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Natural Flights of the Human Mind

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

All right reserved.

ISBN: 0060843365

Chapter One

He dreams of skulls. Seventy-eight of them--factors 1, 2, 3, 13 and 78. While the rest of the world conjures up sheep, he counts skulls, hoping that the number is smaller, that someone made a mistake, that the missing ones are really alive somewhere in the world after all. Once or twice, he only manages to reach sixty-eight, but he can't turn away and be satisfied. He has to count again and bring himself to the same degree of culpability as before. Sometimes there are more than seventy-eight and he feels the sweat in his bed, the heat of his fear, and wakes up abruptly.

He knows there are seventy-eight. Why does his mind play tricks on him? Why does he count at all when he knows the answer before he begins?

He lies completely still and waits for the physical manifestations of his fear to ease. If he doesn't move, the heat will go, the sweat will dry and it will be just him, Peter Straker, no skulls, alone in his lighthouse in Devon, living with the shriek of the gulls and the frenetic howl of the wind.

Once a week, Straker goes shopping. He starts his day by going down to one of the three keepers' cottages and boiling up a saucepan of water, then washes meticulously. Cleanliness is important to him--it's the last barrier between the uncertainty of his precarious existence and barbarity. Heselects a white shirt, a silk tie--pale blue with jagged dark blue patterns down it--and the navy pin-striped suit that he's worn once a week for twenty-four years. He takes it to the dry cleaner's on the first Wednesday of every month. He can't find a matching pair of socks, so he puts on one brown and one green. Then he pulls on his yellow oilskins and boots.

As he walks down the stairs, he passes Suleiman and Magnificent. They usually sit on a windowsill, almost on top of each other, their long Siamese faces turning together to watch him pass. They spend most of their time on this windowsill, dozing comfortably, sitting up every now and again to watch the gulls soaring outside, their ears twitching as they remember their younger glory days, a time when they were more interested in chasing birds than keeping warm.

Straker stops to stroke them and they push their heads towards him. Under my chin, says Suleiman. Top of my head, says Magnificent. They know they have to purr loudly to shut out the seagulls and the sea and the wind. When he stops stroking them and starts to descend, they watch him with a resigned disappointment, but he can't stay there for ever. He has other things to do.

He carries on down, and opens the door to the cliff-head, stopping, as always, to fight for a breath, and calculate the energy required to stay upright. The short blades of grass have surrendered to the constant gales, tugged mercilessly to one side, their shiny blades rippling in the occasional sunshine. He leans in the opposite direction to the wind, not bothering to lock the door behind him. There's nothing of value in the lighthouse, and people don't come out here, miles from human habitation. They do occasionally pause in the middle of coach-trips, which incorporate all the local sights (the cottage where the Beatles once stayed when they were first famous, Beckingham Manor, Hillingham Gardens with a funfair for all the family), but the road runs a mile from here, and there aren't any guided tours round the lighthouse. No souvenir shop, no cream teas. On a fine day, they might get out and walk a bit closer, cameras to their faces, inappropriately using the flash. When it's a tour
for pensioners, they often wave like children, but Straker doesn't wave back. He pretends they're not there.

'Why can't you just leave me alone?' The voice of Felicity, eighteen years old. Slightly high-pitched, and vulnerable, the trace of a Black Country accent still there, behind her elocution lessons.

'Because I have to know.'

'Know what?'

'You can't stop him.' Maggie. Older, confident, motherly. She was there at the beginning, a voice without a background. Once she'd arrived, she invaded all my dreams and stayed. 'He does it to all of us.'

'Well, I have to know you. You have to be real.'

Felicity: 'You keep waking me up. I was dreaming about marshmallows. It's all too long ago.'

'Rubbish. Twenty-four years is nothing. You haven't even started.'

'Go away, Maggie. Stop taking over my conversations.'

'I will never go away, Straker. Depend on it.'

'I know.'

Thirty yards from the, front door, the cliff ends abruptly and there's a precipice of a hundred feet. Straker likes to stand close to the edge, rocking in the wind, testing his balance, feeling his centre of gravity. He sees it as a daily test. Is he still here? What roots him to one spot? Can the wind catch him out? He waits for the moment, the final battle, but it never comes. He remains hovering above the precipice, never quite certain why he continues to survive. The waves roar through the rocks below, pounding against the cliff, challenging the wind to a contest of sound. Raging, shrieking, howling, buffeting. There's no clear winner, just a meeting of currents below the cliff, thirty-foot-high waves regularly crashing against each other, the spray nearly reaching him. Since he's been here, ten feet of the cliff have fallen. That averages out at half a foot per year. But it doesn't work like that. The closer it gets to the lighthouse, the quicker it goes. The elements will win in the end.

He once met a young man up here who wanted to commit suicide. Most potential suicides go to the next headland where the new lighthouse is automated, so there's no one to watch them, but there hasn't been . . .

Continues...

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Excerpted from Natural Flights of the Human Mind
by Clare Morrall
Copyright © 2006 by Clare Morrall.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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