The Unlimited Dream Company (7 page)

Vivid blossoms swarmed among the graves, their semen-gorged petals feasting on the sun. Drunk on the communion wine, I set off across the park, the half-empty bottle in one hand. Beyond the deserted tennis courts lay the river, an over-excited mirror waiting to play a trick on me. Everywhere the air had become a vibrant yellow drum. A heavy sunlight freighted the foliage of the trees. Each leaf was a shutter about to swing back and reveal a miniature sun, one window in the immense advent calendar of nature.

I could see the same intense light in the eyes of the deer that followed me towards the clinic, in the mercurous bark of the silver birch, in the inert trunks of the dead elms. But for the first time I felt no fear. My meeting with Father Wingate had made me understand what it was like to feel a father’s confidence, part of the same assurance I had drawn from Mrs St Cloud. Both of them I had touched with my blood. It was this sure heart’s ground under my feet, my fixed place at last in time and space, that gave the air its vibrancy.

Already I was convinced that the light came as much from me as from the sun.

Calming myself, I reached the empty car-park of the clinic. A few old people sat on the terrace of the geriatric unit, watching with interest as I emerged bottle in hand from the trees. The clinic had shut for the day. I had hoped to see Dr Miriam, partly to tell her of Father Wingate’s closure of the church – her waiting-room would be fuller than usual the next day with mourning parishioners in a psychosomatic swoon – but also to show off to her my new confidence.

Bottle to my lips, I stared at the signposts outside the
clinic, with their lists of diseases like destinations. I waved the bottle encouragingly at the elderly patients. By coupling with them, with the fallow deer in the park, with the magpies and starlings, I could release the light waiting behind the shutter of reality each of them bore before him like a shield. By annealing my body to theirs, by fusing myself to the trunks of the silver birches and dead elms, I would raise their tissues to the fever-point of their true radiance.

The bottle shattered at my feet, spilling the last of the wine across my tennis shoes. Blearily I gazed round for something to do, someone I could bother with my messianic delusions. Beyond the clinic the children were playing in their private meadow, moving in their timeless dream through the overlit grass. David’s broad head drifted among the poppies, square balloon bearing the image of his amiable face. Behind him came Rachel, smiling serenely as she raced through the blood-tipped flowers. Jamie whooped along with his pivoting stride, face raised to the sun as if seeing his expression in its mirror.

Delighted to be with them, I left the car-park and stumbled towards the meadow. The children animated the deep grass with their secret games. Recognizing me, they let out hoots of delight. They swerved around me, squealing as I blundered after them with my arms raised like an aircraft’s wings. I saw a white flag flash between Jamie’s legs.

‘I’m behind you, Rachel …! Jamie, I’m flying over you …!’

I lunged through the grass after them, aware that I was not really playing. If I caught one of these children …

Luckily they slipped past me, trailing the white flag like a snare, and disappeared through the arbour towards the river.

I entered this shady bower and approached the grave, this ambiguous memorial to the flowers. I could see how hard the three children had worked, and just how much my arrival had inspired them. Dead daisies and poppies filled the grave,
and the wooden cross was decorated by a strip of white metal, part of the wing-tip of the Cessna torn away by the current and washed ashore.

Intoxicated by the scent of the dead flowers, I decided to rest in this luxurious grave. The sun was now overhead, and the warmth trapped within this secluded meadow had agitated thousands of insects. Cicadas chittered and screeched, dragonflies leaked electric glimmers on to the stifling air. On a branch of a silver birch ten feet from me sat an unusual visitor to this riverside town, a scarlet macaw whose resplendent plumage barely held its own in the spectrum of excited light. The meadow lay engorged upon itself, swollen by every sap-filled leaf.

Grandly, I lay back among the flowers. As the sun warmed my bruised chest I felt the surge of sexual energy that had pursued me all day. I thought of Dr Miriam and her mother, and of the three children. I needed to couple with them, with the swaying elders and the warm ground, rid myself like a golden snake of my glowing skin. Again I was sure that this abundant life had sprung from my own body, broadcast from my pores and from the hand-shaped bruises around my ribs.

Two fallow deer had entered the meadow and were muzzling the warm grass. In my mind I entered the bodies of these timid creatures. I dreamed of repopulating Shepperton, seeding in the wombs of its unsuspecting housewives a retinue of extravagant beings, winged infants and chimerized sons and daughters, plumed with the red and yellow feathers of macaws. Antlered like the deer, and scaled with the silver skins of rainbow trout, their mysterious bodies would ripple in the windows of the supermarket and appliance stores.

Searching for the communion wine, I rooted among the flowers. My hand came up with a feathery purse, hidden here by the children. I remembered that Dr Miriam had given me no money for my return fare to the airport. About to open the purse, I found myself holding the still warm body of a
strangled starling. I stared at its speckled feathers and limp neck, listening to Jamie’s exaggerated hooting beyond the trees. Irritated by the sunlight, my skin had broken out in an attack of hives. Weals like the stings of invisible hornets rose on my arms and chest, as if another creature was trying to share my skin.

I needed to shed this skin.

I clambered from the grave, brushing aside the cloud of petals that fell from my shoulders, and ran through the grass towards the river. Birds rose on all sides, hundreds of starlings and finches, the fleeing residents of a demented aviary. People were flocking to the park, attracted by this bright Sunday morning, summer doubling itself in the brilliant flowers. Young couples lay together on the grass. A father and his son flew a huge box kite. A troupe of amateur actors in Shakespearian costume rehearsed on the green, and the local arts society was setting up an open-air show, the modest paintings drowned by the raucous shrieking of a macaw.

Suffocating in the overheated sunlight, I ran down to the river. I knocked over a small girl tottering after a white dove. Setting her on her feet, I placed the bird in her hands, and sprinted past the tennis courts. The balls flicked at me on the ends of whips, stinging my eyes. Hoping to see Miriam St Cloud, I ran through the dead elms. A party of sunbathers sitting on the grassy slope cheered me on. I leapt through them, my skin on fire, and dived over a barking dog into the cool water.

I lay in a house of glass, sinking through endless floors of descending water. Above me was an illuminated vault, an inverted gallery of transparent walls suspended from the surface of the river. Carried by the welcoming water, diatoms jewelled the shoals of fish who had come to greet me. I searched for my legs and arms, but they had vanished, transformed into a powerful tail and fins.

I swam as a right whale.

Cooled by the healing stream, this realm free of dust and heat, I propelled myself towards the sun, and broke the surface in a burst of foam. As I hung in the air, showing myself to the hundreds of people on the bank, I heard the startled cries of the children. I lay back and struck the water, driving the sunlight into a frantic maze. Again I leapt at the surface, and hurled the spray from my magnificent shoulders across the delighted children. As I turned in the air the tennis players came through the trees to cheer me on. A fisherman reached into his net and tossed a gudgeon towards me, a silver bullet I caught between my teeth.

As I performed for them, the whole of Shepperton came to watch me. Miriam St Cloud and her mother stood on the lawn of their Tudor mansion, awed by my sleek beauty. Father Wingate unpacked his specimen case on the beach, hoping that my exploding wake would dislodge another rare fossil for him. Stark stood protectively at the end of his amusement pier, nervous that I might shatter its rusting pillars. Urging them to join me, I raced in circles through the surging water, chased my tail for the children, blew spouts of foam through the sunfilled spray, porpoised to and fro
across the river in shallow leaps that stitched the air and water into a table-lace of foam.

Below me the drowned Cessna sat upon the river bed on its podium of light. Tempted to escape from it for ever, I swam downstream towards the marina, where the razor-keels of the yachts dipped and cut at my spine. Once I eluded them, I would make my way down the Thames to the open sea, to the polar oceans with their cooling icebergs.

But as I looked back at Shepperton for the last time I was moved by the sight of its entire population standing on the bank. They were all hoping that I would return, the tennis players and Shakespearian actors, the small children and the kite-fliers with their box kite collapsed like an empty gift in their arms, the young lovers and middle-aged couples, Miriam St Cloud and her mother beckoning to me like figures in a dream.

I turned and raced back to them, delighted by their cheers. A young man threw away his shirt and trousers, and plunged head-first into the charged water. Crossed by a dozen bars of light, he broke the surface, transformed into a svelte and handsome swordfish.

Next, a woman in tennis gear slipped down the spray-damp grass and dived into the water. In the rush of bubbles she swerved past me as a graceful sturgeon. Laughing at each other, an elderly woman and her husband let themselves be pushed from the bank by a party of teenagers, then emerged from a cloudburst of foam as a pair of dignified groupers. A dozen children jumped into the rushing water, darted away from me as a shoal of silver minnows.

All along the beach, people were stepping into the water. A father and mother waded through the waves, each holding a child, and were transformed into a family of golden carp. Two teenage girls sat on the beach, their legs in the shallows, delighted by the elegant tails that extended lazily from their submerged waists. Happily they removed their shirts, reclining mermaids with bare breasts. They let themselves be
drawn into the water that I swirled gently over them with my huge tail, a lacy quilt tossed across two naked lovers. As their hair dissolved in the foam they became two playful dolphins, and slipped away through the water crowded with scrambling pikelets and minnows. An overweight woman in a flowered dress collapsed breathlessly in the water and surged away as a stately manatee. The troupe of Shakespearian actors stepped self-consciously into the unsettled stream, the women raising their crinolines from the sand-stained foam, then sank through the surface, transformed into the players of an underwater pageant, a school of angel fish ruffed with translucent gills and plumed with delicate tendrils.

A few people still hesitated on the bank. I leapt through the crowded waves, urging them to leave the suffocating air. The party of tennis players threw aside their rackets and dived into the water, whipped away as handsome white sharks. The butcher and his attractive wife tottered down the grassy slope, immersed themselves and sailed off as immense sea-turtles with rolling carapaces.

Almost all Shepperton had joined me in this new realm. I cruised along the bank, past the discarded kite and tennis rackets, the still playing radios and forgotten picnic hampers. Only one group remained, watching me from their familiar positions, Miriam St Cloud and her mother, Father Wingate on the beach, Stark and the three children. But their faces were without expression, veiled by the spray as if in a deep dream from which I was excluded.

At that moment I knew that they were not yet ready to join me, and that it was they who were the sleepers.

Leaving them, I drifted downwards into the sunlit water. Led by the swordfish, a huge congregation surrounded me, shoals of porpoise and salmon, groupers and rainbow trout, dolphins and manatees. Drawing the sun’s rays with me, I sank towards the river bed. Together we would lift the aircraft and carry it downstream to the estuary of the Thames and the open sea, a coronation coach in which I would lead
the inhabitants of this small town to the great deeps of their real lives.

The sunlight faded. A few inches from me, through the water-dimmed windshield, a once-human face grimaced at me. A drowned man wearing an aviator’s helmet, his mouth fixed in a death-gape, lay across the controls, arms swaying towards me in the current that flowed through the cabin door.

Terrified by this wavering embrace, I turned and swam blindly into the tail of the aircraft. The air rushed from my lungs in the violent water. No longer a whale, I struck out for the surface through the hundreds of scattering fish. Torn from the aircraft, a fragment of white fabric sailed upwards through the water. Following it, I fought my way to the surface. In a last exhausted race for the sun I seized the air.

I woke in the insect-filled meadow, lying on the wet flowers that filled the grave. A few steps away the three handicapped children watched me from among the poppies. I was drenched in the sweat that soaked my jacket and trousers, and too tired to speak to them. A strange headache was leaving me. I breathed unevenly, as if for the first time, and tried to focus my eyes on the vivid birds and flowers within the meadow. I was aware again of my bruised mouth and chest, as if the dead occupant of the aircraft I had glimpsed in my dream had tried to drown me.

But for all the reality of the meadow, I knew that this warm grass, these dragon-flies and poppies belonged to another dream, and that my fever-vision of swimming as a right whale had been another window into my real life.

I rose to my feet and brushed the petals from my suit. The children moved away through the grass, subdued by whatever they had seen. The strangled starling lay among the dead daisies. Jamie turned on his shackles, avoiding my eyes, but his small face was puckered with concern, as if he wanted
to guide me through the ordeal of my vision. In his hands he held a dead sparrow, another purse to be hidden in the grave.

When they had gone I walked alone through the late afternoon, my damp suit covered with a coat of rainbows, a confetti of petals, celebrating my marriage with the meadow.

People were leaving the river on their way home, the tennis players and young parents with their children, the old women and their husbands. Their faces were lit by an energy I had never seen before. As they passed me I noticed that all their clothes were damp, as if they had been caught in a sudden shower.