Midland

by James Flint

  He paired them all off with an instructor – ‘Mia, you’re sticking with me’ – then quickly ran once more through the protocols for take-off and landing.

  Sean and Demetrio went first. They were to launch off the windward side of la Duna, so Demetrio unfurled their canopy and laid it out at the top of the slope. Then he and Sean clipped themselves into their harnesses and hooked them together, with Luggie double-checking the straps.

  ‘I feel like a pantomime horse!’ Sean joked, as he and the instructor, now tethered together, sidestepped their way down the gradient until the control lines grew taut.

  ‘Just be grateful you’re at the front end!’ Alex called back. And he had a point: to launch, Sean had the easy task of jogging straight forwards downhill. Demetrio on the other hand had to run backwards beside him while pulling the glider up into the air like a kite, then swivelling round and scooping his passenger up underneath him as the wing took flight.

  Even though he’d done this before, Sean was amazed how instant and effortless the process could seem. Three or four steps and they were up and, within another moment or two, impossibly high, both from the speed with which the ground fell away and from the flood of adrenalin. That glucose rush was a feeling Sean loved, one that had always drawn him to sports of all kinds, and for the first time since Alex had poached Mia from under his nose on the aircraft he was able to let go and relax. This he could hold onto, this was reliable: the deep blue bands of the sea, the icing of clouds on the horizon, the clean cool air on his face, the sense of command over the territory below … it was all so much more comprehensible than the fathomless mystery of whether or not a girl might find him attractive.

  Demetrio pulled them into a turn and they carved through the sky until the peak of la Duna came back into view.

  ‘Agora Filipe e Caitlin vão,’ he called, pointing, and as Sean watched the pair of them executed the strange little sequence of launch calisthenics and floated off the face of the slope just as he and his instructor had done. Before long all four tandems were up in the air, Luggie and Mia’s included, and for the next hour or so the neon crescents hissed around the sky like storks bearing twins, hunting out thermals and tacking to and fro across the face of the breeze that flowed in from the Atlantic.

  At length Luggie led them into land on the beach in front of the Club, where they helped pack up the harnesses while comparing notes on the experience. Mia, charged up with the zealousness of the recent convert, was particularly voluble.

  ‘Glad you went for it in the end, then?’ Sean asked.

  ‘Oh yeah. I mean, I was completely crapping myself the whole time and when we took off I thought I was going to die! But Luggie was amazing and he talked me through the whole thing and after a while I just kind of forgot that what we were doing was totally insane and just started to think, God, this is just what it must be like, I mean really be like, to be like a bird, you know? Do you know what I mean?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Alex. ‘The silence of it all, the fact that you’re just kind of there.’

  ‘Yeah, exactly,’ Mia nodded.

  Then Caitlin spoke up. ‘Matthew would have liked it. Don’t you think, Alex?’

  ‘Yes,’ Alex said, surprised. It was the first time anyone had mentioned Matthew during the trip. He’d been working on the assumption that the topic of his brother was strictly off limits. ‘He really would have done. He’d like it here full stop, I’d think. It’s his kind of scene.’

  It was lunchtime so they headed back to the bar, commandeered a table, and ordered food and beer. They were halfway through their meal when Freddie wandered in.

  ‘Well. If it ain’t the Vulture Squadron. How’d it go?’ he asked, and in reply received a chorus of happy responses. ‘Aw, now you’re making me feel bad that I missed it.’

  ‘I’m sure Luggie will take you up another time,’ Sean said.

  ‘Don’t pity him,’ said Alex. ‘I promise you Freddie will have been perfectly happy piloting his hammock at an altitude of several hundred millimetres above sea level.’

  ‘Well, that’s where I got the best view of this morning’s girl-on-girl beach volleyball. Which was not to be missed, I can tell you. But as it happens, I wasn’t in my hammock for very long. I’ve been busy. And I come bearing gifts.’ He reached into the pocket of his shorts, pulled out a black plastic film canister, and placed it on the table.

  Alex was the nearest: he picked the canister up, snapped off the plastic cap and peered inside.

  ‘Easy does it,’ Freddie instructed.

  ‘Oh my goodness. Is this what I think it is?’

  ‘It is. A present from young Mr Blake. Don’t snort it all at once.’

  ‘From Jamie?’ asked Caitlin. ‘He’s here?’

  ‘He was here.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘He showed up after you’d gone. I spent most of the morning with him, sorting out, you know, the thing we came here to sort out. Anyway, then he had to leave. Said it was an emergency, had to fly down to Buenos Aires. Some business thing. He sends sincere apologies. And that, of course,’ Freddie said, indicating the film canister. ‘There’s a big bag of grass too, if anyone wants any. He said to help ourselves to anything we needed, it was all on the house.’

  ‘Is he not going to be here for the party?’ asked Sean.

  ‘I guess not. He did say that he’d be back before the end of our stay, if he could make it. His loss, right? He’s got to work. We, on the other hand, have got to have a good time.’

  There was a crash; Caitlin had knocked over her chair and was storming out of the restaurant and off down the beach.

  ‘Whoa,’ said Freddie. ‘Was it something I said?’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ Sean told him. And he headed off in pursuit of his sister.

  —————

  He caught up with her by the rocks on the peninsula’s promontory, a steely outcrop of granite worn over millennia into a series of lenticular ovoids which resembled a pod of surfacing whales. Caitlin was sitting in the sand with her back to the base of the largest rock, keening. Sean sat down beside her, clearing a space among the briny strands of rotten bladderwrack and the clumps of fishing net knotted around pieces of wave-sculpted driftwood and shards of smoothed bone.

  ‘Don’t be upset,’ he said, uselessly.

  ‘Why would he do this, Sean? Why? When we’ve come all this way?’

  ‘Like Freddie said, he’s got to go away on business. It happens.’

  ‘Oh bullshit! That’s bullshit. It’s been, like, thirteen years! We come to visit, and he’s called away on business? Don’t be so fucking naïve. You should be as insulted as I am.’

  ‘He didn’t disappear the last time I came.’

  ‘Well then it’s just me, isn’t it? It’s just me that he hates.’ She picked up a splinter of driftwood and started grinding its point into her palm, turning it around and around as if she was trying to drill a hole through her hand. ‘It’s just like before, Sean. He’s left me, just like before.’

  ‘It’s not like before. He invited us here. We can come back. It’s easy for us. We have the money.’

  ‘It is like before. You don’t understand. He hates me Sean, he just fucking hates me. He doesn’t want me.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Have you spoken to him about it? Have you asked him?’

  ‘I—’

  ‘No. You fucking haven’t, have you? Because you know exactly what he’d say. You wanted me to come, Sean, you invited me. But he didn’t invite me, did he? He didn’t want me here. Go on. Deny it.’

  Sean couldn’t, so instead he said nothing and pulled his sister to him, stroking her hair while she cried it all out. The beach was busy now, with several hundred people arrayed across it sunbathing, diving in and out of the breakers, playing football. Out in the bay the windsurfers plied to and fro, drawing jagged slashes of colour across the whitecaps with their sails while three or four paragliders with tandem rigs soared ov
erhead – Luggie, Demetrio and Filipe no doubt, repeating the morning’s experience for a new set of guests. It seemed strange to feel sad on a day like this, when the sun was so high it left almost no shadow and the clouds he had seen from the top of la Duna that morning remained suspended above the horizon as if painted onto a screen. But sad he was, sitting there holding his sister’s spasming body, asking himself what could be done to stop his long-cherished plan for family reconciliation from falling apart.

  Then a movement caught his eye. A pair of red Bermuda shorts, running towards them between the groups of holidaymakers, unbuttoned denim shirt flapping in the breeze … It was Alex. And he was shouting.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Sean said to Caitlin, who didn’t respond. ‘I can’t hear you!’ he yelled down the beach.

  Alex continued his run, feet puffing out little sprays of sand. The day was so bright Sean could hardly bear to look at him. As the other man drew near he released his sister and stood, hands shading his eyes, squinting into the glare.

  ‘What is it?’ he yelled again. But Alex didn’t slow. He continued till he was right up alongside them then dropped to his knees.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ Sean asked.

  ‘You’re not going to believe this,’ Alex said, between gasps. ‘In New York. Two planes have crashed into the Twin Towers.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’ said Sean, his mouth suddenly dry. Even Caitlin looked up.

  ‘I wish I was. Both of them have completely collapsed. We just saw it online. It’s totally fucking unreal.’

  EGG

  MATTHEW HAD MET CAITLIN on several occasions as a teenager, but she hadn’t made much of an impression on him – or him on her – until she changed schools from Stratford Grammar to Wardle’s, a fee-paying establishment in Warwick, the same school that Matthew’s sister Emily attended.

  Emily, who was two years Caitlin’s senior, had recently passed her driving test and was now doing the Wolds’ school run. Every day she drove herself and Matthew, whose school was not far from Wardle’s, the ten or so miles to Warwick and back in a somewhat comical red Renault 4 that had been Alex’s before it had been hers, bought for him by Margaret and Miles without any consultation. He’d longed for a car and its promise of freedom from the confines of the countryside, but it was typical of his parents that they’d managed, with their unwavering ability to divine any currents of anti-cool in their immediate vicinity, to go out and buy the one vehicle that he wouldn’t have wanted to be seen dead in. It was by a long chalk the crappiest set of wheels to draw up in the sixth-form car park every morning, and so Alex, in a pointless attempt to make it a degree or two more hip, had set about trying to trash it. But the boxy little vehicle proved as resilient as the indomitable French wagons from which it had evolved, and it survived him to pass into the hands of his sister, who treated it with rather more care and affection than her brother ever had.

  One Saturday lunchtime that summer Margaret had fallen into conversation with Caitlin’s mother, Sheila, over a gin and tonic in the King’s Head. When she’d heard about Caitlin’s move to Wardle’s she’d asked in a characteristic fit of generosity – partly prompted by the flush from the vindication of her own choice for her daughter’s education – if the Nolans would like to take advantage of one of the spare seats in Emily’s car and share the journey to school. The matter was quickly settled: on weekdays Sheila would drive Caitlin from Shelfield to Snitterfield and drop her off at the Wolds’ house for a quarter past eight. At a quarter to five, to coincide with the children’s return, she would come to pick her up. Sheila would return the favour by doing the run if Emily was sick or had to stay late for extra-curricular activities.

  Extra-curricular activities were pretty much the first thing that entered Matthew’s mind when he saw Caitlin emerge from Sheila’s car in his driveway the morning of their first shared journey. Angular and gangly, the grey panels of her ill-cut school uniform serving only to emphasise the litheness of her body, she hovered in the damp September dawn with one long arm rolling her school bag to and fro across her calf while the other pushed her long, tawny hair back from her lightly tanned forehead, as if she’d stepped straight out of one of Matthew’s many wet dreams.

  The effect she had upon him was so intense that beyond the most perfunctory grunts of greeting for the first week of the term he couldn’t bring himself to speak to her at all although, Emily noted with amusement, he did at once forgo his usual place in the front for a seat in the back beside the newcomer. Then one October morning, when his sister was busy filling the car with petrol at a service station, Matthew asked the question.

  ‘Hey, want to meet up at lunch?’ Caitlin blinked, not comprehending. ‘We could hang out in the park. It’d be fun.’

  ‘I … I’m not sure we’re allowed out.’

  Matthew was ready for this. ‘Who said anything about being allowed? Girls sneak out, you know. It’s easy. No one really checks.’

  Caitlin went red. She knew.

  ‘Look, don’t worry about it,’ Matthew said, seeing that he wasn’t getting anywhere. ‘It was just an idea.’

  ‘No, it’s okay. I’ll try. I want to. Where do you meet?’

  Matthew’s heart began to beat a little faster. ‘Usually by the big fountain in St Nicholas’s Park. Or in the café next to it. Café if it’s raining.’

  Caitlin turned to look at him and smiled. ‘Or if you fancy a cup of tea.’ Her embarrassment had gone, and happy, confident Caitlin had returned.

  ‘That too.’

  —————

  For the rest of the week Matthew spent the entirety of his lunch break in St Nicholas’s Park, nervously scanning the paths and the café for a glimpse of the girl. But Caitlin did not appear that day, or the next, or the next. Not wanting to be seen as needy, he didn’t bring the matter up with her when he saw her in the car, and Caitlin didn’t raise it either, maintaining instead her usual aura of absent-minded intensity. For a while it was as if their earlier conversation had never happened at all. And then, the following Thursday, she appeared.

  Matthew was sitting with his friends sharing a bowl of soggy chips and a cigarette, when Stuart broke off from the conversation and stared over his shoulder.

  ‘I think there’s someone here to see you,’ he said.

  Matthew immediately assumed it was one of the duty teachers, who occasionally launched a surprise raid on the park. He blanched and twisted around, expecting the worst.

  ‘Hey,’ Caitlin said.

  ‘Oh,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t sound too overjoyed.’

  ‘No – it’s – I just thought you were someone else.’ He jumped up, ordered the boys to shuffle around, and reached for another chair. ‘You with anyone?’

  ‘Nope. Just me.’ She sat down.

  ‘This is Stuart. Pete. Ashwin,’ Matthew said, awkwardly.

  ‘Hi,’ said everyone.

  ‘Do you want a tea, or something?’

  ‘Okay.’ Then, as Matthew hadn’t offered, Caitlin turned to Stuart. ‘Have you got a fag?’

  Stuart grinned excessively. ‘Of course,’ he said, whipping out his pack. ‘Get the lady some tea then, Matthew.’

  Matthew did, thanking his stars for Caitlin’s arrival and cursing them for giving him Stuart Marshall as a friend. When he returned, the girl was sitting listening to an anecdote Stuart was telling about going with his father to buy a bull terrier from a car-wrecker’s yard in West Bromwich. She laughed loudly at some detail as Matthew sat down, and he felt his throat constrict. Had he already lost her before they’d even got started? Because surely she preferred Stuart to him, Stuart with his moussed boy-band hair and his amusing life featuring comedy dogs and their comedy owners.

  ‘Tea,’ Matthew said. He tried to think of something to funny to add, but the eloquence he’d discovered on the back seat of the Renault 4 had deserted him.

  ‘So,’ said Stuart, happy to continue running point on the conversation. ‘You two share car
journeys, yeah?’

  ‘Yup,’ Caitlin said.

  ‘That’s very interesting,’ Ashwin said, dunking a chip into a pool of ketchup.

  ‘Very interesting’ was the group’s code for its exact opposite. Stuart giggled and kicked him under the table. He missed and caught Pete instead, who swore and kicked back. This meant war, and the table started bucking as the three of them hacked at each other’s legs.

  ‘Stop it you dickheads,’ Matthew said, grabbing for his and Caitlin’s cups in an attempt at damage limitation. He tried to sound annoyed, but in fact he was delighted. It was just the excuse he’d needed.

  ‘Come on,’ he said to a mystified Caitlin. ‘Let’s go outside.’

  They left the café and walked down the crazy-paving pathway towards what everyone referred to as ‘the lake’ but which was in reality just a circular pond with a central fountain in which the local ducks liked to congregate.

  ‘This was the scene of an awesome battle, you know,’ said Matthew.

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last year. Fifth-form water fight. Seventeen of us got suspended. It was epic.’

  ‘You got suspended from school?’

  ‘Yeah, but it was ludicrous, and the teachers knew it. They thought it was a real fight, and by the time they worked out it was just a water fight they’d taken a stand and they couldn’t back down. So they suspended us over half-term.’

  ‘That sounds sort of pointless.’

  ‘Exactly. They did it so they didn’t have to really suspend us during actual school time, but also so they didn’t have to back down and lose face. Except the school disco was on during that week, and we weren’t allowed on the premises, so we couldn’t go, which was a pain. So we got a sound system and set up a gig in Stuart’s garden, which is just up off the Coventry road and has got this raised terrace like a stage. His parents were cool about it and we put the word out and everyone ditched the school event and came to ours instead. It was awesome.’

  Matthew felt protective towards Caitlin, he realised. As the youngest of three he rarely got to feel protective about anyone or anything, unless you counted the guinea pigs that had lived in an old tea chest in the corner of the kitchen, a kind of rodent TV set that served primarily as entertainment for the family dogs. But it was a confusing feeling because he wanted her, too, wanted her naked against him, an impulse that seemed to contradict its more wholesome twin.