“And the ring, did you pay for that?” I have not called the jeweller to finally approve my on-hold wedding band.
“Sorry babe, I didn’t get a chance to confirm.” I screw my face up pleading for help. She knows I didn’t want to call because I had to negotiate the price down.
“You do want the one I chose, don’t you?” I nod my approval.
“Why didn’t you call them then? I will have to do it later.” I leak more responsibility into her already crammed Filofax. She is in a zone of high alert. She took a call before we set off from an ungrateful vegan non-dairy-eating cousin who is suddenly available and wants to attend with her family. Somehow Sophia thrives on it and knows she will bring it all in on time, on budget and to her specification. Her wedding most definitely, mine possibly.
CHAPTER 2
Dan 13:23
WARNING! YOU ARE FORBIDDEN TO ENTER THIS AIRPORT
WITH ANY OF THE FOLLOWING ITEMS
A list of banned substances is attached to the entrance on the outside of the terminal building. It is so long that it can’t be read without the risk of decapitation from the revolving door. It flows from the obvious real or replica guns (No Scooby Doo for Bepe) to reach the impossible brief of no liquids nor gasses. How are humans meant to pass? Will any of my stags fall foul of the list? My throat dries a little and my sphincter twitches at the thought of my disparate stags in one place.
The visual noise and brash modernity of Manchester Airport Terminal 3 screams at us as we move inside. Instantly you feel the contortion between the beckoning promise of the freedom of cheap travel and the sinister threat of some unknown act that could blow it all apart. The rules are unrelenting even before the security assault course of 100ml liquid limits and clear plastic bags. Being a fair-minded capitalist system we also get the choice to buy back anything that has been confiscated at fake bargain prices, which can’t then be taken on your next plane journey! Can’t we just have one big sign saying: “Don’t carry big bad stuff or else"?
My mind is working overtime as it is also confronted by the attrition of advertising communication. I try to decode information crammed onto every paintable, writable, scrawlable space. I am constantly working out the ploy, the strategy, the pun, the masked hip reference point that makes my fellow copywriters cream themselves in quipped glory. I don’t much succumb to advertising; I can only dissect and judge it.
“Departures that way Daniel,” Sophia gestures towards the up escalator as we move inside. Prince knows how our all-consuming desperation to get the hell away from reality keeps us coming back for more.
But Bepe felt differently; he pleads for release from the trolley basket by wriggling every limb. “Diddy, wet down? Get plane Diddy.”
I set him down onto my only baggage; the leather guitar case jam packed with all the clothing eventualities I could imagine for the four days ahead. Sophia has already commandeered every proper suitcase for our honeymoon to Portofino.
Bepe makes three toddler steps towards the escalator, the hesitancy of each one suggesting he is likely to topple over. However, in bold defiance of his dodgy toddling he bolts back towards the revolving door. I am frozen by the contradiction of his movement, as well as being stuck on the wrong side of the trolley. Does he just want another ride around? Twenty seconds later it is clear his agenda is escape.
“Just go will you!” Sophia’s command is my starting gun.
I exit through the pseudo-roulette wheel that is the door. I cannot see him immediately amongst the hubbub of arrivals. So many things move at once that I have to keep surveying and re-assessing the scene. A taxi pulls in sharply but stays closed. A South American-looking businessman pushes an overloaded trolley with his left hand; his right arm holds both a draped camel coat and his mobile. Twelve over-excited eight-year-olds spill from a school mini-bus. I keep searching. There behind the unbalanced businessman I spy his crouching figure, close to the kerb at the rear of the halted taxi.
“Bepe,” I attract his attention with a gentle suggestive tone so as not to prompt him to run again.
His crouch is to retrieve the banned Scooby Doo gun he has dropped in the gutter. It could also be in loin-girding preparation for a poo. I approach slowly but as I crouch down my jacket pocket spills my iPhone, which skids onto the harsh concrete. I wince at the thought of its glass being cracked or more importantly my music collection being trapped inside its malfunctioning casing. On its retrieval a sharp edge on one corner jags my palm. I am relieved to see the Apple sign illuminate it back to life.
“Dan, what are you doing? Dan…” Sophia is five yards behind me. Bepe has gone again. He has disappeared around the taxi, into the road, out of sight.
Engines roar around me. My glands seep hot sweat rapidly into my shirt. To my right I see another taxi travelling at about 30 mph on the two-lane one-way slip road. A blue car travels neck and neck with it. He will be all right; they will see him for sure. There is no point fearing the worst. The black cab in front of me narrows the road and forces them both to squeeze closer together. The drivers are caught up in unforgiving self-imposed timetables and are accelerating to leave the terminal. The over-loaded taxi could have stopped sooner had it had brand-new brake pads; instead an unnatural metal squeal is released as the driver vainly pushes his foot to the floor. This prefaces the thudding metallic crunch of the body of the taxi. My knees hit the pavement. I close my eyes to avoid seeing Bepe’s pliable young bones helplessly shattered on a radiator grill. My eyes close, my head bows, my hands and forehead find my knee tops. At the point of impact he would have been thinking of his gun, the inane grin of Scooby Doo issuing an imaginary “Scooby-Doo-bedo” his last memory. Surely nothing else would register, he would feel pain momentarily and have no explanation for it. There was no chance to fear, he would not have braced himself for impact.
“You fool. Where is he? What have you done?” She speaks breathlessly with no moisture in her mouth.
“Don’t think the worst babe.” She swipes me on the back of the head as hard as she can. I shut myself down, locked in a sickened peace before my life can re-start its bloody mess.
“Bepe my baby, Bepe,” she calls out to the road.
“Urghh.” She emits a primal scream that reverberates in my bones, which I will never forget. Both hands are cupped over her mouth but she cannot prevent the escape of this inhuman guttural moan. At first I am embarrassed that she had made such a noise in public, but I look up to see her beautiful face full to the brim with wide-eyed terror. Through her eyes I see the unfathomable well of the universal parental soul, at the bottom of which is an unparalleled vortex of demonic agony from which there is no escape. This is the unthinkable part of having a child, losing them. The blinding light of her world has been snatched away, the pride and power of parenthood is under threat. She has so often told me that once you are a parent to one child, you become a parent to all children. This never kicked in for me before. This is parenthood, why has it taken me over two years to see it? At the point of tragedy I see my true responsibility. More worryingly Bepe was our relationship, the love we rallied around. Sophia’s tension disperses through her thumb and forefinger locked onto the back of my neck. Somehow I enjoy the pain, as it is fully deserved. As the most culpable adult I will be assigned the millstone weight of the blame. My left arm reaches back to offer empathy but she shakes it off and walks haltingly towards the front of the taxi.
The accident would take the souls of eight lives. With Bepe gone his stricken parents would never make their union, we would walk away from each other without a glance. She would sleep on the floor of his time-frozen bedroom for four years. I would sleep on the floor of the ad agency for four weeks. The light of life would go out for four grandparents, and each in quick succession hastened towards earlier graves. The haunted taxi driver would never recover, always the night terrors and the contradiction being a child killer took against his own family life. I could imagine living in rancid isolation, a sneered-at pub loner
, the man single women cross the street to avoid. My family don’t die early; I would be locked into the insufferable torment of memories of the little life I surrendered for an iPhone. I started babbling this to myself. There is no inane stag weekend now.
“Is this your son?” A male voice from my right shatters my foresight.
“Is this your son?” he repeats. In the seconds since the accident I had lost all hope of him being intact.
“Is this your son?” Bepe is alive and reaching down for me. I look up to accept the intact but limp shape of Bepe into my arms. His face is a puddle of tears and shock, his eyes swollen into slits. He went too far but has come back. His top is soaked with dirty cold water, presumably from some nearby puddle. His second coming brings more life to me than his first. Two and a half years ago Sophia’s mother relegated me at his birth to being a redundant outsider but no more. His appearance then seemed like the frantic production of a coven of white witches. At first I was allowed to look not touch while they hid any hard evidence of his magical appearance.
Sophia lurches past me from the scene of the car crash.
“Sophia, he’s fine, our baby is fine.” She grabs her son from me and screams from her empty womb. They envelop into one, her muscular hold seems to be trying to morph him back inside her body for ultimate protection. She cries and gasps for air, jerking her whole torso.
My life is resuscitated; it comes flooding back in glorious 4D High Definition Technicolor with surround sound. An engine roars high above in praise of my recovered spirit; its burnt petrol particles are like smelling salts. Each breath tastes most wondrous. I feel the damp concrete coldness eke through my corduroys, set dead against the warmth of the spring day. It is that day, the one that bakes the earth for the first time in months, heralding an aching change to the tone of the year, real growth begins.
“I saw it all. He ran across the road, tripped and fell just onto the edge of the pedestrian island.” My fellow traveller helps me to my feet. From my restored height I now see that the blue car was not an immediate danger to him, it was in the outer exit lane across the paved area Bepe landed on. However the travelling taxi must have swerved to avoid him and clipped the open door of the static one.
“Thank you. Thank you.” I clasp his hand and shake away some demons.
“Don’t thank me, I just picked him up. Thank God, Praise Allah and the rest of them that he is alright. Let’s face it, there is nothing you can do to stop them getting into scrapes is there?” I feel unqualified to answer, having only just graduated with a scraped third-class degree in parenting. He goes back for his trolley and to offer himself as a witness to the feuding taxi drivers.
I look afresh at Bepe’s beautiful wet face. Plumped, red, olive-skinned cheeks, redness competing against his brown eyes, a small bloody graze on his forehead. For the moments we were ripped apart he became faceless, I could not see him for fear he never came back. This is unconditional love, not one you can mentally re-appraise the nature and strength of right up to your wedding day. I shudder in his humbling presence.
“Why did you let him go?
“He just ran babe.”
“You silly fool, you almost got him killed while you picked up that bloody phone.” I leave the harsh judgement and blame at my door. Sophia leans forward to spit out the acidic pre-cursor to a full on vomit just released into her mouth.
“Diddy get my plane,” Bepe gives his game away. His escape was to recover the plane from the car. I contemplate recovering it for him so he won’t run again. I am damned for taking one toy and almost damned forever by leaving the other.
“Let’s get you tidied up kiddo.” I rejoice at the prospect of another mundane change of clothes, however incessant these demands I will never begrudge another one.
“Home Diddy? Bad Diddy.” Gravitas disappears as he screws his nose and mouth into a grin. Sophia kisses away his warm salty tears.
“Mummy and Bepe are going home; let’s get rid of daddy on the big plane now.”
“Plane Diddy,” shouts Bepe as we revolve back inside. He is my son like never before.
CHAPTER 3
Dan 13:47
My bones ache, relieved of unthinkable tension. A security guard back inside the terminal is glaring at my abandoned guitar case. I hastily pick it up and return to contemplating travelling with the inhumane chemistry experiment that is my combustible friends.
“What the bloody hell have you packed your guitar for?” My brother Chris arrives with his expected disdain for this trip and all who sail in her. I let go of it to shake his hand and find it scraping my shins through my beige mini cord trousers. The pain is not so bad, just a dull marrow deep ache in my slight shins. I grin at his rounded ruddy blonde presence. He is a ruffle of a man; he looks akin to one of the haystacks at the end of his field. I am happy he is here but I know he is extra baggage on this delicate trip. I have always loved his steadiness. Chris Greenhenge never made store by anything that could not be done manually, a world where words are hardly used. Fashioning potatoes and children from seed, soil and sunshine is his contribution to life. Our physicality is completely different; he is hewn from our father’s rock-like presence, me from my mum’s delicate ancestry.
“Been here long?” I ask.
“No, Sandra and the kids just dropped me off in the Land Rover.” I imagine the mayhem of seven bodies crammed into the far reaches of the vehicle, some seated, some on sheep dip canisters.
“Sophia, right good to see you.” He offers his grinding roughskinned grip to her.
“Bepe nearly had an accident outside. Dan let him run out of the airport and almost let him be knocked over by a taxi.”
“Are you stupid or what? Why did you do that?” He is happy to instantly blame me rather than seek further explanation. He exchanges worn glances with Sophia; both are paid-up members of a responsible parent club that I have been blackballed from. Sophia treats me like Bepe’s sad older brother who has yet to leave home.
“Listen, will I know any of these characters?” Chris is worried.
“Of course. Johnny and Max from my year at school, Robert you met at college once and of course Juliet.” The last name betrays information I withheld till the very last. I have avoided telling everyone except Jonny my best man and Sophia, in the hope of skipping past inevitable resistance.
“What, women on a stag do!”
“Listen, she was a good friend.” She was much more but I cannot remind anyone of that.
“Sounds a bloody odd bunch.” With that he withdrew his approval and sat it squarely on a fence, waiting for the appropriate time to chide my ill-judged selection. Old rogue friends and an ex-girlfriend, who I broke up horrendously with; it didn’t exactly feel risk free.
Bepe reminds us he is still here by firing his gun at the stomach of the security guard who starts to move towards us. I pick him up quickly. They scowl but ignore the non-lethal weapon in my son’s hand despite the briefing from outside.
“Let’s go up to check-in guys,” I say.
“Postman Pat,” Bepe thinks the security guard has the look of a village mailman about him as we ascend the escalator which runs alongside the inside windowed shell of the building. We rise above the two taxi drivers who are now occupied with the police. The angel who returned my son has flown. A brief contemplation of what might-havebeen causes me to stumble at the top.
“Face forward, can’t you read?” Chris points out a sign that I would never have thought I would have needed.
I ignore SELF SERVICE CHECK-IN, a concept I mistrust completely, to find DESKS 23–26.
SEE A MEMBER OF STAFF BEFORE YOU JOIN THIS QUEUE – another sign barks at me, denying me my right to join the great British queue.
Bags shuffle forward in the dreaded line. Some owners are desperate to unburden themselves and proceed to retail therapy; others are starting their holiday right here. Chris and I pass over our luggage. We agree to check in separately so we can both get aisle seats; me because of
oversized legs, Chris because of an oversized body.
“Here’s Johnny!” Sophia is unaware of the grimacing axe-wielding face in my head, rolling his eyes through a wooden door. Johnny offers nothing but solace, we smile at each other knowing that there is love with no edge. No proving, no probing, just approval and openness. I first noticed his unkempt rebel fringe in class 3R and we have co-existed since. I can show him my soul and he will nourish it. We completely unite over the post-punk musical tapestry that succoured us through adolescent acne-afflicted angst. He will add a dose of calm to the heady stag brew.
“Look who I found, Dan,” Johnny’s appearance has a sting in its tail. Back at self check-in, I see the fit scrubbed presence of Robert. His feathered flick haircut has been unchanged for decades. At first glance he cuts a boyish non-confrontational figure, but as he marches towards me with hand outstretched he bellows confidence at my shrinking mojo. He usually pulls the strings and presses the buttons to get whatever he wants. Our college friendship was probably only due to him wanting shagging access to the less available female populace I naturally befriended.
“You skinny twat! Saw you downstairs as I transferred from Barcelona but you disappeared outside after what I assume to be that Sprog of yours. I didn’t think I was going to make it; there was a BA client junket this weekend in Aspen. I thought at least I would get us some serious skiing though. Chamonix will be better anyway, not!” He pretends to punch me in the stomach as proof of our familiarity. The only punch he has ever pulled.
“I’m skiing demon at the moment. I could still hop out to Aspen on Sunday anyway; I will see how things go. Depends on the totty quotient. Can’t think there will be much going on with your track record though, I will have to make the running as usual.” Everyone waits for the tide to go out. Robert just goes; any points of issue are seldom challenged by anyone for fear of a further diatribe.
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