The Unlimited Dream Company. John Gray

      ‘Rachel …! I won’t hurt you! Jamie …!’

      Then I saw that they had meant another tenant to share the grave with the dead flowers. The wooden cross had been shaped into the rough image of an aircraft, its wings and tail marked with white crayon.

      But was it my Cessna they were burying?

      I looked behind me at the secret meadow. The children had vanished. For the first time I sensed a premonition that I might be dead.

      Yet from that afternoon, in the deserted arbour, sprang my determin- ation to prove that had I ever been dead, had I drowned in the stolen aircraft, I would now for ever be alive.

       9

       The River Barrier

      ‘Am I dead?’

      I spoke quietly into the grave, waiting for it to reply. Angrily I stared at the aircraft on its cross, and at the suffocating rhododendrons.

      ‘Am I dead and mad?’

      Why was I so affected by this infantile game played by three handicapped children? I kicked the flowers from the grave, pushed through the dusty foliage and stepped back into the park. Immediately the light trapped below the trees rushed towards me, happy to find something living to seize upon. It played cheerfully on the lapels of my suit, flashed and tripped around my white shoes.

      I was certain that I had not died. The bruised grass behind my feet, the spent light reflected from the river, the cropping deer and the ragged bark of the dead elms convinced me that everything here was real, and not the invention of a dying man trapped in his submerged aircraft. I knew that I had never lost consciousness. I had climbed from the aircraft before it sank, and remembered standing between the wings as the water swirled around my legs.