Once more with feeling.

Once more for the century.

It’s been nearly a week since I got here.

Two hundred miles up in the sky.

They said “you’ll soon get used to the view”.

But that turned out to be a little white lie.

Ninety-nine times I’ve been around the world.

Around the world in ninety minutes.

Ninety-nine sunsets. Ninety-nine new dawns.

And I’m still looking at the view.

From here, I can cover my country with the palm of my hand.

If it’s still my country.

Sometimes, you can see the lights.

Clustered in cities, strung out along rivers and roads.

Sometimes the lights go out.

Like they went out in Japan after the quake.

Sometimes new lights come on.

Volcanoes. Auroras. Lightning.

We’ll be over my country in just a few minutes.

I wonder if I’ll be able to see its new lights.

The fires burning in its streets.

The new dawn rising.

Ninety-nine times I’ve passed over my country.

My home.

I wonder.

When I pass for the hundredth time.

Will it still be mine?

He hadn’t told her where they were going, of course, or why they were going there. He hadn’t even been thoughtful enough to mention that she should probably wear more practical shoes than leopard-print spike heels. Heels which now threatened to break off – or break her ankle – with every faltering step she took across the shingle.

It’d be worth it, he’d said. Worth traipsing all the way down to this Godforsaken corner of the Garden of England, worth taking day off work for, even worth the ridiculous kiddy train they’d had to ride for the final leg of the journey. Perched in miniature carriages, whooshing along behind people’s gardens, full of swingsets and laundry-lines.

The Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway. It didn’t even say Dungeness in the name. Why should it? Who in their right mind would want to catch a funfair ride to this blighted beach, all deadwood, cold rolled stones and scrabbling, prehistoric-looking sea lettuce?

But Maxine knew the answer to that. Her dad had been drawn to this place, bundling Maxine, her sister and their mother into the battered family Sierra on seemingly random Sundays before driving determinedly to this desolation at England’s easternmost tip. He’d park up on some nondescript piece of asphalt or other and get out of the car, roll a cigarette and lean back against the bonnet and stare wordlessly across the grey sea in the vague direction of France.

Maxine’s mum had hated it, though, forbidding the kids from getting out of the car until their complaints became utterly unignorable. She’d been living near Whitby when Chernobyl blew its top in ’86, still remembered being told to stay indoors when the wind blew in off the North Sea. She feared Dungeness’ own reactor, its hulking rectangular form blurred by the seafront haze – suspecting waste in the water, fallout on the shore. Even when she relented and let them out of the car, she’d call after them: “Stay on the path! Don’t touch anything!”

Maxine herself was happier at nearby Camber, with its golden sands, or the friendlier resorts of the Thames Estuary. Herne Bay, Broadstairs, even Margate. Her mum, though, would muse wistfully about wilder shores. Robin Hood’s Bay. Bamburgh. Staithes. Those places, she implied, had a kind of gritty authenticity lacking in the groomed Southern seafronts. Max and her sisters quickly learned to mock such sentiments: it’s grim oop North.

Maxine’s dad, meanwhile, had eventually stopped simply gazing across the Channel and crossed it himself, leaving his  erstwhile family to fend for themselves in honest poverty. He’d ultimately made his way all the way south to Marseilles, which was as full of intrigues as any well-trafficked port is. Like the Cinque Ports, where he’d been wheeling and dealing in penny-ante fashion for years, but bigger and rawer. Plenty of opportunities there for a fortune-seeking chancer.

Speaking of which, Phil had stopped and turned. “Get a move on, Max, we’re going to be late,” he yelled, his voice almost lost in the wind. He was far ahead of her, sure-footed in his grubby white trainers.

“Where are we going?” she protested. “I’m bloody freezing and we’ve been walking for miles.”

“Don’t be such a whinger,” he shouted back. “It’s just a bit further. And it’s not that cold.”

“I’m not one of your Northern slappers who goes out in a G-string and stilettos whatever the weather,” she snapped. He shrugged nonchalantly, seemingly accepting this as a back-handed compliment to his Geordie tribe, and continued to march towards the sea.

Maxine considered for a moment. She was slipping ever further behind: Phil was fast becoming a stick-figure on the beach, a narrowing strip of rusty stones and scrubby green vegetation squeezed between smoky clouds and steely water. The power plant skulked far off to her left. The place where the pylons ended. It looked as though they were marching one by one to their deaths. An electrical extermination camp.

Unenthusiastic though she was about Phil’s latest get-rich-quick scheme, she was even less keen on getting lost out here. Struggling to balance, she removed one shoe, then the other. A momentary sting of panic as she remembered her mother’s cautions. But then it was done. The stones were chilly, but thankfully dry, under her bare feet, and she found she could hop over them much more quickly, limited only by the narrowness of her skirt.

She’d dressed to impress, expecting some high-stakes clubland meeting, choosing her accessories and make-up with care. Examining herself in the full-length mirror before leaving the flat, she’d had a sharp spasm of the increasingly familiar feeling that she looked far better than Phil deserved, lumpen in his fleece and tracksuit bottoms.

Not just looked better. She was better. Things just hadn’t been the same since she’d gone to the Med last summer. Two months of sunshine, blue skies, warm water. Tanned, lean men. Cocktails. She’d changed. She’d learnt a few things about what you could make of life, if you tried. She hadn’t wanted to go back to working in the boozer and vegging out in front of the telly. But the alternative was to concede defeat, to join her mother in modest refuge up on the Yorkshire moors.

She was close enough now to see that Phil had pulled out his makeshift map, no more than a creased bit of paper with pencil scribblings on it, evidently drawn according to telephonic instructions. It’d be a wonder if they made itt o wherever they were going. He really was an useless shit, she thought, rage filling her for a moment.

She caught up with him just as he crested a swell of stones: beyond it, the water’s edge; a few feet out, a sharp-nosed boat bobbing with the tide. On the beach, two men, vaguely European looking. One would have been good-looking were it not for his hugely bushy eyebrows. Her first thought was that they must be French, or perhaps Spanish; but  nowadays they were just as likely to be from the Baltic as the Mediterranean.

They were wearing black leather blouson jackets and what looked from a distance like peculiar trousers; but then Maxine realised they were waders. Mostly dry, only their creases slick with water. They’d evidently been waiting for a while. On seeing them, Eyebrows half-turned and tossed a cigarette butt into the water. His movement spoke of efficiency. Perhaps of aggression.

On the back of the speedboat, she could just make out boxes stacked under a tarpaulin, each a bit smaller than a shoebox. “Unstamped fags?” she asked gloomily. A mug’s game, unless you had the balls to bring them in by the lorryload.

So this was how it was going to play out: offering the punters down the pub a packet here, a packet there. A quid or two each time for the savings jar in the hallway, whose contents were as unimpressive today as they’d been the day she’d started it. The day she’d got back from her summer in the sun. Phil helped himself to its contents every time he needed some change for fags, or a pint, or a paper. Or pretty much anything, really.

“Smartphones,” he replied gleefully, and as Maxine looked more closely she could see that what she’d taken for jumbo-sized cartons were, indeed, individual boxes of electronics. “A hundred of them, unlocked and unregistered, work on any network. Even with a pre-paid SIM. That’s ten grand you’re looking at there.”

More like three, thought Maxine. “Phil, how are we going to get them out of here? We can’t just carry them.” The guys on the beach didn’t looked as though they they’d offer sale-or-return.

Phil looked wounded. “Gimme some credit, Maxine. Jez is coming with his van. He’ll be here in a minute. We’re going evens on it.” He shot her a pleading glance, then trotted down the ridge to meet his partners in crime.

Maxine began pacing along the stony ridge: a few feet this way, a few feet the other. It wasn’t just her feet that were freezing now: she wrapped her arms around herself to fend off the cold wind whipping in off the sea. She could taste its saline tang, and perhaps something more. Something metallic. She looked for the power plant, couldn’t see it.

Finally she stopped pacing and looked at the three men. The transaction did not seem to be going well. Picking her way gingerly down the slope, she could hear the Europeans’ raised voices and Phil’s more plaintive, whiny tones. The price had just gone up, she guessed. Useless, useless, she raged internally, marching across the stones, her shoes still in her left hand, and before she knew it she was fumbling in her bag for the gun, pulled it out, pointed it at the trio.

Maxine believed in being prepared. And she’d been particularly careful in her preparations that day.

“Hey!” she shouted.

The men looked at her, stupefied. For a moment, no-one did anything. Then Eyebrows began to advance on her, his palms up and out. He had a grin on his face, the kind of grin she knew from her summer in the sun. She could almost hear the Eurotrash words coming: Hey baby. Be cool. She’d heard it enough times last year when some sleazebag or other had tried it on, overestimating their charms and underestimating her irritation. Until they’d eventually realised she wasn’t just another clueless little English girl. Until they’d realised she could handle herself.

The bark of the gun surprised Maxine only a little, but it startled the hell out of everyone else.

“Maxine! What the fuck, Maxine –”

“Shut up, Phil,” she said, realigning the gun so that it was pointing directly at Eyebrows, rather out to sea. “You. Keys.” Eyebrows nodded, reached slowly into one of his jacket pockets, extracted a bunch of keys and tossed them at her feet with the same efficiency as he’d flicked the cigarette butt.

“All right,” she said, bending sideways to pluck them off the shingle, hooking them awkwardly with the spare fingers of her shoe-holding left hand. “Now fuck off out of here.”

“Maxine,” started Phil. “Now think about this, Max –”

She fired again. This time the bullet whizzed past his ear, rather closer than she’d planned.

He didn’t need telling twice. For a moment, the Europeans looked as though they might still argue the point; then Eyebrows shrugged, and they slouched after Phil’s rapidly disappearing form.

Maxine lowered the gun, suddenly trembling. She had an abrupt urge to throw it away, forced herself to put it back in her bag. She realised she was holding it gingerly.

Fingerprints.

Don’t touch anything.

She wiped the keys on her blouse, gripped them firmly between her teeth, and extended her arms for balance as she picked her way across the last few yards of shingle and waded into the water, finally thankful for the bareness of her legs and the brevity of her skirt.

Out to where the boat bobbed and fretted in the surf. Tossed the spike heels onboard, pulled herself onto its edge and swung herself on-board with practised ease.

A summer in the sun. She’d learnt a few things.

Ignoring the goosebumps on her arms and legs, she pulled up the anchor – just a block of concrete attached to a loop of plastic twine – then dropped herself into the skipper’s leather-lined bucket seat. The correct key was obvious: she fired up the motor. It was surprisingly quiet, but she could feel the engine’s confident vibration through the fibreglass. A smuggler’s boat.

A few seconds to familiarise herself with the controls, then she dropped it into gear, swung the steering yoke, and swept away from the shore, carving a white weal through the grey and poisonous sea.

A leap of faith.

How has it come to this? Tom asks himself, not for the first time — and hopefully not for the last. How has he come so quickly from recording amateurish, giggly free-running clips on his phone to this: surrounded by hovering fly-eyes and potentiation engines, perched on the frame of an open window fourteen miles up the tallest building in Greater Shanghai, his life hanging at the whim of millions of viewers who might today, just for shits and giggles, choose to let him fall instead of fly?

It’s up to you now, Tommy. Sink or swim, it’s up to yoou.

At one level, the answer is obvious. Fame, sex and money – probably in that order, if he’s being honest with himself. Tom Assumes has made him a household name. It’s ensured that he’s never cold in bed. And it’s made him wealthy beyond his wildest dreams – or, if he were to be honest for an uncharacteristic second time, beyond some of his wildest dreams. Because he’d never have got here if it wasn’t for his unbridled ambition.

At another, he has no fucking idea. Part of it is good branding, for sure. He has his handlers to thank for that. Tom Assumes: it sounds like a stupid name for a show in English, but some bright spark at the production company had noticed that according to the branding engine, tomasumi was close enough to some l33tstreet term for “daredevil” to make sense all across the Asia-Pacific, down through sub-Saharan Africa and across the South Atlantic into Amazonia.

Flyen wingless: catchen tomasumi tonite on p2p?

Hadn’t cracked Europe because of the anti-trust laws, and most Yanks were still more interested in finding things to eat than in watching some Limey try to kill himself. But he was big in all the bits of the world that counted.

A potentiation engine drifts up towards his face. Despite himself, Tom has the creepy feeling that it’s looking at him, even though it has no eyes. It’s just the deaf-blind servant of the audience’s will: it can feel what they want, transmuting their desires into probability densities Planck-second by Planck-second. But it doesn’t even know he’s there.

You’ll believe a man can fly.

The pictures his audience is watching are being transmitted by cameras well beyond the range of his unassisted eyesight. In fact, they’re so far off that he probably wouldn’t be able to see them even if his scopes were switched on. Ludicrously distant, really: it’s hard to imagine how their rudimentary mechanical consciousnesses could possibly entangle with his wave-function anyway. But the bookies are very wary about anything that might skew the outcome of the audience vote. His life has to be in the audience’s hands alone: thumbs up or thumbs down.

Though it might be more interesting, in a way, to leave the decision to the machines. What makes the better spectacle, from a camera’s point of view: triumphant ascent or tragic downfall? He gives them a grin, a cocky one, hoping that they’re picking up his good side. Barney’s been muttering about getting his face remodeled again: it’s starting to look old-fashioned, apparently. Tom prefers to think of it as “classic”, but he knows there’ll be no stopping Barney if the viewing stats go his way. And the shaven head is probably on its way out too. Tom sighs. Back to hours in the make-up chair.

Vote now! Should Tom go Singlish? Or Afrinese?

Now he lets the mask crack a bit, shows a bit of nervousness. Most of the time he fakes it to build a bit of suspense, make it a bit more thrilling for the punters. After all, he wouldn’t want them to think he takes their support for granted, or that the outcome’s a foregone conclusion. Today, though, it comes naturally. Maybe he’s just scared of heights in a way that he hadn’t been of sharks. Or getting shot. Or being buried alive.

Or maybe he’s becoming scared of the audience.

For the hundredth time, he strains pointlessly to detect the potential that the monitors are reading. The flux of all those viewers’ attentions, refined and focused on him, deciding his fate. The quantum mechanical warp and weft they create in space and time. Fly? Or fall?

Or fail. As ever, there’s nothing to stop him just walking away. But no-one does that when they’re at the top. There are rumours that some of the old boys switched in clones late in their careers, and Tom knows at first hand there’s some truth to them. But you can’t chance that kind of fakery when you’re at the top of your game. Just need to keep your spirits up. Make sure your confidence doesn’t crack, but you don’t get cocky. It’s a fine balance.

There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots. But there are no old, bold pilots.

A tricky balance to maintain when the network, the viewers, the agents, are all crying out for you to outdo yourself. Last sweeps season, Tom had gone for a classic: basically,  Schrodinger’s cat – the box, the poison, the radioactive atom and all that. He’d drawn critical flak for playing it safe, but at least he’d lived to play another day. Unlike some of his rivals.

Xiolang Xhi; Zhiang Chow; Sammy Rose. Failed in their ambitious bids to get the ratings, failed to get the mindshare, failed to get the potential. Xhi had burnt to death when the inattentive crowd failed to extinguish his human torch act. Chow’s end had been mercifully quick, by comparison, when the viewers yawned and switched over rather than pray that the guillotine blade would jam during its descent. And Rose… well, he had always told Sammy not to take the audience’s mercy for granted.

Actually, I just had dinner with Sammy and Jean, his lovely wife, the other night. So no, there’s no feud. Healthy rivalry, yes, but no feud. I don’t know who makes this stuff up!

Tom shakes his head. Best not to think about it. There’s no evidence that his perception makes any difference. And then again, there’s no evidence that it doesn’t, since so few of those who’ve got it wrong have lived to impart their wisdom. Best to just put it out of mind. Assume the crowd is on your side, that they don’t want to see you fail. If they’re not – well, you’ll find out soon enough.

If you don’t believe in yourself, Tommy, no-one else will.

The wind is strengthening, and he shudders briefly. It’s not really cold – he’s wearing thermals and the warm air blowing out of the building is enough to fend off the bite of the stratosphere – but he feels chilled anyway. Perhaps it really is time to give up, he thinks. Perhaps this really should be the last time.

But then he always thinks that, and yet here he is again.

It’s time to unclip his harness. He takes a deep breath, looks ahead, to the horizon. He knows there will be a camera directly ahead, somewhere at the vanishing point, but doesn’t try to pin-point it. It’ll find him.

“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls,” he says. “In just a moment, I’m going to unclip the harness holding me to this building. When I do, I will either float gently to Earth – or plummet like a stone.”

As usual, he tries to sound disinterested, while subtly placing greater stress on the former possibility. Audiences don’t much like being told what to think: but it seems foolhardy not to exploit this solitary opportunity to influence the outcome. “It’s up to you,” he says. He waits, imagining the rising tension in the unseen audience, waiting for it to reach a peak. “My life is in your hands. In your minds.”

Time for his exit line.

“I assume I will fly,” he says.

And jumps.

How come no-one wants to know what I saw?

The curve of the world was upon him now, the curve of the world: blue flecked with white and green, a curved slash sliding across the black panorama. Beneath him, the engine’s vibration slowed to grumble, then a murmur, as the rocket neared the zenith of its arc: nose drifting downwards, path flattening out.

The moment of truth was upon him: the tiny hiatus that marked the meridian of his flight. The silent pause before his single-minded, bellowing ascent collapsed into the spiral whistling of his tumble to earth. As always, it had come sooner than he expected; and he was momentarily irritated.

But then he reminded himself to count his blessings: he was a rocketboy, and that was enough. Craning his neck up, peering into the infinite dark, he patted the rocket with his free hand, spreading his gloved fingers across its taut titanium skin. It was a good ship, and he was lucky to ride it, no matter that the ride was so short.

The deep black was inviting, its stillness that of a familiar room at rest; but he would not be travelling there today. He forced himself to look back down, at the horizon as inching its way up the sky. Ahead of him, he could see nothing. Twisting, he looked over his shoulder: a constellation of supernaturally bright stars fanned the sky behind. He was leading the field.

He’d ranked some way behind the favourites for this leg of the race, so anyone who’d backed him to this first corner would probably win handsomely. (Below, he could just glimpse the red shell of a chute: engine trouble had no doubt struck out at least one of his competitors.) But he took little satisfaction in it: there was no skill in the climb, just a straight-up fistfight between throttle and gravity.

And he’d won that fight decisively before: back when space travel still needed men with square glasses to slide rules to send tin cans to the Moon. When space was still the high frontier, not a playground; when you needed the right stuff to ride in – not on – a rocket. When spacemen still gritted their teeth, rolled their sleeves up, and crew-cut their hair.

His own hair, beneath the helmet, was still cropped as short as it had been when he’d first stepped onto the dusty lunar surface. It made him look old, contrasted starkly with the pricey coiffures of his fresh-faced rivals; but it also made him look tough. Perhaps that was why everyone expected him to do well on the up-hills, overlooked him on the way down. Image counted in this game, even if you didn’t think you were playing.

Looking up, he could just see the Moon, aloof from the stars; looking down, the finger of Florida poking into the sea. He could have covered it up with one of his hands: eclipsed Miami and Orlando and Tampa and St Pete. Covered up the house and the car. The peeling paint on the door, the tangled weeds in the yard. Covered up his ex, his daughter. Down there, they were so far away, his daughter unreachable, untouchable. Up here, she lay in the palm of his hand.

The rocket’s nose was almost horizontal now; he fancied that he could hear the thin screech of air past his suit, though was impossible as yet. Soon enough, he would have to take the reins, guiding the rocket into its sequence of loops and arcs. Freefalling, hopeful as ever that this time he could win the judges’ hearts; but the only sure thing was the plunge, cold and alone, into the icy embrace of the ocean.

Bobbing in the sea, waiting for the waterbus to crawl round the route and pick him up: very different, he thought, to a flag-and-tickertape parade. The winner was always the first to be collected, prepped for interviews and medals; the losers, to add insult to injury, were last. There was always the sneaking fear that he might have played such an inconsequential part as to be forgotten altogether: he feared the indignity more than the danger.

Still, he thought, he was a rocketboy, and that was enough.

The rocket’s nose had tilted decisively downwards now, and he swore briefly as he realised he had missed the main chance. Already, the flotilla of sparks behind was fanning out, embarking on their balletic repertoire of pirouettes and sautés. Grace, rather than speed, took precedence in this phase of the race. But he had been clumsy, clumsy as usual.

He jerked hard on the reins – the sudden tilt would cost him points, he reflected – and started on the descent, taking his steed into a long, stretched arc across the ocean below. Now his attention was directed solely to the blue below, not the black above. The arc would give him momentum and space; perhaps enough to pull off a double bow on the return.

He waited for the sharp elbow of the move, vented a little smoke; then again as he came out of it. From the ground, on the scopes, it would seem a confident one-two: or so he hoped. Still very high: better to save the long trails until he got nearer the ground. He pulled left, then right, then threw his weight around the slim rocket until it flipped around nose-to-tail: the bow was almost tied, but not quite.

An outside loop, a barrel roll, a tailslide and a snap roll; a left tilt, a right tilt, a swoop and a flick. The ground was welling up now: in the seconds before he flicked to the north, he saw a town. Too large, now, to cover with his hand. Above, the black was almost eaten away, consumed by the brightening blue of the sky. Ahead, the final gate, the last checkpoint to run: the only timed downhill stop that counted for much.

He lined up with the gate; swapped art for velocity, put his head down. Now the air really was rushing, but only the sound touched him. And he could feel the blood rushing strong and red through his heart, feel his muscles tensing round the rocket’s reins; yet as the gate loomed large ahead, it was lanced by a spark that flared into a man on a ship. The race was lost; and the scores, too, would count against him.

But as he soared through the gate, streaked into the ocean, he remembered: he was a rocket man.  And that was enough. ##

— New York.

You push the door shut. The door of your all-white, perfectly rectangular hotel room. Feel the surgical-grade steel handle turn smoothly in your hand.

Behind the door, the wall. Smooth. Immaculate. White.

You draw your arm back. Ball your hand into a fist. Punch the wall.

The plaster cracks, craters. A splintered bull’s eye.

— London.

You push the door shut. Your perfect room. The steel handle.

The wall is smooth, white.

You make a fist.

The plaster cracks.

— Tokyo.

Door.

Wall.

Fist.

Crack.

— New York. Reykjavik. London. Paris. Berlin. Moscow. Mumbai. Shanghai. Tokyo. Los Angeles.

Close the door, make the fist, punch the wall. And again. And again. And again.

— New York.

And the wall cracks, craters.

— London

A palimpsest written in paint and plaster.

— Tokyo

A hundred holes in a hundred walls in a hundred hotels in a hundred cities.

— New York

You draw back your arm, but realise it’s not enough, it’s never enough.

The white wall stares at you, blind like all the rest. Smooth. Immaculate.

You take the white-headed matches from the white matchbox.

You set the fire.

And wait.

Soon, the white walls will turn black.

##

Pussy by name, pussy by nature.

Colonel Pussy barrelled round the corner in his souped-up, cut-down Jeep: its tyres left trails of black rubber as he screeched to a halt. The Willys MB had barely stopped moving as he stood and vaulted over the door: opening it would have taken too long. And his paws had no sooner hit the ground than he began striding purposefully towards the officers’ mess.

That was Pussy all over: he always hit the ground running. It was said around the base that there were only two occasions on which he took things slowly: the first was when drawing a bead on a baddy; the second was when keeping company with a lady. And there were many opportunities for both. Pussy was the best shot in the squadron, and his tabby stripes, military bearing and gallant air were like catnip to the fairer sex.

“Pussy by name, pussy by nature,” he would roar whenever his news of his latest conquest raised eyebrows in the mess hall. Strictly speaking, the corps preferred its senior men to keep their private affairs just that: private. But it was hopeless trying to hush Pussy’s bragging: it was like a force of nature. And in any case, his success on the battlefield and in the bedroom usually won admiration, rather than arousing envy.

It had obviously been a good mission: Colonel Pussy had the satisfied air of one who had got the cream and the canary. One of the engineers would be stencilling a fresh batch of pointy-helmeted heads onto the fuselage of his Spitfire tonight. He swept into the mess, smacking the door into the wall with a thunderous crash, and bellowed: “Drinks for everyone! On me!”

The words had barely left his lips, to be greeted with a cheer from the occupants of the mess hall, when someone rushed over to him with a saucer brimful of milk. Pussy seized it by the rim, applied his tongue swiftly and drank it down in one long lick. He dragged his forepaw across his whiskers to brush off the few drops that had strayed, and then downed the next saucer proffered him in similarly rapid fashion.

Two underlings – barely out of kittenhood, their ears and feet still oversized – helped Pussy out of his flight suit, while the barman scurried to distribute Pussy’s round to his grateful beneficiaries. Underneath, Pussy wore Army colours, although he’d transferred to the RAF long ago. It was just another eccentricity that his superiors chose to overlook, like his penchant for parading up and down the drill field for no readily apparent purpose. No one ever dared ask why: that was just Pussy.

“Good trip, Colonel?” asked Lieutenant Snowdrop, with a twinkle in his eye. “Very good, Snowy,” rejoined Pussy, holding up a paw and extending its full complement of claws. That meant four kills – maybe five, if the dewclaw up his sleeve was standing similarly proud. “There are going to be some dashed gloomy faces behind the Axis line tonight! And not just because their women are ugly and their fish is rotten!”

There was a roar of laughter: they’d heard it all before, but the jubilance of Pussy’s return had a way of making everything seem new and exciting again, and at the same time, as though nothing would ever change. As long as Pussy kept soaring up, up and away and swooping back down to barge through the mess hall doors, the war could be kept at bay. The menace of Kitler remained little more than a looming presence.

Pussy drank down another saucer of milk – his fourth since entering the mess – and approached the bar. His stool, as always, was waiting for him, its worn leather seat welcome. He straddled it, then sat down, his rear claws scratching at familiar grooves in its sturdy legs. “A few close calls, Snowy, one got off a clean shot at me. Thought I was going to be pushing up daisies and no mistake!”

There was a concerned muttering, but not too concerned: Pussy had never suffered so much as a graze in combat. Intelligence reports suggested that even the other side knew of his charmed life.  “I made ‘em pay dearly for it, though,” said Pussy. “Made widows of a few young kitties in Berlin!” He laughed grimly and patted at his pockets, looking for a cigarette. Abruptly, he stopped: slowly brought his paw back up to his face.

Its white fur was smeared with red.

Pussy stared it for a moment, then patted again at his pocket, hesitantly this time. This time, when he brought it up, there was no mistaking it. The paw was covered in blood. The mess hall fell silent. “I say …” started Colonel Pussy. “I … Snowy, I don’t feel too well.” And with that, Pussy staggered back off the stool. As he stepped back from the bar, the dark, spreading splotch on his shirt was plain for all to see.

“What does this mean?” said the Colonel, his unaccustomed doubt striking fear into the hearts of every tomcat in the room. There was a pause, and then Snowy replied, reluctantly. “It means the day has come,” he said. “The day that we knew would come eventually. We survived sex – in fact, you seem to have rather thrived on that. But it seems that your dreamer has become aware … aware of …” His words trailed away.

“It can’t be!” hissed Colonel Pussy, and for a moment his amber eyes flared with an anger that made those nearby step back. “I can’t die! I refuse to die! I’m COLONEL PUSSY, DAMMIT!” He fell silent for a moment, then added quietly: “Anyway, it’s just a flesh wound.” A drop of blood fell to his floor, its splash audible in the hush. Pussy dragged his paw across his face; a streak of dark red stuck together the fur around his mouth.

“I’m afraid that’s just the way it is,” said Snowy. “There’s no going back now. The dreamer no longer believes.” His icy blue eyes were dispassionate, but his drooping ears told of his real feelings. “From now on, it’s for real. Everything is for real.” This time, the silence endured, the only sound the increasingly rapid patter of Colonel Pussy’s blood dripping on the floor.

It was broken by the crash of the doors. “Scramble, scramble!” cried an orderly. “We have radar contact; they’re only ten minutes out! To your planes! To your planes!”

Pussy straightened up; if the motion caused him pain, he showed no sign. “Well, that’s torn it,” he said, and started pacing towards the door, his tail stiffened. “Fun while it lasted, eh, Snowy?” A trail of spots marked his passage across the floor. “Stop,” said Snowy softly, desperately. “You’re in no shape. Let someone else take them on. You’ll live to fight another day.”

And Pussy did stop, but only for a moment. “But that’s just it,” he said, and strode out of the door. ##

Run for your life.

- the walk back from the station is the same walk every day, the same dull dry combination of dogshit, tarmac and fumes. grey, all of it, grey, grey like the sky above and the ground below and the soul inside. step upon step, each and every one rehearsed each and every day.

bus shelter. fractured glass, veiled youth. scrawl of pen. the wind blows right through. waiting. waiting for the bus that never comes. a scrap of paper struggles fitfully along the gutter. passers-by passing by. don’t catch their eyes. but now a woman, too striking to ignore.

and she smiles. her mask cracks. her eyes light up.

and a young, fair-haired man is running down the street, white shirt untucking from his pressed black trousers, tie slipping from his neck. not just running: sprinting, legs pinwheeling. and another, this one dark haired. and another woman, and another and another and now it is a crowd; a mass of commuters, a train of suited and skirted sprinters, a flock of running, shouting humanity.

but there is no fear, no anger; no mob, no riot. instead, joy, delight. a woman pulls out the pins that restrain her long black hair and throws them to the floor. two bare-chested men sing passionately. birds burst from the trees. grass blooms. and you with it. with them.

and the crowd keeps moving: remembering how it is to run, to laugh, to shout for no reason but for the running, laughing, shouting. And before you know quite why or how, you too are running, and laughing and shouting.

great times are ahead, great times. and you will do great things -

Chicken Little was a gutless wonder.

From up here, high in the air, Dinant looks sleepy. Peaceful. Idyllic.

I wonder, as I release a little more helium into my balloon, if Pompeii might have looked much the same way as it dozed in the shadow of Vesuvius. On another day, Dinanters would be walking to work, shopping for groceries, taking their children to school. Touring fora and agora, much as the ancient Pompeians must have done. Working their fields, harvesting the fruit of their rich, dark soil. Grapes for them, mushrooms for us.

But not today.

The sky is blue up here, above the stones. I remember it from childhood trips to the country, to the seaside. For a moment, I am panicked by the sensation of weightlessness, of the feeling that there is nothing between me and infinity. But my fear subsides as I wonder at how astonishingly distant and insubstantial the clouds seem. And I wonder what it must be like to always stand up, straight and tall, under this open sky. I wonder if I could grow accustomed to living that way.

Certainly, few who venture into Dinant grow accustomed to living our way. Our town is small and remote, its peculiar condition little appreciated in the world beyond our valley. New visitors, arriving unawares – perhaps looking for a bed for the night after hiking over the surrounding hills – are likely first to remark upon the sudden fading of the light as they pick their way through our narrow streets.

Next they notice the extra-ordinary hush that suffuses our town, the nervous disapproval that meets their attempts at banter. Usually they will fall silent to confirm the evidence of their ears. There is no chatter or clatter in Dinant; no raised voices or childrens’ clamour. There are no donkeys, dogs or cockerels. No songs; no music.

And then they finally look up, sensing solidity behind the shadows that dapple the streets of the town and the slopes of the valley. Some put their arms over their heads – as if that would make any difference – while others cry out and are hurriedly silenced. Some simply faint away; others flee at the first opportunity, perched precariously on the back of taxicycles, cringeing all the way to the nearest town boundary. Still others feign nonchalance, perhaps laugh unconvincingly. A very few keep up the pretence until they forget they are pretending at all.

These last are the ones who win the Dinanters’ congratulations; conversely, we laugh at those who cannot bring themselves to repudiate the evidence of their senses and reach an accomodation with the billions of pounds of rock floating in the sky above our town. Dinanters make a virtue out of denial. Thomas Jefferson, on hearing reports of meteorites crashing to earth, retorted: “I would rather believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from the sky.” We Dinanters applaud his attitude. We prefer to believe the lie. And the stones do not fall from the sky.

Usually.

I would like to say that I am regarded as a harmless eccentric in Dinant, but that would be less than truthful. Many of my townsmen regard me as a lunatic, in a sense that’s quite faithful to the original meaning of that word. While most of them prefer to gaze steadfastly at the ground, hunched over in devoted contemplation of the cobbles, I have always been more interested in the more massive stones above.

At first, I kept this interest to myself – like most of Dinant’s children, I was given to understand that such curiosity was somewhat indecent. But as time went on, I grew bolder and more open about my interest, shrugging off the disapproval of my neighbours. And after my parents had passed away, I used part of their legacy to have a small refracting telescope constructed to my specifications. That has made it possible for me to observe the stones in unprecedented detail.

Through the telescope’s eyepiece, I have closely observed the stones’ motions, though I have yet to fully decipher their gyrations and revolutions. I have established that some of the littler stones orbit their greater cousins – a fact hitherto unsuspected by my kinsfolk, who were not grateful for the revelation of this fact. I have watched them occasionally graze each other, and seen the resulting scree hail down upon the town below. (Like most Dinanters, my own head and hands bear the scars of such showers.) And on two occasions, I have seen one of the stones, jostled too hard by another, lose its equilibrium and plummet to earth.

On both occasions, the cause was clear – at least from my vantage point. The first time, it was the clang of a falling saucepan. The second, the crack of a rifle, accidentally and unlawfully discharged within the town borders. Accidents happen, even among careful folk like the Dinanters. Every now and again, someone will be startled or provoked into breaking his self-imposed vow of silence, letting out a cry and prompting a rock to fall. Every now and again the sound of a breaking plate will be followed in short order by the sound of a breaking house. And every now and again, a mother will fail to soothe her baby’s cries in time.

I feed a little more gas into the balloon and cautiously pull at its rigging until it starts drifting towards the mightiest of the stones. The balloon consumed most of the remainder of my parents’ legacy. I try not to imagine what they would think, if they had lived to see it. An indulgence – a wasteful, dangerous indulgence – rather than a house or a dowry. But if they could see what I see now… the titanic boulder’s pitted face turning almost imperceptibly beneath me, barely faster than a clock’s hour hand, its edge furred by the spindly pine trees. There is no breeze that I can feel: the balloon is moving with the wind. But I’m almost sure I can smell resin in the air.

I am sure the streets will be empty, abandoned, but I look nonetheless for children. It is a reflex, an instinct; in Dinant, a child alone is a child in danger. Our children are subdued and pallid, stooped and timid. Silence and caution are the stuff of their whispered nursery rhymes and playground games, their watchwords from the cradle to the grave – a journey conducted all too swiftly by all too many. Children are children, after all; they sometimes forget themselves in their enthusiasm.

I swivel my telescope to examine the massive rock at closer quarters, but find myself looking at Dinant again. The buildings are crumbling because no-one dares mix mortar or swing a hammer; and they are strung together by a patchy net of pipes, ropes and cables that no-one can bury for fear of the crack of a pickaxe or the clang of a shovel. To me, it no longer looks as if it is sleepy. It looks as if it is dying.

Children are also adaptable, however, and Dinant’s have found ways to circumvent and even exploit their situation. They speak in whispers and signs; they skip without chanting and smile without laughing. They play games peculiar to their circumstances. The hunted dart from the security of one umbral shadow to another as the lonely hunter stumbles after them through weak sunlight. They even play rock-paper-scissors: but in their compellingly truthful version, as fascinating as it is futile, the rock always wins.

I am very close to the behemoth now, perhaps only fifty feet away from the tips of its tallest pines. I check for somewhere to touch down. There is a clearing a little distance to the north, not quite in line with the balloon’s trajectory. I carefully start pulling at the guy ropes, hoping to catch a cross-draft and change direction. It is difficult and tiring work, all the more so because it cannot be hurried. Beads of sweat turn into chilly rivulets as they roll down my forehead and into my eyes.

The children are braver than their elders, more accepting of the reality of the situation. We talk as though it will never happen to us or our loved ones; but our actions tell a different story. Near misses draw a impenetrable, suffocating hush over neighbourhoods. Stricken animals are buried wordlessly, shamefully. Thunder in the night makes us cower and huddle and pray we are not among the morning’s dead.

I brace for touchdown, wondering if the impact of the balloon could itself be enough to send the boulder crashing to earth. Surely not: I have even seen the rock brush off stones far larger than my balloon. But I nonetheless grit my teeth, hold my breath, as the ground rushes up towards me, the basket first grazing the gravel of the rock’s surface, before it tips forward, bumps off the ground, bounces, then hits hard and definitively, the deflating sac of the balloon dragging it along pell-mell over the ground until it finally scrapes to a halt.

The rock is indifferent. I release my breath.

Death turns neighbour against neighbour. Those who have lost their loved ones envy those who have not. Irrational jealousies spring up. Superstitions take hold. Unfortunates whisper calumnies about their luckier kinsfolk. The God-fearing wonder why their prayers have gone unanswered. Pray harder, the clerics say.

I crawl from the basket, my head smarting where it struck the side of the basket in the stand during the descent. In the clearing, gazing at the trees around me. I could be in any Alpine forest. I am momentarily exultant at my triumph; I only wish that there was time to explore, to take stories of the wonders back to the world below. But I am here on a mission, and my time is limited. I must act quickly, before morning service is over and my fellow Dinanters emerge from the church. I start unpacking my equipment – quickly, but nonetheless carefully, gently.

Prayer: that is our only answer to the threat we live with, night and day. Prayer, ignorance and fear. Well, perhaps prayer will protect them now. By now, every man, woman and child will be mouthing the litanies silently, or perhaps tracing the lesson with their index fingers. Now, it is up to God – if He exists – to decide if they will all live or all die. Whether He extends a protective hand to shield the church; or a vengeful one to crush it. But whatever fate befalls them, it will befall them together.

The people of Pompeii went about their business as though sleeping, until they died in their sleep. All that was theirs was taken from them, smashed and buried and burned beyond any hope of repair.

We will not suffer the same fate.

We will no longer labour under the sky’s oppression.

I take a last look at the empty streets below.

And then I set off the bomb. ##

#1. trim

The sheet of wrapping paper was too big for the parcel.

“Oh sweet Jesus, what are we to do?” said Mother.

“I don’t know, Mother, but we must be brave,” said Father.

“We’re frightened, Mother,” said the children. “We’re frightened, Father.”

#2. snip

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your hair!” came the voice.

Rapunzel’s heart beat fast as she lowered her tresses out of the window.

There was a sharp tug as the prince started to climb, and Rapunzel almost cried out.

“Gently, my love,” she called.

“I’ll give you gently,” said the voice, and this time it cackled horribly.

It was not the prince at all, but the crone, who had stolen his voice.

“Oh shit,” said Rapunzel.

#3. clip

It looked bad.

He was far off the trail, which few people used in any case.

There was no way to free his hand from under the rock.

In his desperation, he had pried and scrabbled and scratched at the rock with his free hand, hoping desperately that he might be able to move it, even if only an inch.

Now his nails were in a terrible state.

#4. cut

“A horse!” he cried. “My kingdom for a horse!”

“Here, sire,” said a trusty aide, holding the stallion’s bit with one hand and taking the crown with the other.

No sooner had the former king mounted the horse than it bolted.

He tried to leap free of the saddle, but realised his garments had become hopelessly entangled in the reins.

The horse was heading full-tilt for the enemy.

“A blade!” he cried. “A blade!”

But all he had left to give was the horse.

And nobody wanted it.

#5.

The fate of the human race hung in the balance.

“Rock,” said Kirk.

“Paper,” said the Gorn.

And the Earth died screaming. ##

Up, up and away.

February 1931:

[In] our life together I want you to understand I shall not hold you to any medieval code of faithfulness to me, nor shall I consider myself bound to you similarly. If we can be honest I think the difficulties which may arise may best be avoided should you or I become interested deeply (or in passing) with anyone else.

Please let us not interfere with the other’s work or play, nor let the world see our private joys or disagreements. In this connection I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinements of even an attractive cage.

- Amelia Earhart, letter to George Putnam

December 1931:

It’s late, and Amelia is starting to feel a little drowsy. Jenny is reeling off some interminable tale about a surly waiter at an Ambassador’s dinner. Amelia sighs and tugs at the neckline of her evening dress, feeling trapped behind the mask of her polite half-smile.

She’s thinking about the journey she made three years ago, the journey across two thousand miles of featureless grey Atlantic, the shadow of her plane flitting over motionless boulders of cloud. So very different to the almost unbearable six days at sea she endured to reach London this time: six days of leaning over cold iron railings and peering into the thick banks of slowly rolling ocean mist. A castaway on an iron island, wishing to fly free.

Beside her, George stirs, ever so slightly, in impatience. She knows that his tiny motion has gone unnoticed by the other diners, and that only she can detect it and only she can knows what it means, and she is for a moment glad at this evidence of their closeness.

Her husband of eight months is more comfortable in formal wear than she, but he, too, is growing tired of Jenny’s meandering. Jenny is unquestionably charming, her dark eyes raccooned with mascara and her dark hair bobbed fashionably short. So swift is she with her quips and jests that it sometimes seems as though the conversation is scripted to let her shine. But like so many other Europeans, she seems to be a graduate of the endurance school of conversation, spinning every anecdote out into a story and every story out into a saga.

This sometimes infuriates Amelia, who has not entirely lost the slow taciturnity of her Kansas youth, but then she and Jenny are unlike in so many other ways besides: Jenny’s gamine form is contrary to Amelia’s own more rangy figure, her symmetric fall of black hair at odds with Amelia’s tousled blonde mane. And while both women are known around the world, Amelia cannot see how their roles might be interchanged; she would be no more at home in front of a movie-camera or music-hall crowd than Jenny would be five thousand feet up with only an altitude stick to play to.

“So,” says Jenny, turning her bright black birds’ eyes to Amelia, who has thus far escaped her good-natured teasing. “Have you met Herr Jung?”

“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure,” says Amelia, glancing hastily down the table, trying to untangle the knot of half-remembered introductions in her head.

Jenny follows her eyes. “He’s not here, darling,” she drawls. “He’s in Switzerland. He is a colleague of Herr Freud, although he has some very interesting ideas of his own.”

“Really?” says Amelia. “I don’t believe I have met Herr Freud either.”

“Really?” echoes Jenny. “You really must next time you are here. His ideas on –” she circles one hand at the wrist–”qu’est que c’est qu’on dit, the unconscious, the part of ourselves we only see in dreams, they are extraordinary.”

“Is that so?” says Amelia. Jenny’s been spending a lot of time in Paris of late, and takes every opportunity to adopt Continental pretensions. Amelia’s not convinced she really even speaks French.

“Yes,” says Jenny decisively, waving her cigarette holder. “For example,” she says confidingly, leaning in close enough for Amelia to smell her cologne, close enough to create a sense of intimacy belied by the rapt attention of the other diners, “his ideas on dreams. He believes that in our dreams, nothing is as is seems. That everything is simply a symbol of something else. As with this new surrealisme of Messieurs Breton et Dali. A clock is not simply a clock, it is something else also: the passage of time, or the fear of age. To eat an apple is to give in to temptation. And so on.”

“That sounds fascinating–” begins Amelia warily, sensing the closing jaws of a trap, but Jenny breaks in.

“For instance,” she says, “Herr Jung says that when one is flying in one’s dreams, it is not flying at all.”

“Then what is it?” asks Amelia.

“It is sex,” says Jenny, wickedly, her small teeth shining. “It is of sex that one truly dreams. What do you say to that, eh Amelia?

There is a hush, broken only by a half-amused, half-shocked titter. Amelia can see out of the corner of her eye that diners all the way down the table are leaning in to see her reaction.

She allows her half-smile to crack open a little wider.

“Herr Jung may be right,” she says slowly. “But then, tell me Jenny, if he is… what does it mean when one dreams of sex?”

The lull goes on for a second longer, then there is a murmur of amusement, puffs of cigar smoke expanding over the table. A few admiring glances, a few outraged ones, and the meal continues.

George squeezes Amelia’s hand gently below the level of the table.

“Touché,” says Jenny dryly.

March 1932:

George is rocking to and fro in his curious, seesaw manner, breathing heavily through his open mouth. Amelia is motionless and unmoved, gazing into the space beyond the curve of his neck, mildly aroused as he moves within her, but no more.

This is the part she likes best, the part of the act which she feels best reflects their marriage: an understated exchange of strength and comfort without histrionics or fuss. He is entranced by beauty that she cannot herself detect; she is supported, yet calm and independent, free to indulge her own fancies and dreams within the gentle cage of his arms.

As is often the case these days, she is dreaming of flight. Not pedestrian, plodding exhibition flybys which tax neither her aeroplane, her body nor her mind, but the euphoric, headfirst rush of open flight over endless ocean, silent but for the wind and the easily-forgotten drone of the motor. And George’s motion is in-keeping with the dream; an undulating pressure that lifts and drops her alternately, in mimicry of the gentle buffeting of the stratospheric wind.

Her reverie is broken as she feels George grow shuddery and anxious in his final seconds. For a moment she is resentful, then wistful as she recalls Jenny’s tipsy powder-room scuttlebutt: extravagant and no doubt exaggerated tales of prodigious lovers, unorthodox locales and something called le petit mort, a state of rapture Amelia finds it hard to imagine arising from her own dispassionate couplings.

A brace of juddering spasms, and George is done. He rolls away and over, his heavy breathing ragged in the exhausted silence.

“I love you,” he says. Though she knows he means it, he does not look at her as he says it.

“I love you too,” she replies, and closes her eyes.

May 1932:

It’s dark over the Atlantic tonight. But not calm.

Amelia is looking through the thin glass egg of her cockpit, snatching glances at the black sea between impenetrable icebergs of cloud, simultaneously cursing and glorying in the lightning bolts crackling far behind her torpedo-shaped Lockheed Vega. The sky around her is a flickering maelstrom of electric blue and burning red; the altimeter is out, the dead hand of its needle jolting dully across the dial as the wind shoves and pushes at the plane; the barograph is her only indication of height, and even it has been thrown out by the vast low-pressure basin of the storm.

Standing tip-toe, Amelia can just see over the bulbous nose of the aircraft. The sea is almost featureless, the scale of its vast sweeping arcs lost at this distance, but she guesses that she is perhaps ten thousand feet up. Then there is the vibration from a separating seam in the engine manifold, as yet inconsiderable, but insistent and growing. And the alarming, but innocent glow of orange-red flames jetting into the sky from her exhaust pipes.

Amelia fears none of these things. The sky is my friend, she thinks. The sky will not let me fall. But even as she thinks it, the throttle grows sullen and unresponsive, the ‘plane losing speed no matter how tight the grasp of her gloved fist. She realises, with a jolt of alarm, that the windscreen is thickly sheeted with half-liquid ice, the face of the moon growing vague through the aqueous veil, and without a murmur of warning, the Vega flips out at the tail and spins.

Amelia hauls at the stick with both hands, pulling it back until the cords of muscle in her neck stand out like drawstrings, the image of a rancher roping a steer at the rodeo flashing into her mind, but the Lockheed continues to plummet in its long, flat spin, until the cabin is a blurred circle of pale yellow lights and the clouds are smeared across the horizon, and still Amelia hangs on the stick, and abruptly the ‘plane flattens out and bumps back into level flight.

The windscreen is streaked with flattened rivulets of water, the control surfaces free once more as the warmer air melts off their stifling burden of ice. Through the window Amelia can see the white-caps on the ocean. The barograph shows her that she has dropped at least three thousand feet, and she tugs gingerly on the stick to inch the ‘plane up again, watching for ice on the glass. The flames lick their way out of the exhaust once again.

Shuddering, Amelia is weak for a moment, her body slackening with the sudden release of tension, then she laughs wildly – once, then twice. Every nerve and blood vessel in her body sings with exhilaration. A chorus of adrenaline.

I can do this, she thinks. After all, Lindbergh made it. But no-one has yet replicated his feat, and certainly no woman. She thinks of Doc Kimball at the New York Met Office and his grim premonitions, his mournful roll-call of the seven women who have died attempting this same passage before her. She thinks of the 99s, waiting patiently in their Earhart jewellery and Earhart fashions for news of their President’s safe landing in Ireland. For the triumph of the New Woman.

But more than anything else, she thinks of the sky. The sky is my home, she thinks in a momentary flash of fantasy. Looking around her, spying the pink glow of dawn at the horizon, she believes this with a pure, perfect passion. I cannot fall. And for a moment, the sky calls back to her.

The sky is my friend, she thinks, relishing the prospect of such union.

And her thoughts move on, to another, still more impertinent, if not intimate, conceit.

July 1937:

It is much too hot in New Guinea, and Amelia is feeling it, though she gives no sign. To the world at large she is unflappable as ever, a figure of almost superhuman calm.

Tonight, she will fly to Howland Island, the second-to-last leg of her round-the-world trip. She is anxious about navigating her way to the isolated two-mile island, but gives no sign, determined to give her doubters no rope with which to hang her.

A few choice insults stick in her mind. A chance meeting with a drunk political aide at the White House who asks if she uses her maiden name because hers is a marriage of convenience. A veteran flyer of no small repute who berates her for flying a man’s machine; the dismissal of her “magnificent display of useless courage” from a correspondent to the New York World Telegram.

Most painfully, even the professionals of the nascent commercial aviation industry – the beneficiaries of the industry she has nurtured with her record-breaking flights – are belittling her as a little more than a flying circus performer. Beside their catcalls, all her plaudits fade to nothing.

She wishes she could talk to George. But he is thousands of miles away, his finances drained by the expense of mounting her trip. In the hold of her spanking new “Flying Laboratory”, as it has been dubbed, are ten thousand exclusive stamps with which he hopes to recoup his investment. Though she has never questioned his business acumen before, she has a sinking feeling that perhaps this time it will not be enough.

“I have more-or-less mortgaged up my future,” she wrote to a friend a few days ago. “Without regret, however, for what are futures for?” But the bravado is not entirely genuine; for the first time, Amelia is beginning to feel that her actions are more for the Press’ benefit than her own, a feeling that makes her unsteady and unsure.

She sits on the wooden bench and looks at the bleached blue of the sky, straining her eyes in the hope of making out some feature, some mark to reveal its awareness of her. The sky is warm, inviting, open. She wishes again that she could talk to George. She needs his support, his strength, his all-encompassing generosity of spirit. And the feeling of fullness in her belly, her sudden bouts of nausea and giddiness make her wonder if there is, perhaps, a more urgent reason to see him.

If it is a child, she thinks, when was it conceived? She has not been with George for months, hardly at all since March, the outset of this expedition. She has done nothing but sleep and fly. This baby, she thinks, if it is a baby, would be a real child of the air.

For a moment, she pauses. Then she rises to her feet and walks slowly over to the ‘plane. Time to fly. The sky awaits her.

November 1992:

The wreckage of an aircraft, believed to be a 1937 Lockheed Electra, is found on the remote Pacific islet of Nikumaroro, some four hundred miles from Howland Island.

Amelia Earhart is still missing. ##