The Unlimited Dream Company

‘I swam from the aircraft,’ I repeated doggedly. ‘Some fool gave me artificial respiration. Who was it!’

‘No one. I’m certain.’ She straightened the clutter of pens on her desk, so many confusing pointers, watching me with the same expression I had seen on her mother’s face. I realized that she was attracted to me but at the same time almost disgusted, as if fascinated by something in an open grave.

‘Miriam …’ I wanted to reassure her.

But in a sudden access of lucidity she came towards me, buttoning her white coat.

‘Blake, haven’t you grasped yet what happened?’ She stared into my eyes, willing a dull pupil to get the point. ‘When you were trapped in the cockpit you were under water for more than eleven minutes. We all thought you’d died.’

‘Had I?’

‘Yes!’ Almost shouting, she angrily struck my hand. ‘You died …! And then came alive again!’

6 (#ulink_25d75d88-2ea4-59c8-87d0-01dd33bc50c1)

Trapped by the Motorway (#ulink_25d75d88-2ea4-59c8-87d0-01dd33bc50c1)

‘The girl’s mad!’

I slammed the clinic door behind me.

Across the park a white flag signalled an urgent message. The section of the Cessna’s tailplane hung from the upper boughs of the dead elm, whipped to and fro by the wind. Fortunately the police had still failed to find me, and none of the tennis players was showing any interest in the downed aircraft. I drummed my fists on the roofs of the parked cars, annoyed with Miriam St Cloud – this likeable but confused woman doctor showed all the signs of turning into a witch. I decided to lose myself among the afternoon housewives and catch the first bus back to the airport.

At the same time I found that I was laughing out loud at myself – the abortive flight had been a double fiasco. Not only had I crashed and nearly killed myself, but the few witnesses who might have tried to save me had developed a vested interest in believing that I had died. The notion of my death in some deranged way fulfilled a profound need, perhaps linked with their sterile lives in this suffocating town – anyone who came within its clutches was unconsciously assumed to have ‘died’.

Thinking of Dr Miriam – I would have liked to show her just how dead I was, and seed a child between those shy hips – I strode past the war memorial and open-air swimming-pool. The town centre consisted of little more than a supermarket and shopping mall, a multi-storey car-park and filling station. Shepperton, known to me only for its film studios, seemed to be the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere. Young mothers steered small children in and out of the launderette and supermarket, refuelled their cars at the filling-station. They gazed at their reflections in the appliance-store windows, exposing their handsome bodies to these washing machines and television sets as if setting up clandestine liaisons with them.

As I stared at this array of thighs and breasts I was aware of my nervous sex, set off by the crash, by Miriam St Cloud and the blind child. All my senses seemed to be magnified – scents collided in the air, the shop-fronts flashed gaudy signs at me. I was moving among these young women with my loins at more than half cock, ready to mount them among the pyramids of detergent packs and free cosmetic offers.

Over my head the sky brightened, bathing the placid roofs in an auroral light, transforming this suburban high street into an avenue of temples. I felt queasy and leaned against the chestnut tree outside the post office. I waited for this retinal illusion to pass, unsure whether to halt the passing traffic and warn these ruminating women that they and their offspring were about to be annihilated. Already I was attracting attention. A group of teenagers stopped as I blinked and clenched my fists. They laughed at my grotesque costume, the priest’s shiny black suit and the white sneakers.

‘Blake – wait for me!’

As I swayed helplessly, surrounded by these tittering youths, I heard Father Wingate shouting at me. He crossed the street, holding back the cars with a strong hand, his forehead glaring like a helmet in the overbright air. He ordered the teenagers away and then stared at me with the same expression of concern and anger, as if I were some deviant usurper he was bound by a strange tie to assist.

‘Blake, what are you looking at? Blake—!’

Trying to escape the light, and this odd clergyman, I jumped an ornamental rail and ran off down the side-street of sedate bungalows behind the post office. Father Wingate’s voice faded behind me, lost among the car horns and overhead aircraft. Here everything was calmer. The pavements were deserted, the well-tended gardens like miniature memorial parks consecrated to the household gods of the television set and dishwasher.

The light faded as I reached the northern outskirts of the town. Two hundred yards beyond an untilled field ran the broad deck of the motorway. A convoy of trucks was turning off into the nearby exit ramp, each pulling a large trailer that carried a wood and canvas replica of an antique aircraft. As this caravan of aerial fantasies entered the gates of the film studios, dusty dreams of my own flight, I crossed the perimeter road and set off for the pedestrian bridge that spanned the motorway. Poppies and yellow broom brushed my legs, hopefully leaving their pollen on me. They flowered among the debris of worn tyres and abandoned mattresses. To my right was a furniture hypermarket, its open courtyard packed with three-piece suites, dining-tables and wardrobes, through which a few customers moved in an abstracted way, like spectators in a boring museum. Next to the hypermarket was an automobile repair yard, its forecourt filled with used cars. They sat in the sunlight with numerals on their windshields, the advance guard of a digital universe in which everything would be tagged and numbered, a doomsday catalogue listing each stone and grain of sand under my feet, each eager poppy.

Now that I was at last escaping from Shepperton – within moments I would cross the bridge and catch the bus to the airport – I felt confident and light-footed, skipping along in my white sneakers. I paused by a concrete post embedded in the soil, a digit marking this waste land. Looking back for the last time at this stifling town where I had nearly lost my life, I thought of returning to it one night and aerosolling a million ascending numbers on every garden gate, supermarket trolley and baby’s forehead.

Carried away by this extravaganza, I ran along, shouting numbers at everything around me, at the drivers on the motorway, the modest clouds in the sky, the hangar-like sound stages of the film studios. Already, despite the crash, I was thinking of my new career in aviation – a course of lessons at a flying school, a commission in the air force, I would either bring off the world’s first man-powered circumnavigation or become the first European astronaut …

Out of breath, I unbuttoned the clerical jacket, about to throw it aside. It was then, fifty yards from the motorway, that I made an unsettling discovery. Although I was walking at a steady pace across the uneven soil, I was no longer drawing any closer to the pedestrian bridge. The sandy ground moved past me, the poppies swayed more urgently against my pollen-covered knees, but the motorway remained as far away as ever. If anything, this distance between us seemed to enlarge. At the same time, Shepperton receded behind me, and I found myself standing in an immense field filled with poppies and a few worn tyres.

I watched the cars speed along the motorway, the faces of their drivers clearly visible. In a sudden sprint, trying to confuse and overrun whatever deranged sense of direction had taken root in my mind, I darted forward and then swerved behind a line of rusting fuel drums.

Again the motorway receded further from me.

Gasping at the dusty air, I stared down at my feet. Had Miriam St Cloud deliberately given me this defective pair of running shoes, part of her witch’s repertory?

I carefully tested myself against the silent ground. Around me the waste land remained as I had found it, yielding and unyielding, in league with the secret people of Shepperton. Foxglove grew through the rusting doors of a small car. An unvarying light calmed the waiting nettles along the motorway palisade. A few drivers watched me from their cars, demented priest in my white sneakers. I picked up a chalky stone and set out a line of numbered stakes with pieces of driftwood, a calibrated pathway that would carry me to the pedestrian bridge. But as I walked forward they encircled me in a spiral arm that curved back upon itself, a whorl of numerals that returned me to the centre of the field.

Half an hour later I gave up and walked back to Shepperton. I had exhausted all the stratagems I could devise – crawling, running backwards, shutting my eyes and hand-holding my way along the air. As I left behind the derelict car and the old tyres the streets of the town approached me, as if glad to see me again.

Calming myself, I stepped on to the perimeter road. Clearly the crash had dislocated my head in more ways than I realized. Outside the hypermarket I picked an overstuffed sofa and lay back in the hot sunlight, resting among the reproduction fakes and discount escritoires until I was moved on my way by the wary salesman.

I walked through the garage forecourt, where the burnished cellulose of the second-hand cars glowed in the sun, a line of coloured headaches. Straightening my dusty suit, I set off along the perimeter road. Two women stood with their children by the bus stop. They watched me carefully, as if frightened that I might perform my dervish dance, surround them with hundreds of numbered stakes.

I waited for the bus to appear. I ignored the women’s sly glances, but I was tempted to expose myself, let them see my half-erect penis. For someone who was supposed to have died I felt more alive than ever before.

‘Don’t take your children to Dr Miriam!’ I shouted to them. ‘She’ll tell you they’re dead! You see this bright light? It’s your minds trying to rally themselves!’

Dizzy with my own sex, I sat down on the kerb by the bus stop, laughing to myself. In the strong afternoon light the deserted road had become a dusty tunnel, a tube of constricting mental pressure. The women watched me, gorgons in summer dresses, their children staring open-mouthed.

Suddenly I was certain that the bus would never come.

The police car crossed the motorway, cruising with its headlamps full on in the bright sunlight. The beams flared against my bruised skin. Unable to face them, I turned and ran away down the perimeter road.

Already I had begun to realize that Shepperton had trapped me.

7 (#ulink_277bbbbe-f0c5-5f21-85ab-232cb59e2f59)

Stark’s Zoo (#ulink_277bbbbe-f0c5-5f21-85ab-232cb59e2f59)

A cool stream ran between the poplars, waiting to balm and soothe my skin. Beyond the water-meadow there were yachts and power cruisers moored along the river-banks. For ten minutes I had been following the perimeter road, waiting for the right moment to make a second attempt to escape from Shepperton. Lined with chestnut and plane trees, the quiet streets of bungalows and small houses formed a series of green arbours, the entrances to a friendly labyrinth. Here and there a diving board rose above the hedges. Small swimming pools sat in the gardens, water sparkling flintily as if angry at being confined within these domesticated tanks, confused by these obsessively angled floors into which it had been lovingly decanted. I visualized these pools, plagued by small children and their lazy mothers, secretly planning their revenge.

It was plainly not by chance that I had crash-landed my burning aircraft into this riverside town. On all sides Shepperton was surrounded by water – gravel lakes and reservoirs, the settling beds, canals and conduits of the local water authority, the divided arms of the river fed by a maze of creeks and streams. The high embankments of the reservoirs formed a series of raised horizons, and I realized that I was wandering through a marine world. The dappled light below the trees fell upon an ocean floor. Unknown to themselves, these modest suburbanites were exotic marine creatures with the dream-filled minds of aquatic mammals. Around these placid housewives with their tamed appliances everything was suspended in a profound calm. Perhaps the glimmer of threatening light I had seen over Shepperton was a premonitory reflection of this drowned suburban town?

I had reached the hotels near the marina. High above the St Clouds’ Tudor mansion the tailplane of the Cessna hung from the dead elm, signalling intermittently as if already bored with its message.

I crossed the road and approached the untended ticket kiosk of the amusement pier. The freshly painted gondolas of the Ferris wheel, the unicorns and winged horses of the miniature carousel gleamed hopefully in the afternoon light, but I guessed that the only people who came to this dilapidated funfair were a few midnight couples.

Behind the kiosk were the almost empty cages of a modest zoo. Two threadbare vultures sat in their hutch, ignoring a dead rabbit on the floor, dreams of the Andes lost behind their sealed eyes. A marmoset slept on his shelf, and an elderly chimpanzee endlessly groomed himself, sensitive fingernails searching his navel as if trying to pick the combination of this umbilical lock, ever-hopeful internal émigré.

As I gazed consolingly at his gentle face a large and flamboyantly dec- orated vehicle emerged from the gates of the film studios, set off rapidly down the road in a dusty clatter and swerved into the forecourt by the ticket kiosk. A hearse converted to carry surf-board and hang-gliding equipment, it was emblazoned with winged emblems and gilded fish. The blond-haired man who had been painting the gondolas stared at me in a self-conscious way from behind the steering wheel, then pulled off an antique flying helmet. He stepped from the vehicle and busied himself in the ticket kiosk, affecting not to notice me.

However, when I walked out to the end of the pier I heard his feet ringing on the metal slats.

‘Blake … be careful there!’ He waved me away from the flimsy rail, fearing that his rusting hulk might collapse under us. ‘Are you all right? This is where you came down.’

He looked at me with some sympathy, but at the same time he stood well back from me, as if at any moment I might do something bizarre. Had he watched my attempt to cross the motorway?

‘That was a spectacular landing …’ He stared at the strong current flowing below our feet. ‘I know you’re a stunt pilot, but you must have been rehearsing that for years.’

‘You’re a fool!’ I wanted to hit him. ‘I nearly killed myself!’