Duration 2.21

Constance Ortuist Fallaburr is a middle-aged Sackamayer-speaking female woman, and she would be the first to admit her interest in flight has been a long one. 

Since the Violent Unknown Event, Constance has gradually developed an earth-bound shape due to an engrossed coccyx. She has continually harboured doubts about the Responsibility of Birds, and having an exaggerated respect for gravity, now shuns flight for herself. Constance has two houses side by side on the coast at Southwold, Suffolk in England. The one on the left was rented by her husband, the aviation historian Melorder Fallaburr, it occasionally served as a holiday home for air-orphans. The one on the right was reserved for Constance's own use, and was crammed tightly with furniture thrown out from airport lounges around the world. This house was called 'le nid' after the initials of Nathan Isole Dermontier, who threw himself from the Eiffel Tower in 1870. Melorder, Constance's husband, said the story was a fabrication, not least because the Eiffel Tower did not exist until 1889. Constance replied that Dermontier must have jumped from the roof of Les Invalides. Both houses at Southwold have since been demolished and the bricks used to strengthen sea-defences. Constance now lives in a two-bedroomed house beside the main runway at Zurich airport. And her favourite Tulse Luper story is The Cassowary.

"A jet aircraft on a cloudless night began its landing flight-path twenty miles due east from the airport where it was due to land. For the first five miles of its descent, the noise from the jet's engines and exhaust disturbed no-one. At the sixth mile, an ornithologist, birdwatching on a reservoir, was irritated by the jet-noise just enough to give the aircraft a quick glance. He turned into a swan. At the seventh mile a naturalist and his wife saw the aircraft through their bedroom net-curtains and were turned into crows. At the eighth mile, four children in a school dormitory saw the aircraft through a skylight and turned into herons. At the ninth mile, seven night-nurses in an old people's home saw the plane and turned into swallows. At the tenth mile, twenty-one members of eight families saw the plane and turned into gulls. By the nineteenth mile, twenty-four thousand, nine hundred and twenty-seven people in two towns, four villages and a camping-site had seen the plane. Most of them had turned into penguins.

When the plane exploded on the air-strip, a cassowary with a purple beak stepped from the wreckage and checked himself into the VIP lounge."