Flying to Nowhere: A Tale by John Fuller Page A

could not provide. Their movement was indistinct and hypnotic, for the eye, in attempting to observe the motion of every individual, failed to see more than the general heaving. It was like watching a single flake in a snowfall, and their sound was now like the gentle hissing of frying bacon.
    The months that he had been in Vane’s service seemed tedious and overlong, but those same months had seen the comparatively brief custody of Vane’s horse. That friendship was now irrevocably ended, but the bondage to Vane stretched before him like a limitless sea in which there was only the vaguest chance of beaching on some redeeming and friendly island.
    The pain of his loss of the horse now seemed to require some answering sacrifice, and his curiosity about the radical metamorphosis of death to require some ritual expression. Without forethought, Geoffrey thrust his spread hand into the heaving maggots.
    For a moment the incredible warmth, like that of a freshly-baked loaf, was satisfying. The mysterious depths of the stirring mass, half-flesh, halkmaggot, held and almost drew in his fingers as though they were spread drowsily beneath a downy pillow. But within a few seconds Geoffrey realised what he had done and withdrew his hand in disgust.
    The maggots dripped from his fingers until he shook off the crawling glove in three whip-like movements away from him. Even then one or two still adhered to the skin, and one waved, crushed, from a fingernail. He daubed it on to a rock.
    After that, he had to leave the place. He walked along the headland in a fury, thinking of all that he had left behind: his father, who could shoe a horse in fourteen minutes and who sometimes, when he was happy, sang after supper and danced stiffly on his toes behind the kitchen door; his mother, who could comb her hair out all round her head so that you could hardly guess where her hidden face was; his elder brother, who could catch a fish with his fingers; his younger brother, adept at beautiful selfish arguments.
    His last memory was of him urinating dangerously in a patch of nettles and having to be carried to him to say goodbye, since Frobisher was in haste to get his cart to Hereford, and would not stay. ‘Goodbye, Geoffrey.’ The wet kiss had been planted on his nose, and months of service to the dry and energetic Vane had not replaced the memory of it. He had stopped writing letters home, because no one in his family could read, and the letters written for his mother by the curate bore no resemblance at all to her voice.
    From the cliff he could now and then see small pebbly inlets, sometimes with caves, where the sea was able to lap the shore more gently than on the rocky promontories that predominated on the island’s rough coast. He was surprised to discover one which had what looked like over a hundred yards of sand and a shelving beach where the tide curled idly, as if with relief at not being required to shoulder pillars of granite, or grunt and slobber over tiers of boulders. His first thought was to wonder why the boat from the mainland couldn’t have beached here; then he saw the rocks ranged right across the mouth of the bay, crowding thickly like the heads of farmers at a fair gathered to watch the main event of the afternoon. And on the sand, as if in response to such expectation, there were four brown cows.
    Geoffrey had not seen cows on the island before. These were of such a rich sandiness, sandier than the sand itself, as though by placidly standing on it they had drained it of all colour, that they had the air of belonging wholly to the little cove. They formed a small procession, ambling through the foam that seeped away at the crest of each wave and leaving steaming dumps of their dung at intervals.
    At their head, dancing before them, leading them with arms raised as though they were on invisible ribbons, was a girl dressed in grey. There was a lightness in her bare feet and a carelessness in her manner that somehow set her