The Best British Fantasy 2014

by Steve Haynes

  I can’t watch those at all. I know these programmes are deeply important, living history. But it still feels wrong to me, even so, that they were ever broadcast.

  My job at the airport granted me a kind of liberty I hadn’t expected.

  There are people who talk about ‘dead end jobs’ as if working the supermarket checkout or processing visa applications is the end of the world, just a small step away from hawking The Big Issue or cleaning toilets, I say these people don’t know what they are talking about.

  My work with SwiftAir was physically tiring, mainly because I was on my feet all day, but my mind was free. The money wasn’t all that great – it was shit actually, at least to begin with – but at least I hadn’t sold out to the banking industry or some multinational food producer that was secretly manufacturing chemical weapons. It was my job to be polite, but I never had to pretend, and so long as I didn’t cock up almightily I was mainly left alone to get on with the job.

  In a world of limited options, it was an option. It was a job that could buy me the time I needed to work out what I was meant to be doing.

  I intended it to last for a year. I didn’t like having to wear a uniform and the work was boring, at first it was anyway, an endless stream of dopey customers and their idiot problems, rich bitches moaning about baggage surcharges, trainee Hitlers demanding to know why their flight was delayed. Stuff like that, day after day, can get you down. Added to that my direct supervisor was a complete arsehole, a guy with airport management in his sights and determined to let us all know it. He was a total wanker over company policy, although I hardly saw him speak to an actual customer the whole time he was there.

  He was a pain but I learned to ignore him, and once he left – promoted, of course, what else? – I began to see things differently. The stand was a much pleasanter place to be, for a start. Added to that I began to take more interest in the job. I got to know all of our most regular flyers and was able to greet them by name. I made up small challenges for myself and felt satisfaction when things went smoothly. The woman who took over from Dorkface, Florence Agyeman, was a bit of a rebel, and I enjoyed the atmosphere of camaraderie that started to develop between us.

  You might not believe this, given my plane phobia, but I grew to like the atmosphere of a working airport. I liked the sense of continual movement, of things getting done, of people setting out or coming home, of feeling useful. I also liked it that I could keep my eye on things. I came to know the airport’s sounds and routines and rhythms, its ebb and flow. I came to know the air crew and the security guards, their body language and coded signals, their pre-flight banter.

  I liked the way they made their jobs seem perfectly normal. I still hadn’t stepped on board an aeroplane, but there were times – whole spans of hours – when I genuinely believed that I could do it if I really had to.

  A time came when I actually felt safer at the airport than anywhere else.

  When my so-called gap year was up I stayed on. Five years later when Florence retired I took over her job.

  ‘I never saw you in management, I must admit, but I suppose it’s something,’ said my mother. My dad had just started to be unwell – cancer – and so I was travelling up to Birmingham to see him whenever I could. I went by train. When my mother asked me why I didn’t fly up I told her the train was cheaper and more convenient. Which was rubbish, of course. SwiftAir flew five flights a day to Birmingham. I could have travelled for free and been there in less than an hour.

  Willem van Doer flies for United Airlines, so there was no objective reason why I should have met him.

  It happened, as most life-changing events do, completely by chance.

  I was buying my morning latte and almond biscotti at Caffe Nero. I was wondering about whether I should do some shopping at the overpriced airport Waitrose when I went off shift, or grab something from the all-night Co-op on my way home. I wasn’t concentrating on where I was going, and as I stepped away from the counter I collided with Willem, who had been standing in the queue directly behind me.

  My wrist jerked sharply upwards. A penny-sized dollop of boiling latte shot out through the hole in the cup lid and splattered down on my wrist.

  Yow, I thought. But what I was mostly thinking was thank fuck it didn’t land on that guy’s shirt. The shirt was so white it looked newly minted, you know the kind.

  I’d already seen the four stripes on his sleeve that meant he was a full captain. I’d been with SwiftAir for almost eight years by then. I knew that pilots were really no different from restaurant managers: some of them were exceptional people, others, to put it frankly, were just a little bit too much in love with themselves. There was no way I was going to get all worked up at the sight of a uniform.

  This guy in the shirt though, he looked really nice.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ I said to him.

  ‘I reckon you were about a million miles away just then,’ said Willem, although of course I don’t know him as Willem, not yet. He had an American accent. That ought to have put me off, but it didn’t.

  ‘Probably about two,’ I said, then stopped, just in time to realise I was blushing like a schoolgirl.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said. He laid a hand on my arm, the briefest touch, but I found myself remembering it all afternoon.

  Two days later he came to find me on the stand.

  ‘I was just wondering if you fancied a coffee,’ he said. ‘I promise I won’t spill any in retaliation.’

  I told him I’d be going on my break at three o’clock.

  He said he’d meet me in Gino’s then wandered off. He had a long stride, but he didn’t strut, not like some of them. He seemed, well, unaware of himself, lost in his thoughts. Unusual.

  Chloe – she was new on the stand, she’d just recently started – kept giving me these huge inane grins. The minute there was a lull in the check-ins she was on my case.

  ‘This is your captain speaking,’ she said in this ridiculous swoony voice. ‘Scrumptastic.’

  ‘I don’t even know his name,’ I said. ‘So you can stop that right there.’

  The next second the both of us were cackling like full-on lunatics.

  According to statistics, 9/11, with its 2,976 fatalities, is the worst single terrorist incident that has occurred to date.

  In fact, this statistic, like so many, is intrinsically flawed. We who have the privilege of electing our governments have the disconcerting habit of accepting government spin. In fact the single most devastating terrorist outrage was perpetrated by the USA upon Japanese civilians in 1945, when an estimated 237,000 people died in the bombing of Hiroshima. A further 100,000 died days later in Nagasaki. We are taught to accept that the ends of our democratic states justify the means, but is this any less of a brainwashing than the indoctrination of impressionable young men by extremist clerics?

  The statistics vary considerably, but most sources seem to agree that the number of civilians killed by American bombing in the Iraq war of 2003 – launched as a direct response to 9/11 – was in excess of 100,000.

  Most people seem surprised by or even unbelieving of this statistic. We were told the war was fought mostly with smartbombs, and that is the version of the story we mostly prefer.

  Daniel Pearl, 2002 (1), Yazidi bombings by Al Qaeda in Iraq, 2007 (796), Bloody Sunday, 1920 (31), Bloody Sunday 1972 (14), Coastal Road massacre in Israel, 1978 (38), Beslan school siege, 2004 (396), Madrid train bombings, 2004 (191) Mumbai attacks, 2008 (164), 7/7 London Transport bombings, 2005 (52), Omagh bombing, 1998 (29), Alexandria Hotel siege, 2015 (45), Kabul air attacks, 2017 (5,000) Port Columbus suicide bombing by Meera Chowdri, 2018, (53)

  Willem and I have a serious disagreement about Meera Chowdri.

  He wants to know why she hadn’t been deported from America on account of the contents of her doctoral thesis.

  ‘It’s obvious
she was anti-America, anti-freedom,’ Willem says. ‘But that never stops these people taking advantage of our facilities, have you noticed that?’

  I am surprised and a little shocked. I have never heard Willem use phrases like ‘anti-freedom’ or ‘these people’ before – Willem is the kind of American who tells Romney jokes and reads the New Yorker – but then I try not to react, because I know he’s upset. He is upset about the 53 people, all of them ordinary air passengers, men, women and children, who have been killed by Meera Chowdri’s suicide bombing of Port Columbus Airport in Ohio. He is also upset, I know, deep down, about Chowdri herself, who had seemed just like an ordinary Asian-American but who turned out not to be.

  Meera Chowdri left a clip of video film on her phone, in which she claimed her action was a protest at the indiscriminate bombing of Kabul by American forces.

  For Willem, Chowdri’s action is like a kick in the teeth.

  In the days after the attack on the airport, there is mass media speculation about whether Chowdri acted alone or whether she was sponsored by Al Qaeda. A growing number of pundits are of the opinion that Meera Chowdri – as well as her family back in Pakistan – was funded by Al Qaeda from day one. A few people seem to think that Chowdri’s decision to perpetrate the bombing might be connected with her recent split from her American partner, Duncan Freesland. Duncan Freesland is taken into custody for questioning. The American bombing of Kabul barely gets mentioned.

  When I point this out to Willem, he rounds on me angrily. The idea that America should be asked to account for its actions is something he finds incomprehensible.

  ‘Leaving aside Great Britain, can you name a single nation in the world today that prizes freedom more highly? A single political establishment you would trust more than ours? It’s not always perfect, but no system can be – that’s democracy. You can’t blame America for wanting to protect its citizens and its ideals and I’d lay money on it that the victims of Jafari‘s torture gangs would be the first to agree with me.’

  Willem maintains the US had no choice over the bombing of Kabul. He believes it was the only way to make the Islamic government there hand over the Al Qaeda leader Amal Jafari.

  No one knows if Jafari is still in Kabul. Some people are saying he never fled to Kabul in the first place. No one knows the truth, or if they do they aren’t telling.

  ‘I don’t think America should be blamed for having ideals,’ I say to Willem. ‘I just think it might be better if America kept its nose out of other people’s business.’

  ‘And risk another 9/11, or even worse? It’s our responsibility as an evolved democracy to stop that from happening.’

  I shut up after that. I loathe arguments, which often upset me as much as physical violence, and with Willem most of all. I know he doesn’t even mean a lot of what he says, that it has arisen out of his sorrow at the bombing, and from his love of his country, America, which extends, I know already, beyond the rationally explicable.

  Willem loves America not only for what it stands for but because of how it physically feels for him to be inside it. He loves its spaces, its colours and textures, its wide horizons. He loves it that it takes a week to drive across, that it carries within one country the dimensions and variations of an entire world.

  When Willem thinks of America, I know it is that long-ago jet plane he still thinks of, travelling silently through the night in the blaze of its own lights, the sky captain, bringing his cargo of sleeping passengers safely home.

  Who needs heaven, when you have America?

  I understand Willem because I know and love him, and it is difficult to condemn the feelings of someone you love.

  All the same, deep inside myself I want to tell him that America has got into the habit of behaving like a loud-mouthed playground bully and that it’s hardly surprising if the other kids end up wanting to kick the shit out of it.

  Meera Chowdri was an intelligent woman, with a small daughter named Rayisa and a first class degree from the University of Karachi. She wasn’t mad, not in any sense of the word that makes sense. She had reasons for what she did, even though what she did was totally wrong. Even though it was totally wrong, to dismiss the bombing of Port Columbus as the act of a madwoman is both stupid and dangerous.

  I believe we need to try and understand why a woman like Meera Chowdri would do what she did.

  I can’t say any of that to Willem, though. He would be angry, and he wouldn’t get it.

  I think Willem has started to think I might be going crazy.

  The first time I heard the broadcast I thought it was a dream.

  I still get nervous when Willem is flying, but I have learned to hide it. When Willem first learns that I am scared of flying, he is amused. When he realises I’m not joking he is incredulous.

  He keeps asking me to go up with him. He says he can get me into the cockpit, no problem.

  ‘Don’t you trust me?’ he says.

  ‘I trust you,’ I assure him. I do my best to convince him that my fear of flying is a form of claustrophobia. In the end he stops asking. I’m not sure if he’s accepted that I might never fly with him, but I know the thought makes him sad.

  Willem knows to always call me as soon as he lands, whatever the time is. He knows I won’t sleep, in any case, until I know he’s safely on the ground.

  I find airline websites, like airports themselves, reassuring. A live, continually updating data-feed informs you when a plane is ready for boarding, when the flight gates are closed, when the aircraft moves away from the stand to begin its taxi run, how long a flight has been in progress, the ETA, the landing time (both local and portside), the overall flight report. There are minute-by-minute updates on flight delays, industrial action, adverse weather conditions.

  It is a choreography of sorts, the choreography of the entirely normal. Hundreds of flights leave from Heathrow Airport every day. The airline websites offer objective evidence of their entirely normal take offs, through flights, and eventual landings. The evidence has a calming effect on me. It is most likely because of this that I find the airline websites a little addictive.

  If one of Willem’s flights is delayed I will usually know before he has the chance to tell me. Very occasionally a flight is put back with no reason given. When this happens I worry, even though I know a ‘no data’ tag is of itself an insufficient reason for concern. In almost one hundred percent of cases the cause is banal: a VIP jet has jumped the flight queue, the luggage conveyor belt has broken down, a pilot has gone sick with food poisoning, all the stuff that can upset the schedules but that is too long-winded or too much of a one-off to have its own data sign.

  I’m used to it, but I still don’t like it. If the unexplained delay goes above one hour I begin to fret. My palms sweat and my mouth goes dry, my heart rate increases. I refresh the site every two minutes, straining towards the moment when it finally updates, revealing to me the source of my own idiocy.

  I embrace my idiocy like a secret lover. I bring it treats. If this demon can be assuaged by exciting my foolishness, it seems a small price to pay for Willem’s safety to be continued.

  On the night of the first broadcast, Willem is on his way back from New York. His flight is due in at 22.45. I am expecting him home by midnight, perhaps a little later. I know that the plane took off on schedule because the United Airlines website has confirmed it.

  I clock off from the airport and take the train home. I make supper and watch some TV. I do not check the UA website again until around nine o’clock. The site is down, but I think nothing of it – short outages, usually due to increased traffic, are common. A few minutes later the site is running again but this time when I check Willem’s flight it is showing ‘no data’.

  Quickly I refresh the page. Still no data.

  I tell myself it’s nothing. I remind myself of all the logical reasons that exist for this to be happeni
ng. I know I can call the UA desk if I want to – Jeanne Kreif, who will be on shift now, knows me well – but I have a fear (not as strong as the main one, but up there) of revealing my personal anxieties to other people. It’s as if I admit that I am worried, then the fear will come true.

  I know how pathetic this sounds, but it doesn’t help.

  I force myself back to the TV, which is now showing the third part of a crime drama I have been following. After less than five minutes of watching I have only the vaguest idea of what is going on. I am beginning to feel sick. I go upstairs, without checking the site again (a major victory) and run a bath. I lie in the water until it is cold, then put on my dressing gown and come back downstairs to check the site,

  The flight’s number is still showing, but there is still no data.

  I reason that it is just a glitch, a data backlog from the outage earlier, most likely, but I feel weakness spreading throughout my body and my legs are trembling. It is a little before ten o’clock. I put on the news, knowing that a major air crash always hits the headline hot spot, no question. If it isn’t there it hasn’t happened, full stop.

  The lead story is about pension reform. Next up is Meera Chowdri: her doctoral supervisor, Bella Cagill, is refusing to confirm to the US Supreme Court that the content of Chowdri’s thesis was ‘anti-freedom’. After that there is a story about some footballer being dismissed from the World Cup squad.

  I let the rest of the news play out and then prepare for bed. I switch off the coffee machine, switch on the hall light, the way I always do when I know that Willem is going to be late home. I perform these acts as rituals, suddenly convinced – if you are a neurotic then you will know what I mean – that what I have to do is behave exactly as normal. If I act like there’s nothing wrong, then nothing will be wrong.

  These are the ways we have of exerting control.

  I lie in bed, reading the same page – p 238 of Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace – over and over again. I am aware of every tiny sound within the flat, every vehicle driving past on the road outside. At some point these sounds recede, then suddenly I can hear the phone ringing. I wrench myself free of the bed covers. My heart is racing. I am terrified that the phone will stop ringing before I can get to it, then I realise it’s not ringing at all. Unlikely though it seems, I must have fallen asleep. The ringing phone was a dream-phone, non-existent, except in my head.