The Unlimited Dream Company. John Gray

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СКАЧАТЬ hopefully leaving their pollen on me. They flowered among the debris of worn tyres and abandoned mattresses. To my right was a furniture hypermarket, its open courtyard packed with three-piece suites, dining-tables and wardrobes, through which a few customers moved in an abstracted way, like spectators in a boring museum. Next to the hypermarket was an automobile repair yard, its forecourt filled with used cars. They sat in the sunlight with numerals on their windshields, the advance guard of a digital universe in which everything would be tagged and numbered, a doomsday catalogue listing each stone and grain of sand under my feet, each eager poppy.

      Now that I was at last escaping from Shepperton – within moments I would cross the bridge and catch the bus to the airport – I felt confident and light-footed, skipping along in my white sneakers. I paused by a concrete post embedded in the soil, a digit marking this waste land. Looking back for the last time at this stifling town where I had nearly lost my life, I thought of returning to it one night and aerosolling a million ascending numbers on every garden gate, supermarket trolley and baby’s forehead.

      Carried away by this extravaganza, I ran along, shouting numbers at everything around me, at the drivers on the motorway, the modest clouds in the sky, the hangar-like sound stages of the film studios. Already, despite the crash, I was thinking of my new career in aviation – a course of lessons at a flying school, a commission in the air force, I would either bring off the world’s first man-powered circumnavigation or become the first European astronaut …

      Out of breath, I unbuttoned the clerical jacket, about to throw it aside. It was then, fifty yards from the motorway, that I made an unsettling discovery. Although I was walking at a steady pace across the uneven soil, I was no longer drawing any closer to the pedestrian bridge. The sandy ground moved past me, the poppies swayed more urgently against my pollen-covered knees, but the motorway remained as far away as ever. If anything, this distance between us seemed to enlarge. At the same time, Shepperton receded behind me, and I found myself standing in an immense field filled with poppies and a few worn tyres.

      I watched the cars speed along the motorway, the faces of their drivers clearly visible. In a sudden sprint, trying to confuse and overrun whatever deranged sense of direction had taken root in my mind, I darted forward and then swerved behind a line of rusting fuel drums.

      Again the motorway receded further from me.

      Gasping at the dusty air, I stared down at my feet. Had Miriam St Cloud deliberately given me this defective pair of running shoes, part of her witch’s repertory?

      I carefully tested myself against the silent ground. Around me the waste land remained as I had found it, yielding and unyielding, in league with the secret people of Shepperton. Foxglove grew through the rusting doors of a small car. An unvarying light calmed the waiting nettles along the motorway palisade. A few drivers watched me from their cars, demented priest in my white sneakers. I picked up a chalky stone and set out a line of numbered stakes with pieces of driftwood, a calibrated pathway that would carry me to the pedestrian bridge. But as I walked forward they encircled me in a spiral arm that curved back upon itself, a whorl of numerals that returned me to the centre of the field.

      Half an hour later I gave up and walked back to Shepperton. I had exhausted all the stratagems I could devise – crawling, running backwards, shutting my eyes and hand-holding my way along the air. As I left behind the derelict car and the old tyres the streets of the town approached me, as if glad to see me again.

      Calming myself, I stepped on to the perimeter road. Clearly the crash had dislocated my head in more ways than I realized. Outside the hypermarket I picked an overstuffed sofa and lay back in the hot sunlight, resting among the reproduction fakes and discount escritoires until I was moved on my way by the wary salesman.

      I walked through the garage forecourt, where the burnished cellulose of the second-hand cars glowed in the sun, a line of coloured headaches. Straightening my dusty suit, I set off along the perimeter road. Two women stood with their children by the bus stop. They watched me carefully, as if frightened that I might perform my dervish dance, surround them with hundreds of numbered stakes.

      I waited for the bus to appear. I ignored the women’s sly glances, but I was tempted to expose myself, let them see my half-erect penis. For someone who was supposed to have died I felt more alive than ever before.

      ‘Don’t take your children to Dr Miriam!’ I shouted to them. ‘She’ll tell you they’re dead! You see this bright light? It’s your minds trying to rally themselves!’

      Dizzy with my own sex, I sat down on the kerb by the bus stop, laughing to myself. In the strong afternoon light the deserted road had become a dusty tunnel, a tube of constricting mental pressure. The women watched me, gorgons in summer dresses, their children staring open-mouthed.

      Suddenly I was certain that the bus would never come.

      The police car crossed the motorway, cruising with its headlamps full on in the bright sunlight. The beams flared against my bruised skin. Unable to face them, I turned and ran away down the perimeter road.

      Already I had begun to realize that Shepperton had trapped me.

       7

       Stark’s Zoo

      A cool stream ran between the poplars, waiting to balm and soothe my skin. Beyond the water-meadow there were yachts and power cruisers moored along the river-banks. For ten minutes I had been following the perimeter road, waiting for the right moment to make a second attempt to escape from Shepperton. Lined with chestnut and plane trees, the quiet streets of bungalows and small houses formed a series of green arbours, the entrances to a friendly labyrinth. Here and there a diving board rose above the hedges. Small swimming pools sat in the gardens, water sparkling flintily as if angry at being confined within these domesticated tanks, confused by these obsessively angled floors into which it had been lovingly decanted. I visualized these pools, plagued by small children and their lazy mothers, secretly planning their revenge.

      It was plainly not by chance that I had crash-landed my burning aircraft into this riverside town. On all sides Shepperton was surrounded by water – gravel lakes and reservoirs, the settling beds, canals and conduits of the local water authority, the divided arms of the river fed by a maze of creeks and streams. The high embankments of the reservoirs formed a series of raised horizons, and I realized that I was wandering through a marine world. The dappled light below the trees fell upon an ocean floor. Unknown to themselves, these modest suburbanites were exotic marine creatures with the dream-filled minds of aquatic mammals. Around these placid housewives with their tamed appliances everything was suspended in a profound calm. Perhaps the glimmer of threatening light I had seen over Shepperton was a premonitory reflection of this drowned suburban town?

      I had reached the hotels near the marina. High above the St Clouds’ Tudor mansion the tailplane of the Cessna hung from the dead elm, signalling intermittently as if already bored with its message.

      I crossed the road and approached the untended ticket kiosk of the amusement pier. The freshly painted gondolas of the Ferris wheel, the unicorns and winged horses of the miniature carousel gleamed hopefully in the afternoon light, but I guessed that the only people who came to this dilapidated funfair were a few midnight couples.

      Behind the kiosk were the almost empty cages of a modest zoo. Two threadbare vultures sat in their hutch, ignoring a dead rabbit on the floor, dreams of the Andes lost behind their sealed eyes. A marmoset slept on his shelf, and an elderly chimpanzee endlessly groomed СКАЧАТЬ