The Sleepwalker's Introduction to Flight Read online

  She thinks the sun shines out of her son’s fundament. It doesn’t. It shines down from a clear blue sky through the lens of Edmund’s merciless magnifying glass on to the fur or skull of whichever luckless rodent Edmund has in his power. Like most classic fledgling psychopaths, Edmund has graduated from ants and spiders and likes to bind small rodents in Sellotape before griddling their brains.

  He also enjoys downloading Japanese bondage pornography on to his computer – I’ve checked his internet Favourites file.

  The arrangement is that he leaves me alone to surf the net. For the past few weeks I’ve been conducting an online investigation into the history of the Clavadistas in the blissful solitude of his bedroom. Edmund only puts in an appearance when Mrs Kerr brings the lunch tray.

  Naturally, I’m forbidden to touch it.

  I detest watching Edmund eat but it’s hard not to, given that he regards lunch as some kind of spectator sport.

  ‘I’m having one of my ham sarnies now,’ he announces.

  I keep my back to him while I click away. ‘You realize that the Clavadistas of La Quebrada dive from a height of a hundred and twenty feet into just eleven feet of water? And that’s if they’re lucky. It’s a shallow inlet, so the trick is to synchronize your dive with the incoming waves. You can’t pull out if your timing’s off. And then there’s the wind to consider. It’s pretty amazing really. Get one tiny thing wrong and . . .’

  ‘. . . You’re a jam sandwich. A great soggy jam sandwich,’ slobbers Edmund. ‘This one’s ham, though, soda bread and wholegrain mustard with honey-glazed ham.’

  I’m trying to shut him out but my stomach is growling like a junkyard dog.

  ‘It says here that there’s been cliff-diving in La Quebrada since the eighteenth century and that it may have had a religious, or at least, spiritual significance. Even today Clavadistas still say a prayer at the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe at the top of the cliff. The dive is an act of faith. I find that very inspiring.’

  ‘I’m going to have a biscuit now. Will it be the milk chocolate Hob-Nob, the Ginger Nut, or the Jammy Dodger? Hmm, I wonder, I wonder, wonder, wonder . . .’

  I don’t wonder at all. He’s going to eat all three of them along with everything else on the congested tray.

  ‘In Matzelan, this old guy, Mario Gonzales Aguilar, is still diving at sixty-seven. How cool is that?’

  ‘Perhaps I should offer Mikey one today?’

  I know it’s a trap, but I can’t help myself: I spin in the chair, eyes wide. I should have known better. Edmund has only forced me to turn so that I can watch him take a bite from the enormous wedge of Black Forest gateau in his chubby fist.

  In my own back garden I pace the lawn, assessing our trees, finally fixing on the large oak by the hedge. It’s climbable and there’s a good, solid, overhanging branch about twenty feet high.

  ‘What’s up with you then, silly-arse?’ In a clatter of loose metal parts Gerry hauls out the old Punch mower. I’m always pleased to see Gerry, so I grin; the kind of smile that actually stretches my face and makes the cheek muscles ache. They’re not used to the exercise.

  Gerry’s a true mate.

  Not a friend exactly, because I’m only fifteen and he’s about seven or eight years older, but he’s a lovely man. That sounds a bit gay but I don’t think I am gay. I’m fond of Gerry because he treats me like what I say matters, like an adult. And he lets me read his comics.

  Gerry drives a battered Toyota pick-up with an exhaust like a Swiss cheese and comes about once a fortnight to mow our lawn – we never quite know when. My father employs Gerry because he’s the only person capable of breathing life into the antique Punch mower in the garage. For some reason, my father believes that a lawn should have stripes, and proper stripes can only be achieved with an old-fashioned motor-mower.

  Gerry adores plants and dreams of becoming a botanist, but to the world at large he’s just a greasy-haired, oily-fingered layabout with no future and an antisocial car. My mother hates Gerry for almost exactly the same reasons that I adore him. She thinks he’s a man with tattoos; she doesn’t know the half of it. Gerry is the tattooed man – an entirely different thing. In the garden, Gerry wears a black T-shirt and cut-away black jeans, but I’ve seen Gerry’s body in all its glory. Sometimes when it’s hot and my parents are out, he strips off down to his grey undercrackers and sunbathes. Every inch of Gerry’s body other than his face, neck, and possibly the groin area, is covered in virulent green, red and blue ink. I’m not sure about ‘down there’ because Gerry has never offered to show me. I’m curious of course, but don’t like to ask.

  The thing about Gerry is that he’s a work of literature as well as being a work of art. I’m not talking D. H. Lawrence here, more DC Comics. Some of Gerry’s vignettes are every bit as exquisitely rendered as Art Kane’s finest. I know, because over the past few years Gerry has been smuggling all the latest issues in to me.

  I adore Marvel’s Iron Man because he’s physically knackered but I especially like DCs new version of Batman, the Dark Knight, because he’s so . . . well, dark and psychologically flawed.

  Gerry is himself, a cartoon character. If you care, or can bear, to inspect the miniscule but lovingly rendered frames adorning his torso you’ll begin to understand him. You can see imprinted across his skin the chronicles of Gerry, a potted history as it were. There’s a four-frame sequence radiating from his right shoulder in which he qualifies from the world’s top universities and receives doctorates from Oxford, Stamford, Harvard and, oddly, Hull. Elsewhere, Gerry is depicted discovering a new species of orchid in the jungles of South America. In another ten-frame sequence across the small of his back you can see how Gerry’s cultivar-breaking viruses have become the wonder of the tulip world. Gerry later develops a new strain of green rye-grass which is found to have anti-oxidant and anti-ageing properties. After a great many floralogical adventures Gerry establishes a botanical academy before retiring, aged thirty, to a Bruce-Wayne-style mansion, complete with rose gardens and a fabulous collection of souped-up ride-on motor-mowers. The curious thing about these comic-book fantasies is that they all, without exception, depict Gerry sans tattoos.

  Gerry knows everything about plants and horticulture but what prevents him getting the first foot on the ladder to success are the very tattoos he sports. Gerry is a contradiction in his own skin.

  ‘Hey Gerry,’ I shout, ‘know anything about Clavadistas?’

  Gerry silently rolls a thin squirt of tobacco in a Rizla sheath, licks it shut and lights up. He takes a puff and exhales a sad sigh of smoke. ‘Aspidistras, I know everything about aspidistras. Clavadistas, I’ve never heard of.’ He sucks away, decimating the slim roll-up like the fuse of a cartoon bomb.

  ‘It’s a brotherhood of high-divers and I’m going to be one.’

  ‘Good for you,’ he says, tweezing the burning ember between blackened finger and thumb, pocketing the remainder. ‘How can I help?’

  I point up at the thick oak branch high above our heads. ‘We’re gonna need a stack of planking to build a stable platform off there,’ I announce, ‘and a kid’s paddling pool.’

  Gerry considers this for a moment. ‘That shouldn’t be a problem, Mikey,’ he says.

  Honestly, you’ve just got to love someone like that.

  Four

  Unlike my father, I’m not good with money. On Friday mornings he gives me the princely sum of five pounds, which I have to sign for in a scary-looking leather-bound ledger. I suspect this is a bit under the odds. I only have Edmund Kerr to go by and it’s about a quarter of what he gets. I supplement it by doing little jobs that are too small for Gerry, like weeding for the Postlethwaites (but I suspect they’re ripping me off).

  I’m not sure I understand the principle of pocket money – what does it actually represent? If it’s remuneration for all the work I do around the house like washing and drying, taking out the rubbish, polishing the shoes, etc., then I’m earning considerably less than t
he minimum hourly rate and may need to alert the European Court of Human Rights. If, on the other hand, it’s simply a token of the pride and joy I bring my parents then I’m on to a bit of a winner here.

  Two or three pounds of the bounty usually goes straight to Edmund for letting me mooch around his house and use his computer. The rest I spend on myself.

  I’m in a kind of halfway house at the moment; a moist, watery shed between the states of childhood and manhood. I spend my money on a combination of sweets, chewing gum, Airfix models and, occasionally, fags. I bought a six-pack of Stella Artois once but didn’t much like the taste and nearly threw up. I gave the remaining cans to Gerry with the words, ‘Here, have a Stella . . . or trois.’ I don’t think he got it.

  I’ve been avoiding Edmund for a couple of weeks, so I can save up for lumber and nails, which are surprisingly expensive – even the two-by-four offcuts.

  ‘What? You thought this stuff grew on trees or something?’ said Len, the old yardman in the green coat as we loaded up Gerry’s Toyota – really, he’s wasted on Jewsons.

  Gerry’s up in the oak with a saw while I direct operations from below. I haven’t supplied him with specs or a plan or anything but I’m confident that Gerry knows exactly what he’s doing.

  ‘And what exactly do you think you’re doing up there in my bloody tree?’ My father stands at the top of the lawn, quivering like a rabid mastiff.

  ‘I have no idea, Mr Hough, it’s a project of Mikey’s.’

  Thanks, Gerry, I think, shuddering at the ‘H’ word – Hough. It’s my surname too but I loathe it. I don’t mind my first name at all; it’s classical, biblical and capable of contraction to Mike or Mikey without being harnessed to some disagreeable rhyming couplet, unlike, say, Hank, Billy or Enus. But Hough – pronounced ‘Hoff – sounds like a punch in the stomach, or an elderly asthmatic, hawking up in the morning.

  Hough. Hough. Hough. Even though my father has been able to trace our ancestry back to the Doomsday Book, I wish it could have been something cool, like Blaze, or Bond, or Flint. My mother was a Cooper, which is not so bad. They say that most Anglo-Saxon surnames reflect an occupation of some sort; you can find millions of Smiths in the phone book and you know exactly what their ancestors did in the medieval villages. The same is true of Bakers, Butchers, Farmers, Brewers, Fowlers and Farriers. You have to wonder what the Houghs got up to though. Personally, I think they just sat there coughing up sputum and passing on disease: ‘You need a barrel made, Aelfric? Go thou and see Cooper, second wattle-and-daub lean-to on the right. Arrows? Speak with Fletcher there. Ah, Wulfsten, you want the bloody flux? Get a couple of days off work? Go and talk to Ethelred Hough, he’ll sort you out.’

  The twentieth-century Hough is still standing at the top of the lawn, waiting for a response, tapping a brown brogue, huffing.

  ‘Gerry’s helping me build a tree house.’

  My father’s eyes narrow.

  ‘It’s okay, I bought the stuff with my own money, from Jewsons. I’ve got receipts.’

  He clicks his fingers. I retrieve the crumpled papers from my pockets and hand them over. My father pockets them, no doubt for his accountant as a tax write-off, and purses his lips before gazing up at Gerry again. I can tell that he thinks Gerry sitting on a high branch armed with a hammer and saw is a recipe for disaster. ‘I hope you know that I’m not paying you for this, Gerry.’

  ‘I do know that, Mr H.’

  ‘Good. And if you saw that branch off while you’re sitting on the wrong end, you’ll break your neck. And I’m not insured against cretinism.’

  ‘I’m aware of that too, Mr H. I was just fixing up a two-by-four platform for the lad – on my own time.’

  ‘Good. Well, on your own time then.’ With that, my father disappears back into the house through the French windows.

  Our positions are reversed: I’m now the one twenty-foot up the oak, standing gingerly on Gerry’s cobbled-together platform. The overlapping timbers creak and shift under my feet as I inch towards the edge, shivering in my trunks. ‘Now I know why they call things Gerry-built,’ I say. It’s not a good joke, not even close; I only say it because I’m shit-scared and gibbering.

  ‘Shut the fuck up and do your dive,’ wheezes Gerry from the lawn below. He’s out of breath from inflating the paddling pool; he takes a quick drag on a skeletal Rizla to open up the bronchials. ‘Get on with it, Mikey. I’ve got somewhere else to be this afternoon.’

  Gerry’s got the garden hose pumping away in the plastic pool, the two-and-a-half-foot-high walls are overflowing with crystal-clear water. At this altitude it resembles a stray contact lens. I suddenly realize what a ballsy little bastard the Great Miguel actually is, given that he’s spent his career flinging himself from twice this height on a daily basis.

  ‘Do it or don’t do it,’ orders Gerry. ‘Just make it quick.’

  From this height I can look right into the second-floor windows of Coombs’s Victorian Gothic monstrosity over the hedge. I gaze up a floor to the window of the nearest turret – blank like all the rest. I’m just wasting time here, trying to delay the inevitable. I labour to control my breathing and try to visualize a perfectly pancake-flat entry into the pool. My heart is beating furiously now; I focus on the shingled turret next door instead of the target below. Suddenly the spectral figure of a young girl in flowing white appears at the grey-green window. She looks me dead in the eyes, pleading, mouthing a message; pounding at the pane as though trying to escape.

  I blink and she’s gone.

  The platform creaks ominously as I shift my weight. ‘Ah . . . Gerry, I think I just saw a ghost.’

  ‘Was it yours?’

  ‘Uh . . . no. I don’t think so.’

  ‘Then you got nothing to worry about. Just fucking dive, will you?’

  I curl my toes over the edge. ‘Ah . . . I definitely saw something weird next door.’

  Gerry cranes his head, peering up like a worker-ant on the sniff of sugar. ‘You’re panicking, Mikey, hyperventilating. I can hear it from down here. You know what? I think this is a really bad idea. Just stay where you are and I’ll come and get you, okay?’ Gerry begins to ascend the little wooden batons that we’ve nailed to the trunk.

  There’s no way I’m going to let Gerry coax me down from the oak like a stranded kitten, or worse, carry me down. So I push off from the platform, launching myself in a flat-dive out into space.

  Five

  I’m conscious and can sense that time has passed but it’s not like waking from a dream where there are random memories, fractured impressions and snatches of thought. A nano-second ago there was nothing: no sense of self. In an instant I’m here and aware. I think therefore I am.

  There’s no fuzziness, either, no blurry, confused aftereffects – I’m not God or Napoleon, I know with crystal clarity that I’m Mikey Hough, apprentice Clavadista.

  I also know that I didn’t land right, which is why I’m keeping my eyes shut. I didn’t entirely miss the paddling pool: I remember my lower torso slapping water even as my face hit the lawn with a sickening thump. Here’s something else Miguel should tell the kids – apart from ‘Don’t try this at home’ – ‘In this business, a miss is as good as a mile.’ I can’t feel anything below my neck and don’t want to open my eyes, in case I’m just a head on the pillow.

  ‘Hello, Michael.’ A voice I don’t recognize; nice warm voice with the kind of accent I’ve only ever heard in films.

  ‘It’s Mikey,’ I reply, but the words are distorted.

  Oh Christ – they’ve amputated my body at the Adam’s apple and given me a cyborg voicebox.

  ‘Mikey, is it? And here we are, all this time, been calling you Michael.’

  ‘How bad am I?’ I croak.

  I can hear a sharp intake of breath. ‘Oh, you bad, Mikey. I’m waiting to find out what your daddy going to do when he sees you awake.’

  Thanks for reminding me, whoever you are. Perhaps he’ll just clout me around the head wi
th a rolled-up newspaper and leave it at that.

  ‘Come on now, Mikey, open them eyes. We been taking bets on what colour your eyes are.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ replies the cyborg in a weird tremolo. ‘I think I might have bits missing.’

  ‘Oh, no. You all there, boy. Believe me, you are definitely all there.’

  Whoever this person is, she’s not taking this conversation that seriously. No decent person would do that to a paraplegic, or a mere head on a pillow. Maybe, just maybe, I got away with it after all. I flutter my eyes and am instantly blinded by the glare.

  ‘Ah shit, they green. I lost five pounds on you, Mikey. Here, boy, put these on and I’ll chase the sun away.’ I hear the swoosh of curtains being drawn and the unmistakable sounds of a woman rummaging in a handbag. She gently hooks a pair of sunglasses over my ears.

  It takes me a while but by blinking and squinting through the dark lenses I can make out the shape of my bed and, thank God, the outline of my own unabbreviated body beneath the sheet. I can make out colours too. It’s a hospital room but not brilliant white as I first imagined: the walls and curtains are a glossy utilitarian mint-green, same as my sheets. The only additional splashes of colour come from the tubes emanating from my body: bright reds and a lurid yellow.

  ‘Oh, don’t you look fine.’

  I can move my head a little, so I gaze up into the enormous, shining face of my nurse.

  ‘I’m Aggie – Nurse Koroma to you, boy, and don’t be thinking about giving me any trouble just because you’re awake now.’ She reaches for my limp hand and takes it in her own. I can just feel her dry touch, like the ghost of a handshake. I can’t see her face though, because amazingly, my eyes are filled with tears. I don’t remember anyone looking quite so pleased to see me before.

  ‘Aggie!’ I shout. ‘I need Nurse Aggie.’ I’ve been drinking plenty of water but the voice is all wrong, not quite as metallic, but still strange to my ears.