Espedair Street

Just lights.

What could I feel? Like I was being tipped one way and the other, like I was being thrown forward and angled back.

Suddenly I remembered what Balfour had bought along with the plane to help him learn how to fly. I leaned over to him with my fists clenched and screamed, 'You son of a bitch!' at him. I unclipped the harness and got shakily to my feet as we flew along a light-lined valley. I moved to the door, trying to keep my feet as the cabin rolled and dipped. 'You total bastard!' I shouted. 'You can stop that now; turn it off! I've worked it out, asshole!' Balfour was twisting in his seat to look at me every few seconds or so, his face puzzled and worried. He shouted something to me but I couldn't hear for the noise of the 'engine'.

I found the door handle eventually. I waited for Davey to turn round again and then gave him the finger. 'Bastard!' I yelled again. 'You can stop it now; I know. Very convincing, and I was suitably scared, but I know it's a goddamn ...' I pulled on the handle and yanked the door open.

I didn't get to say 'simulator' because next thing I knew I was hanging half out of the plane holding precariously on to the door handle with one hand and staring down through a hard bellowing wash of air at dark fields tearing by a hundred feet below. Something white fell out of the door and went fluttering and tumbling away, falling behind us and then disappearing in a stand of trees. I didn't even have the breath to shout or scream. The plane tipped on one side and I fell back into the cabin again, hauling the door closed behind me. I lay across the seats once more, quivering with aftershocks of utter, mortal terror.

'Danny,' Balfour said in an exasperated voice. 'That was silly, and you just lost my log book, for Christ's sake. I'll have to start a new one now. I mean, what if somebody finds it and connects it with the Three Chimneys tour? I could be in serious trouble, Daniel... Jesus, man, you're more trouble than I thought. Just sit there and don't move until we land, okay?' He sounded quite upset. He belched, and I heard him muttering to himself.

I lay across the seats, paralysed and dumb and quietly pissing my pants.

Balfour must have seen the funny side of it all as he came in to land, because he was laughing so much as we taxied in he missed the hangar and crashed the aircraft into the Roller, breaking the prop, decapitating the silver lady and severely denting the motor's bonnet.

'Oh, shitbags,' he said, as the engine died and splinters of the propellor fell back and thumped on the roof of the plane's cabin.

I might have laughed then, but I was hanging out the door again by that time, and laughing as you throw up is as technically difficult as it is respiratorially unwise.

I'd dropped the stop-watch out the door when I opened it in midair, too, so Davey never did find out if he'd beaten his own record for the power station circuit.

It was the last time he made that journey.

Five weeks later, involuntarily true to my word, in Miami, I really did kill him.

ELEVEN

'Dani-elle, ma man! How the devil are you?' Richard Tumber bounded up the steps from the hired Ferrari parked at the kerb; he stood on tiptoe and put one arm round me. 'Heyyyyyy ... good to see ya again...' He punched me on the shoulder. 'Weird!'

I looked up and down the street, hoping not too many people were witnessing this. They weren't; it was a cold and showery Sunday and respectable folk were at their dinner. 'Rick,' I said. 'Hi. Come in; how are you?'

'Magic, me boy; magic.' He stepped in through the main doors and looked round the folly. 'Still living in the mausoleum, eh?' He clapped his kid-gloved hands together and rubbed them, nodding and clicking his tongue as he inspected the interior of St Jute's. The pigeon chose that moment to flutter briefly from one high rafter to another, cooing in the slightly panic-stricken manner of a bird that hasn't seen a proper meal in three days. 'Hey.' Tumber grinned, seeing the animal. 'You got a pet!'

'Sort of,' I agreed, and helped him off with his fur coat. Underneath, there was a very baggy suit that looked sloppily made but which I didn't doubt had cost him a laughable amount of money. Silk shirt, natch. Bow tie. He carried a very slim leather briefcase (when I first knew him, his briefcase was aluminium) and he wore graded Porsche glasses. I'd have staked money on the briefcase containing a Filofax, up until a few months ago at least, when I heard they were starting to be regarded as... well, Out, dear (Jeez-uz).

'You okay?' he asked, frowning at me.

'Fine,' I lied.

'You look... peaky. What was it you used to call it? 'Peely-wally', yeah?'

'Yeah.' I shrugged, put a hanger inside the fur coat and hung it on a clothes' rack of cellophane-wrapped Bulgarian suits. 'Just a hangover.'

'You been getting... 'steaming', eh?' He grinned, punching me on the other shoulder.

I nodded. Rick has the approach to professional and personal acquaintances of one of those magazinettes that come with credit card statements and colour supplements; he likes to personalise things, as standard. Three Gold— Tooled Initials... Your Name Here... so whenever he meets me I'm treated to a barrage of West-Coast Scottishisms in spoken inverted commas, for at least as long as it takes for him to think he's put me at my ease.

We sat in my best chairs, near the sound system and the electronic gear at the back of the pulpit, far enough downwind from the space heater to be able to talk without raising our voices, but still within its draught of warm, paraffin-scented air. Tumber took off his jacket and put his feet up on a loudspeaker. He'd accepted a small glass of Stolichnaya. He lit up a black and gold Sobranie and looked serious. I waited for him to say something. He nodded once, gave a sort of half-smile with one side of his mouth, pursed his lips.

I fiddled with my glass, wondering what was going on.

'Damn,' he said, taking his feet off the speaker and sitting forward on the edge of his seat, staring down at the tiled floor through the clear liquid in his glass. 'I don't know what to say, Dan.' He looked up at me, and took his Porsche glasses off, rubbing the bridge of his nose as though he was tired. He seemed oddly naked and vulnerable without the glasses. He put them back on again. 'I'm... sorry, I know how much you meant to each other, even if you hadn't... well, no; look...' He held up one hand as I opened my mouth to speak. '... I guess there isn't anything we can say, either of us, but, well, I want you to know ... well, I guess I felt the same way you did.' He looked away, shaking his head.

I had the oddest feeling of deja vu. What year was this, for God's sake? This was what he'd said after Miami, after Davey died. What sort of weird time-warp was I — or he — in? Had something else happened? I didn't know what to say. I wanted to ask, What the hell are you talking about? but there was a silence between us now I didn't feel able to fill, a confusion in me I didn't want to admit to.

I was still trying to cope with last night, with the combined effects of a bad hangover, bruised ribs and the awful feeling that I'd lost a friend. I'd been to the Griffin when it opened, leaving a note on the door of St Jute's for Tumber, but McCann hadn't appeared for his usual Sunday drink. I' d waited an hour, drinking fruit juices, then left a message for McCann with the barman and come back to wait for Rick. So I had enough to think about, and I didn't even want to ask if some new catastrophe had befallen anybody I knew.

Nevertheless, I had to say something. I was still wondering what it should be when Rick knocked back his vodka and reached for the leather briefcase.

'Life goes on,' he said briskly, with the air of somebody deliberately putting a brave face on the hardly- bearable. 'I brought some incredibly pure coke with me. You still indulge?' I shrugged, feeling weakened, suggestible, vacuous in every sense.

'You know I used to be able to fuck twice within the space of one side of an album?' Tumber said. We were playing table tennis on the slightly dusty table right at the back of the choir under windows depicting hares chewing the cud, the two fathers of Joseph, God showing his rear parts to Moses... that sort of thing. Playing table tennis coked up had seemed like a good idea at the time but, as usual when it came to games, I was losing, and in this case I seemed to spend most of my time chasing the ball around under the table and across the floor. I had no idea