At first Roy laughs as he feels it lift beneath him. Bouncy castles are usually a bit tame as an amusement, except for the smallest children, but a flyaway castle strikes him as funny for a few seconds as it rises swiftly on the strong spurt of wind.
‘Hey,’ Roy shouts, as much to the castle as to anyone else, as if it might come to its senses and deposit him back on the ground. Brian runs after him and tries, and fails, to catch hold of the guy ropes to bring him back to earth. Perhaps he’d have made more of an effort if they had winning lottery tickets pinned to them.
Neither Roy nor Brian have been involved in a tragedy before, although they sometimes watch the drama documentaries on the BBC that recreate real life rescues, with many of those involved self-consciously playing themselves. Unfortunately, like so many amateurs in tragedies of this kind, Roy and Brian have no sense of occasion and as a consequence they fail to act quickly or appropriately. They both assume that the flying bouncy castle will drift back to earth. Brian takes out his camera and snaps a few photos. The bouncy castle climbs higher and higher, the wind keeping it aloft skilfully as if harnessing the gentle hands of an invisible juggling circus troupe.
Roy crawls to the front of the castle on his knees, holds on, looks down. He tries to overcome his fear of heights. He has to jump from the castle and save himself. He raises himself to a standing position, knees slightly bent to keep his balance, still holding on. The castle has risen high enough in the air to brush tree tops. How tall are trees? Ten feet? Twelve? Fifteen? Roy tries to visualize himself standing on Brian Donald’s shoulders. Would he be able to reach out and touch the tree tops? How tall is a first floor window? If you jump from the first floor, do you survive? The castle continues to climb. What about the chances of survival if you jump from a second floor window?
Roy returns to a crouching position, then moves again to get comfortable, resting his weight on his knees, holding on, looking down. He is too dangerously far from the ground to risk a jump. He switches his focus to remaining on the castle, as if it were his saviour rather than his captor. He finds a reasonably comfortable position, half reclining like a Roman guest at a feast, his feet jammed into a pocket in one of the side walls, his hands gripping the material beneath him. He feels secure enough to appreciate, if not actually enjoy, the view of the English countryside as he sails above it.
With the quietness, the wind in his hair, the gentle bobbing motion of the castle, Roy could almost believe himself lost at sea if it weren’t for the scenery below. In a rustic tableau reminiscent of an earlier, more innocent age, he sees a mother with two children on bicycles in a country lane. They wave at him as he floats overhead. What is the correct response? He has no materials to make a placard and spell out ‘Help’. The tiny figures are too far below him to read his distress in hand signals. Unwilling to disappoint the children, he waves tentatively. Still the flying castle climbs. The air is very cold. He wishes he could sail nearer the sun, so he could feel its warmth.
Roy loses track of the passage of time. He feels himself becoming light-headed as the air grows thinner. The prototype bouncy castle material, subject to unpredicted changes in temperature, begins to shrink. Roy lifts his lolling head and squints at the sun, trying to assess whether there is a danger of sailing too near and shrinking his craft enough to plummet him to the earth. His last thoughts are of his wife as, eyes tightly shut, he feels the material beneath him wrinkle and contract, hears the menacing hiss of the air inside escaping, feels the too-quick descent towards earth and certain death.
Roy has heard that if you don’t wake up when you feel yourself falling as you go to sleep at night, you will die. Dying and falling are indistinguishable for Roy in his final moments. He wakes in the arms of an angel. She isn’t beautiful, although she is wearing white and she’s soft and comforting. ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Well, well, well. Welcome to Paradise.’
Chapter Two ~ Personne Disparue
Sheila Travers reports Roy’s disappearance the next day, calling in to Brixton Police Station to file the information in person.
‘You have to wait forty-eight hours before you can file a missing person report,’ the desk Sergeant tells her.
‘It isn’t a straightforward missing person report. It’s an accident report. An incident report.’ Sheila picks at the bobbles on her coat, looking down. Then she looks the Sergeant straight in the eye. ‘Please, I need to know whether a body has been found.’
The desk sergeant checks his computer screen and reassures her that Roy’s body hasn’t been found.
‘What kind of man is your husband?’
The question seems a strange one. It strikes Sheila as being unnecessarily intrusive. It carries the implication that Roy’s personality could have some sort of bearing on the outcome of his freak accident, which is impossible. ‘Roy is a sensible man.’
The sergeant, following Sheila’s troubled reaction to his question in the frown lines on her face, seems relieved by the answer when she finally gives it. ‘Well, then. Wherever he’s landed, he’ll try to make his way back home. Why don’t you go back there and wait? I’m sure you’ll hear something from him soon.’
Sheila waits for him for over a week, starting at every sound outside her front door in case it is Roy without his key; lifting the phone receiver every so often to check the dialling tone; not eating properly; not going out in case there is some news; switching on the kettle to make tea and then not making it, switching it on again, letting it boil; switching every switch in the house and switching them all off again.
On the following Monday, with no sign of Roy and still no body found, Sheila decides she needs to enlist the help of all available agencies, including unconventional ones. She visits a clairvoyant in a pleasant, airy flat in Josephine Avenue, off Brixton Hill. The visit is a first for Sheila, although strictly speaking she is no stranger to the supernatural. When she was nine years old, she and her friends watched as a very bright, elliptical light hovered above their heads as they walked home from the school bus stop in the winter darkness. The likelihood of alien life forms drawing near to study the tiny figures in red and gray uniforms was debated in the junior school for weeks. It is the only other time in her life that Sheila has been prepared to believe that there might be more in this world than whatever she can see on the surface but the incident is half-buried in the mythology of Sheila’s childhood and she hasn’t thought about it for more than thirty years.
Sheila has never written to a magazine for advice, never taken part in a documentary for Channel Four, never believed in her horoscope (although she reads it) and never, ever turned to the spirit world for guidance. Now something outside the ordinary has happened to Roy and Sheila needs someone outside the ordinary to provide a clue to Roy’s continuing absence, as the police cannot. Sheila sets aside her misgivings and sounds the buzzer for the flat in Josephine Avenue.
The clairvoyant’s name is Dorothy. She’s in her late thirties, has badly bitten fingernails, an expensive feathered haircut and ever so slightly too-tight trousers. Her flat smells of air freshener but her manner is reassuring.
Dorothy takes the photograph of Roy being blown away on the bouncy castle, thoughtfully passed on to Sheila by Brian Donald, and rests her hands on it in her lap, closing her eyes. Seconds pass. Long seconds, running into minutes. Sheila is embarrassed and impressed by the silence, unsure whether to fill it. From the kitchen, she can distinctly hear the sound of Dorothy’s cat eating its dry food supplement from the plastic bowl on the linoleum.
‘I see him floating,’ says Dorothy at last. ‘I see him floating.’ She settles back, easing the pressure caused by sitting upright in the trousers, apparently prepared to let the matter rest. Sheila tries to pin Dorothy down to an interpretation of this information.
‘On a boat?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘On a river or on the sea?’
‘The sea?’ The inflection in Dorothy’s voice suggests participation in a parlour guessing game ra
ther than the insight of an all-seeing oracle.
The minimal information Sheila gathers in this consultation with Dorothy strongly indicates to her that the wind has taken Roy across the Channel. What other stretch of sea could have transported him to a land mass quickly enough for him to have survived the journey? It is extremely fortunate that she has been collecting tokens from the Daily Mail to exchange for a ferry ticket to France for only £1, as this will enable her to travel inexpensively to look for him there.
‘One more thing, Sheila. I can see him standing on a platform, preparing to step off. It’s a very vivid picture. I don’t know what it means.’
Sheila spends Tuesday and Wednesday with a French dictionary, paper, pens, glue and scissors. By Thursday she’s ready to go to Calais to search for Roy, one of only a few foot passengers to make the trip. Most of her fellow travellers are bootleggers in cars or vans, making a round trip to Calais to buy bottles of Jacob’s Creek at prices which offer a considerable saving compared to current deals in British supermarkets and off licences.
Fifteen minutes into the journey, Sheila starts to feel sick. Her weakened body is powerless to stop anxious thoughts crowding her mind. Where is Roy? What’s become of him? She clings to the hope that he’s alive. Sheila cannot and will not believe that Roy is dead. She holds tight to the rail of the ferry, pea green and sick, not with the motion of the boat but with the effort of disbelieving the evidence of his disappearance. He cannot be dead. He would not have left her. She must believe in him. Believing will give her the strength to bring him back, wherever he has gone, or been taken. Alone, sick, frightened, Sheila spaces her feet a little apart on the wooden floor of the deck of the ferry to keep her balance as the boat rocks with the movement of the sea in the middle of the English Channel. She’s determined to believe.
Sheila has a thin stack of home-made A3-sized posters with her, photocopied in the local newsagent’s, each with a photograph of Roy. The words ask for help from the French people in their own language: ‘Personne Disparue. Est-ce que vous avez vu cette personne?’
Standing on the ferry, attempting to create a reality in which Roy is still alive and trying to get back home, Sheila tries to transmit her belief in him to wherever he is, so that he will know and take comfort. She reaches into her nylon travelling bag and takes out the posters to look at his blurry likeness, enlarged and photocopied from a holiday snapshot. The wind tugs at the topmost poster and whips it out of her hands, flinging the paper against the rail before snatching it up again, toying with it and then dashing it down into the waves. Sheila stuffs the rest of the posters back into her bag, not watching.
Once she reaches Calais, Sheila glues the posters all around the town. The day is exhausting and disappointing. In attending to the detail of creating the posters and buying a ferry ticket, Sheila hasn’t paid attention to the overall strategy of the plan. Now that she has arrived in France, Sheila feels daunted by the scope of her search. She feels useless and frustrated and foolish. She has no idea how to generate leads or gather information. She walks round and round and tries to talk to people, without learning any news of Roy. At the end of a disappointing day, Sheila goes into the hypermarché to buy some cheese and some wine before catching the last ferry home. She hopes that shopping will provide some solace because it is normal and everyday but the lights in the hypermarché are so bright that they give her a headache and, as she takes a trolley from the rack, out of the corner of her eye she sees the doors of a lift close on a man who has been too slow to get out of it, trapping his arm.
The day after her return to England, Sheila visits the clairvoyant again.
‘I think he’s in a happier place,’ Dorothy tells Sheila, with tears in her eyes. Sheila pays the clairvoyant the money for the consultation but she won’t believe her. She goes back to the flat to wait for him.
Perhaps Roy is being held somewhere against his will, unable to get back home? A few days after his disappearance Sheila came across an advertisement in the local paper which she pinned to the notice board in the kitchen, although she hoped she wouldn’t need it:
Fitzgerald’s Bureau of Investigation
~ Discretion Assured
It seems that the time has come to seek help from these people. When Sheila telephones, it is Mrs Fitzgerald herself who answers. She sounds sympathetic and experienced. Sheila makes an appointment to meet Mrs Fitzgerald and another woman named Alison, who will be assigned to help her look for Roy. For the first time since he disappeared, Sheila feels that she has got some help from people who know what they’re doing.
Chapter Three ~ On The Bus
Ella Fitzgerald is riding the buses again. She has found this an excellent opportunity to observe mad people, who ride around all day long on a Travelcard, mumbling to themselves. Today she has selected the 159, one of the few services that still uses the hop-on hop-off Routemaster buses with conductors. She has travelled from Brixton to Oxford Circus and is now on her way back home again.
Looking through the windows of the top deck of the bus, she can see a silvery, shimmery bright sun. I must learn to see the world the way others see it, she thinks. There is something fanciful about the way I see things and I have to stop. Everyone knows the sun is gold or yellow. Even very young children know it, if you look at their drawings. I’ve always seen the sun as silver. If I can learn to see that color as yellow, I’ll be like other people. I’ll be normal.
Mrs Fitzgerald is thinking about madness. More than anything else, more than poverty or war or assaults from local teenagers, Mrs Fitzgerald fears going mad like her brother. What are the signs? She hopes to learn from her fellow passengers.
When she looks outside again, as the bus pulls out of Lambeth Road and turns right towards Kennington, the world seems to have gone wrong. Her position at the front of the bus on the top deck gives her an excellent 270( vantage point. There to her left, as it should be, is the Imperial War Museum, formerly Bedlam. In front of the bus, behind the bus, all around the bus, there is a sea of people as far she can see. Most are walking but some are on bicycles. It’s impossible to tell whether the atmosphere is jolly or menacing. It has something of a carnival feel, which usually means a mixture of both. Mrs Fitzgerald can hear booming music and the shrill, discordant sound from whistles strung round people’s necks on colored strings, jammed in their mouths, blowing at full volume.
‘Reclaim London’ is written on home-made banners waving above the crowds. Mrs Fitzgerald has the sudden, icy fear that these are mad people, spilling out from Bedlam, reclaiming the capital city and taking her with them as one of them. Looking around the bus, she sees she’s quite alone on the top deck. There are enough people outside to pick up the bus and carry it along on their shoulders, Mrs Fitzgerald above them like some carnival queen of the mad people. Is it possible that they know? Is she so like them that they can sense that she sees the sun as silver? ‘The sun is yellow, the sun is yellow, the sun is yellow,’ chants Mrs Fitzgerald, seizing on the thing that will make her normal and different from them. ‘The sun is yellow, the sunny’s yellow, the sunnys yellow, sunnys yellow, sunnys yellow, sunnysyellow.’
The conductor lays a gentle hand on her shoulder. God, there are so many disturbed people on the bus these days, he should get a care worker’s allowance. The conductor’s fingers smell faintly of the grease from the roast chicken sandwiches he has been eating from their tinfoil wrapper a moment before. ‘It’s a demo, love. Anti-traffic, anti-vehicles. Bloody cyclists. They think they own London. You might be better slipping off the bus and taking the Tube. You can stay if you want, though.’ Sometimes they just like somewhere warm to sit.
Mrs Fitzgerald, dry-mouthed, cannot bring herself to reply. Outside, head and shoulders above the other demonstrators, a beautiful blond young man balances on the pedals of a unicycle. He’s wearing a dress. He holds his hand up to the bus driver through the open sliding door that gives access to the driver’s seat. The driver keeps it open against regulations beca
use he thinks it looks cool. The demonstrator’s hand, palm up, loose at the wrist, looks like a foppish invitation to the bus driver to dance. He wakes up all his muscles at once and lunges from the unicycle, pulling the driver from his seat and taking his place in front of the wheel, the bus engine still idling.
Jeremy grips the wheel, his hands in position at ten to two, leaning forward slightly, mastering the great machine. He moves the gear stick on the shaft below the over-sized wheel into first gear and the bus edges forward, slowly. The protestors fall back, whistling and jeering, Jeremy clipping the pedals of the cyclists at the near side of the road as he adjusts to steering the unfamiliarly wide vehicle.
Routemaster buses are semi-automatic. There is no clutch. The drivers slip into neutral and rev the engine before changing gear. Jeremy fails to do this. The bus lurches and comes to a halt two hundred yards further down the road, where the driver pulls Jeremy from the bus by his hair and regains his seat.
The psychic postman stands at Alison’s door, patiently feeding birthday cards through the letterbox. Thirty years old. She hides from view, not feeling like talking.
‘Alison,’ calls the postman, his lips to the letterbox. ‘Are you alright?’
‘I’m frumpy, overweight, dog tired, smelling of milk, vomit, piss and Bonjela.’
‘Oh.’
‘But it’s OK. I’m slowly climbing out of the pit.’
‘It might be post-natal depression. You should see someone about it.’ A plume of his cigarette smoke reaches Alison through the letterbox. The postman’s concern is touching. She presses her thumb and forefinger into the inner corner of each eye, using pressure to stop the tears the way first-aiders stop blood seeping from a small wound.
Alison’s daughter, Phoebe, is around a year old now. She’s not sure of Phoebe’s exact age because she found the baby at the seaside last summer. While there is general sympathy these days for women who suffer from post-natal depression, Alison is aware there would be little sympathy left to go round for women who have found a baby and kept it.
Six Pack of Sleuths: Comedy Mysteries Page 65
