Driving Force

Driving is hard. It’s too hard to concentrate in this heat, but this is summer, and I can’t complain: It’s summer’s job to be hot. I can feel the sweat on my back, and under my thighs; the way it glues me to the seat, the faint tang it adds to the humourless air. I’m not fond of long car trips.
I don’t like driving any longer. I recall liking it, loving it in fact, wanting to throw myself in a vehicle at any hour of any day, and drive to some place I’ve never been. I think it’s just these last few years with Miranda has changed me. I know she never liked cars at all. She used to fly, or catch the train (never the bus- I don’t blame her), or ride her mountain bike. Maybe that’s rubbed off on me. I guess a lot of things have.
She’s there beside me now, curled up in the seat as best she can. I can see her head bouncing on the window, vibrating with the car. It’s funny, she always used to complain about our bed back home, how it hurt her back, how she couldn’t sleep. Now here she dozes, sitting in an awkward upright position, head bouncing against the window in time to the bumps. I do it too; it’s just one of those things.
Why would anybody live here? The land is just flat. There’s nothing to see. Oh sure, there’s trees and power lines, but there always are. You take them for granted. This land, it’s dark grey-brown soil netted with farms and roads, it’s just dull. I’ve always been a mountain person, and so, I guess, has Miranda. Surely there has to be a better way to farm. What I mean is a more efficient way to farm. Look out there at that tractor. It tows the plough or whatever it is, stirring up the soil, which blows away in the wind. You hear about the conservationists are always ranting on about how valuable the topsoil is, and how we should look after the environment for the future generations- fair enough, I guess. So why doesn’t somebody invent a better way to till the land. Or why can’t they invent some sort of factory that can grow grain? Why can’t you make use of all that space up above the paddocks- build giant pyramids out of aluminium and grow grains and rice in terraces alone the faces, using giant solar panel mirrors to reflect the sun onto the dark faces, and generate power at the same time
This happens. I get in a car and drive, and my mind wanders fantastically. If the images in my mind were real we would all be living in a surreal interpretation, a mosaic world of overlayed fantasies, a place where nothing was real and everything existed. I start to imagine that I am the last person on the Earth, here in my little car, putting around, consuming the fruits of humankind in a kind of dejected, burnt out joy, knowing my eventual punitive destruction would mean virtually zilch to the world, the universe at large. Just another grasshopper going splat against the windscreen of time. Damned things.
I should pull the car over and get out, go for a walk. In fact, I should get Miranda to drive for a while. I don’t think she’d get lost if I went to sleep. She’s got a much better sense of direction than I have. I couldn’t find my way out of a sleeping bag.
That’s what I’ll do. Now, to find an appropriate spot. If only those imbeciles who build this road had installed some form of rest area, or left a nice big tree standing near the road, I could pull over and sit in the shade. Maybe they should build a big long roof all the way along the side of the road where people could pull over, so they’d be under cover wherever they stopped
Again, my mind is slipping, but farther this time. If I keep this up I could doze off myself, and lose control of the car. I’m not terribly worried about the car. I mean, it is a rental. It’s not worth anything to me but the deposit. I doubt they’ll give that back anyway after what happened to the boot. No, it’s Miranda I worry about. If I was at fault when we crashed into something and she was hurt in any way- well, you know. Miranda is… precious.
I’m going to pull over.
“What’s wrong?” I hear her ask as the car comes to a halt on the grass beside the road. “Why are we stopping?”
“I just need a break. I keep daydreaming. Can’t concentrate. I’m in no state to be driving you or anybody else around. Getting tired, I guess.”
“Do you want me to take over?”
“No. I just need to stretch, to take a bit of time out.”
“There’s cold water in the esky. Do you want some?” Without my reply, she gets out of the car anyway, and I pop the boot for her, and accidentally open the fuel cap too. I open the door and get out onto the soundless road. I can still hear that tractor, going round and round, stirring up dust.
I walk to the back of the car to close the fuel cap. Miranda hands me a little green plastic cup full of cold water. “Quiet out here, isn’t it?”
I listen. There’s the sound of the engine cooling, little clicks and pops every now and then. There’s the sound of the wind far off, rustling the leaves and the grass, and the low grumble of that tractor. I nod and drink the water.
“It’s an empty landscape,” I say, perhaps trying to inhabit the silence.
Miranda smiles at me. She has the most beautiful smile I’ve ever seen. Her big blue eyes light up, and I am again instilled with that sense of wonder at this woman. She’s so beautiful. We’re coming up to our forth year together as man and wife, so that would be about six all up, and she still fills me with that joy every time I see her. I hope this is all there is to life.
It isn’t. The drudgeries of everyday life still exist for us to contend with, and we are two separate people, we do have our differences. Maybe that a good thing. It highlights these little moments, makes you seem all the luckier.
“I don’t know,” she says thoughtfully. “I mean, there’s the road, and the trees. The land itself has it’s own kind of beauty. It is its own purpose, there’s beauty in that. The way the wind ripples through the grass, the way the dust curls and eddies. Everything is unique to this one moment, and in the billions of years past or to come, this moment will never occur again. See, look at the birds. They fold and slide on the air itself. There aren’t any grand-looking buildings, or neat palms lining the road. It’s a kind of natural completeness though, not empty. Do you see.”
I don’t think I do. I know what she’s trying to tell me. It’s the same thing she’s always tried to say to me, how everything is beautiful. She seems to see the inner interplay between the natural and human-made objects of the world. She’s explained the concept to me any number of times, how to truly see something for what it’s worth you must see it how it is, as it stands, with no preconception of the object. You must see the object in the objects terms, the entity it’s own purpose. It’s just not something I can do. If I could only see the world through her eyes, then I would understand.
I don’t answer her. To me, this is still just an empty landscape.

Crossroads

I come awake.
Miranda says something nice to me, or something I think is nice. I was dreaming of home, the view of the mesa-like mountains, grey-green trees a forefront to golden stone cliffs. Not gone two days I already miss it.
Maybe Miranda wasn’t mumbling something nice, for the car is parked in the dusty car park of a roadside takeaway. She’s already halfway to the door, and I have to scrabble around for my wallet. I’m not wearing my watch, something that bugs me still, but I told her that I would not wear it while we were on holidays. She’s always going on about how my life is ruled by the time. So, to prove to her wrong, as she is, I’ve resolved to not wear my watch for the duration. I look silly with a little white band of skin around my wrist.
I wonder what time it is?
My wallet is in the glove box, where I put it. Sometimes I forget to take it out of my pocket and sit on it. I’m one of those people who keeps change in the wallet itself, not in my pocket, so sitting on it is quite uncomfortable. I know Miranda likes to keep loose change either in her bag or in the ashtray. Why would you put money in an ashtray? You need your money in your wallet; imaging carrying an ashtray around for when you needed change. I guess it’s handy to have some in the car, though.
Miranda has gone into the shop. I lock the car because she’s taken the keys as usual.
“Howdy,” says a truckie in passing. I can tell he’s a truckie because he’s wearing a blue singlet, black shorts and boots. I’m told it’s bad to stereotype people, but I can’t help it. If somebody asks me to think of an accountant, I get this mental picture of a man with a white shirt, black pin-stripe trousers and a brightly-coloured tie. This isn’t a stereotype, it’s just how accountants dress. The truckie is the same, they just all happen to dress, out of pure coincidence probably, in a blue singlet and black shorts.
“How you going,” I reply, but I’ve taken too long again. He’s halfway back to his big black rig. Sometimes I just don’t know what to say to some people, they say something so normal and my mind blanks out for a second, and by the time I recover, it’s too late. The story of my life, I presume.
As I walk into the takeaway, I reel at the smell of hot fried food. It’s just like walking into the shop on our corner back home. I have to admit I am a sucker for hot fried food, against Miranda’s better judgement, of course. She’s up at the counter with a chocolate ice cream in one hand and what appears to be a salad roll in the other.
“What time is it?” I ask her.
“About five,” she replies vaguely, atop the waitress behind the counter, who mumbles “Four forty-two.”
Miranda says to me something that she always says in these situations. “You buy the Cornetto and I’ll just have the bottom.”
“No, you have it. I think I’ll have a choc-mint one.”
“I can’t eat all this.”
“Buff could eat that, and she’s only a dog. You’re much bigger, more room to fill.” I’m waving my hands around in circles, trying to convey the difference in size. It’s not working.
“It’ll make me fat.”
“One gram of chocolate equals one kilogram of fat. Oldest law in the universe.” I grin because Miranda hates it when I tease. I turn to the waitress. “Can I get some fish and chips with chicken salt thanks.”
“Just on the chips?” She asks.
“No,” I say, picking up a pack of orange Tic-Tacs. “On the fish too, thanks. And can I have some lemon? Just a couple of dollars of chips, and two or three of whiting.”
Outside, a truck’s air-brakes bleat into the evening silence.
Miranda is giving me on of those looks. “You should be eating healthy food.”
“Fish is healthy, being white meat,” I say. “And chips are potatoes- they’re healthy.” It’s the line I always fall back on. I’m smiling because I’m happy.
She’s not about to be sucked into that one again. She just continues to give me that look. I think it’s the reason I married her, that look. I’ve never doubted my decision, that’s for sure.
I walk over the freezer and pick out a honeycomb flavour Choc Wedge. I wink at Miranda. Finally she smiles.

The Morning After

Something I’ve never been able to convince Miranda of is the fact that I can’t stand TV in the morning. The radio either. She has an incessant habit of turning the wretched thing on first thing, and turn it up loud so she can hear the news while she makes herself a cup of tea.
“I was having a nice dream,” I call out to the hall, wondering if I close my eyes that I may again return to the surreal world inside my head.
“Sorry,” I think I hear her call out from downstairs. She must have turned it down because now I can only just hear a burble of noises, like listening to a dinner party from out in the garden.
“Can you at least shut the door?” I call out to Miranda, fully knowing that I’ll never get back to sleep.
Miranda normally takes the opportunity to say something along the lines of ‘It’s time for you to get up anyway’ but today she hasn’t.
Why hasn’t she? Why is today so special? Is it our anniversary? No. And it’s not my birthday. It’s not Miranda’s birthday either. I would certainly remember that. The natural progression of the morning is for Miranda to wake me, then for me to complain about it, then for Miranda to somehow force me out of bed. But this day is different. I wonder why?
I decide to call out again. “What’s wrong? Do you need a hand with something?”
There’s no answer. Miranda remains silent. I can still hear the TV, but the volume is down.
Maybe I’m getting paranoid. Maybe she’s just letting me sleep in. We are on holiday, after all. I’m just being obnoxious, is all.
The kettle begins it morning whine. As if the TV didn’t wake me, the daily whine of the kettle is far greater alarm than any clock or radio. “I’ll never get back to sleep,” I say to the room.
The kettle is still crying out in its shrieking crescendo.
“Miranda?”
Finally I hear the kettle release it’s cry, but the silence is replaced almost immediately with a screech from Miranda herself. “Shit!” I hear, and then a metallic clatter and a splash.
I’m out of bed, the sheet around my waist, like that. In the kitchen, steam is rising from the tiles, and kettle lies cracked on the table. “What happened?”
Miranda has her hand under the cold tap. “I wasn’t paying attention. The steam burnt my hand.”
“Are you okay?” I ask, realising that she is not.
“I’ll be okay.”
“Let me see,” I say, but she has wrapped her hand in a wet Chux.
“I’ll be okay,” she reminds me.
“You should keep it under the cold water for a while, or it could blister.”
“I said I’m fine.” She gives me an irritated look, and walks out to watch the TV.
“I’ll get you a bowl of icy water, then.” I don’t get a reply, so I start to fill a saucepan with cold water, and get some ice from the freezer. When I’ve put the ice in the saucepan, I take it out to her. “What’s so special on TV, then?”
“Shhh!”
I put the saucepan of water in front of her and manoeuvre her hand into it. “What’s on?”
Miranda says to me “Turn it up a bit.”
I shrug and walk over to the TV. On the screen, a man with a microphone is standing in front of a very large grey dome. I can see police helicopters and fire crews working in the background. I turn up the volume.
Rare to early morning news, the man on the TV surprises me with his story:
“…in any depth. You can see the dome itself is without any visible lines or markings. I’ve just heard reports from fire officials on the site that the metal appears to be a thin, seamless material. Apparently the whole surface of the object is a single sheet of metal. How this is possible, nobody is sure. Preliminary reports also suggest that the metal is resisting the methods employed by the fire crews of cutting their way in. It appears, Joanne, that the metal itself is impervious to their attempts to cut it, although the fire crew did have limited success with their heavy duty equipment.”
The scene switches back to a studio, where a panel of grey-haired old men is assembled beside a prim blonde reporter. “I see. So how about the people trapped in the building itself? What kind of attempt has been made to free those trapped inside the grey sphere? If the metal cannot be cut, how can the volunteers gain access to the building? From my vantage point, Rod, The sphere appears to have intersected the building. How is that possible?”
“Well, Joanne. That remains a mystery to this moment, however the rescue teams are working round the clock with the city planners to find another way into the building.”
Then, as the reporter held a finger to his ear and listened to some untelevised voice, I ask Miranda “What’s going on?”
She doesn’t turn to look at me, just stares aimlessly at the TV. “I’m not sure. They say the great big grey sphere appeared there sometime last night. They think it’s some kind of new military experiment. Stupid Americans, can’t why think of anything else?”
“What do you mean by appeared?”
Miranda’s voice is almost never this quiet. “I don’t know. It just appeared there stuck into an apartment building, as if someone has cut a whole section of the city out and put it there instead. People went to bed last night as normal and this morning there it was. There’s people trapped inside the building. Look!”
“My god,” I hear the CNN reporter say. “The size of this thing can’t be relayed through your sets at home. It must be at least fifty, sixty metres high, and from that last report, the grey metal surface actually extends both inside the building and under ground. I don’t know how that’s possible, but it appears that this grey ball has somehow materialised inside the apartment building, trapping hundreds of people inside the apartment…”
I’m still by the TV, so I grab the remote, which is sitting on top of the TV, and I mute the sound. Miranda protests.
“No,” I say, putting her hand back in the cold water. “You have to keep it in there or it will blister.”
She gives me that irritated look again, takes the remote from my hand and removes the mute, but thankfully leaves her hand in the water.
She’s acting very strangely this morning. She normally has the TV on for ‘company’, and I don’t think I can remember when she’s been so obsessed with a single strange news story that she would burn herself on the kettle. I’m actually worried about her this morning.
I wander back to our bedroom, and clamber into bed.
The sheets have gone cold.

Questions Arising

I don’t think I’ve ever quite gotten the hang of holidays. I’m used to working day in day out. I’m a nine to fiver for sure; the drive home through the traffic is enough to calm my nerves after a long day. Most people I know hate driving through the heavy afternoon traffic, but I like it because you can concentrate on using your hands and feet to drive, which leaves the mind open to other things. Miranda tells me to concentrate when I drive many times, but I find I can just set my mind at the task of staying on the road, and then think about other things. She doesn’t believe me when I say so, but I can. At home anyway.
Out here in the middle of nowhere, all I can do is wait. I don’t like fishing. Miranda’s brother always wants me to go fishing with him, and I do, because I like him. But fishing isn’t a great pastime; all you seem to do is waste a whole lot of time doing nothing. You don’t even have to work up a sweat. Well, I don’t at any rate. I enjoy walking, but you can only walk so much.
I’m walking up a fairly steep trail today, because I want to see what the little white tower with the blue circle at the top of the mountain is that I can see from our bedroom window. Yesterday after Miranda’s incident with the hot kettle, she and I talked and wandered around, and lying in the afternoon sun on our bed I noticed it up there in the distance. So today I’ve left Miranda to her book and am taking the long walk.
These last few nights there have been a lot of meteorites. I saw a few go over last night, one large one lit up the whole sky, and we could hear it rumbling like distant thunder. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard anything like it. They say on the documentaries that sometimes if the meteor is big enough it can whistle as soon as you can see it, the noise generated by its magnetic field. I don’t know if that’s right; light moves faster than sound, and most meteorites burn out while they’re still hundreds of kilometres up. The planes that go overhead fly a few kilometres above the ground, and their sound still carries on long after they’re gone. Scientists are always discovering new things, so I guess they’re right. They know what they’re talking about, even if I don’t.
I am wondering what the difference between a meteor and a meteorite is. I can never remember which is which. Asteroids are big things in space, and meteors are what you call them when they fall, and meteorites are if they hit the ground. Something like that.
I trip over a half-buried root, and graze my knee.
The little tower at the top of the hill isn’t a little tower, it’s just a pole with a round blue or black circle on top. I guess it must be some kind of marker for navigation or surveys. It might even be a seismic station or something. Those things are usually out in the middle of nowhere.
I keep walking towards it; the trail goes on past it, but I’m staring to get hungry, and I don’t want Miranda having to throw away my lunch because I’m not there to eat it. It’s only a kilometre or so away, so I’ll just go up there, then I can go home.
If it’s a seismic survey station may I shouldn’t be going near it, because it might upset their graphs. I know they can pick up a minor earthquake on the other side of the world, so me walking around on the ground nearby would upset it if it’s that sensitive. But then again, the sound of the meteorites or meteors or whatever they are called would have shaken it around. I guess it doesn’t matter after all.
I keep on towards it.
I’m standing in front of the pole, It’s maybe two metres high with a dark blue circle riddled with holes welded on top. There are a few names and initials scratched into the paintwork, but other than that it’s just a pole on a mountain. It’s just a marker. Well I guess this answers my questions.
I turn around and the first thing I see is a big grey dome down in the next valley, like the top half of a sphere stuck in the ground. Miranda’s father owns this mountain, and that valley, as well as the house we’re staying in, and I don’t think she’s mentioned the big grey dome before. I’ll have to ask her what it is when I get back.

Worldly Affairs

I’m eating my egg and salad roll when the helicopters arrive.
Miranda told me once that the power companies use helicopters to fly all the way along the power lines looking for broken insulators or leaning poles. The big lines that run through these hills are inaccessible to most vehicles, and the choppers are much faster. I saw one while we were driving here the other day. It flew right past the car, maybe five metres above the power line.
I’m still chewing my sandwich, and I’m seated at the table, looking at the local paper but not reading it. Miranda has gone back into town to get some milk and a few other things. On the page in front of me I can see pictures of the big grey dome things that have popped up all over the world. Nobody has any ideas whatsoever what they are, or how they were placed in the ground. I just look at them.
I look up, surprised, because I can hear the engines of the ’copters winding down, as if they’ve landed. I put the sandwich down, and scoop up a Tim Tam from the packet on the table, and then head for the front door.
There’s a great big black helicopter sitting out on the grass in front of the house, and another white one about the land a little down the road. I break of half of the chocolate biscuit with my teeth, and walk out the door and down towards the flying vehicles. I’ve never seen helicopters up close, and these ones are big; much bigger than the one we saw chasing the power lines, and these ones are full of people. I can see at least six heads bobbing inside the first one.
Waves of heat distort the air behind the choppers. The grass and flowers are being blown flat. I hope Miranda doesn’t see them.
The door opens, and I take another bite of the biscuit, this one smaller than the first in the vague hope that if I eat it in smaller chunks, there will be more to it. I can go through a packet of these things in a single sitting – I love chocolate. A man steps out of the helicopter and is followed by a couple more figures. He’s an official looking person – the grey suit blowing away any doubt there. I know he’s not an accountant because he’s not wearing a tie, and I know he’s not a politician because he has a mean-looking face. He’s wearing a white polo shirt under his coat, and dark sunglasses. He’s flanked by a middle-aged woman wearing army field greens, and a young blonde-haired guy with a pony tail, glasses, a goatee and wearing denim jeans. I hate to stereotype, but I’m guessing a computer nerd of some sort.
I wander out to meet them, biscuit in hand. The woman steps forward, smiles nicely. She’s pretty.
“Are you the owner of the land adjacent to the rear of Mount Hopper?” she says, and I flounder for a moment, wondering where Hopper mountain is. I put the remaining portion of Tim Tam in my mouth and realise I should have answered instead.
“You mean this one,” I say, recalling yesterday’s trip up to the white pole on the hill, and point in that direction. I’ve tried to swallow the biscuit as is, and it’s stuck in my throat. I hear the other helicopter’s motor slowing down.
“Yes,” she replies, and smiles at me.
“No. My wife does. Well, actually, her father does. We’re here for a holiday. Is this about that big grey sphere thing?”
“What do you know about it?”
“Only that it’s there,” I say, knowing now that it’s not something Miranda could have answered even if I’d remembered to ask her about it. I recall the pictures in the paper from a moment ago. Suddenly all of my freshly-discovered relaxation begins to dissolve. The world finds me again, or something. I think I’m happy about it.
“Have you seen it, or been inside it?” Says the man in the grey suit.
I’m not sure what he means by ‘inside’. “No. I only saw it from the hill.”
“When was that?”
“Yesterday, about lunchtime. I was hiking up the hill to see the little white tower thing. I saw it and thought it was just a shed or something.”
The man doesn’t seem to like that at all. He seems agitated by what I’ve said, even though I’ve really said very little. The computer nerd doesn’t appear to have heard anything. He’s preoccupied with a little grey device in his hand.
“Or something?” says the grey suit.
I’ve started to cough; the Tim Tam residue in my throat becoming too irritating to ignore. “What?”
The woman interrupts him before he can speak again. I’m terrible at reading people. I don’t know what is going on anyway, or who these people are. All this stuff couldn’t have happened at a worse time, either. My lunch is grumbling at me from down there in my stomach. I think it wants more. For a silly moment I wonder if I should call my stomach Oliver. It seems to burble away happily to itself after I manage to swallow the rogue Tim Tam.
Amazingly enough, I haven’t missed what the woman has said. She asked me whether I would like to take a ride up and see the dome. “Take a ride? You mean in that?” I say, pointing at the black thing out on the grass.
The grey suit leans back and says something to her. I can’t read his lips. I get this impression from them that they know I can't. I’m not getting many good vibes from that man, he’s actually a little bit scary. She isn’t really smiling like she was before, but I’m still getting good vibes from her. Miranda would be saying (if I ever told her stuff like this) that it has to do with her body language. She sometimes goes on about that kind of thing, and even thought it’s really interesting stuff, I just can’t get the hang of what she’s on about. I think I’ll stick to my vibes, for now. One day I will understand Miranda.
“We’ll take the other unit,” she says to me, smiling again.
“Sure,” I say, and it then hits me. Unit equals Helicopter. I’m ok now. “I’ll have to leave a note for Miranda.”
“Don’t worry about that,” she says, “These guys are going to stay here for a while. They’ll be here when your wife comes back, so they will let her know what’s going on.”
I wish somebody would let me know what was going on. I’m feeling excited. “All right then. I’ve never been in a helicopter before.”
“It’s easy,” the woman says, and I’m glad I’m trusting my vibes because they’re all good so far. “We can go now if you’re ready.”
I nod, and then we’re walking side by side back towards the second helicopter. I look at the grey suited man but he’s talking on a phone, or it must be a radio because cell phones don’t work out here. “What about them?”
“No, they’ll stay here and organise the base camp. It’s just us.”

Flights of Fantasy

We walk for a bit. I’m thinking about lunch, because I don’t think it’s sitting right in my stomach at the moment and I’m not sure that bouncing around in a helicopter, if it’s anything like a small plane, is going to be good for me. I’m also thinking about what the hell is going on. I haven’t got a clue what the grey ball is, I mean I only looked at it for a couple of minutes yesterday and then I forgot to ask Miranda about it. It’s obvious that it’s not something she would know about because of what I saw on CNN and in the paper this morning (which is yesterday’s anyway so maybe the scientists have worked out what they are now). Suddenly I rear backwards – there’s a hand on my shoulder and I can see my reflection in the glass bubble on the front of the helicopter which is about half a metre away now.
The lady says “Slow down, you were about walk into it. You’re looking a little lost there.”
“Sorry,” I say automatically, and then wonder if it’s an appropriate word. “I guess I wasn’t paying much attention – again. I’m good at that.”
“Well start paying attention now, because if you’ve never been up before then this is going to be an adventure.”
This is another one of those times where I know there’s a second meaning to what she’s just said, like it the kind of sarcasm you use when you don’t say it sarcastically, but I’m not sure what else she’s saying, or not saying, or whatever. If she’s being sarcastic then she’s really saying it’s going to be dull instead of fun, but I think it will be fun, so maybe she’s not saying it that way. Of course it will be fun – I’ve heard from people at work who have gone on the joyrides in these things at fete’s and things and they’ve loved it. Apparently it’s expensive, so I’ve never gone. I mean, five minutes ago I was sitting down eating lunch and reading about – well ok looking at the pictures of – the big spheres, and now here I am about to get to go up in a helicopter – for free – and get to see one of them in person. Wow. Anyway I don’t think she was being sarcastic, so I guess she just didn’t say something else that she could have said. Again, one of those things I’m not good at, so I just ignore them.
“Ok. What do I do?” I ask her, getting in the chopper beside her and sitting down in the seat to her right.
“You have to do up the seatbelt like this,” she says and reaches across me with her left arm to grab a seatbelt that I’m sitting up against. Her hair is nice and smells like the shampoo that Miranda uses, and bits of her press up and down me as we struggle to get into the seatbelt, which is kind of weird and I’m not sure if I like it. Its funny but I’m just trying to get into this seatbelt that comes down over my shoulders and around my middle, and she’s only trying to help me into it, but since she smells like Miranda and she’s pressing up against me and we’re breathing on each other and smiling and Miranda isn’t here then it’s… just a little weird that’s all. I’m not doing anything wrong, but some of me feels like I am. I’m in my seatbelt now so that’s ok. She says “Now you take the headphones and put them on. It’s so we can hear each other and the pilot while we’re in the air.”
I make a half-smile at her and the suddenly I’m really quite tense about all this. I take the headphones she’s offering me and put them on, and fiddle with the microphone so it’s not poking me in the mouth. I’m actually sitting in a helicopter, strapped in, with headphones on about to take off from home without Miranda knowing where I am with people I don’t know. I could be being kidnapped without even knowing. My hands are balled into fists but I can’t seem to make them relax.
The engines are starting!
I don’t even know their names!
“I’m really sorry but I don’t know you’re name.” I say, holding the microphone near to my mouth. I can’t hear what I’m saying but maybe that’s the whine of the engines. I look over to the woman but she laughing at me, and reaching down somewhere between the seats. She pulls out her hand and in it there’s a headphone plug. She reaches up the a panel on the back of the seats in front of us and plugs it into a socket and throws a blue switch, which lights up. Instantly the sound of the engines isn’t so loud, and I can hear her voice.
“It helps if you plug it in.”
Ok that makes sense. “How come I can hear you so well? Has it got that noise cancelling thing like on mobile phones?”
“Yeah,” she says, her voice eerily vague in my ears, coming from both directions at once even though she’s on my left. “It helps cut out the noise of the engines while we’re in flight. You’re looking a little wild around the eyes.”
She is so relaxed that I actually soak up a bit of it. Finally I’m able to unball my hands and stretch them a couple of times. The whole frame of the helicopter is vibrating now, and the engines are panning out into a steady noise. “I’ll be okay.”
Oh my god! That’s the ground down there! We’ve just taken off and it was just straight up, like somebody picking up the chair I was sitting on. I can feel the blood draining from my head and pooling in my arms and legs. I’m actually flying in a helicopter! I hear a noise and it’s the sound of me whooping out loud and laughing.
“It’s really something isn’t it?” I hear in my headphones, but it’s just a background to what I’m seeing outside. There’s trees falling away, and the ground getting bigger, or more of it. I can’t see the house because it out over the other side of the helicopter, but I can see the road here and there through the trees, and the horizon which is getting a little further away all the time, and out there beyond the forest is the farmlands and the hills. It’s all so amazing, more amazing that just seeing it from the top of the hill yesterday because we’re moving.
The helicopter tilts forwards and I hold on to the arm rests but the helicopter just speeds forward and I’m pressed back into the seat with a rush of acceleration and adrenaline.
“This is so amazing,” I am whispering, and I turn to look at the woman, who I find to me looking at me with a large smile on her face. “I didn’t know we had taken off until we were up over the trees. It was just whoosh –” I indicate with both arms. “Straight off the ground.”
“I love flying,” she says and turns to look out the window. There was something I was going to ask her before we took off but for the life of me I can’t remember what it is now. Look at all the trees! You can almost see into the next valley. I love this!

Fact Finding