the diminishing figure of Dr. Finch below, waving. She doesn’t wave back. That their affair gives her unfettered access to the Cambridge University Royal Aeronautical Society’s gliders is its main purpose. The sex is all right, but she feels nothing for him otherwise, excepting occasional disgust.
As she rises, Bea’s breathing deepens and slows. A wisp of hair escapes her bun, intruding on the view. She pushes it back. When flying, Bea is sometimes seized by the urge to shave her head, to leave the scenery unsullied. It’s an action that’d enrage her elegant mamá—reason enough to do it—and free herself. But, though she’d not admit this either, Bea’s too vain. Looking in the mirror, she compares herself to what she loves. Sometimes her skin and hair are the nut-brown colour of the female blackbird, her eyes the midnight black of the male. Though perhaps her hair is closer in colour to a crow’s wing and certainly as fine—secretly she wishes it were a little fuller. Sometimes . . .
Be careful! Dr. Finch’s whine invades the sacred silence of the cockpit. Bea shuts him out of her mind. Forget shaving her head, now she’d like a lobotomy, if only to get a little peace.
Don’t be so reckless.
Cállate. Bea presses finger and thumb to her temple. Fuck off.
Bea snatches at the joystick, dips the glider’s nose, then pulls sharply back. The plane arcs up and, for one long elysian moment, all she can see is sky—around, above, within. She is free.
Bea screams an ecstatic scream. “Wooooohoooooo!”
In the field below, her tutor will be cursing and shaking his fist at the heavens. Shutting him out, she gazes up at the clouds, made pink-bottomed by the setting sun, holding the suspension a second longer than she should, before allowing the plane to fall backwards, nose plummeting towards the ground in a full turn of the Catherine wheel, so all she sees is landscape—harvested fields and autumn trees. Until, at last, the inverted earth is scooped up and the plane righted and level again.
Bea gives another gleeful howl. “Woooooooo!”
That’s right, niña, you show him you’re not some silly girl, you’re a sister—
“¡Vete a la mierda, Mamá!” Bea hisses, as annoyed by the invasion of her mother’s approval as she is by her teacher’s rebuke. For nearly eighteen years her mother has encouraged her to act audaciously and, although Bea relishes nothing more than reckless behaviour, she’s damned if she’ll give her mother the satisfaction of knowing it.
Bea banks a sharp left, tipping the plane so suddenly and sharply that she slips across her seat, nearly cracking her forehead against the glare shield. She holds the joystick steady, pushing it as far as it’ll go, so the glider tips and the sky slides. The ground rises to her right, then, all at once, the plane rolls sideways, tumbling, flipping, inverting the world so that earth is sky and sky is earth, suspending Bea like a bat in the cockpit, about to plummet headfirst 2,378 feet to the fields below, in a mashup of body and bone and fuselage. But then she’s rolling, following the circular arc of the left wing as it high-fives and low-fives and high-fives the air again.
“Wooohooooo!”
As the glider balances, Bea’s ecstatic shrieks above are seized by Finch’s cursing cries below, both ascending to the heavens in a discordant harmony of exalted rage.
“Woooo—fucking—hoooo!”
“What the fucking hell were you playing at?”
“I knew you were seething,” Bea says, climbing out of the grounded glider. “I could feel it. I could hear you howling obscenities at—”
“Of course I fucking was.” Dr. Finch is beside Bea before her feet have touched soil. “What the hell were you thinking? In fifteen years of flying I’ve never pulled a stunt like that—a backflip and a barrel roll—without a decent thermal lift. What the fucking hell—”
“Was I thinking? Yeah, yeah. I know, I know.” Bea strides towards the stretch of lax elastic snaking across the grass. Now that she’s grounded she only wants to be airborne again. “Now, stop whining and give me a hand with the catapult.”
“What?” Dr. Finch, rooted to the ground, stares at her. “Are you fucking insane? You’re not going back up there. It’s nearly dark.”
“Nearly”—Bea lifts the elastic, finding the winch—“But not quite.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Oh, come on,” Bea snaps. “Don’t be such a dick.”
“Society rules,” Dr. Finch retorts. “You’ll get me kicked out. Dammit, you’ll probably get me disciplined.”
Bea swears to herself. She wants to fly, wants to feel free again. It’s all she’s ever wanted—a