Flight

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘My pleasure. It’s a sweet wee cottage,’ she said, tracing a cross on the kitchen window’s condensation. ‘Can I look around?’

  ‘I wouldn’t call it sweet, but it’s certainly wee. Go ahead. Could you pass me the sugar?’

  She did so. ‘Do you want a spoon?’

  ‘Top drawer.’

  She opened the wrong top drawer, rummaged under papers as if the cutlery was eccentrically underneath. ‘Och, d’you know your passport’s in here?’

  It was sitting in her hand: the old one. Captain Robert C. Winrush, pilot. Thick with visa stamps. The new false one was upstairs.

  ‘That’s fine. Leave it in there,’ Bob said, a little too sharply.

  She closed the drawer without opening the passport, saying how awful everyone looked in their photos, not being allowed to smile. He stirred his coffee. What else was there lying around that might be embarrassing? He was still too malarial to think straight. The moment of stress had pitched him backwards. He put his head in his hands. It would have fallen off, otherwise.

  She saw him up to bed with an aspirin. He took his dressing gown off; he was in pyjama shorts. She eyed his scarred leg.

  ‘You’ve been in a scrape.’

  ‘Car crash. Icy road.’

  She tucked him in, like a nurse. All that was missing was the goodnight kiss.

  ‘I’ll look in on you, later. On my way back from the machair.’

  ‘You’re an angel. I mean that.’

  Her smile made her upper lip vanish again, all but touched her earlobes. ‘You’ve not got a clue,’ she said.

  The intervening hours were a fog. He woke up to find her where he’d left her, on the edge of the bed, frowning and in miniature. An enormous hand felt his forehead. He was a young knight with folded ankles.

  ‘You’re awful hot. Have you got a thermometer?’

  ‘I’ll be fine. I feel better already.’

  ‘I thought you might be in a coma.’ She held up an empty bottle of Talisker. ‘I found this floating in the loch, with a message inside it. I think you’ve caught a chill.’

  ‘Message?’

  She unfolded a piece of paper. ‘It’s a right scrawl,’ she said. ‘But here goes. You’re my little bird. How much does a little bird weigh?’ She turned the paper the other way up, peered closer, her mobile face flashing perplexity. ‘It depends on the fucking bird. As far as I can fucking tell. UNLESS. Unless what?’

  He smiled, his dry lips cracking. ‘My handwriting’s terrible. How was the machair?’

  ‘Ever so wet. I think the world’s going to end tomorrow. Or maybe next week. If we’re lucky. My boots and socks are drying downstairs, if that’s OK.’

  She showed him her bare feet, raising them in turn. They were slender, deeply arched, with no sign of webbing; Olivia’s feet were flattish, the bit of her she would disown and that went with nothing else: not her slim waist, long neck, svelte legs. Oh, wife.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, not really concentrating, closing his eyes because they ached with the light. He had seen the rest of her, firm and smooth as a seal, but she didn’t know that. ‘As soon as I’m better, I’ll invite you round,’ he said. ‘You’re a remarkable person.’

  He looked around; there was no one. The attic bedroom stretched out as long and narrow as a dormitory. It was the dorm. There was a letter from home on his bed, not a good one. He felt incredibly alone and tears came into his eyes.

  ‘Here we go,’ she piped, coming up the stairs.

  A bowl of porridge oats in hot milk, sprinkled with cinnamon.

  She looked down at him, hands on her hips. ‘Have you been crying?’

  ‘Just glad to see you, as they say.’

  The first hints of spring had brought a change. Fresh mould had appeared in corners, despite the Raeburn, the paraffin heaters and the fire kept roaring in the sitting room, and he began to think about it all as if he cared. He inspected the outside walls for damp patches, studied the drains, made rough measurements, found the boggier bits, watched how the rain escaped, ran his finger along sills, and actually bought a ladder and cleared the guttering. As if he cared.

  Colin was exercising his grazing rights, and Marcie had customers. She offered him her power shower. Bob said no; then she’d insisted and he’d said yes, feeling traitorous. He’d emerged glowing and dressed, but with the towel over his shoulder, through the door marked PRIVATE. The customers that day were a middle-aged English couple, already bowed like old folk. ‘We’re from Cheshire,’ they said. ‘You two’ve got a lovely little establishment here.’

  ‘I’m just checking my emails,’ Bob replied, which they thought was a terrific joke.

  One from Al, acknowledging receipt of the divorce papers and attaching photos of his property in ‘Ruislip’: white colonial-style mansion dazzling in the sun; flowery bushes and lawn around a curvaceous azure pool; and the ‘private beach’ – a tropical version of Bob’s, curved into a palm-fringed bay, hammock in the foreground. Marcie caught the last image on the screen as she fiddled with plates in the little galley.

  ‘Ooh, that looks nice. Could almost be here.’

  ‘Ruislip.’

  ‘Thought I recognised it. Your next stop, for the birds?’

  ‘Nope. No black-headed gulls.’

  ‘You chose the wrong species,’ she sighed, heading back to the couple with some sponge cake. It was eleven o’clock.

  ‘That does look scrumptious,’ said the English lady as her sponge cake was lowered.

  ‘Like its cook,’ snorted the man – short, fat and bald.

  ‘Can’t take him anywhere!’ his wife wheezed.

  ‘Putting teeth in his mouth spoiled a good arse,’ the returning Marcie murmured in Bob’s ear. ‘As my da used to say. A friend’s place, is it?’

  Al was there on the beach, bare-chested, tanned and waving a straw hat. His private beach. He can’t have done that many brown envelopes. This was serious wealth.

  ‘A distant cousin,’ Bob said. ‘Likes to show off.’

  ‘To the poor relation, who doesn’t even have hot water.’

  Thankfully she pulled away to the galley’s sink. He opened the other messages: nothing from Sophie amongst the spam, but the one from David was bothersome.

  Tim Sightly had written a report for an anti-arms journal about various dodgy flights, including one from Gostomel to Tehran: it was based on original research by the late Sharansky. The packing lists consisted of the usual – mineral exploration machine parts, rotary drilling-rig spares – and Tim wanted Bob to check it over, any further info welcome. ‘So glad the deal’s still on.’

  The guy’s terrier doggedness was quite something. David had signed off his message with ‘love’ and a cross. That was something, too.

  Bob turned the screen slightly and opened the document, diminishing the font size. Marcie passed him, seeing only a sea of dull-looking text, heavy with acronyms and real names and footnotes, with only the word ‘flight’ repeated.

  ‘Birds, birds, birds,’ he grimaced.

  He decided to print it off: the printer was on the next table with a fax alongside, the latter even dustier. Perhaps it came into its own in the season, perhaps not. He connected the flex and clicked the button and the printer coughed and whirred as he stood up.

  ‘State of the art,’ he remarked.

  ‘Like me, hun.’

  It was a report of just four pages, the last being a grid of packing lists and three different flight plans – from proposed to final. Familiar enough. The last page was emerging when Marcie came alongside with a bill in her hand for the Cheshire couple. He shielded the printer as if unconsciously.

  ‘No problems? It sticks sometimes.’

  She moved to his left, her eyes glancing down. The paper was hard to read because it came out upside down. ‘That looks like a lot of fun. Don’t pull on it before it’s out. As it were.’

  He liked Marcie’s familiar earthiness, but not just now. He tapped a brief note to Sight
ly, saying he would get back in the next few days. He signed off the message to David with ‘loadsa love’ and five crosses.

  The English couple were open-mouthed: they’d seen him pay.

  Sightly’s report was spread before him on the kitchen table. Just reading it had hooked him again: the aviation drug. Being airborne, rotating to take-off, feeling the thrust and the lift, getting all that metal bulk to ease upwards and coast, apparently weightless. He tipped back just as he’d do as a kid in the old wicker chair in the hall, his father holding it by the corners and making engine noises, jerking it when they hit turbulence, spotting an Me109 and giving it such a long burst that his son’s teeth rattled, then shrieking into a spiral dive to avoid its Hun friends (‘rather fed-up, those chaps’), pulling out after they’d cleared the cloud base and could see each stook in the fields, then stalking a Heinkel over the sea and blazing away but to no great effect, landing with a damaged wing and glycol smoke pouring from the peppered nose.

  ‘Not a bad show,’ was all his father would say, lighting his pipe. ‘Now the tea and paperwork.’

  The report, entitled ‘A Proliferation of Lies’ and acknowledging Sharansky’s posthumous contribution, tracked a recent cargo flight from Gostomel to Tehran, with a complex final flight plan of about 15,000 nautical miles involving some ten legs during which a lot of interesting cargo could have been soaked up. There was even a stopover at Pyongyang. This wasn’t the North Korean shindig that Al and he had been roped into a few years back, but a lot more recent.

  The Ukraine–Iran link itself was virtually standard, but the thrust of the report was that this flight was a sting intended to frame a big-time arms trafficker called Igor Karnosov (the name new to Bob). The crate, an Ilyushin seventy six, had been impounded and searched at Colombo, with some thirty tonnes of arms and ammo on board – officially listed as, among other things, drilling-rig spare parts.

  He let his eye drift down a long paragraph detailing the plane’s leasing, wet-leasing and chartering history – the usual sequence of Chinese boxes, designed to blind. It certainly would have blinded him, too, except that his eyes were suddenly opened, and rather wide, by the location of the main shareholder of one of the companies incorporating the outfit that had chartered the aircraft for the last five legs. This shareholder, Swallowtail Trading Ltd, was where the trail of shell companies petered out. It was registered in Panama, although the director was based in the British Virgin Islands. His name (almost certainly fake) was Keith Price. No address in either case, of course: Bob knew that tax-haven companies were all brassplates, their directors virtually untraceable. But something at the back of his neck tingled.

  One swallow does not make a summer, Captain.

  A swallowtail being a butterfly, but Gold Teeth did not have a perfect command of English vocabulary. Bob saw in his mind’s eye that display case at Al’s, full of bright wings: the smell of camphor, the thoraxes pinned to the foam.

  He felt better, he felt worse, depending on the way his thoughts blew.

  Swallowtail appeared to have links, according to the report, with various drug cartels, mainly Afghan and Mexican – goods from the former coming via China, the latter near enough to do it by yacht or speedboat.

  His father’s motto in the Spit: Take your time, punch hard.

  Bob grimaced. He should have stuck to white rhinos, arctic foxes, live crickets out of Brisbane, a Hercules maindeck full of Cadbury’s Creme Eggs. Or self-loading passengers.

  He wandered over to the loch and stood by the neck portion of its goose shape. A fish surfaced, the ripple going on and on, suddenly glittering as the sun came out from behind a sliding cloud. Marcie would have said it was a sign. If Al had anything to do with that heroin deal on the return Turkmenbashi leg, let another fish rise.

  An instant later, the corner of his eye caught someone heading for the cottage: at this distance, from the far side of the loch, he couldn’t identify who until, through the binoculars, he could just make out Judith’s waxed jacket.

  He sprinted back as best he could without falling. He’d left the front door unlocked; Judith was nearly there; Sightly’s report was spread page by page on the table. His yelling of her name went unheard. By the time he leapt over one of the blue milk crates, the peat had hit his eyebrows.

  Judith was in the porch. Her hand was on his arm; he was too breathless to make sense. She looked shocked rather than pleased.

  ‘I wouldn’t ever have dreamed of going in,’ she said. ‘I’m on the way to check out my readings.’

  ‘Cup of tea? Something stronger? Al fresco, even?’

  He gathered up the papers on the kitchen table before she was halfway in, stood there beaming.

  ‘You sure you’re better, by the way, Kit?’

  He’d set up a driftwood bench on the blank south side of the house, facing the peninsula. They took their tea out to his home improvement; Judith made great play of the fact that the bench wobbled. ‘It’s my suntrap,’ he said. ‘But it hasn’t caught anything yet.’ Bands of sunlight were obediently travelling at single-engine speed over the slopes, the loch, the rocks, the distant machair, and striking occasional sparks off where the sea lurked. To Bob’s surprise, she offered him a cigarette, which he declined.

  ‘Don’t tell Ewan. I have one a day, max.’

  The smoke blew across him, but she didn’t notice.

  ‘Basically,’ she began, folding her bony hands, ‘Ewan reckons he knows who you are.’

  He barely concealed the lurch inside him.

  ‘Good for Ewan,’ he said. ‘What’s the prize? A Crackerjack pencil?’

  ‘Before my time. Put it this way: he knows who you’re not. The rest is intelligent guesswork.’

  ‘Impress me.’

  ‘You’re not an ex-teacher of nature studies; no one’s called it that for decades. It’s called science studies and you don’t do birds, not these days. The only bird most kids know is a robin.’

  ‘We called it that at the exclusive little prep school in deepest Suffolk where I taught. Weird uniform. Squirrel-red.’

  ‘Then you should know a buzzard from a hen harrier. We had a clear view of its silhouette. They’re completely different.’ Her dark eyes were on him again.

  ‘Maybe I need glasses.’

  She shook her head in mock-despair. ‘And you didn’t know what jizz was.’

  The plank felt like emery board. ‘I’m very specialised, Judith.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘in wind farms.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘We were a little gobsmacked by your handyman’s lecture on turbines up at the manse.’

  ‘Air and wind. It’s where birds operate.’

  She sighed, looking out on the panorama. ‘Ewan reckons you’re working undercover. He wants to put this fact on his blog.’

  ‘His blog?’

  ‘The centre director’s blog, yes. I said that was unfair.’

  ‘It is. Defence counsel requests more information.’

  Judith explained that there were worrying rumours involving a new energy company called Scottish Torches. They wanted to plant twenty wind turbines on the peninsula: she swept an arm and they seemed to rise like phantoms, turning their vast white blades. This is a bad day, thought Bob: trouble always comes in twos and threes.

  She told him that the croft’s landlord had a multi-megawatt allowance to export electricity to the national grid; the local and national powers-that-be were to be approached, and were expected to approve. A lot of money was involved. Bribes, dodgy politics. Ewan had looked into the possibility of buying the croft, but of course had got nowhere.

  ‘The RSPB will make a fuss and they’ll be fobbed off with your silver ribbons or whatever,’ she went on. ‘According to a mole in contact with Ewan, the cabling will not go underground, but be carried across the island on massive pylons.’

  Bob squeezed his eyes shut and opened them to the same prospect: life as a strip mine, free of pretty illusions. The landlord was Al McA
llister. Al McAllister was God, at the centre of everything. The true skipper all along.

  ‘I can see why they chose here,’ he said. ‘It never stops blowing.’

  ‘As you’re confirming to the grey suits? From your on-site readings?’

  She was looking at him with raised eyebrows, like a clown face. The cigarette in her fingers.

  ‘If you don’t fib,’ he said, ‘you end up somewhere better, my mother used to tell me. Before she died. This is the first I’ve heard of it.’

  ‘You look genuinely upset,’ Judith noticed.

  He nodded and said, ‘Who chased off the grey suits?’

  ‘Not you. I hate guns.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t unhappy about it.’

  ‘So you say.’

  ‘Aren’t you all for it, given it’s green and the Centre’s got its own propeller?’

  She explained how their turbine was tiny, on a human scale. ‘Apart from the pylon question, a full-size turbine is set in concrete that goes down as deep as it does high – some fifty metres high. Tons of CO2 given off in its manufacture. It’s made of metal, which has to be mined, smelted, assembled, transported. It wrecks the landscape, makes this terrible hum, kills birds.’

  Sounds like aviation, Bob thought to himself. ‘Yours might still have a birdstrike,’ he said.

  ‘Offshore’s better,’ she went on regardless. ‘Onshore wind power’s what I call shiteology. You need more heat, so you cut down a forest instead of pulling on a sweater. You know what Americans do? They spin-dry their washing in the sunshine states. That’s shiteology.’

  ‘Like skiing in Dubai,’ Bob suggested.

  ‘Oh, Dubai!’ She waved her cigarette about. ‘Shiteology’s headquarters!’

  The glass towers flashing, the lemons ripening around the pool, the tiles cooking the soles of your feet. Here, a grim bank of cloud was moving in from the west: normal service resumed.

  ‘So if you’re never a wind-farm agent or a private investigator or an agent provocateur from some English security firm, what are you?’

  ‘I’ve said.’

  ‘Military? Your hairy barrel chest, your obsession with fitness, those scars on your leg.’

  ‘Oh, skiing accident. Open fractures.’