Flight

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘Goodbye, Captain Bob sir.’

  She was unhappy with Dubai’s glittering lifestyle, mainly because she was part of the backstage support team and entirely excluded from the show itself. She had particular difficulty with a fun-loving distant relative of the prince, who at nineteen or so had the entire top floor of their block to himself, and was not renowned for his homemaking skills; she would spend much of each week picking her way through his detritus, while he called her names from his bed. But she was kind and Christian, feeling sorry for him because he was so fat he could barely walk, let alone get out of bed. Bob felt less sorry for him, seeing the fatness as self-afflicted, but she taught him to try to see the good in people. Bob thought: I will never forget Maria. I think she may be one of the few people never to forget me.

  He said goodbye to trusty Vakim, handing over the keys. He was pretty certain that the man had been strong-armed or bribed into letting in the visitors; nevertheless, he shook Bob’s hand with alacrity and many smiles. Bob wondered if it was a test to see if he was real, and not a zombie back from the dead. The car was to stay put, as it had come with the job, but he’d ordered a taxi – on his tab, of course.

  Needless to say, the taxi was late, and by the time the Pakistani driver had negotiated Dubai’s usual dogfight of traffic and taken a brand-new, uncharacteristically well-signed peel-off to the airport which ended in sand and lots of fluttering paper litter, Bob only just made it before the check-in closed. There were cars blocking the drop-off point, with the taxi driver determined to play dodgems, and the final sprint was behind a dicky trolley under the hall’s giant palms. In the summer Bob would have run three feet and dropped dead from heat exhaustion, or equally dead from the sudden glacial shock of interior air. A brief hiatus when he couldn’t find his boarding pass (‘It was a late night’) resolved into apologies when it appeared by his left foot.

  Off-block time was bang on and then they sat on the apron for an hour. Bob looked through the porthole and smiled, thinking of what Leila might have said. He’d insisted that she shouldn’t see him off: the less she was seen with him, the better. But he didn’t tell her that. ‘Ta-ra,’ she’d said, after a long final hug. ‘Ta-ra, Captain.’

  One swallow doesn’t make a summer. Great quip. Thank you. Meaningless, in the context. But it had taken the edge off his final performance, despite Leila’s slavering attentions. Now he’d give anything to be with Leila again: she made him laugh, and she was sweetly tender, at least on the outside. Inside she was (he suspected) as hard and smooth as a lychee stone.

  Finally they were aloft. Bob was a poor passenger at the best of times, checking unseen instruments every time an aircraft yawed or lifted or turned, but that day he was worse than usual. He was in the window seat over the wing, and the flaps were bouncing. That’s it, he thought to himself. Jesus gave up carpentry; I’ll give up flying. I’ll stop telling bad jokes. I’ll open that quiet little pub, tell aviation yarns over real ale in some quiet corner of somewhere nice like Devon, if that sort of thing still exists. Maybe it doesn’t; everything seems to be Tesco these days. Above all, he’d get it right with the kids. With David and Sophie. Hardly kids. Let nothing rankle. Let nothing submerged rise to the surface and spoil everything.

  He was flying Emirates Airlines, so the in-flight magazine was mostly duty-free diamond key chains and so on. He admired the usual crop of sea-beaded bimbos, then dropped off. Naturally, the submerged thing rose in his dreams. The dodgy aircraft in trouble, one engine gone, bad weather, fifteen tonnes over the maximums … and every time he failed to make it, in his dream. When Bob emerged through unbelievable noise into a real-life murmur of turbines, he found his neighbour looking at him, surprised. He must have cried out, or twitched violently as the thick forest canopy leapt up. It wasn’t a good dream to have: in the dream, the crash would always bring relief; on waking up, the relief dissolved because he’d instantaneously remember that he did not really crash. He’d landed his cargo safely. And what followed had been much worse.

  ‘I think this is yours,’ said his overweight neighbour, handing him his boarding-card stub.

  Bob blinked at him. He felt they’d met somewhere before.

  ‘Solar panelling? In that bar? Brother with Asperger’s? You’re married to Christine but gay? Didn’t we …?’

  ‘Sorry, no.’ The man grinned. His calorific plumpness was compressed into the space dictated by the armrests, but a bared arm, swirling with hair, protruded, as did his smell. ‘Sales. Machine tools. And you?’

  ‘Not sure. I’m working on it. Sorry, I’m not a good flyer.’

  And Bob closed his eyes as if to sleep. The thought came to him again in the form of his own, clear voice: that’s it. I’ve done with flying. If I fly, it’ll be in my own home-made Sopwith Camel that’ll take years to build. A work of love. Fuck the agencies. Fuck being a haulier with wings. Fuck being a chauffeur. That’s it.

  ‘A drink, sir?’

  Eyes as dark, polished and smooth as lychee stones.

  ‘That’s it,’ he murmured, gazing into them. ‘That’s it.’

  6

  WHENEVER HE’D MENTION having a place in Crowthorne, the clever clogs always said something like, ‘What, a room in Broadmoor? They agreed to have you, did they?’ Others would mention Wellington, the stiff-backed public school that the prince had attended, although it didn’t stiffen him up very much.

  The reason Bob Winrush had a one-room studio flat there was purely practical: it was well under an hour from Heathrow, unless there were a few too many bollards on the Frimley Interchange or wherever, and yet it lay properly outside the airport’s aura. Praise be to motorways, he’d think, despite the nuisance of other cars (he’d remember with nostalgia the empty asphalt sweeps around Bratislava back in the 1990s). It was also a quick train ride to Gatwick. There were nice walks in bluebell woods, and Crowthorne was unassuming and not small enough for his comings and goings to be a subject of interest. His pad was at the other end of town from the BA pilots’ traditional burrow, the pricy and posh Edgcumbe Park: he didn’t want to talk shop all night.

  They’d bought the flat when they moved from London to Worcestershire, in the days when he was doing a lot of shuttle stuff and Olivia had got tired of walking hundreds of miles just beneath the stratosphere (she wore a pedometer on all her flights). He would have preferred the family home to have been in the pilot’s outer commuting zone – somewhere up on the downs near Newbury, say – but Olivia wanted to be near her parents, one of whom had dementia, although Bob could never remember which. She’d had her eye for years on a ramshackle thatched place which they grabbed the moment it came on the market, despite an alarming surveyor’s report. ‘It’s been standing for 800 years,’ the agent assured them. ‘That’s the best insurance.’ This particular myth was nailed by the hard science of deterioration: a main joist was being held up by a kitchen cupboard, itself ancient. Recent doors had perforated the load-bearing walls. They had to call in a building pathologist, who defined every opening as a ‘point of discontinuity’, discovered fungal decay in ‘moist’ beams, and pinpointed unfortunate composites of the old and the new that interfered with elasticity, tension and stress.

  ‘Sounds like me,’ was Olivia’s remark.

  ‘Anyone’d think it was going to fly,’ was Bob’s. He was lightly fingering a masonry join that suddenly fell out in a clump.

  The house, although listed, had to have a virtual rebuild, using original materials. It hoovered up so many brown envelopes that he lost count.

  And now it was going to be hers, not his. After all that.

  England felt wheedling, somehow, after the matter-of-fact heat of Dubai. It was raining and surprisingly cold; apart from a brief and spectacular gash in the clouds above the M25, the day’s light stayed begrudgingly dimmed all the way to Crowthorne, when it almost went completely, and then promptly did, replaced by gaseous orange street lamps.

  The flat smelt musty and unloved. He ran a bath and notice
d bruises; the back of his head was even tenderer when he leaned back, perhaps because Leila had knuckled it in the throes of passion. He wondered if his coccyx was fractured as it rustled over the residue of bath salts – Sophie’s present for his forty-ninth. ‘They’re retro, Dad. They’re making a come-back.’

  So it got dark at four o’clock, and you never saw it happen. He’d forgotten that. He’d last been here in June, when the communal garden’s trees were out and its lupin beds were abuzz. The flat was in a wing of a purpose-built 1980s block, the brick type that had probably looked friendly when new, and now resembled a barracks. Fire and security precautions meant that he had three heavy code-operated doors to grapple with before he reached his pod, and their self-closing systems left about half a second to pass through. He noticed the sills on the triple-glazed windows were rotting.

  At last, with some reluctance, he checked in the metal filing cabinet where he kept his papers and photocopies of his papers. Nothing had been touched. The Taliban flight was still there, in copyshop A4, each page from the logbook framed in black shadow. So was the cash, rolled up in Sellotaped Jiffy bags. About £30,000, most of it from the flights he’d done after Olivia had refused him back, adjusting her halo, the massage huckster still limping about town with the post-traumatic shakes. As if he’d never been waved at by a gun before!

  ‘Why should he have been?’ Olivia had remarked. ‘Most normal people have nothing to do with guns, if they’re not American or Somalian or whatever. It’s totally illegal to carry one, since Dunblane.’

  ‘Because he’s a serial adulterer,’ Bob had replied. ‘Like a pop-up target in a shooting range.’

  ‘The police have said that if you come back, and I don’t want you here, they’ll have you in for questioning. Illegal possession of a weapon, if nothing else.’

  ‘Right. I noticed the mammoth manhunt when the armed would-be killer went missing.’

  ‘They were extremely annoying,’ Olivia snorted. ‘Said it was a private matter and they couldn’t chase up everyone with a gun or they’d be doing nothing else. Oh yeah? In Worcestershire?’

  ‘Fancy you even phoning them.’

  ‘I was bloody frantic.’

  ‘So was I, honey.’

  He yanked the curtains shut on Olivia’s face looming out of the November night. He felt more glum than cross.

  He stood holding the copied logbook, snapping the elastic on its yellow file, wondering if he should physically eat the relevant page. Instead, he looked for somewhere secretive, but the flat had no nooks or crannies. He eventually put the file in the oven. It was the one place (he’d read somewhere) that burglars never look. He unfolded his laptop and spent far too long circling around Matt Sharansky, Evron Bensoussan, Pedro Diez and even the sheikh. Sharansky’s articles were annoyingly sober and reasonably accurate: he was on Bensoussan’s tail, that was clear. No mention of the Turkmenbashi flight, not yet. And nothing else of real interest, no wires touching with a flash. Fingerprints are visible everywhere on the net, but it’s the latent ones that are crucial. And you can’t scatter powder over the Web.

  The next morning was all leaflessness and very low houses, the grey spitting on the glass. He smoked an old cigarillo from a packet in a drawer, relic of an old habit he’d kicked (at Olivia’s insistence) a few years back. It was worryingly pleasant, but he felt he deserved it. Dubai had made him horizontally challenged and light-insensitive: here the buildings really were crouched, like crabs, with a few exceptions that needed to be reported for obstruction. He went out to the corner shop up the road for fresh milk and provisions – custard creams, Marmite and other such native stock, horribly overpriced in Dubai – and he smelt the street before he saw it: a queue of cars, chokes metaphorically out, windows fogged so they looked driverless. The daily commuter rush. Work.

  He was out of work, unless he phoned up the agency in Brighton. They gave you anything: he’d flown a Hercules around the Congo for them at one point. Not that he’d ever liked flying Hercs, but the Winrushes were overstretched some five years back: the shop not doing so well, plus the school fees, the house repairs, the mortgage, Sophie’s cello, his medical insurance. ‘Dodgy agencies here I come,’ he’d said. ‘I’ll phone those Brighton boys. They’ve got this nice big Herc. Lovely to fly.’

  Fat brown envelopes, he was thinking.

  So was Olivia, but you wouldn’t have known it from her tearful look, gazing out on the orchard, the trees just emerging into blossom: old apple varieties, damsons, an ancient pear that long-haired growers would come to graft from. He remembered that look now. She was imagining the twins back in the dodgy local gang, or the cottage up for sale. Seven days of brown envelopes could pay for an awful lot: a year’s education for two, for starters. If he were to do the Goma general cargo run – which was ‘dangerous-ish’, as Al would say with classic understatement – he could clear seventy thou in a week. Who was he to deny their kids a decent education?

  So he’d done it.

  Now, post-Dubai and bruised, it was late, he was in bed and he couldn’t sleep. The flat made strange, alien noises. Footsteps. Dripping sounds. Sighs in his ear. He was hanging on by his shirt tab to a spike on the edge of a cliff. The headmaster would beat him if the tab broke, because it was the third time he’d allowed his games kit to drop onto the bench. ‘I don’t have a mother to sew it on properly, sir.’ ‘You’re lying, Winrush. I talked to her at the beginning of term.’ ‘That’s my stepmother. My real mother’s dead.’ ‘One swallow maketh not a summer, stupid boy.’ He was falling, but at least he wouldn’t be beaten. Then the whole school were after him, yelping and baying; as he plunged on through mud the siren began. That was it. Now the whole world knew.

  He woke up to the Broadmoor siren’s Monday test, a dreamy version of a police chase. Ten a.m. on the dot would be the ideal time for a psychopath to escape, because no one would take any notice. The all clear sounded. He felt relieved. He was still alive.

  He hit the coffee, did a clothes wash, phoned his son David and left a message about wanting to see him. He wondered about phoning Sharansky, not to talk about his writing skills but to warn him, tell him about the Gold Teeth trio, about Lennart’s involuntary exit. But a little bird told him not to meddle. Another day was over before it lasted long enough to be properly counted.

  The next morning, feeling brighter, he searched around for the journalist’s number. He looked through the tumble-dried wash and found a stiffened piece of folded paper in a back pocket, the number just visible. He was instructed to leave a message by the same breathy English rose that fielded his own phone. Imagining Matt Sharansky’s mobile in the hands of those unwanted guests of four days ago, he aborted before saying a word.

  He made another call: Al’s landline. Jane answered and told him that Al was up to his waist in ice-cold water near Berwick, fishing for salmon.

  ‘Do come and see us when he gets back, Bob.’

  Jane: the Olivia that might have been. Jane: Miss Gatwick 1979, against stiff competition (though having been shown the group photo, Bob reckoned it had been a walkover). Now on the inflated side, having given up smoking. He didn’t mention her health. He left Al to his angling.

  He tried Sophie, who answered his text around lunch. Bob told his daughter that he was back for good, that there was no more flying. She was studying music in Newcastle.

  ‘Dad, you’ve said that before.’

  ‘Never, sweetie. I’ve never said it because I’ve never thought it.’

  ‘So what’s up? You’re retiring?’

  ‘No. Resurrecting. Life change. I’ve got a bit put by, can sell this place—’

  ‘Not your little-pub-in-Devon project?’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘Dad, you’ll get so bored. Boring old men whinging on about their carrots and cucumbers. It’s such a bad idea.’

  ‘Oh. That’s pretty encouraging.’ Private education had given his daughter not just a posh accent, but a sort of world-weary
gloss. It was hard to tackle.

  ‘I mean,’ she went on, ‘you have to admit. You’re the type that needs excitement, adventure. Your little-boy side will just go completely crazy.’

  ‘I haven’t got a little-boy side. That’s Mum’s invention. I fly because I love flying. I’m gonna fly for myself, from now on. A Sopwith Camel. Which I’ll build myself, over years. In the field behind the pub.’

  ‘Yeah, Dad. And it’ll crash. You’ll be really quadraplegic or something.’

  ‘Or just dead.’

  Bob had already given up flying – once, just for a few months. This was about a year before Luke struck lucky. Olivia’s argument had been honed over afternoon wine with her friends: the shop was tiring, she came home to no one at all in term-time, it was depressing. ‘But it was your idea that the kids should board,’ Bob reminded her. That was no argument. She burst into tears. He agreed, under pain of a separation, to give up flying for a local desk job; they’d sell Crowthorne and manage.

  Not only had his reputation gone before him (some obscure piece on arms smuggling, blown up and copied and preserved for eternity on the Web), but there were not a lot of openings in Worcestershire for a man in his late forties. He got hired as an account manager for a firm making disabled-access equipment on an industrial estate in Worcester, and survived a couple of months: sitting in a swivel chair all day in the same room as a triple-chinned secretary shouting about her life down the phone proved too arduous. As for Crowthorne, there was one of those property dips and the buyer pulled out on the last swerve.

  Meanwhile, Olivia had started therapeutic massage sessions with some Canadian guy or other on the new estate that had replaced the paddock beyond their garden. She seemed less bothered about her husband being on and off, here and away.