Ideas Above Our Station

by M Y Alam

  There’s always this undertow to the numbing nowhere, outside-time feel of airports, it’s an outside-time, nowhereishness. All numb but pumped up, pretending to be a somewhere. Pretending to be a destination. The numb must be designed in to try to keep down all that lo-fi (or do I mean low-fly?) terror. An airport is outside time, yes, you’re in limboland but time is of the essence: miss that plane and you’re screwed or your credit card will be. As the waitee, I’m not going to find meaning in the tasks that shape the experience of departure: only chance for shopping on the ground for a few hours, the last landside pee, the final cup of coffee, check-in, boarding. That worthwhile progression is not for me; there’s nothing for me here – this nowheres – anywheres-ville can’t hold on to the slight gloss it manages to retain in the traveller’s eye. The excessive information and voluminous space is reduced to ‘on time’ then ‘landing’ and the arrivals gate. There’s only waiting. It’s an empty space, a jumped-up hangar, and it’s brimming over with sickly gloom.

  Miss that arrival and you’re in the doghouse, screwed big-time, or probably not screwed at all as the possibility of a welcome-home fuck recedes sharply. And for some people, using jet lag as a cosmopolitan sexual avoidance technique may be acceptable but withholding sex as a payback for late arrival at arrivals is something much less shiny. I have a strong feeling that being early is not going to add to tonight’s sexual pleasure, and that’s nothing to do with jet lag either. I wish I hadn’t had that thought – it’s given my mood a boot further down the hole. Something tastes bad in my mouth and it’s not airport catering.

  As she who waits I have no excuse to buy a crummy time-passing airport novel that I can happily consume in the parallel universe that is air travel, reasonably safe that no one will catch me at it. And I have already read the whole paper on the tube plus some other tabloids that I’m far too fastidious to buy in real life but always happy to devour when I have the chance. My mouth is stale and dry still but eating or drinking anything in a place like this is out of the question. All the tastes and smells are too cloying, too sweet, too homogenous, probably sprayed on. Anxiety makes the eating and drinking option even less attractive: still, I should be grateful, the toilets may be bad here but at least they’re on the ground. I’m on the wrong side to get into duty-free, whatever those ads say about cheap shopping at the airport, but with the new rules these days even the dubious bargains that a sunny, holiday mood could transform into something worth snapping up (‘well, why not?’) aren’t worth bothering with. Maybe I could use the time to make some calls. What am I thinking? ‘I’m at Heathrow’ is just a snob version of ‘I’m on the train’.

  I’m here to meet my loved one, the returning angel, she I have missed, and who wants to know about that? Our six-month ordeal of absence is finally over. Or will be in about an hour now. OK, an hour and a half if there are no delays. She’s coming back. Back to me. We have, if my arrival here in the arrivals hall means anything, and I’m not so sure that it does, survived our trial by separation. I’m still here to meet her, aren’t I? She still called me – three times in fact, God! But there was a time, so recently, when I would have been hugely charmed by that – to tell me when she was getting in. I can’t help being alert to the pitfalls of what I wish for – or at least what I was wishing for six months ago – so I note my nausea and anxiety with, well, more anxiety. My nausea isn’t only about the coffee and cookie aromas liberally misted around, I know that. Perhaps a kill-or-cure shot of strong alcohol is in order? I know plenty of people swear by a stomach-calming tipple but an airport bar with its unbeatable mix of synthetic odour and chilly aircon that seems to plaster on the smells instead of diverting them elsewhere is no place to be, in more ways than one. Really it’s no place at all, is it? And anyway falling off a trans-Atlantic flight and into the arms of someone who smells of booze is not the welcome experience I am trying to offer. You could say that’s the problem, I don’t know what kind of welcome I want to give her. I wish I could gather her into my arms and feel that I never want to let her go again. And reappearances can do that to you – remind you with a shock what it’s all about, sweep you off your feet, again, turn you around. And around. No, I know. OK then. I do know I don’t want to be smelling like a pub and I don’t want to need Dutch courage, much as I do.

  But then I hit on something: watching the planes landing and taking off as night falls, tail lights fade and all that. Oh this is better, now I’ve got a soundtrack. I’m not sure that planes have tail lights but they do have tails, and there’s a handy song lyric to go with it, so I’m not going to worry about details. Before long though, the sun has set (I didn’t even see it because we’re facing the wrong way) and the light is gone. I look at the few stars that can power their way through the urban airport fug and attempt to feel romantic. But I don’t. I feel desolate and too firmly planted in this nowhere, no-time mirage of a place to be uplifted. Or is it that I just don’t feel remotely romantic? We’re still together, yeah, but maybe only because of the complications of parting from an absence. Or maybe it was just the lack of any alternative. The connection between us reeks of playing parts – all angles taken care of but I’m not sure there’s anybody there, really, and it felt so unbreakable when she left, so sure. Talking about myself again. I’m only here out of misplaced duty. The thrill is well gone, it left not too long after she did. At some point the longed-for phone calls became an expensive roleplay. How long have I been saying I loved her more as an automatic refrain rather than as an expression of my feelings? Four months? Five months? The fear is that this is not going to change, is not going to be wiped away by her physical presence. That I’ll carry on telling her I love her when it’s just a repetition, the required answer with nothing behind it. Once more without feeling. Her reappearance may just write large what I’m already (not) feeling. I’m talking about my doubts, my uncertainty about the welcome I’m putting on for my lost love. For all I know, she might be jetting back with a heavy heart and a dusty mouth for very similar reasons.

  No! Her reappearance at the gate will put an end to this miserable loss of faith and we will, if not skip into the sunset (already too late for that), make our life together. The airport is a line we have to cross. Yeah, a frontier – I know, I get it. We have to cross the line of being together in the same country again, we have to decide to be together, here, anywhere. We have to decide to move on from being tragic-romantically separated and do it, here, now. I feel cold.

  She, like this place, is everything and nothing to me. She doesn’t even exist until she steps through that gate. In fact, she won’t exist until I see her, unimaginably brown – looking how she would if she was healthy and happy and living in the climate she comes from instead of the pallid woman with purple-ringed eyes I know – full of an experience I cannot imagine, tilting her head in that way she has, to find me. It was the same when we met: after a wild three-week love affair she went away for another three. That time I was primed for disappointment. Had I moved on? What had I really remembered? How much were we carried away by her impending departure? I never did bother to work out the answers. I made the decision, as I hugged her longingly (train station, that time) while wondering who on earth she was. I decided right then that I was going to stay with her, to not mind the fall in my expectations. It’s only much later that you dare to remember. I never listen.

  I spend some time thinking about where to position myself for when, finally, she really does get here. Shall I try to make it easy for her to spot me immediately or shall I hang back so that I can suddenly step up, out of the mass of the crowd, sweep her up, envelop her in that all-consuming, all-healing hug I’m still pinning my hopes on? Confused? Just possibly.

  I choose one spot, then another. The flight’s landed and people begin to straggle through customs, now it’s a stream. I’m trying hard to manufacture excitement every time someone appears, make my stomach leap just in case. I get bored. At the same time I’m pretending I’m not hoping that she i
sn’t on the flight. Then I can be angry that she hasn’t come back rather than angry that she has, or angry that she went away in the first place. There we have it: anger, but how can that be her fault? I move position again. I wish I hadn’t come. I wish she hadn’t left. I wish I hadn’t met her so soon before she was leaving for six months. I wish I hadn’t met her. And now here she is.

  Author Biographies

  Rosa Ainley writes about architecture and space. Missing You is part of an ongoing series on waiting rooms. Her first piece for radio, A Trick of the Light, adapted from an original writer-in-residence commission for Architecture Week 2004, was broadcast on AA Independent Radio as part of the London Architecture Biennale.

  M Y Alam has several short stories published, two novels and has edited a collection of crime writing. He is also a researcher and teacher at the University of Bradford working in the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities.

  Penny Aldred’s story ‘Rich Tea and Custard Creams’ was published in Wonderwall. Her story ‘Still Life, Real Life’ was broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Afternoon Reading. She lives in West Yorkshire and is currently working on a novel.

  Adam Byfield lives in Leeds with his girlfriend and an inexplicably small cat. When not at work with Leeds City Council he enjoys literature, music and cinema and is an active supporter of various charities and pressure groups. He has a masters degree in Physics and Astrophysics.

  Alexis Clements has won a number of awards for her writing for the stage, including the Oglebay Institute’s 2006 National Playwriting Contest and the Source Theatre’s 2004 Washington Theatre Festival Literary Prize. For more information visit www.alexisclements.com

  Charlie Cottrell studied Classics at Nottingham University and Kings College London. She writes for History Today magazine, and its online sibling, Historytoday.com. She was a short-listed author in the 2005 Orange–Harpers & Queen short fiction prize.

  Anthony Cropper has written two novels and has co-edited three collections of short stories. In 2004 he won the BBC Alfred Bradley Award for Radio Drama and subsequently went on to write for Radio 4. He has collaborated on many projects, including 24 Piers (with Talking Birds), Wanderlust (also with Talking Birds) and Fierce Earth (with the Word Hoard). He is married and has three young children.

  Sophie Hannah writes crime fiction, poetry and short stories. Penguin have recently published her Selected Poems, and her first psychological crime novel, Little Face, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. Her first collection of short stories, We All Say What We Want, will be published by Sort Of Books. She lives in West Yorkshire with her husband and two children. For more information visit www.sophiehannah.com

  Tania Hershman is a science and technology journalist, originally from London and now living in Jerusalem. ‘On A Roll’, which was broadcast on BBC Radio, is part of the collection she is working on of science-inspired short stories. Tania’s stories have been published in Route’s Wonderwall anthology, The Beat, the Orphan Leaf Review, Front&Centre, and Spoiled Ink. Tania’s published articles and fiction can be found on her website, www.taniahershman.com

  Daithidh MacEochaidh: poet publisher, writer of short stories and novels, was educated at Hull, Ripon and St John York and Huddersfield.

  Michael Nath has published short stories and novel extracts in ‘STAND’, ‘Critical Quarterly’, ‘Billy Liar’, ‘Main Street Journal’ and Wonderwall (Route 16). Michael has also written three novels: British Story, The Book of the Law, and La Rochelle. He is a lecturer in English at the University of Westminster.

  Nathan Ramsden’s collaborative screenplay Tell Me Lies About Love was made into a short film in 2004. Nathan is a teacher of English and of Creative Writing. He is currently working on two novels.

  Paula Rawsthorne was a winner of the BBC Get Writing Canterbury Tales competition with her comic tale ‘The Sermon on the Mount’. She has since written a play for children’s theatre and has recently written performances for a Nottinghamshire heritage festival. Paula lives in Nottingham with her children Stan, Archie and Sadie (a.k.a. The S.A.S) and her husband David.

  James Walker has a number of short story publications to his name. He is currently researching a book on Brian Clough. Details of both can be found at www.jameskwalker.co.uk

  Guy Ware has published a number of stories on www.decongested.com and in Tales of the Decongested, Vol. 1, published by Apis Books.

  Route

  For more on this book and for Route’s full programme of books please visit www.route-online.com