I come in peace

Today I saw a man fall from the sky.

The sunshine woke me. It's one of those days in the dead heart of winter that arrive unannounced, a piece of summer that lost its way. I was out of bed and pulling on my coat before I quite realised what I was doing. Outside, pleasantly bemused people were milling about, faces turned upwards to the unexpected warmth.

I decided to set out for the wooded parkland nearby. The brilliant sunshine was deceptive - in the shadows fingers of cold still felt their way through layers of woolen scarves and jumpers. On the outskirts of town a horse was being led to its stable, sloping silhouette that runs from forelock to withers and beyond drawn in silver against the low sun, breath snorting out in great whitened clouds. The stone-rung clip of shod hooves stayed with me, keeping time, as I made my way to the coast path that sweeps out from the headland.

I was making for the railway bridge that links the coast to the darkened forest inland. The Lady's Stair, it's called, for a long-dead lady of the manor on whose lands the woods and park lie. When night falls lone travellers beneath talk of a white figure that crosses above, long after the gates have closed and that park is shut. Once my father said he saw something. A plastic bag caught in the railings, perhaps, he said.

It is a hundred yards from the bridge that I see the man. He is falling, trailing a yellow glider, towards the coast wall, beyond which the rocks tumble into a choppy sea. There are some other people watching, heads tilted back. At the last moment he pulls on the glider and catches the wind, and is sent back up, up into the clear sky.

I watch him swoop further down the coast, buffeted lightly by the air-currents. He drops, then ascends. He reminds me of a broken-winged dragonfly. I wonder how he will come down, eventually. There are no clear landings here, just road, pathway and sea, and the rusted railway line hugging the edge of the massed forest.

I am under the bridge before I take my eyes off him, and it is only then I see it. The middle section has gone.

I stand for a few moments, trying to make sense of what is before me. The stairway leads up to empty air, a blank section of sky. The forest stands, silent, across the divide. I wonder what did this.

Is a bridge still a bridge if it leads nowhere? Can it ever be a destination in itself?

At a loss, I strike off for a dirt track that leads steeply down to the ocean. The cliff-face has been eroded here and a shallow pebbled bay lies at the foot of the path, banked by long grasses. I find a spot and sit down on my coat. It's so still here apart from the roll of the ocean.

I remember a sentence from a book I read recently, about how the sea is something you can look at for hours and never grow tired of it. About how when two people look at the sea together they don't need to say a word.

I lean back on my elbows and see the man hanging directly above me. He's so brightly clear as he drifts through the slice of sky cut into the rock, suspended from his yellow half-circle, that I think if I stretched my hand up just a little I could touch him.

The skyman waves at me.

I wonder who he is, where he came from. I wonder if the broken bridge means anything to him. I won't ever know.

I wave back. He drifts on.