James Greene was dying and had been for quite some time. He realised this fully, and with all the clarity of faded intoxication, as the balloon began its slow vertical rise off the field towards a clear stretch of blue high above the London skyline. This sudden awareness was (surprisingly, he noted) perfectly welcome, and he reached for his cigarettes in acknowledgment. Indeed, so engrossing was the pleasure that by the time he brought the lighted cigarette to his lips and looked over the edge again, the balloon had risen another six feet.
Below him the modest crowd, lined up like funeral mourners or film extras, was beginning to blur. He could no longer pick out the pained expressions, thinly veiled, on people’s faces. Clothes and colours seemed to blend. The lady in black with whom he had shared a tortuous moment of mutual, regretful longing (though longing for what he did not know) was transformed at this angle into a single blackbird, perched on a rare slab of concrete. Still now he was unable to deduce which of his fellow passengers she was there to see off. He wondered whether, in time, she would remember him; whether she would awaken to the memory of his – a stranger’s – stricken expression, or recollect around a barroom table the thin, pale outline of his lips or the sunken, squalid arch of his –
He cut the apron strings of his fantasy and blew out smoke. It was this same ardent thirst for acknowledgement, for remembrance and praise, which had brought him - knees first - to his present imprisonment, to this final flight, and he would be damned if such narcissistic daydreams were to ruin him now.
“You can’t smoke on here,” a voice said, from somewhere across the wooden panels.
“I can’t...?”
“You can’t smoke,” he said again. The man – forty-five, bulky and severe – motioned to the cigarette in James’ hand.
“I’m not sure I understand,” James countered.
“It’s a non-smoking balloon,” he proclaimed, his voice strident, angry. “I know because I requested a non-smoking balloon.”
They were higher now, much higher, and James felt his legs weaken.
“I didn’t know there were non-smoking balloons,” he said, and politely flicked the butt overboard.
“Well, there are. And I paid good money to get one. So if you don’t mind...”
The stranger was flickering in and out of focus. Were they not so unnaturally positioned above the earth, James might have questioned whether the man existed at all but at this angle the voluminous figure was impossible to deny, kaleidoscoping as it was in and out of James’s field of vision.
“Not at all,” James said, and he turned away.
It was a diverse population inside the wicker basket. Across the planks, beside the anti-smoker, an elderly man of about seventy-five was quietly looking out over the city. He was smartly dressed – brown trousers, blazer, flat cap, square spectacles – and appeared totally unaware of anyone else. Contiguous to him a woman with short, hacked brown hair (who James, with an artist’s arrogance, placed at around fifty-five years of age) was listening to her iPod. And then (he had not noticed her until now) crouched down low so that she could bring her delicate, bleached legs up to her chest, was a girl in her early twenties.
Furtively, he inspected the exsanguinous translucency of her complexion, the shivery vulnerability of the human frame which was intended to hold her upright but which had failed. Even amidst the balloon’s gilded phosphorescence she appeared transparent, as if the sun itself were the radioactive light of an X-Ray machine. After a while it was obvious: both the disease and its countless failed treatments were written all over; her eyes were inked with deep pockets of blotchy inexperience. James wondered where it had started, which part of her it had stolen first. The lungs perhaps - or the pancreas. What lengthy battle had she endured so that she came to be sitting here?
He imagined her without clothes, stretched out in bed in some fictional sky-lit apartment so that her frail, wasteful body (sequestered here beneath a faded white Clash tee-shirt) was reinvigorated with life. His head grew suddenly light with promise.
A middle-aged man with anxious eyes and letterbox lips snatched him from reverie. He was repeating, with effervescent anguish, the same two lines of poetry over and over.
“That’s Shelley,” James said after a moment. The man fell silent, looked at him, nodded coolly then picked up his recitation:
“When the lamp is shattered, the light in the dust lies dead.”
It was a fitting couplet and the words seemed to comfort their orator. James glanced back at the girl to find her staring at her own hands, studying them closely as if they belonged to someone else. At such great height the bright green of the park below better resembled the synthetic cloth of a make-shift poker table, laid carefully out beneath brittle table-top trees and beer tin buildings. James was quite unfamiliar with this part of the capital, where Shoreditch gave way to the City. In all his time in London – since those first fateful flirtations with the publishing houses – he had been awarded little reason to walk amongst the burnished, gin-soaked office blocks, the Blackberry adverts, the al-fresco lunchtime diners. He imagined the bronze-statue businesspeople below him now, each one plugged in to the other as they dashed from boardroom to barroom, and the companies dreamt and the money went round. It struck him then that he had never been enamoured by wealth – at least not savagely – rather, he had become accustomed to it. Money was a narcotic: the more he acquired, the more he used. It numbed the pain of failure and silenced his intimidating conscience.
In his youth he had craved, above all things, artistic credibility and alcohol. Then just shy of a decade into an ailing, extracurricular writing career, delusional and half-defeated, fame became synonymous with achievement and he began to dissolve. The novel which at twenty-six had fulfilled his own literary ambitions – and which was (magically!) commissioned for a two hundred thousand print run – failed to reap the rewards James Greene felt it naturally deserved.
Soon after he had set to work on a lifeless new fiction. Miserably, he typed and edited and formatted until he had banished all happiness from its pages. He felt distracted, angry, bored. The industry which by then should have wholeheartedly embraced his genius had barely paused for breath. Finally, he abandoned the manuscript altogether, met with his agent, deduced (with all the craftsmanship of Juliet ascertaining the identity of her future lover) what it was the publishing houses were looking for, and then wrote it.
And suddenly his surname was on the shelf. The squalid lilywhite and lemon hardcovers soon found themselves stacked shoulder to shoulder beneath a sign which stated, quite earnestly, “General Fiction.” The fonts and plots were identical. Commuters propped them up on buses and trains (how those stifled pages gasped for breath!) and when the summer was over they began to appear in charity shops and at student book stalls. His worst efforts were cherished and despised in less than equal measure by the reviewers. They were accused of being tawdry, deplorable, devoid of originality and intelligence. For a decade he debauched and deceived himself. The paycheques were inconsequential but they kept coming. The novels were inconsequential and they kept coming too. But, he reminded himself, he had never just done it for the cash. Wealth was a by-product, the irrefutable child of success and (mild) celebrity, and whilst it had been a mocking spectre during his life it would not be the mordant assistant to his demise.
Now the balloon was warmer, higher, lighter. It was a nightclub dancefloor when the lights came on. And here they were: the remaining factions of the evening. Six doomed figures, each one stood apart from the next and each too afraid or too untrusting to make a connection. But, oh, how they clung to the possibility (the promise) that it wasn’t all over yet, that some charming presence would come along and say, “I know a place where we can go where we are not known.”
James lit an oblivious second cigarette and looked down again. His chest was tight, his vision hazy. Soon they would reach a safe distance from the ground, a height at which all of those they had left behind ( - will she remember me?) would no longer be at risk of the burning wood or the descending -
“Hey! I’ve told you once. This is a non-smoking balloon!” There was a new tension in the stranger’s voice, perhaps owing to the altitude, which made the final three words lack the impact James supposed he had intended. “That – that shit killed my fucking wife!” He was anxious, watery-eyed, tremulous. “Now, put – it – out.”
“Two minutes and it’ll be gone,” James promised. “Here, I’ll even smoke it away from you so that it doesn’t - ”
“Put it out,” the stranger repeated, more firmly this time. He took a step forward.
“Look, I can’t very well smoke on the way down now, can I? Please. Don’t deny me this last one.” James could feel all the familiar rushes of confrontation. His blood was warm, his legs uncertain.
“Don’t fuck with me.” A staccato step forward and -
The impact was refreshing. With blissful immediacy the stale ache in his chest was gone and he became acutely aware of an exquisite paroxysm in his jaw. Until now he had been punched only once, in his hometown, on the steps of a nightclub on his twentieth birthday. A cushion of adrenaline and consumption had, on that occasion, facilitated the awkward introduction of the stranger’s knuckles to his own unambitious jawline. But this – this was like coming up from underwater.
Suddenly they were grappling and James’ entire body was alight with alacrity. He heard (though barely felt) his back collide with the low wall of the gondola, and an underwhelming murmur of protest swelled amongst his co-travellers. They were too close to the edge but still the stranger’s arms flailed and snatched at James’ shirt.
“Somebody do something...”
For the first time James could feel the envelope above spitting hot air.
“Will you just stop? You’re ruining it all - ”
The stranger was hunched double and in the process of delivering a series of stalled blows to James’ midriff. James strained to return a punch or two only to have both attempts immediately stifled by proximity. He was not a violent man (he had never thrown an actual punch in his otherwise hollow, miserable life) but his reactions now were predatory. Summoning all his strength, he strained forward, forcing his opponent onto his back foot and freeing himself from the stranger’s grasp. James swiftly found his balance, made a desperate ball with his fist and threw it vaguely in the direction of his competitor’s face. It connected, imperfectly but sweetly, with the jutting cliff-face of his jaw. James readied himself to go again but before he could do anything the elderly bespectacled man stepped between the two of them.
The stranger who had attacked him was gone and in his place there stood a weeping papier-mâché model; an apoplectic brute reduced now to halcyon immobility.
“Done?” The old man asked, mapping the distance between them with a pacifying, extended arm.
James coughed and nodded assiduously.
“They – they killed her,” the stranger said, quietly, vacantly, and the old man turned from James and placed his arm around the other’s shoulders. His attacker seemed to have entered into a kind of catatonic shock. Softly, the old man eased him into a sitting position.
For a few seconds something deep in James’ being, some senescent Geiger counter, prohibited him from taking his eyes off of him. He wondered how high they had climbed but dared not look. Instead he inspected the balloon. If there had been a disruption to his colleagues’ adventure (during the height of the action a part of him had hopelessly hoped that the four remaining travellers would form a circle around the two men and instigate an adolescent chorus of, “Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!”) there was little evidence of it now. iPod lady was already scrolling through her menu, presumably looking for something new to listen to. Shelley continued to perform his favourite lines. (James wondered idly whether he had stopped reciting them at all.) Even the old man – who appeared to have either successfully assisted or given up on his new comrade – was once more perched in his previous spot, looking out over a distant London. So where was the -
“Are you alright?” Her voice was not the tremulous jazz solo he’d imagined. James turned to face her.
“Oh, yes – yes. Could be worse, eh?” He bared his teeth in a crooked smile. Tenderly, the girl brought the back of her hand up to rest against the side of his face. “Least I won’t be around to see it bruise.”
She blushed and looked at the floor. Her hand lingered a moment on his cheek.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and then: “I didn’t mean to...”
“We don’t have long to go,” she said, shyly.
With the light behind her she shone silver and gold. Upright, she seemed to have cast off some of the malignant aura which had previously consumed her. Now James could vividly make out the fading dashes of red in her hair; the taut, red lip-sticked lips; the parched, imperfect skin – and he was suddenly quite sure that he loved her. Yes, she was his luminary, his Lolita. Why else had she been placed before him now?
Uncertainly, the girl pushed her hand into his and arched her neck to look at him. James, moved by her reticence, let his palm close around her fingers. She led him silently to the edge of the balloon. James closed his eyes and felt burnt orange sunlight.
“When the buildings are so far down they don’t look real anymore. That’s when they say it happens,” she said, and then: “Do you think they still look real?”
James opened his eyes.
“Just,” he said.
“I don’t want to be alone,” she said.
“No.”
He let go of her hand and raised his arm so that she could move into his chest. And there it was – London, not his birthplace but his home, stretching out onto the distant horizon where a purplish-blue haze forbid him from seeing any further. They had drifted north, so much so that it was impossible to determine exactly the little pocket of grass and concrete they had set sail from. He wondered if the crowd there had dispersed and then, sullenly, he considered his legacy. Would the people or the papers mourn him? Would the Guardian publish his obituary? Would they paper over the cracks and pay homage to his spirit? (“Yes, the main body of his work lacked ambition, and he was often accused of selling out to the narrow-minded, business-orientated publishing houses, but there was undoubtedly something in that first novel: a spark, a wonderment, a youthful joy – but most of all a rare literary talent, and for that reason Greene will be sadly missed.”)
He longed for a familiar location to present itself below him, and he wondered if he was making a mistake. The city was a curious stranger. There was nothing left for him there – no friends, no lovers, no words. And so he found himself here, lonely but not alone, suspended above his tranquil blue planet, with the pale girl in the faded white tee-shirt.
“It’s gone too quickly,” she said, portentously, and as the balloon exploded, and the flames broke loose, he wondered if anyone had ever looked more radiant.
