WKD2

Lights on each wingtip identify the airliner as it passes overhead. Erased by the black night, it oversees the radiant cityscape, cruising with conviction.

Banking left, the lights tip, with an eloquent surge of Rachmaninov. His Vocalise is playing on Maestro FM; a trilling cadence seemingly prompts the pilot aloft to coax his stick to port.

The driver of the car harbours special feelings about being at the wheel. He follows suit, arcing left with the motorway, imagining that his seat too is tilting; angling his body, right thigh high. There’s hardly any traffic, which allows the driver to eyeball the unconstrained northbound plane as it descends towards the city’s airport and becomes lost amid the streetlights and illuminated signs that litter the horizon.

Now the flyover's slip is curving him westward. At its crest he sees the plane again. They are in formation, the illusion of distance having him keeping up with it—one-fifty knots, zero headwind. But then he needs to pull in for fuel because the amber gauge is telling him to.

Stepping out of his sports coupe, he’s convinced that his legs are thinning towards the old man within. Preventive squats have been on the menu. So has assertive walking: muscular walking, including muscular walking from the pump to the night hatch to pay.

Earlier that evening, at the concert, seated on his left and aligned upon the armrest next to his own bespoke sleeve, was that ridiculous couture drama in racing leather—a young man in a brightly coloured motorcycle jacket. On his right, a slender feminine arm in lilac mohair, resting close but not touching. He’d tried to imagine a home for these sartorial collisions: maybe something avant-garde, something marketed to the demon in us. He went somewhere inside himself to see if the image worked, because if it didn’t work for him then it wouldn’t work at all . . . Nah.

‘CBR? Is that what you ride?’ he’d asked, with barely concealed disdain, as the orchestra was tuning up.

‘No, it's just for show,’ came the reply.

Another airliner floats in, crossing the road in front of the car. He watches it. It’s not as high as the earlier one, because now he’s closer to the airport, the road having nudged him northward via west. The plane’s lights tilt then pass behind his right shoulder, into the car’s blind spot, from where a vehicle suddenly appears, overtaking . . .close, very close, furious, not sedate, not sitting on a bed of air.

He’s startled, but Rachmaninov is still emoting, still nurturing that stable, consistent thought; that singular emotion, the result of time well-spent building a curvaceous orchestral edifice. There were no stoppings for gas in the music, no automotive shocks, no leather and mohair sandwiches.

In the morning at the agency he’d return to the WKD2 account with a fresh mind, a classical mind; a sleek, airliner mind with added cardiac surge from strings to give his imagination a lift. He was buoyed by the ease of his inventiveness. No wonder they called them Creatives. Really, all that was needed was awareness, and receptivity, creative awareness, of your environment and its possibilities; its limitless possibilities.

From out the corner of his eye he sees the aircraft again, its double dots turning to a graceful colon in the punctuated sky. He cranes his head to get a proper look. Now he's on the flight deck; his warm, sweatless hands finger-tipping the control yoke, the circuit board city laid out below him, illuminated, except for where the black line of the unlit river runs, a bottle of WKD2 strapped tightly in the co-pilot’s seat, in case of emergencies.

Levelling out of the turn, he’s still eyeing the plane as it ducks below the terrestrial sub-roof plateau and his car leaves the road and plunges into the nearside abyss of the embankment.