‘Possibly. It could, equally, have been a panther; there are some in these parts.’
‘Why did you hide it, though?’
‘For many reasons. Among others, this particular plane is readily identifiable. It’s well known to belong to the man I once was. For that reason, I must ask you to set fire to it on arrival, if the impact with the ground has not already done so.’
Fred twisted round to stare at him in astonishment. ‘Burn it?’
But the explorer was already pointing at the dials. ‘These are the things you need to know. Those dials are for speed and altitude; and that spirit level shows if you’re flying straight. You want the bubble in the spirit level to be in the direct centre.’
Fred muttered the words after him, trying to force them into his memory. ‘Speed, altitude, spirit level.’
‘The pedals bank left and right.’
Fred put his feet on the pedals. They were much smaller than the pedals in his father’s Ford. He prodded them experimentally. Two wires running down each side of the inside of the plane shifted as he pressed the pedals.
‘The joystick –’ the explorer shook the back-seat joystick – ‘goes up, down, left and right.’
Fred held the joystick. It was black with a red button on top. It moved loosely under his fingers.
‘I have one too, in the back seat, so I can take control at any time. This wrench – like a window winder – controls the throttle, meaning how much power you give yourself. And that’s more or less it. Now, you see the button I told you not to press – the black one, on the right?’
It wasn’t a button so much as an oblong, like the lid of a fountain pen sticking out from the dashboard.
‘Yes.’
‘Press it.’
Fred pressed it. His hands were shaking. Nothing happened.
‘Again,’ said the explorer.
Fred pressed harder.
The engine gave a moan, a cough, and then roared into action. The plane shook. Fred could feel it vibrating. It added to the wild prickling of his skin.
‘Do you hear that? That’s the sound of life becoming!’ said the explorer. His eyes were glinting a little maniacally.
Fred whispered under his breath, ‘Oh help.’
‘Now – taking off is the easy part. You just point the plane in the direction you need to go – up through the hole in the canopy – open the throttle, pull back on the joystick, and fly.’
Fred’s breath had given up entirely now. ‘What about the rest of it?’ He gestured at the dials.
‘I’ll tell you when you’re up there. We’ll have to shout: if there’s a wind it’ll be loud, and the intercom was one of the few things I couldn’t fix. Luckily, we have no need of a radio control tower. Now – go.’
Fred’s entire body was metal and stone. He had to force his feet to move, pressing the left pedal to point the plane down the boulevard runway.
‘Now open the throttle,’ shouted the explorer over the scream of the engine.
‘How?’ Fred roared.
‘Wind the winder! At your left side!’
The plane gathered speed, the wheels jolting over the slabs of ancient stone.
‘Pull back! Pull back!’
Fred pulled back on the joystick with all his strength. He felt the nose lift, the front wheels leave the ground, his stomach jerk, and suddenly they were hurtling straight for the top of the canopy. The sky above him was criss-crossed with green.
Fred let out a yell of fear, but the explorer pulled back further on his own joystick, and the tail cleared the greenery of the jungle.
‘It would be a good idea to open your eyes,’ said the explorer. ‘It makes piloting easier.’
Fred opened his eyes. They were in the sky.
‘How did you know they were closed?’
‘Mine were, when I first launched a plane,’ said the explorer. The tinge of madness in his voice was still there. ‘You’re flying.’
Fred looked down. The jungle was an infinite sweep of green: a Turkish carpet for a god. His heart was roaring louder than the wind ripping past his ears.
The explorer leant forward and shouted in his ear. ‘Use the stick to turn left. You need to get the feel of the controls.’
Very gingerly, Fred tilted the stick.
‘More than that! You can be flying sideways without tipping the plane over. You need to feel you can take risks.’
Fred pulled the joystick hard to the left. The wing dipped and the plane swooped in the air. His stomach swooped with it.
‘Less! Less than that!’ yelled the explorer.
A bird flew past them. The plane was heading straight towards it. ‘Don’t hit any birds!’ roared the explorer. ‘It’s bad for the propeller!’
Fred jerked the joystick and the plane tilted straight up, shuddering in the sudden altitude.
‘What now? Shouldn’t you be controlling it?’ Fred’s voice sounded panicky.
‘Of course not! Joystick a little forward!’ called the explorer.
The plane levelled out.
‘Follow the tributary to the river.’
Before Fred had time to breathe they were flying over treetops, above an enormous flock of parrots. And then, quite suddenly, there was nothing between his feet and the Amazon River except air and a millimetre of tin floor.
‘Oh God,’ muttered Fred. The water below was a blue-purple. He could see the shadow of the plane skidding along its surface.
The explorer let out a noise that sounded like a growl, a guttural sigh. ‘My God, it’s beautiful. I’d forgotten.’
The river was staggering to look at. It made every inch of Fred thrum and burn.
‘It’s very easy to not want to come down,’ said the explorer. ‘If planes didn’t run out of fuel, I would still be up here. It’s the closest you will ever come to being inside a fairy tale. Now, if you’ve got the feel of the controls, you can try flying through that cloud.’
Fred tightened his grip on the joystick. ‘I don’t think I want to.’
‘You should know how. It’s important.’
‘Can’t I just keep doing this for now?’
‘No! Up! Up!’
Fred pulled back and steered the nose of the plane into the cloud. The air was bitterly, shockingly cold and wet, and suddenly the world, which had been so intricately detailed, no longer existed.
‘Keep going up!’ said the explorer. ‘Come out of the top of it.’
Fred pulled back on the stick and the nose of the plane rose. They flew up higher and higher into the blue. The joystick vibrated harder under his hand. He clutched it, trying to stop it shaking.
The explorer leant forward. ‘Lighter touch, Fred! I know I said you can be firm with it, but you’re holding it like a steak knife. Use the tips of your fingers. You gauge the wind by how the joystick shudders.’
Fred eased his grip. He felt the plane hum under his fingers.
‘Better!’ said the explorer. The wind dropped, and the roar in Fred’s ears lessened.
He looked down at the green world beneath. ‘Are you sure we shouldn’t be getting back to Max?’ he asked.
‘The boy is safe for now,’ said the explorer. His voice was sharp. ‘I wouldn’t be up here if there was anything I could do for him down there.’
‘Sorry,’ said Fred.
‘He looks so like my boy,’ said the explorer suddenly. ‘Those eyebrows.’
Fred hesitated. ‘You said … cholera?’
‘It happened a lot,’ said the explorer. He seemed to be trying to sound matter-of-fact. His voice was tight; Fred could barely hear him over the engine. ‘I buried my gold signet ring with him, so that anyone finding his bones would know that he was mine, and that he was loved. I made myself a replacement.’
The plane gave a shudder; Fred couldn’t tell if it was the sky or the man behind him. ‘If an adult tells you that you will understand everything when you’re older, you are being lied to. In fact, some things I think you never understand
.’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Fred. It felt very inadequate.
‘Turn left. The government cared very little for its indigenous people at that time. I wanted his death to count. All that down there –’ and the explorer dipped the nose of the plane to point downwards – ‘I’ve made stores of plants, roots, fungus. Of things that might have saved him, perhaps. The jungle can heal, if you know how. I have stores of medicine, of herbs, of information. Did you think I just drank cachaça and polished my teeth?’
‘No,’ said Fred. ‘I never thought that.’
The explorer’s voice sank lower. Fred strained to hear him. ‘I would gladly have given everything I had – my life, of course, but that’s so obvious it’s boring: I would have burnt the entire rainforest to the ground, to hold him for a single minute. When you four tumbled down on to the city floor, I would have swapped your lives for his as easily as blinking. I would gladly have watched you die in exchange for holding him once more.’
He jerked the plane sideways, and Fred gripped the seat with his fingernails. ‘That is no longer the case. I was afraid that my heart had simply … run out. But it transpires that the heart has its own petrol station, its own coal, its own soap. It will renew, so use it hugely.’ The explorer banked sharply left again, and began circling lower.
‘Now, you’re going to land the plane. I’ll start bringing her in.’
Fred murmured a swear word under his breath, followed by another. Landing sounded like the least fun part of flying – mostly because, if you got it wrong, you were liable to be distributed over the world in small chunks.
‘I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,’ said the explorer. ‘I’ll get you through the canopy hole, and then you will finish the landing. You want to land with your back and front wheels on the ground simultaneously. But if you can’t, it has to be front wheels first: the back one is very fragile.’
Fred used his free hand to bring the collar of his shirt up to his mouth. He bit down, hard. It helped keep his hands steady, though it tasted of honey and mud and dead bird.
The explorer guided the plane towards the hole in the canopy. Fred craned round to look at him. His face was concentrated, and glowing. They dipped down through the hole.
‘Now, take the controls!’ called the explorer.
Fred aimed for the stretch of boulevard, and for the panther. As they hurtled downwards the thought of Max, somewhere on the stone below, overtook Fred, and he jerked the joystick forward and down, away from where the boy might be lying.
The front wheels hit the stone, and bounced off again. The impact threw Fred forward and his head smacked against the dashboard. The explorer took over the controls, wrenching the plane round; it bumped once, turned, sped up, and climbed into the air again, back out through the hole. Fred shook himself, disoriented. They were back in the sky.
‘That wasn’t bad!’ called the explorer.
‘What do you mean? It was terrible! I nearly killed us,’ shouted Fred.
‘Not bad for a first try. The instinct is to push down with the stick, to get the nose on the ground.’ The explorer sounded calm. ‘But you have to pull backwards, and up. You can practise that with the plane later, on the ground. You need to get the instinct into your fingers. Now, I’ll loop us, and come in again.’
This time, as they approached the stone, Fred pulled the joystick up. He held the stick steady in his hands; the nose was tilted too high to see the ground through the windshield so he leant out of the side, peering ahead, his heart screaming in his chest.
The plane touched down, rose again, bumped, and suddenly it was speeding along the stone floor towards the wall. The wall seemed to be coming up very fast.
‘Slow! Slow to a halt! Good!’ The explorer reached forward and pulled back the throttle, and took over the controls. ‘Good.’ The plane stopped.
Fred sat in the front seat, sweat coursing down his face, both hands gripping his knees. It was astonishing, he thought. It was like nothing else on earth. He felt wobbly, uncooked.
‘Now – what was that word I heard you say in the sky?’ said the explorer sternly.
‘Sorry,’ said Fred.
‘Where did you learn that word anyway?’
‘School.’
‘Pilots never swear. It makes them look panicked. Kindly remember that, and never let me hear you swearing again, in any circumstances.’
‘Sorry,’ said Fred again. But it was difficult to feel truly sorry, difficult to feel anything except the roar in his ears and the bite of adrenalin in his blood.
‘But, well done. That was a landing you should be proud of.’
Fred shook his head. ‘I bounced.’
‘But you rescued it. That’s the only part that matters.’
Lila sat with Max’s head in her lap as he tossed and moaned. Baca rested on the boy’s stomach, breathing softly into his skin. Lila’s eyes were red, and she’d bitten her lip so many times it was bleeding.
As the evening started to grow blue, Fred could feel his nerves begin to crackle with terror. Max looked so thin, lying in the firelight, as if a single jolt from the aeroplane might kill him. He sat counting Max’s breaths until at last he could take it no longer. He jumped up and went in search of the explorer.
He found him bending over the plane’s engine, a burning torch in one hand for light.
‘You’ll have to take off as early as you can tomorrow,’ said the explorer. ‘Max is lucid, but burning hot. Follow the river north-east.’
‘Which way is north-east?’ Fred forced himself to stop nervously scratching at the bites on his arms, which were already swollen and bleeding.
‘There’s a compass in the plane. Con will be your navigator: she has a memory for topography. The river will take you to Manaus; the city’s built right on the edge of the water. You can’t miss it – there’s a vast opera house, with a glass dome roof and pink walls. The roof catches the sun, and you can see the shine of it from miles away.
‘But if you run out of fuel before you reach the city – and I must warn you, you probably will – fly inland; there will be some cattle ranches, with open fields. Land on the smoothest field you can find. Remember: front wheels first.’
‘Front wheels first.’
‘And the others should be heads down low, behind the seats, and with their hands clasped behind their necks.’
‘What if I forget, though? What if I go crazy and panic?’
‘I think it is very unlikely you will do either.’
‘What if I do, though?’
‘You won’t. Fred, I may be eccentric, but I’m not mad.’ He looked at Fred; it was the kind of look that on a clear day could see through your chest cavity to your heart. ‘I wouldn’t ask you to do this if I weren’t absolutely sure you are capable of doing it.’
Fred twisted his fingers. ‘Are you sure you can’t come with us? I mean – your leg doesn’t stop you climbing trees.’
‘Insolent child,’ said the explorer. He reached into the engine and tightened a bolt. His spanner was carved from bone. ‘No. You wouldn’t all fit in the back.’
‘We could do it in two shifts!’
‘There is only enough fuel for one journey. One way. And the plane wouldn’t take off with the weight of five people – I would have to leave one of you here.’
‘I could stay here! With you!’ he said, wondering as he said it if he meant it.
‘You could not, Fred. There are people at home who need you.’
‘Adults don’t need children.’
‘Yes, they do!’ He looked suddenly so fierce that Fred took a step backwards.
‘You said children are undercooked adults.’
‘I know. I’d forgotten things I should have never forgotten. Trust me. Your father needs you more than you know.’
Fred said nothing, just stood staring at the plane, holding himself still.
‘Fred, listen to me. Even if I could fly Max myself, it would mean I’d never get back here. Th
ey would recognise me, and they would recognise the plane. There would be questions, and interviews, and newspapers.’
‘Why? Why would there be interviews? Is it because – is it because your name is Percy Fawcett? Or John Franklin? Or Christopher Maclaren? Are you one of them? The lost explorers? You are, aren’t you?’
‘John Franklin would be more than a hundred and fifty years old if he were alive,’ said the explorer mildly. ‘That’s rather unflattering, Fred.’
‘But you’ve got to be one of them!’
‘I told you, I’ve been alone so long I have no need for names.’
‘You’re just a coward! You’re scared to leave.’
‘I do not want to leave, certainly. And that is my choice, Fred.’
Fred made a face.
‘I know. But believe me, this is where I am happiest.’
Fred found himself swept with an unexpected wave of fury. He fought back the many unforgiveable things he could have said. ‘You don’t seem all that happy,’ he mumbled.
‘Happy is a peculiar word. It’s one of the few words that makes me sad. I should have said: this is where I feel most honest.’
‘That’s insane!’ Fred felt himself grow hot. Every inch of his skin was raging, including his gums.
‘Why are you angry, Fred?’
‘I’m not!’ He glared at him full in the face. ‘I’m scared, all right?’
‘Of course you are. But you’ve been scared all along, and you’ve kept going.’
‘But that was different!’
‘Why?’
‘The others did everything with me. The raft, and the food, and everything.’
‘It has to be one of you. Why not you?’
‘If I mess this up,’ he didn’t say, if we die, but it was there, unspoken, ‘it will be my fault. This is worse.’
‘Then you will make the decision to steer towards fear. I think you can. I think you were built to pursue the things you are afraid of. Fear is a panther. Humans are stronger than panthers. You fight it, tooth and claw. But you don’t stop when you’re tired. You stop when the panther’s tired.’
Fred nodded. Then, just to check, he asked, ‘Do you mean metaphorically, or –’
‘Metaphorically, yes. Although also sometimes – in the case of my leg, for instance – literally.’
The Explorer Page 18
