Loss of Separation (26 page)

I suffered an engine failure taking off from Manchester airport once. The portside engine flared out once we'd gone beyond V2. No stopping then. We took off, established that a runway had been cleared for an emergency landing, circled and got down in one piece. We came in on the spicy side, but we managed it. The tyres caught fire. But everyone lived. There were a few injuries, but only as the passengers used the emergency chutes to leave the plane. My pulse hardly increased, I was so caught up in procedure. I'd been trained for it. It was second nature. Now I looked out at the engine nacelles as if they were alien objects.

'Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking...'

Push back. Taxiing. I imagined the captain and his first officer going over their routine checks. A forty-minute flight. My hands squirmed against each other in my lap. I responded to every sound change in the cabin. I found myself inspecting the wing for missing rivets, or cracks in the infrastructure. I checked the faces of the cabin crew for expressions of concern. The faint smell of exhaust became, to my mind, a raging fire in the belly of the fuselage. We were going to smother in here. The fuel tanks were going to catch and we would become molten, fused with the plastics and metals of all this unholy tonnage.

'I've got to get off,' I said, but I buckled myself in tighter and thought of Tamara. She might be suffering, and if she was, she was suffering a thousand million times more than me.

'Is this your first flight?' the woman next to me asked.

I let out a nervous little laugh, little more than a puff of air. 'You could say that, yes.'

We reached the runway and as we turned into it, I could see there was no queue. Even before the jet had straightened up, I heard the throttles open and I was pressed back into my seat by a giant, invisible hand. The engines roared. Along the road beyond the airport perimeter, cars were parked. Enthusiasts with cameras and binoculars here to enjoy the shuttling of various aircraft. We used to wave at them out of the cockpit window. It never once occurred to me that they might be rubberneckers hoping to see some moment of spectacular carnage.

I said to the woman: 'Do you know that the Wright brothers' flight, that
first
flight ever, the entire duration of it, could have taken place inside this economy section?'

She gave me a forced little smile and went back to her book. I stopped myself from gripping her elbow and screaming into her face.

There are six million parts on this fucker. This fucker has a hundred and seventy miles of wiring inside it. This fucker's tail is as high as a six-storey building. You could park around fifty cars on this fucker's wing. What could go wrong? WHY DOESN'T IT GO WRONG MORE OFTEN?

I reckoned the speed in my mind. Two hundred and fifteen miles per hour. Sixty seconds on a runway over a mile long... I whispered to myself -
rotate
- a moment before the nose lifted.

Nine hundred thousands pounds. Four hundred tons. This. Is. Not. Right.

I tensed for the explosion as the engine parts disintegrated and flashed back through the tail, slicing through the hydraulics, resulting in a catastrophic loss of control.
Brace, brace
. The screams and the piss and the vomit and the fiery end. Sudden hair ignition. Smoke inhalation. I envisaged being a black icon in an air accident report. All passengers and crew killed. Direct thermal assault.
Controlled flight into terrain.
Which meant: smithereens. Which meant: unidentifiable body parts.
Oh God, oh my Christ.

A hand on my shoulder. The flight attendant. She was smiling. 'Are you all right? Can I get you a drink?' I wondered if all the cabin crew have those smiles impacted on to their faces, a part of the job requirement when they join the airline. Did the tinkickers pull their Joker faces from the disaster sites? Tamara didn't smile like this. She smiled when something pleased her. Her smile was natural; it touched the eyes. It touched everything.

I nodded. I asked for two G&Ts and a beer and washed it down with a dozen various painkillers. By the time we crossed into British airspace I was starting to nod off.

A loud bang jolted me out of it. The woman next to me had dropped her book. Her hand was a white claw on the headrest of the seatback in front of her. Her eyes were wide and restless, hunted, like a small animal's. Flames were tricking from the exhaust of engine number two on the port side, through what appeared to be a solid column of black smoke. There were noises of distress rising all over the cabin. No screams, yet. Whimpers, yelps, moans. The screams would come. People were glancing at each other as if searching for permission to do so.

The cabin crew were flitting around the aisles, trying to get people to calm down, saying that everything was in control and panicking would not help. I caught the wrist of the woman who had served me my drinks and told her I was a pilot and could I help? She squeezed my hand and held up a finger, then she hurried up to the cockpit.

I studied the engine. The condition had not worsened. Beyond the smoke I could see the north-easterly bulge of Norfolk. I imagined the plane turning into an unrecoverable bank and becoming a part of that countryside. Microscopic parts of me would embed themselves in the soil on those tilled fields. In time my molecules would fuse with the skin of potatoes or swedes, and they into me. In time I would become part of a roast dinner.

The flight attendant tapped me on the arm.

She whispered in my ear: 'Captain Purley would be grateful if you'd go up to the cockpit.'

As I was staggering up the aisle - not sweating now, no nerves, I was actually excited... I was psyched about getting back into a cockpit with fellow fliers - the captain made an announcement.

'Ladies and gentlemen, as I'm sure you're aware, we've encountered a slight problem with our flight this afternoon. May I reassure you that we are in control of the situation. However, we are diverting to Luton airport. Please ensure that you have your seatbelts fastened. It's likely that the landing will be on the rough side, but I'll remind you that we are trained for incidents like this and there's nothing to worry about. I'll talk to you again just before we make our final approach. Thank you.'

I knocked on the door and it opened inwardly. The cockpit was empty. I sat down in the left-hand seat and throttled up the port-side engine to full power. The plane yawed violently to the right. I took hold of the column and pulled as hard as I could, taking the plane into a sudden, twisting climb. The stall warning came on. I got out of the seat and staggered from the cockpit. People were screaming. People were vomiting. I saw a man trying to kill himself by stabbing himself in his own eye with a plastic knife. An insensate flight attendant with a bloodied face was flailing around the cabin ceiling like something without bones.

There was something in the cabin with us. It moved like ink in water, or fleet shadows on hot sand. You couldn't fasten it with your eye. It knew when someone was trying to look at it; it was as if its skin was reactive to light, or maybe it was fashioned in such a way as to disallow the angle of reflected light to meet the planes necessary to hit the retina. It was fascinating to watch, or to almost watch.

There were six children that I could see in this portion of economy. The shadow passed close by one of them and then there were five, without me being able to see exactly what had happened. The child was still there, kind of, but it was sagged into its seat as if it was apeing the bag of its clothes. I was reminded of something my mum used to say to me, if we were unlucky enough to get a tough bunch of chops from the butcher. 'Chew the goodness from the meat,' she'd say. 'Then spit out what's left.'

I thought I caught a fleeting understanding of what the Craw was, but it was chancy, dervish-like, dancing out of reach, much like its physicality.

And then there were four.

I stared down into the blank eye-holes of a child who could barely have been five years old. He was slouched in his seat like a pair of pyjamas that are in danger of losing themselves to the crack in a sofa. Boned. The jelly sucked clean of him.

Chew the goodness out of it.

I opened the passenger door and stared at the horizon as it became the verizon. And the light spilled and bent and warped into and around the fuselage as if it had become liquid. There was a loud crack and a grin appeared in the side of the cabin. A port-side engine sheared away from its cowling and thundered through the empennage, turning it to dust. The jet wailed as if in pain.

I could see the land as it swept south. If I concentrated I thought I could see the gleam of the lighthouse in Southwick, and the sweeping pattern of the pebbles as they were pushed on to the beach from the seichs that sloshed through the shallow pan of water in the North Sea.

Home at last,
I thought. And stepped out of the plane.

'Sir? Wake up, sir. Or you'll have the cleaners hoovering under your feet.'

I snapped awake and, like a child plucked from a nightmare who is filled with fear and suspicion, waiting to see if the person who has rescued him will morph back into the monster, stared at the Australian flight attendant leaning over me. She was young and clear-skinned. Blue eyes and freckles. Short blonde hair. She didn't look right in that swirly silvery blue dress. She ought to be wearing denim short shorts and a halter top. Damp hair and tanning oil, fresh from the beach. I felt old and used and crumpled just looking at her.

The cabin was empty. There was no gaping crack in the fuselage. Through the window I could see Terminal 3 and the control tower. I apologised and stood up, feeling the muscles of my back leap and shiver away from the bonded column of bones, the stiff, unresponsive thing I had become. I politely waved away her offer of help and headed for the exit as the cleaning crew were coming in, encumbered by their equipment. Before I ducked between them, I cast a look back at the cabin, half-expecting to see something dark slide across the ceiling, or the carpet, and hunker in the shadows of the galley, waiting for the influx of new passengers. But I saw only the flight attendant checking the aisles.

I was ushered through passport control - no problems this time - enjoying the beautiful feel of firm ground beneath my feet, but trying to hurry, as if the sky-sized nightmare of what I'd just been through, what I'd just
achieved
, might prove too great for me and, the fear, like a planet, would trap me in its gravity for ever. Two, three, four hundred miles away from this airport could never be enough. Never again, I thought, wiping the sweat off my face. Never.

I caught the tube to Liverpool Street, barely conscious of how I had changed lines to reach it. I bought a ticket for the train heading to Lowestoft and waited on the platform and got on. I thought of Tamara all the way. There might have been other passengers on board. I didn't know. I didn't care.

I got off at Darsham and caught a cab. I fell asleep in the back and then the driver was prodding me and for an awful moment I thought I was back on the 747, being wakened by the flight attendant, and that this final leg of the journey was still ahead of me. But then I was standing on Surt Road and it was cold and the air was congealing around me and smelling of surf and hops and smoked fish and it was as if I had never been away.

And I didn't know what to do. Southwick was a small village, but now I was daunted by every place that Tamara might be. There were sheds and attics and garages and forgotten back rooms and plenty of duct tape.

Eventually I drummed up the courage to sneak along North Parade to see if there was any more activity at Tam's Place, but the mobile police unit was gone, as was the police tape. I might have gone to check on the building itself if it wasn't for the two men sitting in the black car outside. It might not have been plain clothes policemen waiting for my return, but I didn't want to chance it. Not yet. I went back to the bookshop and checked to see if Ruth had left a message for me. Nothing there.

I went to Amy's place and rang the bell for an age but the pale orb of her face did not materialise behind the warped, fractured glass in the front door. I went back to the beach and saw her immediately. She was staring out to sea again. I approached, trying to be quiet on the shingle, but it was impossible. I didn't want to startle her. I didn't want her to whirl around and fix me with those granite eyes of hers, shocked wide, too wide. She didn't turn around. She said something, maybe hello, but it was lost to the wind so I just saw her mouth move. Her hat was askew on her head; I could see the scar reaching down from under the edge like a fat, purple finger stroking the side of her face. She seemed thinner than I remembered, though I'd only seen her a few days previously.

'You all right?' I asked her.

'I'm okay,' she said. 'You?'

'Not so good. I can't find my girlfriend.'

'Where did you last see her?'

I laughed a little at that, despite the situation. She had a nice sense of humour, Amy, although she didn't seem to be aware of it.

'What's been happening?' I asked. I stared back towards the main road and the houses overlooking the beach. I could see the top window of Tam's Place. It was smeared with dirt and rain and the reflection of dark clouds, as if trying to gather as much obscuring material as possible to prevent what went on inside that room from being seen.

'You mean the body they found? In your bed and breakfast?'