Then, with great deliberation, he allows his right hand to glide up from his belly to his chest, past his chin and cheek.
He approaches his temple gingerly, his fingers probing gently, expecting the worst, is relieved to find nothing more serious than cuts, bruises and dried blood.
I need my eyes, he thinks. There’s no question of opening them while facing the sunlight. Even with his eyes closed there’s a burning orange behind his eyelids. I’ll roll over, he thinks. He braces himself, bends his knees slightly, brings his right arm across his torso and turns his body so that he is in a kind of rudimentary recovery position, resting on his side with his face sheltered in the crook of his arm. The ribs on his right side have taken a beating and he shifts to accommodate the pain. Finally he finds a less awkward position and allows himself a few minutes’ respite.
Despite the stabbing in his ribs and the all-over aching, he’s aware that his last manoeuvres would not have been possible had anything been broken, and for that he feels some sense of comfort.
For a split second his mind seeks to grasp the magnitude of what he has experienced – and survived – but the implications are too overwhelming, so he concentrates on getting his eyes, now sheltered by his arm, to adjust to the light. He forces his eyelids open, blinks, closes them again. Waits. Repeats the process, each time keeping them open for a few seconds longer. Little by little his vision returns until finally he can look steadily at the ground, focuses on the sandy grains of soil, the two off-white pebbles.
He becomes aware again of his bladder’s irate call. He still feels that the challenge of standing up is too great, so he shifts his body so that he’s on his side, facing downwards, the ground sloping away. He fumbles with his trousers, pulls out his penis and relieves himself from his horizontal position. He watches the liquid snake in rivulets through the dusty soil.
So far, so good. Piece of cake. Time for a look round.
He accepts this suggestion quite breezily, hasn’t made the connection between the atrocity that’s put him there and the scene he might expect to find when he surveys his surroundings.
So when he shifts his head so that he’s no longer looking straight down, but is now peering ahead, at ground level, he’s completely unprepared for the upper torso, severed at the waist, that’s lying six or seven feet away, blocking his line of vision. He blinks, freezes, appalled but unable to drag his eyes away.
He stares for some seconds at the butchered corpse, the spray of blonde hair, the cream silk blouse, the mush of shredded flesh and severed bone. The head’s turned away so he cannot see her features, the expression on her death mask.
New waves of shock roll in. As he levers himself up onto his knees and slowly gets to his feet, an observer could easily mistake his dazed, robotic manner for casual and leisurely. Then he sways, catches himself, and the illusion is broken. In his stained indigo shirt and baggy, bloodied trousers, he looks vulnerable, beaten.
He turns full circle, surveying his environment. The scene is so brutal, the carnage so overwhelming, that at first his eyes edit out the horror, take in only the physical layout of the location.
He seems to be standing at the foot of a steep hill dotted with rocks and bushes, a version of the kopjes he knows so well from his southern African past.
The kopje’s behind him, in front the landscape slopes gently down for several hundred yards to a broad, arid plain speckled with thorny trees, termite mounds, scrawny shrubs. Beyond that, in the faraway distance, a range of hills rises up through the blue-grey haze. He concentrates, peering, scans the flat terrain for evidence of human activity – a village, a cattle kraal, even a temporary dwelling – but sees nothing but untouched nature. He feels a chill of loneliness.
A chill of loneliness, but nothing more. Artist though he may be, today he cannot weigh up the sights that meet his eyes in terms of form and shape, tone and perspective, doesn’t wonder where the optimum vantage point would be to capture the panorama, the best time of day. Today he will not visualise his palette, the burnt sienna and yellow ochre, the cobalt blue and viridian green. For the moment all he sees is his own isolation.
And then, almost as if the filter has been removed from his vision, he becomes aware for the first time of the full extent of the devastation that surrounds him. For a few fleeting seconds he takes it all in – the pockmarked terrain, the strewn aircraft wreckage, the debris, the bodies – and he stands there, tall but broken, and tries to make sense of the mayhem. Simultaneously, like a tripped fusebox flipped back into action, his other senses come alive, and he’s aware at once of the stale sour taste in his mouth, the sticky grime of his fingers, the buzzing whine of blowflies, the reek of aviation fuel mingled with the sickly stench of death.
But it’s too much, a sensory overload. He rubs his eyes with his grubby hands, teeters, weighed down by the desolation around him, weakened by the battering he has received, by dehydration, by the rising temperature.
Unable to take in the totality of the destruction, he seeks escape in detail. Dropping his gaze, he registers three or four playing cards strewn at his feet – a queen of hearts, a two of diamonds, the others face down. He looks up, spots a stunted tree to his left and staggers towards it. He keeps his eyes to the ground, circles the twisted body of a young boy, a black leather handbag, a mangled camera, a tan lace-up shoe.
He’s sweating, his head’s pounding, and when he spots a floppy green hat, the kind worn by Afrikaaner farmers and safari guides, he picks it up, dusts it off on his trouser leg, then pulls it down over his head. When he reaches the tree he squats down in the shade, allows himself a few moments to gather his strength.
A painting looms up in his mind, skeletons attacking human beings, a scene of pillage and massacre, but he’s still dazed and it takes him some minutes to identify it, the ghoulish vision of Bruegel’s Triumph of Death. He seems to remember a poster on his wall as a child, hours spent gazing at the painting’s macabre detail. And he realises why he’s thought of it now, not because the scene around him today reminds him of the painting itself, more that his present environment brings to mind how he would imagine Bruegel’s scene would look the next day, when the murdering, marauding skeletons have departed. Yes, what he’s surrounded by, he realises, is Triumph of Death: The Day After.
The flies are bothering him, circling his head in endless aborted landing patterns. He swats away at them feebly. He’s aware of his tremendous thirst, an overpowering need to find water. He looks around. In a semi-circle sweep of twenty yards in front of him he can see three, four, five bodies, an empty blue canvas holdall, a pair of gleaming trainers, a meal tray, a pair of headphones, several cartons of cigarettes, a row of seating, a stuffed giraffe, two glossy magazines, an arm, severed at the shoulder. There’s a bumbag, three or four blankets, a jagged piece of fuselage, a walking stick and a gutted suitcase, its contents spewed out – a scattering of underwear, a bathbag, leaking toiletries, an alarm clock, toothpaste, paperbacks, the front casing of a busted radio.
Spotting a plastic water bottle, he staggers back up on his feet. He stumbles over to the bottle and picks it up. It’s almost empty but he sucks greedily at the inch or so of tepid liquid. He needs more and so, driven by dehydration, he looks around for a likely source. It’s the first time that survival instincts and rational thought have joined forces.
He looks around at the crash site again, awed by the scale of the devastation, the amount of debris, of carnage. He tries to recall what kind of aircraft it had been, its size, but his memory is hazy. He always experiences flying as a blur, like being sucked through a tube at speed. Had the plane been full? He remembers seeing a few empty seats, but the scene around him suggests that a vast army of travellers have descended from the skies, that the plane had been immense.
He takes in the three principal sections of the aircraft scattered down the slope at roughly ten, twelve and two o’clock, the first about twe
nty yards away, the other two slightly more distant. He decides to investigate these first, heads for the closest, zigzagging his way between body parts and baggage.
It’s part of the main section of the fuselage, a great tubed segment containing two rows of seats, overhead lockers, flooring. Four corpses are still strapped in, surrounded by a plague of whining flies. The first, a middle-aged black man with powder-snow hair, looks calm and serene, eyes closed, his head pressed back against the headrest as if catching forty winks. Next to him, two white schoolboys sit primly in blazers, shorts and long socks, their heads twisted forward grotesquely. Behind, the next two seats are empty, the third occupied by a silent, staring Asian man dressed in sober suit, white shirt and charcoal tie.
Greg approaches with caution, as if frightened of waking his fellow travellers. When he spies the water bottle tucked into the mesh netting pocket at the back of one of the schoolboys’ seats, he reaches down gingerly, extracts it, twists off the cap. It’s a half-litre bottle, almost full, and he drinks it off in one go. To escape the swarm of flies, he retreats, then heads towards the second section of fuselage.
On the way over, he passes a scuffed leather satchel, a woman’s padded jacket, pens, lipsticks, a CD of gospel music. He skirts several bodies, each time rousing swarms of darting flies. Everywhere, there is smashed glass, the shards catching in the sun, the ground a bed of diamond lights. He catches the sour smell of whisky, the pungent scent of perfume, smashed duty-free stock, he supposes. But more dominant, always, is the stench of blood, of flayed flesh, of human waste.
This time the wreckage seems to originate from that section of the plane where the flight attendants prepare meals and where the toilets are situated. As he approaches he sees with relief that there are no bodies, though the reek of excrement is powerful.
Next to the segment of the plane lies a twisted metal trolley, the kind used to bring around the drinks, and one of those sleek, stainless-steel compartmentalised containers used for storing the hot food. Among the array of shattered glass, broken plastic cutlery, empty juice cartons and smashed trays, he sees a couple of bottles of water, which he extricates, and some small sachets of roasted nuts.
He examines the third section hastily. Despite quenching his thirst, he’s still weak and giddy, nauseous from his physical and mental ordeal. On the way, weaving between luggage and unidentifiable wreckage, he has to circumnavigate more corpses, more body parts.
He notes that this section was part of the storage hold, and that a fair amount of the luggage seems to have come down to earth intact. He glances at the topsy-turvy pile of suitcases, backpacks and holdalls – a mountain of leather, plastic and canvas, floral, striped and tartan – and shrugs.
He needs to rest, so heads back to the shady spot under the tree, lowers himself onto the dusty soil, drinks another bottle of water and tries to formulate some coherent thoughts. Without him noticing, the pain in his head has altered from a pounding rhythm to a needling drill.
What next?
Some fucking paracetamol wouldn’t go amiss.
Focus on the bigger picture.
My head hurts.
My heart bleeds. Take a look around you, you ponce.
And all at once it hits him that the scattered bodies parts about him recently belonged to living creatures, that the bodies had names and identities and, with a flush of guilty shame, that some of those bodies may still be alive, that he has been so wrapped up in slaking his thirst that he hasn’t even bothered to go round and check them for signs of life.
After all, you survived. Why couldn’t one of them have too?
He hauls himself to his feet, makes his way unsteadily to the nearest corpse, changes his mind, decides to make a systematic sweep starting to his far left, make sure he misses no one, gives everybody a fair chance. It’s like a pact between the living and the dead. Only they’re not dead yet, he reflects. They remain in some floating limbo, waiting to have their status confirmed.
His legs are stiff and bruised, scratched in a hundred places, his ribs raw and angry. As he stumbles towards the furthest corpse, he becomes aware that the stink of decay in the air is growing more pronounced.
The first body is that of a young woman, perhaps twenty-five, an African with espresso skin and horsey features. Her lips are drawn back, her teeth exposed in a grimace, her eyes wide open but empty. He reaches down, touches her face and closes her eyes. There’s an airline blanket lying next to her which he picks up and places gently over her head.
He can remember the next two bodies. The first, an elderly white, an outdoor man to judge from his ruddy features, has clearly broken his neck. The second, the mixed race air hostess, has had her skirt and blouse ripped from her in the crash, is dressed only in panties and bra, looks as if she is sleeping. It is only when he lifts her head that he sees that the back of her skull is missing, that grey, oozing brain matter is exposed. He lays her back on the ground and fetches a blanket to cover her face, another for her bare body.
After that his sweep of bodies becomes a blur, this one missing a leg, that one’s features unrecognisable, the next almost decapitated. For each casualty, he makes sure the body is covered up, its eyes closed, its modesty preserved.
An hour later, sweating, nauseous, shaking from his exertions, he returns to the shade.
He is the only survivor.
On his travels, he has picked up another bottle of water and he sips from this as he recovers from his ordeal. The heat is stifling, the stench worsening. He takes off the floppy hat he’s been wearing and douses his hair with water. It provides a few moments of relief.
So what’s the plot? When do the cavalry arrive?
Depends where we are. Depends whether they know.
‘Course they know. Black boxes, flight transmitters, all that stuff.
Yeah, well, maybe. Might not be so easy to get here. It’s not exactly Henley-on-Thames, is it?
So where are we then, smartarse?
Dunno. Think about how long we were in the air. Think about the flight path.
He closes his eyes, tries to visualise a map of Africa, to trace a line from South Africa northwards, to calculate time in the air and translate that figure into distances.
Congo. Or maybe the bottom half of Sudan. Maybe even further north. A long way from home, anyway.
And then he remembers his mobile phone. It’s still in his breast pocket, flat, silver and sleek. He takes it out, checks whether it’s working. It’s apparently undamaged, but he can’t get a signal. He gets up, limps over to the nearest body, a male flight attendant, takes a deep breath, bends down and begins rifling through his pockets. He’s examined four bodies, tried out two more phones, before he accepts that he’s not going to communicate electronically.
Back under the shade he feels restless. Despite the heat, the shock, the gore he’s witnessed, he feels the first pangs of hunger.
If I’m going to be here a while. I’d better sort out some food.
He heads back to the section of fuselage that contained the meal preparation area. Amongst the remains of the chicken trays and dessert pots, he finds some portions of processed cheese, three or four rolls, a box of cellophaned crackers, packets of peanuts, a stash of undamaged water bottles. He empties a plastic carrier bag lying nearby and fills it with the provisions.
In the earlier sweep he’d come across other scattered food – some sweet biscuits, more crackers and peanuts – and he limps off to fetch them, adding them to his bag.
On the way back to his tree, he comes to an abrupt halt. On his previous sweep, away next to a section of the aircraft’s wing, he’d noticed an old-fashioned rucksack with what looked like a tent strapped to the frame. He totters over, retrieves the bright orange baggage, carries it back to his base.
As he side-steps one of the bodies that he’s recently covered in a navy-blue blanket, he notices an almost
imperceptible movement from beneath the fabric. He stops, bends down, pulls back the blanket more in hope than expectation.
The body, that of a middle-aged woman, is lying face up. She looks Middle Eastern, short black hair greying at the roots, thick eyebrows, olive-skinned, faint downy hairs on her upper lip, a large brown mole on her chin. Her mouth is slightly open, her lips and teeth stained with fresh scarlet blood. And as he crouches down and peers at her face, a small pink bubble forms between her lips, then pops feebly.
Jesus. She’s alive.
He racks his brains for hazy, half-forgotten first aid directions. Don’t move her. Don’t give her anything to drink. Call an ambulance and reassure the casualty while you wait for its arrival. He almost smiles.
He swipes away a cloud of flies, considers what to do.
If I get the tent up in the shade, she can rest there. It’ll keep the flies off her at least. I’ll have to carry her over and she’ll just have to take her chances.
Despite the damaged ribs, the bruised legs, he hurries back to his tree and sets about erecting the tent. It’s an amateur effort, the tent pegs refusing to penetrate the unyielding soil, but he eventually gets it raised. He returns to the woman and tries to pick her up but in his weakened state he can’t manage. In the end he clasps her under her armpits and drags her to the tent, pulls her inside, lays her gently on the bed of blankets he’s prepared. Apart from the bloody bubble, she shows no other signs of life.
Disregarding his earlier directives, he fetches a bottle of water, tries to pour some into her mouth, but most of it trickles down her chin. He feels for a pulse, cannot find one, yet he’s sure she’s still alive. He zips up the flap of the tent, sits down outside it. The heat’s reached its zenith and the fetid odour is becoming increasingly difficult to bear. He pictures the stomachs of the other bodies swelling, notices the clouds of flies thickening. He cannot relax, his senses overwhelmed by the stench, the relentless buzzing.
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