Five Miles Out

Surveying the outlying woodland, Jason Q. felt secure, like feeling secure under blankets on a dark night, quite happy that he was safe but intellectually aware that should anyone desperately want to try and get through to the house, this mass of tall, elegant trees would do nothing to stop them. This feeling perhaps confirmed his general ease with life, the fact of his distance from the really troubling bits of the world, the insulation of rural communal spirit. Nothing of the nightly news ever got through here and, he thought, none of this utopia had been created by anyone with a bunker, a regiment's-worth of armament and enough tinned food to last until the "invaders left after we give them a good kicking." In his head Jay heard his neighbour's voice saying this, the rabid rantings of a man angry with himself yet blaming it all on others. Confronted with an angry red-clad soldier rampaging through the lower field, Mr. Blether would run a mile rather than put a bullet in him. Humans of every political colour are different from critters; you can't wipe out people like you do with the critters. Mr. Blether was a pussycat.

Jay could see Mr. Blether at his vegetable patch, operating more slowly than he remembered him doing all those years ago when they first met, but still with the same strange jerky movements that the other locals put down to shell-shock. Jay could not imagine Mr. Blether in the army, at least not in any fighting part of it; the old man's armoury was his voice, still loud and strong, though the meaning now, was lost, just random ranting and proof of the nationalism long-ago forgotten by most of the people round here. Mr Blether was like a ghost, visible to some, heard by all and tolerated by most. It was strange that despite the remoteness of the area, the politics leaned towards the centre so Mr Blether called almost everyone "liberal" by way of insult and was not wrong.

The day was dreamy, early still but building up to a heavy mass of air pressing down on everyone. The children in the school would not concentrate and the teacher would get angry but find no energy for discipline and so again lessons would decamp outside, and less and less would be taught and less and less would be learned until the school day fizzled out in a less-than-enthusiastic reading from a favourite book, the children lying back, hands over their eyes against the sun, somewhere between sleep and dreaming, with the buzzy voice of the teacher skimming their brains. Jay remembered these days and wished he was back there.

A plane flew high above them, silent at this distance, half-way to space possibly, its trail only just visible against the hazy-blue sky, competing with the lazy paths of insects dodging the swallows below. So many layers of flight, the bees in the flowers below his head, the various unidentified etymology just out of reach, the swallows, the gulls further up and then the random sketches made by the airliners five miles out. A crescent moon was just visible, completing the logarithmic scale of things, a graph getting ever steeper as we travel to the stars. All of this was just there; it had no meaning, none of it would matter in a few minutes when he went inside for juice and cookies. All around the trees protected this little group of houses, the sky was the window to everything outside, and everything outside was just what could be seen, a happy sky of blue and aircraft, of birds and insects, floating silently. The cold war ended.