At Sunday's workshop, Internal Combustion, we did a group exercise in which we constructed a story. (More about the workshop and exercise here. No, hang on - here! No, wait, let me try again - that's it - HERE!)
We selected three words: a profession, an object and a location, and tried to make a story out of them. The three words were: pilot, match and field, and after some discussion we came up with the sentence: The
pilot lit a match and lit the trail of fuel that leaked from the fuselage of
the plane. (The exact wording may have been slightly different but this was the gist of the thing.)
We further explored our assumptions about pilots. They are assured, we concluded, authoritative, physically competent, charmers (as opposed, please note, to charming). But they can also be lonely and, perhaps, drunken.
We took one quality - coolness or assuredness - and as part of the exercise chose its opposite: panicky, hysterical as a quality we wanted in our character.
The sentence gave rise to certain questions: what is the pilot doing in a field? How did the plane get there? Why is he setting fire to it?
The task then was to write the story of a panicky pilot setting fire to an aeroplane in a field. We had twenty minutes to come up with something and this is what we came up with:
Anyway, here is the story we came up with, written up a bit by me.
Burning Bridges
Bridges’s hands shook.
These hands that had steered thousands of passengers in safety, at heights
impossible to imagine, in machines incomprehensibly heavy, over huge expanses
of rock and ocean, fluttered and shook like epileptic butterflies.
He couldn’t light the match. He had years of experience in managing his
nerves, months’ worth of hours clocked up, the highest possible degree of
training in handling great enormous cages of finely engineered machinery, and
here he was, hands trembling, unable to perform the simplest feat of
technology, the one that cavemen had mastered, the one that predated the wheel probably, the definingly primitive
act of lighting a fire!
He roared in frustration and scared a bird that rose from
the cornfield and took to the sky above the rusted form of the old crop
duster. The beating of its wings filled
the air and the pilot took a deep breath and tried to calm himself.
When his cousin had told him that he owned a plane, he
should have known he meant this flying lawnmower. Well he might not be able to light a match
but if Cousin Erik could get that thing into the sky he could, or he deserved
what was coming to him.
But first he needed to calm down. He needed to smoke. He had not smoked for three days. He was used to suppressing the need on
long-haul flights, but on a long haul flight to Singapore or Melbourne you were
alone in the sky. You did not have your
family in the cockpit: your father resentful and your mother tearful and your
brother framing his failure to leave home as some sort of moral imperative, and
weeping over his fat, sweet natured, almost unbelievably brainless wife.
It had been as depressing as he left it, the men useless in
the face of grief, the women in sweaters with kittens. When it transpired that he had no suit for
the funeral, they found him one from Terry’s prom, a hideous thing made from a
patented synthetic fabric. But at least
it was black; it could easily have been powder blue, and nobody would have seen
anything funny about that.
That Delia had been killed by a hairdryer in the bath should
not have been surprising. That Bridges should have said so at her
funeral seemed madness. But some part of
him understood that he must never come home again, that if he did he would hate
himself for it.
When he left, his cockiness had seemed a thing of
youth. He thought of the crocheted toilet-paper
holder in his parents’ house and he could smile, as he surveyed the continents
laid out below him, at the impetuous lad who had cursed his cosy hometown and
the smallmindedness of his kind dull family.
In the years since, he had developed a nostalgia for the place, an
easily assumed humility and fondness for the summer days whose endless skies in
that flat country had engendered his dreams of flight. When he occasionally encountered, in the bar
of some pilots’ lounge, or some hotel, others from the same rural state, he had
reminisced about counties and parishes whose names were talismans from
childhood.
He should have known better. As soon as he returned to the flat expanse of
green corn, as soon as he saw that crocheted Spanish dancer with the prudish
sanitary secret under her skirts, he was disgusted; as if the life of the
fields was a festering thing, endless miles of it, horizons stretching beyond
horizons, and the blank mindlessness of his family as oppressive and open and flat as the land that held them.
He had to burn his bridges.
It was a matter of life or death.
That was the only explanation.
He grabbed his wrist and held his arm tightly to his side
as he walked towards the crop duster across the field. He counted his breaths, he measured his paces
to calm himself. If he could control his
breathing, he could light a cigarette; he could sigh, relax, and get away from
here. He had done it once. Now all he had to do was run away from his immediate
guilt, which was much easier than it sounded, he knew.
He didn’t feel bad about his sister-in-law, or his cloyingly
unhappy parents, but he felt a twinge of guilt for the brother Terry who would
never forgive him. However, it was the price to be paid for freedom, and he was
glad that he would be making his escape in an aircraft, even if it was Erik’s ridiculous
old crate.
Perhaps he should not have shot the dog, but nobody else
was going to. For country folk they had
a sickeningly sentimental attitude towards an animal who was obviously, or at
least probably, or at the very least
possibly very sick. It had to be
done. Still, he should have made sure
the children were out of earshot, and that kill was a clean one. Normally he was a good shot, his eyesight
was perfect, his hands were professionally steady, his judgement when dealing
with emotionally overwrought people was cool, authoritative, reassuring. So something
in him, something unconscious had made him produce the bloody mess of fur and
howling that had sent the children into hysterics and brought his sister and
her husband from the house to chase after him with threats of violence. It was a need to escape from here and never
come back, and that is why he had taken his brother’s car, why he had fled down
a labyrinth of country roads rather than ever apologise or explain.
They were close by, Lorraine and Ray. Bridges knew he had brought this upon himself
and it was this thought that finally calmed him. He was, he reflected, in some way unknown
even to him, in control. He had not
wanted to hurt his brother but he needed a clean break. He thought about his sister-in-law, flabby in
body and mind as he had said at the graveside. Actually he had done Terry a favour.
He mastered his hands, even as the sound of his sister’s
car clattered into earshot. What would they do with him if they caught
him? They had probably not even thought
that far ahead. In any case it was
immaterial, because they were not going to catch him. He pictured them waddling into the field as fast
as their anger could carry them, just in time to see him take off into the sky,
to freedom.
(Since things, the theft of a crop duster was technically
an act of terrorism. Would Erik back him
up when Bridges claimed that he had given him the machine? Possibly.)
His hand was firm.
He removed the book of matches from his pocket. Hilton,
it said, Zurich, and Bridges smiled. He
looked up with a sort of friendly authority at Erik’s old rustbucket. Now, old thing, let’s see about getting you
up in the air. Right on cue Lorraine’s
battered truck chugged into view, a long distance across the enormous
field. She got out and he could make out
her fat figure with its ridiculous sweater barrelling towards him, her husband,
lean and tall, overtaking her as he charged towards the crop duster.
He didn’t need the cigarette now, but he had time for a
couple of drags before he left this place forever. He took one from a box in his breast pocket. He
could hear his brother-in-law calling his name, squawking at him. He struck a match with a swift firm stroke
and set it to the tip of the cigarette.
The match fell unostentatiously into the green corn. Bridges approached the ancient flying
machine. He cursed as he saw a gaping
gash in the fuselage. It would take
hours to get it fixed, and his relatives were approaching. His brother-in-law was violent. His sister was furious. He cursed Erik, and the green fields and the
small people and he turned to face his brother-in-law whose loping form was
drawing near with speed.
Whatever happened now it would still be a clean break. He would hit or be hit. He would not forgive and he would not be
forgiven. He had lost his moment of
glory, but his purpose was firm.
Fine. Let them come.
It took barely a moment for him to think all this, and
while he was thinking the match had fallen to the ground. He would never have been stupid enough to
drop a lighted match into a dry cornfield, but the corn was green and a light
evening dew was already coming down. The
tiny match-flame flickered, and nosed about like a dog looking for a
scent. Aha – petrol! It sniffed its way towards the sharp smell,
flared its way along the remainder of the matchstick, and pounced.
Well! Although Bridges had seen the hole in fuselage, and
even though he had steadied his hand sufficiently to light his cigarette, there
must have been some part of him still flustered and flummoxed from his trip
back home because you don’t need to be a pilot to know that it is the height of
folly to drop a naked flame where combustible substances are around. The match’s flame took to the trail from the crop duster and, in less
time than it takes to tell, it had engulfed the old machine and the trickle of
fuel that had made its way onto Bridges’s clothes.
He didn’t even really have time to think before the flames began
to consume the synthetic fibres of his suit.
He dropped his cigarette, and flailed blindly at the line of orange
flame that coursed its way up his leg, up his torso, all over his clothes. He
felt wet before he felt hot, and he smelled the burning of his clothes before
he felt it on his skin. Although he screamed loudly, it was more bewilderment
and confusion he felt, as the rickety old plane behind him exploded and blew
his body apart, than pain, and he was never certain if it was anger or alarm
that distorted Ray's face as his lanky brother-in-law lolloped over the
cornfield screaming.
