Authors: Chris James
“Late tomorrow morning. I have to be back in London in time for dinner. Life goes on. My other life, I mean. That’s a beautiful conch. Not from local waters, is it?”
Pilot picked up the shell and read the tiny writing on the label. “Sri Lanka.”
They spent the next hour and a half looking at Penwith’s finest shell collection and talking about coral reefs, sea turtles and dodos. “I need to wrap up a few more things with you in the morning before I go,” Vaalon said. “Then I’ll leave you to prepare for the rest of your life.”
It was past midnight, two hours after he’d fallen exhausted onto his bed, but through a combination of cerebral overstimulation and sexual frustration, Pilot was finding it impossible to sleep. He was just about to take matters into his own hands when he thought of a better alternative.
“Who is it?” Jenny asked, answering the light rap on her studio door.
“It’s me. I didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to you properly. Can I come in?”
Lonnie Pilot, an only child, had been twelve when his father died, leaving his mother in dire financial straits, compounded by the negative equity of the marital home and her inability to keep up with the mortgage payments. Out of desperatio
n−
in an attempt to save herself, her son and her hom
e−
she surrendered to the advances of a travelling computer software salesman, who had sold her a program of empty promises and bogus claims to great prospects. However, even at his young age, Pilot was a good judge of bad character and his toxic dislike for the man had been so overtly expressed, and was so threatening to her ‘rescue’ that Phyllis Pilot decided to place physical distance between her son and Mr. Stoker. Before moving to Essex with her new partner she had lodged Lonnie with her two larky-legged spinster aunts, Sally and Hilda Tink. ‘I love you, Lonnie,’ she had told him, ‘but I need this man. The two of you can’t live in the same house together, so Les and I are leaving Cornwall. I hope you understand. I’ll send money.’
Pilot
didn’t
understand. The evaporation of his parents from his life, and the bank’s repossession of the only home he had ever known, threw him into an early-teens crisis. As for sending money, at the beginning of every month until his sixteenth birthday, he would receive a crisp five pound note with words like, ‘Don’t spend it all at once,’ and ‘Buy yourself a warm scarf.’
ADHD
-
Inattentive
Sub
-
Type
had been the label given to Lonnie Pilot by the school psychologist. Whether or not the teachers had felt threatened by his eerie precocity or thought him a disruptive influence on the other students, the result was the same. Within six months of his mother’s departure, he had left the Humphry Davy School to follow his own course of full-time higher education, the school system being unable to teach him things fast enough; the National Curriculum being too circumscribed for his expanding brain.
In the first floor reference section of the Penzance Public Library, at the farthest corner table, there was a chair acknowledged by all but strangers as being ‘Lonnie’s Chair’. The chewing gum screwed under that corner of the table was ninety per cent his. There, the autodidact had sat for days, weeks and years, systematically digesting everything the library had on its shelves and in its computers. Some afternoons, for extra quiet, he’d go to the antiquated private library in Morrab Gardens, where he had volunteered to dust shelves every Thursday in lieu of paying the annual subscription.
Pilot’s aunts had never crossed him, because his insolent wit was more than they could deal with. Although they clothed and fed him with a clumsy virtuosity unique to elderly childless females, they moved mountains to avoid spending the time of day with him. They didn’t understand the first thing about him. For his own part, Pilot was fond of them, but so disinterested he could barely tell the two apart.
At the age of eighteen, Lonnie Pilot’s life changed again. For several years he had been making weekly visits to his great-uncle, Marrek Tink, who lived in a converted net shed in Newlyn. Of the four Tink siblings, Sally, Hilda, Marrek and Merryn, only Merryn, Pilot’s grandmother, had reproduced, and Phyllis herself was an only child. With no brothers or sisters and no cousins in the locale, Pilot threw everything into his relationship with Marrek. They walked, went sailing, but mostly they talked, or rather, Marrek did. During his half century in the merchant navy, Marrek Tink had garnered the kind of knowledge not found in books, and Pilot had made the most of it until death parted them. In his will, Marrek Tink left the net shed to his great-nephew.
Living independently was one thing, but Pilot was penniless and had refused to sign on for benefits. To make ends meet, he tutored the children of local fishermen and farmers for cash, fish and dairy products. Subsistence living, Cornish style.
At 8.00am, Pilot peeled himself off Jenny’s warm body and began getting dressed in the early morning light. She stirred, but remained deep in sleep. He thought how beautiful she looked and how much he would miss her. If she could get a few paintings done quickly, perhaps they could get back on track. Not wishing to wake her, he opened the door as quietly as he could, but was stopped by Jenny’s sleep-soaked, sultry voice. “Lonnie,” she said. “Don’t do that again.” Pretending he hadn’t heard her, Pilot let himself out and began walking towards Penzance for his meeting with Forrest Vaalon.
On the stretch to Jubilee Pool and Battery Rocks, he saw no-one and heard only the occasional car or seagull. Seaweed and pebbles from the night’s strong seas decorated The Promenade, but Pilot was too distracted by his early morning love-making and the pain of Jenny’s admonition to avoid the flotsam and jetsum and he stumbled several times. He’d arranged to meet Vaalon on Battery Road at 8.30 and, true to the man’s word, there he was, with a bag of Abbey Hotel croissants, two cups and a flask of coffee. They exchanged pleasantries and sat down on a bench to have breakfast.
“It’ll have to be black,” Vaalon said, unscrewing the thermos. It was a beautiful, windless spring morning, yet not even the blue skies and mild temperature could breathe life into the boarded up former guest house across the street.
“The town’s seen better days, as you can see,” Pilot said to his companion.
“That’s one thing you will not be able to say when you plant your flag in August,” Vaalon answered. “Your new land will be one of the few places in the world
not
to have seen better day
s−
at least, not in the past 5,000 years.”
Pilot thought for a while, then looked Vaalon square in the eye. “Forrest, we have the
theory
of an island coming up in the Bay of Biscay. No problems with that. And we have the
concept
of establishing a model nation capable of changing the world. No problem there, either, apart from actually doing it. There’s that bore sample, but nothing else tangible to work with. We’re just two men sitting on a bench at the end of England. How confident are you that the two things will ever happen? Out of ten. Be honest.”
Vaalon answered without hesitation. “I’ll give the theory a nine, but as to whether the island won’t kill 86 people on its way up, I’ll have to give that a five. The concept is an obvious ten. The odds on it ever being realized are for you to work out. I think anything between seven and ten is workable. Happy?”
For the next two hours, without opening his laptop, Vaalon expanded on the science of solar tides and magmatic attraction, Pilot’s crew, the specialists, the advocates, and wrapped up the meeting with a colourful description of the house he was building near Taos. “Lonnie, I’m so confident this island’s going to appear on time that I’m betting the farm on it. If the island doesn’t come up as predicted, my ranch is yours.”
Pilot laughed. “And if it does, you’ll own my net shed.” They shook hands on it. “One more question, Forrest. Jenny’s exhibition is being hung at the end of June and then she’ll be free of all her commitments. I haven’t said anything to her about this, but I think she could be an asset to us. I’d like to take her with me if that’s okay.”
A look of disappointment flashed across Vaalon’s face. “That’s the mongoose in you talking, Lonnie. You told me she’d severed the relationship. What makes you think she’d unsever it? It’s all academic, though. Jenny is
not
part of the plan. She’s not the one.”
Pilot felt his stomach drop at Vaalon’s answer and the firmness with which it had been delivered. The door Jenny had semi-closed had now been locked and bolted by Forrest Vaalon. There was nothing Pilot could say that would open it, and he knew better than to try.
“Jenny’s just a familiar face… a sexual dalliance,” Vaalon said, softening. “I don’t mean to be harsh, but your future’s with another. Trust me. Is there anything more you’d like to ask me?”
“Yes. What was my grandfather’s nickname?”
Vaalon gave an open mouth smile, his white teeth set off nicely by his rich man’s tan. “Would my ability to answer that question make all this credible to you, Lonnie? Is that the one word you need me to say before you can commit unconditionally to this enterprise?”
“Yes.”
“Well I have bad news for you. I didn’t know he even
had
a nickname.”
Pilot’s head sank in mock resignation. Then he looked up and laughed. “You pass, Forrest. He hadn’t.”
They meandered along the Promenade to Vaalon’s car, savouring the aroma of seaweed as they walked. After belting up, the man consulted a list written in his expensive leather notebook. “Credit card, passport application, airline ticket, phone, laptop, chargers, business cards – that’s everything, I think. I’ll see you soon, Lonnie. In the meantime, call me if you need anything. This has been good.” He reached out his hand and Pilot shook it firmly.
Pilot followed the car with his eyes to the South Pier. As it disappeared around the corner, the feeling of emptiness arising from his mentor’s departure was washed away by a growing sense of his own destiny.
For ten minutes he stood there, his inherited laptop cradled like a baby in his arms, and gazed vacantly at the sparkling, fishless waters of Mounts Bay before jogging back to the net shed.
Monday, May 4th, began with the sort of rain Pilot hated. He delighted in thunderstorms where the raindrops sound like gravel being offloaded from a dumper truck, but drizzle depressed him. Loath to leave his warm bed, he tried to reconnect with his thoughts of the previous three days. Foremost in his head was a vision of the barge flotilla, floating serenely in the Bay of Biscay, and a rock the size of Wales speeding towards it from below at a hundred miles an hour. Pre-coffined for a more convenient burial, he thought.
He arrived at the library just as they were unlocking the doors and was soon enthroned in his chair with three oversized tomes on the table in front of him. He wanted to get a better understanding of the physical nature of the continental shelf – anything to make it feel more real. He opened
The
Atlas
of
The
Oceans
to a map of the sea bed of the Bay of Biscay. Based on National Institute of Oceanography soundings, it was about as informative of the true nature of what lay at the bottom of the Bay as a man’s photograph is of his personality.
He noted that the continental shelf, from a point about forty miles off the elbow where Spain and France meet, progressed at a forty-five degree angle northwest. The edge extended farther and farther from the coast of France until by forty-eight degrees north, at the latitude of Brest, the shelf edge was at its greatest distance from land. The drop from the continental slope to the Biscay abyssal plain also got steeper and deeper as one moved northwest. On the floor of the abyssal plain there was the odd seamount, but the mountainous areas didn’t begin until it was no longer the Bay of Biscay, or the Celtic Sea, but the open Atlantic. Pilot squinted at the map, hoping that an obvious island shape would leap out of the page, but none did.
He photocopied the map, then began shading in a sliver of the edge of the continental shelf in a shape one hundred miles from north to south and fifteen miles east to west. The dimensions were arbitrary, but would give him a starting point. The volume of water between the shelf and the surface was vast and, when displaced, would have to go somewhere. France and southwest England would take the brunt of the tsunamis, he reckoned. A lot depended on the speed of ascent, a figure he hoped the IGP computer simulations would provide. Pilot reasoned that if the shelf rose at, say, ten feet per second, it wouldn’t be fast enough to kill them, but the barges would in all likelihood break up, unless they came up in a bed of soft, oozy sediment. How deep
was
the sediment on the sea floor? He opened
Submarine
Topography
and thumbed through the pages until he found the answer.
Over
millions
of
years
the
deposit
of
sediment
on
the
seabed
has
produced
a
carpet
in
some
places
half
a
mile
thick
.
This
sediment
covering
consists
of
clay
,
shell
particles
,
sand
and
dust
,
volcanic
ash
and
cosmic
spherules
.
He couldn’t begin to guess the consistency of this particular mixture, but feared the wors
t−
sediment rising past them at 30 miles an hour, leaving them buried in hundreds of feet of mud. The sooner he went to London to view the computer models the better. First and foremost, he wanted to know if the flotilla could withstand the landing. The other worry was the threat the inevitable tsunamis posed to coastal populations. If his island killed even a single person and there had been no forewarning, he and Vaalon would be dead in the wate
r−
branded as mass murderers.