Who Runs the World?

by Virginia Bergin

  He’s looking at it all. He’s not speaking.

  ‘People plant a tree here, when they’ve given birth to a son.’

  He just stares.

  ‘And then they decorate the trees,’ I say to fill the silence of his staring. I am suddenly uneasy. I feel . . . as though I might have made a very terrible mistake, because . . . what would that feel like? To never know who your Mumma was? ‘And, on the boy’s birthday, we bring cake and have a little party.’

  ‘On January the first . . .’

  ‘That’s your birthday, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s everyone’s birthday,’ he says.

  ‘It’s not mine. Mine’s November the second.’

  ‘I was born on January first, same as every boy.’

  ‘Mason . . . I don’t think that’s true. I mean, maybe you were born on the first of January . . . but . . . Look: that’s Aidan’s tree; he was born in November. A hornbeam – for the berries. Nathan, born in December, so . . . holly. That’s Luke’s – September: evergreen oak. Then there’s Finlay – July – so the horse chestnut. For luxuriant shade. Stanley-Tiger: August. Davidia involucrata. Ghost tree.’

  The ghost tree has already lost its leaves, as though it had anticipated this wild-weather autumn. It is pure shape. It is a beautiful shape . . . and behind it, the tree Kate planted for Jaylen: a silver birch. The first one died, but you can still see the stump; the next one to be planted is very old now too, but hanging on.

  ‘Does my . . . Mumma – would my Mumma – have a tree like this for me?’

  It was mainly the Granmummas who planted trees. The Mummas’ generation, they tend not to.

  ‘She might do, yes. I mean . . . even if there wasn’t a tree, I know for sure your Mumma would remember you.’

  I meant to make things better. I feel as though I have made things worse.

  He is rooted to the spot, staring at those trees.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ I whisper – and he nods, but he doesn’t move, so I take him by the arm and I turn him around. I steer him down the lane and –

  I STOP BEFORE HE DOES. NO. NO. NO.

  It’s like he’s in some kind of dream state, so I actually have to pull him to get him to stop. And he looks round at me, like he’s just remembered I’m there, and he looks at where I am looking – and I feel fright surge through him, so I take his hand to hold him still, and I hiss, ‘RELAX!’

  An apparition is skipping towards us, puddle-jumping. Not jumping over puddles, but – SPLASH! SPLASH! SPLASH! – into them. It’s Sweet. It would be Sweet! Of course, my heart groans, it’s Sweet . . . In self-constructed, garishly painted papier-maché butterfly wings; her face adorned with autumn leaves stuck on with smears of mud; ancient, way-too-big red wellington boots on her feet – and she is clutching an enormous bright yellow chicken-of-the-woods fungus.

  There is no place to run. No place to hide. And no time to speak before –

  ‘I’ve got a chicken!’ she announces, splashing up to us. ‘You’re hairy. Who are you?’

  ‘Courtesy!’ I try – desperately. ‘This is . . . my cousin . . . the cousin of my cousin. I don’t even know what you’re doing up at this time, but –’

  ‘It’s not my fault! It’s the storm’s fault! It woke me up!’

  Concern of a new kind rips through my existing troubles like a – like a bolt of lightning. ‘Sweet! You didn’t go out in the storm, did you? You know you shouldn’t do that! It’s dangerous!’

  She studies me for a second. ‘That’s why I went into the woods,’ she says. ‘It’s safer! Don’t you know anything about lightning?! When the kz-kz-kz-kaboom happens it’ll just get the trees because they’re taller. I wasn’t scared! You are very hairy. You’re the hairiest person I ever met.’

  ‘You’re the weirdest thing I ever met,’ the boy growls, before I can stop him.

  ‘Have you got a sore throat?’ Sweet asks. ‘I had a sore throat once. You have to tell the Granmummas.’

  ‘We will. We’ve got to go now,’ I hear myself saying. I squeeze the boy’s hand – and I feel him squeeze back; not hard, like I did, but a frightened pulse of acknowledgement. And I draw him on, down the lane . . . Sweet dancing around us, puddle-splashing.

  ‘My throat was SO sore I couldn’t even speak – and when I did it came out ruh-ruh-ruh – just like you!’

  ‘You shouldn’t go out in storms . . . and you should take the chicken to Willow,’ I say, over my shoulder – casually and with grimly retrieved normality. ‘She’s the best at cooking them.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Sweet, puddle-splashing past us, ‘but I want to see the hairy girl.’

  ‘Well, you can’t,’ I snap, ‘because . . . she . . . is poorly. Go. Go on – go.’

  Sweet assesses the situation. She assesses the fierceness in my eyes.

  ‘You know I said I liked you a bit?’ she tells me. ‘It’s not that much.’

  ‘Go!’

  She shrugs, puddle-splashes back down the lane.

  ‘I’m not allowed outside in my dressing gown!’ she cries. ‘And how come she gets to wear the dead-boy shoes?!’

  I do what I suppose people did for centuries. I cast my eyes up to the sky. It is so much bigger than us and so very amazing. It is no wonder people thought there had to be a God. And it is no wonder people thought God would live right there, in the sky. I look up and I see . . .

  THE DREAMBIRD.

  CHAPTER 20

  DREAMBIRD

  Stress makes you deaf. That’s my conclusion.

  It makes you deaf – temporarily – but it does not make you blind. The second I clap eyes on that beautiful aircraft sailing in I hear it too. EASING POWER! DESCENDING! DESCENDING!

  ‘River?’ I vaguely hear Mason say.

  DESCENDING! DREAMBIRD DESCENDING!

  Designed in India. Chinese aluminium. Japanese tech. Revolutionary fuel-economic engines. Lower-speed manoeuvrability. The first supersonic plane to be built in . . . OVER A HUNDRED YEARS?!

  I sky-gawp.

  DREAMBIRD. DESCENDING. DESCENDING. DESCENDING.

  Only one place it could be going.

  I sigh at the sky – my heart soaring high as that plane.

  ‘I don’t like planes,’ Mason mutters.

  I tune back down to Earth. ‘What would you know?’ I snap. Gotta ditch him. Gotta go.

  I drag him by the hand the rest of the way up the lane – Mumma and Kate, all snaggle-sleepy haired and frantic-looking are coming out of our door – who cares?

  ‘Sweet saw us,’ I say, releasing the boy’s hand – releasing him into their care. ‘She’ll say something; she’s bound to. Told her she’s my cousin’s cousin, and she’s poorly – sore throat – I’ve got to go –’

  Kate opens her mouth to say whatever – can’t do this right now.

  ‘It’s the Dreambird! Did you see it?!’

  My Mumma opens her mouth too –

  ‘Just tell them everything,’ I urge Mason. ‘Tell them. About Sweet, about the lies. Tell them!’

  His face twists in fear and confusion – and I do not have time to make it right.

  I do not. I’m gone. I race back up the lane.

  ‘Back A-S-A-P!’ I shout, already wondering if there’s enough fuel in my bike to get us to the training airport.

  ‘PJs!’ Mumma shouts.

  True. Drat. True. Drat. I’m tempted to ignore it, but . . .

  I race back down the lane, straight into the house and up to MY room. I’m mid-changing – i.e. naked – when Kate, Mumma and the boy come in.

  ‘Put some bloody clothes on!’ Kate shrieks, pulling the gawping boy out of the room.

  ‘I am!’

  I am too – I’m dressed in seconds, ignoring Kate telling me we need to talk and Mumma telling me to just hold on a moment.

  ‘It’s the Dreambird.’ I speak into their faces as I come out of the room. I know Mumma will know how important this is, and not just because I’ve gone on about it in the past, but because it’s
such an international BIG DEAL. Kate? She’ll have heard, but it will have bored her. She won’t have cared enough to register: DREAMBIRD. Both cases: whatever they’ve got to say, I don’t want to hear it. And as for the harvest-supper preparation? It’s too bad. There is always a terrible mess afterwards anyway, so I’ll work extra hard on the clear-up.

  ‘Later,’ I hear the boy say as I clatter down the stairs to grab my rucksack.

  Five minutes later I crash into Lenny’s barn and grab my scrambler.

  ‘Given up on the running then?’ Lenny shouts with a huge grin on her face as I fire my bike up. Lenny is the one person in my life who will absolutely understand this. We both adore machines.

  ‘Dreambird!’ I shout, and speed on out of there, scattering chickens.

  It is so good to be on my bike. I’d forgotten how good it was. You get a certain amount of freedom to ride when you’ve first built your machine, then, after that, you’re fuel-rationed – unless it’s a journey you need to make. And I need to make this journey; Yaz and Yukiko will back me up if it comes to it: this is for my education, and my education is for the good of everyone. (A fact I try not to allow my mind to add to the pressure to do well that already haunts me.)

  I take the A-road. Through the woods would be quicker, but that route is hardly repaired at all – there’s not enough justification for it – and although it’d probably be fine – and fun, on a normal day, to be dodging road ripples and potholes at speed – I cannot risk a prang. That’s a Kate word that, as far as I can tell, covers anything from a bit of a dent to a total write-off (if she’s driving). So I’m A-A-A road all the way. A scrambler’s not built for pure speed, but my bike is loving the road – and so am I . . . For the first time since the boy arrived, I feel FREE.

  ‘No admittance.’

  I almost can’t believe I’m hearing the words. Not just because I need to see this aircraft so badly my whole body is burning – flaming! – with feverish, passionate desire, but because . . . well, I mean: Who says that to anyone about anything?

  ‘No admittance,’ says the H&R person inside the gate. We couldn’t shake hands and kiss cheeks as Courtesy demands because there is a massive fence between us, so we just touched palms through the chain-link as we greeted each other, me saying, in huge excitement, ‘Hi! I’ve come to see the Dreambird!’

  She saying . . . what she said: ‘No admittance.’

  Stunned . . . and hurting and longing, I try EVERY plea I can think of:

  ‘But that’s the Dreambird!’

  ‘I’m studying Aeronautical Engineering!’

  ‘But this is the training airport!’

  ‘I’ve been here lots of times before!’

  ‘I’m going to work here!’

  ‘I just rode 120 kilometres to get here!’

  ‘I’m out of fuel! I had to push my bike the last 10k!’

  ‘But . . . please, that’s the Dreambird!’

  Each results in the same answer – ‘No admittance’ – until I hit on:

  ‘My Mumma said it would be OK.’

  ‘No admittance.’

  ‘My Mumma is the South-West Rep on the National Council.’

  The H&R person walks away from the fence. I feel wrong in myself for having ‘pulled the Mumma card’ as Kate would say, but my yearning to get close to that incredible machine is too great. I can see it, less than a couple of kilometres away, parked outside a hangar . . . and, already, with every plea, I have looked and seen how that hangar is fenced off from every side. I WILL find a way in . . . though perhaps I won’t have to. The H&R person makes one radio call after another, with people calling her back.

  The H&R person walks back to the fence.

  My heart is singing!

  ‘No admittance,’ she says.

  My jaw drops.

  ‘That’s the final word on it,’ she says. ‘It has been Agreed.’

  The plane of my dreams, the plane I really, really need to see, is . . . just standing, right there on the tarmac.

  ‘No admittance.’

  I wheel my bike around the perimeter fence. I know where to go and ask for fuel. There’s a depot. Mariam’s cousin works there; Laila-Jewel – we know each other. We know each other enough for her to immediately see how upset I am.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she asks as we shake hands and kiss. ‘Ah! I don’t even have to ask that, do I?’

  ‘How’s Jewel?’

  ‘She’s great! Running rings around the Granmummas and doing so well at school – better than Mariam,’ she whispers – then laughs: ‘Better than me, at any rate!’

  From out of the back of the depot I can see the object of my desire – and in my bones, still rattling from the ride and aching from the push, I can feel my wasted journey hurting.

  ‘What is this No Admittance thing?’ I ask.

  ‘I do not know,’ she says. ‘NO ADMITTANCE! Infuriating, isn’t it? The Dreambird’s in and no one’s allowed to go and see . . . except . . .’

  I tear my eyes off the plane to look at her.

  ‘I’ve got to re-fuel it. 8 p.m.’

  That’s so late. That so doesn’t matter. I’d wait for a week to see this. A week? I’d wait for months.

  ‘I expect you need to go to the workshops,’ she says, ‘before you come back and assist.’

  My smile is a thousand kilometres wide.

  My smile is so wide, I daren’t even visit the workshops. All everyone will want to talk about is the Dreambird anyway – and all I’ll do is end up telling everyone I’m going to get to see it up close, because to do otherwise would be not just withholding knowledge, but a further lie on top of a mountain of lies I’m sick of telling.

  So I go to the museum hangars instead. They’re open 24/7 and the Granmumma pilot and the engineer who are on hand to explain anything you might need to know have seen me so many times before, they leave me be – though from their smiles alone I know they know exactly why I’m here, and I know they’ll be as desperate as me to see the Dreambird.

  No admittance, eh? is all the engineer says, as she and the pilot offer me cup after cup after cup of tea, which I sip, stern-faced, over my notebook as I examine plane after plane after plane, the specs of which I already know by heart . . . and when they have gone, I climb into the cockpit of the Fairey Delta. It’s my favourite. It always has been, and I think it always will be. I knew about it long before I knew anything about the Dreambird. It was flown by the Granmummas’ daddies’ daddies’ daddies. Just being inside that ancient little blue beast of a dream of a bird makes me happy. Makes me feel connected to generations of people like me who just wanted to know: what can we do?

  I sit, in the cockpit, in the dark, and I beam. In my imagination, I am not just flying that Fairey, I am at the controls of its daughter’s daughter’s daughter’s daughter: the Dreambird. And I will see her.

  At 7.30 p.m., still beaming with joy, I go to find Laila-Jewel.

  I remember very clearly the first time I saw a BIG plane up close. Not the Concorde in the museum, which Littler One me found cosy as a playhouse inside, and packed with too many kilos of seriously once-was electronics, but an Airbus. Inside, that was an incredible sight: nearly a whole plane-full of seats – from the time when people thought nothing of burning millions of gallons of irreplaceable fossil fuels, going to places they had no need to go to . . . though if you ask Kate, she’ll tell you she really did need to go to Ibiza with her cousins Cheyenne and Bianca.

  And on the outside? I just remember how tiny I felt; how amazed I was that this enormous beast of a bird could ever even leave the ground.

  I feel tiny again now. I am in awe. Laila-Jewel knows it – she understands just what this means to me:

  ‘It’s quite something, isn’t it?’ she whispers to me as I stand there, in a borrowed blue fuelling jumpsuit . . . dumbstruck – because even in the darkness lit by floodlights, I can see how truly extraordinary the Dreambird is.

  I am now, I know, going to stud
y extra, extra hard. I am going to ACE every single subject I have to ace – because I want to be part of the team that builds aircraft like this. And if we can do this . . . surely it is possible, that in my lifetime, we could go back into space.

  It’s genius. Weight challenges manoeuvrability at lower speeds. Deltas demand long runways. This one won’t.

  The wing is exquisite. It curves – divinely! – a curve more complex than a Concorde’s twisting ogee. Seamless riveting; but I can see there’s hydraulics. It must have lift – superlift! – smooth, smooth cruise (I’m visualising this subtly complex wing being tested in a smoke tunnel, how it’d just grab any speed of headwind you could throw at it and glide on through) – AND deceleration capacity. Hydraulic manoeuvrability.

  It’s got it all.

  Delta paradise.

  I study online with students in India. I can’t wait to see them again. I can’t wait to tell them, Congratulations! You did it.

  This bird is amazing, and it is beautiful. And I would love – love – love to see inside. I want to know about the engines, I want to see inside the flight deck – and there are lights on in there; I can see the pilots doing pre-flight checks – and I know, in my bones, that no amount of ‘No Admittance’ is going to stop me.

  ‘Amazing, eh? Amazing,’ Laila-Jewel says, winding the fuel hose back in.

  It’s Laila-Jewel who will stop me. She helped me. I cannot abuse her kindness. I’ve been useless to her. I try to help wind in.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ she says.

  ‘Why would they do this?’ I ask her, my heart torn apart because I am seeing my own true love right in front of me and yet . . . it’s forbidden. ‘Why would they fly this in and then not let anyone see it?’