Case #0022010, Moira Kelly
Release date: May 26, 2016
First listen: 16th October, walk into work. Out in the countryside with nothing but farmland and a big ol’ sky with the sun coming up.
…. The sky just… ATE A DUDE FAM!… What am I meant to do with that!?
The Vast is a strange one for me. I am a country girl first and foremost, I love being need the sea and I get antsy if I go too long without seeing the curvature of the earth or at least a decent horizon line. Having said that, if I spend a second too long thinking about the emptiness of space and/or the deep ocean, I will stun lock myself. The Vast and The Buried have a profound effect on me in different directions because they just. Don’t. Care.
This statement has a bit of a different tone that I don’t think we’ve heard before. It’s a statement of someone recounting what I am going to call the inciting incident that happened to someone else. Why Moira was there to see the event and have that encounter with The Vast as a witness, she was essentially collateral in her son's story. It could be argued that Timothy Hodge of MAG006 is doing something similar, relaying Harriet’s ‘mugging’ by The Flesh Hive that led to her death, but there’s a different weight to this, this isn’t recounting something told to you by a near stranger. This is a mother mourning her son in a state of fear and confusion. I think it’s also one of the first statements that deals with a grief like this.
Yes, Naomi Herne, I said that with a full chest.
- But I think Moira's opening passage of the statement does give an indication of what she is dealing with. She says it ‘doesn’t make any sense’, that it makes her ‘head hurt awfully’ whenever she tried to think of it. Psychologists and other specialists, please chime in, but I’ve given to believe that PTSD can induce headaches. Although Moira's encounter was with The Vast, by proxy, I think the confusion and grief could play her more into the hands of The Spiral or The End. She does ask if she’s mad, doubting her own mental faculties as she appears says ‘it can’t have happened.’ However, as she describes her life, I think she’ll be picked up by The Lonely not too long after the loss of Robert.
- I had a look for Althorpe, Lincolnshire, as I grew up on that side of the UK and I was at a weird little border between 3 counties, Lincolnshire being one of them. Turns out, we’re at almost opposite ends of the county. But like Robert, I spent a lot of my childhood in the wild places, fields rather than woods and alone rather than with friends. waves a hand to aggressively bat away the looming spectre of Peter Lukas
- I’m looking at this kid and I can’t help but think he and Mr Timothy Stoker would have gotten on like a house on fire. Adventure holidays, and yes, I subscribe to the kayaking agenda, volunteering with charities.
- ‘...to the point where I wondered where he was getting the money...’ I would not be the first to draw connections between The Entities and how they can be allegories for capitalism and systems of oppression, but The Vast and Simon Fairchild in particular, are held in a certain light in my mind in connection to late stage capitalism and mega wealth. I have a whole essay on it that I’ll write one day, it’s currently a voice memo in dodgylogic’s inbox. But I think the sinking of time and money into this lifestyle, much the same way Laura Popham did with caving in MAG015, means that a potential victim is less likely to walk away before they’re primed for harvesting. The fear probably tastes different if it’s a seasoned pro having their world, the world were they’re competent and comfortable, betray them.
- I have absolutely no idea how long it takes to become a ‘fully qualified skydiving instructor’ and I think this is either a case of ‘I’m over thinking it’ or ‘yes kid, it’s painfully obvious, everyone had worked that out’ but they way he talks about the company and the job before he reveals he’s qualified… I’m reading it as the company approached him, recruited him and put him through the training. So they’re going to be a sense of commitment and obligation there on his part. They’re moulding him to be prime for the picking.
- ‘After that, I didn’t see him much. He was home for Christmas and Mother’s Day, if I was lucky...’ Feels like The Vast is pulling him one way and The Lonely pulling her the other.
- ‘Before he’d said anything I took him inside, sat him down and started to run a hot bath. Whatever had happened, I told him, could wait until he’d gotten himself together.’ Bless this woman, best mum.
- So Fairchild is supposedly doing this jump ‘in memory of his wife.’ I mean, obviously a cover, but do we ever hear of Fairchild actually having a wife or is this just an unpleasant little detail seeing as Moira had become a widow recently and was about to lose her son?
- I don’t like Simon. I hate pretty much all the Avatars with a few exceptions, but I don’t hate them equally. I do not like Simon Fairchild. I don’t like how he’s smiles and jokes and is all personable just before the act. I don’t like how we see in a later statement he can turn tempestuous when he’s defied. I don’t like him.
- Do we actually ever hear from Harriet Fairchild again? And actually, while we get Harriet Fairchild, Robert’s colleague and presumably the Fairchild representation in the business, we don’t get a confirmed connection between her and Simon in the body of the statement do we? Robert doesn’t know Simon as a Fairchild. For all the good it would do him.
- ‘Enjoy sky blue’… Well, that’s not ominous at all. The grammatical delivery just makes it all the more threatening.
- After his moment of dizziness, what if he’d sat down and not jumped out the plane? Would he have returned to the airfield as the plane just continued on, or was it already too late and was he stuck up there until he leapt?
- It’s hard for me to describe what I think I’m feeling when Robert describes that the ground is gone but I think it echoes in the realisation that Earth is gone in MAG057. It’s one of fear, but the fear is that of such a terrible loss, rather than fear for my own person. It’s a loss of everything that was. I’m not sure I can explain it well presently.
- Even though Moira ‘wasn’t sure (she) believed all what he was saying’ she still has the utmost care for her boy, looking after him as best she can. She asks ‘him how long he’d been falling’ and I love that there’s no ‘how do you think you’d been falling’. She doesn’t demand evidence or explanation.
- Harriet is an interesting one to me. We hear she was ‘surprised by how long it had taken him to get down’, but she is a Fairchild. Do the Fairchilds operate as a clan the same way the Lukas’ do? Is it just Simon who has any real power and the rest rally around? Has Simon cultivated a family as a cover, impact on ageing be damned? Does Harriet even know she’s feeding people to her weird Grandpa’s weird god?
- ‘I tried to talk him through his problems and his feelings...’ Moira tried, bless her. And she was making the same mental connections as any reasonable person would make in her stead.
- This statement just makes me so sad. This mother was doing her best to comfort her child after he’d been through a horrific ordeal she couldn’t understand. He was back recovering in the family home. She planned a calm and wholesome outing for the pair of them. I could be coaxed out of so many a terrible situation by my mum suggesting a walk and a picnic. This statement stings because it feels like such a violation of trust and an invasion of known and well trod territory; a career that Robert loved and was excelling in, a grassy beauty spot near the family home. Wide open spaces speak of opportunity and room to grow and change and I hate Simon Fairchild so much for robbing folk of that joy.
- ‘That last hour was one of the happiest I’d ever spent with my son.’ weeping
- ‘…he just screamed and pushed me away.’ I’d like to think this was an act to try and save her and draw whatever it was away. I hope it was. I can’t be sure.
- And the sky… ate him. Whatever had happened in Doncaster had followed him to his mother’s. It hadn’t struck in the moment or as he was reeling from the encounter, it waited until he was recovering, until the fear had receded, before moving in to strike. It was a waiting game. It had hunted him. Any time he was under the open sky, he was fair game.
- And so Open Skydiving never existed as an operating company. The Fairchilds, like the Lukas, seem to have a handle on business and corporations, so it’s just a shell company or front or whatever the correct term is. This leads me to believe Robert was recruited by them and the training was done in house, forging documentation and licenses as to not get governing bodies involved. Robert probably couldn’t believe his luck. Not long after graduation in the late 90s, and he’s recruited into a job and field he’s passionate about, the company sees to all his training. I can’t help but draw on the ‘army recruiter at a high school’ analogy I had a while back, I wonder how much of the decision was steered by the presence of student debt and slim job opportunities.
- There are new paper mentions about Open Skydiving a few years before the event takes place but the Archivist doesn’t divulge any details.
- ‘Tim really outdid himself here.’ I’m so proud of him. The Assistances are such hard working beans, I love them. They do such a good job.
- ‘In fact, for the four years prior, it’s hard to find any evidence for Robert Kelly’s existence at all.’ Open Skydiving just… housing and moving him. Walking larder, keeping him close.
