The platform was the only refuge I had. After my mother was gone I discovered that it was the best place to be. Half dead with hunger and grief and fear, I was. But if I’d known that they were going to be there, so whispery-quiet that at first I didn’t hear them … They were irresistible, the tenderness, the two of them so full of kindness, hiding there.
That afternoon the cat managed to escape Tom’s hand. And although Alice was never seen there again, Tom was back soon enough. But not so tender now. He returned the next day, at dusk, drunk, on a bicycle which he hid behind the outbuildings. He came stealthily and stayed half the night. And the next. Hours together, night after night, to kill the winged cat. Up and down the rotten ladder he went, up to the little platform, heedless of the rats which at that time of night scurried about with little regard for him. Sometimes he had a knife in his hand, sometimes a cudgel, and sometimes also a lady’s handkerchief, which from time to time he would kiss as if to give himself strength, although it provoked in him only a childlike stream of tears, and there he’d sit, alone in the dark, sobbing.
What with one thing and another, then, the cat had to escape. One night, after the poor boy had given up hope of making a kill and had gone home, it abandoned the workhouse. Fearing that dawn would bring a host of new difficulties, not least the problem of visibility, it went immediately in search of a place where it could curl up and sleep in safety. By now it was so frail that it managed to cover little more than two or three miles, struggling on hunger-weakened legs, incapable of scaling walls or exploring its new terrain with any real energy, simply moving onwards, knowing that something would turn up.
Finally, it crept through a hole in a pair of wooden gates and found itself in an old courtyard. The sun’s first breath of life was just then making its way into the sky. Grass, which grew freely in the yard, turned from black to indigo, to a dark marine blue and, with an eerie, rippling haste, through shades of deep green and turquoise. In the far corner lay an old ceramic sink, tipped on its side; and now that too began to catch the light, a big, rounded-off square of luminous blue-grey, but changing slowly against the surrounding darkness, its edges gradually sharper, its emerging whiteness more and more vivid. The cat went straight to the sink and dipped from view, its weary body falling somewhere between sleep and exhaustion. From trees that were still little more than inky stains against the sky, birds now began to chatter and shout in earnest, like a thousand high-pitched caricatures competing to be the funniest, desperate to earn favour with the new sun. But despite all this, the cat fell straight asleep.
The courtyard was overgrown with grass, lush and heavy. There was the insinuation of cart tracks leading from gate to stables, but even these were no more than old scars, just the outline of former wounds that would never disappear completely. To one side of the stable doors was an old horse cart. A man stood, leaning against it. His face was inclined upwards, to the multicoloured strata of the sky in the east. As he watched, his lips moved fractionally, putting a word to each subtle shift of hue in the sky: navy, magenta, sapphire, puce. He invented words – pucetta for a vague purple on the very edge of burnt yellow – and amused himself with more elaborate descriptions – lightish darker blue and quickly fading red-tinged blue-yellow – mouthing each word silently into the air, his eyes wide open, the noise of the birds chaotic and deafening. He had been there half the night, patiently waiting in pitch darkness to see the sun rise for the first time on his new home. There he had been, unwilling to miss a second of it, when the cat crossed right in front of him. But neither he nor the cat noticed the other.
The sun came up, and I was over the worst of my weariness. A fresh, good feeling soaked into my fur, and the heat of the new day was quickly in my bones. I felt as if I had been rolled up tight and was now opening again.
The cat stuck its head up above the top of the sink. And there he was, not more than three or four feet away. A man, in a baggy old suit that was well worn and darker than normal, almost black, though it was hard to tell, since it was shiny with grime. He stood against an old horse cart. In his hands was something small. He held it close to his face, turning it in his fingers. But apart from this not a muscle of his body moved, and when the breeze caught the hem of his jacket, the whole of him seemed to sway.
Finally, he placed the cigarette carefully between his lips, as if there was one ideal way of doing it that he had nearly perfected. Even without lighting it he took satisfaction from it, slowly drawing the air in through the sides of his mouth, inhaling imagined fumes. When he did light it the little ceremony was brief but exact. Afterwards, he shook the match with a sweep of the arm so expansive and natural that there could be no other interpretation but that here was a man at last in his own world.
He stood quite still, a cloud of smoke falling around him. Then he turned, and his eyes fell straight on the cat, eyes that were dark inside and out, eyes that frighten people. Though not cats.
John Longstaff felt betrayed by the silence of the morning, tricked in the belief that he had been alone as the sun rose. How long had the cat been there, a trespasser, watching? He stared at its small ginger head. And to his surprise it stared back, straight into his eyes. There they remained, man and cat, their gaze steady and unhurried, the early sun growing stronger and more insistent, heating up the tops of their heads until they prickled. Both were thinking of their next move.
In the end Longstaff took a step forward. The cat immediately disappeared, dropping down as far as it could, its face squashed flat against the bottom of the sink. Longstaff came over and crouched down. He stayed there a long time looking at the animal, which lay as if dead on the white ceramic. Then it pulled its face off the hard surface and looked up. Longstaff’s eyes were close, unnerving, the kind of eyes that stare right through you, hinting at the vastness of their own light and darkness. He extended a hand and stroked the cat’s head. His hand was small, and he turned tufts of fur one way then the other, exploring it with the ends of his fingers. The cat, with its workhouse caution, prepared for the worst. Longstaff ran his fingers across its head and on to its back. He followed the ridge between the two wings and, sensing something unusual, traced the outline of one of the wings, right along its edge. The animal froze rigid, and then, just as Longstaff’s curiosity was such that he knelt down on the ground, shuffling in as close as he could, almost crawling inside the sink, the cat bolted with a frenzied burst of panic-energy, leaping right over Longstaff and darting off into the stables behind him.
Longstaff sat on the sink and smoked another cigarette, watching the stable doors. After he’d finished it he ground the quarter-inch butt into the grass with his boot. Then he stole over and gently pushed the stable doors shut. But straight afterwards he opened one of them again, at first just enough to peep inside, then, on an impulse, throwing both doors wide open. Yellow light broke in through the doorway. The dust in the air seemed to shimmer with heat. And the cat was caught there in the sun. It had been about to ascend an old ladder which led to a raised platform high up in the stable. But now it stopped, its front feet on the lowest rung, its head looking back over its shoulder. Then it opened its wings, stretching them out to their fullest extent, the little limbs vertical in the air and the skin pulled tight, the sun warming them through.
Something like a cough rose from Longstaff’s throat. A wheeze, followed by more rasping breaths, the noise getting louder until his laughter seemed to pour from his throat in vomit-like gushes; it filled the stable, each terse echo met by another, more powerful roar, his body pivoting at the waist, his torso swaying so wildly that it looked ready to snap off. He flung his arms out, fingers spread, and felt the raw power of the sun on his back. The cat climbed the ladder and found itself a place on the platform, from where it looked down and watched him rejoice.
He went to fetch his wife and their two young daughters. They stood, huddled together at the stable door, their eyes following the direction of his outstretched arm. They gazed up at the winged cat, wonder in their faces.
At first I wanted to run straight to them, to let them fuss over me. How I longed to feel their hands against my fur, tickling the skin behind my ears, and hear them laugh each time I sneezed. But I kept my distance, resisting the temptation, watching.
After a while the more intrepid of the girls edged into the stable. Looking around to see her father’s beaming approval, she went over to the ladder and tried coaxing the cat down. It held back, and seemed to look across to the girl’s mother, who stood at the stable doors. Seeing that it was not going to move from its spot up on the platform, the girl finally decided to climb the ladder herself. Words of caution came from the mother, who looked as if she were about to rescue her little child. But Longstaff held up an arm as if to restrain his wife, all the time transfixed by the sight of his fearless daughter as she began to climb the ladder alone.
She made slow progress, her eight-year-old legs straining with each oversized step, and the further from the ground she went the more nervously she glanced back down to it. When her head did at last poke up above the platform she stopped, a smile of pride breaking out across her face. Then, holding the ladder with one white hand, her legs quivering beneath her, she reached out and stroked the cat’s head, the palm of her hand flat and clumsy. The smile intensified, and she ruffled its fur with that beautiful combination of innocent pleasure and curiosity. Then, as her hand moved down its back, she froze suddenly, terrified, and could not even pull the hand away; there it remained, resting lightly on a wing until her face had turned to a dumb scowl, tears filling her child’s eyes.
Longstaff exploded with laughter. His daughter turned, helpless and terrified. Even as she did so her father was there on the ladder to catch her loose, frightened body in his arms, pulling her face to him until it was squashed hard against his ribs.
‘Look!’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Don’t you wish you could fly? Look!’ And he nudged her chin upwards until she could watch him run his fingers over those ginger-white wings. ‘A magical cat, come to us!’
And after she had become accustomed to the sight of the animal he took her in one arm and the cat in the other, and the three of them made their way down the ladder.
‘The censors can’t catch me!’ Longstaff would shout in those early days, intoxicated by the solid reality of his own success, there with his family, in their new house.
He had arrived in the city just in time to be listed on the 1880 census. He was eighteen and had left the small Yorkshire farming village of his childhood with no trade and no schooling beyond reading and writing, which even as a young boy he had taken to without effort, along with arithmetic, in which he seemed to need no instruction at all. Both his parents were dead, his mother having died that same year. On the 1880 census the word ‘labourer’ had been recorded as his profession, for at that time he had no trade at all. Ten years later it had become ‘coal leader and remover’, though this was too modest even then. Two years after that and John Longstaff took possession of his own premises: stables, storehouse and private dwellings. His wife Flora and their young daughters could hardly believe what had happened, even after they finally told themselves that their new home, with its parlour and separate kitchen and a big fireplace in every room, was not in fact the setting for a long, ecstatic sequence of dreams. Incredibly, he bought the place with cash, getting it cheap from a widow who had let it stand empty for so long that people assumed it was no longer for sale. More than incredible, though, something almost miraculous to Longstaff, was that it had a name: New Court.
‘The census’ll not get me right, not one year to the next, never mind every ten! There’s not words to describe John Longstaff,’ he shouted, a daughter in each arm, and swung them around so fast that their legs flew out horizontal and bumped into the enormous oak dresser which filled one side of their new dining room. ‘Where’ll we fly to, eh?’ he asked them, his rough voice like a teenager’s, mid-range and torn through with unresolved hoarseness. ‘Anywhere!’ he cried, and piled both girls on to the table in the middle of the room, which was so robust that it could have taken a hundred more. There they lay, collapsed, breathless with excitement, flopping hopelessly on to each other, their father looking on, hands on hips, his eyes wet and giddy.
Since arriving in the city, twelve years earlier, Longstaff had worked every waking hour. When his body was not actually employed for gain, in those rare moments of physical inaction, he was still at work, thinking things through, always several steps ahead of himself, planning, building his future on foundations which themselves were still to be built. From labourer he found work as a coal leader, and then into the delivery business generally, working for a host of employers, never stopping too long at any one job, but always making sure that he had learned all there was to learn about the job before shifting quickly on to whatever was more lucrative.
Also, he kept hens. He bought a dozen to start with, housing them in an old shed in the corner of a field that he rented for next to nothing. At the end of every day he’d rush off to feed and water them. Workmates would laugh, shaking their heads at his unremitting energy, as if the very idea of a dozen hens was a joke, neither pets nor a business. However, the dozen began to multiply. Each time someone asked, it seemed, there were more of them, until in the end he had to rent half the field and erect several long huts, which he did himself, using wood from a disused barn that he got free from a farmer in exchange for an agreement to buy grain for a year. He rarely had problems with thieves, after a couple of boys who were stealing eggs one night were so badly beaten that although they could not say who had assaulted them in the dark, their bruises served as a warning to others.
He delivered the eggs on Saturdays after work, door to door, returning home only when his week’s stock had all been bought, no matter how long it took. And if he ran out of houses to call on, he would stand outside pubs, waiting with his last half-dozen in the freezing rain until someone, perhaps drunk and eager to make amends by returning home with at least something to show for the week’s money, bought them from him. In the end he needed a horse and cart to make the deliveries; his round took in bakeries, hotels, market stalls, and even the workhouse. Bakeries in particular bought from him eagerly, because he had a reputation for reliability, and without eggs a bakery is nothing. He would deliver to them on a Monday morning, loading his cart up at 4 a.m., and driving his horse hard to make his rounds before work began. The bakers, though they took his eggs, thought him quite mad. There was something in his short, meatless body, a jumpy itch of nerves, that put you immediately on edge; and there was a sense with him that whatever was going on, whether he was negotiating a price or just passing the time of day, everything had a purpose. In the end even his cough, or a flick of the wrist, seemed to mark a significant victory for him.
For twelve years he kept the hens, stealthily putting the profits aside, and each year increasing the flock, though he always made a joke of the eggs to his workmates, as if the whole thing were of little importance. Finally, he was delivering over seventy dozen a week from three hundred birds, and had about a hundred boiling fowl to sell each year on top of that. Only he, it seemed, could see the true beauty in a hen: it cost nothing to bring into the world, it gave you three or four eggs a week to sell, and when it was three years old it could be sold for the pot. The very mathematics of the animal’s existence sent Longstaff into a kind of rapture, and more than once he shook his head in utter bewilderment, quite incapable of understanding why the whole world was not keeping hens. After twelve years he had accumulated more money from his flock than anyone he knew had earned in twenty.
By the time of the 1890 census Longstaff, though just a ‘coal leader and remover’, was on his way to becoming one of the richest in the district. Two years after that he sold the hen farm and bought New Court, filling it with grand, oak furniture from the house sales of bankrupts and the deceased which his new removal and haulage company organised. On his first morning there, as he watched the sun rise above solid stone that belonged entirely to him, a flying cat appeared, to complete the miracle.
So the winged cat was introduced to its new family, who petted it that morning, there on the stable floor, until it seemed as if they might pet away the fur on its body. That night it fell soundly asleep on a blanket in the scullery of its new home. The following morning it had to be persuaded from its slumber with a dish of milk, and was fed so much bread from the girls’ breakfast plates that in the end their mother had to put a stop to it.
The Longstaffs had just arrived at New Court, and the appearance of a winged cat turned their natural high spirits into a kind of boundless excitement. Each day ended with the thrilling promise of the next, and for many weeks they all, parents and children alike, had difficulty closing their eyes at night, such was their desire simply to open them again on a new morning. Night after night Longstaff himself did little more than drift in and out of a light, delirious sleep, and by dawn would be wide awake, listening out for the sound of his daughters, as punctual as the sun, as they fidgeted and wriggled with impatience for the start of the new day. Eventually, he would allow them to get up, even if there were still two hours until breakfast, just so he could watch their limitless delight at everything around them.
The cat, which was christened ‘Catty’ without anyone having thought much about it, padded inquisitively around the house, and seemed to lend each room a sense of magical possibility; it allowed Longstaff and Flora to dream deeper and wilder dreams of their future, and as for the girls, from the moment they first stroked those soft wings, the difference between make-believe and reality evaporated, because now they existed in a place where the imaginary was no stranger than the song of a thrush at day break or the braying of a horse late at night. In short, the cat was a good thing.
During those first weeks at New Court, when they were still deciding where all the furniture should go, Longstaff’s haulage business began to grow at a rate which even he found surprising. For many years his credo had been one of a simple faith in hard work and hard cash, but now he ceded that a kind of charm must have been spun over him and his family. And though in his whole life he had never once invoked the help of any being, he nevertheless saw in the confluence of events on that first morning at New Court a blessing and a providence; later in his life, when it was all over, he would look back on it and weep.
One evening he arrived home after a tiring but profitable day’s work, to find wife and children grinning like fools. Flora was laying the table, and the girls sat in a corner, petting Catty with careful attention, as if the animal had fallen ill. But they were not sad. He stood there for a while in bemusement until the other three burst out laughing; then he too laughed, though without knowing why.
‘Show him, then!’ Flora told the girls, as if her husband had been kept waiting long enough. The two girls, after giving the cat one final, indulgent stroke each, approached the great dining table. They both reached into their pockets, then let a handful of coins fall on to the tablecloth in front of them. There were no more than five or six in all, but they fell noisily from the girls’ hands like a cascade of treasure.
‘It’s Catty’s,’ one of them said.
Then the other: ‘We’re going to buy a cathouse, with windows and a door!’
Longstaff looked at the coins and then at his daughters. Long years of chasing and hoarding money had left him unable to resist its base allure. But this first sight of his own children handling money, their own money, and their obvious pleasure in possessing it, induced in him peculiar and contradictory emotions.
‘But how …’ he said, almost fearing an answer, ‘… how did you get it?’
The girls turned to one another and giggled, and it was their mother who finally explained.
‘They’ve been charging folk to see Catty, that’s what they’ve been doing. A farthing a time, right here in the yard, an’ all,’ and she nodded towards the window as she continued arranging things on the table.
‘Well,’ Longstaff said at last, eyeing the paltry sum scattered on the tablecloth, ‘you’ll be needing more than that to buy a cathouse. Why not let me buy it? We can …’
His suggestion was drowned out by such loud and incoherent protests that he soon gave up hope of doing any persuading at all. Instead, he turned to his wife for support, who felt compelled to continue the story.
‘First, Mr Heath came to pay his bill,’ she said, ‘and they got him to pay a farthing.’
‘Each!’ one of the girls boasted, holding up her farthing.
‘Each?’
‘Each!’ said Flora. ‘And then his wife came round to see if it was true, and that made four farthings.’
‘And then Mrs Heath told Mrs Barker,’ one of the girls continued, breathless with pride, a little pant for air between each word, ‘and she brought someone who we don’t know. But they only paid one farthing each. That makes six, Daddy!’
And word got out. Each night Longstaff would return home with his crew, and whilst the horses were being stabled for the night he would sneak into the house and look for his daughters, who would be hidden away in some corner or other counting and recounting their day’s takings, or making stacks of coins with all the money they had earned so far. They chattered endlessly about the cathouse, where it would go, what colour the door would be, whether it really needed a sink in the scullery … And if there had been no visitors that day, then their father would give them a single farthing just to keep things ticking over, and also in order that he be allowed to stay for a minute or two, cross-legged on the floor with them, and listen to the elaborate discussion about the cathouse, which he still found difficult to imagine, although the two girls seemed to understand perfectly.
One Saturday afternoon an open-topped charabanc turned up at New Court with eleven passengers aboard. Flora and the girls were out shopping, and Longstaff, having just then returned from a job, was milling about in the yard alone. The visitors wanted to see Catty, and had come all the way from Dewsbury. He made a quick calculation: ten miles in a charabanc, on a Saturday afternoon, multiplied by eleven. The mathematics seemed to suggest that a farthing was not enough. Who would set out on such a trip without a certain kind of expectation, and money in their pocket to back it up? Would people travel such distances for a mere farthing’s worth of entertainment? He decided on tuppence each, which they all agreed to eagerly, although several added the proviso that they wanted to see the animal in flight for the price.
‘Can’t promise that!’ he scolded them. ‘It’s not a dog doing tricks, you know. Flies when it feels like it. Takes orders from no one.’
In the end they agreed to take their chances, and Longstaff went off to find Catty. He found the cat nibbling from a slice of sweet cake which its two young keepers had secreted inside the thick pile of blankets which served as its bed. It looked up at Longstaff with that guilty little snap of the neck which tells you all you need to know. He left the cat with its sweet secret and closed the doors on his way back out to the yard. Returning to the group, he shook his head as if in exasperation.
‘I told you. Got a mind of its own, that cat. It’ll be off on a fly.’
The visitors gasped in amazement, unashamedly.
‘I know!’ he said, relishing the effect of his extemporisation. ‘It’s most likely up at the Towers! That’s where it goes. Flies around up there. Sometimes it sits up in a tree, or on the roof of the house. You’ll most likely see it up there. If you don’t, come back here later on. It’s always back at teatime. You can count on that.’
The crowd bustled with excitement, bumping into one another as they scrambled to get back up on the charabanc. Longstaff gave them directions to the Towers, which was a large Gothic house about a mile away, the kind of place that is always said to be haunted, just because a few bats live there.
They left in a state of high agitation, already looking up to the sky in search of the cat having a fly. Longstaff stood by the gates of New Court and watched them disappear up the road.
Sure enough, the charabanc returned about an hour later, and this time its occupants not only had their tuppences ready, but would have paid more. The cat had indeed been spotted, but far off in the distance, perched so high in a tree that only its outline could be seen. Several of them thought they’d seen it take off and land in another tree, but there was some doubt about this. They were now so desperate to see the cat up close that Longstaff could have charged them a shilling each. But he stuck to the original price, and as he took their money he explained about his little daughters and their plans for a cathouse; people were so delighted with the story that a few gave an extra farthing or a halfpenny, just for the girls, and Longstaff bit the insides of his cheeks as he dropped the coins into his trouser pocket.
Catty had by now polished off the sweet cake, and also half of a second piece that Longstaff had left on the blanket. What with all that sugary food and as much milk as it could drink (Longstaff made sure of that, too), the animal now dozed in an idle, over-indulged way which one might almost have called decadent. It hardly moved its head when he came to fetch it, and had to be carried as far as the doorstep, where it did finally manage to support itself on four legs as it made its way out to the yard.
The visitors bleated with rapture. There was something instinctive in Catty, who immediately sensed the crowd and took on that erect swagger of the natural performer, wings spread to their fullest extent. And although the cat padded about pretty slowly, those ginger wings nevertheless dazzled all who saw them.
‘It’s only just got back. Been out on a fly all afternoon. All afternoon!’ said Longstaff, now wondering how far he should take the joke. ‘Are you sure you didn’t see anything up at the Towers?’ He knelt down and stroked Catty’s head. ‘I sometimes see you there myself, don’t I?’ And then, returning to address his public: ‘Many’s a time we see Catty up there if we’re out on a job that way.’
After ten minutes of Longstaff’s patter, tuppence seemed like good value to all concerned. The visitors were dumbstruck, and peered down at the cat as if it confounded all the laws of the natural world, not just those of zoology. And Longstaff, though somewhat regretting that he had not set a higher price, had found himself a new vocation. With each additional description of Catty’s prowess in the air – the distances travelled and the speed and agility in flight – as these stories mounted up, one on top of the other, taller and taller, each a little more fabulous than the last, the audience almost begged him not to make the poor animal take to the air again. Why, no wonder it won’t fly now! they cried. The thing’s exhausted! The animal was indeed exhausted, from a bellyful of sweet cake. Eleven visitors, though, went back to Dewsbury to spread the word. A flying cat.
That evening Longstaff narrated the episode to his wife and children, guffawing at the idea of the charabanc circling around outside the Towers with those on board thrown into a fluster every time a crow flew overhead.
‘But it’s true!’ his daughters told him, jumping and shaking with a manic insistence, as if the matter was of desperate importance. Catty, it seemed, really could fly.
Both parents threw up their arms as if this were startling news. The girls continued, claiming that they had seen Catty swoop right down across the stables, one side to the other, from high up in the roof, and that it would sometimes jump right off the platform and glide down to the floor, flapping its wings to break its landing, hovering above the ground for a moment or two before dropping on to its feet. The girls pleaded to be allowed to go to the Towers the next day, since they also wanted to see Catty flying there.
Longstaff saw no way out. He couldn’t make the cat fly, but neither could he take them to the Towers only to be disappointed, to discover that their father had been lying. So he announced a game of table-jumping, and to his relief this put paid to any further talk on the subject of flying cats.
Flora cleared the table, and then removed its thick velvet tablecloth, revealing the big, heavy wooden structure. Whilst the girls squealed with anticipation, both mother and father prepared to play, he by tucking his trousers into his sock garters and removing his jacket, she by tucking her skirts into the bottom of her long johns. The two of them stood side by side, facing the table. Then, as the girls counted to three, they crouched down, knees springy, their bodies taut and ready. On three they both sprang into the air, and he cried out so loud that had anyone been listening from the next room they might have suspected murder. As they jumped they brought their legs up under them, and with great adeptness landed with their feet on the table, which even as they performed it seemed close to impossible. The girls applauded wildly, and Longstaff, looking sideways at his wife, smiled as if in making one clean jump she had issued a challenge which he meant to fight to the death.
After a few seconds’ rest they both dropped back down to the ground. Then again: one, two three … up, to another scream of approval from the girls. This time Longstaff dropped back down almost immediately, but Flora took her time, reckoning that he would tire himself out and in this way she might outwit her husband. She too dropped back down to the floor, and then they were off again, up and down. The thud of their shoes on the table echoed around the house, accompanied by squeals of encouragement from the girls. One, two, three … up, each time a little less energetically, and each time Flora struggling a little more to make sure her feet reached the level of the table. But not Longstaff. After six or seven jumps he was throwing himself up and down like a chimpanzee, mindless of his wife, and humming to himself, his eyes staring straight in front of him as if only the jumping mattered.
Flora gave in. Shaking her hands in surrender, she flopped down on to a chair and Longstaff had won. He didn’t stop, though. He wouldn’t. Not even when, after several more jumps, the others shouted out to him. On he went, up and down, panting heavily and uttering a strangled grunt with each new explosion of energy. Up and down, without pausing, sweat soaking through his shirt and running down his face and neck.
‘Look … here!’ he shouted, one word on the up, the next on the way down.
His daughters did look – in confusion. Flora came as close as she dared to the table, but was powerless to stop him.
‘… I … can … fly!’