Free Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! by Douglas Lindsay Page B

watched the dog walkers go and decided not to shout after them to ask what year it was. Do that and I would be getting into standing-naked-in-a-crowd territory.
    I walked towards the town. At the end of the beach, just over the sand dunes, there is a caravan park, with a large administration building with a shop and café. I headed there in a daze, no longer trying to think about the situation, as it was so utterly inexplicable.
    Like the time those two hooded crows turned up in the loft. There really was no way for a bird to get into the loft. No gaps in the eves, no window left open. I checked everywhere. We'd lived in that house for over five years, and at no other time had anything ever got in that shouldn't have. It was a bright loft, a couple of large windows, easy to see into corners. There was nowhere to get in, and yet one afternoon, out of nowhere, two crows had turned up. There had been no rational explanation, so I'd stopped thinking about it.
    I walked along the beach until I reached the pier, and then took the path through the dunes that led to the shop. I moved slowly, my clothes started to dry in the heat of the sun. My legs didn't feel entirely steady, as if the entire seashore was rocking and swaying like the plane. At this end of the beach, nearest the town, there were a lot of people around.
    I went into the shop, smiled at the woman behind the counter who completely ignored me, and had a quick look at the newspaper headlines. I didn't even need to check the date. I recognised it straight away. The story was about the government minister who'd had to resign because he'd been sucked into a paedophile case. This report was from when he was still strenuously denying the accusations. It was early on in the story's life.
    I stood looking at this, knowing how it would develop. Knowing that proof would emerge, knowing that he would be arrested and charged, knowing that he would be released on bail and that he would hang himself in his own kitchen, little more than a month later.
    I hadn't just thought myself off a plane, I had travelled back six months.
    I found myself staring at the shop assistant, without really looking at her.
    'Do you want anything?' she said.
    I shook my head, walked out of the shop, and went into the café next door. I stood behind a family of four, two noisy kids, who were getting something to go.
    'What can I get for you?' asked the woman. The barista. Would she think of herself as a barista, in a small café in a caravan park in the north of Scotland?
    I was staring at the menu board, reading it without thinking. Flat white. Americano. Cappuccino. Espresso. Latte. The usual suspects.
    'Flat white,' I said.
    I invariably ask for a flat white. It sounds kind of dull, but it's how you measure the barista. Get fifty people to make you a flat white, and you'll get fifty variations. Today, however, the words just tripped off my tongue. I wasn't thinking.
    I had counted my money on the way along the beach. I had twenty pounds, and four hundred dollars in notes.
    'Anything to eat?' she asked.
    I looked at the pastries. I couldn't think. So I didn't say anything, and she made the coffee.
    *
    T he corridor didn't seem to have an end. How long could it take to walk to the end of a corridor? How big could a building be?
    I think I knew the explanation before I got the actual proof of it. The thought had been burbling away somewhere out of reach, but not far out of reach, as if it had been held in a bubble just outside my head.
    At some point I realised that one of the doors up ahead was open, and I instantly knew that it was the door to my cell. I was walking in a circle. A large circle.
    How long had I been walking? It felt like twenty minutes. How long could you walk in twenty minutes? A mile? Two miles? Admittedly I wasn't going very quickly, and on further admission, I had no idea whether I'd been walking for twenty minutes or two minutes or two hours. The corridor was so dull and featureless