Coming Down

Martin Howe

Description

Coming Down is a novel about falling - falling in love, falling from grace, falling foul, falling apart, falling free. A story of addiction, drug dealing and sky-diving. At its vertiginous centre one man's commitment to making money and living life to excess. An unprincipled hero with huge appetites for women, designer clothes and drugs, guided by a criminal code that allows him free rein to exploit the real and virtual networks of the global era.The exhilarating drama of a high altitude free fall over the desert coastline of southern California provides the narrative structure for Coming Down. Each chapterbrings the hero, X, closer to the earth. As he hurtles downwards his thoughts and feelings about falling provide the cement that binds the key events in his life into arevelatory whole that opens the way to understanding why he is, where he is, plunging towards the Pacific Ocean at terminal velocity.Falling is central toComing Downand each chapter is "book-ended" with startling biblical, literary, scientific, and journalistic extracts, both serious and humorous,about falling. Some are of only tangential relevance to the plot, others of vital importance.

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 16 mars 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800469440
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

About the author
Martin Howe is a journalist who has worked for the BBC, Channel 4 and a news agency in Washington DC. Writing literary fiction is his escape from the constraints of factual news. Coming Down is his third novel.

mbhowe.com
Facebook.com/MartinHoweAuthor
Twitter: @_MartinHowe
Instagram: @martin.howe.925
Also by the author
White Linen
The Man in the Street


Copyright © 2021 Martin Howe

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Matador
9 Priory Business Park,
Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,
Leicestershire. LE8 0RX
Tel: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
Twitter: @matadorbooks

ISBN 9781800469440

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

For Eleanor

Eternity is not hard to imagine, believe me, just strap on a parachute, hitch a ride on a small plane, mainline smack, wait a beat before edging the rush with a boost of laughing gas … then bale out.

Stanley Overton, the Terminal Tour Archive (p. 127), Woadtown Press.
Published: 16/07/2001

Sky-divers are addicts – it’s official!
They can’t help themselves, it runs in the family. You may have thought that “Adrenaline Junkie” was just a phrase, but in fact it is very close to being a statement of fact. Sky-diving fanatics have the same genetic make-up as heroin addicts, so say researchers at a leading University in the UK. They have discovered that a gene closely associated with risk-taking behavior was also linked with the abuse of drugs. So susceptibility to addiction could be inherited.

Ambrose Wylie, Stenning Gazette, 14/7/02
Contents
4,116 metres
3,956 metres
3,672 metres
3,558 metres
2,753 metres
2,666 metres
2,160 metres
1,574 metres
1,014 metres
344 metres
1 metre

4,116 metres
St James’s bible
Revelations 9:1
And the fifth angel sounded, and I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit.
And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit.

2 Peter 2:4
For if God spared not the angels that sinned, but cast them down to hell, and delivered them into the chains of darkness, to be reserved unto judgement.
“God…”
The word was sucked from his body in a whirlwind of escaping air. Unable to breathe, he hung above the world in silence. The clatter and roar gone in an instant.
It never made any difference how often you did it – the jump, the leap, the plunge into the void – the feeling was always the same. Flowing, the body fluid, blood rushing, the stomach churning, juices roiling – a desire to open the sluice-gates, release the floodwaters, overtop the banks – saliva streaming from the corner of a gaping mouth, eyes liquid, sweat pooling in hidden folds, slick on surfaces exposed to the whipping gale, the face and hands, a liquid skin. A drop of moisture falling towards the earth. Raining down.
Senses drowned out. All he could recall was the final touch of his foot on the solid steel frame of the Beechcraft King Air 90 aircraft, the mechanical urgency of its engines vibrating through the thin sole of his Van Buren Blue Flash trainers. He was flying, once again he was flying. Physical laws, limitations and constraints, defied. Beliefs suspended. He could do anything. Yet the sensation lingered – the false memory of a limbless accident victim curling non-existent toes to shake off the persistent pins and needles – earthing his body. Bringing him back to his senses. He began to count out of habit.
“One thousand …”
Dropping tens of metres.
He didn’t need to follow this exit protocol any more, he was vastly experienced, had logged many hours in the air, but did it anyway. Shouting out numbers, no one would hear.
“Two thousand …”.
The sun was shining, there was barely a cloud in the sky, just smudges of chalk dust scattered in the atmosphere way below, blurring his view, tricking the eye. A blanket of haze cushioning all that was harsh and rugged, smoothing the edges, shading lines, comfortably tucking up a slumbering world. The curvature of the earth gave the merest hint of where solid met vapour – a faint line, a slight shift in the spectrum, a barely perceptible change of hue, shades of blue so similar as to be beyond definition – marking where it had to end. The landing.
Bird-like he flapped his arms as he spun slowly, somersaulting through the air. The plane above his head was yellow in silhouette against the blue encircling sky. Wings tipped with black, propeller a silent blur, the open door framing a pale shaven head looking down at him, an arm sinuously waving as if caught in the slipstream. Blinking he watched as it grew smaller and more distant, jerkily diminishing as if being sucked against its will into a heavenly vortex.
“Three thousand …”
The machine’s passing left the sky unblemished, a shade of vivid turquoise so profoundly bright that he knew he could never forget it. Had never forgotten it.

Lying on his back in the dunes with Louise, her hand inside his shirt next to his skin, that very same turquoise sky an overbearing canopy, pressing down, hurting his eyes. Her head had been resting on his chest, her wispy blonde hair tickling his throat. She had been reluctant to leave the warmth of Flynn’s bar, said it was too cold for the beach, but he had reminded her of the promise she had made the night before on the grassy bank beside the rushing Corrib River in Galway’s inner harbour. And she had smiled and followed him outside.
That previous evening, drunk beyond his imagining, they had been discovered in the gloomy shadow of the Spanish Arch, lying together. He had been partially on top of her, his jeans around his thighs, she had been giggling her dress crumpled beneath them, tights and underwear around her ankles. They hadn’t cared as the passersby laughed at their disheveled, intertwined bodies, just hugged each other more closely. Euphoric at being with a woman, he buried his head between her breasts and imagined that they were invisible. He couldn’t believe that she had helped him through, massaging, cajoling, as keen as he was to make love in the damp evening air.
“Don’t worry, I know a lovely place on the strand out in Salthill. We can go there tomorrow and do it all over again, I promise.”
There would be no relief from the imprint of that turquoise sky. Its intensity banishing the darkness, every time he closed his eyes. Out of this blue, women would come back to him as he leapt time and again into the void. Blondes mainly and always with staring, azure eyes. There had been so many that he had no fear now. The exhilaration was everything, the thrill of the fall. He was an addict.

He had consumed drugs that came close to achieving that level of euphoria – on the good days, in the summer, in the sunshine – but not often. In his line of business he had the pick of the best – dope from the highlands of California and Lebanon, speed, ecstasy, cocaine – but none had given him the ultimate high, the final escape that he was looking for. Sky-diving, stoned out of your mind, seemed the only true path. Stepping into space over Torres Pines, Dinosaur or Sun Valley, he prayed every time that this would be it – the rapture. He had never given up hope.

From this height, on such an evening, it was possible to believe all was well. He could see forever, sense the totality of existence, feel the passing of time – glimpse the past, interrogate the future, live the present – that’s why he loved free falling. There was nothing to stop him, no limit, save the feebleness of his vision, the failure of his imagination. There was a prospect of breaking away, of soaring upwards, of flying, of never coming down. The feeling was there every time he leapt, even if it rarely lasted. How he envied those he had seen at Elsinore diving from planes, circling like wraiths, shadows against the steely azure sky, criss-crossing the face of the sun, haunting the heavens, merely hitching a lift back to earth on the nearest plane when they were done. Or hurtling to earth in some spectacular fashion, performing extraordinary feats on the way down. He had never been good enough, had had to experience the buzz vicariously, using the skills he had to get close to them, his innate affability winning him friends among this enviable elite.
Surfer, Travis Berkovitz, was one he knew well. A maverick stoner attractive to X for his immense capacity to consume stimulants and remain cogent at the centre of the most vicious chemically induced maelstrom. Never deterred by the physically imbalanced consequences of many hung-over dawns he was a resolute companion in t