Read by Greg Page
Bill Sharpey boards the commuter train with hundreds of people like him and sits by the glass so he can see the last flashes of green before the train goes underground. Under the strip-lighting, his fellow passengers’ skin looks dull and dirty.
‘Man in the brown suit, go get a cup of coffee. Secretary, flip off your boss behind his back.’ Sometimes Bill tries playing God, saying something out of the ordinary to see if he actually has power over them. ‘Bald man, take off your shirt and walk out.’ This never works. Bill wonders what someone might say about him, a block over and a few floors up.
*
He takes the train home in the evening with the same faces. Despite the heat in the closed carriage, a breeze tickles through the edges of the doors and plays pleasantly around his collar. Today two tourists sit opposite him, holding their bags tightly, interested in the journey, talking loudly and looking up instead of down. Bill smiles when they glance in his direction, and decides to follow them to the airport.
The airport is busy, and Bill wanders through the crowds as far as security will allow. He studies a sign on the wall describing modifications to a fleet of planes, watches take-offs and buys a child’s book about how airplanes work, which he reads over a pastry in the coffee shop.
Dinner burns because he is two hours late home, which keeps happening lately. His wife Alice asks where he’s been with a tight, wary smile. Bill says he isn’t hungry and goes down to the basement. Alice sniffs the air for perfume behind him.
Bill spends all his free time in the basement. Alice used to take him cookies and see what he was working on, but now she rarely does, preferring to stay upstairs and glare at the noise he makes. He has been making things for years, although previously it has been less secretive, in her opinion. One side of the spare room is still filled with balsa-wood planes Bill made for their son David’s amusement. David outgrew them before Bill did.
Bill’s latest creations hang on the basement wall in a pool of evening light. All that remains is for the feathers to be tipped with gold paint so they’ll gleam; the paint waits for Saturday in a tin on the shelf. Today he just wants to look for a while before returning upstairs to eat the pot roast that’s sitting blackly on the stove. Alice has come to expect little reaction from Bill over his meals, so she saves her interesting cooking for lunchtime. Recently she has been eating her lunch off her knees on the basement steps, staring at Bill’s handiwork, because Bill cannot keep the basement key from her in her own home.
*
A few months before, Bill had been sitting in his office dreamily watching the clouds move. The more he watched, the more he noticed that they didn’t really drift. They floated, swirled and separated, sometimes surrounding a patch of blue sky, sometimes appearing to run from it. He imagined himself up there among them, feeling his limbs lengthen and twist, his hair trail, gleefully elongating each finger to trace a wispy line across the horizon. He could feel the air streaming into him, filling his lungs and being breathed to every inch of his body until he was made of nothing but air. He floated along like a breeze, lightly touching roofs, skimming over treetops and feeling the flutter of the leaves. The sounds of the city below merged into a sort of gleam, a bright hum that became part of him. The force of the whole city ran through his veins: buildings, traffic, sidewalks, parks, trash cans, apartments, shops, offices filled with the smell of copiers and coffee, taxicabs, bars, clubs, police cars and fire trucks, sludge in the sewer, stray dogs, movie theatres and buses and newspapers and all-night parking lots and people.
Afterwards he was filled with the urgent, energetic feeling that there was something he must do.
*
The following night, the children, David and Laurie, join them for dinner, and Alice drops her bombshell. They haven’t all finished squeezing lemon juice over the fish and David is just mentioning how bad things are at work, when she says, ‘And your father picks a time like this to make wings.’
There is a silence in which Laurie wonders if she has heard quite right. David stops dead and then laughs.
‘Wait, what kind of wings? Are we talking panty pads or something?’
‘David.’ Alice speaks sternly. ‘I mean actual goddamn feathery wings.’
‘They’re not goddamn,’ Bill says.
‘What are they for, Dad?’ Laurie asks.
Bill smiles for the first time that evening. ‘To fly, of course.’
David enjoys this. ‘What’re you gonna do, just fly right out of here straight to Tijuana?’
‘Of course not. I’m going to jump off of the Gordon Building.’
This stuns David into silence, while Alice frowns and Laurie says thoughtfully, ‘Why the Gordon Building? I mean there are plenty that are taller.’
‘But the Gordon Building backs onto the park, and then I can land on the grass.’
‘Don’t hit any trees on the way down,’ says David.
*
After dinner, Laurie carries the dishes to the kitchen so she can talk to her mother privately.
‘What have you said to him?’ she asks.
‘Why say anything? He won’t listen anyway. And he’ll get tired of this soon, I’m sure.’
‘What if he’s serious?’
‘When is he ever serious? He’s not serious about his work, about…about -’ Alice falters for a second. ‘He just wants attention.’
*
It might be Laurie mentioning it to a friend, or Alice remarking bitterly to an acquaintance about Bill’s foolishness. But someone finds out, and people arrive at the house that weekend to see the wings and the man who thinks he can fly.
Bill stands uncomfortably in attendance in the basement, unhappy at the influx of people but unwilling to leave the wings to be prodded and poked by a stream of neighbours. Jim from next door asks what mechanism Bill’s using, and without meaning to, Bill explains the lightweight motor between the wings. Jim smiles. ‘I guess you weren’t putting up shelves, then.’ Rich from the Turnstile Bar examines the plans at length and finally says, with odd conviction, that he thinks it could work. Bill starts to feel a little better about them all being there, and even offers to go and make coffee for everyone after Alice refuses to do so.
The fibreglass frame is based on a skeleton of a bird Bill found in the park. The tiny bones are pinned neatly on his workbench, surrounded by pages of sketches from his hours at the airport. It was at least something, Alice thought, that he was putting that engineering experience to use. Each wing-feather came from other walks in the park. It had been the birds, especially the dead one, which gave him the idea in the first place. He hadn’t told Alice to begin with because it hadn’t occurred to him, and then he carried on not telling her because he knew she wouldn’t want him to endanger himself. He didn’t want to argue with her, even though he knew there was no danger.
At four, Alice calls the children in exasperation. When David arrives, he pulls Bill upstairs into the den.
‘Look, Dad,’ he says through his cigarette, ‘If you want to kill yourself, do it. Don’t put all of us through this dumb stunt.’
‘What’s dumb about it?’
‘You’re trying to jump off a building!’
‘Who’s trying?’ He smiled and jerked his hand in the direction of the stairs. ‘Some people down there even think -’
‘It’s not funny. It’s in the newspaper!’ David thumps the paper against his hand. ‘Area man jumps Monday at three! People’ll think we’re some kind of crazy family who -’
‘They won’t think you’re crazy. They’ll think I’m crazy.’
‘Aren’t you?’
‘No.’
‘Then why are you doing this?’
After a moment Bill says, not entirely truthfully, ‘Because I think I can.’
*
Bill isn’t really friends with his co-workers, but he knows things about them, and thinks about them according to the number of their office. Bill knows that the man in the next office is ambitious, because he has heard him recite his power mantra through the thin walls. He also knows that the man is having an affair, because he has heard that too. But he has never heard the man’s name.
On Monday morning, there is no chanting or heavy breathing from next door. When Bill sneaks a look into the office, he sees his colleague by the window, gazing in the direction of the Gordon Building.
At 10am, Bill receives a note from his boss, addressed to the occupant of office 23A. The note categorically forbids his leaving the office before five, jump or no jump. Further, the note adds, why the Gordon Building, and not this one?
*
By three, a clear blue sky beams over the treetops and bright, cushiony leaves of Gordon Park. The sun shines on thousands of windows, the glass sparkling and seeming to ripple in the heat. Hundreds of faces line balconies and windows. On top of the Gordon Building, a mass of people blocks the path of the police while the crush in the park below prevents firefighters from getting through. Beside local news crews, bystanders hold banners of good luck as they stare up wolfishly. David is trapped in the crowd. When a figure steps to the edge above, his heart tightens. He remembers a man a few months ago who rollerskated into the river. After a tiny story on the late news, the man was never mentioned again.
No-one notices Bill in the hubbub on the street, although he cuts an odd figure, dressed in a heavy overcoat and struggling to carry a huge bag under his arm. They are all looking up, and he hears them chant when he and the wings do not appear at three.
Several hundred stairs later, on the roof of a building on the other side of the park, Bill is at last able to remove his coat, revealing the harness beneath. He unfurls the wings from the bag and attaches them, then walks to the edge and glances up at the sun. For a moment he’s transfixed, as if he’s witnessing the face of God. Then he stares back at the city, imagining himself soaring across it through the heat haze. Despite the awkward wings on his back, he feels weightless.
He eases himself down until he’s sitting on the edge of the roof, dangling his feet over as if testing the water. He pictures David and Laurie next to him, aged eleven and eight, kicking their legs against the stone, all three of them chewing candy cigarettes, a habit of Bill’s after he gave up the real thing. Are you sure you want to, a wide-eyed Laurie had said, are you sure? And he’d said, It’s for my health.
He wonders if Alice is below, in the throng. And right then the easiest thing in the world seems to be, why not go take a look?
(c) Tessa North, 2013
Tessa North has been writing fiction for several years. She has a Masters in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia, and has also studied in Texas and London. She is currently working on a science fiction novel.
Aged 6 Greg Page was cast in a nativity play. Somebody put a teatowel on his head and he became someone else. He was hooked. Since then he's been someone else more times than he cares to remember. He can be contacted through www.roseberymanagement.com and has no idea what he has done with his keys.
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