Black Feathers: Dark Avian Tales: An Anthology(79)

She thought I was the pilot of the little private Cessna she could see out of the café window. In fact I had only come to deliver its cargo—an unadmitted load for an unadmitted destination—some commercial research centre in Zurich or Budapest. At the time I called myself Rose Medical Services, Plc. My fleet comprised a single Vauxhall Astra van into which I had dropped the engine, brakes, and suspension of a two-litre GTE insurance write-off. I specialised. If it was small, I guaranteed to move it anywhere in Britain within twelve hours; occasionally, if the price was right, to selected points in Europe. Recombinant DNA: viruses at controlled temperatures, sometimes in live hosts: cell cultures in heavily armoured flasks. What they were used for I had no idea. I didn’t really want an idea until much later; and that turned out to be much too late.

I said: “It can’t be so hard to learn.”

“Flying?”

“It can’t be so hard.”

Before a week was out we were inventing one another hand over fist. It was an extraordinary summer. You have to imagine this— Saturday afternoon. Stratford Waterside. The river has a lively look despite the breathless air and heated sky above it. Waterside is full of jugglers and fire-eaters, entertaining thick crowds of Americans and Japanese. There is hardly room to move. Despite this, on a patch of grass by the water, two lovers, trapped in the great circular argument, are making that futile attempt all lovers make to get inside one another and stay there for good. He can’t stop touching her because she wants him so. She wants him so because he can’t stop touching her. A feeding swan surfaces, caught up with some strands of very pale green weed. Rippling in the sudden warm breeze which blows across the river from the direction of the theatre, these seem for a moment like ribbons tied with a delicate knot—the gentle, deliberate artifice of a conscious world.

“Oh, look! Look!” she says.

He says: “Would you like to be a swan?”

“I’d have to leave the aerodrome.”

He says: “Come and live with me and be a swan.” Neither of them has the slightest idea what they are talking about.

Business was good. Within three months I had bought a second van. I persuaded Isobel Avens to leave Stratford and throw in with me. On the morning of her last day at the aerodrome, she woke up early and shook me until I was awake too.

“China!” she said.

“What?”

“China!”

I said: “What?”

“I flew!”

It was a dream of praxis. It was a hint of what she might have. It was her first step on the escalator up to Alexander’s clinic.

“I was in a huge computer room. Everyone’s work was displayed on one screen like a wall. I couldn’t find my A-prompt!” People laughed at her, but nicely. “It was all good fun, and they were very helpful.” Suddenly she had learned what she had to know, and she was floating up and flying into the screen, and through it, “out of the room, into the air above the world.” The sky was crowded with other people, she said. “But I just went swooping past and around and between them.” She let herself fall just for the fun of it: she soared, her whole body taut and trembling like the fabric of a kite. Her breath went out with a great laugh. Whenever she was tired, she could perch like a bird. “I loved it!” she told me. “Oh, I loved it!”

How can you be so jealous of a dream? I said: “It sounds as if you won’t need me soon.”

She clutched at me. “You help me to fly,” she said. “Don’t dare go away, China! Don’t dare!”

She pulled my face close to hers and gave me little dabbing kisses on the mouth and eyes. I looked at my watch. Half past six. The bed was already damp and hot: I could see that we were going to make it worse. She pulled me on top of her, and at the height of things, sweating and inturned and breathless and on the edge, she whispered, “Oh, lovely, lovely, lovely,” as if she had seen something I couldn’t. “So lovely, so beautiful!” Her eyes moved as if she was watching something pass. I could only watch her, moving under me, marvellous and wet, solid and real, everything I ever wanted.

The worst thing you can do at the beginning of something fragile is to say what it is. The night I drove her back from Queensborough Road to her little house in the gentrified East End, things were very simple. For forty-eight hours all she would do was wail and sob and throw up on me. She refused to eat, she couldn’t bear to sleep. If she dropped off for ten minutes, she would wake silent for the instant it took her to remember what had happened. Then this appalling dull asthmatic noise would come out of her—“zhhh, zhhh, zhhh,” somewhere between retching and whining—as she tried to suppress the memory, and wake me up, and sob, all at the same time.

I was always awake anyway.

“Hush now, it will get better. I know.” I knew because she had done the same thing to me.

“China, I’m so sorry.”

“Hush. Don’t be sorry. Get better.”

“I’m so sorry to have made you feel like this.”

I wiped her nose. “Hush.”

That part was easy. I could dress her ulcers and take care of what was coming out of them, relieve the other effects of what they had done to her in Miami, and watch for whatever else might happen. I could hold her in my arms all night and tell lies and believe I was only there for her.