Loss of Separation

by Conrad Williams

  I trudged to the bookshop. Ruth was at work, but she'd agreed to let me play shopkeeper. She told me she'd buy me a present if I made more than five pounds in one day. I wasn't seeing her around as much as I hoped. I wanted to talk to her about the boat trip, and I was worried that she was spending too much time doing her job. I suspected it was a way of screening her thoughts from the baby because when her mind turned to the pregnancy she also dwelled upon the events that resulted in it.

  Vulcan trotted in after a few minutes and took up his position on the cushion in the window. He paused to look at me while he washed one of his paws, as if he couldn't quite believe someone else was being his underling today. I put out some food and water for him and then I tried to find the booklet about Winter Bay that I had seen the previous day, but I couldn't remember where I had positioned it. I checked my room, in case I had accidentally taken it back with me, but it wasn't there either. Someone must have bought it.

  I sat at the desk for an hour, trying to read, but my pain would not allow me to focus. No position was comfortable. Just trying to keep my balance on the rolling ship had caused me agony in muscles that my wasted legs had not used for months. The motion of the sea had stayed inside me, as if it had stolen aboard and was influencing the tides of my blood.

  I closed my eyes and thought of one of my first times flying a commercial passenger jet. I had the controls of a 737 and we were flying through heavy cloud, climbing out of Prague. The sun was shining through them, giving everything an otherworldly brightness. It was like flying through glass. We banked left, a steep one, and a couple of minutes after levelling off I suddenly felt certain that the jet was going into a subtle roll. The horizontal situation indicator was dead level though. I closed my eyes and yes, there it was, that feeling of tilt. I compensated with the steering column and the indicators showed we were tilting to the right.

  'I think we have an instrument malfunction,' I told the captain. He took over the controls - correcting my manouevre - and checked the display.

  'Not that I can see.'

  We talked about it and he told me it was spatial disorientation, a fairly common phenomenon that most pilots experienced, even seasoned ones. I'd been made aware of this during my training as a pilot, but until then I'd never experienced it. It was believed to be the cause of an Air India 747 crash in the 1970s.

  Now I felt like this all the time. Listing, spinning, a sense of always being about to fall over despite being on an even keel. Nevertheless, thinking back to my days as a pilot had a calming effect. Gone, or at least reduced, was the edge that seemed to harry me all the time. The coldness of or in my bones lessened, and I didn't feel quite so ill-fitted in my skin. It was as if the memory of altitude had nourished me in some way, reminded me of who I was, essentially, rather than what I had become superficially. The breaks and bruises would take time to heal and the scars would be ever-present, but I was coming back. It might take years, but I was still Paul Roan. I still had a part to play in things.

  Bolstered by this, and the realisation that I might well make a full recovery given time, I felt the urge once again to connect with Tamara. I was convinced that she would change her mind if she could only see how well I was progressing. And any improvement would surely be accelerated were she to return to me. I couldn't see how she might refuse, despite Ruth's insistence that she would eventually have moved back to her comfortable, certain life even if the accident had been averted.

  I dug out the numbers I'd dialled and tried them again. No answer. I tried them again, dialling carefully with the stiff pegs of my fingers, but there was no joy. I felt cheated. My mood upswing had been checked too easily.

  I thought of Tamara maybe sitting in a room, dressed for lunch with her old flame, but poring over photographs of me. She'd be chewing her lips as she often did when she was worried or unsure. I should call him. I should see how he is. How could I just walk out on him like that? At the very least he deserves an explanation, an apology.

  Yes. That's right. Call me.

  I closed my eyes and willed it.

  Footsteps outside the door.

  I opened my eyes, fully expecting to see Tamara's hand reaching out, but it was a bald, heavily-bearded man in a pale grey jumper, bottle-green corduroy trousers and Wellingtons armoured with mud. He was old. He was carrying a box and peering through the glass as if unsure that the shop was open. He seemed uncertain, worried even. I noticed that I'd failed to switch the sign around to read OPEN. I went over and let him in. His expression didn't change.

  'Books?' I asked, cocking my head at the box. 'Ruth's not around at the moment, but you can leave them with me if you like.'

  'Not books,' he said. And then I saw that his expression was less to do with whether the shop was open and more to do with me. He was assessing me.

  'This is... well, let's just say it's a box of things I don't need any more and leave it at that.'

  I nodded. I was a little taken aback. Usually I was left items by anonymous donors. This was the first time I'd seen in person someone who wanted to be rid of something. I didn't want to touch the box, so I asked him to leave it outside. He did so, wiping his hands on the back of his trousers. He seemed about to leave when he turned back. Suddenly he was close to tears.

  'You're filth,' he said, and it seemed he was having trouble keeping the emotion from his voice. His eyes shone. 'You disgust me. I wish you'd died on that road. Nothing you can do. Nothing we can do. Nothing we've done. None of it is any good. Nothing will work.'

  I didn't know how to respond. I felt as if he'd kicked me in the guts, despite my feeling the same way sometimes, about my unconventional role within the community. Was this how people saw me? Even as they were leaving me their little piles of guilt to dispose of? I stroked Vulcan's fur and thought about how I had come about this unwanted position. I felt upset: there was a spike in my throat I couldn't swallow around. Sin-eater. Trouble-shooter. Janitor. Eliminator.

  I didn't recall seeing the old man around the village before, but then I didn't pay much attention to other people. Maybe he was an out-of-towner come in especially to give the village pariah a box of grief.

  I went outside and picked up his offering. It was heavy, and something was seeping through the cardboard, darkening it. There was a faint smell rising from beneath the oily tea-towel that served as a lid, a smell I recognised so well yet could not identify.

  I carried the box away from the village, as if it were a bomb that needed to be disposed of in a safe environment. It was heavy. At the pier I hobbled down the concrete steps to the sand and shuffled into the shadows where the ghosts of previous fires waited bitterly for me. The wind hissed around the promontory; slow footsteps moved across the wooden slats of the pier above my head. In the summer this place was thronged with visiting families. Queues in the café for fish and chips snaked out of the door. Out of season I was sometimes the only person in that café for hours.

  Blistered, salt-burned supportive columns. An empty beer bottle. The sand gradually losing its toffee colour to the pounds of carbon dust I was adding to the beach. I thought I saw the broken gull being rocked on the curdling tide but it could have been anything. I stared at the box. I knew what was inside. I couldn't understand how he had happened upon it, or why he thought I would be able to destroy it with fire.

  I peeled away the tea-towel and gazed at the 'black box' nestled within. Much of it was dented and scratched, the lettering stencilled upon it - FLIGHT RECORDER DO NOT OPEN - partially obliterated by scorch marks. Fire had already tried to have its way with this thing.

  'But there was no crash,' I said. 'There was no fire.'

  I felt something cold sweep through my bowels, as if I'd suddenly been immersed in the North Sea. I wanted to hurl this thing away. I couldn't understand why the guy had dumped this on me: no beach fire was going to penetrate an exterior capable of withstanding temperatures upwards of 1,000 degrees Celsius. Of course the box was nothing to do with Flight 029, but inexpli
cably, I knew that if the tape housed inside the thing were retrieved and played, my voice would be on it, monotoning the same mistake that I had made on that night over Madrid.

  I lifted the box so that it was level with my face. My slack, sleepy muscles struggled with its weight. I shook it. I smelled it. The tang of metal and a shut-in odour of burned things. Plastic, aluminium, flesh. I closed my eyes and saw jerking passengers belted into their seats trying to scream, but there was no oxygen to feed them because the fire was stealing it from their lungs. I hurled the box as far as I could into the surf, rubbing and re-rubbing my hands on my jeans to get rid of the greasy feel of the thing.

  I burned the cardboard and climbed the stone steps back to the promenade, suddenly bone weary. I kept looking back, expecting to see the orange casing tumbling ashore on the filthy brown curl of tide, but I knew it would not surface again without the help of a diver.

  I walked around the village for a while, hoping to spot the person who had given the box to me. All I could think when I tried to picture his face was a number and a letter: 34A. I tried to remember if he had said that number in conjunction with the box he had handed over, but the upset of being given the CVR wouldn't let me settle on anything we discussed. By the time I reached Ruth's house, I was convinced the 34A was in my mind for some other, probably trivial, reason. His address, maybe. He must live in a flat. But how could I know that if I'd never seen him before?

  I made a cup of tea I didn't want and settled on the sofa, feeling hot and agitated. The room had a feeling of absence. It was a cool room, with little in the way of decoration or ornament. There were no clocks, no pictures, no mirrors. No magazines lying on the floor. No flowers in vases. It felt like a waiting room. It felt like a place that was never meant to be lived in.

  I grew impatient. Rest was the only word the doctors ever seemed to toss my way, but the moment I parked myself in a chair it was as if life started to accelerate around me. Tamara was getting older while I sipped tea. Her life, presumably, was thickening with other people, events, excitement, while mine spun like a dead thing caught in a web. Any doubt or regret she might be feeling was being erased every day that went by without my contacting her.

  But there was also the possibility that she, like me, was failing to kick on after the breach. There were things to do, there was this old flame of hers trying his best to re-kindle what had existed between them, and she was either going for it, or she wasn't. And here I was wondering whether I ought to give a shit. She didn't stick with me, so who was to say, were she to come back, that she wouldn't hightail it again if some other catastrophe befell me?

  The empty room sucked any noise I made into it and shared it around. I placed the tea cup on its saucer and the room filled with brittle echoes. Then I had to move again, to take the cup from the anaesthetic living room and deposit it in the kitchen, which contained a welcome chaos. I stood by the window and looked out at the massive Suffolk sky. There were no aircraft up there just now, but there were plenty of contrails to show where they had been. When there were no jets, it was easy to convince myself that they did not exist, that it was all a mental construct. How could they exist? How could something weighing the same as 800 elephants get off the ground? Lift and thrust. And bollocks. I passed my 'A' level in Physics, I had flown the bastards, but I still couldn't get my head around it. I think, maybe, that part of the accident - the almost accident - came about because at base I didn't have faith in these machines. I had trained for years and spent a lot of money following my dream, but that's all it was. A fancy created by an ambitious imagination.

  It had been a year since the near miss; I could hardly remember what I needed to do to taxi from the apron to the runway. My hands no longer looked like the kind of things that were capable of the delicate manoeuvring that took a mass of metal up, or brought it down. And now, every time I saw a Trip-7, or a Jumbo, nosing into the blue, there was a frisson of disbelief - as if I was looking at a flying saucer - before the fear descended and rational thought went walkabout.

  Rain was rearing up far south of the nuclear reactor at Sizewell. It was at once both a solid black wall and as soft and uncertain as gossamer. I thought of Charlie's nets once they'd been shot, the way they hit the water and then billowed, as if they'd expanded as a result of breath drawn. Black capture, sinking fast.

  The other side of the sky towards Great Yarmouth, miles and miles away, but little more than a turn of the head, was as clean as a scrubbed plate. Supertankers spoilt the horizon's line.

  There was a piece of paper lying next to the microwave oven. I went to retrieve it, thinking that Ruth had left me some instructions for dinner, but it was just a shopping receipt from the previous day. Steaks. Broccoli. Orange juice. Folic acid. I checked the fridge, thinking I might start cooking so that dinner would be ready for Ruth's return, but there were no steaks to be found. The fridge was pretty much empty, bar a bottle of milk, some butter and half a bag of salad. I felt cheated; I really fancied a steak now.

  I slung a potato in the microwave and scooped the salad into a bowl. There was a tin of tuna in the cupboard; my fingers were on fire by the time I'd ground the lid off it with the can opener. I ate standing up, wishing there was something to do beyond physio, bathing and the constant dread of things arriving to destroy.

  We would have had the B&B, Tam's Place, going six months by now. We wanted to be ready for the Christmas period; this part of the country was a popular place to spend the festive season. Our rubric was a hotel in Hertfordshire where we had retreated for a restful weekend shortly after the hardship of the enquiry. It had a quirkiness about it, despite its luxury. The wall behind the reception desk was covered with ancient keys. There was soft, recessed lighting but only so much as to produce moody pools of blue here and there, and a small bar. It was the subtle touches that we liked, and that we remembered when we started planning the B&B. We wanted to be a cut above. If someone ordered a drink there would always be a little complementary something to go with it. A wafer with a coffee, a small dish of spiced nuts with a beer. Tamara wanted stone-coloured towels rolled up into neat bundles, and sisal baskets in which to store them. There would be something nautical in each room, and each room would be named after a fictional seafaring character. We were going to paint the walls mushroom and have aubergine carpets. A solid oak front door with a bay tree and gravel. Fresh flowers. Fluffy bathrobes. I ached for that time, a promise that seemed to be calling to us from across the years.

  I'd finished my meal without tasting it. I scraped the remnants into the bin and fed the plate to the dishwasher. I checked my watch. Ruth's shift had finished an hour ago. It took less than half an hour to drive from the hospital. Coffee with a friend. Loose ends at work that needed tying off. Supermarket trip to fill this refrigerator's belly. So why was I so concerned? Perhaps I was just missing her company. I'd only seen her for a fleeting moment in the past few days.

  The rain waded in. It was the kind of weather that tapped politely on the window a few times and then unleashed all hell. I thought of her driving through this, everything - the roads, the windscreen, the black canopy over Bailey's Hollow - turning to oil. I started to shudder. I had to sit down.

  I had been out walking that road in a storm like this. Apparently. I have no recollection. I was found twelve metres from the road at the edge of a ploughed field. I'd been hit by a 4x4, at a blind corner. A foot to my right was a ditch filled with water that would have drowned me. A foot to the right there was a gathered pile of dead branches upon which to impale myself. The flesh of my right arm was peeled back from the bone like a thick red sweater sleeve where it had plunged through the windscreen. I was lucky to be found as soon as I was. In all probability I suffered the first of my cardiac arrests out here and Ruth resuscitated me. She called Charlie, and 999. Charlie arrived first. They kept me warm until the ambulance turned up and then he visited me in hospital, with Ruth, a couple of times a week. They both talked to me for hours at a time. They kept
me going when my body had forgotten what going meant.

  I must have fallen asleep, because suddenly I was staring up at Ruth's face and it was upside down and I felt embarrassed, as if I'd been caught doing something inappropriate. For a few moments we were complete strangers. Ruth's face was inflexible. Maybe the cold had made her stiff. Her eyes were blank, uncomprehending. And then she thawed, or I saw her in a warmer light, or the spell was broken somehow. She smiled and I levered myself carefully upright.

  'It's late,' she said.

  'I wanted to wait up for you.'

  She sat in her favourite armchair. The house ticked around us. There was something about her that I had sensed, without being able to pinpoint, something unusual. Now I had it: she hardly blinked. It was like being with an owl.

  Of course, the fact that she had just come off a long shift might have something to do with it. Often, despite being pregnant, Ruth would overload on coffee, which meant that when she got home, although bone tired, she could not rest and had to wind down by watching a film, or reading one of her survival books. But even when she was relaxed, it was there. When you talked to her she would hold a level gaze without blinking. I wondered if she might even be aware of it, whether it was a technique NHS staff were taught to calm down nervous or agitated patients, or disarm troublemakers.

  'Did you have a meeting?'

  She gave me a blank look.

  'After work. It's just, well you were late home.'

  'Late home.'

  'Yes.'

  'I had a few things to do. But not a meeting.'

  'How's the baby?'

  She shot me a look. Something wasn't right, but I didn't know what to ask, or even if I had, how to couch it.