Landing Gear (14 page)

“Manchester United,” Jack had said. Some of his friends at school supported them. Frank had a miniature Manchester United kit that he wore most weekends.

“No,” his dad said. “Let’s go for a London team.”

Jack couldn’t think of any London teams.

“Let’s support Chelsea,” Michael said.

And so they did. Now as they walked to the barber, they discussed how the team was faring. Jack gleaned enough information from the internet to pretend he knew what he was talking about, while his father took a more statistics-based, analytical approach. That conversation didn’t last long and they walked the rest of the way in silence. But the silence between them was easy. Unlike with Harriet. With his mum, Jack always felt as if she was barely keeping a lid on it, all the millions of things she wanted to say to him, all the instructions, all the questions. Sometimes he dreaded being with her.

Still, Jack got along better with his mum these days. Well, kind of. Sometimes. He thought that since they had their “events” and she lost her job, she had softened a little. No, that wasn’t the right word. Acquiesced. Given up. She had more time. The domestic goddess routine didn’t suit her, Jack and his mum both knew that, but they pretended. The fact was, Jack didn’t need her anymore. In some countries he’d have left home ages ago. In
some countries he’d have a job and a wife and a child of his own. Or he’d live in a slum and sell his body for crack. Jack wondered about Yacub. Maybe he had five kids and a wife in a burqa back in his village in Iraq or wherever he came from. Jack resolved to ask where he was from, maybe once they’d finished this game. Sometimes he wondered about leaving home, heading off into the wide blue yonder, but then he thought: no. Who would cook his dinner? Who would pay his allowance?

Being sixteen sucked: tons of exams and no money. Still, Jack told himself, it was better than being fifteen. And that was better than being fourteen. Fourteen was truly crap. When he was fourteen, David McDonald died and Ruby ended up in hospital and he might have been responsible; he nearly got expelled; he and his mum got chased by a psychopath and his mum lost her job. Fourteen sucked.

Yacub and Jack played
World of Battle Fatigues
for a while—Jack was surprised to find Yacub was pretty good at it for a guy who was living in the little room at the back of the house. He heard Harriet’s keys in the front door.

“That’s her,” he said.

“Your mother?”

“She’s coming in.”

Yacub stood up and put his hands together and gave Jack a little bow. “Very nice to have made your acquaintance,” he said. “I’d better go.”

He shut the door to the little room as Harriet entered the sitting room. Jack pretended to be playing his game.

“Hi,” she said.

His mother sounded tired.

“Hi,” he replied.

As always, his mum took the fact that Jack responded to her greeting to mean that he was ready for a full-on conversation. “How was your day?”

“Fine,” Jack said. Ordinarily, he wouldn’t pause the gameplay, but today he paused. “How about yours?”

She was carrying a shopping bag and a handful of paperwork. She went straight into the kitchen. Before Jack realized it, he’d followed her.

“Okay,” she said. “A bit tiring.”

He struggled to stop himself from firing a string of questions at her. Instead he tried to remember how he behaved normally: oh yeah, I ask her to do stuff for me. “Can you drive me to school in the morning? I’ve got to take back all that kit.”

The colour drained from his mother’s face. She swallowed. “Can’t,” she said. “No car.”

“Where’s the car?” Jack asked.

His mother’s eyes widened and her nostrils flared. Jack thought, it’s as though I’m the parent and she’s the truth-dodging teen. “I had an accident.”

“What happened?”

She paused long enough to give herself away.

“A tree fell on the car.”

He folded his arms across his chest. “Oh yeah?” he said. “Were you hurt?”

“No. I wasn’t in the car at the time. It’s in the garage. I’m waiting to hear whether it can be fixed.”

He could see from her face that she had managed to move from lying into more truthful territory. But it didn’t make sense. A tree fell on her car? How? Where?

“I’ll cook supper later,” she said. “Do you have any homework? Have you done your guitar?”

He rolled his eyes at her and slouched back into the sitting room.

9

Most days when Jack and Harriet were home together he was either in his room on his laptop or in front of the games console, and she was in the kitchen at her so-called workstation. Harriet had spent a large part of the past two years online—doing what, she was never quite sure, given the way time contracted on the internet. She monitored news stories and had become fascinated with the way that certain stories started as tiny specks but then became huge sandstorms, like the way a young man immolating himself in Tunisia became the Arab Spring.

The kitchen computer corner now resembled the NASA control room at Houston—three big monitors, two keyboards, a couple of smartphones, several tablets, an e-reader, an external hard drive, a backup drive and a small jungle’s worth of cables. Occasionally, very occasionally, Jack brought his laptop into the kitchen with him and they worked together companionably. One afternoon a while back, Harriet got up to make dinner and was standing behind Jack at the counter. She could see his screen over his shoulder. He had his headphones on with at least a dozen windows open at the same time—he was watching music videos and using chat and a bunch of other applications and websites that Harriet had never seen before. It
was unusual, this opportunity to watch him online, and as she chopped the onion she tried to act normally, so that he didn’t cotton on to the fact that she was spying on him. Now that he was a bit older he seemed to find her slightly less annoying, but if he noticed her watching him, she’d be in trouble.

So she had watched him as he flicked from site to site, conversation to conversation. He moved rapidly, looking at his friends’ photos, responding to their comments. He was happy. Harriet was happy. She chopped that onion for ages, all the way through the very loud Skype discussion with his friend about the merits of Frank Ocean or otherwise.

But today Jack was on his games console in the sitting room and Yacub was in the little room out back. Yacub seemed okay. She’d checked on him just now—asleep again under the heaped-up covers, but the sandwich had been eaten.

What was she going to do with him? How was she going to tell Michael and Jack that a man fell from a plane onto her car and she’d brought him home? There was no point in telling anyone anything if Yacub was in fact dead. Do ghosts eat sandwiches? Had no one else seen him fall?

She used all three of the screens simultaneously, flicking through the feeds and the alerts. She was usually very precise with keywords, search terms and hashtags, but now she threw the net wider and wider: landing gear, Heathrow, #Pakistan, asylum, illegal entry, supermarket car parks, #fallingmen, man falling, flight paths, sky. Nothing—well, plenty of stuff surfaced but she did not find any references or
links to her falling man, however oblique. She kept poking away, moving from application to application, website to website, search engine to search engine, new media to old media. Nothing.

Jack came into the kitchen. “When’s supper?” he asked.

“I’m about to start cooking. It’ll be quick.”

Jack nodded. “Supermarket special,” he said approvingly. Normally he would shuffle off at this point—he had to shuffle because he wore his trousers slung so low he walked with his legs spread wide apart. But this time he didn’t walk away. Instead he stood there, looming over Harriet.

“What are you doing?”

She looked up at him. He was peering at the screens, and Harriet could see he was actually interested, which in and of itself was peculiar and worrying.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Nothing?” he asked.

Harriet looked back at the screens. He couldn’t possibly figure out what she was doing—what happened yesterday.

And then she saw it. There was a message in one of the streams: “Is it a plane? Is it a bird? Or is it a man, falling?” followed by a crunched photo URL.

Harriet suppressed a gasp by pretending to clear her throat. “I bought some of those Belgian waffle biscuits you like—they’re in the cupboard,” she said, knowing that nothing could be interesting enough to divert Jack from biscuits.

“Yum.” He hoiked up his trousers and ambled to the cupboard.

Once he was gone, she clicked on the link.

A photo of a man, falling, indistinct yet unmistakable. A cloudless day, an empty sky. The airplane Yacub had fallen from already out of the frame, so it was as though he was falling from Heaven itself, an angel without wings.

Whoever took it was not in the supermarket car park, she could tell, but a distance away. Harriet enlarged the photo, disturbing the pixels, making the whole thing even more blurry. There was the roof of the supermarket. There was the main road to the bridge. The photographer was somewhere above ground level, maybe two or three floors up, in a block of flats or offices perhaps, looking south. She opened the map on her tablet and watched the globe spin round before she used the touchscreen to find her virtual way to the supermarket. She’d figure out where the photo was taken from. And then what would she do?

Someone else saw Yacub falling.

Harriet was not sure why she felt compelled to keep Yacub’s presence in the house a secret. She knew it was not a good idea. But Harriet was a keeper of secrets; keeping secrets was something she excelled at. She had never told Michael about Emily. By the time they met, keeping that secret had become second nature to her. It was something that nestled inside her, kicking her sharply in the
ribs from time to time. Soon it was too late for it to be anything other than a shocking revelation, so it remained a secret. She kept secrets from Jack too, as parents do, all the smoking and drinking and drug taking and inappropriate sex with the wrong men at the wrong time in her past. Her dread fear of losing him, her terror that he wouldn’t love her when she was old: she kept those secret, of course. It was not difficult to keep secrets from Jack. It hadn’t occurred to him yet that his parents had lived lives of their own.

All in all, Harriet was a fan of secrets, and she wished Michael had seen fit to keep what happened in Toronto to himself. But she had guessed and he had confirmed her guess, as though he expected to be forgiven simply for having told the truth. But she hadn’t forgiven him, not really. And now that was a secret too. So, not telling her husband and her son about Yacub was perfectly reasonable. How do you tell someone that a man fell out of the sky and onto your car, like a Pakistani David Bowie, and that you felt compelled to bring him home with you and hide him, even though you weren’t entirely sure if he was dead or alive?

After she recovered from the shock of finding the photo, Harriet cooked. She had long since banned the use of laptops and phones during dinner, and neither she nor Jack broke that rule often. Once they were sitting together at the table, she would try to start a conversation, which was never easy. Like his father, Jack wasn’t much of a talker.
Harriet’s attempts at light and breezy tea-time conversation rarely succeeded and—she tried to stop herself but was unable—their discussion usually deteriorated into a series of pointed questions about Jack’s homework, his social plans and his friends, none of which he wanted to discuss. But she kept trying anyway.

“Do you have any plans for the weekend?”

“Don’t know.”

“How’s your essay going?”

“Okay.”

“How is Ruby?”

“Don’t really see her these days, not since she switched schools.”

They had gone through phases where talking was easier. When she lost her job, it became apparent that Jack was worried the family would no longer have enough money to stay in the big house, to keep taking holidays, so they’d talked about that a fair amount. There was plenty of money, and as long as Michael kept working there would continue to be plenty of money. They also spent a lot of time discussing the “events” that had led to Harriet’s losing her job, which was understandable given that Jack was with her when it happened, though she lied about George Sigo—one more secret—claiming she had no idea who he was. Other allowable topics included Jack’s elaborate critiques of Harriet’s cooking, as though they were on
The Great British Bake Off
, Harriet a hapless competitor and Jack an exacting judge. But apart from that, Harriet and Jack lived their lives so separately that there
was nothing to discuss. They didn’t even watch TV together—Jack watched what he wanted on his laptop, and Harriet watched what she wanted on her tablet in bed. Michael worked late, came home, and left for work early the next day.

Harriet had spent the day trying to sort out the car. It had been impounded and towed away and it took her hours to track it down. She didn’t want to talk to Jack about that. And there was the ghost of Yacub in the little room. She didn’t want to talk about that either. Plus the photo she’d found online. With all these hidden things pressing in on her, tonight she decided to take the easy way out and opted for silence.

“So,” Jack said, “how’s the job hunt?”

She could not remember the last time he had started a conversation voluntarily.

“Well,” she said, trying not to sound too pleased, “not so great. I mean, it’s tough out there. Plus I’m past my sell-by date. I’ve expired.”

Jack laughed and she laughed too; she was filled with happiness because he had shown an interest in her.

“Past your sell-by date. Come on, no you’re not.”

“I am, actually. Who wants to employ a middle-aged woman who has been out of work for two years and who was sacked from her last job?”

“You weren’t sacked.”

Harriet took a deep breath. “I might as well have been.”

“Are you even looking?”

That was the kind of loaded, not-very-nice question that Harriet was prone to ask Jack, like “Are you even bothering to revise your paper?” She was startled to think he’d learned the technique from her. She took another gulp of air. “You’re right. I suppose I have given up looking.”