By then Ingrid was with him in Dundee, busying herself around the flat, talking to funeral directors, emptying the dishwasher. The next part of Finn’s life had begun, without anyone asking him if he wanted the last part to end.
Looking out the ambulance into the gloom now, he saw a crowd of emergency vehicles beyond the body on the tarmac. Two fire engines were next to the front half of the severed plane, firefighters in clumpy boots and bulky uniforms stamping around. An ambulance and three police cars were parked in between, a couple of guys in uniforms placing cones around the area, unwrapping that yellow tape they used.
Finn looked at the plane. One wing was still attached to the fuselage, but the tip was missing. It looked like a giant injured bird. The rear of the aircraft was relatively intact compared to the front half. The cockpit had concertinaed, crumpled into a snubbed nose, glass missing from the windows. There was a smattering of debris around it. The right engine and wing sat jutting out of the cabin just behind the cockpit, reminding Finn of the metal spike sticking out of the guy’s back. His stomach tightened and he struggled to breathe. He put his head down on the stretcher and heard voices outside the ambulance.
‘Seven confirmed dead,’ Magnus said.
‘Christ, we can’t handle this,’ Linklater said. It sounded like she was close to tears.
‘You’ll be all right, Morna, just follow procedure.’
‘What’s the procedure for this?’
Finn imagined Magnus putting a comforting arm around her. Orkney was such a small place, everyone knew each other.
‘Do you want us to move the bodies?’ Magnus said.
‘Wait for forensics. I’ve called for help from down south. God knows when they’ll get here.’
‘Can they even land with all this here?’
‘They’re coming by helicopter. Air and sea rescue are helping.’
‘I’ll get these two to hospital,’ Magnus said. ‘Eilidh’s already headed to the Balfour with the stewardess in the other ambulance.’
There was a moment’s silence between them, just the thrum of machines and the ambulance engine ticking over.
‘Three injured?’ Linklater said.
‘Yes.’
‘And seven dead?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Christ,’ Linklater said. ‘That means someone’s missing.’
8
‘I won’t lie to you, this is going to hurt.’
The badge on her white coat said ‘Dr Flett’.
Finn felt a jab as she injected a large amount of liquid into the side of his hand from a big syringe. The liquid went in and his skin stretched tight and bulged like something out of a horror film. Finn imagined the skin rupturing and spraying blood all over the treatment room.
‘That wasn’t so bad,’ he said.
The woman smiled. She was early forties, about the age Sally would’ve been if she were still around. Strawberry-blonde hair cut into a short bob, green eyes.
‘I didn’t mean that,’ she said. ‘That was just the painkiller and local anaesthetic. We need to wait a couple of minutes for you to lose feeling in your hand, then I’ll reset the fingers.’
‘Reset them?’
She nodded at the X-ray on the backlit screen. A close-up of Finn’s hand, two rogue fingers off at a tangent to the rest.
‘The knuckle is crushed, the bones in the fingers are fractured and twisted. If I don’t reset them they’ll fuse squint and you might lose the use of them altogether.’
‘Right.’
‘It’s called a boxer’s fracture, although the gloves normally protect real boxers. Mostly we see it in pub fights. Have you been punching someone?’
Finn didn’t speak.
‘It’s none of my business,’ Flett said. ‘I’m sure the police will talk to you.’
She tapped the side of his hand and wiggled his pinkie finger. Pain shot up his arm and he flinched.
‘I guess you can feel that.’
‘Yes.’
‘Give it another minute.’
She got up and swished away through the blue plastic curtain around the booth. Finn looked round. X-ray display, treatment table covered in a plastic sheet, low shelves stuffed with medical supplies and paperwork. An empty stand for holding drips lurked in the corner.
The ambulance had delivered him to A & E at the Balfour Hospital on the southern outskirts of Kirkwall. It was little more than a pebbledashed hut down a side alley, tagged on to the sprawl of low concrete buildings that made up the overcrowded hospital, skulking in a residential area. Cars were parked all over and the ambulance had to squeeze past them before doing a five-point turn at a dead end so it was pointing the right way to get out again.
Finn was able to walk to the waiting room, which was an improvement. The A & E team took Oil Guy first, wheeled him through to a consultation room deeper in the building. Finn wondered if he was OK. He thought about Charlotte too, the stewardess. Were her injuries serious? The pilot and co-pilot were dead. He wondered if Charlotte knew them well. Maybe she had a thing going with one of them. Maybe she was heartbroken.
Finn prodded at the bulbous skin of his hand. He flicked at his pinkie and was surprised that it didn’t hurt.
The curtain was swept back and Dr Flett came in. She was wearing boot-cut jeans with Nike trainers, a tight purple T-shirt under her open doctor’s coat. She was someone’s mum, probably, someone’s daughter. She fitted into life here on the island and was just doing her job. Finn wondered if she knew any of the dead passengers and crew. Did she realise the extent of what had happened? When word got out his life would be unbearable.
He thought about Maddie.
‘OK,’ Flett said, gripping his hand. ‘You might want to look away.’
Her head was bowed as she concentrated on his fingers. Finn stared at the swirl of her hair, the pattern of follicles, the individual strands. He thought about how many hundreds of thousands of hairs were there. He wondered how much morphine she’d injected into him. He felt the bones in his knuckle crunch and grind against each other, unnatural, like the devil messing with his body. He felt the fingers being twisted into line with the rest of his hand, heard a pop as a bone went back into the joint, then more grinding as Flett jiggled the bones into place, gripping and twisting, bending and massaging. The colour drained from his face. He put out his other hand to steady himself, then his body slumped back on the treatment table, plastic headrest against his scalp, the reassurance of it, something where it was supposed to be.
‘You OK?’ Flett said.
Finn managed a small nod with his eyes closed.
‘I just need to splint it,’ Flett said.
Something cold touched the outside of his hand. He opened his eyes and saw her strapping a metal splint to his smallest finger, along the outside of the palm. Then she taped his two injured fingers together with the middle one.
‘This provides support to the two broken ones,’ Flett said. ‘We call it buddy strapping, attaching the broken fingers to a healthy one.’
Finn thought about that.
Flett moved the hand around, examining her work.
‘That’ll do.’ She nodded at the X-ray display, which had a second image, the left side of Finn’s ribcage. A hairline crack in the bone below the nipple. ‘Shame we can’t do the same for your rib.’
‘So what can you do?’ Finn said.
Flett shoved a hand into the pocket of her coat, pulled out a box of pills and placed them in Finn’s lap.
‘Take two whenever you need, no more than eight in twenty-four hours. They’re morphine, pretty strong, so they might make you tired or sick. Don’t drive or operate machinery, all the usual.’
‘OK.’
Flett stood up and put on a smile. ‘You’re very lucky, I hope you appreciate that.’
‘I do.’
She pulled the X-rays from the light box, switched it off and the room went gloomy. ‘We’ll keep you in overnight for the head knock. Just to watch f
or complications from concussion.’
‘I can go home in the morning?’
Flett looked at him. ‘That depends on the police.’ She had a hand on the curtain, pulling it back. ‘Good luck, I think you’re going to need it.’
9
The door of his hospital room opened and Ingrid walked in.
‘My boy.’ She put her hands to her face then stretched them towards him as she came to the bed.
‘Ingrid.’
He’d stopped calling her Gran when he was fifteen. It seemed babyish as a teenager, and he wanted to annihilate all that back then. He regretted it when Sally died, wanted to have the family link again, so now he allowed himself to switch between the two.
She hugged him and stroked his head, and he felt pressure on his rib. He tensed his muscles, which made it worse. She noticed him flinching and pulled back. She went to take his hand and spotted the strapped fingers.
‘For Christ’s sake,’ she said, ‘what have you done to yourself?’
‘I was in a plane crash, maybe you heard.’
‘Oh, Thorfinn.’
He didn’t like her using his full name, it felt too formal, but he said nothing.
Ingrid ran a finger along the splint. ‘Are you OK?’
‘I was lucky,’ he said.
‘Just awful. Folk have died, is that right?’
Finn nodded, head down.
She stroked his hair, her fingers at his temples, behind his ear. He leaned away as she found a cut at the back of his scalp.
‘They’re keeping me in tonight,’ he said. ‘Concussion. They don’t want me having an aneurysm like Mum.’
‘Don’t talk like that.’
‘I got off lightly. A fractured rib and a broken knuckle.’
‘How did it happen?’
Finn looked at her. Cropped white hair pushed forward, blue-grey eyes full of mischief. Fair Isle jumper with a Nordic runes design, red jeans, smart boots. She was sixty-seven but looked closer to fifty, amazing considering she’d spent all her life battered by the elements up here. She’d worked the farm for thirty years, with her husband for the first twenty-five then on her own, before selling off the fields to a neighbour when she began to feel the aches and pains too much. The job at the Tomb of the Eagles seemed to have injected new life into her, though.
Finn thought about her question. ‘I’m not sure. There was a lot of fog and turbulence, we were getting thrown around.’
She touched his cheek, which made tears come to his eyes. He breathed in and felt his ribs expand and contract. He was aware of his body struggling to hold itself together. He imagined the morphine seeping through his veins.
‘You’re probably still in shock,’ Ingrid said.
She put her arms around him and he let himself be held like a baby. The release of it felt good, someone else taking control.
‘I feel so guilty.’
Ingrid pulled back to make eye contact. ‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘You don’t know what it was like.’
‘I know that you’re my grandson and a good boy, and whatever happens I’m here for you.’
He looked away.
She rubbed his arm. Finn remembered her doing the same thing as they sat in his living room in Dundee, the day after he found Sally. He was brutally hungover, had spent the rest of the previous day drinking and wandering from room to room, picking up things and putting them back down, lying down on her bed and smelling the pillow, staring at a photo of the two of them on holiday in Greece together, stupid smiles on their faces. But this was the next day, the truth starting to sink in. He was never going to see her again.
Ingrid had got the first ferry in the morning and driven down through the country. They held each other and cried until it seemed a ridiculous thing to keep doing, like they were imitating themselves being sad, falsifying their emotions. Cups of tea went cold on the low table in front of them as Finn flicked through some of his mum’s drawings. She’d been skilful with a pencil, the reason she’d gone to art college in the first place. She’d never done enough with her degree. Having Finn so young she had to get on and make money, didn’t have time to be unemployed. But she didn’t blame Finn for that, and never accepted help from Ingrid. Finn couldn’t understand either of those things. He blamed his own existence for Sally not becoming a proper artist, and he blamed her for not letting her own mother help her out in difficult circumstances. But Sally had always maintained she didn’t have to work as an artist to be an artist, she was happy doodling away, sketching him as he played Mario Kart, or mucking about at the bandstand in Magdalen Green. He flicked the pages of her sketchbook, unable to take it in. Ingrid was next to him, the touch of her hand on his arm only highlighting the distance between them. How could Finn ever understand what it was like for Ingrid? Losing her own daughter yet having to keep herself together for her grandson. He tried to think about that whenever he felt like wallowing in self-pity, but the grief swamped him all the same.
Now his stomach lurched as he remembered the plane last night, nosediving through the fog, the glance he shared with Oil Guy as they strapped themselves in, the look on Charlotte’s face. He pictured the punch-up, flirting with Maddie, seeing her walk into the airport at the start.
His phone rang. It was in the pocket of his jeans but he couldn’t get his hand in with the splint. He tried to reach round with his other hand but his rib growled in pain.
‘Let me,’ Ingrid said, pulling it out and handing it to him.
Amy.
‘My God, Finn, are you all right?’
He remembered talking to her on the plane. Shit, had his phone done something to the electronics, was that why they crashed? No, that was crazy, he’d used it at the start of the flight, before everything else.
‘Are you there?’
It seemed obscene that she was talking in Dundee and he could hear her. He imagined radio waves racing up through the fog and cloud, zinging above the earth, bouncing off the satellite and back down to the exact place he was now, trying to hold on.
‘I’m fine,’ he said.
‘I was so worried. It’s all over the news, your flight. Are you OK? Where are you?’
She had that flat Dundonian accent, same as him, the vowels smudged together like you didn’t want to open your mouth too wide. The opposite of Orcadian with its rolling Rs, tone shifts and dancing rhythm.
‘I’m in hospital,’ he said. ‘Ingrid’s here. I’m OK. Broken rib and hand, that’s all.’
‘They said on the news seven people are dead?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How did it happen?’
Finn realised he would be asked that as long as he lived. He’d survived a fatal plane crash, it would define him for the rest of his life. He was inside a big story. Do you remember the plane that crashed in Orkney before Christmas that time? This guy is one of the survivors. Wow, what was it like, how did it happen, did you see anyone die, were you scared, I bet you were scared.
‘I can’t remember too well,’ Finn said. ‘I have concussion, they’re keeping me in.’
‘I’ll come and see you.’
Finn shook his head. ‘There’s no point. I’ll be out tomorrow, I’ll come home then.’
He tried to imagine stepping on board a plane.
‘I should be there,’ Amy said.
‘By the time you get here I could be back in Dundee. There probably won’t be any flights for a while, I’ll get the ferry. I’ll be back before you know it.’
He tried to picture Amy in their flat. He supposed it was their home, the two of them, but it didn’t feel like that. It was where he grew up, too many memories of Sally everywhere, her ghost haunting every room, every dinner plate, every air freshener, every stick of furniture. He wondered what it was like for Amy, stepping into the home of her boyfriend and his dead mother. How can you compete with that? But she never mentioned it, never complained or suggested they move. She never pushed him to get rid of any of Sally’s stuff
. He imagined her now, phone to her ear, pacing around the tight kitchen like she always did on a call, running her fingers along the worktop, absent-mindedly swiping crumbs to the floor.
He tried to remember how they got together in the first place. Their relationship seemed like a dream somehow, like he’d never fully been present in it. They met in the Art Bar, a basement dive just along from his flat, one of the first nights Finn went out after his mum’s funeral, two months after. Some coursemates cajoled him into it. One of them was performing at an open mic. Amy was at the next table with a girl who was also doing a turn on the tiny stage. She seemed grown-up compared to his student mates, though she was the same age as him. It was easy, he didn’t have to try too hard, just mentioned his dead mum and off they went together. Within three months she’d moved in and they were shopping for new cutlery and going for Sunday morning walks around Balgay Hill. It was almost too easy.
‘If you’re sure,’ Amy said down the line.
‘Trust me.’
There was a knock, then the door opened. It was the police officer from earlier, Linklater, with another cop, middle-aged, pot-bellied, saggy jowls like a bloodhound. Linklater gave Finn a look. Ingrid introduced herself with a firm handshake.
‘I have to go,’ Finn said. ‘The police are here.’
10
The uniformed cop stood at the door and stared into space as Linklater walked to the bed.
Ingrid tried to give Finn a reassuring look.
‘I’ll be outside if you need me,’ she said, closing the door.
Linklater looked at Finn’s bandaged hand. ‘What’s the news from the doctor?’
‘Six weeks to heal, same with the rib. They’re keeping me in overnight.’
Surely she had already spoken to the doctor.
‘You’re lucky,’ Linklater said.
‘So everyone tells me,’ Finn said, then regretted how it sounded.
Crash Land Page 4