Free Edge of the Orison by Iain Sinclair

them. One in particular.
    After a subdued session, sitting outside at green tables, slow pints and no Vanessa, we climbed into the car, leaving Renchi in the pub. Chris, returned to Stilton, left immediately for London. Vanessa, stuck on the road, was delayed – but arrived, with Renchi, in time for another courtyard meal (without Morris men) at the Bell.
    At breakfast, next morning, I asked Anna about the haunted room. She said it was nothing like the one in Whitby. That attic, though busy, shapes pressing against her bare legs, was benevolent, ‘filled with children’. As were her dreams: a nursery of spirits, active and warm-breathed. Curious little things. Stilton was very different, the proportions, the weight of the furniture. Nothing floated, it dragged. A sufficiency of brandy took care of sleep, pushed the dreams too deep for retrieval. But they were still there, unappeased. Living faces in an album of cancelled topography. Backgrounds fade, gardens disappear, the eyes of those who have once beenphotographed continue to search out an audience. The ceiling of the disturbed bedroom was so low, she felt, that the plaster took an imprint of your sleeping face.

Flying

    Wrapped like something precious, a bundle that might shatter, the feverish child was taken from her bed and driven to the airfield. Not quite seven years old, she thinks. All the details are still there, vividly so. The emphasis in her voice when I question her. ‘The back seat was round, like a bucket.’ Arms thrown wide – ‘so’ – as she enfolds an imagined space. No smell of fuel in the cockpit. The leathery closeness of a borrowed coat. The plane lurches into the air, wind pushing against the perspex bubble.
    Anna frowns, the sequence of events is vague. It was so long ago. She is careful not to betray her own memories or the memories of those who were with her.
    Three children, Anna the eldest. Her brothers, William and Robert. They were born, one after the other, at yearly intervals. And they were all sick: whooping cough. Has it gone out offashion? Not much in evidence when our own children were young, but making a comeback, I'm sure. The name fits the period: postwar, National Health Service ready with corked medicine bottles of sweet orange juice, a sticky spoon of Radio Malt, liberty bodices, kaolin poultices for mumps (cooked and hot). Nasty business, whooping cough, acutely contagious. Bouts of paroxysmal coughing followed by the involuntary drag and scrape of breath (the whoop): a feeling of helplessness on the part of parents, listening from another room, or fussing at the bedside.
    Mr Geoffrey Hadman, industrial chemist, lateral-thinking businessman, occasional artist, had a theory: on everything. Assembly-line chickens in a shed at the bottom of the garden. Indoor mushroom plantations. Asbestos insulation. A central heating system that, like the footballer Martin Peters, was years ahead of its time. Outboard motors were tested (and failed) on the deeps of Ullswater. Money-making schemes of great ingenuity (and lethal consequence) imported Fenland self-sufficiency into the refined suburbs of Blackpool. A gardener from the works took care of the lawn and tennis court. Works' plumbers installed car radiators throughout the house. Copper pipes, heated from a coal-fired stove, passed through the children's bedrooms.
    Anna woke to a ‘sweet smell’ and had the wit to rouse her father. Who sprung from his bed. ‘Robert was nearly dead.’ Fumes. Father, faced blackened, was not discouraged: teething faults, nothing wrong with the theory. Pipes were re-routed to an exterior wall. ‘The house was still freezing.’
    Two of the coughing children, William beside his father, Anna in the green leather seat at the rear, were placed in the Auster. Squire's Gate Aerodrome, Blackpool. Or they might have been taken up one at a time. Mother waiting in the clubhouse. The idea was: altitude. Fly as high over the sea as the small plane would go.