Thorpe - Flight

Contents

About the Book

Bob Winrush used to fly passengers, then worked for years as a freight dog, flying consignments of goods and sometimes people to all the corners of the world including bush-strips in war zones: real flying, as he called it. Until, one day, he walked away from a deal that didnt smell right something a freight dog should never do.

Now working as a private pilot for an Emirate prince in Dubai, he finds that moment of refusal catching up with him. Caught between those who want to find out more and those who want to cover their traces, he becomes a marked man, and flees to a remote Scottish island. Pursued by both armed assassins and a ruinous, bitter divorce, he struggles to re-fashion himself in this barren, beautiful place, taking on another identity.

But back in the world of smuggled AK-47s and heroin, the stakes are rising. Despite the presence of Judith, the alluring environmentalist, memories of his uglier flights return to haunt him. Even in the furthest Hebrides his past is with him, and the predators are closing in.

Adam Thorpes tenth novel is an extraordinary amalgam: a vertiginous, page-turning thriller and a masterful work of literary fiction. Fast, funny and very frightening, Flight shows a new facet of this most brilliant of writers.

About the Author

Adam Thorpe was born in Paris in 1956. His first novel, Ulverton, was published in 1992, and he has published two books of stories and six poetry collections most recently Voluntary. His new translation of Madame Bovary has just been published by Vintage. He lives in France with his wife and family.

Also by Adam Thorpe

FICTION

Ulverton

Still

Pieces of Light

Shifts

Nineteen Twenty-One

No Telling

The Rules of Perspective

Is This The Way You Said?

Between Each Breath

The Standing Pool

Hodd

POETRY

Mornings in the Baltic

Meeting Montaigne

From the Neanderthal

Nine Lessons from the Dark

Birds with a Broken Wing

Voluntary

TRANSLATION

Madame Bovary

The impression left after watching the motions of birds is that of extreme mobility a life of perpetual impulse checked only by fear.

Richard Jefferies

Part One

IF YOURE HAVING an affair with a freight dogs wife, you should check the worlds weather.

A final flight to Zambia was cancelled because of flash floods: the airport runway and all alternatives round about were rendered unusable. It was Bobs last haul for that trip, which had been the usual mixture of things, although the last few days had been toing and froing for Glencore with machinery for the copper belt. He came home two days early, not warning his wife so he could surprise her even finish tiling the bathroom, fix the outdoor light, mow the lawn. He was looking forward to it.

Then he remembered that Olivia wouldnt be at home until early evening. The twins, of course, were away at school. He hated them boarding nothing to do with the considerable cost but it was her decision. Worcester, she claimed, was mostly obesity in cheap jeans and there was some sort of serious drugs ring: at fifteen, the kids had begun to have dodgy friends.

So he had a couple of hours in which to shower, nap, find his land legs. He was glad. He smelt of sulphur from the strip mine at Mufulira, the wind blowing southerly over the town and its scratch airport. The acid gas from the smelter was still in his mouth. He was glad the rains had come.

It was the mid-afternoon of a cloudless and cold October day , mulch and woodsmoke nipping the air, as unmistakeably English as an old churchyard. The ancient mill-house, modified for the twenty-first century, seemed braced for another thousand years under its fresh thatch (and so it ought to have been, if expense was anything to go by).

He closed the car boot and took a slow breath, filling his lungs. It took longer, these days, for the ground to settle. The country air felt deliciously damp and green after the dryness of the cockpit, from which hed barely emerged except to sleep. Home is sweet and silky, he thought. Home is good. Celandine House. Olivias idea, the name. Celandine all the way up the grassy approach track, before the council turned it into a runway for the posh new estate.

He crunched across the gravel drive, unlocked the door, planted his bag on the hall carpet.

An unfamiliar smell. No pets (the twins were allergic), so it was usually a mixture of fireplace, cinnamon from the carpet cleaner and Olivias fruity hairspray, with an underlying hint of hay-bale from the thatch. Now there was lavender. A lot of it, oily but pleasant. Olivias latest fad, no doubt. You could never smell much in a cockpit, but hours of being cooped up with his co-pilots armpits and Hugh Al McAllisters low-tide breath (not improving over the many years Al had been his loyal flight engineer) made him appreciative. And that last copper town had been something else: sewage, sulphur and slag dust.

Asthmaville, Al had shouted over the unloading, eyes as red as a ghouls, wheezing horribly. Ill sue Glencore for millions!

You never know what youll find at the other end.

He heard sobs from upstairs, was only surprised for a moment: the telly was left on for security purposes when there was no one in. Some emoting afternoon soap. Or perhaps tennis, without the knock-knock of the ball. Just the grunts.

A nature documentary, he realised, as he poured himself a glass of mineral water out of the fridge: peculiarly like the moans and screeches of the equatorial forest hed spent the first part of the trip flying into the landing strip like a dropped pin on a rug, somehow rotating to a scar wide enough for your considerable wingspan. Bump squeak bump. A testing time for the landing gear. Then he remembered it was early-closing day, which Olivias boutique was unusual in honouring. It was part of her class act.

He climbed the stairs and opened the bedroom door. When it comes to emergencies, a pilots reaction time is faster than other peoples: the seconds break their own rules, slow down, become brown and viscous. Otherwise pilots are dreamier than most. This is why it took Bob Winrush a long moment really, a split second to recognise that his wife, crouched stark naked on their double bed, was not examining her own feet. She was gripping the feet like a pair of throttles, while a pair of shiny-knuckled hands covered her breasts from behind. They were not her hands, she didnt have four arms: the broad nails were clipped to the pink, the wrists were thick. And her own legs were not stretched out in front of her, but tucked up either side; the legs in front of her were someone elses, swirled with dark hair, a tuft on the bridge of each big toe.

She was frozen in shock, staring back at Bob. Or would have been frozen, if her moaning partner hadnt continued to rock her up and down. The room was heady with lavender oil: Olivias neck, shoulders and clavicles were glossed, as was her open lower lip and the tongue resting on it. There was a ball of tissue, grey with moisture, by the mans shin. Her buttocks were on the mans belly. It was all any old how.

At first she said, Job. Its his job. Then she reached for the duvet rucked at the bottom of the bed, pulling it up over her long body as if her husband had never seen her naked. She squeezed her eyes tight shut.