‘There will be assistance here any minute, just stay still for now. You can explain what on earth you were doing later on.’
‘What was I doing?’ I asked. ‘I’m not exactly sure what’s happened.’
I seemed to be half buried in bits of plastic and seat padding, the cockpit was a right mess. I couldn’t remember anything. How did this happen? I felt something slightly salty in my mouth, warm and salty, I wiped my mouth on my bare forearm and saw at once it was blood.
I was beginning to feel alarmed. I couldn’t sense any pain but I was starting to become mildly nauseous.
‘You’ve landed in our square,’ said the woman. ‘Why you chose our square I have no idea, why you were droning through the air I have no idea.’ She turned away from me and looked back. ‘It’s okay, assistance has arrived.’
The woman slowly removed her hand and disappeared from view, downwards which was rather confusing.
I moved my head slowly, nothing hurt, I glanced around as best I could and what I saw was very distressing. Where the wing should have been was just torn fabric and twisted aluminium struts, broken off at different angles.
I let my head rest back against the mess behind me but after a few moments – I have to say moments of great peace, there was no alarming noise or sudden movement – two other heads arrived at my side.
‘Let’s have a look at you then,’ said a woman. She was young and seemed to be wearing some kind of uniform; her hair was tied tightly behind her head. She slipped something around my neck which immediately inflated and tightened in some way, it wasn’t uncomfortable and even as my head rose a little I understood this to be some kind of sophisticated neck brace. The man was running his hands up and down my legs, I couldn’t see what he was doing but I could feel him.
‘Legs seem okay,’ he said.
‘I think I’m fine, I’ve got some blood in my mouth though.’
Before I could say any more the woman was wiping away at my face with some kind of cool spongy thing. She didn’t say anything, but I was reassured by her confident manner and quick actions.
‘Get on the other side if you can, we’re going to have to manually extract him,’ said the woman.
I could just see the man nodding obediently and he disappeared. The woman continued to wipe my face, she pulled my bottom lip down and I tried to open my mouth, it was difficult with the neck brace in position. She inserted a small tube and I heard quite loud sucking sounds as she presumably cleaned out the blood that had collected there.
The man appeared to my left and without further explanation I was lifted out of the shattered cockpit by two clearly very strong people.
‘Don’t do anything,’ said the woman. ‘I just want you to let us manage your body for now.’
‘’K,’ I said through gritted teeth as the neck brace was now holding my head rigidly in position and things were just starting to get uncomfortable. I regretted letting them move me, I just wanted to stay in the cockpit, it was so warm and comfortable.
The man and woman eased me up onto some kind of stretcher seat thing that was right beside the cockpit, I remember it had a light blue cover. This was the first time I got a look at where I was. Basically about fifteen feet in the air, the Yuneec was completely wrecked, the main fuselage was essentially resting in the upper branches of an enormous tree.
The woman eased me back onto the stretcher and her powerful hand on my chest indicated with no confusion that she wanted me to lie down. I did so, staring at the cloudless sky.
I clearly remember seeing some house martins flitting about overhead, I could hear them chirruping to each other. I felt movement and suddenly broken tree branches and bits of tattered wreckage came into view. I was being lowered down at speed by some kind of mechanical device, the movement was very smooth and there was no noise associated with it.
The view then changed again as I was manoeuvred into some kind of enclosed space, a white roof above me, I couldn’t see much to either side. The stretcher thing stopped moving and a moment later the man and woman appeared beside me.
‘How are you feeling young man?’ asked the woman.
‘I’m okay,’ I said as best I could. ‘Did I crash?’
The woman glanced at the man and made a peculiar expression I didn’t quite register. ‘You crashed,’ she said.
So that was how I landed in the square. My memory from before that moment is very dim, I can remember coming out of the cloud, the anomaly as William had called it. I came out and saw a grid pattern on the ground that seemed to go on forever. I can remember that, but not much else.
The grid pattern, I soon came to realise, was because the dwellings I saw in the distance as I was lowered down from the wrecked Yuneec were arranged in large squares. Essentially rows of terraced houses facing onto a large space dense with vegetation.
I can only assume that I was trying to find somewhere to land, had made a fairly catastrophic error and ended up colliding with a tree.
Whatever I was lying inside started to move, I could sense that it was a wheeled vehicle of some sort but it made very little sound as it progressed. I am guessing that it was making its way across grass or something, there were a couple of small bumps and then I felt it accelerate along a very smooth surface.
The journey was short, within minutes I was being removed from the vehicle, I was slightly surprised to see that the vehicle was inside a building.
I assumed it was some kind of hospital and again I started to feel anxious, if I was in a hospital I must be injured and yet I was not conscious of any pain, only the slight discomfort of the neck brace.
The bed I was lying on moved along so smoothly it felt as if I was stationary and the building was sliding along over me. I glided through a door and looked up at a more complex ceiling, this one fitted with numerous lightweight mechanical arms and equipment.
A woman appeared in my field of vision which was still quite limited; she was wearing goggles and an elaborate breathing mask over the lower half of her face. The mask was transparent, I could clearly see her mouth, she was smiling, it was a sort of pained smile a mother might make toward a fractious child.
‘What have we here then?’ she asked. Her voice sounded peculiar, the only explanation being that she was speaking through some kind of wireless communication system being fed into speakers I couldn’t see. I was hearing perfect stereo.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid I’ve had a bit of a ding dong with a tree.’
‘I should think you are afraid,’ the woman snapped. ‘Didn’t you work that out before you got into that ridiculous thing?’ I could hear her sigh and then witnessed the rather odd sight of her slowly shaking her head inside the bizarre face mask as she uttered, ‘I don’t know.’
She shook her head as she watched what I imagined was a screen below my field of vision. I then saw a white object move over my body at great speed, utterly silent, not a bleep, whoosh or any mechanical noise.
‘What a silly little fellow you’ve been,’ said the woman in the facemask. ‘You are very lucky, no fractures, no internal distress, just a cut lip.’
She held up a small, pen like device, I noticed it had a silver tip, she ran it over my top lip. The feeling was peculiar to say the least, cold, with a slight tingling sensation.
‘All done,’ said the woman brightly, again in a tone of voice medical professionals would use having just administered an injection to a child.
She brushed her hand over the side of the mask and it came loose and was retracted off somewhere by the thin breathing tube it was attached to. She then gently removed the neck brace thing from around my neck and the bed contraption I was lying on slowly became a chair. I don’t mean it materialised from one thing to another like a badly rendered CGI effect, it folded itself from a flat bed into a chair shape allowing me to adopt a sitting p
osition with no effort.
It was clear that I was indeed sitting in a brightly lit room in a hospital. I didn’t immediately recognise any of the equipment that was either hanging from the ceiling or neatly arranged along the walls. What ever it was, it was very modern-looking and clean.
‘Can I ask something?’ I said eventually as the woman started to make a move toward a doorway.
‘Me?’ she asked, turning to look at me.
‘Well, yes, there isn’t anyone else here,’ I said.
‘Why d’you want to ask me something?’ she said, she looked mildly offended as if I’d made an unwanted proposition or told her that her bum looked fat. Which it didn’t, by the way.
‘Well, I’m a little confused. The last thing I remember I was flying through a dense cloud, I came out of it and saw…’
The woman put her hand up to stop me talking. It was a very effective physical signal. I stopped mid-sentence. She turned and walked through the doorway. I say doorway as there was no door fitted in the doorway, it was just a gap in the wall, beyond it was another wall, as she went through the gap, she turned to her left and disappeared.
So I was left, sitting on the folded-up bed that had become a chair, feeling quite stable, not in pain, but still utterly confused.
All I could remember was coming out of the cloud, realising I was much lower than I expected and clearly not back in 2011. Wherever I was, it was very different to the world I had just left. I could remember seeing this peculiar grid, mile after mile of squares stretching to the horizon. The squares were buildings, I knew that now. Each side of the square was made up of long terraces of what I took to be houses. There was something vaguely Georgian about them, very regular and clearly all built at the same time. By that I mean it wasn’t a higgledy-piggledy mash-up of buildings from different eras and different styles that just happened to be crammed up together. This was designed, built at the same time to the same specifications, and when I say Georgian I only mean that by styling, not size, these building were huge.
One thing I can clearly remember from my arrival over the Squares was the very severe lack of anything that looked like a landing strip or even a piece of open ground. There was certainly nothing like the oil seed field I’d spotted when I arrived in Gardenia.
I dropped my head as I tried to recall what had happened next. There was nothing, no re-call. I’d never experienced this before. If I had ever been on a journey or witnessed an event in the past, I could always run through it in my mind’s eye and recall it in immense detail. Not so now, I was able to recall waking in Gardenia, getting dressed in front of a crowd of anxious looking people, running into the Bow field, seeing the anomaly, getting into the Yuneec, seeing Grace through the window, Grace. Suddenly the memory of Grace hit me like a sledgehammer in the guts.
Where was Grace?
What had happened to her, to my potential child, to the life I was slowly getting used to in Gardenia? Why wasn’t I there and, more importantly, where was I now?
I heard a movement at the doorway, I turned and saw another woman standing looking at me.
‘Would you like to talk?’ she asked.
I smiled and nodded. The woman raised her eyebrows as if making a mental note. She turned to her side and said, ‘I think it’s all fine.’
She then walked into the room, put her hand on the wall opposite me and part of the wall folded down and made a chair. The woman sat down facing me. She seemed quite young, clear dark skin and black hair, she was wearing a kind of slightly weird looking one-piece body suit with no obvious seams or opening. It didn’t look like a wet suit or flight suit, it was lighter material and slightly tailored. Just as I know little about architecture, I know even less about clothing. I’d certainly never seen anything like it before, either in the real world of 2011 or Gardenia. The people I’d seen in New York, Beijing and Mumbai certainly didn’t wear anything like it.
‘How do you feel about it?’ asked the woman.
Again I smiled as what she said to me made no sense.
‘D’you think it’s funny?’
I sat in silence for a moment. I think everything I had gone through in Gardenia had made me a little more aware of myself and the difficulty I clearly had in communicating anything when my mind was bursting with complex questions which would require equally complex answers.
‘You’ve scared people, upset them, destroyed a garden, risked your own life and put many people to great trouble to protect and repair you, and yet you seem to find this amusing. Is my analysis correct?’
I shook my head and took a big breath. This was going to be complicated.
2
New Reality
Two women dressed in white overalls guided me from the room in which I’d been medically examined. They didn’t say anything to me, just gestured for me to walk with them. I didn’t say anything in case they didn’t speak English, I didn’t feel like trying to work out how to communicate, the sign language they used to tell me what to do was perfectly understandable.
I walked along a short windowless but well-lit corridor and into a rather pleasant room that did have windows, big windows that looked out onto a garden. The two women stood by the door and watched me for a while. I say door, but again there was no actual door, no hole-closing device, just a gap in the wall.
This room was yet again very familiar, but with one or two details noticeably different from the world of my birth, as opposed to the world I had just come from.
For a start it was very quiet; I assumed I was in some sort of city but the only noise I could hear was birdsong from the garden. The weather was good, a clear sky with bright sunshine was visible through the large windows but the interior of the room was cool, the air smelled fresh. I glanced back at the doorway entrance and the two women had gone. I shrugged, who knew what was going on, all I could hope for was that someone did, because I didn’t have a clue.
I stared out of the window, trying not to worry about where I was. I didn’t want to find out I had jumped yet further into the future when I was hoping so much that I would return to 2011. Whatever I’d seen from the Yuneec when I came out of the cloud, it wasn’t 2011.
I looked around the room. It was sparsely furnished but comfortable, a large sofa-type of thing facing the window, a single armchair-type of thing to one side. I say ‘type of thing’ because I’m not sure how to describe them. Their function was clearly designed to be comfortable sitting devices but I don’t have any capacity for describing furniture. I don’t have any taste apparently, that was what Beth had always told me. I suppose if I was confronted with a sofa in bright orange with gold trim and moulded plastic feet that looked like snakes I probably wouldn’t like it, but if it was comfortable I’d still sit in it.
The furniture in the room wasn’t like that, the big sofa looked odd but quite old, it had a high back, much too high for any functional reason. It was covered in numerous pieces of colourful cloth and some big cushions.
There was a low wooden table between the two chairs containing an elaborate flower arrangement sitting in what looked like a handmade pottery vase.
I stood looking at the flowers for a while, I was feeling fairly sleepy and more than a little disoriented. My mind was slowly ploughing through a mass of memories, worries and deep confusion. What had happened to Grace? Was I now further into the future and would I be able to read about her in some kind of databank, about her and my child? Was I going to have to go through the same weird experience I had been through in the woods in Gardenia? Reading about her death, and my child’s death, and my grandchild’s death, and then travelling around the world to try and find my great grandchild who could be a hunchbacked woman living in Mongolia or something?
I understood by this time that I was capable of being a little disconnected with the world I lived in, with people I knew and possi
bly loved, but my recent experiences in Gardenia and now wherever I’d ended up were not helping me connect, in fact quite the opposite. I realised that although I’d gone through an absurd amount of trauma, I felt oddly calm. It didn’t seem right. Surely I should be writhing about on the floor, screaming and soiling myself in profound madness?
I sat down on the sofa-thing and indeed it was very comfortable, I stared around the walls that were covered in paintings, maybe festooned with them is a better description. All framed, all without any obvious glass covering them, I don’t know how many but in the hundreds. Some large, some tiny, they were hung very expertly from waist height to the ceiling and this room had a very high ceiling. The proportions reminded me of Georgian houses I had been inside in Bath and Brighton, and yet it clearly wasn’t Georgian, it was recently built. I’m not sure why I felt confident of this fact. It must have been the cleanliness and smooth lines of the structure, it somehow smelt as if had just been built.
Some of the paintings looked very old, I mean pre-2011, some of them looked like the unfathomable splotchy etchings I’d seen in galleries in London but had no idea what they were for, let alone what they were meant to be.
I felt my eyelids getting heavier and heavier, and I must have dozed off. I have no idea for how long, but it could have been a while. When I eventually opened my eyes again the light was different, more like a late summer evening light, I could see sunlight was filtered through the trees outside the window, it looked very calm and peaceful.
I sighed deeply and stretched my legs out straight on the sofa, then a small movement caught my eye. I started a bit, a woman was sitting in the chair on the other side of the table and she was looking at me. I pulled myself up quickly and rubbed my eyes, blinked a bit and stared back at her.
‘Sorry, must have dozed off,’ I said through what felt like a mouthful of cotton wool.
The woman continued to stare at me. She had a kind face, Mediterranean dark skin, dark hair, brown eyes. I would guess she was in her late forties but after my experience in Gardenia, she could have been anything between forty and a hundred. I smiled at her, then remembered how this had been frowned on by the women who’d treated me in the hospital room, so I stopped.
News from the Squares Page 2
