Stray Pilot

Thomas Tellman, an RAF pilot who disappeared pursuing a UFO in 1948, unexpectedly returns entirely un-aged to a small town on Scotland’s north-east coast. He finds that his 7-year-old daughter is now a bed-bound 87-year-old woman suffering from dementia. She greets him as her father but others assume she is deluded and that Thomas is an unhinged impostor or con man. While Thomas endeavours to blend in to an ordinary life, his presence gradually sets off unpredictable consequences, locally, nationally and globally. Members of the British Intelligence Services attempt to discredit Thomas in advance of what they anticipate will be his public disclosure of evidence of extra-terrestrial activity, but the local community protect him. Thomas, appalled by the increase in environmental damage that has occurred in his 80 year absence, appears to have returned with a mission: whose true nature he guards from everyone around him.

Douglas Thompson’s thought-provoking novel is unashamedly science-fiction yet firmly in the tradition of literary explorations of the experience of the outsider. He weaves together themes of memory loss and dementia, alienation, and spiritual respect for the natural world; while at the same time counterposing the humanity inherent in close communities against the xenophobia and nihilistic materialism of contemporary urban society. Of all the book’s vivid characters, the fictional village of Kinburgh itself is the stand-out star: an archetypal symbol of human community. In an age of growing despair in the face of climate crises, Stray Pilot offers a passionate environmental allegory with a positive message of constructive hope: a love song to all that is best in ordinary people.

Cover design: Tenebrae

Stray 

     Pilot

DOUGLAS THOMPSON

Elsewhen Press

Also by Douglas Thompson from Elsewhen Press

Entanglement

The Rhymer: an Heredyssey

‘Bird Brains’ in Existence is Elsewhen

Stray Pilot

First published in Great Britain by Elsewhen Press, 2022

An imprint of Alnpete Limited

Copyright © Douglas Thompson, 2022. All rights reserved

The right of Douglas Thompson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, telepathic, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. Extract from Virgil’s Aeneid, translated by John Dryden, first published in 1697; Extract from The Tyger by William Blake, first published in 1794; Extract from Crossing the Bar by Alfred, Lord Tennyson, first published 1889. Thomas’ biblical quotation is from the Holy Bible, The American Standard Version (ASV), published in 1901 by Thomas Nelson & Sons.

  Reverend Baliol’s biblical quotations are from Holy Bible, New International Version Anglicized, NIV Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Elsewhen Press, PO Box 757, Dartford, Kent DA2 7TQ

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978-1-915304-03-2 Print edition

ISBN 978-1-915304-13-1 eBook edition

Condition of Sale

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

This book is copyright under the Berne Convention.

Elsewhen Press & Planet-Clock Design are trademarks of Alnpete Limited

Designed and formatted by Elsewhen Press

This book is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, agencies, organisations, news media, governments, are either a product of the author’s fertile imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual states, newspapers, broadcasters, companies, agencies (fascist or otherwise), places or people (living, dead, alien, or future) is purely coincidental.

Irn Bru is a trademark of A.G. Barr p.l.c.; Scottish International Airshow is a trademark of The Airshow (Scotland) Ltd. Use of trademarks has not been authorised, sponsored, or otherwise approved by the trademark owners.

For Ally (1955-2016), in whatever dimension.

Contents

Virgil

01   02   03   04   05   06   07   08   09   10   11   12   13   14   15   16   17   18   19   20   21   22   23   24   25   26   27   28   29   30   31   32   33   34   35   36   37   38   39   40   41   42   43   44   45   46   47   48   49   50   51   52   53   54   55   56   57   58   59   60   61   62   63   64   65   66   67   68   69   70   71   72   73   74   75   76   77   78   79   80

The souls that throng the flood

Are those to whom, by fate, are other bodies ow’d:

In Lethe’s lake they long oblivion taste,

Of future life secure, forgetful of the past.

Virgil, The Aeneid. (Trans. John Dryden)

01

A late summer evening in July. The landscape is uncharacteristically flat for Scotland. Good farming land on a flat east-coast plain with Pictish stones dotted here and there, testament to generations of culture reaching back into time beyond known history. The twentieth century brought an airfield, then a military base, to this stretch of coastline. Between the chain-link fencing of that and a large forest of densely-planted fir trees, sits a house on its own a mile and half from the nearest village. Within its kitchen sits Doctor James McCaffrey, resting for a moment at the last of his house-calls. Horizontal bars of yellow-orange light and shade from the lowered kitchen blinds fall across his hands and face, and the table at which he sits and writes into his personal notebook:-

Mrs Mary Tellman is eighty-seven years old and her memory is shredded. Human memory, indeed human consciousness as far as scientists have so far been able to tell, is not unitary but vested in many different layers and compartments of the brain that generate them like a cinema projector. For most of our lives, more or less in the flush of youth, we all enjoy the wonderful illusion that we are one entirely unified and integrated thing, a person, character. It’s such an appealing and useful notion, that most of us go quite far to suppress any clues to the contrary. But the clues are many, mostly in very young children and in the very old, the latter of which seem even now scarcely to be studied for this purpose. The progressive failing of differing aspects of memory and consciousness that can be observed in the very old and dying, is like a slice through the mind of the human organism, in which an invaluable insight is briefly afforded, of how ‘we’ are made, how the magic-lantern illusion of ‘I’ is generated…

The unusually loud cooing of a wood pigeon causes Doctor McCaffrey to look up, to see it sitting outside on the window sill behind him, throwing its enlarged shadow across the kitchen floor and wall like some monstrous mother hen. He resumes writing:

…There are thought to be at least five different kinds of memory the human brain is capable of. Thus is it possible that Mary Tellman can remember the automatic and habitual such as locking her doors, or which kitchen cupboard her dinner plates are kept in, but cannot recall something said to her repeatedly only five minutes beforehand – never mind last week – while also being able to remember in detail events of sixty years ago. Thus is it possible that every time she wakes up from an afternoon nap she finds herself in a house that is completely unfamiliar to her, even though she has lived in it for the last eighty years. At that point, it must seem to her exactly as if she has travelled forward in time. Just a moment ago, as far as she is concerned, she was five years old and living with her parents in Ayrshire in the house she grew up in. When she wakes up she sincerely asks where her parents are, and is visibly devastated when someone such as myself has to tell her that they are both dead. Who else have I got left? she then asks, meaning aunts and uncles, apparently having at that moment no conception that she is a mother and grandmother herself with children of her own, that she had a husband once, whose picture still sits on her mantelpiece. Even when I direct her to look down at her own old and wrinkled hands, the idea that she has lived through the last eighty years, rather than been cruelly transported through them by some magical technology, still seems impossible for her to accept.

Movement in Doctor McCaffrey’s peripheral vision catches his attention. He looks down to see a large spider working its way across the kitchen floor. Having disciplined himself since childhood to eschew revulsion in favour of fascination for all living things, he even tolerates it climbing over his shoe. He resumes writing:

This is not fiction, let alone science-fiction, but real. The genuine experience of how this old person’s life and world feel to her every day. And her case is not by any means unusual or uncommon. It is almost as if our capitalist society of endless consumption, and therefore fantasy of endless life, appears to have an elective blind-spot for death and anything related to it. Hence the relative silence surrounding senescence. Is it up to me to study it? I don’t have the means or time, a simple G.P. in a rural practice, whose own youth is passed. But imagine the irony. If through telescopes and microscopes, out there on the edges of space and amid the interstices of the tiniest things in biological labs or the quantum racetracks of physicists: humankind searches and searches in vain for the meaning of life. While all the time here it is, hidden in plain sight, available for anyone to see, in the decaying mind of an old lady…

As Doctor McCaffrey stops writing, a small sound from the next room catches his attention and he stands up and goes through to check on his patient before he will exit the house and drive back to his own home for the night. Standing at the door to the bedroom he sees that the sound was only a moth battering itself against the blinds, and that Mrs Tellman seems sound asleep now after taking her medication. Turning around and walking down the hallway past the living room, he notices three things: the sound of the radio constantly playing classical music at low volume to relieve the old lady’s sense of loneliness, how old-fashioned the floral wallpaper is, and the black-and-white photograph on the sideboard of her as a little girl with her father standing behind her – a handsome smiling man in a pilot’s uniform, his strong broad hands resting on his daughter’s laughing shoulders.

02

The sun rolls down below the hills, slowly taking the entire landscape into darkness. At the light’s last gasp, the shadows thrown across the house from the pine forest nearby are impossibly long. At this time of year the sun will roll on its back, hidden below the northern horizon for only a few hours before emerging again, triumphant. Its orange glow will weaken, but never truly leave the edge of the sky. A chill night breeze begins from the ocean a quarter of a mile from Mrs Tellman’s house. The sea’s wave-textured surface, like frosted glass, is progressively illuminated by the stars coming out and moon rising above. The sea sighs and sobs into the sand of the shore, an ancient sound that Mary finds soothing on nights when her ears can catch it through an open bedroom window. Around her house and in the woods, numerous nocturnal creatures stir, emerge, and quietly carry out their usual patrols around her property. Foxes in search of snails and voles, visiting deer in search of the luscious leaves of unusual bushes, their rough tongues allowing them to tug at thorned roses and gorse. A pine marten climbs onto her roof. A late brood of swifts shiver together in their nest in a hole in the eaves of her disused garage.

The sun yawns and rises out of the sea again around four o’clock, its circumradiant glow of orange and yellow building into intense rays of red light that cut a path across the swaying fields of wheat between the shore and the woods, to penetrate the blinds of Mary’s window, leaving a brief flickering apparition of fire on the wall opposite her bed, amid which the shadows thrown from her overgrown pampas grass outside dance wistfully. She sleeps on, aware of nothing. Her hands and feet twitch occasionally. She is dreaming of 1948, the last time she saw her father, of her joy and excitement when he lifted her up in his arms.

03

Mrs Tellman’s local authority carers always operate in teams of two, in their characteristic dark blue loose-fitting uniforms that render everyone safely hygienic and almost sexless. Today’s shift is Magdalena and Christine; Magda picks Chrissy up outside her home first thing in the morning and they drive through the outskirts of Kinburgh and out towards Mary Tellman’s house, chatting over the sound of the car stereo playing popular evergreen songs, the local radio station. How was your holiday, Chrissy? Tenerife was it?

No bad, ta. Kenny got terrible sunburn and drank too much Sangria, the dafty. Flight delayed for two hours on the way back, the usual shite. How did you get on with my stand-in while I was away then? My stunt double? Young Becky, was it?

Beyond the RAF airfield out of town, they turn off the main road and wind along the poorly maintained drive to the Tellman house. The car crunches over the gravel and weeds of the last hundred yards before coming to a halt outside the back door, into whose night-box Magda punches the memorised number and retrieves the key. The girls call out upon entry as usual: Good Morning, Mary!

After a moment, some vague moans of confusion come from the bedroom. By the time the nurses reach the room, Mary is starting to pull herself up, her white hair standing up in wild disarray like an artistic mime of inner confusion. Who’s that? Are you ma daughter? Where am I? Ah’m ah supposed to be here? Who’s paying for this place? De ye ken whaur ma parents are? Ma mither? Ma aunty and uncle? Who huv ah left then?

The nurses move around, preparing to change the bedding and to give Mary a wash, while supplying their stock answers to these questions to which they have long become accustomed. Look at your hands, Mary. See how wrinkled they are? Now what age do you think you might be? Can you imagine your mother still being alive if you’re this age? Don’t worry. Ah said Dinnae fret Missus Tellman! It’s all paid for. The whole house and everything. Paid for by your savings and your pension and your two children.

Children? Weans, ye say? Whaur ur they? The old woman looks around startled as usual, as if the room and its walls might hold answers, as if these unfolding surprises are like some kind of inverted Christmas morning in which she gets to unwrap her own life.

A boy and a girl, a man and a woman, both married. Called…. Magda what did you say they were called again? Andy and Louise, that’s it. I said Andrew and Louise, Mrs Tellman. They live far away from here. One in Australia and the other one in London. But Louise comes to visit you every month or two. Would you like me to bring you the phone and you could call one of them? You’ve just been asleep, Mary, your memory has gone and blanked itself again, emptied oot like a big jug o’ watter, but it will soon fill up again, don’t you worry yourself.

Frustrated at Mrs Tellman’s particularly slow mental reboot this morning, Chrissy resorts to her final ace card to distract the old lady: the framed black and white photograph of Mary as a little girl with her airman father. Like a child with a particularly awesome toy, this always evokes silence and wonder in Mary, like a key with which to find her way back into her own identity.

Ten minutes later, with Mary changed into dry fresh bedding, Magda comes back into the room with a tray of tea and biscuits, to find that Mary is doing the full routine now, calling out, almost talking to herself, about the memory of her father: If only they had foond a body, some trace o’ ma faither, then we could hae grieved, tried to move oan. But ah still wait for him hen, e’en efter a’ these years, still haud oot the hope, vain though it micht well be, that he’ll come hame some day. Am ah a silly auld footer?

Not at all, Mary. Chrissy answers. It was before my time of course, but I remember my mother talking about it. All over the newspapers back in the forties and fifties, wasn’t it? So you’re not the only one that wanted to find him, that wanted an answer. You’re not daft at all. Apparently they still get weirdos, UFO-hunters turning up occasionally, sniffing around the town, looking for mementos or wee green men or something. You’re certainly no dafter than any of them, Mary…

*

Funny how you call her Mrs Tellman and I call her Mary, isn’t it, Magda? Chrissy asks as they drive away ten minutes later.

Magda frowns in the passenger seat, looking down at her phone, checking her messages distractedly. I never really think about it. I suppose you’re right. Being respectful I suppose, but maybe it’s too formal. Maybe it’s a Polish thing. Which do you think she prefers? Maybe we should ask her?

Chrissy shrugs and sighs as she looks left and right, turning onto the main road and rapidly accelerating so as not to slow down a logging lorry bearing down on them on the road behind. She winds the window down and takes a draw on her vaporizer, blowing out clouds of strawberry-flavoured smoke. Have you ever wondered, Magda, what would happen if one of these times we told her something totally different?

Like what? What do you mean?

I mean, if instead of telling her the usual stuff about where she was born, how old she is and where she grew up, what the headline news on today’s newspaper is, what if we told her something far-fetched, like she used to be an aid worker in Africa or something, rather than working in the local post office. Or if we told her that astronauts have just found blue gooseberry bushes growing on Mars…

Magda laughs. You’re a sicko, Chrissy. Honestly.

But she’d forget, wouldn’t she? Completely forget an hour or two later, or as soon as she nodded off to sleep. So why would it matter?

Why would we do it? And what if she didn’t forget? Just for once, just our luck? What if she remembered for once and told someone else? Repeated our crazy nonsense to someone?

But nobody would believe her, would they? Anyone would just assume she was havering as usual, a mad old lady spouting nonsense.

But we would get found out, reprimand, disciplinary hearing, struck off and all that.

No we wouldn’t. No one would find out, or care. No one could be sure. And anyway, only doctors get struck off. The likes of us minions, we just get suspended pending disciplinary hearing panels or some such bullshit.

Dishonourably discharged, like in the army? If you were going to risk your job, you’d be better to do it for something more surreal and daring.

Daring? Chrissy asks as they turn into the cul-de-sac of the Kinburgh council house estate where their next client, a blind old widower with emphysema, is waiting for them.

Yeah. Like telling her that aliens had landed in George Square in Glasgow or something.

Glasgow? Be serious, hen. Chrissy laughs aloud, throwing her head back as she parks and switches the engine off. Even ah wouldnae believe that! Trafalgar Square in London more like. What self-respecting aliens would ever land in Scotland?

04

Later rumours will become confused. Some will say that unusual lights had been seen over Kinburgh earlier that night. That a white-blue light hovered over the woods and briefly produced a single beam downwards like a stage spotlight, like a helicopter searching for an escaped convict, an hour before the pilot was seen marching out of there. Except that there was no noise. Others will say that his propeller aeroplane, a Hawker Sea Fury, was dimly seen and heard landing on the disused airstrip far out amid the sand dunes of the military testing range, whose tall barbed wire borders every Kinburgh citizen is taught to avoid since childhood. Still others will say that the pilot was seen walking calmly out of the sea itself in twilight, as if he could breathe water as easily as air. His airman’s cap appearing first above the waves like a bobbing seal before the rest of him gradually emerged, walking, just walking on and on, staring straight ahead. His first footsteps in the grey sand, showing the imprint of the gripped soles of his military boots, the water running off his uniform, but his body heat and the mild July night progressively drying him as he walks through