The House of Tiny Whispers

Dream of Flying

I swoop up into the night, following the pull of the moonlight. I want to feel it tingle on my skin, a thousand times purer than down below on the ground, sliding over my hands like cold silk. Shivers race under my clothes, under my skin, right down my nerves. The wind spirals around me. It whips my hair and streams down my arms and makes my jacket ripple and it's all I can hear, this roaring, like putting a conch shell to your ears only so loud that it batters through your cells and feels as though it may obliterate you. All noise.

It stops. My heart stops with it, just for a second. Suspended in the beat, that edge again, flying and falling, life and death.

And I head north.

If I see an orange haze, a city, I swerve around it. Clouds pass below me; I dart down and brush my hand through them, like that girl on that advert. I don't remember what it was for. Perfume, possibly. She was wearing a primrose dress. It must have been a fresh, clean scent. Day-time perfume, not the heavy musk of night. Up here there is no smell.

I dance in the aurora. I spin and twirl and groove and boogie and shimmy and shake and salsa. The aurora is charged particles from the sun, flaring up green and pink and even blue in ever-shifting lights, three dimensional club strobes, and they are so hot that I take off my jacket and tie it around my waist and expose my bare arms to them. The moon is cool silk; this is like one constant electric shock, zipping through every cell to remind them that they're alive. I do not just dance in the aurora. I dance with it. I am it.

I am the backing dancer taking centre stage, the only girl in the club, the sequence dancer going solo. I don't need music. The rhythm of the dancing lights is enough. And it changes constantly, a great celestial DJ shifting the tunes in this most magnificent discotheque. A spin of the disc; it slows. Red seeps into every edge and they twist and entwine with each other, slow and sensuous. The charge on my arms is no longer fast and urgent but pulsing gently, caressing my skin as though it has never been touched, slipping between the thin sheet of my PJs, making me shiver with the thrill. The song is some kind of low, sexy jazz, a saxophone moaning, a piano playing the underlying notes. And then it swings away again and it's rock 'n' roll, shake-your-hair rebellion, and it doesn't matter how I move because it's not about how it looks, it's about how it feels. And then it trails off, mournful, a power ballad as the aurora sways, colours dimmed, pining. And I am aware, then, of the lonely ice flats below me and the emptiness of the sky and how far I am from anybody.

On these nights I would love to cut all bonds. To be free to sail on, to have nothing to tie me down anywhere. But the blood, so alive in my veins, is tied to others: parents, sister, cousins. And it is when the aurora sings her sad song that my heart can feel itself being pulled back, dragged down to earth by chains that are even stronger than freedom, even stronger than hope, chains of love. And there is the emptiness, there is something missing. There is nobody to cling to under the mournful lights, nobody to hold close and sway with, nobody to share this with.

One last, tremulous note. The lights shake with vibrato and vanish. I am surrounded, then, by dark sky and white ice and nothing else. There are no trees, no animals, no life. I cannot stay here.

I head home.

I pass over small villages. A house, looks like an old barn conversion, still has lights on. Inside a couple argue, hurling insults; the car is crooked on the driveway; he has come home late. Smelling of perfume? Lipstick on the collar? Or just drunk? She stands at the top of the stairs, face caked in a mud mask, screeching like a harpy. He leans against the door, his carefully styled hair slicked with gel, red in the cheeks while she calls him a bastard and a no-good son of a whore and a waste of space and that she should have married Liam when she had the chance, and actually the last she heard he's still single so how would he - that's the husband - like it if she went off to spend the evening with him and came in at three in the morning? To which he says that that'd be great, he'd get peace and quiet all evening and it'd be absolute bloody bliss, so she cries. The tears cutting through her mud mask are to make him feel guilty and they don't work, he just laughs because this is his money and his house and if they divorce she loses. And in the smallest bedroom their baby stands in his cot and listens. He doesn't cry anymore.

I pass around a city, blinded by the lights of surburbea. The ice flats are gone, back to the patchworked fields and clusters of trees, and underneath the clouds it is raining. Above them, I swim through the moonlight. I am English; there's nothing special about clouds.

I find my way home and don't know how. This always happens. No matter where I go, I always get home. Follow your heart. It's a cliche now, but like most cliches it is built on truth. My heart pulls me back to the ground, back to my roof and my sister's bedroom window and my bed. Last week I went south to the searing hot desert, sand forever. You don't get mirages from the sky. Everything glistened with heat. I still got home.

Landing, like takeoff, is hard. I drop down, close my eyes and wait until I feel the cold tiles under my bare feet. It has been raining here and they are slippery. My feet are on the ground - on the roof - but my head will not accept it. I am touching the ground but not standing on it. I don't want to let go. Next time I might not be able to take off.

The thought is sad; heaviness shoots through my body and anchors me. Standing, supporting my own weight, is hard. I concentrate on feeling the tiles and the orange electric light that coats my skin. I put my jacket back on. If anybody looks up, if anybody is awake, they will not expect to see me here, so they won't. How many people have seen me and not let themselves? I fly high. I avoid planes.

So. Back down the drainpipe, hands sliding with the fallen rain. It gurgles down the inside. My hands move oddly through this thick air, with gravity urging them down. I am slow and heavy and stupid, not the light being that danced with the northern lights.

Back through the window. Close it behind me. My sister is now on her other side, with her other thumb in her mouth, and her eyelids flicker as I close the window and shut off the world. I go back to my bedroom. Dry my hands and feet on my jacket, leave it on the floor where it was when I picked it up. Climb back into bed. Pull over the smothering sheets.

And then it's morning and a chink of weak daylight pokes through the gap where my curtains don't quite close properly. Flashes of my dream zip across my memory; a roaring louder than a jet plane, jiving in green and red strobes, something exploring my exposed, pale skin under the night. People will have similar memories. Only I know that these are different. And I never tell anybody about my dreams.

After all, not everything is possible. Humans will never fly unaided.

I get out of bed. I pick up a jacket that I have left on the floor and hang it up on a peg. I slide my feet into slippers. Downstairs is the noise of breakfast being made, my parents teasing each other, the chink of my sister scraping out her cereal bowl. I pad downstairs.

My mother jokes that I am up late and my father pretends that I snuck out into town last night and says that I'm looking pale, am I alright, what's the boy's name?

"Shut up, Harold," my mother says, giving me a stern look. She doesn't approve of staying out late with boys. She does not approve of sex, she doesn't laugh at jokes about it and she fast-forwards through kissing scenes on the TV and she sneers at couples lying in the park, absorbed with each other. She does not approve of clubs or bars. She would not approve of flying. Not even in dreams.

I fend off their jokes and sit opposite my sister. She's in a pink nightdress that used to be mine and the bowl that she's eating out of used to be mine too. There's a chip in the rim from the first time I tried to do the washing up myself. She has my eyes and hair as well.

"Good morning," I say. She looks up at me through her fringe, face puzzled.

"I dreamed you climbed in through the window last night," she says.