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Fly-by-night

I am winged and I fly.

I soar, soar into the majestic depths of the air, with the wind ruffling my wings as I turn. Here are no paths and no gravity, no constraints, but an eternity of radiant blue filled with breath and life and sunshine.

I chase the horizon, arcing over well-kept gardens. Below me sheds, wheelbarrows, ponds and statues, flowers glowing pink and the yellow of melted cheese, and prickling heaps of drying grass. Southward, southward...

I pass over aerials on roofs with tiles the rich, brown colour of chocolate; pass over stout brick chimneys and the waving, sighing branches of trees. I glimpse the smooth industrial skylights of a warehouse, its moat an acre of sweltering tarmac that glints with cars.

Flight!

I was never confined to traffic lights and double yellow lines! See me bank on air currents, high, high above the stream of metal insects and the faintly buzzing pylons that regulate lightning. My aerobatics are effortless and audacious.

Now I am singing, joyful, for the grass grows luscious and uncut below me. This meadow is dotted with daisies and buttercups; it is bordered by copses and sombre rows of oaks waist-deep in a vibrant, verdant ferny sea. Here are cows that laze grazing by a brook.

"We are full here and content," they low. "You, small traveller in the skies, what have you seen that is better than our sweet, sodden grass and cool, dark water?"

"I cannot stay and tell you," I call to them. "I must keep travelling until I reach the edge of the world. Maybe some day I will come back with my stories."

My heart dances within me and I fly on, ever faster, following the silver sound of water, the silver thread of black water below. My happiness is intense and unbounded... and now the brook becomes a river, the river broadens to an ocean glittering with small diamonds of sunlight, and I see nothing but blue sky and bluer sea.

This salt-stinging breeze is wonderful. I swerve and curve over the wide white deck of a ship, and I am flying, flying, ever southward, with no destination but far-beyond-here.

Already I am swooping down, down close to the cream-spattered shore. I see the horizon expanding, unfolding, and before me now a coastline of chalk-white, sun-bright albino cliffs alive with waving grasses, the sands at their base dotted with scattered people, parasols, and colours.

Children gaze up at me from striped towels and melting ice-cream cornets; a man over-hot in a business suit glances heavenward from the noon heat of the pavement. They watch me soar in the sky-blue, eye-blue vault so bright above them. Perhaps they, too, wish to be winged.

I fly faster and higher. The noisy rush of the traffic becomes distant and quiet as I surf over tall, beautiful skyscrapers, structured regular as crystals, with blackly reflective windows. They reach out to me with boastful words.

"See how vast we are, how proudly we stand. We join earth and sky!"

"Yes yes," I tell them, "I am tiny, but I am a creature of the air; can you dart and swoop as I can? Have you seen the houses and gardens across the sea?" But their reply is lost as I continue my journey, forever ahead, forever southward.

I reach the sea again and my wings are buffeted by a zesty ocean zephyr. The sun, painfully bright, scintillates on the scalded water, and now, now I know that I am at the edge of the world, and when I see another like me I know that it is here I shall meet my love and mate.

"Hail! Come join me," I sing to her. "We can fly together from one end of this world to the other. I will show you fields of swaying crops and the city in its sprawling enormity."

She approaches me joyously, singing a song of her own: "Fly with me! I will show you gleaming islands of ice and the swirling ridges of the desert."

"I will fly with you," I promise her. "We two shall circle in the vast skies forever, with salt spray colliding on the ocean beneath us. We are free!"

"We are free!" she echoed back, but her voice was distorting, at the same time strange and familiar. "We're free... we free... wiffree..."

"Geoffrey! Geoffrey!"

He had slept through his alarm. Still drowsy, he thanked his wife for waking him, rolled heavily out of bed before he could change his mind, and went to use the bathroom.

The stippled glass of the bathroom window was spotted with rain. Outside, there was a vague mass of foggy grey cloud. The relentlessly hot water that came from the tap could not quite dispel the gloomy chill of the morning. More raindrops thunked against the window as the sky mourned for something that never was.

He snapped off the buzzing purr of his electric shaver, soaped and rinsed his face, and, once dressed, trudged downstairs to join his wife for breakfast. He ate an unappetising bowlful of tasteless bran-based cereal. Through the window, he noted that the grass needed mowing and the pond was choked up with leaves at one end.

He drove to work. The sound of the rain was different on the roof of his car. On the way to work he passed a familiar field of cows, most of them lying down. A billboard that faced the road advertised British beef.

In the city, there were rush-hour traffic jams. Geoffrey fidgeted and sweated in the humid car. Stretching out behind him and in front of him, other cars like his nudged their fidgeting occupants forward between rows of warehouses and workplaces.

When he arrived, he signed his name on a sheet of paper and went up to the office where he worked. It was the first of October, and someone had turned the page of the glossy wall calendar to reveal the new month and a picture of a crowded beach. He half-remembered a vivid dream he had had involving oceans, a beach, some kind of lover... but he dismissed those irrelevant memories. His lover was a 38-year-old London graduate in Political Science.

As the memory of the dream faded, he settled down to work, only glancing up for a brief moment when a bird swooped past outside the window, startlingly close to the glass.