"LIKE, TOTALLY PICKED UP”
By
David Shaw
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 David Shaw
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
THIS STORY IS INTENDED FOR ADULT READING ONLY
There are some lovely beaches down in the south west corner of Western Australia. Long stretches of pristine sand dividing the Indian Ocean from the dense forests of tall karri trees. Hundreds of kilometers of unpolluted and mostly unpopulated coastline stretched like a silver ribbon between rockbound headlands. Very nice -- except when your idiot of a boy friend has bogged down his four wheel drive on one of those deserted beaches.
Believe me, there's no better way of exploring the strengths of a relationship than sharing a shovel on a scorching hot December day, especially when all your sweaty efforts to dig large holes in fine sand are proving futile.
Which was one of the reasons why my feelings for Jeff Mosey were sinking even faster than the Honda RV. Not that it was much of a relationship to begin with, we'd only been out a few times, and I doubt there would even have been a first time if I hadn't been a newly arrived nurse in a small town where single men featured on top of the endangered species list.
I certainly hadn't wanted to spend my free time driving down some isolated bush track to go rock fishing. As far as I'm concerned fishing is an old man's occupation. If Jeff had any plans on a big seduction scene, then dragging me out into the sticks to get sun burnt and pestered by flies was absolutely the wrong way to do it. He should have invited me into his flat to watch cricket -- there's almost nothing I wouldn't do rather than watch that totally boring game.
But no, he'd missed his chance and now we were bogged down in loose sand before we'd even got to the fishing spot. The nearest sealed road was five kilometers away, five kilometers of bare dirt trail bulldozed through the trees. No other signs of life on the beach, not even a boat in sight anywhere and Jeff snarling at me all the time just because I happened to be driving the bloody vehicle when it sank down to the axles. He was the one who was telling me where he wanted to go!
The most annoying thing of all was my job -- I was scheduled for the night shift at the local hospital. A fine fool I was going to look if I couldn't even phone in and let them know I wouldn't be able to make it. Oh yes, just to complete the fiasco, we were outside mobile phone range.
Then something entirely unexpected happened. I was walking back from the tree line with an armful of old branches to push under the Honda's back wheels when I heard an engine. At first I thought it was a car and then I saw a small aircraft skimming along the shoreline so low it was well below the tops of the karri trees. It was the strangest looking thing I'd ever seen -- not like a normal plane with a wing on each side. Instead there was just one triangular wing that looked something like the sail of a yacht, with red and white patterns on it. Hanging underneath the wing was the rest of the plane, what there was of it.
Have you ever been to a fairground and had a ride in one of those little plastic pods that hang down from the edge of a big horizontal wheel? If you can imagine something like that, only smaller, with the pilot sitting in it and a windscreen down around his knees, you've got the idea. The only other difference was a nose wheel at the front and two more wheels at the back with pointy hoods over them.
Yes, and the engine of course. The plane was flying so low that I could easily see the square shape of the engine behind the pilot, with the propeller mounted right at the back, pushing the strange little contraption along.
I suppose it was traveling about as fast as a car would on a normal road and as it came level the pilot waved to us with one hand. The other one was resting on a bar -- like a trapeze bar, I guess -- which was the bottom piece of a triangle which came to a point underneath the wing. There were two more metal bars that I could also see, from the front and back of the pod and also joined together at the wing. They obviously carried the weight of the pod and somehow the pilot was steering himself around with the bar he was holding.
Anyway, whatever he was doing and however he was doing it, he seemed to be having a much more enjoyable morning than we were. As soon as the plane was past us the engine revved up and the plane climbed away at a steep angle until my eyes were watering from the strong sunlight as I tried to watch it. The show seemed to be over, although when I got back to Jeff he was still scanning the sky with his hands cupped around his eyes.
"That must be what they call a microlight. Strange looking thing, like an overgrown hang glider. That's the way they steer hang gliders, with a bar attached to the wing, and they push and pull against the bar to move the centre of gravity of whatever is hanging underneath it."
One of the most amazing things about men is the mass of totally useless knowledge they always have tucked away in their heads. As though it mattered what sort of aircraft it was when we were still stuck in the sand. And then we heard the tiny plane coming back again, even lower than before.
It looked as if it belonged in a sci-fi movie, with its strange shape and the way it was hanging in the wind like a mechanical hawk. I thought it must be a hell of a way to fly, in a seat with nothing much around it but empty air.
Then the engine noise dropped off and I quickly changed my mind about even thinking about wanting to try it -- the wing had dipped lower and it seemed the microlight was going to crash. The wheels wavered around unsteadily a meter or so above the hard packed sand left by the ebbing tide, like a drunk trying to get his arse back onto a bar stool.
Then the plane settled down onto the sand with the sudden deftness of a seagull dropping onto a morsel of food. Little gusts of water sprayed out from underneath the wheels as the pod's weight fell onto them. The wet sand seemed to slow their rotation down very quickly, the plane wallowing to a walking speed about fifty meters away from our RV and the pilot revving up again to keep his wheels turning until he was level with us.
The high pitched yammering of the engine stopped and the propeller blades jerked to a halt. The pilot carefully tilted the wing over, keeping control of it with the steering bar until the wingtip nearest to us was resting on the sand.
Jeff and I were watching all this with surprise and interest. We kept on watching as a tall slender man in tight fitting blue flying overalls unstrapped himself and climbed out of the pod. In fact it was only his figure -- or his lack of it -- which showed him to be a man because his head was completely covered with a wrap around motor bike helmet that had a tinted glass vision panel in the front of it. By God, I thought, I was right, not only does the plane look like a prop from a Star Wars set but the pilot dresses like Darth Vader.
Before he even touched the helmet the pilot took something out of the pod, something which looked like a giant corkscrew, then walked along the wing to the down-tipped end and rotated the corkscrew into the sand before tying a cord from the handle to the wing tip. His intention was clearly to prevent the wing being blown around.
At close range my impression of the wing being like a yacht's sail deepened. The whole thing was just a collection of alloy battens wrapped around with colored fabric. It seemed incredible to me that anybody would trust their life to such a flimsy support. Still, it wasn't my worry, though as the pilot finally removed his helmet I watched with interest to see what sort of a madman he was.
It was another surprise to see that he was pretty old. In his late thirties for sure, though very well preserved, with a lot of dark hair turning gray at the temples, a sharp angled face with a wide smile that showed off excellent teeth and crisp blue eyes with crinkles of smile lines around them.
Behind the good looks there was confidence as well, self confidence and self assurance. If I'd seen this guy in hospital whites I'd have tagged him straight away not only as a doctor but as a highly skilled consultant. Success lingers on some men like after shave, an enticing aroma which never fades away. And as we were looking at him he was looking at us: at Jeff, briefly, then at me, for a longer time.
"Hi, I'm Brett Gorman."
A nice voice, sharp but well controlled.
Jeff introduced us: "Jeff Mosey, and this is Sandra Pearson. You've caught us at an awkward moment. We've got stuck in a soft patch of sand and can't seem to get out of it."
"Yeah, I could see you were in strife. I can't give you a tow but I thought you might want some messages passed on. I couldn't see any antennas on your vehicle and I guess you'd be well out of phone coverage in this neck of the woods."
"That's right. We tried to use our mobiles but it was a waste of time."
The pilot was still looking at both of us but I knew that most of his attention was on me. Not that I could really blame him for that because my sweat soaked tee-shirt was sticking closely to my bra. Nor were my shorts leaving much to anybody's imagination. In fact I felt quite flattered that I could get a guy like that taking second and third looks at my legs.
"Is there anybody around here who could help you out?" Brett asked.
"There's a service station in Kilkenny Ponds," Jeff said. "They've got a Land Rover with a recovery winch on it. That could haul us out. Kilkenny Ponds is the nearest town. It's about sixty k's from here, though."
Brett smiled, showing off his teeth like a model in a toothpaste ad.
"It's rather less. It's forty seven point two kilometers from here. Or at least it is to the Kilkenny airstrip as the crow flies. I suppose it must be another five or six k's into the town itself. I've got it nailed down on the GPS because I flew out from there this morning. My car's still there."
"Oh." Jeff smiled a little himself, clearly as relieved as I was at the prospect of being saved a lot of trouble and effort. "Maybe you could phone through to the service station when you get back?"
"No problem. It's a lovely day for a flight and I doesn't matter to me which direction I fly in. I can go back to Kilkenny Ponds now and call in from the flight office on the strip. With the wind blowing the direction it is I should be there in about half an hour. Do you have the servo phone number?"
Jeff thumbed it up on his mobile and Brett wrote it down on the back of his hand.
"Could you phone another number as well, please," Jeff asked. "It's for the hospital in Kilkenny Ponds. Could you let them know that Sandra won't be able to come in for her shift tonight?"
Brett nodded and took another long look at me: "You're a nurse, Sandra?"
"Yes."
"Can't have the hospital running short of nurses -- you never know when there might be an emergency. Why don't I give you a lift back to Kilkenny Ponds in the trike and then drive you into town?"
I didn't quite realize what he meant by a trike until he nodded towards the tiny plane and my stomach flipped over like a tossed pancake.
"Me! Go up in that thing!"
The obvious fear in my voice made him shake his head in rueful amusement.
"Sandra, it's not like bungy jumping off Sydney Harbor Bridge -- it's fun, and safe. I'm a licensed and insured pilot and my passengers are all insured as well. I've got a spare helmet and a spare set of overalls on board, though you'll hardly need them in this hot weather. Believe me, you'd be safer on board a trike than you would be on a 747."
His eyes crinkled up in another sudden smile.
"And I should know, I fly 747's for a living."
It was an exciting idea and an attractive one in many ways, provided I didn't find myself gripped in total panic once we were off the ground. Rather stunned, I walked over the plane and had a second look at it. True, there were two seats in it, one behind the other, but that was about all you could say there was in the way of accommodation. It was only at the front of the pod that the top of the plastic windscreen came up to about waist level. On either side of the front seat the bodywork was hardly ankle high, and no more than that around the back seat.
I imagined myself looking straight down from one of them, down into a drop of hundreds of meters, and my insides did another backward somersault off the high board.