Landing Gear (6 page)

“You were always too skinny.”

It was one of the great things about having friends who knew you when you were young: when they picture you they see what you looked like when you were eighteen, not what you look like now that you’re pushing fifty. That’s why those Facebook reunions of high school sweethearts are so common: these people take one look at each other and the years of poor diet, no exercise and too much television fall away. But Michael knew Marina would never be so soft. He was sure her hard edges were sharpening with age.

“You need a place to stay.”

“I don’t know,” he said, “haven’t looked into it yet.”

“The hotels in Toronto are as full as the hotels in New York,” she said. “There’s a lot of gouging going on, apparently, rooms tripling in price. You’ll come and stay with me. You never have. It’s about time.”

He gave her his arrival time and Marina said she’d meet him.

“I’ll be the fat guy in a suit,” he said.

She laughed. Marina. Michael’s first girlfriend.

After he left Vancouver, they stayed in touch via ironic postcards, Michael sending royal family memorabilia for the most part, Marina specializing in Canadiana—the Mountie on his horse, the stuffed black bear on his hind legs outside the tourist shop. They knew before they started dating that their relationship was time-limited; Michael had already been accepted at the London School of Economics. As a result, their relationship had an unnatural natural ease to it, a live-for-today clarity. The advent of email had revived their correspondence just at the point it was beginning to fade away, and they’d kept up sporadic contact that way. Michael was a Facebook refusenik; no amount of nudging and poking and requesting would make him change his mind. But he used to travel to Toronto for business fairly regularly before the crash, and he would see Marina whenever he was in town; they’d have dinner together somewhere smart and new. Marina always knew about the next big thing before it became the next big thing, by which time she’d have moved on to the one after that. She’d worked as an interior stylist for a home decor magazine for many years,
before finding an investor and opening her own store. Furniture, lamps, a select range of luxurious clothes made for lounging on the furniture lit by the lamps, and an even more select range of jewellery with a tasteful Persian influence. No carpets. Years before, she had extricated herself—painfully—from her father’s Vancouver business to go to art school in Toronto, and she wasn’t going anywhere near Persian carpets. You couldn’t buy anything in her shop for less than a couple of months’ worth of mortgage payments. Yorkville, of course—the funky bit, where the streets are narrow and the old houses have been transformed into shops and galleries.

At the train station Michael spotted her immediately: long black wildly curly hair, tall and straight backed and a little forbidding in her layers of black clothes and startling jewellery. She was always lightly tanned, even in the depths of winter; she claimed it was her Eastern genes. She hadn’t gone leathery like some women do; instead she looked bronzed, as though a sculptor had made a cast of her and she’d left her old body behind in the studio.

It took her a while to spot Michael on the platform as he walked toward her. But then she smiled, and her smile tore through his layers of aging flesh until he felt as though she found the real him, the one she wanted to see. She embraced him and gave him a big kiss.

“Fatty!” she said.

“Porker,” Michael replied. “I think you’ll find they call me Mr. Fatty Porker down at the bank.”

“Dick Schwein!” she shrieked. They’d had a thing for
swearing at each other in mock German, Michael couldn’t remember why.

“Mr. Dick Schwein,” Michael said.

Marina lived alone in the big house that she and her husband, Stewart, had bought back in the ’90s, an old house for Toronto, early twentieth century, with hardwood floors and high moulded ceilings. It had been renovated so thoroughly that the original house was mainly a genetic memory, everything precision engineered for the utmost in comfort in the best possible taste. It was a machine for living, with wide doors that opened onto big rooms full of long couches, vast, pristine countertops in the kitchen, a warm rosewood table in the eating area, bathrooms that were almost too perfect to use. She showed him to his room, and when he put down his suitcase, all he could think was that it looked far too battered and grubby. In all the years that they had kept in touch, he had never stayed with her, not in Vancouver when she still lived there with her parents, not after she moved to Toronto to go to university. She had never been to London. They had slept together for the last time when they were eighteen.

“You fancy a margarita at the Boulevard Café?” she asked. “I made a dinner reservation at a new place for later.”

“Are you single these days?” Michael asked.

She laughed and indicated the perfect room in which they stood. “I’ve got a new husband, a dog and a couple of kids stashed away somewhere,” she said, “but I like to keep things neat.”

“Stewart was a neat freak,” Michael said. He hadn’t known Stewart well, but his funeral had coincided with a trip to Toronto in 2004, so he’d attended. It was a big gathering at St. James’ Cathedral—Stewart had been the editor of the magazine where Marina had worked, and he was well known and well liked in media circles. It was an icy February day and the stylish crowd were dressed in sleek black wool coats, with a preponderance of clunky black spectacles and neat little hats. The women wore brooches; the men had stylish facial hair. People dress to charm and amuse in Toronto in a way that no one would ever dream of in London, Michael thought. On that day, for the first and only time in her life, Marina was pale.

“People used to say that Stewart was the neat freak, but it turns out that, all along, it was me.”

“Let me buy you a margarita,” Michael said.

“Fine with me, Dick Schwein,” Marina said, and as she slipped her arm through his, her hair brushed against his cheek. It felt right to be there with her while the sky out over the Atlantic had fallen silent. Michael had no doubt that the planes would fly again before too long. But, if he was going to be stranded anywhere, it was meant to be here, in Toronto, with Marina.

14

The weekend after her father’s funeral, Emily took herself out for a long cycle ride along the Thames. He’d been dead for ten days. Ten days. She’d done the funeral. She’d gone back to work—what else could she do? She’d convinced Harv to stop calling. There was no one to stay up with all night, wailing. She had to get on with life. She had no other family—well, that wasn’t completely true. Now that her father was gone, she could fill in that birth parent search form without worrying about hurting him.

The weather was glorious but the empty sky unnerved her, made her feel cut off, as though she’d lost contact with the world as well as her dad. She’d lived in Richmond for several years—North Sheen, really—and while it was a long way from the centre of town, she liked its leafy suburban feel and its proximity to the river. She’d have to deal at some point with her father’s house—he hadn’t bought it, a council tenant all his life—but not yet. She’d tidy up her own life first. She pushed herself to cycle hard, as though the exertion and the sunshine would clear her mind. The wind made her eyes tear up, and she had to stop and get off her bike and sit on a bench because she couldn’t see.

After a while her eyes stopped leaking. She got out her phone. She’d continued to receive lots of texts and
emails and messages from her friends, and she went through the most recent ones now. She accepted an invitation to meet friends for drinks on the following weekend, thinking she’d better at least pretend to be alive, though she knew she’d cancel. She opened up Facebook. Harvinder had been posting photos of her and emoting all over the place about their breakup and her dad. She unfriended him. She opened up her list of friends and began unfriending systematically: people she didn’t like, people who were friends of friends she’d never met, people she had no idea who they were. Through the
A
’s and the
B
’s, then onto the
C
’s. Crazeeharree. She paused. Who the fuck was that? Crazeeharree—soon to be deleted. Emily paused again. She’d take another look at this person’s page first.

She opened it up. Odd. Only a handful of friends, most of whom were Emily’s friends too. Female. No photos, apart from Emily’s own, reposted without comment.

A shiver ran from the phone’s screen through her body. I don’t need to contact social services. I don’t need to register with find-your-birth-parents online. There she is, right in front of me: Crazeeharree. Female.

Emily stood up from the bench so quickly, she almost fell over. She got on her bike. She needed to get home as fast as possible.

15

On Tuesday night Harriet got home from work a bit earlier, after nine. The studio was still missing half its staff, technicians, reporters, presenters; the people who’d been unable to get home last week continued to be unable to get home this week, same as Michael, who was still in Toronto. Harriet had done double shifts since Thursday and was tired.

Earlier that day, her boss had paid her the biggest compliment in his tiny arsenal of praise: “Well done,” he said.

Harriet saw her opportunity. “I’d like you to call in a few favours on my behalf,” she said.

Steve looked at her blankly. He was even more tired than her.

“I want to continue reporting—I want more of this kind of work.”

He scratched his head and yawned. “You’re a bit old for any of the training schemes.”

Her mouth dropped open and her eyes went wide.

“I’m just saying, Harriet, you’re not exactly fresh blood.”

“I don’t need any training, Steve. I’ve had training up the hoo-haa. I want the work.” She did not attempt to curb the anger in her voice.

Steve held up one hand: stop. “Okay, okay—I’ll have a think.”

Harriet knew
have a think
meant
do nothing
. “I’d like you to send a recommendation to Mallory Flynn.”

“Flynn? Television?”

“Yes. I know you know her. I know her too—from back in the day. I want you to send a recommendation to her and I’ll follow it up myself.”

“A recommendation?”

“Yes, Steve.” Harriet knew the nagging tone she used when she was telling Jack to do his homework had crept into her voice, but she allowed it. “A recommendation. I’ll write it for you, if you like. I’ve got all these pieces I’ve filed in the past week to show. Video as well as radio. You’ll only have to okay it. Simple. Then it’s out of your hands.”

Steve looked at her. “Have we met before?” he asked. “I’m Steve.”

“It’s the ash cloud,” she said. “New horizons.”

“I’m nodding like I understand what you’re talking about,” said Steve.

She’d meet with Mallory. There was a general election around the corner. News coverage would increase exponentially for that event, and everyone who was anyone would be working that night. She’d offer up her expertise; she’d get herself back into the mainstream. Away from local radio. Back into television news, where she’d been before she met Michael, before she’d had Jack. On television, reporting.

Jack was lying on the sofa with the television on, asleep. Harriet could see he was drooling slightly. The carpet between the sofa and the coffee table had an asymmetrical layer of broken crisps ground into it. She spotted his backpack by the front door. He’d eaten the sandwiches she’d made him for lunch. He’d even got out his homework—Harriet could see it on the coffee table amid the dirty glasses and games controllers. In the kitchen, she put a frozen meat pie into the oven and began to clear the dishes. She’d wake him when it was ready.

She turned on her computer and clicked on the BBC’s live news feed. All day they’d been reporting that negotiations over lifting the flight ban were nearing completion. She made a salad and was sitting at the counter, waiting for the pie to be ready, propping up her heavy head with both hands, when the announcement came. Heathrow was reopening. At 10 p.m. the planes would start flying again. The first flight to take off was heading for Vancouver, Canada. Harriet pictured the airport waking, the departure boards blinking back to life. She thought of Michael. She picked up the phone and dialed his BlackBerry, and left a message when he didn’t reply. God knows how long it would take him to find a seat on a flight back to London.

It was peculiar—Michael had been gone less than two weeks, but it felt like much longer. There was a lot to tell him. He’d be pleased. She went to wake Jack. The pie was ready.

16

Jack didn’t mind that school had started again. It was always good to see his friends, and classes didn’t really get in the way of socializing. He’d found his first year in the school terrifying, what with the massive scary boys and shrieking terrifying girls in the playground, and so he hung out mostly with his old friends from primary school. Primary school was a doddle compared to secondary. His primary school was small and sweet, with lovely colourful classrooms and cuddly teachers, and awards for good behaviour that hardly anyone got because everyone was good pretty much all of the time. Moving to secondary school had been traumatic. Jack felt as though he’d stolen a loaf of bread and been sent on convict transport to Australia. The school was a wild frontier, and he’d spent most of Year Seven worrying someone was going to kill him.

But he survived, and then in Year Eight he began to make new friends and find his way. It stopped bugging him that the big boys teased him for being middle class. They tried calling him Smoked Salmon because his mum sent him to school with smoked salmon and cream cheese sandwiches instead of—what? Jack didn’t know, chips in a white roll? Luckily, the nickname didn’t stick. It was a
crap nickname, and he liked the sandwiches his mother made. Once he began to grow, everything got easier. It’s a simple truth that all it takes to intimidate a bully is a few inches of extra height.

Now, in Year Nine, Jack was fully acclimatized. He had learned the lingo. He didn’t look confused when someone said “Wa’gwan” instead of “What’s going on?” He’d learned to walk with his school trousers hanging off his butt. He knew when it was safe to go into the loos.