The Carrier (2 page)

The young woman next to me is more upset than I am. Not only me; she is more upset than everyone else in the airport put together, and she wants us all to know it. Behind me, people are grumbling and saying, ‘Oh,
no
,’ but no one else is weeping apart from this girl, or shaking with fury. She is able to harangue the Fly4You official and cry copiously at the same time. I’m impressed that she seems not to need to interrupt her diatribe, ever, to gulp incoherently in the way that sobbing people normally do. Also, unlike regular folk, she appears not to know the difference between a travel delay and bereavement.

I don’t feel sorry for her. I might if her reaction were less extreme. I feel sorriest for people who insist they are absolutely fine, even while their organs are being consumed at great speed by a flesh-eating bug. This probably says something bad about me.

I am not upset at all. If I don’t get home tonight, I’ll get there tomorrow. That will be soon enough.

‘Answer my question!’ the girl yells at the poor mild-mannered German man who has the misfortune to be posted at boarding gate B56. ‘Where’s the plane
now
? Is it still here? Is it down there?’ She points to the concertina-walled temporary air-bridge that opens behind him, the one that, five minutes ago, we were all hoping to walk along and find our plane at the end of. ‘It’s down there, isn’t it?’ she demands. Her face is unlined, blemish-free and weirdly flat; a vicious rag doll. She looks about eighteen, if that. ‘Listen,
mate
, there’s hundreds of us and only one of you. We could push past you and all get on the plane, a load of angry Brits, and refuse to get off till someone flies us home! I wouldn’t mess with a load of angry Brits if I were you!’ She pulls off her black leather jacket as if preparing for a physical fight. The word ‘FATHER’ is tattooed on her right upper arm in large capital letters, blue ink. She’s wearing tight black jeans, a bullet belt, and lots of straps on her shoulders from a white bra, a pink camisole and a red sleeveless top.

‘The plane is being rerouted to Cologne,’ the German Fly4You man tells her patiently, for the third time. A name badge is pinned to his maroon uniform: Bodo Neudorf. I would find it hard to speak harshly to anyone named Bodo, though I wouldn’t expect others to share this particular scruple. ‘The weather is too dangerous,’ he says. ‘There is nothing that I can do. I am sorry.’ A reason-based appeal. In his shoes, I’d probably try the same tactic – not because it will work, but because if you possess rationality and are in the habit of using it regularly, you’re probably something of a fan and likely to over-value its potential usefulness, even when dealing with somebody who finds it more helpful to accuse innocent people of hiding aeroplanes from her.

‘You keep saying it’s
being
rerouted! That means you haven’t sent it anywhere yet, right?’ She wipes her wet cheeks – an action violent enough to be mistaken for hitting herself in the face – and whirls round to address the crowd behind us. ‘He hasn’t sent it away at all,’ she says, the vibration of her outraged voice winning the sound war at boarding gate B56, drowning out the constant electronic pinging noises that announce the imminent announcements of the openings of gates for other flights, ones more fortunate than ours. ‘How can he have sent it away? Five minutes ago we were all sitting here ready to board. You can’t send a plane off to anywhere that quickly! I say we don’t let him send it away. We’re here, the plane
must
be here, and we all want to go home. We don’t care about the sodding weather! Who’s up for it?’

I’d like to turn round and see if everybody’s finding her one-woman show as embarrassingly compulsive as I am, but I don’t want our fellow non-passengers to imagine that she and I are together simply because we’re standing side by side. Better to make it obvious that she’s nothing to do with me. I smile encouragingly at Bodo Neudorf. He replies with a curtailed smile of his own, as if to say, ‘I appreciate the gesture of support, but you would be foolish to imagine that anything you might do could compensate for the presence of the monstrosity beside you.’

Fortunately, Bodo doesn’t seem unduly alarmed by her threats. He has probably noticed that many of the people booked onto Flight 1221 are extremely well-behaved choirgirls between the approximate ages of eight and twelve, still wearing their chorister cassocks after their concert in Dortmund earlier today. I know this because their choirmaster and the five or six parent chaperones were reminiscing proudly, while we waited to board, about how well the girls sang something called ‘Angeli Archangeli’. They didn’t sound like the sort of people who would be quick to knock a German airport employee to the ground in a mass stampede, or insist on exposing their talented offspring to dangerous storm conditions for the sake of getting home when they expected to.

Bodo picks up a small black device that is attached to the departure gate desk by a length of coiled black wire, and speaks into it, having first pressed the button that makes the pinging noise that must precede all airport speech. ‘This is an announcement for all passengers for Flight 1221 to Combingham, England. That is Fly4You Flight 1221 to Combingham, England. Your plane is being rerouted to Cologne airport and will depart from there. Please proceed to the baggage reclaim area to collect your bags, and then go to wait outside the airport, immediately outside the Departures Hall. We are trying to make the arrangement that coaches will collect you and take you to Cologne airport. Please make your way to the collection point outside the Departures Hall as soon as possible.’

To my right, a smartly dressed woman with postbox-red hair and an American accent says, ‘We don’t need to hurry, people. These are hypothetical coaches: the slowest kind.’

‘How long on the coach from here to Cologne?’ a man calls out.

‘I have no details yet about the timetable of the coaches,’ Bodo Neudorf announces. His voice is lost in the spreading ripple of groans.

I’m glad I can miss out on the visit to Baggage Reclaim. The thought of everyone else traipsing down there to pick up the luggage they waited in a shuffling, zig-zagging, rope-corralled queue to check in not much more than an hour ago makes me feel exhausted. It’s 8 p.m. I was supposed to be landing in Combingham at 8.30 English time, and going home for a long soak in a hot bubble bath with a chilled glass of Muscat. I woke up at five this morning to catch the 0700 from Combingham to Dusseldorf. I’m not a morning person, and resent any day that requires me to wake up earlier than 7 a.m.; this one has already gone on too long.

‘Oh, this is a fucking joke!’ Psycho Rag Doll pipes up. ‘You have got to be shitting me!’ If Bodo imagined that by amplifying his voice and projecting it electronically he could intimidate his nemesis into silent obedience, he was mistaken. ‘I’m not going to collect any suitcases!’

A thin bald man in a grey suit steps forward and says, ‘In that case, you’re likely to arrive home without your bag. And everything in it.’ Inwardly, I cheer; Flight 1221 has its first quiet hero. He has a newspaper tucked under his arm. He grips its corner with his other hand, expecting retaliation.

‘Keep out of it, you!’ Rag Doll yells in his face. ‘Look at you: thinking you’re better than me! I haven’t even got a suitcase – that’s how much you know!’ She turns her attention back to Bodo. ‘What, so you’re going to unload everyone’s cases off the plane? How does that make sense? You tell me how that makes sense. That’s just . . . I’m sorry for swearing, but that’s just fucking plain stupid!’

‘Or,’ I find myself saying to her, because I can’t let the bald hero stand alone and no one else seems to be rushing to his aid, ‘you’re the one who’s stupid. If you haven’t checked in a bag, then of course you’re not going to collect any suitcases. Why would you?’

She stares at me. Tears are still pouring down her face.

‘Also, if the plane was here now and could safely fly to Cologne airport, we could fly there
on
it, couldn’t we?’ I say. ‘Or even fly home, which is what we’d all ideally like to do.’
Shit.
Why did I open my mouth? It’s not my job, or even Bodo Neudorf’s, to correct her flawed thinking. The bald man has wandered away with his newspaper and left me to it.
Ungrateful git.
‘Because of the weather, our plane can’t fly
into
Dusseldorf,’ I continue with my mission to spread peace and understanding. ‘It’s never been here, it isn’t here now, and your suitcase, if you had one, wouldn’t be on it, and wouldn’t need to be taken off it. The plane is somewhere in the sky.’ I point upwards. ‘It was heading for Dusseldorf, and now it’s changed course and is heading for Cologne.’

‘No-o,’ she says unsteadily, looking me up and down with a kind of shocked disgust, as if she’s horrified to find herself having to address me. ‘That’s not right. We were all sitting there.’ She waves an arm towards the curved orange plastic seats on their rows of black metal stalks. ‘It said to go to the gate. It only says that when the plane’s there ready for boarding.’

‘Normally that’s true, but not tonight,’ I tell her briskly. I can almost see the cogs going round behind her eyes as her mental machinery struggles to connect one thought to another. ‘When they told us to go to the gate, they still hoped the plane would be able to make it to Dusseldorf. Shortly after we all pitched up here, they realised that wouldn’t be possible.’ I glance at Bodo Neudorf, who half nods, half shrugs. Is he deferring to me? That’s insane. He’s supposed to know more about Fly4You’s behind-the-scenes operations than I do.

Angry Weeping Girl averts her eyes and shakes her head. I can hear her silent scorn:
Believe that if you want to.
Bodo is speaking into a walkie-talkie in German. Choirgirls nearby start to ask if they’ll get home tonight. Their parents tell them they don’t know. Three men in football shirts are discussing how much beer they might be able to drink between now and whenever we fly, speculating about whether Fly4You will settle the bar tab.

A worried grey-haired woman in her late fifties or early sixties tells her husband that she only has ten euros left. ‘What? Why?’ he says impatiently. ‘That’s not enough.’

‘Well, I didn’t think we’d need any more.’ She flaps around him, accepting responsibility, hoping for mercy.

‘You didn’t
think
?’ he demands angrily. ‘What about emergencies?’

I’ve used up all my interventional capacity, otherwise I might ask him if he’s ever heard of a cashpoint, and what he was planning to do if his wife spontaneously combusted and all the currency in her handbag went up in smoke.
What about that emergency, Bully-breath?
Is your wife actually thirty-five, and does she only look sixty because she’s wasted the best years of her life on you?

There’s nothing like an airport for making you lose faith in humanity. I walk away from the crowd, past a row of unmanned boarding gates, in no particular direction. I am sick of the sight of every single one of my fellow travellers, even the ones whose faces I haven’t noticed. Yes, even the nice choirgirls. I’m not looking forward to seeing any of them again – in the helpless, hopeful gaggle we will form outside the Departures Hall, where we will stand for hours in the rain and wind; across the aisle of the coach; slumped half asleep at various bars around Cologne airport.

On the other hand. It’s a delayed plane, not a bereavement. I fly a lot. This sort of thing happens all the time. I’ve heard the words ‘We are sorry to announce . . .’ as often as I’ve seen the flecked grey heavy-duty linoleum flooring at Combingham airport, with its flecked blue border at every edge, for contrast. I’ve stood beneath information screens and watched minor delays metastasise into cancellations as often as I’ve seen the small parallel lines that form the borderless squares that in turn make-up the pattern on a million sets of silver aeroplane steps; once I dreamed that the walls and ceiling of my bedroom were covered with textured aluminium tread.

The worst thing about a delay, always, is ringing Sean and telling him that, yet again, I’m not going to be back when I said I would be. It’s a call I can’t face making. Although . . . in this instance, it might not be so bad. I might be able to make it not so bad.

I smile to myself as the idea blooms in my mind. Then I reach into my handbag – not looking, still walking – and close my hand around a rectangular plastic-wrapped box: the pregnancy test I’ve been carrying with me for the past ten days and never quite finding the right moment to do.

I often worry about my tendency to procrastinate, though I’m obviously putting off tackling the problem. I’ve never been like this about anything work-related, and I’m still not, but if it’s something personal and important, I’ll do my best to postpone it indefinitely. This could be why I don’t weep in airports when my flights don’t depart on time; delay is my natural rhythm.

Part of me is still not ready to face the test, though with every day that passes, the whole rigmarole of weeing on a plastic wand and awaiting its verdict starts to seem more and more pointless. I am so obviously pregnant. There’s a weirdly sensitive patch of skin on the top of my head that never used to be there, and I’m more tired than I’ve ever been.

I glance at my watch, wondering if I’ve got time to do this, then tut at my own gullibility. The American woman was right. There are no physical real-life coaches on their way to rescue us. God knows when there will be. Bodo didn’t have a clue what was going on; he fooled us all into assuming he was on top of the arrangements by being German. Which means I’ve got at least fifteen minutes to do the test and phone Sean while the rest of them are retrieving their luggage. Luckily, Sean is easily distracted, like a kid. When I tell him I won’t be back tonight, he’ll gear up to start complaining. When I tell him the pregnancy test was positive, he’ll be so delighted that he won’t care when I get back.

I stop at the nearest ladies’ toilet and force myself to go in, repeating silent reassurances in my head:
This isn’t scary. You already know the result. Seeing a small blue cross will change nothing.