Natural Flights of the Human Mind (18 page)

Could poison unhinge the mind, drive someone to suicide? But Celia’s mind had already been swaying, her behaviour erratic and strange, and nobody else seemed to have observed this. A new guilt wrapped itself round Imogen’s thoughts. She should have told someone Celia was behaving oddly.

When Imogen was finally allowed back into her room, she went straight to the box under the bed where she kept the yew berries. It wasn’t there. She lay on the floor for ages, stretching her arm in the dust, but couldn’t find it. She pressed herself flat and peered under, certain that she had just underestimated its position, but the space was empty. Had the police taken it?

‘What are you looking for?’

She sat up with a jump and saw Jonathan standing there looking at her. ‘Nothing,’ she said.

He stood there silently.

‘What do you want?’ said Imogen.

But he said nothing, and she knew then that he knew. Either the police had her berries, or he did, and either way, he knew about it.

Doody drives to B&Q with Straker. She’s can’t remember the last time she drove with a passenger and is nervous with him sitting beside her.

Straker looks out of the window to the side, away from her, and she tries to make herself concentrate on the driving.

‘Is there a library near here?’ she asks.

‘It’s the other side of Sainsbury’s.’

‘I’m going to look up aeroplanes, find out what it is.’ She has been holding the image of the plane in the back of her mind all the time, but only visiting it occasionally for a treat, in case it wears out with use.

She knows it’s not a Camel, but that’s no reason why she shouldn’t have one in her novel. That’s the good thing about the writing—you can have whatever you want.

There’s a Camel in the barn, about eight feet tall, wing span twenty-eight feet, length eighteen feet.

The details are clear in her mind—it will be easy to insert them.

Straker seems to be fascinated by the row of terraced houses on the side of the hill and says nothing.

They are climbing in too low a gear and only just miss a woman who steps out without looking. When they reach the B&Q car park, Doody reverses into a space too fast and hits the bin on the wall behind.

‘Stupid place to put a bin,’ she says, still waiting for Straker to say something. ‘I don’t normally bump into things. I’m fairly safe as a general rule.’

He doesn’t look interested.

‘Do you drive?’ she says.

‘No,’ he says. There’s a long silence. ‘I did once. A long time ago.’

He seems to be telling her something significant, so she waits for the rest. Nothing happens.

They go round B&Q with a trolley, putting in paint and paintbrushes. ‘I can bring the tools from school,’ says Doody. ‘I don’t need to buy any.’

He nods. ‘You should get the electricity put on,’ he says.

‘Why?’

‘Then we can use power tools.’

‘It’ll be too expensive.’

‘No, it won’t. You’re hardly ever there.’

The trolley is alarmingly full. ‘Do we need anything else?’

‘Wood,’ he says. ‘I’ve got some odds and ends that we can use.’

‘OK. Shall we drive out there? I’m sure we could get the car over the grass.’ She wants to go inside his lighthouse. Find out if Maggie lives there.

He doesn’t respond. ‘I’ll take that as yes, shall I?’ she says.

They pass the village and leave the road, weaving across the uneven ground to the lighthouse. ‘It’s not that bad,’ says Doody, as she wrestles with the steering-wheel. ‘But I don’t think you’d get a taxi driver to do it.’

She’s enjoying the novelty of the drive. ‘Geronimo!’ she shouts, as they go up a particularly steep slope and drop over the other side.

‘I hope the car isn’t damaged,’ he says, in a quiet moment.

‘No, it loves it. Gives it a challenge. Can’t you tell how much it’s enjoying the exercise?’ She glances at him for a second before quickly focusing on where they are going. He might be smiling.

Doody stops outside the lighthouse and turns off the engine. They sit in the car for a moment, uncertain in the sudden change of atmosphere, studying the lighthouse.

‘Are those cracks on the side?’ she asks. She doesn’t remember seeing them before. The wind is buffeting the side of the car, rocking them from side to side. All around them, the grass is blown almost horizontal, away from the sea. ‘It’s windy here,’ she says. A cat is sitting just two feet in front of the car, watching them, its ears pricked and its eyes round and interested. They must have only just missed it.

‘I want to go and see the plane again after this,’ she says.

‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ says Straker, getting out and slamming the door shut behind him.

For a moment, she’s disappointed, but then discovers that there’s nothing to stop her going too. She gets out, closes the door, and follows him into the lighthouse.

There are even more steps than she expected, a long flight for each level, seemingly endless. She climbs quickly, wanting to get to the top before he knows she’s come up, but soon starts to get out of breath and has to slow down. She passes through two levels that seem unused, and then arrives at a room with some furniture. He’s not here, so she goes on up.

She examines the next room. There isn’t much space. A mattress on the floor with a sleeping-bag, carefully folded and neat, and a basket at the end with another cat in it. Apart from that, there’s a table and chair, and a cupboard along the wall, built into the roundness of the lighthouse, curved and narrow. She wanders over to the table. Several files are laid out on it, with photographs pinned to them. She picks one up, a picture of a middle-aged couple standing in front of a caravan. The wind is blowing, so that the woman’s hair is blossoming out round her face and she’s struggling to hold her skirt down. They are both smiling, and there’s a feeling of health and happiness emanating from them, which makes them almost familiar. Then she notices the names under the photograph. Simon and Maggie.

She picks up the file and opens it. Inside, there’s a list of dates, some newspaper cuttings, and a letter. She starts to read the letter.

‘What are you doing?’

His voice is loud and very harsh. She freezes. ‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘Nothing.’ For the first time, she’s genuinely frightened of him. He grabs the file out of her hand, and she is aware that he’s a big man, and very strong. He’s staring at her, his eyes fierce. She realises that she doesn’t know him at all.

They stand like this for several seconds, and nothing happens. Doody starts to breathe again, slowly, self-consciously, still watching him. As she relaxes, she begins to think that he’s waiting for her to say something. He doesn’t seem to know how to proceed.

‘Who are they?’ she says at last, relieved to hear that her
voice doesn’t sound too scared. ‘All the people in these files. What are they to do with you?’

He’s a spy, she thinks, and these are his targets. That’s why he’s so secretive. Or an assassin and these are the people he is being paid to kill. Her legs start to shake again, and she wants to back away down the stairs quickly and tell him she hasn’t seen anything.

But then, at last, he moves. ‘Sit down,’ he says, and pulls out the chair from the table. She doesn’t want to, but decides to do as he says. She watches him, trying to decide how alarming he still is. Whatever she saw there for a moment has gone, and he’s just Straker, the idiot man who doesn’t talk much, who mended her roof, who needs a shave.

Yes, she thinks, he mended my roof. He can’t be all bad.

There isn’t another chair, so he sits on the side of the table. ‘There’s something I need to tell you,’ he says.

‘About Maggie?’ She doesn’t want him to know that she was afraid for a moment.

‘Yes. And some others.’

‘The people in the files?’

He nods.

‘So who are they? What have they got to do with you?’

He pauses. There is a long silence. Get on with it, she thinks, worrying that they’re going back to square one.

‘They are all people who died in a train crash.’

This is not particularly helpful. ‘What have they got to do with you?’

He sighs, and his shoulders seem to droop. He looks somehow defeated. ‘I killed them,’ he says.

Doody thinks about this. ‘You killed them?’ she repeats. The villagers were right. He is an assassin.

‘Yes.’

‘How? I thought you said it was a train crash.’

‘I caused the crash.’

His eyes are amazingly blue. ‘You were the train driver?’

‘No.’

‘How, then?’

‘I was flying an aeroplane and it crashed on to the train, which then came off the rails and fell into a housing estate.’

She cautiously starts to breathe again. He’s not a murderer on the run. ‘When?’ She can’t remember a train crash. He’s making it up.

‘A very long time ago.’

‘Oh.’ An enormous relief rushes into her. ‘So it wasn’t recently?’

‘The people are still dead, whenever it happened.’

She nods. ‘But it was an accident.’

He sighs again and sits silently for a long time. ‘No. It was my fault.’

‘Are you sure?’ Why should he take all the blame?

He hesitates. ‘Well, I can’t remember anything, but I know it was my fault.’

‘Did you go to prison?’

‘No. There wasn’t enough evidence to establish what exactly happened.’

‘There you are, then. It was an accident.’

‘No, it was my fault.’

He is determined to make himself guilty. If he doesn’t remember, how can he be so sure?

‘I’d been drinking,’ he says.

She glances down at the files on the desk. There are an awful lot of them. ‘Who’s Maggie, then? Did she die on the train?’

‘Yes. She was a victim.’

‘So why do you talk to her in your sleep?’

‘They all talk to me in my sleep. They are there every time I close my eyes.’

‘Perhaps you shouldn’t close your eyes.’ This probably explains why he keeps dropping off during the day. ‘How many?’

‘Seventy-eight.’

She stares at him.

He looks steadily back.

‘Seventy-eight?’ she says.

He nods.

‘That’s a lot of people,’ she says.

As they drive away from the lighthouse, Doody doesn’t speak. Straker watches her out of the corner of his eye. Her face is closed, slightly frowning, with a single straight line between her eyebrows. There’s a hardness on the side of her jaw, as if she’s clenching her teeth while she concentrates on the driving, and a network of creases runs up her cheek, intricate and well defined.

He counts the seconds of silence, missing out 78. On and up to 178, 278—and nothing happens. What is she thinking? You can’t ignore 78. You can’t just pass it by as if it were irrelevant. The figure hangs above them from the roof of her ridiculous little car. Waiting. Watching. She must be counting too, running over the number in her mind. Has she realised the perfection of the figure? The addition of all the numbers up to twelve.

When they drove out here, she was so excited. Every time they jolted down a hole or hit a bump, she laughed with an abandoned joy that Straker had not seen in her before. He was moved by it. He nearly laughed himself. It was like being in a dodgem car for the first time, separated from Andy. He can remember the extraordinary discovery that he didn’t have to sit and wait for people to hit him. He could hit them. He can still feel the thrill of chasing Andy, the judder that went through him when he made contact, the shriek of excitement that burst out of him. It was a time of innocence, a moment of true childhood. And when they drove out to the lighthouse today, it was almost the same. Uncomplicated.

Now it has all changed.

Everything is curling back inside him, back to where it came from, that twisted, foul interior, which will always swallow any passing innocence. The world inhabited by Sangita, Felicity, Sean and the others. They are there in his head, waiting—they want something from him, everything, more than he can give.

What can you expect? says Maggie. Except she doesn’t. She remains silent, but he knows what she would say if she were to speak.

‘Can we go to see the plane again?’ says Doody.

He looks at her.

‘Well?’ she says. ‘I do wish you’d answer my questions.’

‘No,’ he says. He doesn’t want to think about the aeroplane. It makes him feel as if he can’t breathe.

She drives straight past the cottage. ‘Too late,’ she says. ‘We’re going anyway.’ She stops the car on the grass verge outside the gate. They sit and look at it for a minute.

‘We ought to get the gate open,’ she says. ‘Then we could just drive up.’

‘Yes.’

She smiles. ‘But not today,’ she says.

He’s not sure why she smiles. Is she playing games? Pretending that nothing’s changed? Or telling him that everything’s changed?

They get out of the car. He’s been over the gate many times, but never considered the latch. Today, he looks at it more closely, tries to move it, and it resists him. ‘Oil,’ he says. He wants to stay there, at the entrance to the field, thinking about the gate.

‘Yes,’ she says, and climbs over it.

He follows her unwillingly. With his feet, he feels the ruts under the weeds, and tries to decide if a car could come up here. It’s so long since he’s driven.

Everything is as they left it. Doody stands outside for a bit and examines the roof. ‘You know the plastic sheets you put on the cottage roof for a while?’

Presumably she means the sails. He nods.

‘I don’t suppose you could put them on here? Where the gaps are. So the plane doesn’t get wet.’

He doesn’t want to see the aeroplane. The thought of it sends his insides into impenetrable knots. But he wants to please her, and patching up a roof doesn’t involve going into the barn. ‘All right.’

She is delighted, the lines on her face somehow weakening and lightening, and he feels better. ‘I’ll do it tomorrow,’ he says.

She hesitates. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

‘No,’ he says.

She turns her head away from him. ‘I mean—don’t you have to get to work? I don’t want to take up too much of your time.’

‘It’s OK,’ he says.

She waits for a few seconds. He looks at the barn roof, and the tree overshadowing it. It won’t take long to put the plastic sails up there. He’s familiar with the structure of the roof by now.

‘Well?’

He’s confused.

‘So do you have a job? I’d just like to know.’

Oh. He hadn’t realised that she was asking him about jobs. ‘Well—no.’

‘Unemployed, then. Right.’

Is he unemployed? He’s not quite sure. He’s never looked at it like that.

‘But what do you do all day?’

What does she mean? He has a timetable, he’s busy all day and every day, but it doesn’t sound very much at all when he goes over it in his mind.

He has never been part of the world of working people. Even before the crash, he didn’t have a proper job. Why work when there was an endless supply of money? A vast treasure chest that was going to waste. But it was more than that. He can’t answer Doody. It’s too complicated.

‘Well, that sounds like an interesting activity,’ says Doody. ‘Don’t know if it’ll make you rich, though.’

She opens the doors of the barn and goes in to examine the aeroplane again. Straker stands outside with his back to the barn and looks across the overgrown field.

‘What’s the matter?’ she asks, coming out again.

He keeps his eyes away from her, not wanting to speak, struggling with the dizziness that hit him as soon as she opened the doors and he caught a glimpse of a wing, the seized-up propeller.

She walks round in front of him and stands there, glaring into his face. ‘What’s going on?’

‘Sell it,’ he says, his voice low and harsh. ‘It’s probably worth a lot of money.’

‘No. I want to fly it.’

‘You can’t.’

‘Why not?’

‘You don’t know how to.’

‘I can learn.’

‘Do you have any idea how much it costs?’

She doesn’t reply.

‘Do you?’ he says, louder.

She looks away. ‘It’s all right for you. You can do it—you know how to fly. I’ve never done anything exciting.’

A fragment of memory slips into his mind. Sitting at the controls, flicking a switch, someone beside him, Justin and Francis behind, the sudden roar of the engine—

He finds he is sweating and raises his hand to wipe his forehead. Doody steps back in alarm, as if she thinks he is going to hit her. Indignation flashes through him. ‘What did you do that for?’

‘What—what?’ She is flustered, nervous, pretending it was nothing, that she hadn’t misunderstood him.

He steps away from her and struggles to control his breathing. ‘Sell the aeroplane,’ he says unevenly. ‘Get rid of it.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Why should I? I can do what I want.’

‘You don’t need it.’

‘Don’t tell me what to do.’ Her voice is rising.

He turns away from her. He can feel an alien violence inside him, struggling to emerge, a desire to do something physical, a darkness taking over his mind. She’s so stupid, so stubborn, so ignorant. He grabs one of the doors of the barn with both hands and hurls it shut. The crash blasts out into the air, the barn shudders and the door sounds as if it’s ripping apart.

He watches it shaking for a second, then strides away, wishing he’d never met her, never seen the aeroplane.

Behind him he can hear her voice, shrill, strident. ‘I might have known you’d be no use. I don’t know why you pretend to know about flying. Crashing seems to be more your sort of thing.’

‘Maggie? Are you there?’

Silence. Why does she always have to mean what she says? I’m not used to it
.

‘Maggie, I need to talk to you. I don’t know what’s happening to me. Please say something.’

Sangita is singing: ‘Return home. Breakfast without you—coffee cannot wake me…’

Felicity: ‘What are you singing?’

Mike: ‘It’s Rob Willow, isn’t it?’

Sangita is thrilled. ‘You know him?’

‘
Of course—he was a hero. Best singer/songwriter of our generation, according to
New Musical Express.’

‘Oh…’ Sangita’s voice is trembling with pleasure
.

Felicity is annoyed. ‘There’s more to life than singers, you know.’

More to life? Does she know what she’s saying?

‘Where’s Maggie?’ It sounds like Anne, without Jerry for once
.

So I’m not the only one who misses her
.

‘Maggie—I lost my temper today. I didn’t know I could be like that.’

‘She’s gone.’ Alan is around. He’s older, he understands
.

‘Gone where?’

‘I don’t know. She’s angry.’

‘She’s always angry.’ Felicity’s voice is petulant and childish today, bored, left out by Sangita and Mike
.

‘No, she’s not,’ says Sangita. ‘I like her. We should look for her.’

‘What a waste of time. She’s dead.’

They’re all dead. Maggie—

Sangita sings: ‘The dust of muesli falls on your abandoned key. Return to me.’

Pete saw Andy only twice after the crash. The last time, Pete was just back from hospital with his right arm in a sling and a long, livid red scar down one side of his face. It was still held together by stitches. Mealtimes were difficult, and his mother had to cut everything into small pieces, but didn’t offer to help him eat it. He juggled with his left hand to lift the food to his mouth. It required an enormous effort to control the trembling in his arm, and most of the time he wasn’t willing to try. Eating didn’t feel very important.

His father behaved as if nothing had happened, although he gave up television after the accident. ‘They’re all fools,’ he said one day, when he crashed through the front door. Presumably he meant the news reporters at the gate.

So the three of them sat in the dining room, eating in silence. The dark, highly polished table could seat twenty, and there was a fifty-light chandelier suspended above it, which sent startled shivers of light darting in all directions if a small breeze or air current rustled it. The walls were covered with maroon and white Regency stripes, and antique mahogany
sideboards were placed along the edges, dwarfed by the hugeness of the room. The heavy baroque curtains were draped in such a way that outside light hardly penetrated.

They didn’t speak. At school, Pete had learned the habit of asking politely: ‘Please could you pass the water?’ ‘Would you like the mustard?’ And they had to wait until everyone on the table had finished before the pudding could be dished out. This had no effect at home. ‘If you want something, take it,’ said his father. ‘That’s how life is. If you don’t grab it, someone else will get there first.’

He was probably right. Pete’s good manners didn’t get him anywhere, didn’t prevent his fall from grace.

Andy’s appearance on this occasion was unexpected. For some reason, they hadn’t heard him drive up, so when he marched into the dining room and stood in front of them, it took a moment to register his presence. He waited to be welcomed.

‘Andy!’ said his father, leaping to his feet. ‘Good to see you. Grab a plate.’

His mother rose to her feet at the same time. She didn’t say anything, but she smiled and you could tell that she was thrilled to see him. Pete stayed sitting, feeling uncomfortable.

Andy was very successful, as everyone had expected. Unlike Pete, he’d gone to university and then into management at Marks & Spencer. He’d started at the bottom and gone up and up. They loved him there. He had so many contacts, friends from school who stayed in touch, and he knew how to take advantage of them. Last time he came home, he asked Pete why he wasn’t working.

‘I’ve got a job,’ said Pete. ‘I’m going to start working for Dad.’

‘Well, well,’ said Andy, with a grin. ‘Giving up the playboy life?’

‘Let’s not get too enthusiastic,’ said Pete.

‘There are althernatives to working in the scrapyard, you
know,’ said Andy. ‘There’s lots of other opportunities, even without a degree. You can work your way up. Lots of people do it.’

What he meant was, anything would be better than working in a scrapyard. It’s not a proper job.

This was true, and they both knew it. Their father couldn’t give his sons an expensive education and then ask them to work in a scrapyard. If he sent them to a place where they didn’t fit, had them moulded into the shape of the school so that they became a certain type of person, he couldn’t expect them to come home and fit into his world too. It didn’t work. Pete ended up in limbo, not fitting into either world, despised on both sides.

The embarrassment of parents’ nights, rugby matches, sports days, Founder’s Day, school fêtes. His father dominated fathers’ races, blindly ploughing through everyone else, scattering them in all directions. Pete couldn’t bear to watch him thunder past, leaving injured men in his wake, always winning. He would run up and down the touchline when Andy was playing rugby, yelling abuse at all the other players, purple with inappropriate passion.

And their mother, dressed wrongly, small and ineffectual next to her husband. Pete never saw anyone talk to her. It was as if she didn’t exist. All conversations were directed at her husband. She was just a breeze in the background, a shadow hidden behind him, a silent whisper that you would miss if you blinked. Sometimes, Pete just wanted to go and shake her. ‘Speak to them, Mum. Say something. You’re just as important as he is.’ But he never said it, and never did anything to show that he appreciated her.

Her first act of rebellion was to reject him.

Andy didn’t care. He had such charm, such a hold over other people, that he was able to place himself in his family and make them seem eccentric and lovable. He enjoyed his unconventional background. People admired him for his
ability to rise above it. They talked to his father with respect because he was Andy’s father. Boys in Pete’s class thought his father was hilariously funny, and it was Pete’s fault. If he had discovered alcohol earlier, if it had been available at school, he’d have started drinking then. To hide the embarrassment.