Free The Angel's Cut by Elizabeth Knox Page A

gives you unimpeded views. But it’s only a slow fall, not flight. To fly, to depend on the air without an engine, I got near to that only once. It was the very first time I went up, when I was only four. This was how it happened. My father and I were out driving when we saw some men down on one of the flat flood meadows by the river. They had a big man-kite up in the air. I hadn’t yet seen an airplane—this was only a few years after Kitty Hawk. Daddy drove us down to have a look and the men asked if I wanted to sit on the kite. They winched it down. It came down rock steady. There was a strong, even wind blowing, with no gusts. I wanted to try going up, but didn’t think Daddy would let me. But he did—though he made me promise it would never get back to Mama. The men lifted me up into the kite—there was a seat on it—and let out the line again. I guess I was only fifteen feet up at most, but there was nothing underneath me. A car with good suspension can bounce you about, but this was different. I was being buffeted and jostled very softly . It wasn’t like rocking in turbulence in a plane. In a plane you feel you’re the pivot. Either you, or the engine. And it wasn’t like a balloon or a dirigible. I’ve never felt anything like that kite. And I remember looking down on Daddy and the other men, all grinning like crazy. And then Isaw our shadow—my shadow inside the kite’s—and I remember thinking how funny. How funny that we weren’t attached at the feet, me and my shadow. Then Daddy put his arms up for me and the men fetched me down again.’ At the end of the story the man put up his arms, mimicking his father’s suppressed anxiety at their separation. ‘Daddy was an old man then; he and I never had much fun together, but we had one or two secrets, about the things he let me do without our having to campaign at Mama. Mama was one of those women who know everything is dangerous.’
    Things at night were no less visible than they were in the daylight to the angel, only coloured differently, a world of many shades of darkness from luminous to inky. The man’s eyes, his thick eyelashes, his mouth, all were variations on darkness. Xas could see him clearly, but he still seemed obscure—obscure and unfathomable. Xas was closer to the man than he’d been to almost anyone in a long while; close enough to smell the ketones on his breath and know that he’d gone without food for too long. It wasn’t a pleasant smell, but it was very human and, blowing in Xas’s face, this scent, and faintly moist breath, seemed as powerful in their way as the ram air into which he used to lean when he was wing-walking.
    The man added, ‘Mama was always a stickler for neatness. She would dress me, then ask me to check myself in the mirror, where I’d find myself looking the way she wanted me to look, not that I cared then—I was too young to care. But my reflection never impressed me as me . When I went up in the man-kite I recognised myself by my shadow.’
    Xas inhaled sharply. He felt breathless. He said, in wonder, ‘Is that what people feel on first leaving the ground? They feel it too? A separation from their shadow?’ This was a revelation.
    â€˜I’m not people ,’ the man said. ‘Not folk . I have no idea what folk feel.’ He had kept one arm up after miming his father’s eagerness to hold him. He had hooked a finger into the cord of the lamp. Now he gave it a tug, and the light went on.
    Xas and he looked at one another.
    Xas felt his own face softening with concentration. Everything receded from him but the face before him, in which he read recognition, not of himself , but of the mutuality of what was happening.
    Something was happening. The man looked wondering and resigned. Time slowed, then came to a stop. It stood still so that they could both look at it. They looked into each other’s