“Oh god, of course it’s not funny that she died!” My face flushed hot. “I’m sorry. I just meant…the name of the place.”
“Gliding can be very dangerous,” she said. “It’s not for amateurs.”
“I think the sky is dangerous for everyone,” I said. She took my hand in hers and put both into her coat pocket. Then she told me about her big brother Elliot who was in the RAF, and how I shouldn’t be scared, because people like him were up there keeping the sky safe for people like me.
I told her I had never even been in an aeroplane, and I was terrified of the idea. It baffled me that anyone could want to fly one for a living. I couldn’t imagine having nothing to stand on, no support, nothing there to stop you going into free fall.
“Uh, that’s what the plane is for,” she said, knocking me on the forehead, as if to check whether anyone was home. “Flying isn’t dangerous if you know what you’re doing. Way safer than hang-gliding. And trust me, anyone who’s flying a commercial plane with you in the back knows what they’re doing. It’s what’s in here…” She knocked on my forehead again. “That’s what’s scaring you.”
What was in there? A bunch of goop, I supposed. Finely tuned, carefully evolved goop. I’m not afraid of that weird material, just perplexed by it.
“I’m not scared of my own brain,” I said. “I’m scared of plummeting to my death. It’s totally different.”
“Not your brain, you numpty. Your mind. Your fear is all in your mind.”
“My mind…” I refocused. I wasn’t sure I believed in minds, at least not if they were supposed to be different from brains. Certainly I had never seen a mind.
Then again, was it seeing that mattered? Galileo supposedly dropped a cannonball and a musket ball from the Leaning Tower of Pisa, so the people could see for themselves how the two objects would land at the same time. Now that’s a good story. The visuals are spot on, tinged with military history, and it has a strong hero: the kind of genius we all want to know and love into existence. Sherlock Holmes is just like this. Do you know how many people play “the Game”? Its one rule is that the Sherlock Holmes stories are not fictional.
Anyway, that was Galileo’s big gimmick, getting people to look and see for themselves. Look through his telescope and see the Galilean moons and know the truth. Game over, right? Well, it’s a pretty good way to crash and burn your narrative arc, that’s for sure. Someone’s going to have to introduce a very different kind of drama if you insist on playing it that way. How else to keep the story moving along, create some tension? Holmes knew what he was doing, keeping all the important details to himself until the bitter end, the big reveal, when everything would come together. And Poirot, beloved Poirot, he understood that seeing for oneself wasn’t all that. Poor old Japp says that Inspector Miller won’t miss a single clue, he’s got eyes that see everything, and Poirot absolutely zings him: So, mon ami, has the London sparrow. But all the same, I should not ask the little brown bird to solve the problem of Mr. Davenheim…It is the brain, the little grey cells, on which one must rely.
So was that what I was afraid of? Reliance? I can’t rely on something as flimsy as an aeroplane to keep me in the air. I don’t belong up there with Cosimo’s stars. Then again, maybe they don’t belong up there either. Or to Cosimo de’ Medici. Or to Galileo. Is it even possible for a moon to belong? One might be tempted to answer that, if your tube shows something which cannot be there, it cannot be an entirely reliable tube, wouldn’t you say?
—
There was nothing about the gliding accident on the news yet, so I asked if we could drive out to Steeple Bumpstead and see what was going on. It was only forty minutes and The Cop said she didn’t mind because country driving cleared her head after work. Out past Addenbrooke’s on the Babraham Road, the landscape flattens and makes the sky wide. I watched it expand around us until it engulfed The Cop’s little car and we became comfortably tiny, peering out through the windscreen at the vast acres of crops. Our progress was slow. Negligible, when one could see it to scale. I watched the road signs passing, and imagined what they might look like to someone who did not know our conventions. Our symbols. How far could you get by looking at the shapes alone, probing them for some physical resemblance to a real situation that one might encounter on the roads? And then, what about the words? How do words look when you can’t read them? What if you don’t even know they’re words? There’s a Sherlock Holmes story about criminals using little stick figures as a code, because to outsiders they don’t look like bearers of meaning at all. But anything can be a word, if we decide it is one. And what about the other direction—can we undo that decision, once it’s made?
The crash site was in a huge flat brown field, a few huge flat brown fields over from the village of Steeple Bumpstead itself, to the north and east. A handful of people were milling around, every now and then looking up at the huge blue sky as if they half expected someone else to fall out of it. One of them was insisting to anybody who would listen that this very field was the “Bloody Pightle,” a locally famous spot where some guy was supposed to have been burned in the sixteenth century for being a nonconformist. Going to the wrong kind of church in the wrong kind of way.
Crash or burn. What’s worse?
