Oriel fables

His answer left me not much the wiser.

‘Well, there’s an exoskeletal formation on each shoulder which protrudes from what you call the scapula.  What in a free translation from the Badezoid we might call the ‘oriel’, as in the protruding window.  Let me feel yours.’

He reached over and put his long arms under my top, feeling the shape of my shoulder blades, and tutting in a way he’d picked up from Sandy as he presided over his optics.  Just as I was relaxing into the connection that was being established between skin and sleepy brain, he stopped as abruptly as he had started.

‘Your scapulae are disguised by all that potter’s wheel muscle of yours.  But in the bar and on the beach I’ve noticed that many humans have quite pronounced or pointed bone structures there, which are not dissimilar to the Badezoid child’s.  I think there might be a genetic relationship between our species that is lost in the mists of time.  That is of course something which could now be tested.’

I gave him a ‘we are not submitting ourselves to tests’ look.

‘Anyway, the casing of the Badezoid’s fledgling wings is embedded in the scapula and is not necessarily that much more pronounced than a human’s, though inevitably Badezoid shoulders develop more powerfully than yours’.

I though about mentioning Björn Borg at this point but the flippancy would almost certainly be lost on Bill.  I was by now inured to human inferiority and Badezoid superiority.  Besides, it was flattering to hear that my shoulders disproved the general rule.  At least, I think it was.

‘It might look a little odd if the baby does carry the genetic coding to develop wings, but if it did, the protuberances could still be in the spectrum of what is humanly possible and explicable.  But the ridges might raise some eyebrows.’

‘Ridges?’

‘Badezoid babies have a ridge along the underside of each arm, from which an additional part of the wing structure sprouts at a varying age – the shoulder wings overlap with these so that the arms become part of an impervious whole.  If you look along my arms you can just make out the scarring where mine were cut away.  In places.’

I peered at his now wingless arms, raised nevertheless as if for flight, and looked for seams as you might in the stitched-up sides of an ancient teddy bear.  It was difficult to see by lamp and flame alone, and I was too comfortably heavy to get up and turn the main light on.  I made a mental note to check on another occasion, but I’d made more than one thorough exploration of his arms before now, kissing the length of them, and not noticed any ridges.  I trusted my lips as much as my eyes in that respect.

What a strange state I was in.  Pregnant by a man who genuinely seemed to believe he was an alien, and against all rational analysis instinctively inclined to give maternal credence to the notion that my baby might appear from the womb with a pair of wings.  It was as if in taking his seed into me I had out of reproductive necessity become part-Badezoid myself.

Was this the birth of a new species, a story that would one day be embellished to become a set of magnificent fables – a creation myth – or simply a series of delusions told by a madman and believed by a woman not much less insane, day after deluded day?  That I still did not know; I believed he wasn’t entirely sure either, or that the baby when it came would offer us proof one way or the other.

My dreams that night defied rational analysis too.  As dreams should; but these were such as I had never had before, going beyond those I remembered from my previous pregnancies, before each successive would-be life was unfairly, harshly snuffed out.  I dreamt of walking with Bill through what in the dream and on waking I knew was a forest on Badezon; the scale of the trees was unearthly and their unfamiliarity magical.  Badezon appeared as a deserted world in which the alien and I roamed together, as if we had been given the planet to populate.  The wild slim alien’s wings were spread like a cloak around my shoulders as we drifted along a short distance above the sandy forest floor.  And the love we made hidden among waterside trees that bore some resemblance to weeping willows woke me with a start.  For a moment the vivid reality of the dream took away my breath, and the whole of me heaved with waves and wings of desire.

Kerplunk! – [Swallows and Charolais]

At last the forty days and nights are over.  You have seen out God’s personalised wrath, and perhaps the good times can now begin.  It is evening when the rain stops, and the sun is rehung low in the clearing sky, above the centre of the village.  It is beautiful out, as it is only after days and days of rain.  The sunlight is warm, yellow and dancing, and the smell of wet grass is wafted on the drying air.  The milky white Charolais cows in the field across the road start once again on their eternal grassy drift, insects make tentative first flights from unseen nooks, and midges gather in cloudy circles.  The silhouettes of the trees beyond the cows wave under the influence of the clearing wind, and in these and the trees nearer at hand, reanimated birds discuss what to do now that it’s stopped raining.

You go out for a walk, meaning eventually to find a place where no trees hide the sunset.  You idle before a mossy calvary at a crossroads where the fourth direction is one of two driveways up to the squarish block of the village’s château, which is the centre of the maze of perspectives that the avenues form.  A battered Deux Chevaux parked at the steps up to the front door testifies to less than stratospheric wealth.  Idling turns to blatant staring at the unlit but unshuttered windows; were anyone looking from those cool, tall openings, they would see (if their eyesight were good) that you have an invite-me-to-dinner look of considerable weight on your face.  You will often return to this Golgothan spot to gaze past the brick pillars, the wrought iron gates swung open, imagining yourself free to wander up the dusty, grass-ridged drive, past the unkempt swathes of grass on either side of it – these signs of fading fortune make the château’s unseen inhabitants all the more attractive to you – to rest your arms on the sill of one of the open windows, and at your quiet greeting be welcomed with a smile, and a word or two to the effect that it will be just you and the family at dinner tonight.

The village is surrounded and regulated by avenues, usually of elm.  The roads are often roofed by their canopy, which in summer provide a cyclist with welcome stretches of shade.  Past the church, walking towards the ten o’ clock sunset, the trees enclose you, their trunks stretching from head height upwards, having been planted many years ago in now rooty banks of earth.  They remind you of the cemetery that the train from Liverpool Street cuts past, the excavation close to view from the window seat, the detail lost in a blur of speed, above which the graveyard stretches more slowly away.  Aided by the motion of the train, an impressionable mind can see bones jutting from the bank, and glimpse rotting shoes and tufts of hair.

One tree on each side of the tunnel you are now walking through has slipped towards the middle of the road, so that they have taken on the appearance of a couple in intimate conversation, about to kiss.  You watch them as surreptitiously as you might if they were lovers in the street, then quicken your pace to pass beneath them, emerging from the avenue just in time to catch the red sun disappearing over the crest of a Norman roll, amid the wheeling noises of a flock of starlings, cockerels stringing their unique signal across the countryside, and the spitfire singing of lone swallows diving across the sunset.  The occasional artillery grunt of a distant Charolais completes the silent cacophony.

Fledgling wings

I waited for her to tell me.  On Badezon a male of the species knew when the female to whom he had become attached was expecting a child; there was something in our biological make-up that made it so – a smell, a look, a difference, a genetic understanding.  I presumed this was not how it was with humans.  Typically their biology seemed to breed mental complications where ours stripped those complexities away, rendered them simple.  But I judged it best not to let on that I knew; I suspected it would – in a phrase I heard regularly among hang-gliding club members – freak her out.  In the meantime I tried to work out the implications of the as yet unspoken news, and to translate my instinctive Badezon reaction of joy and deep curiosity into some gently equivalent human male form.  Humans seemed to think that the gulf between their sexes was wider than it appeared to me to be, but perhaps the margin was most frequently at its largest when the half that were men were faced with the struggle of making the transition between partner and parent.  The little that Chan had told me about her previous partner seemed to confirm a male fear of being shaken out of a comfortable rut into one which he envisaged being both less comfortable, and less free.

We were sitting before the fire one night, watching the flames dance awkwardly to some of Chan’s favourite songs.  When the music stopped, a raging winter wind stepped in quickly to take its place, howling its frustration at not being able to blow our house down.  Chan took my hands and I knew this was the moment; I knew the words she was about to speak.  She spoke them, a badly disguised look of uncertainty in her eyes.  I smiled, and I kissed her, and, finding I was unable to pretend otherwise, told that I already knew, had known for some time.  She hit me on the head with a cushion then, and said, ‘Why ever didn’t you say?  I’ve been worried sick about telling you.’  Then she hugged me, and kissed me back.  It was difficult to gauge, but I think my reaction had pleased her.  She talked, slowly at first, then with her words tripping over each other in their rush to be spoken.  I listened, smiling all the while, and looked into the heart of the fire just as ancient cave-dwelling Badezoid males must have at the blaze pitched in the mouths of their shelters, dwelling with primeval satisfaction on the knowledge that their line was set to continue.

My attention was drifting, so I made an effort to reconnect with what Chan was saying, and realised to my surprise that she seemed to be seriously countenancing the possibility that this baby might be born with an unusual set of genes.  Not just a weird set, but alien.  This was a breakthrough; but it was probably also a sign that Chan’s underlying pragmatic determination was coming together with the maternal instinct to protect her unborn child from every conceivably threatening possibility.  She desperately wanted this baby, and nothing – not even alien genes – was going to stop the world from treating it like any other ordinary, wholly human infant.  After so many disappointments, she did not want success to turn into a freak show.  But it was what she asked me next that most confounded my expectations.

‘Are Badezoid babies born with little fledgling wings, or do they sprout from your shoulders at some point as you grow?’

Terpsichore Melpomene Thalia Calliope Erato

Barge House Street, London, SE1, 2005

Kerplunk! – [Chimera]

The consistent rain builds to a summer storm.  The black plastic sheeting flaps, the holes in the thatch open up still further.  At night the electricity buzzes alarmingly, and sudden squalls of wind mix with noises out of nowhere.  There are sounds like creeping footsteps which never bring anything into view, and tappings that are the prelude to nothing at all.  Then one night there are more distinct noises in the attic.  You wake to hear scampering above, and sit bolt-upright in your bag, listening intently, clearing your mind in an attempt to visualise what could be making such a noise.  But for a dead broom and a hessian sack, the attic was empty when you first mounted the decaying wooden steps and explored it.  Any treasures once stored there have long since been removed.

The attic runs the length of the cottage and so does the noise.  The light is already on; you had dropped off over the tubercular novel into dehydrated sleep and broken dreams.  A picture to match the noise refuses to materialise.  It is too quick to be human, but equally it moves back and forth too heavily to be ignored.  Too big to be a rat.  A wild cat, or a fox?  If it is sheltering from the rain, why so restlessly?  You cannot summon enough energy or muster enough courage to dress and investigate, even armed with the cycle’s detachable headlamp.  The added disincentive of the unremitting rain is decisive.  There being only one set of scampering feet, it cannot be one creature chasing another, unless the second is airborne, or too small to register.  In any case, the movement is too frantic and not calculated enough for an animal stalking prey.

After a time – the scampering continuing in fits and starts – you drift into an uneasy state somewhere between alertness and sleep.

… the Mini stuck in drifting snow and deep countryside, but within sight of a light, a comforting, cheery yellow at the end of a long drive.  At the door of a large Tudor house, all beams and angles, your mother explains as you shiver.  The woman takes you in.  The bedroom is wooden and gently sloping, as were the long corridors leading to it; the bed itself is huge and creaking.  The electricity fails.  You could almost be at sea, with the unnerving gradient of the floor, the gusts and moans of the wind, the guttering candles.  Left alone at the centre of a labyrinth of unfamiliar corridors, the flame of the candles batting about – as if defending itself from encirclement by enemies – you feel as deserted and as mortal as a child can feel.  The creaks sound sudden and intense, like snapping sticks…

You start awake again at the sound of more scurrying.  It continues long into the night, the effects on you the worse for the lengthening pauses between the ghost-animal’s scampering exercises.  You eye the black panes of glass in your uncurtained window – the sun bed is positioned so you can see both it and the door – but of course, you can see nothing outside with the light on.  You could easily be watched until you can stay awake no longer.

You try to pull yourself together and take your paranoia apart.  Most likely it is the Drouet’s cat at a mouse which, in play, it keeps letting escape.  You fetch a broom from what was once the kitchen and try to scare the noise back by banging on the wooden beams, but the pattern of the movement does not change.  There is very little you can do to distract yourself.  Music is no help, for if you were to wear headphones, your insecurity would magnify: the noise would burst through the flimsy polystyrene, faces would appear at the window, the door would suddenly blow open.  All that you can do is keep the light on, fix the sun bed so you rest sitting up, and leave yourself in the hands of sleep when your attention finally tires.  What matter then whether morning comes or not?  You know the odds are that it will.

Scots pine in exile

Scots pine, Headley Down, Hampshire, 2009.

Leaping roe

This was happiness.  The day-to-day stuff, not the burn and scorch of fast-flaring love; that was now in the past.  Why did I not tell him that I was pregnant?  Because this was happiness.  And because I knew what havoc the introduction of a third party could wreak.  So I blocked out the knowledge when I was with him to avoid it showing on my face.  The physical effects of the pregnancy I blamed on bugs and food poisoning, trusting that if he really were an alien, human biology would not be his strong suit.  But of course, I would have to tell him soon; nightly our bellies came together, and whether for the purposes of alien research or out of plain human curiosity, he remained observant of our life together, sometimes astutely so.

I kept giving myself one more day; then, as each seemed as ordinarily perfect as the one before, I kept feeling disinclined to cast a possible shadow over it and all the days that followed.  When not lingering in the present moment, I made my memory work hard to avoid thinking about the future – about, for example, how I would navigate the health system with a life form that just might turn out to be regarded by it as freakish.  I knew I needed to think about that, but I didn’t want to yet.  So I wandered back to the last time I had been as happy as this, day-to-day.  The year before my parents died, the summer that began with the invigilator signalling the end of the last exam.  It was a song that sent me there, one of the ones the wild slim alien and I listened to in front of the fire, after eating, before bed.  ‘Harvest time’.  I found myself before the memory of a boy who worked holidays on the farm whose acreage surrounded our house, and of a girl who had nothing she needed to do with her summer, nor anything better than read or listen to music, except to meet the boy in his lunch hour, and on Sundays.

When we were aged thirteen he and his friend whose name I can no longer remember had on a perfect summer’s day chased us – me and my friend who I last saw a dozen years ago – along the rutted furrows of a farm track.  When we broke across the lines of discarded barley stems, they followed us, until eventually we tumbled down laughing, glistening and unrelenting in the shade of a stand of trees whose coolness was doubled by the neighbouring pond deliberately and artlessly dug into the shallow bowl of the landscape, its chalky sides the scummy white froth atop the muddy brew of weak coffee-coloured water.  An East Anglian oasis, and we on that day were their mirage, conscious for the first time of a power that we could call upon but they could not.  Straw stuck to our clothes, we flirted, and they learnt to take it, and deal with it the best they could, or could not.  They panted like dogs and begged to be petted, but they were boys and we were almost women.

Three years later and we were both full-grown.  His shoulders had broadened and his muscles were toned from working the sacks on the potato harvester.  I led him by the hand through the ancient corridor of interlinked barns, lit by gaps where the wood had rotted.  At the time it felt like we were the first who had ever made such a walk, the first who had ever settled in such a nest constructed and walled with hastily re-arranged bales of hay, but now I realise that the barns would have seen many such couplings over the four centuries that they had stood.  But at the time, of course, there were no ghosts, just me and the boy, and our beating hearts and sweaty palms.  His insistence, my acceptance, my choice of place.  I wanted the transition as much or more than I wanted him.  I knew I was not for him, but I was happy enough to let him be the one.  I couldn’t wait to tell the friend who had run with us that perfect summer’s day, the friend who had chaperoned me when I first visited his house.  In his surprise at our visit, he had leapt through the door of his bedroom and clunked his head on the lintel that long habit usually and automatically allowed him to avoid.  His mother brought tea and a cold flannel and we looked him in the eye to make sure he wasn’t concussed.  I sat next to him on his bed and gingerly dabbed at the cut with the flannel.  Emboldened by his injury, unembarrassed by my friend’s presence, I put my arm around him, lifted the blood-matted hair from his hot, damp forehead, and softly kissed him there.

In the barn we lay a while, straws of straw marking our backs as we gazed into the time-blackened depths of the roof above the cross-beams; there were bats up there somewhere, for sure, and mice beneath the bales.  Occasional sparrows flitted over us, having found their way in through the same gaps in the wood as the sunlight.  Arms flung over each other, I reflected on his absence of knowledge, his expectation that I would know what to do, that I would be his guide rather than he mine.  And so with clumsy directness and overswift accomplishment on his part we both made the transition.  But oh! the extraordinary particularness of it, the feel of him slipping hard inside me.  I had had a taste of the tidal tug that existed between those two overlapping forces, desire and satisfaction, and I wanted more of it.

Today the barns are unrecognisable.  I went back to East Anglia for a period, before coming to Cornwall.  I ate a meal in the fancy restaurant that had once been home to bales and bird shit and a girl and a boy, and drank wine from the vineyard which became the farm’s chief raison d’être; the rest of its thousand acres sold to an agribusiness.  No-one recognised me, and I didn’t declare myself.  The young waitress who served me might have been me.  I didn’t doubt that there was a kitchen hand who coveted her, nor that the after-hours privacy of the restaurant’s toilets or linen store cupboard ensured that the barns still saw their fair share of transitional moments.

Dancing Ledge

Dancing Ledge, Dorset, 2004.

Try doing it with bells on

Headley Down, Hampshire, 2007.

Kerplunk! – [Maggot]

You crawl into the sleeping bag earlier each day, lying for hours on the sun bed, watching the white rain storm through the noughts and crosses of the window frame.  Along each vertical line of wood, some peculiarity of light, and the oblique angle of your head as it stares, has caught and delineated two colours, to the left an intense, inky, translucent blue, to the right a neon, golden yellow, like that of toffee wrappers.  A memory of a similar moment of colour distortion comes back to you, of a vase on a window sill, a black silhouette surrounded by these never-seen-before colours.  How has this partial prism come about – some defect of your eyes’ rods and cones, combining with the dull, dislocating whiteness of the sky?  For a moment you are scared that all colour will break up into its constituent parts, and you will lose the shape of things in a riot of pointillist dots.  Standing to see the agitation of the trees caused by the acceleration and emergency brake of the wind, the colours fly away; when you lie down again they return only faintly, evidently not subject to your will.

Black dreams come to you, of rough, disoriented sex, friends known to you and conveniently forgotten when you are conscious again.  There is rapid movement all about you, coupled with a sense of your body being lost.  Then the dream holds itself steady, bubbling slowly, your body prickling with awareness.  Before the finale, you once again lose the participation of your body, which you now see through detached and hovering eyes.  As you come, you see your disfigured face with its eyeless sockets, and the shock returns your body to dream-normal.  Now you are tantalisingly close to saving wakefulness, but you seem to have lost the ability to see straight ahead.  Your head lolls.  Your eyes register objects only at the same oblique angle which watched the translucent lines of colour.  The need to see normally, to prevent some imminent danger, is horribly pressing.  But your body is paralysed until suddenly allowed to see a face in the mirror: not the expected face.

You wake as if to another day, jolted out of your inertia, and sit up for vague beginnings of memory – of your dream, of where you are, of the lover you have left behind.  You pull out your small portfolio from your backpack, and flick through, stopping at a picture of Louise.  Her head rests back on her hand, and her forearm catches light from the flash.  She is giving the camera a stare that is no less than penetrating.  There is no trace of a tear, or redness around the eyes, no disturbed make-up to say definitely what you know to be the case, that she had not long before been crying.  How you came to take a picture so soon after she had been upset, you cannot remember or understand.  But evidently she made no effort to resist it being taken, knowing that one day you would recognise the look of sad, almost indifferent reproach which now churns your stomach with pain and longing.

The area between these two posts to be kept clear of all objects

Watercress Line, between Medstead and Alresford, 2007.

Herring gulls

English Channel, 2009.

We need flight to feel alive

Sandy’s seasonal workers had moved on, and though he didn’t really need help in the autumn and winter months, he let me pot-wash and collect glasses on the busier nights of the week.  Pot-washer by night, glider by day, or at least on those days that the school decreed it safe to take to the air.  The gliding burned off the excess of human adrenaline that – I now saw – had precipitated my mental crisis; strangely it also left me physically tired in a way that flying under power of my own wings had rarely done. 

Over the winter months I built back Chan’s trust.  I could see it returning in small increments (I had been with her long enough now to be able to begin to perceive these little human signs); in the momentary relief that showed before she composed her face each time I returned from gliding, and in the way she would half-smile as I described a typically ordinary evening at Sandy’s.  Her eyes clouded only at the mention of Badezon, which I had begun to talk about again.  I wanted to normalise the notion of what I was, and talk freely about my origins as I had in the period after she found me on the beach.  So, talking about the hang gliding, I would say, ‘I’m Badezon; we need flight to feel alive.’ And then wait hopefully for the kind of questions she used to ask, about life lived in the air, life lived on my planet.  Now and again, usually late at night, she would humour me.

I understood that she would have preferred me not to hang glide.  But she had also quickly understood that it was for me what ceramics were for her.  Before long I had flown from all of Cornwall’s recognised launch sites – Sennen, Perranporth, Chapel Porth, St. Agnes Head, High Cliff, Vault Bay, Carbis Bay, Carne, Carn Brea, Rosewall Hill, again from Godrevy, and from one or two unofficial places.  I never felt in the slightest danger.  I knew I could fly, whether with real or artificial wings; bird-alien that I was, I turned and dived in a way that few of the other professional pilots would dare to try.  Soon the school’s manager started to talk about me gliding competitively, even though he knew it meant that he himself would drop a place in any competition we both entered.  I wasn’t sure what to do.  Like any Badezon, I wanted to show off my prowess in the air.  But obviously it would draw attention to me, too much attention.  Chan immediately said no.  Now that I had begun to talk about my planet again, I could tell that she feared the stress of competition – of exposure – would force another crisis, another moment of dangerous madness; another hang gliding fatality.  She needed me to carry on existing and she did not have – could not have – my conviction that in the air I was safe from harm.  I agreed not to put myself forward, but the urge was strong, and I knew that eventually I would give in to it, and risk the consequences.

But that winter, alien-human relations were at their best.  When I came home from the bar or from the air, and Chan from her potter’s wheel and kiln, we would both ache with virtuous exhaustion.  After preparing and eating a simple meal, we would sit before the flickering open fire and listen to music – Earth songs about the sea and the moon, or Spain, or hearts entwined with human complications.  When the songs finished we would allow the wind to slip in and take its place, and listen to the music of the onshore breeze rising off the sea, ascending the hill, deviating over the roofs of the houses that clung to it, until it gusted down our chimney, scattering the flames in all directions, and left behind a sound like the fading shimmer of a cymbal.  And then we ourselves would rise on an indoor thermal and without any seeming effort find ourselves in what I began to think of as not Chan’s but our bed.

That was the night I remembered making love with another of my species, in the air above the semi-translucent sloping fields of quartz, as Badezon’s two dying suns set them aflame.  In our sleepy, stream of consciousness bliss, I immediately relayed this flashback to Chan, who to my surprise roared with laughter.

‘Well, that brings a whole new meaning to the Mile High Club,’ she said.  Then, laughing hysterically, ‘Don’t even think of trying that in a hang glider.’

Kerplunk! – [Trou normand]

The sound of rain tapping on an upturned metal bucket, like dim low distant church bell’s chimes blown irregularly to the ear on the wind.  A creaking and tapping in the eaves.  Drips and streams at the door.  A dead fly on its back caught by the web in the corner of a window pane.  A bird sheltering from the rain on the hatted, vented chimney.  Down the blackened circle to hit the cold acoustics of the tiled room comes first a comic two note plaint, then a pure bird note.  The tiles ring with the sound.

The grass silently catches the unrelenting rain, and palpably turns greener.  Wheat soaks and grows, bulges.  The trees shiver, the branches of the avenues pull together, clamouring as the wet falls harder, then stretch out, shaking off the rain.  Soon the foliage is lost again beneath a very fine silking of grey-white.  The church bells come nearer, and for a moment there is the taut sound of a drum.

The army green sleeping bag is coffin-shaped.  The water rises quietly through the tiles, and you fear the flood of despair, the long eternity of its forty days and nights, the damp ache of bones that live only for the sun which feeds, clothes and dries them.

The rain keeps up for a week.  You feel a little like Poe’s Fortunato when first he realises he is to be bricked up in the catacombs trickling with moisture.  You spend whole days cleaning and cobwebbing each of the three rooms, but the mixture of dust and damp remains.  The wet seems either to rise up through the tiles or descend upon them as if they are sweating in the humidity.  You may as well be living in nitre-encrusted vaults or back taking photographs in one of the dark and dripping pump rooms behind the Underground’s well-lit façade.  The novel you have with you is extensively informative about the hero’s tubercular antecedents; you cannot help remembering that the writer himself died of pneumonia.  Cooking steams up the room a little more; the food tastes watery.  Your sleeping bag issues damp against your skin when you retreat to it mid-way through the evening, and your clothes are damp when you put them on in the morning.  In what was the kitchen, an ever larger puddle is forming directly under the largest hole in the roof.  You fetch in the bucket and try not to anticipate the next drip when lying inert on the sun bed two rooms away.

The only trips outside you make each day are to catch the early morning visit of the bread van, and to the Drouet’s outside toilet.  Other than that, twice a day you dash along the side of the cottage to the outside tap, keeping as much of yourself as possible under the overhang of the thatch; unfortunately the tap itself is exposed, and here your efforts to remain dry come to nothing.  You feel puppeteered, tested, hard-done by: the bottle the one wetness that warms you.

Elevation

The hang gliding school were wary of my credentials, and warier still when I appeared not to know certain technical terms which were their lingua franca.  I said we’d developed our own Aussie slang for the kit we used, and improvised some names for them on the spot: goblet, tinny, short leg, gastropod.  They were still wary, and later I learned that one of them had checked the internet to satisfy himself that the club I purported to teach for really did exist.  But Chan and I had done our research; she had meticulously faked a certificate from the Australian hang gliding association, and, with the help of an acquaintance of Sandy’s, had come by a marriage certificate and proof of joint nationality.  With this and one or two other easily acquired items, I could open the bank account I would need to become employable.

I committed to memory all the basics of hang gliding, and visualised what in artificial terms I needed to do to become airborne.  Once in the air, I was convinced that my genetic, natural flying ability would be there waiting for me to reclaim it.  There might be some bumpy moments as I adjusted my centre of gravity to the fact that my wings were no longer attached at my shoulders but were instead held by a frame some number of feet above my head; I would ride those out.

At the end of that first meeting with the people from the school, they seemed more or less satisfied, and told me that they would ring me when the weather was set fair for flying.  As for teaching, well, they’d have to see how I flew; but even then, I’d need to take the national association’s qualification before they’d let me near novices.

When the day came, my skin prickled and my mind exploded with flashbacks to Badezon.  The clouds were the flat-bottomed cotton-wool puffs of cumulus that signified safe gliding, and as the pilots gathered on the hillside at Godrevy, there was talk about streets, glassoffs and elevators.

I was impatient to feel the air about me as I had on Badezon, but I carefully and methodically adjusted my kit as protocol required, and waited my turn.  As I launched myself from the hillside, I tucked my legs into what they called the cocoon and I the gastropod – like the bottom three-quarters of a sleeping bag – and was transformed into a giant wasp with chevron sails.  Immediately I felt myself rise on a thermal, sniffing the air for its feel and its path.  These wings were clumsy in comparison with my own, but I soon had their measure, and knew they would do.  So I swooped down and into and up on a thermal.  I wheeled like a gull, and wheeled again.  Then I glided for miles along the coast, watching the human flyers drop behind me and away.  I ignored the variometer.  The climatic conditions were near-identical to Badezon.  When my wings had first been strong enough to lift me into the air, I discovered that what my parents said was true – you’ll know what to do, and where the good air is.  And then I was alone, I was free, soaring as we used to do on Badezon across the plains of rock that heated the air and created the uplift which bore us higher, lighter than a single one of our feathers.

From the skies, I could see the beauty of the planet I had found myself upon.  If the coastal walks with Chan had given me a glimpse, now I had a three-dimensional panorama all about me.  But to what astonishing effect the planet’s weather systems and the bodies of water and earth interacted; light reflecting and deflecting off clouds and sea, and colouring the emeralds, yellows and greys of the land with a degree of intensity that momentarily dazzled me and took my breath away.  And as I had come to expect at such moments, a flashback hit me, and I remembered the exhilaration of flying over features of the Badezon land- and waterscape that I had never before encountered.

While I was in the air, the wind changed direction, and I was able to head back the way I had come, landing to everyone’s astonishment on the very hill from which we had taken off.  I was a natural bird-man, they said.  Unusual technique.  But very effective.  ‘So you believe me now?’ I said, softening the impact of the implicit criticism with a smile.  The school’s manager cracked a smile in return, and I knew I was in.