Читать книгу The Unlimited Dream Company - Джон Грей, John Gray - Страница 7
ОглавлениеIn the first place, why did I steal the aircraft?
If I had known that only ten minutes after taking off from London Airport the burning machine was to crash into the Thames, would I still have climbed into its cockpit? Perhaps even then I had a confused premonition of the strange events that would take place in the hours following my rescue.
As I stand here in the centre of this deserted riverside town I can see my tattered flying suit reflected in the windows of a nearby supermarket, and clearly remember when I entered that unguarded hangar at the airport. Seven days ago my mind was as cool and stressed as the steel roof above my head. While I strapped myself into the pilot’s seat I knew that a lifetime’s failures and false starts were at last giving way to the simplest and most mysterious of all actions – flight!
Above the film studios helicopters are circling. Soon the police will land on this empty shopping mall, no doubt keen to question me about the disappearance of Shepperton’s entire population. I only wish that I could see their surprise when they discover the remarkable way in which I have transformed this peaceful town.
Unsettled by the helicopters, the birds are rising into the air, and I know that it is time for me to leave. Thousands of them surround me, from every corner of the globe, flamingos and frigate-birds, falcons and deep-water albatross, as if sprung from the cages of a well-stocked zoo. They perch on the portico of the filling-station, jostle for a place on the warm roofs of the abandoned cars. When I lean against a pillar-box, trying to straighten my ragged flying suit, the harpy eagle guarding these never-to-be-collected letters snaps at my hands, as if she has forgotten who I am and is curious to inspect this solitary pilot who has casually stepped off the wind into these deserted streets. The barbarous plumage of cockatoos, macaws and scarlet ibis covers the shopping mall, a living train that I would like to fasten around my waist. During the past few minutes, as I made sure that none of my neighbours had been left behind, the centre of Shepperton has become a spectacular aviary, a huge aerial reserve ruled by the condors.
Only the condors will remain with me to the end. Two of these great vultures are watching me now from the concrete roof of the car-park. Fungus stains the tips of their wings, and the pus of decaying flesh glints between their talons, carrion gold shining in the claws of restless money-changers. Like all the birds, they give the impression that they might attack me at any moment, excited by the helicopters and the barely healed wound on my chest.
Despite these suburban pleasantries, I wish that I could stay longer here and come to terms with everything that has happened to me, and the consequences for us all that extend far beyond the boundaries of this small town fifteen miles to the west of London. Around me the streets are silent in the afternoon light. Toys lie by the garden gates, dropped in mid-game by the children when they ran away an hour ago, and one of my neighbours has forgotten to turn off his lawn sprinkler. It rotates tirelessly, casting a succession of immaculate rainbows over the ornamental pond at the foot of the garden, as if hoping to lasso a spectral fish from its deeps.
‘Mrs St Cloud …! Father Wingate …!’ I miss them already, the widow who tried to finance my flying school, and the priest who found my bones in the river-bed.
‘Miriam …! Dr Miriam …!’ The young doctor who revived me when I had almost drowned.
All have left me now. Beckoning the birds to follow me, I set off across the shopping mall. On a beach by the river is a hiding place where I can wait until the helicopters have gone. For the last time I look up at the vivid tropical vegetation that forms Shepperton’s unique skyline. Orchids and horse-tail ferns crowd the roofs of the supermarket and filling-station, saw-leaved palmettos flourish in the windows of the hardware store and the television rental office, mango trees and magnolia overrun the once sober gardens, transforming this quiet suburban town where I crash-landed only a week ago into some corner of a forgotten Amazon city.
The helicopters are nearer now, clattering up and down the deserted streets by the film studios. The crews peer through their binoculars at the empty houses. But although the townspeople have left, I can still feel their presence within my body. In the window of the appliance store I see my skin glow like an archangel’s, lit by the dreams of these housewives and secretaries, film actors and bank cashiers as they sleep within me, safe in the dormitories of my bones.
At the entrance to the park are the memorials which they built to me before they embarked on their last flight. With good-humoured irony, they constructed these shrines from miniature pyramids of dishwashers and television sets, kiosks of record players ornamented with sunflowers, gourds and nectarines, the most fitting materials these suburbanites could find to celebrate their affection for me. Each of these arbours contains a fragment of my flying suit or a small section of the aircraft, a memento of our flights together in the skies above Shepperton, and of that man-powered flying machine I dreamed all my life of building and which they helped me to construct.
One of the helicopters is close behind me, making a tentative circuit of the town centre. Already the pilot and navigator have seen my skin glowing through the trees. But for all their concern, they might as well abandon their machine in mid-air. Soon there will be too many deserted towns for them to count. Along the Thames valley, all over Europe and the Americas, spreading outwards across Asia and Africa, ten thousand similar suburbs will empty as people gather to make their first man-powered flights.
I know now that these quiet, tree-lined roads are runways, waiting for us all to take off for those skies I sought seven days ago when I flew my light aircraft into the air-space of this small town by the Thames, into which I plunged and where I escaped both my death and my life.
