The Sleepwalker's Introduction to Flight.

Prologue

The figure on the precipice is a distant sketch, lacking all detail. There is nothing to show what has brought him to this. He's a man literally on the edge, perhaps even the brink of madness. He stands motionless, arms outstretched like a sleepwalker, and yet is surely more awake and alive at this moment than most of us will ever be.
For an instant he hangs, leaning into nothing before exploding in a blur of motion, a human pyrotechnic; whirling, spinning, fizzing as gravity takes him.
At the last possible second he unfurls, comes to a point and plunges, like a perfect dagger into the waves below.

Chapter 1

I'm in the tub, one of those massive ancient things with curly feet; cast-iron overlaid with a whitish skin of enamel. Despite my mother's Vim and vigour, the enamel appears to have contracted some kind of geriatric disease over the years; the areas of most frequent contact have become brown and scabby and are beginning to flake, like tiny liver spots. The good news is that I can gently scratch my back as I lie here, immersed in the oily, opalescent distillation of Wright's Coal Tar soap. I like to pretend that my willy is a little man on a desert island, which, for complicated geophysical reasons, is sinking into the sea. I waggle him about, frantically searching for rescue. The island continues to descend, slowly and inexorably into the warm grey water, taking the castaway with it. Then up he pops once again, re-vitalised and wearing an inflatable life jacket. Obviously, you can't keep a good man down. But I have to exercise caution here as I'm forbidden to lock the door. My mother has already caught me at this game once before. She went cross-eyed and all sort of gaspy: 'Bernard, he's playing with himself again,' she shrieked, like I was drowning. I'm an only child and very unlikely to be getting a brother or sister any day now, so frankly, who the hell else would I be playing with? But there's no point having that kind of conversation with my mother. For this, my father rewarded me with a good talking-to - a rambling stream of euphemism and bluster featuring a variety of improbable musical instruments. These occasional lectures are more or less his only form of communication with me and invariably leave us both disappointed and resentful. Bernard Hough is perhaps ten-years older than my mother; a short, pugnacious man with a comb-over who seems to have gone through life with a perpetually surprised expression on his face - like the world just twanged his braces. His favourite expression is 'Oh really?' but he can deliver it with such a variety of subtle inflections that he can make it mean almost anything he wants it to. My father's 'Oh really?'s contain a veritable cornucopia of meaning if you know how to decipher them. He was a bank manager back in the seventies, one of the first to catch the property boom on the back of a one-percent preferential staff-mortgage, which has left him a very wealthy man. His last regional manager was a man by the name of O'Reilly and, from time to time, I amuse myself by imagining my father's conversations with his ex-boss. I also amuse myself by farting, though rarely in front of my parents. My mother always looks so disappointed as though this perfectly normal bodily function was some kind of wretched and devastating moral lapse: 'Has someone left the gas tap on?' she sniffs sanctimoniously. So I tend to restrict this activity to the bathroom. There's only me to offend for one thing, and I am never offended by my own farts; although I am occasionally surprised. On especially flatulent days I pretend to be a Clavadista, one of the brotherhood of Acapulcan high-divers, luxuriating in the Jacuzzi after a breath-taking, cliff-top performance.

I decide that 'Castaway' is too risky today. My mother is under the weather again and has taken to her bed which is only two rooms away from the bathroom. Instead, I decide to resume training. I've been refining this technique for a couple of years now, ever since I stumbled across Miguel Sanchez Domingo on Youtube. Miguel is the Clavadista Loco, greatest of all cliff-divers; he even has his own website. I clamber up onto the slippery edge of the tub and balance by curling my toes over the rim. Unlike Miguel and the genuine Clavadistas of La Quebrada, who employ an absolutely perpendicular entry, I use the flat-dive method, in order to dissipate kinetic energy. I launch myself at the steaming surface in a bellyflop. Almost immediately I can sense that something is wrong. I recall reading somewhere that it is possible to kill a person by driving the nasal bone into the brain and, for a ghastly moment, I fear that this is what I have done to myself. I'm underwater now, floaty. The scary thing is that I know that the warm creamy water surrounding me is gradually turning red. But really, I'm too tired and comfortable to care.

Chapter 2

It seems that my mother has saved my life, but only because she urgently needed the bathroom. I think she was more relieved to find me drowning than playing 'Castaway'. Nevertheless, the sight of my naked buttocks bobbing up and down in that blood soup appears to have delayed her recuperation by a week or two.

I'm in the spare room, assessing the damage in the dressing table mirror. It's one of those chintzy, fussy antiques with a triptych mirror designed for four-foot-something Victorian ladies, so it's ideal for my father to adjust his comb-over. I crouch to inspect my face and profile. No surprises there. I was never the most gorgeous of specimens but at fifteen, I do have youth on my side. I'm slim, clean-limbed, olive-complexioned, but my nose has been horribly bent and now points emphatically to the left. In later life I might have attained a certain swarthy, brooding appeal, but that's out of the question now. I have become Eddie Munster's elder brother. I console myself with my hair. I've got great hair, incredibly thick, black, and luxuriant hair, which is why I now spend so much time with my back bent, locked inside these three angled mirrors, admiring the back of my head. From behind, I'm a great advertisement for shampoo, from the front, seat belts. Our GP, Doctor Hemstock, tells me that my nose bone is now frangible and can no longer be relied upon to protect my face or brain. This strikes me as odd. I have never found my nose to be much good for protecting my brain - usually the other way round. I consider the words of Miguel for the millionth time: 'You cannot begin to live unless you take yourself to the edge.' He's right of course, total immersion is what I need; absolute commitment. To a Clavadista a broken nose means nothing, a minor setback - although in the case of my nose, it's a setback of some forty-five degrees from the perpendicular. It's pretty clear I've outgrown the bathtub.

I'm startled by the creak of a floorboard. In the doorway is my father, puce in the face, as always, waving an ancient wooden Slazenger tennis racquet. I drop to a protective crouch, using both hands to cover my privates. From his expression, I realise that he now suspects me of playing with myself in front of the mirror. For one horrible moment I think he might actually be about to swat me with the racquet and engrave a grid of strings across my pink behind, like some kind of surreal Financial Times crossword puzzle. Instead, he simply holds out the racquet. 'Tennis,' he barks. 'You're playing tennis with Coombs and, for God's sake, put some bloody clothes on first.' 'But . . . but I hate tennis,' I stutter. He arches an eyebrow. 'Oh really?' What this tells me is that he thinks I'm spending far too much time indoors, onanising myself; I don't get nearly enough fresh air or exercise; and that today, and probably every day for the rest of the long summer holiday, I'm playing tennis with sodding Coombs whether I like it or not.

I dress quickly in a mixture of old sportswear and find the smirking Coombs in the driveway, leaning against his black Range Rover. Barry Coombs owns the detached turreted red-brick Victorian house, which overlooks our back garden; a great bearded lout of a man who's something or other on the Borough Council. He's also involved in property and Captain of the Caversham Lawn Tennis Club. In short, a pillock of the community. Coombs wears a pristine white Aertex tennis shirt and a pair of shorts at least three sizes too tight, extruding plump hairy legs like a couple of par-boiled Weisswursts. As if he wasn't a grotesque enough caricature of a middle-aged plonker, he's also sporting stripy wrist-bands and matching toweling head-band. 'There he is, the young Henman. Come to show us how it's done, eh, Michael?' Coombs only talks to me like this when he thinks there's a chance of being overheard by my father. The rest of the time he snarls like a publican's pitbull. I climb into the Range Rover and buckle up. 'All right, Mr Coombs?' I mumble, in a tone that I hope will discourage further conversation. Some hope. It turns out that Coombs is trying to inveigle my father into certain dubious local property speculations, which is why he's sucking up and doing him this favour today. Coombs spends the journey pumping me for information as to the likelihood of my father 'filling his boots'. As if I would know. I grunt a few monosyllables and jiggle the electronic windows until Coombs cuts me off with the master switch.

Out on the hallowed turf of the Caversham Lawn Tennis Club, Coombs unzips a gigantic racquet bag and selects one of perhaps half-a-dozen, state-of-the-art graphite racquets from its depths. 'Right, Mikey, your dad wants me to play you in. But - and it is a big but, as the Bishop said to the actress - even though I'd like to do your dad a solid, you need to be of a certain standard to become a full-time card-carrying member of the Caversham Lawn Tennis Association. No exceptions. You've got to be good. I can't make allowances. Got it?' I nod dumbly and try not to grin, caper, or leap the net for joy. Game-set-and-match to me. Coombs doesn't realise it, but with those words he's just enabled me to ace my father and utterly scuttle his plans for getting me out of the house this summer. I'm going to play so awfully and with such potty-mouthed bad grace it'll make Greg Rusedski sound like a Mormon choirboy. 'Oh, yeah, and Mikey, your dad wants me to let him know whether I think you've been really trying. If not, he'll want to know the reason why. You're not to muck about, basically.' With that, Coombs throws the ball high and does a corkscrewy thing with his arm. I'm not ready for one thing; I'm still in shock from the way my father has vicariously smash-returned my best efforts at scuppering him straight down the tramlines; and for another, this wooden Slazenger racquet is completely wonky; warped from having sat in our damp garage for twenty-years without the benefit of a press. I give Coombs's serve a half-hearted swat but it spins away from me like a googly from Shane Warne. In truth, I'm not that bad at tennis. At any rate, I know I can do better than this. Although I loathe sports, the school games master, Evans-the-Physical, tells me I do have unusually good balance and hand-to-eye coordination. 'Right, warm-up over,' barks Coombs. I stand on the baseline and watch Coombs's bizarre wind-up. This time I'm prepared: I step back and take a pace to the right, allowing the off-spinning ball to bounce and begin its downward arc. When it does, I catch it with a stunning top-spin from the Slazenger's sweet-spot. Only there is no sweet-spot, just sour rotten cat-gut mesh, which emits a loud cartoon-like twang as the bright yellow ball pings off and sails over the fence into the trees beyond. I can feel the painful vibrations all the way up to my elbow. 'Right, Michael, you can owe me for that ball.' Coombs continues to paste me into the beautifully trimmed lawns with his oversized racquet head. But - and it is a fairly big but, as the young athlete said to the fat bearded lout - as the match continues odd members of the club begin to cluster around the court and, for some reason, begin to cheer me on. Coombs enjoys a crowd. He makes an 'aggahhh' sound when he serves, as though the effort is devastating his trapezoids; he preens and prances athletically, huffing and spluttering like there was a championship at stake. Each time I take a point though, I'm applauded wildly and I can see it's getting to him. Coombs swishes ineffectively at one of my rare passing shots. 'Bad luck,' he bellows, without troubling to see where the ball lands. 'Actually, I think it was in.' 'Don't think so, Michael.' 'I'm sure it was.' Coombs approaches the net and beckons me over. He keeps his voice low, mindful of the crowd. 'It can be in if you like,' he hisses, 'in which case, you're out. Or it can be out, in which case I might still decide to play you in. Up to you.' It's a good point and I concede it. 'Forty, love,' he announces, to murmurs of disapproval from the sidelines. He winds up again and sends down a rocket. 'In,' he exults, punching the air. It's not, of course. Not even close. We change ends. I manage to serve a fizzer which, due to the idiosyncrasies of my antique wooden racquet, swerves through the air like a pretzel and bounces straight up into Coombs's tightly sheathed nuts. I am given what can only be described as a standing ovation by the spectators. Inevitably though, and despite the urging of the crowd, I lose in three straight sets: six-love, six-love, six-one. Coombs leaps the net. Happily, he catches a trailing foot and down he goes, the back of his head crashing into the lawn. He picks himself up, feigning indifference and trots over, all smiles and bonhomie. He grips my hand, hard. Too hard. 'Did I . . . am I played in?' Coombs smirks, applying more pressure. The members begin to disperse but two bright-eyed, sprightly old ladies wander over - identical twins by the looks of it. Coombs releases my hand. 'The boy played well, Coombs, and with a busted old racquet too.' 'What are you thinking of, letting the boy play with a broken racquet?' Coombs recoils and raises his eyebrows. As he does so, the tight, sopping headband crawls up his slimy forehead before suddenly contracting at the top of his head, flipping his thick salt-and-pepper hair into a sumo-wrestler-topknot. 'Look, I didn't force him to . . .' The ladies shriek with mirth which instantly endears them to me. I want to howl with laughter too as he snatches away the offending headband. But I keep a straight face since Coombs currently holds my fate in his sweaty paws. 'I did try though, Mr Coombs?' 'Of course you tried, love,' replies one of the old dears. 'Not much you can do with a racquet like that though. Shame that Coombs didn't think to lend you one of his,' sniffs her sibling. 'He's got some lovely racquets.' 'A great sackful.' Coombs bristles and looms over the twins. 'Look, you two, I can cancel your memberships right now, and then what are you going to do all day, collect old plastic bags in a shopping trolley and talk to your cats?' The sisters stand their ground for a second before scuttling away. 'The boy was good. He played his heart out,' one of them gets in a Parthian shot. 'The Pond sisters,' spits Coombs. 'Pain in the arse. Always late with their subs.' I look down at the grass and try not to smile. 'Well, I tried, Mr Coombs,' I say with a touch of unctuousness, 'but I just wasn't good enough.' 'No. You weren't good enough.' 'But I did try?' 'You tried to make me look a prat.' 'But you'll tell my father I tried?' 'I'll think on it.' Coombs spins on his heel. He packs his racquets and I observe with satisfaction a great indelible emerald and brown grass stain smeared down the back of his white shorts. I'm still gloating about this when I realise that the bastard has gone and driven off without me.

Chapter 3

I've spent the morning at Edmund Kerr's. Edmund is my only friend and, indeed, only my friend, because I pay him: I pay him to use his laptop - Bernard believes that the internet is a corrupting influence, so I don't have a connection at home, or even a computer for that matter - and I pay him so that my father can see me hanging out with him. My father generally approves of Edmund and the Kerrs. I hate Edmund with a passion. Alison Kerr, his mother, is a grumpy old heifer from Morningside. Although I've never been to Edinburgh, I've done a bit of internet research on Edmund's computer and one of the jokes about Morningside ladies is that they're so tight they greet you at the door with the words: 'You'll have had your tea then?' I can vouch for this. Even though I've known Edmund nearly all my life I've yet to be offered so much as a beaker of bath-water by Mrs Kerr. She thinks the sun shines out of her son's fundament. It doesn't. It shines down from a clear blue sky through the lens of Edmund's merciless magnifying glass onto the fur or skull of whichever luckless rodent Edmund has in his power. Like most classic fledgling psychopaths Edmund has graduated from ants and spiders and likes to bind small rodents in Sellotape before griddling their brains. He also enjoys downloading Japanese bondage pornography onto his computer - I've checked his internet Favourites file. The arrangement is that he leaves me alone to surf the net. For the past few weeks I've been conducting an online investigation into the history of the Clavadistas in the blissful solitude of his bedroom. Edmund only puts in an appearance when Mrs Kerr brings the lunch tray. Naturally, I'm forbidden to touch it. I detest watching Edmund eat but it's hard not to, given that he regards lunch as some kind of spectator sport. 'I'm having one of my ham sarnies now,' he announces. I keep my back to him while I click away. 'You realise that the Clavadista of La Quebrada dive from a height of a hundred-and-twenty feet into just eleven feet of water? And that's if they're lucky. It's a shallow inlet, so the trick is to synchronise your dive with the incoming waves. You can't pull out if your timing's off. And then there's the wind to consider. It's pretty amazing really. Get one tiny thing wrong and . . .' ' . . . You're a jam sandwich. A great soggy jam sandwich,' slobbers Edmund. 'This one's ham, though, soda bread and wholegrain mustard with honey-glazed ham.' I'm trying to shut him out but my stomach is growling like a junkyard dog. 'It says here that there's been cliff-diving in La Quedabra since the Eighteenth Century and that it may have had a religious, or at least, spiritual significance. Even today Clavadista still say a prayer at the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe at the top of the cliff. The dive is an act of faith. I find that very inspiring.' 'I'm going to have a biscuit now. Will it be the milk chocolate Hob-Nob, the Ginger Nut, or the Jammy Dodger? Hmm, I wonder, I wonder, wonder, wonder . . .' I don't wonder at all. He's going to eat all three of them along with everything else on the congested tray. 'In Matzelan, this old guy, Mario Gonzales Agilar, is still diving at sixty-seven. How cool is that?' 'Perhaps I should offer Mikey one today?' I know it's a trap, but I can't help myself: I spin in the chair, eyes wide. I should have known better. Edmund has only forced me to turn so that I can watch him take a bite from the enormous wedge of Black Forest gateau in his chubby fist.

*

In my own back garden I pace the lawn, assessing our trees, finally fixing on the large oak by the hedge. It's climbable and there's a good, solid, overhanging branch about twenty-feet high. 'What's up with you then, Silly-arse?' In a clatter of loose metal parts Gerry hauls out the old Punch mower. I'm always pleased to see Gerry, so I grin; the kind of smile that actually stretches my face and makes the cheek-muscles ache. They're not used to the exercise. Gerry's a true mate. Not a friend exactly, because I'm only fifteen and he's about seven or eight years older, but he's a lovely man. That sounds a bit gay but I don't think I am gay. I'm fond of Gerry because he treats me like what I say matters, like an adult. And he lets me read his comics. Gerry drives a battered Toyota pickup with an exhaust like a Swiss cheese and comes about once a fortnight to mow our lawn - we never quite know when. My father employs Gerry because he's the only person capable of breathing life into the antique Punch mower in the garage. For some reason, my father believes that a lawn should have stripes, and proper stripes can only be achieved with an old-fashioned motor-mower. Gerry adores plants and dreams of becoming a botanist, but to the world-at-large he's just a greasy-haired, oily-fingered layabout with no future and an antisocial car. My mother hates Gerry for almost exactly the same reasons that I adore him. She thinks he's a man with tattoos; she doesn't know the half of it. Gerry is the tattooed man - an entirely different thing. In the garden, Gerry wears a black T-shirt and cut-away black jeans, but I've seen Gerry's body in all its glory. Sometimes when it's hot and my parents are out, he strips-off down to his grey undercrackers and sunbathes. Every inch of Gerry's body other than his face, neck, and possibly the groin area, is covered in virulent green, red and blue ink. I'm not sure about 'down there' because Gerry has never offered to show me. I'm curious of course, but don't like to ask. The thing about Gerry is that he's a work of literature as well as being a work of art. I'm not talking D.H. Lawrence here, more DC Comics. Some of Gerry's vignettes are every bit as exquisitely rendered as Art Kane's finest. I know, because over the past few years Gerry has been smuggling all the latest issues in to me. I adore Marvel's Iron Man because he's physically knackered but I especially like DC's new version of Batman, the Dark Knight, because he's so well, dark, and psychologically flawed. Gerry is himself, a cartoon character. If you care, or can bear, to inspect the miniscule, but lovingly-rendered frames adorning his torso you'll begin to understand him. You can see imprinted across his skin, the chronicles of Gerry, a potted-history as it were. There's a four-frame sequence radiating from his right shoulder in which he qualifies from the world's top universities and receives doctorates from Oxford, Stamford, Harvard and, oddly, Hull. Elsewhere, Gerry is depicted discovering a new species of orchid in the jungles of South America. In another ten-frame sequence across the small of his back you can see how Gerry's cultivar-breaking viruses have become the wonder of the tulip-world. Gerry later develops a new strain of green rye-grass which is found to have anti-oxidant and anti-aging properties. After a great many flora-logical adventures Gerry establishes a botanical academy before retiring, aged thirty, to a Bruce-Wayne-style mansion, complete with rose gardens and a fabulous collection of souped-up ride-on motor-mowers. The curious thing about these comic-book fantasies is that they all, without exception, depict Gerry sans tattoos. Gerry knows everything about plants and horticulture but what prevents him getting the first foot on the ladder to success are the very tattoos he sports. Gerry is a contradiction in his own skin.

'Hey Gerry,' I shout, 'know anything about Clavadistas?' Gerry silently rolls a thin squirt of tobacco in a Rizla sheath, licks it shut and lights up. He takes a puff and exhales a sad sigh of smoke. 'Aspidistras, I know everything about Aspidistras. Clavadistas, I've never heard of,' he sucks away, decimating the slim rollup like the fuse of a cartoon bomb. 'It's a brotherhood of high-divers and I'm going to be one.' 'Good for you,' he says, tweezing the burning ember between blackened finger and thumb, pocketing the remainder. 'How can I help?' I point up at the thick oak branch high above our heads. 'We're gonna need a stack of planking to build a stable platform off there,' I announce, 'and a kid's paddling pool.' Gerry considers this for a moment. 'That shouldn't be a problem, Mikey,' he says. Honestly, you've just got to love someone like that.