Three

After Lilly’s misunderstanding my world became a bleak and twisted fairground ride and I was the smallest weakest person in it and then time just took a different shape and I couldn’t tell you how long any part of it took to go.

I was crying all the time and I had been that way for a while, not wailing like a baby or sobbing like a sissy but enough to make everything look blurred and misty, and seeing the world through tears had become so normal I forgot what edges looked like and I lost weight too, which would have pleased my dad if he had been around to see it.

People kept telling me everything would be OK and had been telling me that for a long time, but it wasn’t OK and wasn’t going to be and only a fool would think otherwise and I knew that much for sure. Something was broke and wasn’t getting fixed and sometimes that’s just a fact of life.

Even my feet had taken to feeling strange, so the ground under me was unreliable like it lived and moved and was treacherous so I was sea sick most of the time and living on a big orange jelly like old ladies make. My palms sweated sometimes without warning and I was hoping every day that I’d become numb and hardened but it seemed that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon and panic lived just an inch from my nose and there was always a little part of my brain or mind or soul that said, Hold on, hold on, this will pass. Trust your voices my voices told me and I did and in time the voices said, See, hush now hush now, and nobody told me I was leaving until men I didn’t know took me to the airport.

I broke down and cried on the way because we went past the gravel road that lead into the trees and then to the lido. I couldn’t help it and caught a few sobs and let my forehead bang on the window of the car and the trees were full and the road snaked into them so familiar that it called to me and beckoned me and I knew there would be lifeguards there readying the pool for the new season, hosing it clean, painting the places it was peeling the worst and playing football or sweeping the terraces, and I hoped they wouldn’t break up that lichen too much because it was fine as lace and twice as pretty. I would know some of those lifeguards but some would be new and wouldn’t even know how good it had been before. They just wouldn’t know and that was heart-breaking because things forgotten are worse than things never having been and forgetting is up there with Old Age and Death in the trinity of evil.

I’d never gone straight past the lido before in all my life and it pulled my guts out to go straight past it now, and it was like walking right past love and not stopping and love not seeing you and I was looking at a cemetery where everything that was or could have been was stopped for all time and grown over and even the names had worn away and faded already. I’d seen cemeteries like that. I closed my eyes and hoped when I opened them I’d be back in the lido sweeping the winter leaves away and sanding the rusting legs of the lifeguards’ watchtowers and sniffing up the scent of Old Rum. I would be listening to the men laugh and seeing them smoke and sweat and work and smelling the paint and disinfectant and chlorine.

When I looked again we were still on the highway and I caught my breath in a hiccup. The rest of the journey was so hard I chewed my lips until they bled and peeled tiny bits of flesh off them with my teeth and I couldn’t help it.

The airport was big and busy and the two men with me were quiet the whole time. They thought they were special agents or SS but they were just social service lackeys and I didn’t call them nothing and didn’t even speak a word.

One big man stayed with the car and the other big man chaperoned me through the crowds and sat me down. He never took his hand from my shoulder until we sat, then he sat between me and everyone else like I was dangerous and the crowd needed protecting. He never took off his sunglasses either and he never smiled at me or spoke much and when he did speak he put on a fake deep voice, I could tell. I reckoned he’d never seen titties in his life unless they were in some sticky magazine he kept under his bed at his mummy’s house along with his fake gun and chest expander and he probably broke sweat every time he passed a primary school and I could tell.

As I was sitting waiting to board the plane a bigger boy came and sat next to me and the big lackey scowled at him but the boy just smiled at me and ignored him. The boy was older than me and looked real confident and smooth and I could tell this was his kind of place just as the lido was mine.

I was holding an envelope with the name and address of my destination printed on it and the boy just reached out and took it from me and read it and passed it back and I was too tired and weak to resist. Then he struck up talking about aeroplanes and he sounded like he knew his stuff. He was tall and lean with ginger hair and was nice looking and I could tell he was very rich. He was wearing good clothes and proper brogue shoes shined up so you could see your face in them and their pattern was real holes and deep not just patterned on the surface like the ones in the Number 10 Discount Shoe Store. He looked like the cleanest, most soaped kid I’d ever seen and he even smelled of soap and he held out a wrinkled paper bag full of Rhubarb and Custards. At first I didn’t dip, but he shoved it at me harder so I took one and it tasted good but it’s juice kind of stuck in my throat.

‘Best Rhubarb and Custards in the bloody world, eh?’ He smiled and I nodded. ‘Mum gets them from a shop in the city. By the quarter if you don’t mind!’ He laughed. ‘I’m sure she pays in coppers and pennies!’

I reckoned he was called Rupert or Sebastian or something like that, not that I’d ever met a Rupert or a Sebastian. He was going long haul and told me all about the best planes to fly in. He must have seen I was teary and assumed I was afraid of flying because he went into a big talk about how planes want to stay in the air and all the physics of it.

He was smart and I didn’t know what he was talking about but the essence of it seemed to be that I shouldn’t worry because there was a very high probability that the plane wouldn’t be crashing today. He said the best planes are jets but if you’re flying props, singles are pretty good, but twin prop aircraft are dodgy because balancing the two engines is a real skill, you have to feather it, and if one engine dies it’s a battle royal … so whenever possible, avoid twin-props. Feather it … I didn’t know much at all about planes but I knew there were no feathers, so I just nodded and I wanted to ask him what exactly is a battle royal but thought I should probably know already, so I said nothing.

His plane was called a few minutes later and he said goodbye and offered his hand and I shook it. He had a firm cool grip and wore a long stripy scarf even though it wasn’t cold and a posh-school uniform with a multi-coloured stripy blazer and grey slacks and them deep shiny brogue shoes and he was movie-hero stylish like a ginger film star and I liked him.

‘Time flees.’ He looked at the lackey then back to me. ‘Be staunch fellow traveller,’ he said, and patted my shoulder, looking at me hard and deep. I hadn’t said a word the whole time and for all he knew I could have been a mute or deaf. Then he took a colourful marbled notebook from his inside pocket, unsnapped an elastic band that was wrapped around it and scribbled a note the way a doctor writes and put it in the bag of sweets and handed them to me. ‘Keep these. For your journey. I have about two thousand of them in my luggage.’ Then he walked away and was lost in the crowd.

When he was gone I pulled the note out. It had an address on it in the smartest part of the city and his name was Hamish Taunton and underneath was scrawled Non illegitimus carborundum. I didn’t know what it meant and put it back in my pocket and I reckoned I could like Hamish Taunton if I ever had a chance and I could be his friend.

The big lackey suddenly smiled like an idiot does when he realises he actually knows something and he told me his name was Mr Lore and it sounds like law then spent the next twenty minutes sitting there at that airport lying to me about how lucky I was to be going to such a lovely place, and he didn’t know shit. He’d never even been there, he told me that straight off, and even if it was Shangri-La all I wanted in the whole world was to be home and for it to be months and years ago. He was trying to be nice and I didn’t like it and he was angling for a Rhubarb and Custard and he wasn’t getting one.

Then the idiot lackey stood up and nodded to me. ‘Time to board,’ he said softly. It was the first genuine gentle thing he said all day and right then I almost bolted, but his hand fell heavy on my shoulder and I knew I was getting on the plane like it or not. I hated him but right then I wanted to fold into his chest because in that final parting he was all I had from anywhere near home and I knew I should have bolted long before and hid out and been like smoke and now it was too late.

We walked for a couple of minutes and down some stairs into ever more smaller and narrower places where eventually through big windows I could see huge jet airliners, some new, some older, all belonging to different airlines. They were like great shining manta rays and dolphins and there were jets with two engines and jets with four and I guessed Hamish Rupert Sebastian Taunton was on one and for a moment then I slid outside my own self-pity and wondered by what miracle something so big and heavy could actually fly and physics or no physics it didn’t make sense and it was science and sorcery. Their tails were all painted differently and it looked like a hundred different companies had aeroplanes on the tarmac in a magical banner parade.

Then the fake man idiot lackey gave my ticket to a young woman in a uniform and she smiled at me and he patted my back and at the same time shoved me through the gate and it wasn’t until he lifted his hand off my shoulder once and for all that I realised how heavy he had been on me.

My sudden lightness made me stagger for a step or two, then the sweep of people carried me along and onto the tarmac and I’d expected to walk through a tunnel and straight onto the plane, but it was a lot lower budget than that and I was outside in the fresh air and we walked across the tarmac with yellow lines to keep us from straying and an airline security guard was walking me towards my plane and I felt sick and for the first time I was afraid of flying, and it wasn’t a jumbo jet or even a jet of any kind, and it was dwarfed by the other planes on the tarmac and looked puny and weak or a toy or maybe through another eye delicate, graceful and elegant. And it was a twin-prop.