Flight

Bright sun. It pierces. He is blinded by it as he walks, blinking, towards town. His sunglasses are in the glove compartment of his car. Tucked away, with thoughts of summer all now memory, no longer current. A sudden return to the stage, though, for the ball of burning gas in the centre of the sky.

He walks quickly and tries not to think about the taste of her last night. Sweet and salty, both in balance. A different kind of honey.

He remembers the piece of grit that had somehow found its way onto the coffee table. The way he pushed his empty mug away from him, the piece of grit trapped beneath it, scoring the surface of the wood. The way she had looked at him, so distant. And he had tasted her. Eaten her up.

He walks away from the home that is no longer his. The death that fills it chased him away. She would not be comforted, and he – what of it? Where did he fit? He could only seek to take from her that which she gave without emotion.

He left her sleeping, her eyes wide open, lying in the bed; sleeping and staring and seeing nothing beyond whatever images danced before her eyes, inside her brain. He cannot comfort her, he can only take.

He hurries down the hill, towards town. The brightness of the sun makes him blink and tears fall from his eyes.

At the bridge, he stops, just before he walks onto it. He left her sleeping, and somehow she is there. The wind is blowing her nightdress tight against her body, which is full and firm, rounded and complete. He sees the curve of her breasts, the swell of her belly, beneath the thin satin covering. Something stirs within him to see it, and he remembers her taste again.

She is standing, balanced, on the railings, high above the rush of traffic on the motorway below. He can hear the cars, ceaseless in their passage, untroubled by the sight of the woman standing on the railings of the bridge above them. He wonders how they can continue moving, how their drivers can’t stop, when he is unable to move, standing here, looking at her.

Cars driving along the road beside him don’t stop either. Everything except him is carrying on, moving through time, perpetual in its motion.

She is standing with her feet hooked through the narrow gap at the top of the railings. The bottom part of her shins rest painfully against the metal, holding her in place as she sways in the wind. Her body is beautiful; the ripple of the satin against it enhances it. He is transfixed by her.

She throws her arms wide and stares up at the sky. He half-expects to hear her cry out from the pain he knows she carries, but she remains silent, and the traffic continues to move beneath her and behind her. Then, as he knew that she would, she pitches forwards and falls, arms outstretched as though she is flying.

He waits to hear the sound of tyres screeching, of cars swerving, of horns blaring, but nothing comes. Just the continued rush of the motorway traffic passing under the bridge.

He walks to the railing where she had stood and looks over it, down at the flashing colours, the metallic blues and silvers, the bright reds and yellows. There is no body. She doesn’t lie crumpled on the tarmac as he expected her to. There is nothing there.

He stares down, his knuckles whitening as he grips the metal railing. The wind buffets his face and whips his hair. As hard as he stares at the tarmac surface metres below him, he cannot conjure up an image of what isn’t there.

He vomits. The surface tension holds that noxious fluid together in globules as it falls. He watches it fall. Car horns sound and pass off into the distance as drivers curse him, safe inside their metal boxes. He smells the acrid odour of his bile as it leaves him. He heaves and retches a couple more times, but nothing else comes, and he wipes the back of his hand across his mouth.

The taste of bile fills his mouth. He begins to walk, more slowly than before, in the direction of town. He no longer knows what he is doing. The image of her, perched on the railings, falling through the sky, out of his line of sight, fills his mind. He doesn’t understand what he saw; how she could not be there, lying on the tarmac, waiting for someone to chalk an outline around her.

He waits at the pelican crossing through two changes of lights. People passing in their cars stare at him, but he doesn’t register their curiosity. He doesn’t move until the moment when he sees her again, across the road from him, walking away from him, down the hill into town.

He steps out into the road to follow her, oblivious to the traffic screeching to a halt at either side of him. Inside his head, he is calling her name. He thinks she turns slightly, once. He thinks his Kathy heard him.

She moves quickly along the back streets. He follows her up the ramp to the car park at the top of Debenhams. His breathing is laboured; he is out of condition, unused to moving at such a pace. He turns to the left at the top of the ramp, but doesn’t see her. He looks to the right, and she isn’t there either. His eyes stare ahead of him. She is standing on top of the lift housing. He has no idea how she got up there, or how quickly. He has the sense that there is something not quite right in all of this.

He walks towards her. She is standing with her back to him, facing out at the main street, the busy A6 that cuts through this satellite town, leading south, away from trouble. She adopts the same stance as before; arms outstretched, head tilted up at the sky, and then she drops. She launches, soaring out before disappearing from view.

He walks slowly this time. He walks over to the low wall above the pedestrian area and looks down. People are walking, laden with shopping bags, sitting at bus stops. There is nothing out of the ordinary about the scene he witnesses. It is only extraordinary in his head.

“Are you alright, love?”

A woman, returning to her car, plastic carrier bags in her hand, stops behind him. He looks at her. Something in his face makes her put down her shopping and move over to him.

She places a hand on his shoulder.

“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” she says.

“I’m fine,” he tells her. “It’s nothing. Just a little out of breath.”

She looks at him a few moments longer, as though she is trying to see into his mind, trying to read what thoughts are in there. Then she smiles and pats his arm.

“Well, if you’re sure, love.”

He smiles back, weakly, and nods.

He tasted her last night. That house is full of death. Her body lies broken, the newspapers full of it for weeks. Her body, that he can taste, flying through the air, the torment more than she could live with. He left her body lying there, glassy eyed, staring off at nothing, at things he could never hope to see. He left it, cold, on a mortuary slab, the curve of her breasts and the swell of her belly visible through the sheet that covered her.

He pushes back from where he is leaning over the wall. He turns and walks away from the place.

© J R Hargreaves August 2006