Espedair Street

'We are!' I howled, hardly able to believe it was really happening, that even Balfour would be so insane. 'You — We — This really is...' I spluttered, then was thrown back as we accelerated. Balfour clicked lights on, and I saw the airstrip in front of us. 'No!' I shouted.

'Shut up and sit down,' Davey said calmly, peering at some dials. We leapt forward again, heading down the field. I looked for a door handle.

'You're mad,' I told him. 'Stop this! You bastard! Let me out!'

'Will you stop shouting?' Davey said, and pressed a stop-watch into my shaking hands. 'How can I concentrate when you're shouting like that?' The plane powered down the grass, bucking and heaving on the uneven ground.

I gave up looking for a handle in the darkness — I could never find the door handles in cars, so I knew I'd no chance in a plane and threw myself over the seat at Balfour. I managed to get one hand to his throat. 'Let me out, you mad son of a bitch! I'll kill you! I'm not kidding; I'll kill you now; I'm not letting you take me up in this thing!'

'Look, stop being melodramatic, will you?' Davey said reasonably, and detached my hand from his neck without looking at me. 'I'm about to take off; you're distracting me, know what I mean?'

'Take off?' I screamed, and threw myself back into what I imagined was the comparative safety of the rear seats. I lay there quivering, backside stuck in the air, hands over the pith helmet, but the plane didn't tip back and soar; it slowed, and made a sudden turn which pressed me (still whimpering) hard against one side. Then the engine roared, I was thrown against the backs of the seats, and the bucking and heaving increased dramatically in both frequency and amplification. 'What... what happened?' I shrieked over the racket.

'Oh, I wasn't really taking off before; I was just taxiing to the end of the field,' Davey explained in a reasonable voice.

'Bastard!' I scrambled to my feet and threw myself forward again, grabbing at the back of Balfour's head and just missing.

I saw him flinch and duck and heard him say, 'Now I'm taking off.'

'Aargh!' I shouted. The aircraft's nose reared up; a line of lights beneath us fell away, the blurred ground disappeared, some trees flicked into and out of sight just like that, and I was thrown back again as we climbed.

I froze. I went into some sort of temporary catatonic state, my hands clawed round the back of the seat beside the pilot, my eyes fixed staring straight ahead, my body — even my heart, it seemed stopped, fixed, stalled.

'Hey, you dropped the watch; here.' Balfour reached over to me and pressed the watch into my stiffened fingers. I was staring into the starless dark beyond the steeply tipped windscreen, my teeth vibrating in time to the labouring engine. Davey adjusted some controls. 'Sit down, Danny. You'll be more comfortable.'

I found my way into the co-pilot's seat. I got the harness on somehow. I could see lines of light beneath us; the sodium yellow of streets in towns and villages, and the tiny white spears and dim rubies of a motorway. I stared, transfixed. Then I looked over at Balfour. He was smiling, looking quite relaxed and happy. If I could have made it out over the engine, I bet I'd have heard him humming to himself.

He'd had less than I had, I told myself. He wasn't drinking as much as me and he had less dope and it doesn't affect your reaction time so much anyway and besides the coke should counteract it a bit... shouldn't it? I stared at the stop-watch in my hand as we swept out across a stretch of darkness I suspected was water, heading for an isolated bunch of bright lights in the distance.

'You all right?' Davey asked me.

'Ha ha! Fine!' I said. I looked at the stop-watch again. Then I dropped it and put both hands round Balfour's throat. He looked mildly surprised but didn't take his hands off the controls in front of him. 'Take us down. I may still kill you, but take us down right now; hear?'

Davey tutted. 'Look, you've dropped the watch again. I'll need you to work it in a few minutes. Will you behave yourself? You're getting excited; I knew I shouldn't have given you so much cocaine.' He shook his head; I could feel his neck move in my hands.

I realised I was dealing with a complete madman impervious to any reasoning or threats, and let go of his neck. I resigned myself to my death and picked up the stop-watch again. 'Fair enough. Just say when.'

'That's more like it.'

'But if we ever do get down intact, I'm still going to kill you.'

'There you go again,' he told me, settling himself in his seat and staring forward. 'Just calm down. Get that watch ready.' I stared forward as well.

We were approaching what looked like a huge factory of some sort; a gigantic building lit from inside, its many outbuildings blazing yellow under sodium lights; from the centre of the building a huge chimney rose, hundreds of feet high and lined with levels of red lights like vast necklaces of LEDs. We were flying just under the level of its summit. Smoke twisted lazily from it, and ghostly white steam drifted from bits of the brightly lit buildings beneath. We were flying straight at the chimney stack.

'What the hell,' I breathed, 'is that?'

'Kingsnorth power station,' Davey said, still aiming us straight for the vast concrete tower. 'Ready with the watch?'

I watched the chimney get closer and closer. We weren't climbing over it; we were at least fifty feet beneath the summit, and on a collision course. I pressed back in my seat, eyes goggling. 'I said, ready with the watch?' Davey said, annoyed.

'Yes,' I croaked weakly. I closed my eyes as the chimney, almost filling the screen in front of me now, came up to splash us like a midgie against a flyswat.

'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?