hobbyists

Samuel, thirty-six, fourteen years in brand roles for the financial services sector, and one brother, no children, and six girlfriends in that time, and well-respected in the model aircraft community. Propranolol. Finasteride. Something had gone wrong for him in the toilet the year before he flew to Copenhagen, the broken red parts of that city in the plane window unresolving under him, with no pattern discernable in any of it at all. 

His good friend Danielsen picked him up from the airport. It was not yet ten in the morning, Samuel having woken at three to take the Thameslink to Gatwick and then to fly, and the stink of Matt’s house was still all over him. Green blocks slotted themselves steadily into the bottom of his phone screen. I’m sorry, so sorry to hear, ya-da, ya-da, your brother, your loss. They drove out west through Hedehusene and south to Ringsted and pressed on southwards through light industrial areas of elevated roadways over warehouses in white and grey, and hatched upstairs windows showing into cramped storerooms, and smoking figures on break, and they drove on further into a countryside that seemed impossible so soon after that, where they passed across long, flat beige land and dipped down into sunken holloways under autumnal slidings of light. 

I used to live on Samsoe, Danielsen said over the ticking of the indicator. Now that was a place.

I could do with a shower, Samuel said. When we get in.

Mm, Danielsen said. Then, he was saying something like: the waking of Angantyr, good tourist story, it’s short. He was buried with Tyrfing, but it was Tyrfing that killed him, his brother Heidrek had wanted to look at the blade. I can’t tell it so well. It was his daughter who woke him.

In Samuel’s dream there were shattered pieces of white plastic all over the floor and trod into the carpet. Beige light through the curtains. He was wearing something like snow boots, or biker boots, maybe. He was in Matt’s house although it was no house he’d ever been in. He could hear his phone buzzing in his pocket. With each step he heard the crunching of inchlong struts and he was aware of the woozy warm-face feeling that came from deep inhalations of poly-cement. He took a knife from his pocket and unzipped the cardboard boxes that were there, lurching toward him, their brown tape crackling, and he took out a photo frame from on top of a pile of damp books. Afterwards he was outside on the pavement, throwing something into the skip, and after that it was less distinct.

He woke again in Vinstrup. He checked his phone in bed; no texts, no signal. The ceiling was a spare, stippled white that reminded him of some coastal childhood holiday, a trip to a lighthouse somewhere, though with no further specifics. In the kitchen Danielsen was emptying two bread rolls onto a plate for him from a noisy plastic packet. He indicated an open pot of jam with a smeary, red knife laid across its open throat, knotted the bread bag with a definite gesture, set it on the table between them, and leaned forward to rest his weight down through his palms.

There was something about that bread bag that attracted the eye. It was ordinary plastic, cheap, shiny and crinkled in red and printed white. A transparent polyethylene window ran up one side where it sat hunched on its end, through which the shapes of three more bread rolls could be seen. Samuel hadn’t been sleeping right. He felt really weird. Almost without thinking he scraped the jam across one roll and ate, his body working independently of him, tasting nothing. The bag had come to fill his field of vision, the rest of the kitchen blurred as if in fish-eye, the outer side of the world coloured in ashes and carbon fibre. For a moment he flushed with a brutal sensation of guilt, but not much after that.

Will you sell me your rig? Danielsen said. He lowered himself into a push-up position. From that low posture he looked up at Samuel, the tips of his cleft chin almost against the surface of the table.

I’d prefer not to sell, if that’s okay. Thanks for breakfast.

Danielsen pushed back up to a standing position and exhaled through his nose. 

That’s okay, he said.

They spent their afternoons in separate rooms. Danielsen’s house formed the peak of a low rise that ran down towards the lake on one side and to a stand of beech at the other. Any further on than that, it was only fields, barrows, and stones. The house had white walls inside and out and at all times echoed a little too loudly, as if somewhere else in the building a door had just been slammed. All the up-sliding windows were stuck open two-thirds down, their transoms marked with aged sellotape or black mould. Samuel sipped on his vape and exhaled, thinking of nothing in particular.

In recent weeks he had been working on a new camera rig.

It was printed in a lightweight fifteen-per-cent infill, and it fit perfectly onto the plate underside of its own small drone. He had set the camera inside a small orb with an automatically adjusting eight-inch rod that collapsed and extended with each slight movement in the air, to ensure the camera stayed absolutely level in its housing. This was to account for one of aeromodelling’s disappointing truths: from the ground your flight may feel smooth, air coursing over your perfect wings, but a flat camera would serve only to reveal the awful jagged line you had actually taken. By Samuel’s estimation, his new design was unique and could not be improved upon. He knelt up from his flight case on the floor and stretched his back out. 

Everything would be alright, he decided. 

Your mindset in life can physically change the world around you, this is well-known. You can be kind to yourself, if you like. If you like, you can even allow others to shoulder your burdens - on occasion. Arrange things, maybe, resolve things, even. 

He went to make another coffee; through a doorway he saw Danielsen laid on his bed, smoking a cigarette with one hand and holding open a French novel with the other, a pink plastic dish of ashes sat indenting the covers by his hip. 

Danielsen glanced up at him and set the novel down open on the bedside and the cigarette in the dish. 

Do you have something you want to do today? he said. Beforehand?

Without waiting for Samuel to respond, he leant back to his bedside table, took a match from a small book, and struck it against the headboard. Danielsen cupped the flame for a moment, as if appraising its value, then shook it out and laid the burned thread down in the dish parallel with the cigarette. He folded his hands across his sternum and looked at Samuel expectantly.

No, nothing, it’s fine, said Samuel. I didn’t think modern matches would strike on anything any more.

They don’t. I buy the strike-anywhere matches on import.

Can I ask why?

Danielsen looked at Samuel as though he’d asked whether it might be a dreadful imposition to bring a stray dog in for a quick fuck.

So I can strike them anywhere, he said.

The next morning they went out into the fields. Samuel had sunk down a pod coffee, and urinated normally. After his shower, he felt clean as a whistle, a phrase his father had often used when his boys were young. Danielsen went up ahead of him, his thermos on a long leather strap that bracketed it against his thigh like a lowslung cowboy rifle. 

They drank black tea in the shadow of the beech and set up the planes. 

It was a two-plane system. Danielsen was a fine stunt pilot in the community, and it was planned to all be over and done with quite quickly. The idea was that Samuel would use his new camera drone to capture Danielsen’s particular style of flight, his little machine orbiting like an alien craft around the other man’s sharp, nimble movements, his painterly yaws and twisting, elegant dives, his beautiful model Cessna; the Skyhawk 172; what a beautiful thing; Danielsen brought it low over the trees and it snickered in the canopy and leapt out in silhouette against the gunmetal lake beneath, arrowed with cold sunlight; what a shot that was; how grateful the aeromodellers would be to see it, how jealous of their combined budget. And he wasn’t even thinking about clearing out Matt’s, and then it was done, and already it was over. 

It all went ok. 

Danielsen landed his Cessna and flicked the engine off a foot over the ground. It fell with a puff into the long grass. Samuel was already breaking down his machine and had the side of his zip hoodie held out to shade his laptop screen from the sunlight. He leant forward in a vampiric posture. 

Of course, he said, I should have thought.

You are seeing it’s no data, said Danielsen.

You get Starlink?

Dead spot, said Danielsen. You’ve got a great machine, man. I’d love to buy it from you.

Ah, it’s only a proof of concept. You wouldn’t want to buy it. I might set up a side thing selling them custom though, once I’m back in the UK. I’d make you one for free, if you’d like that.

Danielsen didn’t seem to have heard. He had picked up his model Cessna and brought it over one shoulder like a pickax. He shaded his eyes with his free hand and squinted at him and made a noncommittal click with his tongue.

How do you get online then?

I drive to the library.

God’s perfect hermit.

It was arranged afterwards that Danielsen would be the one to upload the footage. But it was harder for Samuel to fly, because he had to track the camera while matching Danielsen’s moves, and so they would probably both get some credit. Samuel broke down his drone into eight separate components and slotted each of those components into its foam negative in the flight case. It felt good to have things in their proper place.

That night the two men listened to live recordings of XTC on the stereo and ate teriyaki salmon over rice. Danielsen poured more aquavit into Samuel’s glass.

Drink in the culture, he said. 

They built a bonfire in the back garden. Danielsen turned his stereo way up and staggered down the hill toward him, applauding, muttering to himself, his shape in the firelight bright and intense against the grey outline of the house. Samuel’s face felt slack and he slapped himself across the chops numbly. Danielsen laughed. 

Yeah, bro, he said, and hit himself too, twice, then again. 

Samuel’s dead, empty phone was hot in his pocket.

Later that night, he turned over in bed and brought his knees up halfway to his chest. He groaned. An awful clunking sensation landed in his chest and down into his stomach and he sat up and belched a thin acrid vomit into the bedsheets. He lay there for a while, sweating and smelling the puke. The night became an unpleasant dreamy wash of tobacco, hallucinatory and tea-stained, burned up at the edges, and eventually he made it to five o’clock, and six, and onwards, and then he was just hungover. 

Danielsen was a kind man. He made Samuel another pod coffee and brought it to him and encouraged him to lie in and use as much mouthwash as he might need. 

I am going to do some housework this morning, while you are recovering, he said.

Samuel vomited three more times. 

He lay on his side on the linoleum in the cold, sterile bathroom, where the window was stuck open above him, and felt the wind on his naked upper half; he was wearing the jeans he had slept in. In the corridor, there was the sound of plastic rolling over carpet. The sound stopped for a moment, and clunked over a step, and continued out on the driveway. Samuel was facing the bin beneath the sink. Its pedal was rounded, flat, the same faded pink as Danielsen’s ashtray, and he noticed that there was a subtle wear on it in the centre, where Danielsen must have stepped so many times previously, precisely in the centre; the paint there was thinning, and if you looked closely, you could see the fine outline of the cheap metal within the pedal, murky within that paint, and hardly visible at all. Danielsen’s tread sounded again outside the door, towards his bedroom, then back again, this time accompanied by the wheels of Samuel’s flight case. Samuel lay there a bit longer and sat up. After thirty minutes he brushed his teeth. 

Outside on the driveway Danielsen was waiting for him. He had loaded the car and was sat in the driver's seat with the door open, squinting at him and sucking on a cigarette. 

You are feeling better?

Thanks, said Samuel.

He got in opposite Danielsen. In the rearview mirror, he could see the hump of his travel bag on the back seat. Danielsen put the car in gear and reversed down the drive, and as he curved out onto the road, Samuel saw at the back of Danielsen’s open garage his flight case stood pristinely among the piled trash, the wheelbarrow, a broken cabinet, a shovel handle with no blade. 

The airport was cold, but not uncomfortably so. In its main atrium, Samuel sat under murky glass with dead, wet leafmuck piled on it; someone watching from above would have seen the outline of him slumped on the bench, his arm loosely weaved through the twin poles of his suitcase’s telescopic handle, the man and the case and the bench all seeming like a single indistinct object. He was unobserved scrolling through the section of the Wikipedia article that bulleted the history of air crashes at Copenhagen airport. 

Later someone asked him at baggage check where his second checked item was.

Jeg har kun én taske, he said. 

He wheeled his bag over to security with the wheels faintly rattling on the tiles. He was listening to Tangerine Dream in his earbuds and not thinking about anything when—Oh my god, he thought, and he said it out loud, under his breath, the phrase chopping up with each clack of plastic wheel on ceramic. Oh, my, God. You were supposed to – you stupid bastard – and he would be late! 

He turned his bag right around and wheeled it out of security, back to the Espresso House, and dragged the bag round flat onto the ground by a pillar and knelt and unzipped it round, and opened the lid, and unzipped the underwear section of the bag, and shoved his hand in through his dirty laundry and fished out the small, transparent packet he had brought. He checked it all over. There were no signs of leakage. Its stamped steel disc was still in place, thank God, twined around the bag’s opening, and in hefting the ashes up, Samuel had an odd, sudden memory of Danielsen’s house, and the bread bag. 

God, hadn’t he meant to take these to – where – Rubjerg Knude? He didn’t want to upset anyone now. He held the bag against his stomach and zipped his jacket closed over it. It was fine. It was all the same one way or the other. He relaxed the muscles in his shoulders and neck. He wouldn’t be late. Nobody had seen. Nobody would be upset by anything. 

On his way back to security, he stopped by the bin, wrapped Matt up in a copy of Ekstrabladet, and dropped him off where he could be found by the proper authorities and later disposed of.

C Bride works in London and has previously published fiction in Die Quieter Please and Midcult*.