy rain down her windshield, obscuring her vision, and she was driving at a dangerous sixty miles per hour. The roads were narrow but luckily not busy. Body numb, she felt as though she was floating across the asphalt of the A358. Lime Regis, Exeter and Dartmoor had become a single stretch of blurry land and memories as she headed further west. Dead ahead, a sheep casually walked into the road having escaped from a meadow via a snapped chain
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link fence. It stood innocently in the path of Faraday’s hurtling Aston Martin. Only at the last moment did she see it and instinctively turned the wheel in a last
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ditch effort to save the animal’s life. The sports car flew into an aggressive spin, adding to her giddiness. She heard a thud against the frame of her sports car. Then she stopped. She opened the door and vomited in the passenger foot well.

“Oh God!” she yelled, banging her fists on the steering wheel.

Realising that the sports car had stopped sideways in the road blocking lanes in both directions, she restarted the engine and drove slowly up the embankment. As soon as she stopped, something on her windshield appeared; a trickle of dark red fluid diluting in the rain followed by a little black foot. Then the whole sheep rolled down the windshield, leaving a smear of wet blood as it slipped onto the bonnet and off the side.

“Oh my God, oh my God!” she shrieked, putting a hand over her mouth.

She opened her window and vomited again. Not far off, sheep made cackles behind a hedged fence and she couldn’t help thinking they were meant at her. A cursory inspection of the car revealed a dent on the left side and a cracked taillight. Since nobody came forward to claim responsibility for the sheep, she climbed back into the car. Her clothes were soaked to the bone and the smattering of eyeliner she wore made lines across her pale cheeks. The last thing on her mind at that point was the damn press conference and the approaching balloon flight.

Balloon flights were great opportunities to get some thinking done whilst watching the world roll by. The adventurist had spent her whole adult life ballooning for recreation, viewing landscapes from the equanimity of the sky, setting new world records and unsettling rivals.

The opportunity to join the Fable
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1 balloon team, however, was her first offer of employment in that field. At the interview, Brad Sutcliffe had been able to sense Faraday’s genuine passion for flying. Coupled with her experience, knowledge and grit determination, Sutcliffe was confident he had found the perfect crew member. Piloting a giant manned balloon to the edge of space was just the type of adventure she craved. Additionally, she was a wizard with cameras and technology and had been asked, by Sutcliffe, to be responsible for documenting the experience. The fact that she was the cousin of Simon Matthews, co
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founder of the project, didn’t factor in whatsoever. She was keener than most at training sessions, always first in the gym and often last out, and was super fit and athletic. She had run the London Marathon twelve times and had finished second in the Paris version.

Claris Faraday boasted an impressive resume of ballooning experience with headlining exploits that included tightrope walking between two balloons at fifteen
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thousand feet and ballooning right around the world. The ballooning connoisseur attended at least one hot
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air balloon festival each year to participate in races and the exhibition of evening balloon glows where she would wave at the earthbound spectators. The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, the largest hot
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air balloon festival in the world, was her favourite of them all, mingling with over seven
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hundred balloonists representing some twenty
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two countries.