The summer wedding, p.12
The Summer Wedding, page 12
‘You must qualify as a pilot first.’
‘How long does that take?’
‘A year, maybe.’ His eyes creased with amusement at Griff’s shocked expression. ‘That would get you off my back for a bit, huh?’
Sitting back in his chair with a sigh, Griff half-heartedly pursued the idea. ‘How did you become a professional balloonist?’
‘I trained in South Africa,’ Dominic said unhelpfully, before leaning away from the table to call a waitress.
‘A bottle of Scotch, more Coke and soda,’ he told her, then turned back to Griff. ‘The local whisky is pretty rough, but it can make mute men talk.’
Griff perked up. He might finally be getting somewhere.
When the drinks came, the young Kenyans realised that their boss wanted to speak alone with the filmmaker and drifted away.
‘Near Barnsley,’ Dominic said as he poured two Scotches, and it was a moment before Griff registered that he was answering the question he’d been asked earlier. ‘Little town called Dinfield. You won’t’ve heard of it.’
‘It featured a lot in the news during the miners’ strike,’ Griff recalled. ‘Didn’t the police beat back several hundred men in the picket line and claim they were rioting? Later they were forced to apologise and pay compensation.’
‘How d’you know that? You can’t’ve been born then.’ Dominic looked surprised. ‘Is that what they teach you public-school lads in history lessons these days?’
‘I’m from the valleys. My father was a coal miner like his father before him. They stayed out the whole year. The strike was talked about more in my house than any world war, although by the time I was born Da had a window-cleaning round and Tadcu – that’s my grandad – was on the dole.’
‘So why d’you talk like a toff?’
‘I still sounded more Captain Cat than Captain Oates when I came out of the forces, but television producers like their stars to be understood by Wisconsin housewives. They’d love your Yorkshire accent,’ he added hastily. ‘It’s got just enough African dust in it to add spice without losing its authenticity. It’s good you’ve kept it, and stuck to your roots.’
Dominic laughed. ‘I gave everything up when I came here, especially politics. When I’m rich I live like a rich man, when I’m poor I live like a pauper. I treat everyone I meet the same, regardless of their wealth or background. And that includes you, toff or Taff.’
Griff raised his glass. The whisky – a local concoction called Hunters Pride – was having a remarkable effect on Dominic, who had started to talk about his memories of the miners’ strike: ‘I was with the pickets most days. Dad was always mad at me for bunking off school, but there wasn’t much he could do once I turned up, and his union brothers loved me. They called me their mascot.’
The little phone counted up the minutes of recording time as the fabulously sonorous voice talked on, as entertaining as always but this time with a whole new script.
Across the room, his two workmates kept a close, wary eye as Dominic laughed and joked about his childhood; they knew such displays of loquacity were rare, and inevitably ended in violent eruptions.
For a man who had given up politics when he came to Africa, Dominic Masters liked to talk about them a hell of a lot, Griff reflected half an hour later, as his phone ran ever shorter on memory and battery life.
The level of the whisky bottle had also plummeted. Griff, who had no great capacity for alcohol, was struggling to pronounce ‘Scargill’ without slurring. Yet Dominic, who was utterly lucid, had given nothing more revealing away than his recollections of union men; his father was clearly a local hero in Dinfield.
‘Is your dad still involved with the union?’ Griff asked, trying to steer Dominic back to more personal memories.
‘You’d have to ask him that.’
‘How did you lose your arm?’ Griff blinked hard to focus on that extraordinary face.
‘Bike accident.’
‘Here?’
Dominic shook his head and topped up his glass. The rain still pounded down outside, audible now that the band had stopped playing.
‘How long ago?’
‘Almost a lifetime.’
‘Were you a balloonist then?’
‘No. I told you I learned in the Cape. I’d been working in a vineyard for an Afrikaans family, driving a delivery truck. They were branching into tourism and my English was better than anybody else’s, so they paid and I flew the guests.’
‘Wise move. You have the voice.’
He chuckled, adopting his thickest Yorkshire brogue: ‘See all, ’ear all, say nowt. Eat all, sup all, pay nowt. An’ if th’ivver does owt for nowt, allus do it for thissen.’
It was starting to occur to Griff that the whisky was a cunning trick to anaesthetise him; Dominic might be talking more and enjoying the craic, but his audience would never remember a word in the morning. He pushed his glass to one side, now too tired to be subtle. ‘So if I Google “Dominic Masters from Dinfield” what will I get?’
He looked across the table sharply. ‘I’ve no idea.’
Having Googled ‘Dominic Masters’ a lot in recent weeks, Griff doubted he would get any more than he had already, which was mostly LinkedIn connections to a sales manager in Basingstoke and a few others who shared the name. As he’d left the UK in the nineties, he was under the internet radar. The Mara River Camp website was lavish, with plenty of breathtaking balloon shots, but Cloud Man’s real name was nowhere on it and his reputation entirely word-of-mouth.
Yet Dominic was jumpy at the prospect of an internet trail, making Griff suspect he was hiding something.
He noticed that his phone had switched itself off, plucked it up and jabbed at the power button. The battery had just a bar left. Almost howling with frustration, Griff set it back on the table. ‘Is it the fear that somebody’s looking for you that keeps you lying low, or are you more afraid that nobody is?’
Dominic closed one eye as he absorbed this. To Griff’s relief, he laughed. ‘Both, I guess. You really don’t want to know.’
‘I really do,’ Griff assured him, eyeing the little phone groggily and saying a silent prayer that it kept going. ‘You want me to fly a balloon to get shot at. You tell me why, one miner’s son to another.’
Dominic laughed so uproariously that he had to mop his eyes. Watching him, Griff blinked in horror. For a moment it had looked as though he had three eyes. Then he realised that the third was the chunky ring Dominic wore.
‘When I regained consciousness after the crash, I could still feel the fingers in my right hand,’ Dominic said. ‘A doctor said something about trans-radial amputation, but I was too spaced out to understand. I was trussed up and pegged out, unable to move anything but my fingers. I thought my girlfriend was beside me… I could feel her hair against my fingertips, her breath on my palm as she kissed it.
‘The doctors insisted there were no fingers or hand there; my lower arm was gone. They kept repeating the same information: “You have been involved in a serious road traffic accident. You have lost your right hand and forearm. You also have severe facial injuries. You have extensive body burns. Please try not to move.” I thought I was dreaming. I just kept flexing the fingers of my right hand.
‘I could only hear medical staff talking to me when they stood to my left – I was totally deaf on the right – but I took in enough to piece together the basics: high-speed crash on the M1, sixty per cent burns, half my face seared away, right arm amputated at the elbow. The accident had happened somewhere near Nottingham, but I’d been transferred to a specialist unit in the south-east. There’d been no other casualties. Any personal belongings that could identify me had been destroyed in the fire. I found out later it was joyriders who took me out – they probably never even saw me or had a clue what was going on until they went from eighty in the fast lane to zero on the central reservation with me and a Triumph Bonneville trapped under their stolen Astra. They’d run off long before it all went up in flames. Unfortunately I was still there.
‘The hospital staff kept asking me who I was, but speaking hurt like hell. My face felt like it had been encased in burning glue. They asked my name again and again. They even offered me an interpreter, thinking I didn’t understand English – one nurse did a lot of parlez-vous-anglais and sprechen-sie-deutsch, I remember. That’s when I realised they really had no way of tracing me. I’d bought the bike from a bloke in a pub in Wakefield and never got around to registering it. Nobody could link it to me. So I stayed quiet.’
Griff was confused. ‘Why not tell them who you were?’
‘I needed time to think, to form a plan before I started to speak again. I knew as soon as they told me how badly injured I was that I mustn’t burden my loved ones. I wasn’t about to expose them to the sight of me reduced to a burned, truncated mess. My dad had been ill a long time and could hardly look after himself. My sister was about to have a baby. My girlfriend—’ He looked away sharply to compose himself. ‘My girlfriend had her whole life ahead of her. I was determined they shouldn’t find out where I was.’
He spoke pithily and without sentiment.
‘The medics put the fact I wasn’t speaking down to post-traumatic amnesia, so the nurses nicknamed me Golden Boy, which got shortened to Goldie, like the Blue Peter dog.’ He laughed drily. ‘It was Olympic year and the Games were on everyone’s minds – they all hummed “Barcelona” as they changed beds and hung around the ward televisions. I was a model patient. I did every exercise, applied every cream, took every drug prescribed and completed every arduous, repetitive drill – but it was bloody-mindedness, really.’ The smile faded. ‘Getting rid of the masks and splints so I could walk free was all I cared about. I was told I’d never regain hearing in my right ear, but when my eye reopened and I could see a world to my right, I wept with joy and so did all the ward staff. It was like being in the third act of a bloody Chekhov play.’
Griff could well imagine the nurses’ reaction to those intense blue eyes looking at them. ‘When did you start to speak?’
‘When the support worker explained that I was unlikely to be eligible for compensation,’ he explained. ‘My bike was uninsured and the lads from the stolen car had never been traced, so any court claim could take months and go nowhere. Once I was out of hospital, I’d be relying on state help, and she needed to know who the hell I was to set that up. The ward staff had already started a collection for me – enough to buy a ferry ticket, I figured – so I told her who I was and that all I needed was my passport. We argued a lot, but I talked her round in the end. She broke a lot of rules sorting it, but she did me proud and never gave me away. I let the nurses think my only family was overseas and that’s where I was heading when I’d healed enough. Their collection grew bigger – clothes, a backpack, a Walkman. A pair of walking boots came from one of the consultants, all scrunched up in the Daily Telegraph. That’s where I read an announcement from the “Wilde family of Downhurst, Lancashire” that their only daughter, my girlfriend, had just got married.’
Griff was no longer aware of low battery life, his own or his gadgetry’s. He felt plugged into the mains.
It was such a simple story. He’d imagined blackmail, murder or smuggling. Instead he had a love story about pride and sacrifice. Unwilling to be a burden to those he loved after an accident had wiped out a burgeoning stage career, Dominic had determined to put as much distance between himself and his home as he could and never look back.
‘I knew I had to walk away and let them all live their lives in peace, but I was so angry when I read that Mia had married, I couldn’t think straight. It was her birthday coming up and I got her a card, but I found my left hand and my screwed-up head were pretty much illiterate as a pair. In the end I sweated tears to write a couple of sentences legibly. The day I left hospital, I asked a nurse to address the envelope and post it. Since then, not a single day has passed when I wouldn’t have retraced my steps to snatch it back and never let it be sent.’
‘What did you write?’
He studied the chunky ring on his finger. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’
‘Try me.’
‘I told her to live her life again and forget I ever existed. God knows how much it must have upset her. She didn’t deserve it. It was her twentieth birthday.’ He sighed. ‘This year she turns forty.’
Griff noticed the way his scarred face contorted with pain as he spoke of her. ‘Surely she deserves to know what happened to you?’
The blue eyes hardened. ‘She got the card. She knows I’m alive.’ He kept all sentiment out of his voice, rigidly self-controlled now.
‘She probably thought it was a suicide note.’
‘Then she’ll already be free.’
‘No, she fucking won’t!’ Griff exploded, drunkenness making him lose his rag.
Dominic made no comment, simply pushing the bottle aside. ‘Mia always said I lived so deep within my roles she thought I might never emerge. This time, I won’t. I’ve been rehearsing enough years to play the part. She was always the instinctive actor; I’ve had to work much harder.’
‘So she’s an actress?’
‘She could never have been anything else.’
Griff racked his memory for actresses he’d heard of with the name Mia, but unless Dominic had followed in the footsteps of Sinatra, Previn and Woody Allen, he guessed her success had to be quite modest. ‘What is she doing now?’
‘Why would I want to know?’
He rocked back in his chair. ‘You let her go because you thought she’d be better off without you. Surely you still want to keep track of her?’
‘She’s not a lioness I reintroduced into the wild. Acting was her life. That’s what she’ll be doing.’
‘Who did she marry?’
‘Leonardo Mikhail Eduardo Devonshire,’ the deep, gravelly voice intoned, like a judge passing sentence.
‘Leo Devonshire?’ Griff snorted disbelievingly.
‘They met at university. He wanted to be a costume designer. She was his “muse”.’
His jaw dropped. ‘You were in love with one half of Leomia?’
‘They’re a double-act?’ He looked confused.
‘You really have no idea?’ Griff was uncertain how much was genuine, how much drunkenness and how much he was being fed a line. He was a fan of Chancellor and caught up with each series in a great box-set binge whenever he had a long enough break to do so. The lead character was complex and renegade and delivered some of the best lines being written in drama right now. Leo Devonshire was a sublime actor, as subtle as he was engaging. His marriage was British celebrity royalty, with Mia a model queen and the ravishing Iris Devonshire its fairy-tale princess.
Griff loved to read British newspapers online and, while celebrity trivia was not his bag, he had followed the Leveson Inquiry and seen enough stories surrounding Leomia and the Devonshires’ long-distance marriage to pick up the insinuation that the real queen in the family was not beautiful Mia. Griff’s younger sister Ceinlys was a huge fan of the couple and argued vociferously that all the rumours were rubbish, but now he had a missing twist to the tale sitting in front of him, and his clever head was racing just as fast as his old-fashioned romantic heart was pounding.
‘Surely it’s only fair to put the record straight?’ he suggested now. ‘It wouldn’t be too hard to get a message to Mia just to let her know that you’re still alive and well and—’
‘No!’ Dominic bellowed. Ngara and Leboo hurried towards him. He held up his hand to them and fixed Griff with a determined stare. ‘You leave her out of it. This conversation stops here and is now forgotten.’ The bluest of eyes fixed him for a long time. ‘I will agree to help you make your film on the condition that you fly the balloon. Then you will be a cloud man too, and I will be your voice. Go to South Africa to get your licence.’
