'Now!' Davey yelled. I felt my thumb press down on the watch; the plane flipped on one side, I was forced hard down into my seat and the engine roared. When my eyes opened again we were back on an even keel and the power station was behind us. We were heading across darkness for another distant set of lights and another red-speckled tower. The light-bright field and flickering flares of a big oil refinery glittered away to one side. I couldn't swallow and my eyes were stuck. Everything had dried up.
'One down,' Davey said happily, and nudged me, grinning. 'Watch going all right?' I nodded dumbly and stared with appalled fascination at the next power station, as it drifted slowly closer.
We rounded that chimney too, then another. I found my eyes kept closing of their own accord whenever those massive concrete barrels filled my sight. Each time we banked, I was pressed into my seat, and we passed the smoke stack. I had no idea just how close we were coming each time, but I swear I heard our engine echoing off the concrete on the third pass.
We headed back for Kingsnorth and finally swung round it again; I clicked the watch off as we dropped suddenly, sickeningly towards the dark waters of the Medway.
'Got to do a bit of low-level stuff now,' Davey explained. 'Just in case we've been spotted on anybody's radar; don't want them to know where we land, do we?'
I closed my eyes. We rose, fell, my stomach going light then becoming very heavy in turns. I felt sick. We banked left, right, left again, then kept on doing that, and rising and falling as well.
I waited to die; I waited for a gasp or a shout from Balfour, for a shudder as we clipped trees and then nose-dived; for the bright flash of pain and flame, for oblivion, and as I waited I tried to tell myself it wasn't really happening and I was just having the most awful nightmare of my life, in bed, in our hotel in London, beside Inez, or Christine, or better yet between the two of them... any second now I'd wake and I'd be all right. I told myself even Balfour wasn't this crazy, not to really do this, not really...
Unless he'd taken my brief liaison with Christine harder than I'd thought; shit, I hadn't thought of that! Was that it? Was he going to nose-dive now and kill us both, or throw me out over a sewage farm, or did he just not care whether we crashed or not? Jesus; I'd thought it was all settled; Davey and Christine were back together, Davey had stopped the smack, Inez and I were going out again, even if things weren't totally back to normal yet ... He couldn't have been lying about not being angry, could he?
Meanwhile I was pulled this way and that; left and right and down and up, as if I was being tipped forward, thrown back, and stood on one side and then the other...
I opened my eyes, looked out. What could I see?
Just lights.
What could I feel? Like I was being tipped one way and the other, like I was being thrown forward and angled back.
Suddenly I remembered what Balfour had bought along with the plane to help him learn how to fly. I leaned over to him with my fists clenched and screamed, 'You son of a bitch!' at him. I unclipped the harness and got shakily to my feet as we flew along a light-lined valley. I moved to the door, trying to keep my feet as the cabin rolled and dipped. 'You total bastard!' I shouted. 'You can stop that now; turn it off! I've worked it out, asshole!' Balfour was twisting in his seat to look at me every few seconds or so, his face puzzled and worried. He shouted something to me but I couldn't hear for the noise of the 'engine'.
I found the door handle eventually. I waited for Davey to turn round again and then gave him the finger. 'Bastard!' I yelled again. 'You can stop it now; I know. Very convincing, and I was suitably scared, but I know it's a goddamn ...' I pulled on the handle and yanked the door open.
I didn't get to say 'simulator' because next thing I knew I was hanging half out of the plane holding precariously on to the door handle with one hand and staring down through a hard bellowing wash of air at dark fields tearing by a hundred feet below. Something white fell out of the door and went fluttering and tumbling away, falling behind us and then disappearing in a stand of trees. I didn't even have the breath to shout or scream. The plane tipped on one side and I fell back into the cabin again, hauling the door closed behind me. I lay across the seats once more, quivering with aftershocks of utter, mortal terror.
'Danny,' Balfour said in an exasperated voice. 'That was silly, and you just lost my log book, for Christ's sake. I'll have to start a new one now. I mean, what if somebody finds it and connects it with the Three Chimneys tour? I could be in serious trouble, Daniel... Jesus, man, you're more trouble than I thought. Just sit there and don't move until we land, okay?' He sounded quite upset. He belched, and I heard him muttering to himself.
I lay across the seats, paralysed and dumb and quietly pissing my pants.
Balfour must have seen the funny side of it all as he came in to land, because he was laughing so much as we taxied in he missed the hangar and crashed the aircraft into the Roller, breaking the prop, decapitating the silver lady and severely denting the motor's bonnet.
'Oh, shitbags,' he said, as the engine died and splinters of the propellor fell back and thumped on the roof of the plane's cabin.
I might have laughed then, but I was hanging out the door again by that time, and laughing as you throw up is as technically difficult as it is respiratorially unwise.
I'd dropped the stop-watch out the door when I opened it in midair, too, so Davey never did find out if he'd beaten his own record for the power station circuit.
It was the last time he made that journey.
Five weeks later, involuntarily true to my word, in Miami, I really did kill him.
ELEVEN
'Dani-elle, ma man! How the devil are you?' Richard Tumber bounded up the steps from the hired Ferrari parked at the kerb; he stood on tiptoe and put one arm round me. 'Heyyyyyy ... good to see ya again...' He punched me on the shoulder. 'Weird!'
I looked up and down the street, hoping not too many people were witnessing this. They weren't; it was a cold and showery Sunday and respectable folk were at their dinner. 'Rick,' I said. 'Hi. Come in; how are you?'
'Magic, me boy; magic.' He stepped in through the main doors and looked round the folly. 'Still living in the mausoleum, eh?' He clapped his kid-gloved hands together and rubbed them, nodding and clicking his tongue as he inspected the interior of St Jute's. The pigeon chose that moment to flutter briefly from one high rafter to another, cooing in the slightly panic-stricken manner of a bird that hasn't seen a proper meal in three days. 'Hey.' Tumber grinned, seeing the animal. 'You got a pet!'
'Sort of,' I agreed, and helped him off with his fur coat. Underneath, there was a very baggy suit that looked sloppily made but which I didn't doubt had cost him a laughable amount of money. Silk shirt, natch. Bow tie. He carried a very slim leather briefcase (when I first knew him, his briefcase was aluminium) and he wore graded Porsche glasses. I'd have staked money on the briefcase containing a Filofax, up until a few months ago at least, when I heard they were starting to be regarded as... well, Out, dear (Jeez-uz).
'You okay?' he asked, frowning at me.
'Fine,' I lied.
'You look... peaky. What was it you used to call it? "Peely-wally", yeah?'
'Yeah.' I shrugged, put a hanger inside the fur coat and hung it on a clothes' rack of cellophane-wrapped Bulgarian suits. 'Just a hangover.'
'You been getting... "steaming", eh?' He grinned, punching me on the other shoulder.
I nodded. Rick has the approach to professional and personal acquaintances of one of those magazinettes that come with credit card statements and colour supplements; he likes to personalise things, as standard. Three Gold— Tooled Initials... Your Name Here... so whenever he meets me I'm treated to a barrage of West-Coast Scottishisms in spoken inverted commas, for at least as long as it takes for him to think he's put me at my ease.