The nightmares are getting worse. I wake drenched in sweat and stare up at the ceiling until the birds start their pre-dawn chorus from the sprawling backyard fig. I peer through the gauze curtains. My shoulders sag with relief when I see nothing hanging from its dark branches.

I decide to go out and buy coffee and warm croissants for the two of us, to try to make up for disturbing Lilly’s sleep yet again.

The suburban streets lie empty beneath the early morning blush as I drive. The appetite-arousing aroma of baking bread starts wafting through the air vents, but I turn towards the autumn chill of the nearby playing fields. I park and sit for a while before climbing out of my SUV and walking towards the baseball ground, with its surrounding phalanx of gum trees waiting patiently for the chance to lasso an unwary model plane flyer.

My eyes linger on a small clearing where I used to unpack the model plane. The boy loved the meticulous order in which the battery, charger, accessories and cables were laid out and I remember his inordinate delight in reciting the steps needed to assemble the plane for flight.

I stop before the nearside fence. This is where I first saw him.

I had been kneeling on my groundsheet, preparing for the first flight of the day, when I noticed a green pushbike with a boy in his early teens staring at the planes zooming about in the sky above him. He stood hunched and remote from the surroundings, his long fingers clutching the fence in front of him like the slender toes of a heron.

I noticed his dark eyes following me as I made my way to the flight line and a few minutes after launch I felt his presence beside me.

“Do you want to have a go?” I asked, before returning my focus to the EasyStar soaring effortlessly in the light thermals above.

I felt a confirming touch on my elbow. “Okay, see how I’m using two joysticks, one in my left hand and one in my right?”

“I’m going to let go of the right hand stick in a moment. Take hold of it. If you move it very gently, the plane will follow. But gently mind you.”

I released and felt the additional weight on the controller as he gripped the joystick. The plane lurched to the left.

“Easy does it,” I said. The plane quickly flipped the other way. This time he corrected it before I could say anything. I looked down and saw a face concentrating in rapt attention.

“Just make sure you keep your movements nice and slow.”

The swooping turns were taking the plane closer and closer to the ground.

“Okay, that was good, I’ll take over now,” I said. There was a brief struggle before I could wrest the controller back to land the plane.

“How was that?” I asked as we cleared the field.

He giggled.

“Good.”

His eyes were faraway and unfocussed in a kind of private ecstasy.

It was a few weeks before I saw him again, reaching into the back of a beautiful old Citroen DS and carrying his brand new model towards me with the same care and attention as one might carry a baby bird still peeping in its nest.

His mother accompanied him. She was wearing a cream dress with a tan belt slipped over a slender waist. There was a serenity about her presence, her face captivating despite the lack of makeup. Calm eyes looked at me enquiringly.

“Hi, I’m Mike,” I said putting out my hand. “I’m Renata,” she replied, “and this is Robert.” Her hand felt smooth and warm and our grip lingered.

“So he built this by himself,” I murmured while looking over the newly assembled EasyStar. “His third attempt actually,” said his mother apologetically.

“It looks pretty good to me,” I said. “Do you have a radio controller for your plane?” I asked Robert. He nodded and made his way back to the car.

“He’s autistic,” his mother said quickly.

I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“He said you let him fly your plane, that was nice of you.”

“No problem,” I said. “He did well.”

“Can you teach him to fly?” she asked. “Properly I mean. He can’t stop talking about it. He spent ages on the internet before we ordered the first kit online. He got frustrated trying to build them though, the first two kits ended in the bin.” A wry smile crossed her lips.

We watched as he returned with the radio. “It will take a bit of time and practice,” I said slowly. “But I’d be happy to try. We could make a start today if you like.”

“You don’t mind if I come back later?” she asked. “I don’t get much time during the week.”

“That’s fine, we generally pack up around midday.”

She returned to the Citroen DS with its sleek curvaceous lines and pivoted gracefully to wave goodbye to her son.

Robert had assembled the airplane well. There were only a few minor fixes needed, the most important being the centre of gravity.

“See how the nose rides high when we hold it at the middle of the wings?”

His black eyes focused on the suspended plane.

“That means we need to move weight into the nose. I think the easiest would be to move the battery to the front.”

I glued Velcro at the front of the cockpit and shifted the battery. “Now you can see how it balances in perfect harmony, it should fly well now.”

The boy nodded.

“Some people are well balanced,” he said at last. “Not like me.”

My face grew hot. I tried to focus on the next step, testing the radio link between controller and plane. I instructed him on how to hold his plane safely. Then, keeping the radio controller with me, I counted out twenty paces across the smooth grass.

“Remember to keep your fingers clear of the prop,” I shouted between cupped hands.

I moved the throttle forward and heard the engine give an answering buzz. I checked the rudder and elevator in turn and watched as the control surfaces responded.

I returned to Robert. “Your radio seems fine,” I said.

He didn’t respond, still staring down at his powered glider.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I wish people were like this,” he said in his deliberate manner.

“What do you mean?”

“You move the stick from over there,” he said, pointing to where I had been standing, “and straightaway the rudder moves over here. Every time. That’s how I wish people were.”

“People can be like that sometimes,” I said.

“Not for me,” he said. “Not with M-Melissa.”

A dark frown shadowed his face.

I felt uncomfortable but tried to stay purposeful.

“There’s one more thing we need to do before we fly, and that’s the glide test.”

We walked to the northern end of the field, well clear of the flight line. I held the model high above my head in my right hand and gave it a firm toss into the breeze, quickly reaching for the controller.

I needn’t have rushed. His plane glided beautifully without me needing to do a thing. It was like watching a pelican soar over the surface of a lagoon, perfectly poised just above the water to stretch out its glide.

She floated through the air so well that we had to jog to keep her in sight as she passed behind a slight rise in the ground. Robert was whooping in excitement and delight by now. I brought her down in the rough just short of the boundary fence.

“Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy,” cried Robert hugging himself. “Did you see that? Did you see that? Oh boy!”

After this, the first powered flight was almost anti-climactic. I think we were both tired by then and the wind had strengthened. There was one brief opportunity to give Robert partial control and I think he was satisfied with that.

His mother was parking her car by the time we returned to the groundsheet. Robert held up his plane triumphantly.

“It flies Mum,” he cried. “It flies really well!”

“Oh, I am pleased,” she said, laughing.

“I’ll bring my buddy cord next time,” I said, squatting beside him. “That way we can connect our radios together and take turns controlling your plane, each with our own controller. If something goes wrong, I can take over.”

Lilly and I were not blessed with offspring of our own and I began to look forward more and more to the distinctive car sliding to a stop at the field with the teenage boy bounding out and reaching for his model, full of jerky enthusiasm like an excitable puppet.

We’d go through the sequence of pre-flight checks, with Robert frowning as he learned to recite them by heart and with me trying not to notice the jagged scars that ran across both his wrists.

Once the plane was in the air and we were standing side by side looking up, a warm feeling would steal over me.

“I didn’t know you had a son,” one of the club members remarked one day. I didn’t bother correcting him.

Robert loved circuits, flying round and round in the same racecourse pattern until it was time to land. One day the plane descended too low and we lost sight of it as it dropped into the valley on the far side. He dashed frantically across the field. When I caught up with him, his plane was nowhere to be seen and he was crying great sucking sobs as though his heart was about to break.

“We can’t see it, but maybe we can hear it,” I said, pushing the throttle forward for a couple of seconds. The plane responded with a faint buzzing from down in the valley.

“Stay here,” I instructed, “and give a little throttle whenever I ask you to.”

It didn’t take me long to clamber down and retrieve the plane from the valley. Luckily the damage was superficial and easy to fix.

“He’s feeling more fragile than usual,” his mother confided that day. “He’s fallen for a girl, Melissa, but she doesn’t want to have anything to do with him. It’s all very difficult.”

Falling in love must be a real minefield for an autistic teenager, I thought.

Two weeks later Robert flew too near the sun and we both lost sight of the airplane in the intense glare. By the time I realised that the plane screaming down at full throttle was his, it was too late. Sympathetic bystanders helped pick up the pieces from the middle of the field.

Robert seemed to have recovered his equilibrium later that morning. Maybe there was some kind of secret thrill at seeing a diving airplane smash into the ground and explode into a hundred pieces, even if it was his.

“Don’t worry, I’ll build another one,” he said grandly as we parted that day. “It will be even better.”

He didn’t come the next week, however, or the week after. Then at last the light blue Citroen swung into the car park and there he was, extracting a brand new EasyStar.

“Robert tried to kiss Melissa on the way back from Arrowfield School a couple of weeks back,” said Renata quietly. “He felt terribly rejected by her and has been depressed ever since.”

She wrote on a piece of paper. “Here’s my mobile number in case you need it.”

I did need it, the very next week in fact. Another flyer had snagged his glider in the tops of a tall gum tree and a few of us gathered around to see if we could help. Apart from a single low-hanging branch, occupied by a length of dangling old rope, the trunk rose uninterrupted all the way to the crown.

While we were deliberating, a gust of wind caught the top of the tree and the glider slid down until it was hanging precariously above us, caught in the very tip of a single branch.

“What if we threw stones at it, Ian?” asked one of the fellow pilots. “That might dislodge it.”

“Okay, go ahead,” said Ian, though with some reluctance.

Grown men were transformed into a noisy tribe of competitive boys as a continuous shower of stones flew through the dusty air. I was about to join in when I saw Robert clamp his ears with his hands. He spun around crazily and dashed away. I caught up with him amongst the glazed ferns, rocking back and forth on his heels and screaming inconsolably.

I took out my mobile and the piece of paper with the neat handwriting. His mother arrived and he fell into the car, still sobbing, looking frightened and frail like a wounded bird.

“Don’t worry, it’s not your fault,” Renata said. “It brought back bad memories, that’s all, kids throwing stones at him.” But I could see the worry in her eyes – they did not come to the field for the next few weeks.

“I wish you would stop moping around the house,” my wife said after breakfast one day, with cup of coffee and the local paper in front of her. “Did you see this article? They say a teenage girl was assaulted in Arrowfield and a local youth has been taken in by the police for questioning. Isn’t that terrible?”

When I arrived at the field that Sunday, the green pushbike was leaning against the fence, like the first time except that Robert was nowhere to be seen. Then the Citroen spun into the carpark, its tyres shrieking.

All thoughts of flying were quickly abandoned as more than a dozen of us spread around the perimeter of the field, crashing our way into the eucalyptus-scented bush and shouting his name.

Desperately afraid at what I’d find, I pounded through the undergrowth. Arriving too late, I stood staring at the tree weighed down by guilt, at the stump toppled underneath, at the branch with the rough-hewn rope and its terrible burden still swaying – a savage rebuke to a world that can bear someone so special yet refuse to accommodate his differences.

A small group of us had gathered by the time his frantic mother arrived. I will never forget the stumbling run and pitiful clutching, the fearful rocking back and forth and the continuous keening of agony with her face buried deep in the poor sunken chest even as we were trying to cut his body free.

***

“Humans are the only creatures on earth that shed tears when they feel sad,” he once told me.

Now, with the early morning sky dressed in shimmering gold above the misty ground, I wipe the tears from behind my glasses.

I climb slowly into the SUV. To buy the coffee and warm croissants.