Landing Gear (16 page)

Jack and Harriet both looked at Yacub. He definitely wasn’t dead. Jack felt a bit foolish for believing even a tiny bit that he might be.

“I’m not dead,” Yacub confirmed, though he sounded as though he wished he was or thought he would be soon.

“I wasn’t sure,” said Harriet. “He needed help. He needs us.”

“What?” said Jack’s dad. “Who is he? A refugee?”

“No—he—”

“You’re moving strangers into the house without even telling me?”

Jack noticed that his father was bleeding from a cut on the top of his head. Blood had snaked through what was left of his hair and was making its way across his forehead. Had Yacub hit him?! Jack felt an unfamiliar surge of anger; he couldn’t just stand by, yet again, when his parents were under threat. And he’d liked the guy! He pushed past his mother and into the little room and threw himself at Yacub, wrestling him off the chair and onto the floor.

“Jack!” Harriet shrieked. “Stop it!”

Jack expected Yacub to put up a fight, but he lay there on the floor without moving. Jack had him pinned down by the shoulders. Yacub looked up at Jack with an expression of such weariness that Jack stopped, confused.

“You didn’t have to hit my dad!” Jack said. “He’s an old guy.”

“Jack,” Michael said, “he didn’t hit me. Your mother did.”

“I did not!”

Michael sighed. “Let’s just say it was an injury from a previous incident that took place earlier this evening.”

“You’re bleeding,” said Harriet, and she moved toward her husband with a tissue from her dressing gown pocket,
but he stopped her before she could touch him. He took the tissue out of her hand without touching her.

“Thank you,” he said, sounding oddly formal. “I’ll take care of it myself.”

Jack stood up and offered a hand to help Yacub off the floor. “Sorry,” he said. Yacub took his hand and sat down on the bed.

“I suppose he is,” Harriet said.

“Is what?” asked Michael.

“A kind of refugee.”

“I’m not a refugee,” Yacub said sharply. “I’ve come to work. I’m not staying in this country. I’m going to America.”

Michael snorted.

“You’re going to the US?” Jack asked. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt like crying. Luckily he had learned how not to cry two years back. “Who will play
World of Battle Fatigues
with me?” he asked, immediately regretting it—pathetic whinger.

“You’ve met?” Harriet asked. “You’ve played games?”

“You can’t hide someone in our house and expect me not to notice,” Jack replied. “It’s my house too. I live here.”

“Okay,” his mother said. “Let’s go back to bed. We’ll talk this through in the morning.”

So that’s what they did. They all went back to bed.

Jack couldn’t sleep. So he did what he always did when he couldn’t sleep: he thought about Dukes Meadows on a sunny summer’s day, and he thought about Ruby.

14

Harriet listened to Michael breathing, knowing he was listening to her.

After a while, she spoke into the darkness of the room. “He’s just a boy.”

“Where’d you get him from?”

“You make it sound like I
bought
him at the supermarket.”

“Harriet, who is he and what is he doing here?”

“We’ll talk tomorrow, Michael.”

“I’ll be home late. I’ve got a meeting.”

“On a Friday night?”

“There are people here from New York. I have to be there.”

“Of course.”

They stopped talking and rolled over, away from each other. They pretended to fall asleep for so long, they fell asleep.

In the morning, as usual, Michael was gone before either Harriet or Jack was up. Jack announced that when he got home from school he would take Yacub shopping for clothes. “I’ll introduce him to the joys of British high street shopping,” he said. “I’ll take him for coffee and load him up with the latest stuff.”

“Okay,” said Harriet, relieved at the thought that she wouldn’t have to do this herself. “Great.”

“You’ll need to give me cash,” Jack said. “Lots.”

He packed the sandwich she had made him and left.

There was no sign of Yacub; she would leave him to sleep. Harriet took a shower, dressed and got ready to walk down to the cash machine. She would go to the supermarket later, maybe while the boys—she laughed to herself at that, “the boys”—were out shopping. As she emerged from her house, she noticed the young woman on a bicycle across the street. As always she was stationary, one foot on the ground. She was staring straight ahead, as though waiting for an invisible traffic light to turn green.

Harriet never got a really good look at the girl on the bike; she wore a helmet, sunglasses, scarves. For a while Harriet thought she must be a new neighbour, but she knew most of her neighbours—their large terraced houses were under-occupied and over-renovated, like hers—and no one had moved in or out. Perhaps the girl was staying in the house across the street, though Harriet doubted that the retired circuit judge was the sort to let out rooms. From time to time Harriet wondered if the cyclist could in fact be Emily, but then thought it was too unlikely, couldn’t be.

It looked like it might rain, so Harriet went back inside to get an umbrella, and when she came out again the girl was gone.

15

Every morning Michael walked to the station to take the train to work. The train to Waterloo, followed by the Drain into the City. He liked his commute, truth be told—it was a blank space between home and work. He left early and came home late so he avoided the crowds. He did his commute empty-handed—there weren’t enough hours left in the day for him to have to work at home, so he didn’t carry paperwork. He didn’t read the newspaper, he didn’t do email, he didn’t shuffle through documents, he didn’t fiddle with his phone; he walked, he sat, he looked out the window, he watched his fellow commuters and he thought about nothing. It was a forty-minute meditation at each end of the day. It kept him from going crazy.

Michael was at a loss. He’d spent the last two years at a loss. He had no idea how to make amends to his wife; he wasn’t in the habit of making amends simply because he was not in the habit of doing wrong. He thought perhaps—was it possible?—he’d never done anything wrong before in his entire life. No, he must have done something wrong at some point. But maybe not. He handed in wallets and umbrellas to lost property, he offered his seat on the train to older people, his expense account was pristine. He wasn’t a big talker, so he’d never had occasion to
exaggerate or, indeed, lie. He liked the same bands he’d listened to as a student, even when their reunion albums were lousy. When the Occupy people had been camped in front of St. Paul’s, he bought them food and donated money, even though what they were protesting against in their vague, all-embracing way was him. Well, not him directly—he wasn’t a banker—but his friends. Except, he corrected himself again, he didn’t have any friends, he’d never been a person who made friends. His colleagues.

If there is an advantage to leaving where you come from and making your life somewhere new, it is that you can leave your past behind. Michael had left his past behind. He’d wobbled that time in Toronto, he’d allowed a combination of nostalgia and cocktails to morph into desire. But he’d left that behind as well.

The disadvantage to leaving where you come from and making your life somewhere new is that once enough years have passed, the new place is no longer new, and you find yourself burdened with a past after all. Michael had a long history in London; he’d lived in London for more years than he’d lived anywhere else. And he coped with this by becoming absent. He was absent from his family; he was absent from his life. He was the Man Who Wasn’t There, except he
was
there, eating and working and taking the train into work every day. Going to meetings. Moving figures around spreadsheets. Estimating and assessing risk while remaining truly risk-averse himself.

And he had let people down. He had done wrong. To Harriet. Jack as well.

And now Harriet had invited a stranger into their house. Was this his punishment? A man who fell out of the sky?

16

On his way to school Jack thought about Yacub. Now that he was allowed to leave the little room out back and go into the world like a real person, not a ghost, Jack was looking forward to showing him round. After we’ve been to the shops, he thought, we’ll visit the supermarket. It would be like a visit to Mecca for Yacub, Jack reckoned, or maybe not Mecca, since Yacub might be an actual Muslim and that might offend him. While out, they’d watch the planes lower their landing gear. He’d get Yacub to tell him what it was like to fall out of a plane. Jack could take him to the multiplex. He’d like that. And he could take him over the river to Dukes Meadows.

When Jack was fourteen, he and his friends fell into the habit of meeting at Dukes. But then David McDonald died. It all came to an abrupt end. Jack had handed the bag of weed to Ruby. It contained three little tablets. He saw Ruby take one. David McDonald probably took one. David McDonald died. Jack carried this knowledge around with him like an extra limb he kept hidden under his hoodie.

He kept track of Ruby and Frank on Facebook, but it wasn’t the same as seeing them every day at school. Ruby
was probably still down at Dukes with her cartwheels and her older brother who Jack had never spoken to but who, he felt sure, was as terrifying as ever.

While Jack was suspended, his mother had insisted on taking him with her that night she was covering the election, the night they got into trouble with George Psycho. The “events” changed Jack. Changed Jack and his mother. It was pretty spectacular, the video of her moment in front of the cameras, and it had a perpetual afterlife online. Jack sometimes watched it to remind himself that it really did happen, that he hadn’t made it up. He had been standing behind the cameraman in the drafty town hall, watching the live broadcast, almost ready to admit that it was pretty interesting to watch his mum on TV. The producer with her clipboard, the candidates lined up on the stage, the ballot boxes, the party workers, all the purposeful activity. It took only a few moments—the man brushed by him on his way toward the stage. He ran straight for Jack’s mum, he grabbed her and knocked her off her feet and they slammed into the row of politicians behind them, and everyone fell, like dominoes,
clack, clack, clack
. His mother had shrieked when George Sigo grabbed her, and that shriek was lodged in Jack’s brain, would always be.

It was strange to think about his mother losing everything in that moment. She wasn’t hurt, not physically; only the guy dressed as Frankenstein was injured, and that was just a bang to the back of his head. The fact was, Jack was glad he had been there with his mum; he was
glad she had not been alone that night. He was glad he witnessed what happened to her with his own eyes, not on YouTube, not on Facebook where, beneath the video, thousands of people had clicked on “Like.”

When Jack got home from school, Yacub was in the sitting room watching TV; it was no longer necessary for him to hide. Jack felt a pang—he kind of missed having a strange man hiding in the little room out back. Harriet was in the kitchen baking a tart for dinner. Once Jack got out of his school uniform, cleaned himself up and put on his newest jeans and his favourite T-shirt and a ton of cologne—you can never wear too much cologne—he was ready to head out to the shops with Yacub. His mother handed him a wedge of money. He looked at her in amazement.

“Two
hundred
pounds? You never give
me
this kind of money. Can I buy something for myself?”

“No,” she said. “You can have a drink and a cake somewhere.”

He was aware that Yacub had walked into the kitchen and was standing behind him, and he imagined what Yacub was thinking. Yes, Jack thought, I’m spoiled, I’m a fucking spoiled only child, but it’s
her
fault, she’s the one who spoiled me. He didn’t look at Yacub.

“Yacub has nothing, remember. He needs underwear. He needs socks. He needs pyjamas.”

“Mrs. Harriet, I have no shoes,” Yacub said.

“He needs shoes, he needs T-shirts and trousers and— He has nothing.”

They both turned to look at him. He was wearing Jack’s old track pants and an old jumper of Harriet’s; somehow, he looked almost stylish.

“Mrs. Harriet, I have no shoes.”

“He needs shoes,” Harriet said.

“No,” Yacub said, and Jack thought, why, why does he keep repeating the same thing? “Excuse me, but you don’t understand. I have no shoes now. They must have come off when I …” he paused, frowning, thinking, “disembarked from the plane.”

“Oh,” Jack and his mum both said, and they looked at his feet, which were indeed shoeless, plus Jack noticed he had a hole in one of his socks.

“Oh my god,” said Harriet. “I’m so sorry.”

There was no way that any of Jack’s shoes would fit him. Jack was a giant with a giant’s feet. Michael’s were nearly as big. Harriet went to the cupboard near the front door and foraged, returning with a bunch of shoes, mostly her own old trainers. She made Yacub sit down and she lined up the shoes in front of him and they watched as he tried them on, one pair at a time, both of them willing the shoes to fit, as though he were Cinderella and Harriet and Jack his collective Prince.

And he was lucky. Even though Harriet was several inches taller than him, a pair of her old black Chucks fit, at least well enough to enable him to walk over to the high street with Jack to buy proper footwear.

“Thank you, Mrs. Harriet,” Yacub said.

“It’s nothing,” she said. “We’ll get you some shoes that actually fit properly. Please, call me Harriet.”

“I will pay you back, Mrs. Harriet,” he said, and he sounded both earnest and anxious. “Harriet,” he corrected himself. Jack looked at him and thought, shit, this can’t be much fun for him, he’s a grown man, not a lousy teenager like me, happy to live off my mum’s handouts.

“I know you will,” Harriet said, and she smiled.

So Jack walked him through the leafy streets, past the big houses, watching him as he looked around, wondering what he saw.