Come in number 2

It is one of those real Autumns we get every five years or so, Clare says. She is right. The leaves stay on the trees in time long enough to glow like Girl Guide pennies cleaned in vinegar, instead of being ripped off by grey winds before the chance of an Indian summer of glorious opulence cheers a depressed middle age. Spidery sun trickles through the beeches like Earl Grey, the way Nab used to like it when she was alive (weak, no milk, no sugar ) and splashes in the residual pools of last night’s rain showers. The days shorten prettily at each end now gathering all back to the earth. Somewhere over on yonder hill a migrant goose stops on the journey south. Its cry carries on the sharpening morning air ‘All -aboard -what’s -coming- aboard-all- aboard- what’s -coming -aboard'. A shoal of startled seagulls shifts against the red-brown till, flash now silver, now white, torn between the plough and some unknown terror. A signal cannon booms at the railway station, signifying something unimportant masquerading as something significant. He consigns it to one of his parallel worlds, laying out the lines meticulously.1

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He blinks, stares , trying to make sense of an incongruity. A silver number 2, or is it a 5, difficult to tell, soars above the town and over the red pantiles of the rooftops below. Carried on air currents it makes a break for open country, the ridge beyond the trees, across the fields to the moors and the North Sea So purposefully does it fly, he wonders if it has an independent power source after all. Who would send up a remote controlled number 2? Why? Did it have it's own intelligence? He scanned the sky for another number, but number 2 was alone. Some things did not become clear even with explanation. He had found that information was more satisfying when distorted by imagination anyway. It was better not to tell any of the others about that.. He had tried once and found his voice faltering away to a nervous giggle when it met the wall of their incomprehension and derision. Mad. Fondly enough they said it, but sometimes it hurt a bit. Madness ran in the family, so it was always whispered when he was a child. They called it all madness then, not much store set by which particular brand of madness it might have been. Now it had as many names as you can fit into the most flamboyant of spirograph Venn diagram petals.3

He pushes them all away into their own trench where they belong , he had come up here alone this morning to get away from them all, spend rare time in his own redoubt watching the world stand still4

‘Come-in-number-two-come-in-number-two your time is up up up’ The rooks , stirred like unstrained tea leaves in an cup spin around St Nicholas’s steeple squawking indignantly.5

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