The Amazing Spencer Gray (5 page)

Here he was, at Skippers Cove airstrip, checking out an A22 Foxbat, and not far away was the local emergency helicopter, a Bell 412, with RESCUE emblazoned in huge red letters on the tail.

He walked the length of the A22. It seemed big up close, but when you saw them in the air they looked like little dragonflies buffeting about in the wind. The Foxbat was a standard light aircraft; Dad could fly one of those too, had learnt on an A22, up in Perth. But he reckoned he preferred a glider any day, the
natural competence
of it, he said; the fact that you were part of nature when you were up there and had to rely on the wind and the land and the way they interacted to fly. Dad said that, other than hang-gliding, it was as close to being a bird a person could get.
Peaceful
was the word he always used.

Over at the hangar, Reg and Dad were hooking up the
Drifter.
It was a blue spring day with a cottonwool
cloudbank in the distance. Spencer felt the familiar pang of midmorning hunger and jogged over to grab one of the muesli bars Mum had packed.

‘How are ya, son?'

‘Good thank you, Reg.'

‘Hungry already, are ya?' he laughed as Spencer reached into the glider for the food bag. ‘Eat ya outta house an' home, does he, Doc?'

‘You got it, Reg. We're not quite at the seventeen-Weet-Bix stage, but it won't be long, I reckon.'

Reg smiled. ‘They keep ya young, don't they? That's what Ray always loved about our three. Said they kept her young an' fun.'

‘And heaven knows we all need that,' Dad said wryly.

‘You're spot-on there, Doc. Spot-on.' Reg went quiet then, and Dad's eyes rested on Spencer's for a moment.

‘Muesli bar, anyone?' Spencer said, reading his code. He held out the bag. ‘Apple?'

‘Not for me thanks, lad. Save it for you young ones, eh?'

Dad laughed. ‘It's been a long time since I've been called that.'

Reg patted the flank of the
Drifter.
‘Reckon we'd better get this show on the road before those clouds spoil your fun.'

Dad looked over at the bank of cumulonimbus puffing up in the south like steam from an old train. ‘We're flying away from that,' he said, looking at Spencer. ‘Those clouds'll be beautiful from up high, Spence.'

Spencer nodded, looking up into the blue glare.

‘Let's get our safety check happening, Reg.'

‘Right on,' said Reg, reaching to the pilot's seat for a clipboard with a checklist on it. ‘Okay. No outstanding maintenance to be done. Tick.' Then he hauled himself into the cockpit and pointed his pen at each dial, one by one. ‘Right. Flight controls an' instruments all in order.'

‘That's a good start,' said Dad.

Reg hopped out then and walked along the
Drifter'
s body. He tilted the flaps this way and that. ‘Airframe an' moving control panels A-okay,' he murmured, marking up the sheet. Then he moved down to the wheels. He kicked the tyres gently. ‘Tyres okay.' He crouched down and checked the wheel brakes. ‘Brakes good.'

‘Nearly there, boys, won't be a minute now.'

‘That's fine Reg, take your time,' said Dad, and Spencer nodded, fairly vigorously.

‘Just gunna check the tow-rope release mechanism now.'

Tick.

He walked around the plane to each wing. ‘Wing lock safety pins an' connectors checked. Okay Doc: we're safe to go.'

Dad looked at Spencer and grinned. ‘The
Drifter
—she's a little beauty, eh, Spence? A little beauty.'

Once they were up, once the glider had caught the breeze under its belly and thrown off its weight, once Dad had released the tow cable and saluted Reg as his plane curved away back to the airstrip at Skippers, once Spencer had loosened his grip on his seat—that was when Dad told him the story about Ray, Reg's wife.

Outside, the wind gusted silently. But around them, the cockpit was a calm, safe vacuum.

‘They were a really close family. The three kids would visit Reg and Ray regularly, even though two of them live in Perth, and one—the son, I think—lives in Esperance.'

‘What happened?'

Dad adjusted his sunnies. Even though there were clouds about, the glare in the cockpit was harsh. The cockpit ceiling was transparent for maximum viewing pleasure. ‘She got Alzheimer's disease. Do you know what that is?'

‘Umm ... isn't that when you lose your memory and stuff?'

‘Yeah, essentially that's it. You forget things—normal things like birthdays and where your car keys are—but you also forget how your body works, and what you need to do when you're hungry, or have a full bladder, and things like that. The worst thing is that you forget much deeper things, like who the people around you are. So, even though she loved them so much, Ray couldn't recognise her daughters at the end, even when they were right in front of her.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Well, she knew they were important people in her life, but she couldn't remember whether they were her sisters or her daughters, she couldn't remember their names, or what they liked to do, or if they had any children of their own, or any of those sorts of things.'

Spencer imagined his mum not knowing who
he
was and felt alarmed. ‘That's horrible.'

‘Yeah, I know. It's distressing, isn't it. Sorry, mate, I didn't want to upset you, but I just thought I should explain why a cloud passed over Reg back there.'

‘Yeah, no, I'm glad I know. Thanks, Dad.' Spencer paused. ‘Is she still alive?'

‘No. She died last year, and it was a relief to everyone,
if you know what I mean. Not that they wanted her to go, but just that her life had lost so much quality. The things that had been so meaningful to Ray had become completely meaningless, and just painful. So it was very hard on Reg and the kids.'

Spencer thought about Leon's mum, who seemed to be always losing her keys and locking herself out of the house, and how, even though she had spare keys hidden in a few places outside their house, she could never remember where they were when she needed them. Leon would get a text message from his mum asking him to go home to let her in.

Uneven green lumps were now in the distance—the Stirlings. Dad led the
Drifter
into wide thermals, leaving one and picking up the next, circling towards the ranges.

‘You know how we're going round and round and round in the same direction in these thermals, Dad. In a spiral.'

‘Mmhmm; that's how they work. The hot air rises like a corkscrew to the top, and we piggyback it, if you like.'

‘But, do you ever get dizzy? I mean, after a while in the same thermal?'

Dad laughed. ‘I know what you mean, Spence, but
the radius of most thermals means that you don't get dizzy. We're turning fairly gently, in the scheme of things.'

Spencer nodded. He took a breath. ‘Dad?'

‘Mmm?'

‘Could Leon's mum have Alzheimer's disease?'

Dad looked across at him and took a moment to answer. ‘Usually it's an older person's illness, Spence, so it'd be quite unusual for someone as young as Mrs Wilkes to have it. Why, what's she doing?'

Spencer explained about the keys but Dad said she'd have to be doing loads more weird stuff for it to be Alzheimer's. ‘If she got lost on her way home from work, or went to the shops and then didn't know why she was there, or anything like that, then you'd have cause for concern, but not otherwise. Just sounds like she's a busy woman, and maybe a bit of a scatterbrain—but that's okay. A lot of us are like that!'

Spencer was relieved—especially for Leon. Imagine having a sick parent at this age, having to look after them—take them to the
loo
and stuff. Hardcore.

Spencer leaned back into his seat and started to look for bits of the landscape that he might be able to recognise from their last trip to the ranges.

The wind shifted and raised them and they felt light,
as though the
Drifter
was just a paper plane some kid had made and chucked into the air. They gradually wound their way up the columns of warm air, reaching the top of one thermal before Dad would set off on course to the next, bringing them ever closer to the Stirlings.

‘Is that Bluff Knoll?'

Dad looked and pointed through the windscreen. ‘The tallest one is Bluff Knoll, just over these humps here, see?'

‘Oh yeah,' Spencer said. ‘It's funny how it's hard to tell their height when you're above them.'

‘We'll be dropping down a couple of hundred metres in a few minutes, to get amongst it a bit more.'

‘Cool.'

‘We'll skirt the ranges around their perimeter and then cut across the top, and then we'll head back to Skippers. And then home—via Milano's.'

What a great day. Spencer couldn't believe they were up there; couldn't believe he and his dad were flying in a plane with no engine through the Stirling Ranges. Crazy.

Below them, the ranges looked like a miniature golf course. Green and undulating. Gentle as the world comes.

‘There's one main rule among glider pilots when you're in the sky, Spence.'

‘What's that?'

‘Well, the pilot of the first glider entering a thermal decides on which direction
all
the gliders will fly within that thermal: either clockwise or anticlockwise. Any other glider entering the thermal
must
fly in that same direction, otherwise there's a midair collision just waiting to happen.'

Spencer swallowed. That'd be messy. Very messy. He looked down. ‘You probably wouldn't...'

‘Survive? No, mate, you wouldn't have a hope. That's why it's so important for all pilots to understand and follow that rule.'

There was a sort of a heavy silence, while they contemplated the scenarios.

‘We've actually flown quite far, haven't we?' Spencer
said, looking around. ‘I mean, since we left Reg in that first thermal.'

Dad nodded. ‘We've clocked 60kms.'

‘So we'll probably have done about ... 150kms by the time we get back to Skippers?'

‘Nice maths. On the best soaring days gliders can travel more than 1000kms, Spence—though I should say that is pretty rare. A good day is more typical, with 300 to 500kms fairly common.'

‘Far out.'

‘The best thermals—the strong ones—occur in the warmer weather, so summer is soarers' favourite season.'

But today was not a summer's day. It was still spring. And today, as it turned out, as the clouds darkened and gathered tightly to the south, stealthily, almost without Spencer and Dad noticing, was absolutely not a good day for soaring.

Over the next twenty minutes or so, Spencer felt the glider being buffeted by the wind increasingly forcefully. He looked at Dad; his face showed concentration.

‘We're yawing,' Dad said, pointing to a string on the windshield that was leaning to one side.

‘What does that mean—“yawing”?'

‘We're sort of skidding in the air,' Dad said. ‘It's normal to do it a bit when you're gliding, but this is too much. I'm going to adjust the rudder.'

‘What will that do?'

‘Point the nose to the left or the right, and correct the yaw.'

Another gust of wind slammed into them; Spencer felt himself rise off his seat momentarily.

‘I don't like this,' Dad murmured, moving the stick. ‘This weather's getting nasty.'

Spencer clung to his seat. ‘Should we go back?'

Dad hesitated briefly, then said, ‘Yes, actually. I'm
going to roll us away from the mountain.'

He pushed the stick hard, bringing up the left aileron and lowering the one on the right, and they began to curve up and to the left, away from the angular bulk of Bluff Knoll.

Dad always knows what to do,
Spencer thought.
He's been doing this for years! It'll be fine. It's always been fine.

Dad picked up the two-way radio and spoke into it:
‘Drifter
to base,
Drifter
to base, do you read me, over?'

There was thick hissing and they craned to hear anything at all through it.

Dad picked up the two-way again and spoke clearly just as they copped another wind-slam:
‘Drifter
to base: we are heading back; I repeat, we are heading back due to deteriorating weather conditions, over.'

As he slotted the radio back in its place, Dad's face took on a look that Spencer wasn't so familiar with—a sharpness and intensity—and it made Spencer's guts drop. The
Drifter
had now turned a full 180 degrees and they were heading due south, back towards Skippers Cove. It should be okay. Spencer tried to calm himself.
It's okay, it's okay, it's okay,
he chanted silently, not quite rocking.

But thoughts couldn't change the wind, neither the direction nor the strength of it. Nature always won,
didn't he know that by now? A whopper gust picked them up from underneath—like a giant hand might—and flipped the
Drifter
back against the mountain, hard down. The trees met them first, branches like electricity poles through the windscreen, then the earth greeted them, wrong way up, in a soily, thudding, brutal welcome.

Everything went black.

It was weirdly dark. Everything was coloured like midnight. Spencer couldn't understand why he felt so uncomfortable.

Slowly, it dawned on him that he was hanging upside down, suspended, like on the chunder rides at the Royal Show. His head pumped tightly with blood.

He smelt soil. Moist, earthy dirt. He could feel the coolness of it close to his face.

Then, in that moment of realisation, fear arrived. It wasn't anything like the fear you feel just before you're about to crack yourself on the skate ramp. This was fear at Spencer's very core. A coldness inside him. ‘Dad!' he shouted, in a panic.
‘DAD!'

A moan came out of the murkiness.

‘Oh, Dad, no. Are you okay? Where are you?' Spencer reached out with his hands and moved them through the space, but only touched the cold hard fibreglass fuselage and a set of headphones, dangling
near him like a huge horrible spider.

Moan. Mumbled words. Moan. Then nothing.

Spencer may have been twelve years old, but right then, in the strange, lonely dark, he wet his pants.

His hands were numb. Spencer opened and closed them a few times to warm them up. He ran his fingers along the strap of the safety harness to find the release latch. Before pressing, he reached out his other arm to break his fall. He felt the cold sticky cockpit ceiling. He pressed the latch and his body fell heavily into the ceiling, despite his attempt to prepare. Spencer curled up for a few minutes, wishing he could just stay there and go to sleep and wake up much later on, not here, not like this. As the blood in his head retreated back around his body, he began to feel pins and needles and burning in places that had been cramped for ... he didn't know how long. He had no idea when—or how—this had happened. Spencer felt lightheaded, and clammy, and lay there, still, until his body calmed down.

‘Dad!' he whispered hard.

Nothing.

He couldn't bring himself to try again.

In the strange gloom, he began feeling around for a
better idea of where he was in the plane and how he could get out. Spencer's hands moved across the ceiling and found the cockpit's hinged door. It was no longer shut snugly, protecting them from wind and cold. It was bent open; mangled. His hand pushed into damp soil. He pushed further. Plants and sticks dug into his arm. The door felt as though it could be pushed out completely, so Spencer bum-shuffled closer to it, to get more purchase. He put both hands against it and shoved. Scrubby bushes blocked its path. He could feel there was space beyond the plants if he could just force the door against them. He brought his feet up, resting back on his flat hands, and pushed forcefully. The door crunched through the plants, opening wide. Cool air and dirt—and light!—rushed across Spencer's face. It was still the afternoon, not night! Spencer suddenly understood: the
Drifter'
s windscreen was flat against the ground and buried in bush. Adrenalin kicked in and he forced his body into the opening, squeezing painfully through thorny scrub as he left the
Drifter'
s tiny, dark cockpit.