—
When we returned to Nairobi, I clocked through hours of instruction like a possessed woman, taking every moment Tom could give me. Four weeks after Denys’s accident, nearly to the day, Tom and I finished a short run and seamless landing at the aerodrome in Nairobi. Most of the town was yet asleep, and the Ngong Hills were draped over with mist and stillness, but the morning wasn’t over. Tom had a secret in his pocket. Instead of taking her back to the hangar, where Ruta waited, he had me spin the Moth around for another take-off. This one would be mine, though. My first solo.
“Just once around the paddock.” He smiled. “Nice and steady.” He took off his helmet and scrambled out casually, as if this were something we always did—me alone behind the controls, and him on the ground.
Nice and steady would certainly do it, but adrenaline tumbled through me so crazily, I felt dizzy. Could I remember everything Tom had said over the last months and put it to use? Could I quiet the clamouring in my head, the vision of the ten thousand things that could go wrong? Only one had taken Denys’s life, and that was still an utter mystery.
Willing my hands still, I gave Tom a thumbs-up. Ruta came out of the hangar and stood beside Tom, and I waved to them both, taxiing the Moth to the end of the murram strip, where I pointed her nose at the implacable hills and opened the throttle.
I thought about the tug of altitude and the Moth’s weight. I thought about speed and wind, the hundreds of adjustments Tom made without thinking, but that I was still learning. He had faith in me, though. I felt that solidly, and Ruta’s belief in me, too, as he raised his hand once. Kwaheri. Farewell.
Gunning hard, I sped along the hard-packed runway, my heart in my throat, every nerve alive. I waited until the last possible moment to pull back on the stick, and then the Moth inched up, bobbling a little, and gradually steadied, finding the wind and her centre. Behind me I felt Tom and Ruta, and Denys, too. Before me lay everything, an entire world opening moment by moment under my own strong wings.
I was off.
4 September 1936
There is no way of knowing how close I have come to the clawing reach of the Atlantic when my engine finally kicks and thrashes to life again. The sound of it is jarring. It startles me as if I’ve been asleep for years and years—and it’s possible I have been. I push the throttle forward to full power and ease back on the stick, away from the icy waves. The Gull’s nose tips upwards again, finally responsive. She climbs, scrabbling her way up, tooth and claw, scaling the face of the storm. I am climbing with her, out of an inner fog. A tangling blindness.
It’s only when I’m level again and my hands have stopped trembling that I let myself think about how long my engine might have been silent, and how ready I was to give in to the stall, to plummet when I felt the bottom go. I’ve always had that in me, but also a sound inner compass. There are things we find only at our lowest depths. The idea of wings and then wings themselves. An ocean worth crossing one dark mile at a time. The whole of the sky. And whatever suffering has come is the necessary cost of such wonders, as Karen once said, the beautiful thrashing we do when we live.
—
For several more hours the black rain doesn’t give way. I follow the rim of the long night, almost delirious with exhaustion, and also more awake than I have ever been. Finally, I spot the ghostly beginnings of daybreak—or are those hints of land? The window glass has a mantle of ice, and fog shifts in front of my eyes, but soon I know I’m not imagining it. The grey-black canvas becomes water, and then clear waves, and then the growing form of a cliff’s edge like swept-up cloud ledges. I have reached North America, the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Newfoundland. Flickering smudges becoming more real by the minute. This is the place I’m meant to go.