Flight

by Adam Thorpe

  He cut off the reply, caught the salesman-type looking at him and flashed a pilot’s reassuring smile. The man got up and left, blushing. The rain had stopped, as if the scene in the film was over. David would be interested, of course. Unfortunate. There wasn’t a lot of nuance when it came to landmines in the popular imagination.

  The blue-eyed waitress cleared the salesman’s table. Olivia always told Bob that his eyes were grey, not blue. Grey-blue, at the very least.

  I’m not partial to men with blue eyes.

  She had said this the very first time they met. It was at a friend’s wedding. Bob was barely weaned off simulators, but had clocked up a long haul or two. Her own eyes were green, her dark hair imbued with a citrus smell. She was exactly his height that day, in high heels. They were all hanging about for the happy couple in the ancient country churchyard. She explained to him that her name used to be shortened to Liv, but when she made friends with a Liv (the bride) at the age of nine, she became Olivia.

  ‘Not Ol?’

  ‘Too male,’ she said in her throaty voice. ‘And Olivia was also Olivia Newton-John, I’m afraid. We were fans.’

  ‘I’m Bob. The groom’s Rob. We’re known as Bob ’n’ Rob.’ She found this funny. Her hand touched his elbow.

  ‘What do you do, Bob ’n’ Rob?’

  ‘Fly planes.’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking. Who for?’

  ‘BA at present. I’ve just got my stripes. I think I know where the brakes are, now. You don’t look impressed.’

  ‘I’m Pan Am. Serving drinks and sick bags in white gloves. Based in Miami.’

  Of course, hers wasn’t a top-model look; it was the post-Pan-Am-training look. The straight back, the elegance, the looking-into-your-eyes. The bergamot oil against jet lag.

  He asked where her Florida tan was.

  ‘I’m an English rose. And the fuselage doesn’t get the sun.’

  ‘So are those the same gloves?’

  ‘What a cheek.’

  ‘Pan Am doesn’t believe in British pilots, alas.’

  ‘And nobody believes in women pilots. Not yet.’

  ‘The day will come,’ Bob said, secretly thinking it never would.

  They began to read the tombstones, like the other guests. Her high heels got stuck in the lumpy turf and he had to hold her silk-covered arm. They got engaged a year later.

  The rain was still switched off, so he went for a run up on the downs, Ulverton extending into them in the form of a new estate crammed with posh houses in tiny gardens, window staring into window to check out who was sleeping with whom. He imagined it at night, full of snores and giggles. The only other walkers were people with dogs, looking wind-bitten and healthy under bobble hats. His Dubai tan must have struck them as inauthentic. The downs felt bleak and the tracks were as slippery as cream, but he appreciated the space and pushed himself a little, stretching his lungs and burning them on the cold air, so that by the time he was back they were flaming. He doused them in steam from the shower on the homeopathic principle, thinking about the DC-10’s sauna and how the prince had been so quick to get rid of him. Fat white rabbit, scared by the foxes. The wolves, maybe. Bob wasn’t sure. Sharansky was the hunter with a kid’s catapult.

  The phone grumbled as he sat there in his ash-smelling towel, feeling steamy and picturing Leila in a waitress’s bib apron and nothing else. A text message from his soon-to-be-ex, finishing ‘LOL OLIVIA’. She still shouted at the end. No crosses. She didn’t now mean the lots of love; it was automatic. Otherwise she’d still be calling him grey-eyes, as in the old days.

  She wondered when oh when would he take away his ‘bits n pieces’. Twenty-five years of marriage ending in bits n pieces. He ignored it for the moment. He must go up and see David. He wasn’t sure whether Olivia had told the twins about the bloody Makarov, that single sky-shot she still heard as entering her lover’s head, whatever the evidence to the contrary. They did know about the Canadian prick, though. For the moment they hadn’t taken sides; they were helpless spectators. For how long? Olivia was growing vindictive, maybe out of shame.

  It had taken him three weeks of brooding in the Grampians, and a lot of staring into a lodge hotel’s roaring fire, to forgive her. Before the bullet had had a chance to come down to earth again, he’d spat the drive’s gravel, sped along Worcestershire’s golden lanes, blended into the motorway, whipped past Birmingham, Stoke-on-Trent, Warrington and Wigan, shot past Lancaster, Kendal and Carlisle, and hit Scotland’s hills after hours behind the wheel, using up all the CDs trailing about in the car, music at full volume, sliding past Glasgow at dusk, the lights coming on around Stirling, stopping at last in a pub in Killiecrankie and downing a foamy pint of Red McGregor over a Stilton risotto, talking to no one, easing his back, then on over the Drumochter summit and into the night, aware of the great mountains all about, the very cold air, the freshness, keeping the window down in case he went to sleep – which he did anyway at about two in the frosty dark, but not before he’d pulled off the A9 onto a lay-by north of Carrbridge, to be woken after dawn by the throb and squeal of a lorry touching down in front of him.

  All for nothing: Olivia didn’t want him back. She’d not told the kids that he’d vanished, not in their A-level year, and so had absorbed all the worry into herself. With the help of her book-club friends, between chapters.

  You need your own life, they’d advised. You no longer love him, do you? Always off on his jaunts. Coming back grumpy, like ours are all the time. He’s probably having the life of Riley. Go for it. Attagirl. Njoy. Clink clink.

  So easy to slip up in real life. The split-second decision. What was she telling the twins now? After all, David hadn’t come to see him in Dubai: ideological reasons. Sophie had had a ball, though – in the clubs, on the beach, in the pools, on the slopes.

  No, David was the worry.

  He checked at the desk about the salesman: he was an IT manager heading for Swindon. He’d paid and left. His car was not in the hotel’s car park: the deep gravel exhibited impressive ruts of wheelspin, as if he’d left at a lick. Bob wished the waitress, smoking in the porch again, a happy life.

  ‘No problems. Bye bye, sir. Thank you for your visit. I really love your car!’

  Bob offered her a spin. To his great surprise, she agreed. There were no guests; she had an hour before preparing the lunch tables. His heart was hammering with expectation, like a pimply youth. But she was the age of Sophie, by the look of it. He glanced across as she climbed in and was touched by her child-like delight, the innocence of it.

  He would behave. He would be honourable. She trusted him.

  His wheels left as deep a mark as the IT manager, but that was just showing off. They threaded the downland in lanes banked either side by grass and slashes of brilliant chalk. The sun had emerged; he lowered the top but the cold air allowed them only a few minutes of exhilaration. She was laughing, her lips glistening, clutching her coat to her neck. He took her up to Uffington; they walked to the White Horse, stood in its grassy eye, sunlight scudded over the tussocks, over her angel hair which she loosened so that the wind rippled it out behind her. It’s so easy, thought Bob, to fly to somewhere else. Split-second decision. Because it was a chill weekday in November, they were alone. She had worked at the hotel for six months, but had never come up here, not ever. Her electric-blue eyes were enormous, looking at the view of the downs spreading southwards. ‘I must do my table setting,’ she cried, checking her watch. On the way back he played her Manuel Poveda, the flamenco voice turning the bare sweeps of chalk slopes all around them into something passionate and heat-rending. ‘I love Spain, Estonia, England!’ she shouted out of her window as the Healey swallowed the banked lane. I’m mad, thought Bob. I’ve fallen in love again.

  ‘That was the best hour of my life,’ she said, before running back into the Old Rectory Hotel, ten minutes late and risking her job. They were very strict, she said, these Serbs. He didn’t even know her name.

&nb
sp; ‘And mine,’ he shouted after her, his voice vanishing into the laurel bushes.

  He phoned Sharansky and left a message. The deal was on. He was perfectly polite: he’d made the decision in the eye of the horse. Or rather, it had been made for him, threads of angel hair tickling his cheek.

  He had called Jane to check if the angler was back. He was. Bob stopped off on the return leg back to Crowthorne: the sensible man still lived near Maidenhead, but had relocated to a fancy Edwardian mansion with an immaculate garden, complete with heated pool, statuary and his other hobby: roses. Bob was taken aback; it might almost have been one of Sheikh Ahmed’s spare homes. Lots of brown envelopes, careful investment, a childless and rock-solid marriage, but it still surprised. The next fishing trip was to Norway, once the rivers had unfrozen. McAllister hadn’t even been a chief pilot, thanks mainly to his reputation as a brawler. (There had been a single incident in the bar of the Hotel Ter Streep near Ostend airport, where the low-lifer crews tended to gravitate; it had got around.) Perhaps that rankled: if so, Al never showed it. Bob was always the skipper-that-must-be-obeyed, without irony.

  Jane was out getting her perm reconfigured, which meant the men could yack. Al’s extra two years were cancelled out by a healthy tan, and his sandy hair showed no signs of greying. Somehow he looked more strapping, or perhaps it was due to being semi-retired and fattening up. Bob’s own Dubai bake was beginning to fade. They inspected what Al called ‘the grounds’: he had six hives, made sweet Maidenhead honey. The gliding koi had names: Pretty Lady, the Count, Popeye. So did the roses, presently pruned right back to thorny sticks but apparently Jane’s chief love – closely followed by her husband, Al joked.

  ‘Bee, koi and rose breeders,’ Bob remarked. ‘Impressive.’

  ‘At least we’ve bred something,’ Al murmured. ‘A human being would’ve been nice.’

  Then they did the ‘guided tour’ of the en-suite bathrooms, the breakfast room, the lot.

  ‘Jane’s done everything in shades of green and grey,’ Al pointed out. ‘That’s her domain. She has an eye. This one’s called Elephant’s Piss, or witever,’ he growled, gesturing at the dining-room walls. His mobile kept ringing and he’d talk into it in single-word sentences, puffs of marshy breath.

  ‘The world loves you,’ said Bob.

  ‘When it suits it to,’ Al muttered, switching the phone off. ‘You know I’ve a new hobby, to go with my passion for koi?’

  A tall walnut cabinet of thin drawers in the study held Al’s collection of butterflies: African, Indonesian, Himalayan and so on, with one drawer full of more modest home specimens, some of which Bob recognised.

  ‘I’ve always been tentative about this kind of thing,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t be a wet,’ said Al. ‘Billions of ’em live and die and we don’t even notice. Remember the clouds that’d rise up in front of you in the bush?’

  ‘Sure do. That’s my point.’

  The pin through the thorax, the shimmering colours pushed out of sight. When Al pulled out a drawer entirely and lifted its glassed lid, there was a smell of camphor. He pointed to a specimen with iridescent blue patches as bright as police lights, marked Prepona werneri in Al’s attempt at a neat hand.

  ‘Remember seeing this in Ecuador?’ said Al. ‘On that great big leaf? Rare. We were damn lucky, you and me.’

  They skipped tea and hit the gin straightaway: Al could never drink it in front of Jane, it was one of the smells that made her ill. He favoured gin over whisky, oddly for a Scot, as long as it rang with ice and was lidded with a thick slice of lemon. Oh, and the tonic had to be splashed, not poured. Otherwise he wouldn’t touch it. This is what made Al something else to fly with, Bob thought: he was fussy, but he savoured life.

  They touched glasses.

  ‘Tea and sympathy,’ Al said. ‘Sounded nasty. But no worse than anything in Africa.’

  ‘It was worse.’

  ‘But you look good on it, skipper. Sparkly eyed.’

  ‘Clearing the dust off in the Austin Healey. What is the actual speed of light, by the way?

  ‘Now that’s straining my brain cells way beyond their capacity. Why? Is that what you reached?’

  ‘The speed you can fall in love. Visual information, eye to eye.’

  ‘Who this time?’

  ‘Someone.’ Bob shrugged. ‘A hotel waitress. Remember Ulverton? That nice pub? I think I took you up there one time.’

  ‘Vulva.’

  Bob chuckled, after a puzzled pause: someone had sprayed a V on the village sign when they’d visited, back in the 1990s. Al remembered everything.

  ‘Ach, that’s just post-separation trauma,’ he said.

  They drank to that, Bob disappointed that Al was not more interested.

  ‘So now what, skipper? Start a gliding school for blondes?’

  ‘Yup, with an engine to cover their blonde moments. I know that one.’

  The two men sipped their gins thoughtfully.

  ‘Well, Bob. You’ve had a prowler.’

  ‘If you mean the journalist, he’s dealt with.’

  ‘Dealt with?’ Al looked genuinely alarmed suddenly.

  Bob laughed. ‘No way. I mean I’ve verbally shown him the door.’

  ‘Good news. What a little wanker. So who’s your new dish?’

  ‘I haven’t got one.’

  ‘Oh. I thought you said.’

  There was a silence between them. Little wanker was not quite right for Sharansky. Pain in the arse was better. Doing his job. The real wankers were the men who’d misled them into a deal none of them liked. And one of those wankers was dead.

  ‘He’s not a bad sort,’ Bob continued. ‘He’d better be careful, though.’

  ‘He’ll be fine. We’re not in a film.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what Lennart thought.’

  ‘The poof? He had short life expectancy written all over him.’

  ‘Did you come back empty, Al? From Turkmenbashi?’

  Al frowned. ‘Full of air. A terrible waste, I thought. We could have hoovered up some of them puddles of crude, at least. Why?’

  Bob leaned forward, keeping his voice down. ‘No extra kilos of a certain poppy derivative?’

  Al paused, as if in shock, then snorted. ‘Was that a question? A lean-forward question, from the look of it?’

  ‘As I told him, you’d have known nothing about it.’

  ‘Heroin? Christ. You’ve got to be pulling my leg, Bob. We flew back with wall-to-wall air in the hold. Where’s he picked up that scrag o’ shite from? Eh?’

  Bob held up a calming hand. He’d not seen Al so worked up since a loadmaster claimed his men weren’t responsible for damage to the cargo door in N’Djamena, the tarmac melting in the heat. Maybe it was the strain of Jane. The strain of not flying enough. Of not having his gin whenever he wanted. ‘I’ve no idea. I told him, arms and drugs never mix. Chalk and cheese. Oil and water.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ said Al. ‘Now that’s a thing. Heroin! Taliboy brown sugar! Terrorist skag! Christ alive!’

  He looked out of the French windows, and so did Bob. The glorious garden looked mopish, it being November and grey in the Maidenhead area, but it was still impressive. The statuary around the covered pool, the weeping willow by the pond, the comforting spiral of smoke from a huge heap of leaves.

  ‘I see you’ve put in a copper beech,’ Bob remarked, noting the pool of red beneath a tree on the lawn.

  ‘For the future generations,’ said Al. The outside light fell on his face: he had developed some more capillaries over his cheeks since the last time Bob had seen him – which was standing in a hotel room in Istanbul, watching the skipper jump ship. Al sucked on his lemon noisily, then munched it.

  Bob said, clearing his throat, ‘Well, I never quite trusted ex-Swissair.’

  Al turned to him sharply. ‘Apart from being Swiss, nothing wrong with the guy.’

  ‘And Pedro Diez?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Pedro Diez. Th
e skipper for Turkmenbashi. My fascinating stand-in. Surprised you’ve forgotten.’

  ‘Oh, him.’ Al shook his head. ‘Nah. Ex-Iberia. Could barely speak English. When he did, you couldnae understand him. They scraped the barrel, I can tell you. Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, Bob. We all know Bensoussan is never into narcotics – he has a thing about it. His crippled daughter?’

  ‘Disabled daughter. You’ll get into trouble. Yup, that was my conclusion. So if the info’s reliable, and apparently it is, then the stuff was planted behind Evron Bensoussan’s small but compact back. Lennart knew?’

  ‘What is this?’ growled Al, spreading his arms. ‘Twenty questions? Sherlock fucking Holmes?’

  Al could look ferocious: those genial creased eyelids turning hawkish around the pale blue stare. Rare, but in Africa it was useful. He’d never wear sunglasses out there, and his long eyelashes were bleached hamster-white.

  Bob made light of it. This wasn’t working. Sharansky would publish and David would never speak to him again. Or not for years. ‘I’m worrying for our health, Al. That’s all. If one green bottle should accidentally fall, that’s fine: it’s an accident. Any more, it’s deliberate.’

  ‘You didnae fall.’

  ‘Next time, I will.’

  ‘Who told this scribbling fella there was heroin?’

  ‘I said, I’ve no idea. He called it protecting his sources.’

  ‘Bensoussan’s a big-time arms trader. Even without his junkie daughter in the wheelchair, he wouldnae readily deal in narcotics, not in the real world beyond men’s feverish imaginations. And I’ll tell you what I think,’ Al went on, leaning forward himself, his freckled forehead glistening: ‘I think someone’s out to nail Evron Bensoussan with false information, and your writer-wanker’s swallowed it. Cogs within cogs, Bob. That’s the Jewish mind for you. Political scheming.’