For three hours he sat very still at the centre of the airport, motionless like the human eye of a storm, until all the swirling activity blurred and made him sleepy. Moving to a quiet corner by the observation window, he folded his coat into a pillow, went to sleep and dreamt he was a mouse in a maze. Round and round he ran until he found the pathway leading to freedom – only to find it blocked by the face of an enormous mechanical cat.
YEOWWWWW!
He leapt in his sleep, startled and disorientated, banging his head on the metal window frame. Boy was awake, watching him anxiously. But despite the terrifying image he felt calm. The cat in his dream was a murderer, but the mouse was still alive.
He stretched, found the toilet. More hours passed, during which he drifted from kiosk to café, reading magazines dedicated to subjects that had never before interested him, flipping through foreign guidebooks, shaking plastic blizzards, observing the wax and wane of the shifting crowds. Time slipped by easily here. He felt inconspicuous, relaxed.
The next time hunger beckoned he sought out the Traveller’s Café, pushed his tray around the chrome track with the rest of the In Transits, chose sausage and mash and peas, chocolate cake and orange juice, and paid for it with the pocket money for his school trip. He ate slowly, happy to be an observer. He was the only one with no mission, no plane to catch, no breakfast to serve, no children to entertain. All around milled anxious groups of travellers, all nationalities and all colours, all sizes and shapes and sexual persuasions. Sometimes they smiled at him, struck by his face, his coat, or even his dog, establishing the most fleeting of human connections, a millisecond of brotherhood.
We’re all in this together, they said to him, silently, in a hundred different languages.
And then, in a sudden blinding flash, he realized he no longer needed to comb the world in search of a destination.
He had arrived.
22
Eight hours spent stretched out along an undulating row of plastic seats is not everyone’s idea of a good night’s sleep. But with legs slotted under metal armrests, ten thousand watts of fluorescent light glaring directly overhead, hundreds of disgruntled travellers for company, an abandoned acrylic airline blanket for a cover and his loyal dog at his feet, Justin slept like a baby.
He felt almost serene.
The rattle of the cleaner’s trolley lulled him into the gentlest unconsciousness he had experienced in years. The intense artificial light gave him a powerful sense of well-being; it occurred to him that he’d spent most of his life afraid of the dark.
He slept through the early morning arrivals and departures, waking refreshed and cheerful at 8 a.m.
The first day of his new life began with a full English breakfast at the café across from the first-class lounge. Except for the mushrooms, which tasted strongly of plastic, the meal was adequate: microwave hot and plentiful. When he asked for more toast, the middle-aged woman behind the counter waved his money away.
‘You save that money for your journey,’ she said, handing him a plate heaped with slices of cold, singed white toast, a handful of individually wrapped butter pats, and five tiny tubs of strawberry jam.
He smiled at her.
Working his way through the pile of toast, Justin felt there was no pressure to do anything. His pace slowed accordingly, and it was nearly ten by the time he’d finished his food and read all the newspapers abandoned on surrounding tables.
He wiped his mouth and stacked his rubbish for the cleaners, left Boy to look after his belongings, followed the picture signs to the Comfort Zone, pushed a pound into the slot of a tall turnstile, stripped off his clothes and stepped gratefully into the steamy blast of the airport shower. The thick stream of hot water felt like a miracle; he stood under it motionless, letting it pour through his hair, down his neck and back, over the narrow smooth planes of his hips, down his legs, and off his ankles, swirling around the soles of his feet before disappearing down the plughole. For ten minutes he stood, allowing the warmth to penetrate his muscles and soak through to his bones. It brought with it a realization of how lucky he was, how privileged to be alive and well and living at Luton Airport.
He spent so long in the steamy cubicle that the attendant had to bang on the door to move him along, but he didn’t care. He felt peaceful, warmed through to the very core of his being. He turned off the water and at first the silence confused him. It was ages before he realized that the soundtrack that had accompanied his recent life – the constant buzzing white noise of anxiety – was gone.
He felt like singing, crying, shouting with relief.
He stared hard at himself in the mirror as he brushed his teeth, noticing that the face that stared back at him looked different. The haunted expression was gone. He looked less like a nervous child, more like a person.
The attendant pounded on the door, more loudly this time.
Justin dried his neck and ruffled his damp hair with a tear-off paper towel. He felt cleaner than he’d felt in his entire life. A pound’s worth of soap and hot water was all it took to cleanse the grime from his soul, remove the sludge from his brain and reveal the face behind the mask.
He held his hand out in front of him. No trace of a tremor. He was strong. Invincible.
Bring on your worst, he said to fate.
Indeed.
23
For three days Justin lived in a state of suspended animation that passed for a sort of domestic bliss.
Each night he tucked himself into his moulded plastic row of blue seats and slept deeply, his dog by his side. After the first night he dreamt a new dream. In this dream he was naked, submerged in air so thick and warm it buoyed him up, let him float like a Zeppelin through the fuggy atmosphere of the airport. From his vantage point near the ceiling he could observe the comings and goings of humanity like some lesser god, occasionally lowering his imaginary flaps to swoop down among the people, amused, playful, and all-powerful.
Each morning he awoke loose-limbed, clear-headed and optimistic.
He suddenly realized that what he felt was happy, and the feeling was so dramatically new, so different, he had to tell Agnes.
‘Where are you?’ she squawked down the phone. ‘I’ve been so worried.’
‘Luton Airport.’
‘Luton Airport?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you coming or going?’
‘Just… staying.’
‘How strange.’ She was quiet for a moment. ‘Is it nice?’
‘Yes. Perfect.’
‘Perfect? How, perfect?’
‘Just perfect. I can’t explain.’
‘Try.’
He paused. ‘It’s peaceful here. Nothing’s familiar. No one knows who I am.’
At the other end of the phone, she said nothing.
‘It’s not even a place, it’s like a place on the way to another place. Like limbo.’
‘I never thought of it that way.’
‘Neither did I. But… there you are.’
‘There you are,’ she said, and he could hear the expression on her face.
Neither of them said anything. Then he heard the pips of his money running out.
‘Agnes –’
‘I’ll be there in half an hour.’
The phone went dead.
24
He knew within seconds that she had arrived. Beside him, Boy flicked his ears back and forth and arranged himself along her line of approach. Even across the huge expanse of airport terminal, Justin recognized the strange pockets of quiet followed by a kind of murmuring buzz. He wondered what she was wearing.
From his elevated position on the observation deck, he looked down on nearly the whole space, observed with affection and awe the disturbed waves of crowd movement that described her path across the floor.
He could see her now, in her green snakeskin boots, heavy magenta tights, tiny green velour shorts and a stretchy, nearly transparent shirt with sleeves that extended past the ends of her finge
rtips almost to the floor. Under one arm she carried the huge shaggy pelt of an enormous acrylic beast. A pointy white woollen hat with bright bobbing pompoms covered the crown of her pink head; her camera bag completed the outfit.
Now he could hear her too, even from up here, the clomp clomp clomp of the thick-soled boots.
He smiled, and for a moment felt deeply touched by her friendship. Then leant over the balcony and waved to her.
‘Agnes!’ he called. She looked up and beamed at him, managing to click off a few shots on a long lens while waving excitedly.
He pointed to the escalator at the far end of the terminal, and, arriving almost the same moment she did, started down towards her. Boy stood at the top, shivering and whining. He gave a long howling bark, the first Justin had ever heard from him.
But he had no time to think about Boy.
Too impatient to wait, Agnes had stepped on to the up escalator. As they converged, travelling in opposite directions, she hiked herself up over the moving handrail, climbed awkwardly across the centre section and dropped on to the step below his with a great clump. She stepped back and appraised him.
‘You look different,’ she said, frowning and changing lenses on her camera. ‘Better.’
He nodded.
‘What about…’ She lowered her voice, ‘you know?’
He spread his hands and shrugged, but the words tumbled out. ‘Something has changed. I feel lighter, happier. Free. Like a weight has lifted. I know it sounds ridiculously melodramatic.’ He grinned, unable to suppress the feeling of joy. ‘But he’s gone.’
The two inclined their bodies slightly forward, whether to kiss, or simply to step together off the bottom of the escalator is impossible to know. For in the split second that followed, the air was rent by an explosion so loud, they felt its vibration penetrate the soft tissues of their bodies before they heard it, felt it hurl them two metres or more into the air and smash them back violently to the ground, along with every other person in the airport, even the ones who were dead.
25
Ask any comedian, tennis player, chef.
Timing is everything.
26
Who knows what to expect from a blast of that magnitude? The brain struggles to process information with which it has no experience, races to find an explanation for the searing pain in one shoulder, the awkward bend of a leg folded under and digging into your solar plexus, a leg that turns out not to be your own.
At first everything seems utterly quiet, except for a continuous tintinnabulation, like church bells.
Then as your eyes adjust to the singular angle of your head and you manage to lift it enough to look around you, it becomes obvious that what you are experiencing isn’t silence at all, rather an extreme, blast-induced inability to hear. All around are events signalling noise, mouths open in the posture of screams, huge panes of glass splintering from within bent window frames. Everything falls much too slowly and silently towards the ground.
You suddenly remember another person, her name escapes you but you know what she looks like and you know she isn’t there, or at least that you can’t see her within the forty-five degrees of your vision. You haul yourself slowly, painfully, up on to your knees and look around, calmly, for calamity is, after all, what you’ve been expecting all along, and what you see that appears to have caused all this commotion is the nose of an enormous aeroplane, crushed and smoking, arranged almost perfectly perpendicular to the floor of approximately the place you were standing five minutes ago. The plane is nearly intact, balanced unnaturally on its head like a monstrous grey pachyderm in a grotesque three-ring circus. Your eyes follow it upwards, mesmerized by the slight sway of the fuselage, or at least that part of it not obscured from sight by what remains of the terminal roof.
This is even worse than you expected. But you have to admit, in some small way, it is gratifying.
I told you so.
I told you so.
People are beginning to stir now, and now is when you notice the pretty tongues of flame, fascinatingly orange, delicate and polite, gliding softly over the surface of the plane.
There is a hand on your shoulder, the one that hurts, and the girl whose name you can’t remember is standing next to you. Swaying, more than standing. Her face is bloody but she doesn’t appear to be in pain. She holds a camera in one hand and tries to say something to you, but you just stare at her and smile because you are so happy to see her. You see her mouth move with words addressed to you, though you can hear nothing at all.
She takes your hand, pulls you to your feet, and the two of you begin to walk, unsteadily because of all the debris and the bodies and the parts of bodies in your way, not to mention the bruises and as yet uncatalogued injuries spread across your own bodies, and a certain unsteadiness caused by shock. You begin walking faster, almost jogging once you get a little better at avoiding things that you remember could be dangerous, or disgusting, and also you remember how to move quickly, which was never something you imagined you could forget, even for a few minutes. You are starting to remember lots of things, like about fire and how it can be harmful, as you jog towards a hole that has been blasted through the side of the building, picking your way as carefully as possible over the inert bodies of the injured and dead, avoiding molten drips of metal, lethal tottering icicles of glass, pools of blood.
Some of the things you see are curious and might have been disturbing in another context where they seemed more real. One person’s legs look all wrong as if they’re on backwards and there’s a hand on the floor all on its own looking somehow careless. A little further away there’s what looks like a torso with no arms and you’re glad for a minute that you can’t hear any of the noises that are coming from the torso’s head.
Then you stop and look down and see one of the strangest things you have seen so far that day. It is an oversized magazine on the ground, creased open and spattered with blood. There is a picture of a boy in the magazine and he is wearing clothes that look vaguely familiar; there is something in the face staring up at you that reminds you of someone or something, but you can’t quite remember who or what.
The boy in the picture is slim and stands with his body partially turned away from you. His hair is longish, his skin very pale. He has his hands crammed into the front pockets of his jeans. The expression on his face is slightly blurred.
There is a large caption at the top of the page but some of it has been smeared with blood. The bit you can still make out reads: Doomed Youth.
You are not allowed to stop and think about this strange picture, for in no time at all you are being pulled forward and then you are outside, breathing air that doesn’t hurt your lungs like the acrid heavy air in the terminal.
It is a relief to be outside, away from the silent screaming mouths and the falling rubble. When she’s not taking pictures, the girl keeps pulling at your arm, which is starting to annoy you and feels painful, but her grip is surprisingly strong given how small and delicate she looks and the fact that she is barefoot, and you can tell from the bloody footprints she leaves that the bottoms of her feet are bleeding.
You want to stop and look around, wish you had your own camera to take some pictures of the astonishing sight of a substantially intact DC-IO standing on its nose in the centre of your new home. But you give in to the pressure on your arm, because fighting it just causes it to hurt more, and the last thing you require just now is more pain. You are nearly crying with the pain by the time she lets you stop and turn round, and nudges you to follow the direction of the finger she points at the part of the plane now swallowed in flame, and then, succumbing once more to the pressure of her hand on yours, you begin to move and as your feet hit the tarmac in the nice familiar rhythm of running, the words that go through your head sweetly and deliciously like a kind of nursery rhyme gone wrong are doomed youth doomed youth doomed youth.
27
Don’t get sniffy with me. I get no particular pleasure from tragedy.
>
Some days nothing but good deeds will do.
Who do you think brings lovers together, reunites long-lost siblings, effects miracle cures?
Who makes cripples dance, halfwits think?
Survivors survive.
28
‘It’s OK, Justin, I think we can stop now.’
Agnes was speaking loudly, just an inch or two from his ear, but he didn’t flinch, or react, or turn around, or give any indication that he’d heard. She tapped him, and when he turned from the mesmerizing sight of the burning terminal, she pressed her hands palms-down towards the ground, the way a nursery teacher calms and settles children in a classroom and tells them it is time to sit.
Justin sat.
They were far enough away to be safe now; even an explosion would have to cross the main north-south runway to get to them. She was panting and for the first time felt the pain in her feet, cut as they crossed the terminal floor. But her head was clear and the sequence of events transparent enough for her to wonder how her shoes had come off and when. It seemed such an odd consequence of a blast.
As they sat, a small fireball rolled up the tail of the DC-IO, then another, and another, and then the black smoke pouring out of the smashed nose thickened, and finally they saw, then heard, the explosion that ripped the plane to pieces and destroyed what was left of the terminal.
Justin stared like a bushbaby, his eyes huge, unblinking and seemingly disconnected from his brain. He looked more like a child than the disorientated teenager he was, a child watching fireworks, excited, waiting for the next explosion.