The Unlimited Dream Company Read Online Free PDF

in Shepperton? A factory explosion, or a crashing airliner?’
    When she shook her head, looking at me with a suddenly professional interest, I pointed through the window at the calm sky, at the park filled with bland summer light where the crippled children played, circling each other like aircraft with outstretched arms. ‘After the crash I had a premonition that there was going to be some kind of disaster – perhaps even a nuclear accident. There was an enormous glow in the sky, an intense light. Come with me …’ I tried to take her arm. ‘I’ll look after you.’
    She placed her hands on my chest, her fingers overlaying the bruise-marks. She had not revived me. ‘It’s nothing, Blake, nothing unusual. It’s common for the dying to see bright lights. At the end the brain tries to rally itself, to free itself from the body. I suppose it’s where we get our ideas of the soul.’
    ‘I wasn’t dying!’ Her fingers stung my ribs. I was tempted to seize her by the neck, force her to take a long look at my still erect penis. ‘Miriam, look at me – I swam from the aircraft!’
    ‘Yes, you did, Blake. We saw you.’ She touched me again, reminding herself that I was still with her. Confused by her feelings for me, she said: ‘Blake, while you were trapped in the cockpit I actually prayed for you. We weren’t sure you were alone. Just before you escaped there seemed to be two people there.’
    I remembered the deep light that suffused the air above the town, as if some fiercely incandescent vapour had been about to ignite. Had there been someone else in the Cessna’s cockpit? Just beyond the margin of my vision there seemed to be the figure of a seated man.
    ‘I swam from the aircraft,’ I repeated doggedly. ‘Some fool gave me artificial respiration. Who was it!’
    ‘No one. I’m certain.’ She straightened the clutter of pens on her desk, so many confusing pointers, watching me with the same expression I had seen on her mother’s face. I realized that she was attracted to me but at the same time almost disgusted, as if fascinated by something in an open grave.
    ‘Miriam …’ I wanted to reassure her.
    But in a sudden access of lucidity she came towards me, buttoning her white coat.
    ‘Blake, haven’t you grasped yet what happened?’ She stared into my eyes, willing a dull pupil to get the point. ‘When you were trapped in the cockpit you were underwater for more than eleven minutes. We all thought you’d died.’
    ‘Had I?’
    ‘Yes!’ Almost shouting, she angrily struck my hand. ‘You
died
…! And then came alive again!’

CHAPTER 6
Trapped by the Motorway
    ‘The girl’s mad!’
    I slammed the clinic door behind me.
    Across the park a white flag signalled an urgent message. The section of the Cessna’s tailplane hung from the upper boughs of the dead elm, whipped to and fro by the wind. Fortunately the police had still failed to find me, and none of the tennis players was showing any interest in the downed aircraft. I drummed my fists on the roofs of the parked cars, annoyed with Miriam St Cloud – this likeable but confused woman doctor showed all the signs of turning into a witch. I decided to lose myself among the afternoon housewives and catch the first bus back to the airport.
    At the same time I found that I was laughing out loud at myself – the abortive flight had been a double fiasco. Not only had I crashed and nearly killed myself, but the few witnesses who might have tried to save me had developed a vested interest in believing that I had died. The notion of my death in some deranged way fulfilled a profound need, perhaps linked with their sterile lives in this suffocating town – anyone who came within its clutches was unconsciously assumed to have ‘died’.
    Thinking of Dr Miriam – I would have liked to show her just how dead I was, and seed a child between those shy hips – I strode past the war memorial and open-air swimming-pool. The town centre consisted of