The Most Amazing Man Who Ever Lived

1

THIS
ICARUS SORT OF STUFF

‘And then I shall leap
from the east pier and be borne aloft by these wings.’ Norman the elder made an
expansive gesture which Norman the younger found most encouraging. ‘Up I shall
go.’ The daddy’s right hand described the flight path. ‘Across and around.’ His
left hand joined in with much gusto. ‘And away.’ The hands flew off in the
direction of France then came home to roost in the elder Norman’s trouser
pockets.

‘Gosh,’
said his son, ‘and with only the aid of these.’

The
daddy stroked the wings upon the garage workbench. ‘The aid of these alone.’

Young
Norman sighed a sigh. ‘Gosh,’ he said once more, ‘imagine that.’

‘Something
to tell your school chums, eh?’ The daddy nudged his son confidentially in the
rib area. ‘Not many of them got fathers who can fly, I’ll bet.’

Young
Norman shook his head. ‘Not many,’ he said, ‘but a few.’

‘A
few?’

‘Well,
Blenkinsop’s father claims to have mastered the Lamaist art of levitation. Charlie
Huxley’s brother has a pair of zero-gravity trousers and Boris Timms says he
has a priestly uncle who can inflate his stomach with helium and propel himself
through the sky by fa—’

His
father cut him mercifully short. ‘Not many got feathered wings, by the sound of
it.’

Young
Norman shook his head. ‘Not many,’ he agreed.

The
elder Norman ran a loving knuckle across the feathered wings.

‘Fine
big wings these,’ he said, gazing wistfully through the cobwebbed garage window
towards the lonely sea and the sky. ‘Fine big wings.’

On his way to school the
next morning the boy Norman thought a lot about the conversation he’d had with
his father.

Could
it be, he asked himself, that the daddy has truly cracked it regarding this
wing business, or is this just another of the sad flights of fancy to which the
old chap has become subject of late?

The
annual
Skelington Bay East Pier Man-Powered Flight Competition
always
drew the holiday-makers. And the annual £1000 prize for the first successful
one-thousand-foot flight always drew the town’s eccentrics. But no-one was
actually expected really to win the money. It was all just a bit of summertime
jolly, wasn’t it? Men in cardboard planes and dicky-bird costumes jumping into
the sea to raise money for charity.

A bit
of jolly. That was all it was.

Although
it didn’t
have
to be.

Norman
strode on, chewing gum and bouncing a tennis ball.

It
didn’t
have
to be.

As it was Thursday it was
Science for 3A.

Norman
sat at the back of the class, that he might observe whilst remaining
unobserved.

Mr
Bailey bashed the blackboard with his baton. ‘Boyle’s law,’ said he, in the
voice of one who really cared about such things. ‘What do we know of Boyle’s
law?’ The eyes behind his pebbled specs searched in vain for that little island
of enlightenment set in the sea of vacant faces. ‘Blenkinsop?’

Blenkinsop
the Buddhist pulled his finger from his nose. Examining the yield he said,
‘There is only one law and that is the law of dharma.’

‘The
law of dharma.’ Mr Bailey beckoned with his baton. ‘Come hither, boy, and have
your trousers dusted.’

Sheltering
behind Bilson’s gargantuan frame, Norman leaned upon an elbow and stared out of
the window. His thoughts were far from the horrors of corporal punishment. They
were sailing high above with Timms’ clerical uncle and a veritable flock of
airborne relations. There couldn’t be too much to this flying lark if you
really put your mind to it. A lad of his capabilities should surely be able to
figure it out.

On Friday there was Games.
PE it was called.

3A’s
pimply personnel stood shivering in the drafty hall that springtime never
reached. Those whom loving mothers had furnished with ‘notes’ sat grinning from
the safety of the stage. Those with parents who believed in healthy exercise
and team spirit shuffled in their vests and shorts and viewed the exalted ones
with a healthless mixture of envy, loathing and contempt.

Mr
McLaren the games teacher sprinted knees-high into the echoing hall. Clad in
the regulation-issue soiled track suit and evil-smelling plimsolls, his arrival
brought dread to the non-athletic noteless.

‘Vaulting
horse, Tompkins and Turner. At the
double!’
The order was barked out in
that staccato ex-national-service voice that you don’t hear much of nowadays.
‘Straight line, the rest of you. Number off. Wait for  . . it.
Now!’

‘One,
two, three, four,’ went the quavery wavery voices, to end with the big, deep
‘twenty-three’ of Teddy Bilson.

‘And
go!’

Number
One was stubby Harry Hughes. His dash towards the towering horse was determined
and courageous. His would be the only broken collar bone of the day.

Norman
was unlucky Thirteen in the quivering queue. ‘A man with feathered wings might
soar above that vaulting horse with next to no effort at all,’ he confided to
the trembling Twelve.

‘To paraphrase
the late great Winston Churchill,’ the Dozen replied, ‘Give us the wings and we
will finish the job.’

‘Twelve!’
screamed the martial Mr McLaren.

‘God
bless me,’ whimpered Number Twelve, making the sign of the cross.

‘With
wings all things are possible,’ Norman informed Number Fourteen, a big lad with
a small moustache. ‘All things to do with flying, anyhow.’

Number
Fourteen nodded. ‘Wings have their uses,’ he said, ‘this cannot be denied. But
I am approaching fifteen years of age and beginning to take a lively interest
in girls.’

Norman
stroked his hairless upper-lip area. ‘Further conversation with you on the
subject of wings would probably be wasted then, I suppose.

Number
Fourteen nodded again. ‘Isn’t there a bird in South America called the Giant
Condom?’ he asked.

‘Thirteen!’
bawled the games teacher.

‘God
bless me!’ mumbled Norman. And this gave him a sudden idea.

At 5.30 a.m. on the
following Sunday, young Norman, damp with dew and ring-fingered by carrier
bags, laboured to the top of Druid’s Tor and stood puffing and panting to await
the arrival of the new sun.

Below
him Skelington Bay, holiday town of his birth, lurked in sea mist, its twin
piers paddling in the tide.

Above
him the sky. The big, wide-open sky.

Just
waiting.

It was
the ‘God bless
me’
of Games that had brought young Norman here. It had
recalled to him a painting he’d once seen during a force-marched school outing
to the town hall.

It was
one of those huge Pre-Raphaelite jobbies that municipal councils used to snap
up for a song before the War, to cover the cracks in their walls. It was of
angels evident at the birth of the Christ child. And the thing about these
angels was that, although togged up in what appeared to be old curtains and
bereft of footwear, they had, as Norman remembered quite clearly,
dirty
great wings of the feathered variety growing out of their backs.

‘Fine
big wings,’ as his father would have said.

And the
recollection of these fine big wings had set young Norman thinking.

Now,
angels could fly. This was well known. But, according to the Bible, no matter
how good you were while alive, your chances of becoming an angel when dead were
somewhat less than zero. The old harps and wings were not doled out to the
blessed the way cartoonists would have us believe. You
joined
the
angels. You did not become one.

And of
course you did have to be dead first.

And of
course, if you were dead, then you couldn’t win the man-powered flight
competition and fly off with the £1000 prize.

But
what say, if you could communicate with angels? Contact them, with a view to genning
up on the various hints and wrinkles concerning the art of ‘winging it’? Surely
that would give you the supernatural edge on the opposition.

Of
course it would.

And so
it was to this end that Norman had spent the greater part of Saturday in the
reference section of Skelington Public Library. He’d drawn a bit of a blank
with the Christian tracts though. These spoke a lot about prayer and guilt and
living a blameless life, but nothing about how you could get any one-on-one
chit-chat with any of the feather-clad choirs eternal. In &ct, the would-be
aviator was just on the point of chucking the whole thing in and making off to
the Wimpy Bar, when the new librarian, the one on the Job Opportunities Scheme,
skulked over with a large buff-coloured book and thrust it into his hands.
‘Check this out, kid,’ he said. ‘I think it’s just what you’re looking for.’.

Norman
eyed the book with interest.

Its
title was
The Necronomicon.

Now it
is a fact well known amongst satanic circles, or wherever two or three
heavy-metal fans are gathered together, that every borough library secretly
possesses a copy of
The Necronomicon.
Not the original, of course, bound
in the skin of a sacrificial virgin and penned in the blood of the mad Arab Abdul
Alhazred. The Vatican has
that.
But most often they possess one of the
forbidden Latin translations of Olaus Wormius, revised into English and
published as a part-work for private subscription by Marshall Cavendish, or
some such.

Of
course the librarians, who have taken whatever binding oath they take during
their secret initiation ceremonies, won’t let you see it. They’ll swear blind
that it doesn’t even exist.

But
then they would, wouldn’t they?

The new
librarian on the Job Opportunities Scheme was wearing a
Deicide
T-shirt
with the legend DEAD BY DAWN
[1]
printed across the front. His name was Chris and he had lots of hair. And he’d
only been working there for a day. ‘Use the photocopier and go for it,’ was his
advice.

So
Norman had done and was doing so even now.

To the
early-rising passer-by, the dog-walker or poet seeking inspiration upon the
misty hilltop, the youth would have presented a most disconcerting spectacle.
Now stripped down to his Y-fronts and crouched within the confines of the
lop-sided pentagram he’d just chalked out, his Thermos flask and sandwich box
before him and a selection of anything he could find that looked remotely
‘occult’ spread whither and so, he clutched his photocopies in one hand and
began to make wild gestures with the other.

And to
intone.

The way
you would.

‘Hail
unto thee, thou Ancient Ones,’ he went, as best he could, with the unbroken
voice and the touch of catarrh. ‘Hail unto thee, Absu Mummu Tiamet, Nar Maturu,
Yog Sothoth, Nyarlathotep and the like. I conjure thee, thou fungous
abnormalities too hideous for the grave’s holding. Rise from your haunts of
forever night and summon unto me.’

It had
to be said that there was a distinct air of blasphemy about all this. And an
older and wiser fellow might perhaps have thought twice before seeking to
invoke the powers of darkness and taking the risk of eternal damnation, just to
win the first prize in a man-powered flight competition.

But
then, when you’re fourteen, you do that sort of thing. We all do. Indeed who
amongst us can truly put their hand upon their heart and swear that they never
once offered up a sacrifice to Satan during their teenage years?

Not
many!