The Flying Girl
by
Paris Portingale
Copyright © Paris Portingale 2011
MoshPit Publishing
Hazelbrook
an imprint of Mosher’s Business Support Pty Ltd
Shop 1, 197 Great Western Highway, Hazelbrook NSW 2779
Website: http://www.moshpitpublishing.com.au/
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Cover photograph (c) Jennifer Mosher
Cover design and layout by Ally Mosher
The Flying Girl
In the dream Lanya was floating, flying, three metres above the ground. She called down to the couple of people below her, ‘See, I told you I could fly!’ And she did a quick breast-stroke and glided off, to bank and turn and fly over the top of them again saying, ‘See …’
It was a wonderful feeling. There was a freedom in being able to fly, not just from the dreary pull of gravity, but from everything. All the hurtful abrasions of the world. The feelings of non-worth, of being such a dirty perversion. Nothing and no one could touch you when you were flying. You were above it all.
She twisted and turned onto her back, to look up at the powder-blue sky and the little traces of summer cloud, seemingly floating below her now, and she sighed and stroked the air so she propelled herself away from the group over which she was hovering, to glide and slow and stop over the small stream, banked by willows and little groups of hollyhocks popping up here and there amongst the grass. And the waters flowed beneath her and she felt their sparklings on her and she rolled over and dipped and, letting her arms drop, sailed just high enough so her fingers formed little swirling trails as their tips moved through the water.
Then she woke up. But with the wakening came a tickling—the beginnings of a thought that, even as it wiggled its way into her consciousness, began growing into an almost-certainty—and the thought was that if she could just get the right feel and twist to the thing, she would, in her real life, in the real world, outside her dreams, actually be able to fly.
Her father had been in to see her the previous night. She’d lain there, stiff, listening to hear if he was coming, because she never knew. Sometimes he was drunk, mostly he was drunk, but sometimes not, so that wasn’t any sign you could rely on. Sometimes he was less rough than others, mainly not. Sometimes he was very rough, and on those times it hurt more. More than the usual hurt. Sometimes he just stood over her and touched her. Others he’d lie beside her with his hands on everything and she’d feel him stiffen and then he’d lay on top of her and if he had been drinking, which was most often the case, she’d try to turn her head far enough away to escape the sour whisky smell his gasping and panting blew in her face.
And always afterwards she felt unclean. Dirty, inside and out, and dirty in her mind because she knew it was her fault. It was something about her that made him do it. She provoked it in him, she made him want to do it, and she was dirty because of it.
She kept a small towel under the bed with which she wiped herself afterwards, because she couldn’t go to the bathroom. As much as she wanted, after each encounter, to wash and wash and wash, to get the last skerrick of him off her, she knew he would hear and come out and ask what she was doing. He said he wanted to know he was still on her, that it made him feel good and sexy to think he was still inside her. He said if she washed he would know and she wouldn’t like the consequences. He’d beaten her before, when she wouldn’t cooperate. When she threatened to tell her mother. After, he said she fell down the stairs and, out of fear, she agreed to everyone that, yes, she had fallen down the stairs, and she would be more careful in future. The doctor had questioned how her eye could have got like that from a fall and her father had pushed him from the house, asking what he meant by that and if the doctor was prepared for the trouble to which that line of assumption would most assuredly lead.
She had, on one occasion when her father was away in Nairobi, begun to open up to her mother about what had been happening, but she was drunk and wouldn’t listen and, when pushed, called Lanya a liar and the next day she had forgotten the incident and Lanya never broached the subject with her again.
Now, outside her room, the rich greens of the dream were replaced by the dull, crackling browns of the great Kenyan veldt and the dream’s white and red-roofed cottages and the picket fences and curving cinder paths became the decaying farm and the surrounding rusted-iron huts of the black workers and their children. The stream had become the drying, mudded dam, stirred to thick brown by cattle hooves, and the hollyhocks now the desiccated stalks of plain-grass.
Looking out the window, down on the dusty stretch of grey-brown earth that ran to the small workers’ ghetto, she saw the coloured children gathering for morning school, slates and slate-pencils, no books and no schoolhouse, just a squatting section of dirt and a desk, from behind which fat Mrs Akalah in her loose, lotus patterned cotton dress, would recite the alphabet in a call and chorus song.
Lanya’s room was on the upper floor and she imagined opening the window and climbing out onto the narrow lip of shingled roof to stand for a moment before launching herself off and out and away, to glide over the gathering pupils and out over the long brown grass, to run her shadow over the lions and gazelles and gnu and wildebeest, on to the very edge of the Great Rift Valley and the long cliff edge that dropped suddenly and sharply some three quarters of a kilometre down to the valley floor.
She didn’t do it, of course, didn’t launch herself off, as she didn’t yet have the knack. Didn’t yet know the right sequence of things-to-do to give yourself that first, special push that would take you into the air. That was the key. Once you were launched, natural forces took over. That’s the way it always was in the dreams. You did … something … and then you were airborne, free to swoop and glide and swim, or just hover where you pleased. It was the getting up there that was the trick, but this morning she felt with a new and comforting certainty that she would get it. She would find it, she knew, and it would be soon.
So she went downstairs with a lighter step and when Matilda, the brown cook with teeth so white they gave out light, served her breakfast she ate a little more than the bird-like pickings she normally afforded the chore of eating, and outside performed just a single, shallow retching heave, part of a process she hoped would postpone the further rounding of her body, slowly approaching her time of maturing. She feared the filling, feared the effect, the exaggeration of her filthiness, the further development of the things men like in the sluts and whores and dirty women of the world. She hated her body for its potential to be wanted, hated every inch of flesh for what it so obviously provoked, and she pushed two fingers down her throat to more release the dangerous material she had eaten.
And that night she dreamed again and she watched herself as she tapped a particular rhythm with her heels and rocked onto her toes in a special way before bending, then straightening with a quick push so that she sailed straight up, turning, to hover some metres above the ground. And her sleeping mind remember the gestures, noted them precisely, the tapping and rocking and pushing up, and she locked it all in a special area, for proper examination in the morning. And when she was sure it was all safely there, she smiled and, just from thinking of it, propelled herself over the perfect world below where people cried up to her of how she was indeed so special, and how amazing it was she could fly, and she was no longer despised, not even by herself, and she rolled in the air and her tears dropped onto the faces of those beneath her as they looked up with longing and admiration.
And the next morning, checking her special place of remembering, she ran over the exact procedure for flying. And it was all there, clear as clear, and she knew she had it. It was a firm and special certainty and she knew there was no need for testing. It was bright and clear inside her and she knew with a strength she had never felt about anything before that it was right and she had her escape from the vileness of her situation and life and, more importantly, herself.
So it was with a happy certainty that she walked the dirt track to the dirt road that led to the wider tarred highway where she hitched a ride in a rusty truck with fifteen singing black farmhands all the way to the edge of the Great Rift Valley where Africa was slowly breaking into two, the massive plates sliding ever so slowly apart as the world ordered and rearranged itself along the lines of a plan, so long in the making and undertaking that human beings could share no part in it, and never would or could share in it, even should they have the inclination. And she sang along with the farmhands in the songs she knew, and she smiled and clapped to the rhythms of the ones she didn’t, and at the point where the road ran closest to the rift’s edge she got out and waved to the singers till they went completely from sight. And when they were gone she walked the twenty minute walk the valley’s lip and stood with her toes on the crumbly edge and looked down to the valley floor so far below. And her mind sang as she started the ritual of the special things-to-do that would take her into the air and fly her so high above the dizzying world beyond the cliff edge. She saw herself, at such a height, as being an eagle, a slender, white-winged eagle and, filled with the happiness the image evoked, she hastened to finish the special routine of taps and bends and thrustings up and with a joyous final effort she flung herself from contact with the world and its trappings and pushings and draggings and unwanted contacts and she sailed out into the warm, dry, gently buffeting air of the Kenya noon with a final freedom that filled her with a happiness she felt must surely, just from its sheer intensity, cause her to burst apart and die.
For more about Paris and his works visit
http://www.parisportingale.com/
http://www.artandthedrugaddictsdog.com/
http://www.narratormagazine.com.au/
http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/parisportingale
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