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collapse under us. ‘Are you all right? This is where you came down.’
    He looked at me with some sympathy, but at the same time he stood well back from me, as if at any moment I might dosomething bizarre. Had he watched my attempt to cross the motorway?
    ‘That was a spectacular landing …’ He stared at the strong current flowing below our feet. ‘I know you’re a stunt pilot, but you must have been rehearsing that for years.’
    ‘You’re a fool!’ I wanted to hit him. ‘I nearly killed myself!’
    ‘Blake, I know! I’m sorry – but I suppose we rehearse that too …’ He played with the antique goggles and helmet, suddenly embarrassed by this rival show of flying gear. ‘I’m working on a picture at the studios – the remake of
Men with Wings
. I play one of the test pilots.’ He gestured deprecatingly at the Ferris wheel. ‘All this is a long-term investment, or was meant to be. It needs something to give it a lift. In fact, I’m surprised more people aren’t here this afternoon. It’s rather funny, Blake, that you’re the only one who’s come …’
    He reached up to one of the gondolas and swung himself into the air, showing off his muscular physique not so much to intimidate me – I could have knocked him down without any effort – as to win some kind of physical respect. His manner was aggressive but ingratiating, his mind already hard at work trying to think up some means of putting my crash to his advantage. As he gazed wistfully at the river, at the vanished traces of my accident swept away by the sunlit back of the Thames, I could see that he regretted being unable to exploit the derelict pier’s chance proximity to my crash-landing.
    ‘Stark, tell me – you saw me swim ashore?’
    ‘Of course.’ As if to forestall any criticism of his lack of action, he explained hurriedly: ‘I was going to dive in, Blake, but suddenly there you were, somehow you’d climbed out of the plane.’
    ‘Father Wingate helped me on to the beach. Did you see anyone try to revive me? Mouth to mouth respiration …?’
    ‘No – why do you ask?’ Stark was peering at me with asurprising look of intelligence in his actor’s face. ‘Don’t you remember, Blake?’
    ‘I’d like to thank him, whoever it was.’ Casually, I added: ‘How long was I in the aircraft?’
    Stark was listening to the restive vultures in their cage. The huge birds were clambering around the bars, trying to seize a piece of the sky. I studied Stark’s unsettled eyes, the fine hairs that stood like needles around his lips. Had he revived me? I visualized his handsome mouth locked against my own, strong teeth cutting my gums. In many ways Stark resembled a muscular, blond-haired woman. I felt attracted to him, not by some deviant homosexual urge the crash had jerked loose from my psyche, but by an almost brotherly intimacy with his body, with his thighs and shoulders, arms and buttocks, as if we had shared a bedroom through our childhoods. I was the younger but stronger brother, the yardstick against which Stark would for ever measure himself. I could embrace him whenever I chose, force his hands against my bruised ribs to see if he had tried to attack me, test the bite of his mouth.
    Confused by my stare, Stark turned his back on the river. ‘How long were you under? Three or four minutes. Perhaps more.’
    ‘Ten minutes?’
    ‘That’s a long time, Blake. You’d hardly be here.’ His composure returned, he watched me shrewdly, curious to see what I would do next. He played with the antique flying helmet, dangling this film prop in front of me as if toying with the suspicion that we were both actor-pilots. Yet I had flown a real plane against the sky, a powered aircraft, not one of his passive hang-gliders collaborating with the wind.
    Along the perimeter road the police car approached, headlamps inflaming the afternoon sunlight. When it stopped by the kiosk I saw that Father Wingate was sitting in the rear seat behind