For distraction, I mist the purple orchid on the mantelpiece, stroking its leaves, whispering Wordsworth into its petals, its stems now so heavy with buds that I search for pencils and twine to tie them up. Before I arrived the mortality rate for flowers was shocking. A dozen would die a month. But I’ve reversed that. I’ve always had green fingers. Afterwards, I stare at the computer. I polish the overpolished counter. I arrange and rearrange the drawers. I even wish for late guests to appear. But I can’t stop thinking of that moment, the moment he turned upon reaching the lift. I’m so used to feeling always on edge—a crouched hare ever ready to dart to its burrow—I didn’t know I could feel any different. But for that moment, I felt strong. As if I could command armies. As if I could topple nations. As if I had magic at my fingertips . . .
11:11 p.m.—Leo
To Leo’s knowledge, he has never dreamed before. He doesn’t need the restoration of REM sleep—indeed, doesn’t need sleep, but sometimes takes pleasure in it—leaving his nights uninterrupted by the intrusion of needless, nonsensical images. So when he drifts off then wakes tonight and the image of Goldie lingers, he’s startled. Perhaps it’s a subliminal warning against complacency, his subconscious cautioning him not to underestimate her as an opponent. He came to the hotel to watch her, but perhaps he should keep a closer eye, assess her strengths, determine her potential. Or perhaps he’s developing an unnatural obsession. Admittedly, seeing her face again is far from disagreeable. Still, the question of why he is suddenly dreaming and whether Goldie might be the cause keeps Leo alert till dawn.
30th September
Thirty-two days . . .
6:33 p.m.—Bea
The first time Bea took off in a glider, she was terrified, though she’d have sooner crashed than admit it. Indeed, it’d irked to admit it to herself. It wasn’t the flying—once airborne she felt joy she’d never known—but the taking off that took some getting used to. The plunge of the roller coaster in reverse: the slow stretch and pull of the ground catapult, the tightening, the almighty snap and fling.
The lift—oh, the lift!—was sublime. After the abrupt snap came the radiant soar. Rising into the air as if entirely weightless, the catapult forgotten, the plane forgotten, everything forgotten—all past experience erased by this single, spectacular moment of absolute presence. A moment that stretched until the glider began to quake and tilt, prompting the pilot to seize the joystick and seek an updraught.
It took half a dozen flights before Bea began to savour the catapult as much as the lift, the climax as much as the release. Now, as the giant elastic band pulls taut, Bea feels a coil of anticipation tighten inside her. She sits in a state of both absolute stillness and ceaseless quivering, as if her entire body were on the brink of laughter. She has no understanding of the physical dynamics or meteorological phenomena that keep the glider in flight without an engine, nor does she wish to. To define terms, to understand concepts, would weigh it down, would make concrete that which must remain celestial.
Bea glances out the window at the diminishing figure of Dr. Finch below, waving. She doesn’t wave back. That their affair gives her unfettered access to the Cambridge University Royal Aeronautical Society’s gliders is its main purpose. The sex is all right, but she feels nothing for him otherwise, excepting occasional disgust.
As she rises, Bea’s breathing deepens and slows. A wisp of hair escapes her bun, intruding on the view. She pushes it back. When flying, Bea is sometimes seized by the urge to shave her head, to leave the scenery unsullied. It’s an action that’d enrage her elegant mamá—reason enough to do it—and free herself. But, though she’d not admit this either, Bea’s too vain. Looking in the mirror, she compares herself to what she loves. Sometimes her skin and hair are the nut-brown colour of the female blackbird, her eyes the midnight black of the male. Though perhaps her hair is closer in colour to a crow’s wing and certainly as fine—secretly she wishes it were a little fuller. Sometimes . . .
Be careful! Dr. Finch’s whine invades the sacred silence of the cockpit. Bea shuts him out of her mind. Forget shaving her head, now she’d like a lobotomy, if only to get a little peace.
Don’t be so reckless.
Cállate. Bea presses finger and thumb to her temple. Fuck off.
Bea snatches at the joystick, dips the glider’s nose, then pulls sharply back. The plane arcs up and, for one long elysian moment, all she can see is sky—around, above, within. She is free.
Bea screams an ecstatic scream. “Wooooohoooooo!”
In the field below, her tutor will be cursing and shaking his fist at the heavens. Shutting him out, she gazes up at the clouds, made pink-bottomed by the setting sun, holding the suspension a second longer than she should, before allowing the plane to fall backwards, nose plummeting towards the ground in a full turn of the Catherine wheel, so all she sees is landscape—harvested fields and autumn trees. Until, at last, the inverted earth is scooped up and the plane righted and level again.
Bea gives another gleeful howl. “Woooooooo!”
That’s right, niña, you show him you’re not some silly girl, you’re a sister—
“¡Vete a la mierda, Mamá!” Bea hisses, as annoyed by the invasion of her mother’s approval as she is by her teacher’s rebuke. For nearly eighteen years her mother has encouraged her to act audaciously and, although Bea relishes nothing more than reckless behaviour, she’s damned if she’ll give her mother the satisfaction of knowing it.
Bea banks a sharp left, tipping the plane so suddenly and sharply that she slips across her seat, nearly cracking her forehead against the glare shield. She holds the joystick steady, pushing it as far as it’ll go, so the glider tips and the sky slides. The ground rises to her right, then, all at once, the plane rolls sideways, tumbling, flipping, inverting the world so that earth is sky and sky is earth, suspending Bea like a bat in the cockpit, about to plummet headfirst 2,378 feet to the fields below, in a mashup of body and bone and fuselage. But then she’s rolling, following the circular arc of the left wing as it high-fives and low-fives and high-fives the air again.
“Wooohooooo!”
As the glider balances, Bea’s ecstatic shrieks above are seized by Finch’s cursing cries below, both ascending to the heavens in a discordant harmony of exalted rage.
“Woooo—fucking—hoooo!”
“What the fucking hell were you playing at?”
“I knew you were seething,” Bea says, climbing out of the grounded glider. “I could feel it. I could hear you howling obscenities at—”
“Of course I fucking was.” Dr. Finch is beside Bea before her feet have touched soil. “What the hell were you thinking? In fifteen years of flying I’ve never pulled a stunt like that—a backflip and a barrel roll—without a decent thermal lift. What the fucking hell—”
“Was I thinking? Yeah, yeah. I know, I know.” Bea strides towards the stretch of lax elastic snaking across the grass. Now that she’s grounded she only wants to be airborne again. “Now, stop whining and give me a hand with the catapult.”