Outside the bank a postman was waving his arms at the overlit air, trying to drive away a flock of orioles who swooped at the bright stamps in his satchel. As I approached he blundered into me.
‘You’re up early – did all these flowers wake you?’ Too surprised to notice my naked body, he watched me warily as I picked up the bundles of letters. Muttering to himself, he moved off down a quiet side-street. Roses sprang from the envelopes in his hand. Puzzled, he pushed postcards wreathed in vine-leaves through the letter-boxes, tax demands decorated with tiger-lilies, and handed parcels transformed into flowery bouquets to the drowsy housewives.
Last of all, completing my transformation of this suburban town, I walked along the main roads leading to the perimeter of Shepperton. To the south I threw my semen at the foot of Walton Bridge. Standing in the centre of the main road to London, I ignored the hornblasts of the passing drivers. Once again I was sure that none of them realized I was naked, and thought they were looking at an eccentric villager trying to throw himself under their wheels. As I turned my back to them the pale green shoots of bamboo pierced the cracked macadam and quivered fifteen feet in the air, their trunks forming a palisade across the embankment of the bridge, a forest wall behind which the motorists would soon be stranded.
Again, on the road to the airport, at the northern boundary of Shepperton where only three days earlier I had trapped myself, it was now my turn to seal out the external world. Two middle-aged office cleaners pedalled past me. They laughed good humouredly as I stood in the road, masturbating while the sun waited patiently at my shoulder. When they looked back a grove of saw-bladed palmettos sprang across the road at my feet.
As I returned to the river Shepperton was coming to life, curtains flung back on to the brilliant day and the jungle gardens that crowded the drives and garage roofs. Children in pyjamas leaned from their windows, whooped and shouted at the rainbow clouds of tropical birds. A milkman with a vanload of bottles had parked outside the film studios, and was pointing to the giant ferns and climbing palms that sprawled across the sound stages. Three film actors stepped from a taxi and stared at this transformation as if caught without any rehearsal for a new scene in an Amazon spectacular their demented producer had dreamed up overnight. When I walked past them they stared at my naked body and semen-smeared thighs, obviously assuming that this was the proper costume for their jungle epic.
However pleased I was by these preparations for the day, I knew that all this was only a beginning. I had brought back the primeval forest, but within these tropical vines, behind the lurid plumage of the birds, there waited a harsher world to come. I watched the housewives in their nightdresses lifting bouquets of orchids from their letter-boxes as the postman passed, smiling at these messages from an unknown lover. The whole town was my garland to their night-warm bodies.
But this was only my first day as the presiding deity of Shepperton, as that pagan god of the suburbs Miriam St Cloud had described. I listened to the cawing of great birds, and saw a condor clamber across the roof of the clinic. Its talons seized the tiles like the necks of its prey. It cast a weary eye at me, bored by all this festivity, and waiting for the real time to begin.
Waving away the pregnant deer, I entered the still cool forest. I knelt on the wet grass between the illuminated trees, the once dead elms which were now stirring faintly with life, putting out the first new shoots through the moribund bark. Feeling the sun bathe my naked body, I worshipped myself.
CHAPTER 23
Plans for a Flying School
‘Blake, you’ve prepared a wonderful day for us!’ Mrs St Cloud stood at her familiar place by the bedroom window. She pointed to the light that poured from the trees along the Shepperton river-bank, an electric shore. ‘It’s marvellous – you’ve turned Shepperton into a film set.’
For an hour I had been lying in the warm morning air, my body cared for by the sun. I was happy to see Mrs St Cloud, as excited as a scout-mistress at some spectacular jamboree. She waited at the foot of the bed, unsure whether she was allowed to penetrate whatever aura surrounded me. She was both pleased and confused, the mother of a precocious child whose talents might veer away in a dozen unexpected directions. I wanted to show off, conjure all sorts of extraordinary treasures out of the air for her. Even though I still had little idea of the real extent of my powers, I could see that Mrs St Cloud took them for granted. That confidence in me was what I most needed. Already I was thinking of extending my domain, even perhaps of challenging the unseen forces who had bequeathed those powers to me.
‘Have you seen Miriam this morning?’ I was afraid that she might have fled from Shepperton to the safety of London, by hiding in some colleague’s chambers while the strange events played themselves out in this small riverside town where her pagan god cavorted among the washing-machines and used cars.
‘She’s at the clinic. Blake, don’t worry, she was upset last night.’ Mrs St Cloud spoke of her daughter as some kind of errant wife who had fallen into a silly religious fever. ‘She’ll understand you soon. I do now – and Father Wingate.’
‘I know. That’s very important.’ I waved to the people on the Walton bank who had come across the water-meadow to see for themselves the transformation of Shepperton. ‘I’ve done all this for her. And you.’
‘Of course, Blake.’ Mrs St Cloud held my shoulders, trying to reassure me. I liked her strong fingers on my skin. Already I had begun to forget that we had lain together on this bed, during my surrogate birth. I was glad that, like everyone else, she had failed to notice my nakedness.
A swordfish leapt from the water, its white sword piercing the air as it saluted me. The river was crowded with fish, an over-stocked oceanarium. Ignoring the dolphins and porpoises, the shoals of huge carp and trout, Father Wingate sat on a canvas chair among his fossil-hunting gear. Hard at work, he sieved away at the wet sand, surrounded by a troupe of curious penguins. The three crippled children were with him on the beach, dragging ashore a section of the Cessna’s wing cast into the shallows during the night.
They were all working away as if time would soon run out. It occurred to me that whenever I woke I found the members of my ‘Family’ in their original places, like so many actors setting up another take in their impersonation of reality. Even Stark, stripped to his swimming trunks, was working on his ramshackle amusement pier. He had loosened the mooring lines of his dredger, ready to float the rusty pontoon above the submerged Cessna. The clumsy jib was entangled in the thick lianas that covered the Ferris wheel. Machete in hand, he slashed morosely at the vines, waving the heavy blade at the watching fulmars.
Unsettled by all this activity, I took Mrs St Cloud’s arm. She held me reassuringly to her breast.
‘Blake, tell me – what are you going to dream for us today?’
‘I don’t dream.’
‘I know …’ She smiled at her clumsiness, pleased by her affection for me. ‘It’s we who dream, Blake, I know that. You’re showing us how to wake.’ As a scarlet macaw flew past the window she said, with complete seriousness: ‘Blake, why don’t you start a flying school? You could teach everyone in Shepperton to fly. If you like, I’ll talk to the people at the bank.’
Thinking about this strange but potent suggestion as I stepped on to the lawn, I watched Father Wingate and the three children hard at work on the beach. Why was the renegade priest so keen to discover the remains of the archaic winged creature buried beneath his feet? I smiled at the guilty expressions on the faces of the children, involved in a secret enterprise not in keeping with the spirit of the day. They dragged the section of the Cessna’s wing into the undergrowth, so preoccupied that they too failed to notice my naked body.
Teach them all to fly? No one could teach these crippled children to fly, but as for Miriam St Cloud … Already I visualized us flying together in the sky above Shepperton, escaping for ever from this modest paradise. I left the grounds of the house and let myself through the gates into the park. As I ran pa
st the tennis courts the warm air rushed against my naked skin, eager to lift me from the ground. I needed to find Miriam before she despaired of everything I had done.
On all sides of me parties of people were moving through the trees, children raced among the flower-beds, trying to catch the vivid birds. Drawn to Shepperton by the extraordinary vegetation sprouting from every roof-top, by the hundreds of palm-trees lifting their jungle parasols from the suburban gardens, the first visitors were pushing through the bamboo palisades I had set up by Walton Bridge. On the airport road they stepped from their cars and photographed the cactus plants and prickly pear rooting themselves comfortably in the concrete pavement.
A long queue of patients waited for me outside the clinic – old men from the geriatric unit bitten by the marmoset, a woman with a hand she had impaled on a bamboo stake in her garden, two teenage girls who giggled at me nervously, as if certain that I had impregnated them, a young electrician savaged by a nesting osprey on the roof of the post office. They glanced at my naked body without comment, taking for granted that I was clothed. The waiting-room was filled with a platoon of middle-aged women impatiently arguing over the results of their pregnancy tests. My devoted claque, their eyes were fixed on the semen stains that marked my thighs. Had I mounted them all in my vision? Looking at their plump cheeks and pink mouths, I knew that all the tests would prove positive.
‘Mr Blake! Please …!’ The receptionist pushed through the throng of people in the corridor. Exhausted, she clutched at my arm. ‘Dr Miriam’s left us! She closed her surgery this morning. She seemed strange, I wondered if you …’
Taking the keys, I let myself into Miriam’s office. I closed the door on the noise outside and stood naked in the darkened room. The hundred scents of Miriam’s body, her smallest gestures, hung on the faint light like a caress, a present to me waiting to be opened.
Her desk had been cleared, the drawers emptied, cabinets sealed. Pinned to the wall were the X-ray plates of my head, deformed jewels through which a ghostly light still shone, like that corona of destruction I had first seen over Shepperton. Between them was a holiday postcard from a fellow physician, a reproduction of Leonardo’s cartoon of the Virgin seated on the lap of St Anne. I stared at these serpentine figures, with their unfathomable pose. Had Miriam seen my winged form in the bird-like creature, the emblem of my dream flight, that seemed to emerge from the drapery of the mother and her daughter, as I had emerged from Miriam and Mrs St Cloud?
‘Mr Blake … You’ll see your patients now?’
Restlessly, I waved the receptionist away. ‘I’m busy – tell them they can cure themselves, if they try.’
I needed to fly.
I pushed through the crowd of women in the corridor and left the clinic. People jostled me, shaking their wounds and bandages, pinning me against the cars. An old woman knelt on the ground at my feet, trying to milk the blood from my knuckles.
‘Leave me!’ Exhausted by them all, and thinking only of Miriam St Cloud, I grasped the windshield of her sports car, vaulted over the hood and set off towards the church. I tried to think of my next step in the transformation of this town. For all my authority, I still felt the need to prove myself, to explore my abilities to the fullest, even to provoke myself. Was I here to exploit these people, to save or punish them, or perhaps lead them to some sexual Utopia …?
I looked up at the vivid tropical vegetation that crowded the rooftops of the town, the hundreds of huge date-palms dipping over the chimneys, the green fountain of the banyan tree. I was eager to get on with the day. I listened to the excited voices of the people outside the clinic, arguing like children among the cars. I wanted them to discover their real powers – if they existed within me, they existed also within themselves. Each of them had the power to conjure a miniature Eden from the ground at his feet.
I wanted to lead them to their true world, across all the tariff lines of restraint and convention. At the same time, on the most practical level, I guessed that I could use the population of Shepperton, not merely as part of my plan to escape from the town and deny finally that death from which I had already once escaped, but to make my challenge against the invisible forces who had given these powers to me. Already I had wrested from them the governorship of this small town. Not only would I be the first to escape from death, but I would be the first to rise above mortality and the state of being a mere man to claim the rightful inheritance of a god.
The church was empty, the milk-red blossoms of my sex choking the porch and the doorway of the vestry, barbarous flowers taller than those disappointed parishioners. Still hunting for Miriam, I ran past the swimming-pool towards the entrance to Stark’s amusement pier.
The kiosk had been freshly painted, the desk fitted with a ticket dispenser. When my second coming occurred, Stark would be waiting in his box office. The dredger on its rusty pontoon now floated twenty feet from the pier, its crane cut free from the vines that encircled the Ferris wheel and the merry-go-round.
But why would the people of Shepperton, many of whom worked at London Airport and the film studios, be interested in the shabby wreck of the Cessna? Perhaps Stark guessed that once the news of my extraordinary powers, of my survival of death, reached the world at large the aircraft would take on a talismanic aura that would survive my own departure? Watched by the world’s television cameras, people would pay anything to touch the waterlogged wings, gaze into the blanched cockpit from which the young god had appeared …
I felt the bruises on my chest, almost convinced now that it was Stark who had revived me. He alone was certain that I had died, and that through the narrow aperture of my survival another world was spilling through into this one.
Wings shivered dustily in the darkness below the cages. As its door swung in the air I saw one of the vultures picking in a desolate way at the gravel floor. Its mate huddled against a pile of old packing cases, hiding its shabby plumage from the sun.
So Stark had unlocked the cages of his threadbare zoo and expelled the occupants. The marmoset hung from the outside bars of his cage, locked out of his own home, while the chimpanzee sat dejectedly in a gondola of the Ferris wheel, his gentle hands working the controls as if hoping to fly off to some happier landing ground.
They looked hungry and uncared-for, intimidated by the tropical vegetation erupting around them. I knew they were no part of my renascent Shepperton, but sorry to see them in this neglected condition I knelt down, touched the semen-stains on my thighs and pressed my hands to the ground. When I stood up a small breadfruit tree rose with me, its fruit as high as my head. I fed the marmoset, then walked over to the Ferris wheel and raised a miniature banana tree beside the chimpanzee. He sat in the gondola, head lowered shyly, gracefully unzipping the fresh yellow fruit.
Before I could attend to the vultures I heard Stark’s hearse approach, its hoarse engine breathing like a beast. Stark swung the heavy vehicle into the forecourt, throwing the hot dust against my legs. Smoothing his blond hair in a self-conscious way, he gazed at me from behind the wheel, unaware that I was now naked. In his mind he was setting up the first of the television interviews.
As I out stared his insolent eyes, I felt my blood rise. I was tempted to launch a falcon from my arm, a young killer that would seize Stark’s throat in its first moment of life. Or a cobra from my penis to spurt its poison into his mouth. But when I walked towards him I saw the struggling plumage of some dishevelled creature in the rear of the hearse. Lying across the steel coffin racks were a dozen birds he had netted. Macaws, orioles and cockatoos, they sprawled helplessly on the floor of the hearse, the new tenants of Stark’s zoo.
They’re nervous of you, Blake.’ Stark lifted the rear door of the hearse in a grand gesture. ‘I trapped this lot in the last half-hour. Shepperton’s turning into some kind of mad aviary …’
His manner was still wary and ingratiating, as if my increasing power over this small town, my limitless fertility, provoked him to challenge me all the more.
I was certain he suspected that these bedraggled creatures snared in the coarse netting were parts of myself.
Careful not to touch me – would I transform him into some sharp-beaked but weak-legged raptor? – he lifted the tail-gate, seized the net and jerked the birds on to the dust at my feet. He stared down at the netted sprawl, at the bruised plumage, obviously tempted to strangle the birds with his bare hands there and then.
‘You’ll like what I’m doing, Blake. There’ll be a permanent record here, one of each species, a kind of memorial to you. Don’t you like that, Blake? Already I’m thinking of a dolphinarium, large enough for a whale. But I’ll have all the birds here. And in a big cage by the Cessna, there’ll be the largest of them all, the king-bird.’
His dreamy eyes roved across my body in an almost erotic fever. ‘What do you say, Blake? A condor, for you …?’
CHAPTER 24
The Gift-making
Sitting naked on the war memorial, I decided to enjoy this public holiday. The entire population of Shepperton was already in the streets, celebrating a jubilee. A huge crowd dressed in its summer finery moved around the centre of the town, turning the modest high street into the flower-bedecked rambla of a tropical city. People strolled arm in arm, pointing up to the vines and jewelled moss that hung from the telephone wires, to the hundreds of coconut and date palms. Children swung from the branches of the banyan tree, teenagers climbed into the arbours of orchids and gourds into which the abandoned cars had been transformed. Tapioca plants ran riot in the gardens, overrunning the roses and dahlias.
And the birds were everywhere. The air was a paint-pot of extravagant colours hurled across the sky. Parakeets chittered on every window-sill, rails screeched from the jungle decks of the multi-storey car-park, screamers trumpeted around the fuel pumps in the filling-station.
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