The lowered side of the bed's canopy acted as a giant sail, bulging like a dark purple spinnaker and making the whole framework of the bed creak and flex. The Queen Mother woke up groggily just as the bed started to move. The giant statues with the frayed shining armour stared down, their tattered gold leaf whispering wildly in the gale blowing through the long room; a gibbous moon flared in the cloudless night sky, pouring through the space and scintillating on the tiny strips of tinkling leaf as they tore and lengthened and ripped away and went flying through the moon-dark room like shrapnel confetti.
The bed began to move along its rails. Mihu/Walker decided it wasn't moving fast enough, and put his huge hands on the east side of its frame, and pushed. Contained within a blue-glittering cloud of golden flakes, the bed rumbled along its tracks and out into the night. The Queen Mother screamed, the bed's wheels hit the end of the tracks, but there was nothing there to stop them. The wheels clattered down on to the stones, striking sparks; the bed's canopy, loops and folds and curtains all flapped and snapped and fluttered in the golden-seeded breeze. Still picking up speed, wheels and the Queen Mother still screaming, the bed hit the terrace wall and crashed on through, tipping momentously into the black gulf beyond.
Somehow Mihu/Walker's hand stuck on to the bed and he could not let go, and so he went with it, and Uncle Freddy — trapped in the bed by straps and tubes and wires — screamed as he fell into the night.
I woke from that one with the sweats. I checked my watch. Twenty minutes since the last time I'd looked at it. After that it was a relief to lie and worry about everything.
Uncle Freddy. Suvinder. Stephen. Stephen's wife.
In a bizarre, horrendously guilt-making way it was a relief to have something to have to do. I remembered the feeling I'd had when I'd flown back alone from my Italian school trip, knowing that my mother was dead. The tears did not come and I just felt numb, surrounded by layers of insulation that even seemed to muffle the words of people. I recalled the noise the jet made as we flew over the Alps, all feathers of white spread over the land far below.
I was having problems with my ears and gone slightly deaf. The stewardesses were kind and solicitous, but I assumed they must have thought they were dealing with a half-wit from the way I had to keep asking them to repeat things. I really couldn't quite make out what they were saying. There was a roaring in my ears, a compound of the jet's engines and the air tearing past the fuselage and the effects of the pressure on my inner ears. That more than anything else was my insulation, the thing that kept everything at bay.
Then, more than now, you were isolated in a plane. Nowadays you can make calls from your seat phone; then, once you were up in the air, that was it. Aside from the very unlikely possibility of a caller persuading Air Traffic Control or somebody to patch them through to the flight deck, once you took your seat you weren't going to be disturbed. You had that time, that interval between the responsibilities that the ground beneath your feet implied, to detach yourself from things, to take an overview of your life or just whatever problems ailed you at the time.
It struck me only then that maybe that was why I always felt good on planes, why I liked them, why I slept well on them. Shit, did it really go back to that flight from Rome to Glasgow and that roaring in my ears, that strange, numb knowing that I was cut adrift from my mother for ever, and wondering what would become of me? I knew I hadn't really worried — or at least I hadn't worried that my biological father would come and reclaim me for himself and the life I thought we'd left behind — but I did get that detached, Now what? feeling, that impression that everything was going to change and I would too.
And so I kept myself awake all the way through the night thinking this sort of thing, wondering if Uncle Freddy was going to live, and if he didn't whether I'd get there in time before he died, and what it might be — if there was any specific thing — that was so important he was calling for me and not anybody else, and should I let Hazleton let Stephen know about his wife and her lover, and would the Prince, despite all he'd said, hate me for turning him down, and had it all been set up by the Business as the ideal way of tying Thulahn tightly to us, and how else were we going to do it, and should we do it, did the people in the place deserve or need or want to have all that might happen to them happen?
And was this whole thing about planes born in that other flight back after catastrophe, and did it go deeper than that, to layers of insulation I'd been wrapping around myself all my life, to all the hierarchies of contacts and business associates and good reports and executive levels and salary increments and pay-off guesses and colours of credit cards and classes of aircraft cabin and higher-level interest rates and even friends and lovers I'd collected around myself over all the years, not to keep the world away from me, because people were the world, but to keep me away from me?
My last thoughts, as dawn was coming up and I fell briefly asleep again, were that all this stuff about flying beds and aircraft and sleeping on them was making certain that I'd be so tired and sleep-deprived that I was bound to sleep on the plane; the Gulfstream if not the Twin Otter. Then, before it seemed I had really got back to sleep at all, the alarm went off and it was time to get up, feeling groggy and terrible and dizzy with the effects of interrupted sleep, and stumble sticky-eyed to the bathroom.
I stood beneath a tepid shower, listening to the wind moan in the vent to the outside air and making my own moaning noise as I heard it pick up and start to gust.
I dressed ethnic, in the long red jacket and matching trousers. It was only after I'd put everything on that I remembered I'd meant to dress Western. Oh, well.
My bags were already on their way down to the airfield when i did my usual last look round the room for anything I might have forgotten. Just a formality, really: I'm a conscientious packer and I hardly ever forget anything.
The little netsuke monkey. It was still sitting there on the bedside table.
How could I have missed you? I thought. I stuffed it in a pocket of my long red padded jacket.
The Twin Otter landed, I thought, spectacularly. Not an adverb I enjoyed settling on as the mot juste, in the circumstances. The Prince, bundled up against the cold, stiff wind, took my gloved hand in his. The wind was making my eyes water, so I guessed it was doing the same to his. He asked, 'Will you come back, Kathryn?'
'Yes,' I said. Dark clouds were moving fast across the sky, torn to great rolling ribbons by the high peaks. Swathes of snow dragged down the slopes. The pilots were hurrying the few pallid passengers off the craft and helping with the unloading, loading and refuelling. The crowd was small. Gravelly dust was picked off the football/landing field and thrown into the air.
Everything was late; the plane had been delayed at Siliguri with a burst tyre for an hour. I'd used the time to do a bit of present shopping while the weather worsened. When we heard the plane had taken off and was on its way I wasn't sure whether to feel relieved or terrified. My insides settled on both, which just seemed to leave my lower brain confused.