“Here we are again then.”
I do wish he wouldn’t say that.
We’d been flying together now for the past god knows how many years. And you can be your bottom dollar, that every time we go out to fly, he starts the day off with the same line; “here we are again then.”
It’s got so that I grit my teeth in anticipation of hearing it.
Oh it’s not his fault I grant you, some people are naturally boring, born to it in fact, and in an aristocracy of bores Peter would be a prince. He’s the sort of guy who you’d never even think of calling Pete. He’s a natural beurocrat, a born pen pusher, and a natural snore inducer. He’s a nice guy, but by buggery he’s boring.
He’s an accountant, you’d not have guessed would you? I’ve nothing against accountancy, someone has to do it, it’s just that they tend to be of a kind. He’s got his own practice, down in the town centre, called “Clarke the Accountant,” an almost, but not quite, witty name. He seems to make a healthy living looking at the car he drives and the size of his house.
Always worth popping in to see him at the office, he’s got a little darling manning the front desk, little Asian girl known, enigmatically, only as Sue. Mind you, the price of copping an eyeful of Sue is have to have a conversation with Peter. The boredom of this is alleviated by Sue shuffling in with a tray of coffee and biscuits. She’s a real looker, lovely figure, and she never seems to speak unless spoken to. This is in high contrast to Renee, Peter’s wife, a brassy harridan who seems to have modelled herself on Sybil Fawlty. The worse case scenario is popping into Peter’s office when Sue is out, and Peter and Renee are having one of their never ending arguments. These normally revolve around money, to Renee spending money is both a sport and a high art, to an accountant like Peter it’s the ultimate sin
Anyway, as I said we’d been flying together for years, and Peter had become one of the clubs fixtures. To be fair he did do the clubs books for free, and we always showed a healthy balance each year.
This trip we’d been planning for weeks, we’d been hoping to push out into the badlands, go looking for some real big cross country mileage. The plan was this, we’d tow the winch out into open country, the border of the desert, get us winched up early in the day, and then head off as a gaggle. Flying as economically as we could, we’d try and push out into no mans land, with the driver of the winch truck following us on radio and by sight. We wanted to clock up as many miles as we could, get some big distance flying done.
We were all amazed when Peter signed up for it. Normally nothing on earth would tempt him out of his office on a working day, you couldn’t crow bar him out. He even took a laptop out on the hills when we flew on a weekend, so he could number crunch while waiting for the right conditions. But for this trip we’d agreed to drop everything and go, no matter what day of the week was suitable. If boring is his middle name, then methodical, pernickety, forward thinking, staid, unemotional, and others must also have been considered. So when we discussed this at the club’s monthly meeting, and he said “count me in, it sounds fun,” several of us choked on our beers. For him to even attend a meeting was rare.
So the plan was fixed. We’d chosen our launch site, miles from anywhere, but with open desert fanning out all directions north. There were several dirt roads in the area, and our Range Rover can handle most of what the desert could throw at it. The plan was, as I said, to stick together as a gaggle, and to fly as a team, making all decisions, on direction etc, together. We all have good radios and GPS, we’d all have camelbacks, and we’d all be carrying survival kit.
The plan was to wait for a good days forecast, then drive to the site the night before in order to camp, and get as early a start as possible. We’d all fixed it with work, well I’d fixed it with work, all the others are self employed, giving truth to the statement, that anyone self employed has an idiot for a boss. There were four of us flying; Big Bob, who’s the shortest guy in the club, Banksy, Peter, and me. Banksy’s wife Helene was going to do our winching, driving and retrieve. She’s a good pilot herself, but didn’t fancy pushing things the way we intended to.
It took weeks before a suitable forecast came, so all of us were hyped to the hilt when it actually arrived. They drove out in the Ranger Rover, I got the wife to drop me after work. The winch was all set up when I got there, they’d thrown a few tents up, and got a barbie going. We drank beers, poured over the maps, planned and anticipated, and drunk more beers. Funny thing happened at about 10.30 that night, Sue turns up, dressed for a change, in jeans and a T-shirt, looking even more tasty than she does in her office suit. She came over to Peter and gave him a small sheaf of papers. She then smiled, and gave a sort of bowing nod, before driving off.
“Do you always let the staff use your posh car, Peter?,” chipped in Big Bob. “Only when they are delivering important papers mate,” he replied. So we had a last beer and crashed out for the night, Peter staying up to study some of the papers Sue had delivered.
The morning was chilly, but the sky was clear and already with the sun coming up over the horizon the day was heating up. Banksy took off first, flew a few circles before landing. “No thermals as of yet, but there is that nice soft northerly breeze we were hoping for” was his verdict.
We waited, Peter had a bit of breakfast, but the rest of us were too hyped up to eat, typical of him. At about 9.00 am, a decent thermal scuffed up some dirt just close to us, and Banksy took off to see the score. He stayed up, and so the rest of us threw the kit on, and Helene winched us up.
Once we were all in the air and thermaling nicely, Bob led us off on the first of many hops between thermals. I’m sure Bob has got built in infra red vision or something, he never fails to find a thermal. We soared and swept across the desert plain, far below Helene tracked us, occasionally heading off in a different direction to us, to avoid obstacles on the ground. This was turning out to be even better than we thought.
We’d been in the air for a couple of hours, our conversation on the radio’s had dropped to nothing as we concentrated on flying economically, when we got a call from Helene; “I don’t know if you buggers up there have noticed, but there’s a range of hills, or bloody great dunes, ahead?” We looked to where she meant, a long range of dunes and sandstone bluffs, some hundreds of feet high, formed a solid block virtually to the horizon, and the wind was taking us straight down the middle of them. She chipped in again; “I can get through them, but it’s tricky terrain, so you’d best be careful.” “OK babes,” Banksy replied, “we’ve thought about this, we knew we’d hit them eventually, so we’re prepared, you drive carefully, keep an ear to the radio, we’ll give you our GPS location when we’re down.”
We were high enough to not have to worry about the hills, and some of them were generating boomers of thermals, so on we went. I was loving every second of the flying, it was close to perfection. Sweep across to a thermal, pull some tight 360’s to find the core, and up we go like an elevator. Get to the top, circle for as long as it lasts, then follow Bob to the next one he’s picked up on his radar. It had almost become hypnotic, but eventually the day was coming to an end, and each thermal was getting weaker. We’d started thinking about landing when Banksy broke radio silence; “Peter, where in the name of sodding hell do think you’re off to?” I looked over my shoulder. Peter, who had been holding his circle slightly higher and behind of me, was heading off at a tangent from us. His voice broken and crackling came back “I jus.. wan.. to see if I c..n c…ch an…ther one.” Banksy swore like a trooper, “we agreed to stick together you…” I wont say what he said, it wasn’t very nice, and I couldn’t imagine Peter’s mother doing that,
Peter pushed on regardless, actually gaining hight. We had already started to descend, Banksy was shouting instructions to Peter. These went along the lines of: “make sure you keep in radio contact, give us your position off the GPs, and don’t go anywhere until we get to you.” There’s about eight words missing from that, but I think the meaning’s the same.
The last thing I saw of Peter was his glider against the rapidly darkening sky, several kilometres away, still high.
We got down safely. Banksy got on the radio to Helene, gave her our position, and asked her to try getting Peter’s position off him. The radio in the Range Rover is a powerful piece of kit, but even so we had enough problems getting her, it’s these dunes blocking out everything. She got to us, but hadn’t had any luck getting hold of Peter.
We camped over night. In the morning, Helene went off to get the emergency services alerted. We winched up, but didn’t head off cross country, we just got as high as we could and circled the area. We were all pretty freaked out by then. The emergency van arrived later that arvo, and search and rescue went into full swing. We gave as detailed an explanation to the cops as we could, and included all we knew about where he had headed off to. The cop shook his head, “silly bugger’s got himself lost in the biggest area of nothing south of Darwin.”
They never found him. His glider was found a few days later, miles from where we had seen him last. His kit was found soon after. They did a search, it went on for a good couple of weeks in fact, but no trace of him was ever found. There was an inquiry, and a Coroners inquest, it cleared us of any blame I’m glad to say, and Peter was given an “open” verdict not “death by misadventure,” as they never found his body.
Several things emerged during the inquest. It would seem that Peter hadn’t been as good at his work as we’d thought. Over the past six months or so a million and a half dollars worth of his clients money had gone unaccounted for. He’d damn near bankrupted one business, and left others scratching for cash. Fortunately the clubs books were all in order, and our cash still healthily in the black.
His house was re-mortgaged to the hilt, and that and all his worldly goods were taken into account at his bankruptcy hearing. Renee emerged from that looking ashen, not a cent in the world to her name. She ended up back living with her mother, a woman next to whom even Sybil Fawlty would look an angel. Last we heard she’d been hitting the bottle quite hard.
The club instituted a new trophy last month, the “Peter Clarke Memorial Trophy”, everyone calls it the “Boring Cup” though. It’s for the best long distance flight (one way).
Funny thing is, last Thursday was the first anniversary of the day he went missing. Me and Banksy and Big Bob and a few others did a flight in the desert in his memory, I think Bob was going for the cup, he got 230 k in that day, all over friendly terrain though.
When I got home there was a postcard on the mat, with a Thai stamp on it. A lovely post card of a beach, with a pretty Thai girl in a bikini on it, she looked familiar somehow. And the only message on it was “Here we are again then.”
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