BOOK EXCERPT: FAMILY MATTERS by SUE MOORCROFT
Gareth never admired Valerie more than when she was in the pilot’s seat, a slim figure with her hair tucked around the headset, controlling the feisty little machine that was about to hoist him into the air.
White with slashes of red and the newest helicopter the flying club owned, it was her favourite; every curvaceous inch. She handled the aircraft – and the sports car he’d soon be able to see gleaming bright blue in the car park as they rose above the trees and hangars – as if every forty-something woman in middle England had the same expensive toys. Hers was such a different life to his.
Valerie. His fascination with her hadn’t worn off.
Last week she’d flown him to the Fenland Airfield to meet her friends for lunch, flying right over his house in Purtenon St. Paul, the village looking like one of those three-dimensional street maps in the vast market garden of The Fens. He’d imagined lifting the roof and peering down at Diane, hunched over her sewing machine inside. Imagined her gaping astonishment to see him perched in this mechanical dragonfly.
The sun beat into the cockpit. Gareth watched Valerie yawn behind her hand.
Languidly, she ran through the checks and processes that were a mystery to him but he was proud that she understood, obtaining clearance from the dispassionate and unseen controller in the tower.
‘Alpha Zulu, cleared to start at your discretion, report ready to lift.’
The rotor began to turn powerfully over their heads and the machine to vibrate.
She lifted her glasses and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands then returned to the instruments as her shades dropped back onto the bridge of her nose. She looked as if she’d been up all night.
‘Are you OK to fly, Val?’ His own voice came back at him over the intercom.
‘Sure.’ She smiled reassuringly. For a moment he was reflected in her sunshades. Valerie was the only person he knew that wore aviator glasses for their intended purpose.
He hesitated, but her lips were tightening with the effort of suppressing yet another yawn and he could see how slack her normally sure movements were. His hand slid to the seatbelt release. ‘Valerie, let’s leave it. You’re tired.’
She laughed. ‘I’m fine!’ Firming up her hold of the collective lever with her left hand and the cyclic control with her right, she glanced cursorily around the airfield as she requested permission from the control tower to lift off.
With the first stirrings of real alarm, Gareth repeated her visual check, but more thoroughly. The flying club was part of a busy local airfield; there was a procession of small aeroplanes that he’d now learnt to refer to as ‘fixed wing aircraft’ taxiing about, racing along the runway and swooping up among the clouds.
“No reported traffic, cleared to lift at your discretion.”
Looking over to the right-hand seat he let his voice sharpen. ‘Valerie, you know you’re not up to this today!’
‘Here we go!’ Smoothly, she rolled the throttle away from her, and lifted the collective. The vibration eased, the engine sweetened as it was given its job to do and Gareth felt the peculiar but now familiar sensations of lift, the seat kicking against his legs and back as they were hoist into the air and paused in hover before Valerie nudged the cyclic control to begin a forward ascent. This was normally a-b-c stuff to her, in her sure hands the machine would drop its nose a little and lift off in a diagonal line. But today the helicopter began to rise uncomfortably steeply, and Valerie frowned, jogging the cyclic forward once more.
With a lurch, the aircraft found the correct angle of ascent. But began to turn slowly as it rose.
Gareth watched Valerie correct the turn clumsily with her feet on the pedals. The ground began to move rapidly beneath them. Too rapidly. ‘For God’s sake!’
‘What?’ Sweat shone on her cheeks as the sun beat into the cockpit. Their angle of ascent sharpened again, and again she corrected. Gareth grabbed the edges of his seat. His heart rate began to climb the scale.
‘That’s enough! You idiot! I’ve just realised what’s going on! Turn her round and put us down. I’ll drive you home. We’ll have a meal on the way.’
She glanced at him and grinned. ‘There’s only one pilot on this aircraft!’ The treetops were already rolling out ahead, and she let the machine fly on towards them. ‘Don’t you feel as if the trees sometimes look almost solid enough to land on?’
‘No I bloody don’t!’ Not remotely they didn’t, thrashing back and forth with the approaching rotor wash.
The controller’s voice came over the radio. “Watch out, Alpha Zulu, you look a bit close to the Eastern perimeter trees.”
Valerie made no response.
Gareth felt fear rise up in him, real and undeniable, and shock at how far below them the ground was, how fragile the cockpit that sheltered them. ‘Valerie! Put this bloody machine down! Are you mad?’
‘Alpha Zulu! You are too CLOSE –’
The aircraft gained speed without height, scudding along parallel to the ground. Abruptly, Gareth changed his plea. ‘Climb! Climb now! Valerie, the trees!’
As if the penny had suddenly dropped, Valerie yanked the cyclic back. The aircraft reared… all Gareth could see was sky.
And Valerie jerked the cyclic forward again.
The helicopter plunged like a furious horse, the businesslike chadda-chadda-chadda of the blades interrupted by a bang and a lurch as if a grenade had hit their tail and at the same time a rifle volley of cracking, splintering wood came from below them as the skids caught the edge of a tree and wrenched them round.
He heard Valerie’s yelp in his earphones, ‘Shit!’
The aircraft pitched; Gareth’s teeth snapped shut on his tongue and he tasted blood. The machine whipped around. And around.
Then pitched earthwards as if spat from a cyclone.
He had time for one coherent thought. Brace yourself for the impact. But then the cyclone hurled them down with a force that made any such attempts puny. His head snapped helplessly forward, back, and his legs and arms flailed into Valerie’s as Valerie’s limbs windmilled uncontrollably into his. He tasted fear, he tasted lunch.
Ferocious energy smashed them into the unforgiving earth.
The engine screamed, and the machine thrashed itself to death against the ground.
Family Matters by Sue Moorcroft is published by Robert Hale and is on sale here: http://cataurl.com/qSlYm .
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