Later, I hung naked beside Miriam St Cloud, each of us in our bird-dress, our feet a few inches above the undraped altar. Below us the nave was filled with the worshipping townspeople of Shepperton. Arm-in-arm, they sailed through the air above the aisle, a concourse of embracing figures, delightedly filming each other on this last flight. I was ready now to take them into me, into the host of my flesh. I needed their bodies to keep me in flight, to give me the power to move on to the world at large. From there I would fly on across the planet, merging with all creatures until I had taken into myself every living being, every fish and bird, every parent and child, a single chimeric god uniting all life within me.
Beside me hung Miriam St Cloud, her eyes closed, a dreamer floating in her deepest trance. After our marriage I would know her only as one of the lights in my bones.
I reached out to embrace her for the last time. But at that moment, while I looked into her sleeping eyes, Stark stepped into the entrance of the church, his rifle in hand.
He stared up at the congregation circling the dark air of the nave ten feet above his head, and at the huge bird-costumes which Miriam and I wore on our shoulders. His sweat-stained face was without expression, but he moved swiftly as if he had made up his mind long before. He raised the rifle towards Miriam and myself, and shot us each through the chest.
For the second time that week I fell through the air. At the foot of the altar I lay dying among the feathers of my winged head-dress. Above me swayed the lengthening streamers of my still flying blood.
CHAPTER 32
The Dying Aviator
All night I sat against the altar of that derelict church. Trapped by the head-dress of flowers and feathers around my shoulders, I was unable to move, my legs propped uselessly in front of me. Near me, but beyond my reach, Miriam St Cloud lay face upwards on the stone floor. Her blanched skin, from which all colour had been drained by Stark’s bullet, had taken on a nightmare glaze, as if the blood in the delicate capillaries of her cheeks had been replaced by the purulent yellow wax. Shortly after midnight her thin lips parted into a widening gape, a silent rebuke screamed at me by this dead woman doctor.
At first, as we lay side by side in our head-dresses, I hoped that she was still alive. Stark’s bullets had passed through our hearts, but I knew now that I would never be killed by Stark or anyone else in this small town. Perhaps my own immunity would carry itself into Miriam. Then through the darkness I smelled the changing odours of her body – the vivid spice of her sweat and the hot kill of her blood faded into the staleness of common death.
All around us were fragments of stained glass, pieces of apostles, saints and sacred animals which reflected the leaping flames of dozens of bonfires. Through the open doors of the church I could see the jungle burning in the warm night air. Thousands of terrified birds cowered in the branches of the banyan tree as the townspeople piled kindling around the roots and set fire to them. All over Shepperton people tore the vines and creepers from the roofs of their houses. They siphoned fuel from the parked cars and doused the palmettos and tamarinds in their gardens.
Throughout the night they roved the town in packs, axes thrashing at the tropical forest I had so lovingly created for them. I heard the crying of the fulmars, the frightened hooting of the owls, the weeping of the deer. On the wall of the vestry the skeleton of the winged creature trembled in the flames, as if this ancient bird-man dislodged from the river-bed was trying to tear himself from the display case and fly away through the night.
During the hours before dawn the streamers of my blood sank through the air, long tassels that extended from the wound in my chest, gaudy banderillas in a dying bull. Stark’s soft-nosed bullet had struck me in the centre of my breast-bone, traversed my chest and exited in a hundred fragments each carrying a piece of my heart.
Although I was still alive, I felt only a numbing despair. I knew that my powers had vanished, and with them all my exaltation of myself, my pride in being the presiding deity of this small domain and of having proved my right to enter that real world into which I had briefly stepped since my forced landing. Once again I had been plucked from the air, at the very moment of my marriage to Miriam St Cloud.
Already I knew that I was guilty of many crimes, not only against those beings who had granted me a second life, but against myself, crimes of arrogance and imagination. Mourning the young woman beside me, I waited as my blood fell from the air.
At dawn a party of deranged aviators arrived.
‘Blake! He’s still alive!’
‘Don’t touch him!’
‘Call Stark!’
Led by the old soldier with the shooting stick, they entered the church one by one. They pressed their backs to the pillars, frightened that by coming too close to me they might be whirled off their feet into some insane vortex. Their faces were black from the jungle fires, hands raw from the shafts of their axes. They approached timidly, these account executives and bank clerks, hiding behind one another. Having destroyed their clothes the previous day, they were now dressed in costumes looted from the film studios, a motley of uniforms from the air spectacular – antique open-cockpit flying suits, fleece-lined jackets, broad-shouldered airline uniforms.
As they stared down at me, axes raised uneasily in the dawn light, Stark arrived and pushed his way through them. Blond hair loose around his shoulders, he wore the sleek, form-fitting gear of a gunship pilot. He seemed deliberately to be playing a leading part well above himself, the death-angel in a film of aerial Armageddon.
He stood among the fragments of glass and pointed his rifle at me, ready to speed another bullet through my heart.
‘You’re alive all right, Blake. I know that.’ He spoke quietly, in an almost patient tone. ‘Anyway, you’re not dead – I saw those eyes on the beach …’
I could see that he was not wholly convinced I had lost my powers, and half-hoped that I might have retained just enough of my strength to be of use to him in the coming television interviews. I tried to raise my hand, to forgive him for shooting me, but I was unable to move. The pennants of my blood still hung a few inches from the floor, undulating around Stark’s feet, kept aloft by the spirits of the children I had taken into me.
Stark turned from me and stared down at Miriam St Cloud. For all the yellow gape of her mouth and the flies festering on her eyelids, the young woman I had loved was still present in the beads of moisture that soaked her hairline, the mole by her left ear, the childhood scar below her chin. Her worn hands were raised to the wound in her chest, and she clutched at the spray of dried blood like a bride clasping an unexpected bouquet of dark flowers forced on to her breast by an uninvited guest.
Stark looked down at her without a trace of pity, as if he had saved the skies of Shepperton from a bird far more dangerous than myself. I realized then that he had killed her because he feared she might have conceived a child by me and become pregnant with some sinister winged creature who would destroy them all.
Spitting on her feet, Stark beckoned the others forward.
‘Right – take him outside. But watch him in case he tries to fly.’
At last overcoming their fear, they pulled me from the church. Outside the porch they lifted me on to a metal trolley taken from the supermarket. As they propelled me past the film studios, mock-aviators with a dead colleague in his winged head-dress, the pennants of my blood shivered in the cool air. Stark ran ahead, raising his rifle to the sombre trees, ready to make short work of any bird unwary enough to look at him. He dashed back to me, and pushed aside the old soldier who was prodding my head with his shooting stick.
In a hostile but still deferential way, he murmured: ‘We’ll take you flying, Blake. You like flying. I’ll teach you to hang-glide.’
We moved past the war memorial through the deserted streets. Smouldering vines and creepers lay on the pavements, lengths of charred fuse left behind by a demolition squad who had moved through Shepperton during the night. Thousands of blanched flowers c
overed the high street, and the wet plumage of slaughtered birds lay among the blood-stained petals. The arms of the banyan tree still hung over the town centre, but a dozen bonfires lit below the heavy branches had carbonized the bark. Trapped within the blackened roots were the hulks of burnt-out cars.
Outside the supermarket a small crowd had gathered, a raw-faced group of husbands reunited with their shocked wives, children with their parents, dressed in a motley of garments salvaged from dustbins and bonfires. They pressed around me, these executives and shop assistants, who only a few hours before had happily sailed with me around the nave of the church.
A dishevelled young woman in a soot-stained evening dress struck my face with her sharp fingers.
‘Where’s Bobby? You took my son away!’
The others clamoured around me, shouting out the names of their lost children.
‘He’s still alive! Look at his eyes!’
Stark waved them back with his rifle and manhandled the trolley towards the car-park.
‘Don’t touch his hands! He’s a dead man!’
They were stamping on the pennants of my blood that floated from my open heart like the still fluttering tail of a downed kite. The old soldier lashed at them with his stick.
‘Don’t look at me, Blake! I’ll cut your eyes out!’
A chorus struck up among the appliance islands and bedroom suites.
‘Cut off his hands! And his feet!’
‘Cut off his penis!’
‘Don’t touch it!’
Covered with spit, I sat helplessly in the trolley, the tattered head-dress around my shoulders. Stark was peering up at the car-park. I knew that he planned to throw me from the concrete roof, confident that this time I would fall. But did he guess that I would survive, even if he dropped me from his hang-glider?
‘Stark, we need him here.’ The old soldier held on to the trolley, remonstrating with Stark. ‘Without Blake we’ll never escape.’
My mind drifted away into my bones, wandering through my exhausted body as they argued. Spittle stung my cheeks and hand, the pennants tore at my savaged heart as hands tugged at them. I had become a maypole idol, stitched together in my own blood by these grimy and excited women.
I woke again as Stark propelled the trolley along the street. We swerved in and out of the gloomy side-roads. All over Shepperton the remains of winged head-dresses lay against the garden fences, as if during the night an aerial armada had been shot down over the town. Wan-faced people squatted in their doorways, lighting small fires of palmetto leaves. Nervous children slashed erratic slogans in the bark of the palm trees.
We approached the bamboo palisade, beyond which lay the open road to London and the airport. Large gaps had been burned through this once impenetrable forest wall, and the first early risers watched from the quiet windows of the neighbouring village, no doubt mystified by this costumed mob pushing along the wounded body of a winged man.
We raced through a breach in the palisade. But as the excited shouts subsided around me I felt once again that sensation I had known on my first day in Shepperton.
‘Keep on! Don’t give up now! We’ll be on the news tonight!’ Thumping my head with his rifle, Stark drove on these exhausted executives, their wives and children. One by one they faltered and broke into a dispirited walk. Catching their breath, they looked back at Shepperton, which had now receded from them, a mirage miles away towards the south. Beyond the perimeter formed by the motorway the red-brick houses of the village lay on the horizon, a distant perspective on a Victorian postcard.
Stark threw his rifle across my legs. With a cry of disgust he turned the trolley towards Shepperton.
‘You can keep us here now, Blake,’ he muttered to me. ‘But before it’s all over you’ll fly again for the television companies …’
For the next hour we roamed around Shepperton through the sombre jungle streets. Barely conscious, I sat propped up in the supermarket trolley as this exhausted troupe of suburbanites in their aviators’ costumes swerved around the half-empty town. Led by Stark, they charged across the parking lot behind the filling-station, only a hundred yards from the motorway. Shouting hoarsely, they stumbled forward, a shabby light brigade running the trolley over the rough ground, a battering ram they hoped would break through the wall of the world I had placed around Shepperton. But within seconds they found themselves plodding wearily across the largest car-park in the world. The cinder surface extended to the horizon, isolated cars separated by miles of empty parking bays.
Driven back again, we retreated to the town. The post office and supermarket reassembled themselves around us. Determined to prove that his authority over this new time and space was the equal of mine, Stark led us behind the furniture store, where once again we lost ourselves within an endless terrain of furniture suites and kitchen units, archipelagos of appliance islands that stretched to the horizon, as if the contents of all the suburban homes on the planet had been laid out in the infinite sales bay of the universe.
‘What good are you, Blake?’ Despairing at last, Stark lost interest in me. Leaving his troupe outside the car-park, he wandered towards the banyan tree and began to shoot at random into the branches. Exhausted, the townspeople squatted around me in their aviators’ gear, picking at the plumage of the dead macaws that lay among the damp flowers. One by one they drifted off, until only the old soldier with the shooting stick remained. Before leaving, he took the handles of the trolley and propelled me down the high street, left me to collide head-on into the railings of the war memorial.
CHAPTER 33
Rescue
I was alive and I was dead.
All that day I lay in the tatters of the winged head-dress among the yellowing wreaths at the foot of the war memorial. I had fallen from the trolley on to the stone steps, and the pennants of my blood entwined themselves around the obelisk, caressing the names of the men and women from Shepperton who had died in the country’s wars. Unable to move, I waited for Mrs St Cloud and Father Wingate to come and bandage my wound, but they had abandoned me. I saw them across the park, Father Wingate comforting the mother as they left the vestry where Miriam lay. I knew that they had decided not to bury her until I had died again.
Meanwhile the outside world seemed to have forgotten Shepperton. The traffic moved along the motorway towards London, the drivers and their passengers apparently unaware of the existence of this small town, as if the mental screen surrounding Shepperton reflected only their own passing thoughts.
Through the humid afternoon a faint rain fell on the smoke-stained houses, dripping from the blackened vines and palmettos. I listened to Stark rove the streets with his rifle, killing the few birds which ventured from their perches.
The townspeople of Shepperton were hiding in their bedrooms, but at dusk a party of women approached the memorial and began to abuse me. They were the mothers of the children I had taken into me, those girls and boys whose distant souls ran through the dark galleries deep within me and alone kept me alive. The women had brought garbage with them in plastic bags. Their aviators’ suits torn open to the waist, they pelted me with the wet rubbish and hurled dead birds at me.
For all their hate, I was glad that I had taught them how to fly. Through me they had learned how to become more than themselves, the birds and the fish and the mammals, and had briefly entered a world where they could merge with their brothers and friends, their husbands and children.
I lay at their feet, trapped by the winged head-dress. The streamers of my heart rose on the cold air and fluttered at their faces, the lost spirits of their sons and daughters.
That evening I saw the faces of the three crippled children watching me through the damp light, small moons quietly circling each other. They squatted among the dead flowers and macaws, and played with the pennants of my blood. Rachel fondled them, her blind eyes flickering raptly, trying to read their mysterious codes, cryptic messages from another universe transmitted by the ticker-tape of my heart. D
avid stared gravely at the dying jungle that covered the shop-fronts, puzzled by this pointless transformation. Meanwhile Jamie mimicked me, pressing wet poppies to his chest, squeezing the juice between his fingers. Once he crept forward and placed a dead crow by my head, but I knew that he was not being cruel. I had become a cripple like himself.
Under the cover of darkness the children came to life, and pulled me on to the trolley. Rachel’s hands punched my legs, trying to bring them to life.
Fires burned through the dark streets, rising from the upper decks of the multi-storey car-park. The children propelled me swiftly past the deserted clinic towards their secret meadow.
In the grey light I saw the white form of the aircraft they had assembled over my grave.
CHAPTER 34
A Mist of Flies
So the children took me to live in my tomb. I sat like a scarecrow in the flower-filled grave on an upholstery of dead birds, surrounded by the rags of my head-dress still attached to me by the shoulder and jaw-straps. Sections of the Cessna’s wings lay in the darkness on either side of the grave, and fragments of the windshield and tailplane formed a crude fuselage. Even the propeller had dislodged itself from the river-bed and been dragged across the meadow. A bent and rusty sword, it lay on the grass at my feet.
The three children sat in the shadowy arbour, deformed cherubs in a mortuary garden. An almost tangible miasma had settled over Shepperton. The trees were covered by a sombre canopy, as if a grey shroud had been draped over the dying jungle. Light no longer streamed from every leaf. The birds remained silent, hidden among the fading orchids and magnolias, whose petals were now as waxy in their death as Miriam St Cloud’s cheeks.
Dark wings fluttered like ragged sails above me. Vultures were gathering in the dim sky, landing on the yellow grass to feed off the bodies of slaughtered birds. A small griffon alighted on the propeller in front of me, talons pinioning this two-bladed sword. Everywhere a macabre vegetation was emerging. Strange predators moved through the grass. Snakes climbed from the banks of the creek. A plague of spiders cast webs of pus across the trees, drawing silver shrouds over the dead flowers. Above the grave white flies festered in a halo. As a pale dawn filled the meadow I could see shrike attacking the last of the hummingbirds and impaling them on the thorn-bushes.