The Best British Fantasy 2014

by Steve Haynes

  All the TV stations keep playing that sound, over and over again, as if they can’t get enough of it, as if they can’t believe it, as if playing it one more time might give them some answers.

  I still haven’t seen it happen. I have sat still on the bed all this time, just listening. Neither my mother nor my father asks me if I want to look and I do not press them. I don’t say anything about not wanting a meal, because I know that whatever I say will sound stupid or wrong. We go down the road to a restaurant. I eat a large portion of chicken with cous cous and a slice of tarte tatin with almond pastry. The tarte tatin especially is delicious. I chase the last crumbs around my plate, scraping them all together with the edge of my spoon.

  ‘You mustn’t be frightened, Elaine,’ says my mother at some point during the meal. ‘It happened a long way away. They couldn’t do that here because none of the buildings in Britain are tall enough.’

  I have the feeling that what my mother is saying is some story my parents have agreed on between them, even though they have barely spoken a word to each other since we left our hotel room.

  They want to talk though, they are dying to, I can feel it. It’s like they’re embarrassed to say anything in front of me.

  ‘But they could still crash a plane,’ I say. ‘Into the ground. Anywhere.’

  My outburst is a surprise, even to me.

  ‘The police won’t let them,’ says my father. He sounds like one of the commentators on the television. I notice we are all saying ‘they.’ I wonder who exactly ‘they’ are, when they’re at home.

  We leave London the following morning, a day early. Everyone on the train seems to be reading the same newspaper. Only gradually do I come to realise that it’s not the same paper, just the same picture or versions of it on all the front pages: the south tower, the orange flames shooting out like the breath of a dragon, the hole in its side like a wound, the billowing smoke.

  The words ‘9/11’ don’t quite exist yet, but I can almost sense them, the need to give a name to what has happened, to give it a shape. I have a book to read on the train, Gulliver’s Travels, but I can’t concentrate on it. I keep looking out the window instead, half expecting to see buildings in flames and people running, to hear that stomach-turning thrump, the sound of steel and concrete and human beings being destroyed.

  Vaporised, is the word they keep using.

  I couldn’t stop thinking how September 11th started off normal. It was just a day at first, like any other, until the first plane took off, and even then it still seemed normal for quite a while longer, even though it already wasn’t.

  The broadcasts mostly happen at night.

  I’ve always depended on the radio for getting to sleep. I’ve never been a good sleeper, not even in the early years with Willem, when I was happy every minute of every day and before I started going insane. I’ve always found the radio comforting, those reasoned, measured voices bringing me news. Even if it was bad news the radio made it feel like a solution could still be worked out. Even if the world was going to hell in a handcart at least I could be grateful the world was still there.

  Now I’m terrified to turn on the radio because there’s a chance, each time I do, that I might hear it, that broadcast, the final communication from the cockpit of United Airlines Flight 259.

  Jesus

  I think that’s done it, I think it’s holding

  The fuck it is. Merrick, get the nose up, for fuck’s sake – we’re going down like a –

  Your light’s on, sir. The carriage release –

  I see it. Jeez, give me some space here, won’t you?

  There’s a bumping sound in the background. Once the cockpit tape has played out the studio commentators spend some time speculating over what the bumping sound might be. One of them thinks it’s the sound of the cabin door being torn off, the other reckons it’s just static. They go on and on about it, as if prolonging their stupid discussion might keep UA 259 from finally slamming into the centre of Istanbul.

  The man saying ‘jeez’ is Captain Willem van Doer. Merrick, I have discovered, is Willem’s co-pilot. The mysterious thumping is the sound of my world, splitting in two.

  Willem never swears, at least he never used to.

  The sound of his voice saying ‘jeez’ and ‘fuck’ is terrifying, because it’s the sound of the man I love abandoning hope.

  Two seconds after Willem says jeez the jet’s cargo bay doors are wrenched off.

  A rain of suitcases, mail sacks, industrial grade ball bearings and three Karri-Safe crates containing three pedigree Doberman Pinschers pours down into the streets a thousand feet below. There is something else in the cargo hold as well, something dangerous that should never have been there. It falls with the rest, shedding itself in minute particles all over the city. Moments later the jumbo hits the ground and explodes in a ball of fire.

  Night after night they discuss it, those calm voices with their firm and ready opinions.

  No one can make up their minds, you see. No one can make up their minds whose fault it is.

  The crash of United Airlines 259 has precipitated what is called an international situation.

  It hasn’t happened yet, but I know it will.

  I pretended to forget about 9/11.

  Actually I did better than that: I pretended not to be interested. Everybody knows that kids have short attention spans. At ten years old, if an adult tells you that what’s happening on TV is nothing to worry about you’re supposed to believe them. When my mum or dad switched on the news I either made out I wasn’t watching or left the room.

  It’s like running from a bull, or a mad dog. The trick is never to look it in the eye.

  Instead of looking it in the eye I collected newspaper clippings about it. I hid the cuttings in a cardboard box under my bed.

  Every time I heard a plane going over I would look at the ground. It seemed to me that any plane might be the next one to fall, that if I singled one out with a glance it would somehow mark it down for future destruction.

  Willem tells me many pilots see the big jets as a second best.

  That pilots who are used to flying thoroughbred fighter aircraft for the military tend to think of the commercial airliners as so many big dumb farm animals. There’s fuck all to do except sit there, they say. Once you’ve handled the take off that’s pretty much it. You could spend the whole flight taking a shit and no one would notice.

  Willem says the newer planes, the planes that carry fly-by-wire technology, are more or less impossible to crash.

  The only way to down a plane like that is to blow it up.

  Willem insists that an airline pilot’s high salary has nothing to do with the long hours or the night shifts or the disruption to family life caused by jet lag and long absences. An air captain is paid well not as a reward for years of reliable service but for those crucial five minutes when his knowledge and actions will make the difference between life and death.

  He says that every pilot will experience such a moment in his career, sooner or later.

  ‘You never know when it will happen, just that it will. And when it does it is your job to be ready for it.’

  ‘Doesn’t that freak you out?’ I ask him.

  He shakes his head. ‘It’s all about knowing the plane,’ he says. ‘So long as you know your plane, you’ll know what to do.’

  I do not ask him about those moments that come to some pilots, when there is nothing that can be done except prepare to die. Instead I ask him what it was that made him want to become a pilot in the first place.

  A look comes into his eyes then, a look of such tenderness and longing that it makes my heart clench. His whole mind is bent on remembering, and I can see from his face that he has forgotten, just for a second, that I am there.

  I think this is the moment when I fall fully in love with him. In love so
there is no way out, in love so that it will hurt me badly if things go wrong.

  ‘I was ten years old,’ he says. ‘I remember it was night time, we were travelling back upstate, we’d been visiting friends in the city. It was a long drive, some of the country up there was quite isolated. I remember thinking how dark it was, so much darker than night in town. I remember staring out the window of my father’s car and seeing this plane go over. The lights of the plane seemed very bright, very beautiful, and I suddenly found myself wondering where it was going. There was something magical about it, the thought of all those people up there, sleeping maybe, or reading quietly in their seats, perhaps looking down into the darkness to where I was, but all of them trusting the captain of the aircraft to bring them safely to where it was they needed to be. I kept thinking it was like the old days, when there were big ships and sea captains, only now we had sky captains instead. Sky captains! I loved even the sound of the words. From that moment on I was lucky, because unlike so many other people in the world I knew exactly what I wanted to do with my life. And it was always the big jets for me. Nothing else would do.’

  ‘That’s a beautiful story,’ I say to him. I mean it, too. I know already that Willem van Doer is four years older than me, that he became ten years old in 1997, four years before I did, four years before the words 9/11 bore any significance.

  For a ten-year-old Willem van Doer the sky was still a place where dreams could unfold.

  I do not ask how 9/11 affected him. After what he’s just told me the question seems rude.

  For my GCSE in physics I chose to do a project on commercial airliners.

  At the age of fourteen I still felt vaguely frightened every time I heard a plane go over. The thought of actually having to fly in one made my palms sweat. I thought it might help me feel less afraid if I knew more about them.

  I learned everything I could about the air industry, from the early post-war Douglases and Comets to the superjumbo Airbus 380, which came into service right around the time I handed in my project. I learned the difference between piston engines and turbojets, the relative dimensions of a wide-body versus a narrow-body airliner. I knew that the take-off weight for a two-engine aircraft should not exceed fifty tons. I knew that the catastrophic metal fatigue that led to the grounding of the entire fleet of de Havilland Comets in 1953 was ultimately caused by the plane having square windows instead of round windows or oval ones. I could quote chapter and verse on wing angle and runway speeds and what I knew about aerodynamics, Willem later told me, would not have looked out of place on the exam syllabus of a first year undergraduate.

  I learned also about air crashes. I learned that the six worst peacetime civilian air disasters by order of their fatalities were Tenerife (1977), Japan Airlines (1985), Haryna (1996), Turkish Airlines (1974), O’Hare (1979) and American Airlines Flight 587, which crashed over New York on November 12th 2001, just two months after the terrorist attacks of September 11th.

  Reading about the crashes made me feel small and pointless and terrified. In some strange way I also felt guilty, that I was still alive when the people who’d been on the planes were all dead. That they died horribly made me feel even worse, and yet I could not bring myself to stop obsessing over the facts.

  In time I came to realise that I secretly thought of my obsession – my reading about the crashes, my collecting of news clippings and statistics and air accident trivia – as a kind of insurance policy. The more I knew, I reasoned, the less likely it was to happen.

  I also came to realise something else: 9/11 hadn’t really been an air disaster at all, but a faultlessly staged demonstration in mass murder.

  Every source I examined told me that aeroplanes were safe and becoming safer. The statistics insisted I was in less danger inside the cabin of a jumbo jet than I was in my own bedroom. There were fewer air accidents happening year on year, and there had never been all that many in the first place, not in comparison with the number of car crashes, for example, or even bicycle fatalities.

  The planes that caused 9/11 had not failed their pilots, they had been misused.

  The disaster had been part of the flight plan. The fatal pieces were all in place before the aircraft even taxied down the runway.

  The defining tragedy had not taken place in the air, but on the ground.

  I did well in my GCSEs, and in my ‘A’ Levels also.

  My parents and teachers took it for granted that I would apply for university. I didn’t, though. I could give any number of excuses, but mainly I didn’t apply because I didn’t know which subjects to choose.

  When my mother found out I hadn’t sent the forms in she did a mental. She accused me of having a butterfly mind.

  ‘The grass is always greener on the other side with you, isn’t it, Elaine?’ she said. ‘You can never make up your mind, about anything.’

  I made all the usual teenage uproar about it being my life and my choice. It would be better if I took a gap year in any case, I insisted. At least that way I could be earning money while I decided. When the fuss had died down a bit I applied for a job with one of the smaller commercial airlines, working on the helpdesk and check-in at Heathrow Airport. I travelled down to London for the interview and was told more or less then and there that the job was mine if I wanted it.

  I accepted on the spot. How weird is that?

  In the decade following 9/11, the number of feature films, documentaries and TV programmes about the attacks mounted to a total well in excess of five hundred.

  I know, because I’ve made a list of them. Even so I know I’m bound to have missed some. What surprises me most is the number of films based around 9/11 conspiracy theories.

  9/11: In Plane Sight

  9/11: Press for Truth

  Fahrenheit 9/11

  The Man Who Predicted 9/11

  The Secret History of 9/11

  Loose Change

  9/11: the Greatest Lie Ever Sold

  9/11 Mysteries

  Between the Lies

  Core of Corruption

  The Elephant in the Room

  Great Conspiracy: the 9/11 News Special You Never Saw

  9/11: Explosive Evidence

  Aftermath: Unanswered Questions from 9/11

  ‘Flight 77’: The White Plane

  Painful Deceptions

  The Truth and Lies of 9/11

  The Ultimate Con

  The Unofficial Story

  September 11: Evidence to the Contrary

  The list goes on and on. It’s easy to dismiss these films as the work of crackpots and there are plenty that are, but for me at least what’s most interesting about the conspiracy theories is not so much the theories themselves (although some of them are so ingenious you can’t help but feel a twinge of admiration) but what they indicate: that there are many people, even now, who find the very fact of 9/11 too daunting and too overpowering to accept on trust.

  This disaster, they seem to suggest, is a chimera, a group delusion, a conspiracy of the intellect against the imagination.

  Many of these films are now available as free downloads. The strange thing is, the more of them you watch, the less certain you become of what actually happened.

  The feature films are mostly crap. Oliver Stone’s 2006 movie World Trade Center, starring Nicholas Cage and Maria Bello, was made for a budget of $65 million with a running time of 129 minutes. For all the time, money and special effects lavished upon it, World Trade Center, an unwieldy, overripe fusion of a propaganda newsreel and a 1970s disaster movie, is embarrassingly unsuccessful as cinema. Stephen Daldry’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, released in 2012 as an adaptation of Jonathan Safran Foer’s controversial novel, is more ambitious but equally bad, an attempt, if you can believe it, at 9/11 feelgood.

  The best of a bad bunch is Paul Greengrass’s 2006 United 93. The film plays its
elf out in real time, and the real air traffic control staff were brought in (wherever possible) to play themselves. There are very few special effects. The film has a tighter focus. It never tries to show more than it can. It succeeds better as a result.

  The first 9/11 film I saw was the Oliver Stone. I watched it on DVD as a kind of bet with myself, that I could do it, that I could finally bring myself to watch what happened, even though you could argue that watching a fictional replay of the events was a bit of a cheat. I chose World Trade Center as my starting point because I knew it would be shit. I thought that the film being shit might make watching it easier and in a way it did but not in a good way. The script is the worst part. In World Trade Center, people say things like ‘we’re Marines, you are our mission,’ and ‘I don’t know if these guys realise it, but this country’s at war.’ The film ends happily with a barbecue. The glowing figure of Jesus appears from the rubble. For me, Stone’s film made the events of 9/11 appear unreal and for the most part survivable. I felt it was an insult, a squirm-making error of taste that should never have happened. In the end it taught me nothing.

  United 93 was more difficult because I believed in it. What disturbed me most of all was that a part of me, deep inside, found the film exciting. About half way through I realised I was watching to find out what happened, for God’s sake, that I was rooting for the passengers, even though I knew they were dead, that they had all died in terror in spite of their bravery, that was the point.

  Part of me still hoped for a happy ending.

  Feature films I have trained myself to cope with, after a fashion, but I still haven’t watched any more than very brief snatches of actual footage from the actual day. Even worse are those programmes that were put together afterwards, the montages of voicemail recordings and text messages sent by people trapped higher up, in offices above the impact zones, the final phone calls made by passengers on the hijacked aircraft.