Landing Gear (3 page)

At Dukes, the bandstand was already occupied by a bunch of kids from another school, older and rougher looking, so they stayed well clear and moved over to the common instead. They opened the cans of beer and shared them round. Jack still wasn’t sure about the taste, but at least he’d managed to move on from the massive involuntary shudders that used to overtake him whenever one of his parents offered him a sip. He liked the way the alcohol made him feel, how after a few glugs the band that was wound tight around his guts loosened a little, and the fear he had of saying or doing something wrong in front of his friends began to ease.

Today Ruby was sitting next to him and he was conscious of her leg touching his, but he could see that her other leg was touching Frank’s. After they’d been there for a while and drunk the beer and discussed how much they hated their teachers and what a total plonker Mr. Evans was, and how Miss Gerhart showed too much crepey cleavage—“Her skin, man,” said Frank, his face screwed tight with distaste, “it’s like cowhide.”

“Eww,” said everyone else. Jack pressed his back against the log he was leaning on, and looked up at the sky. That’s when he realized.

“No planes,” he said.

“What—,” Frank started with what Jack could hear was sarcasm, but he held up his hand and his gesture actually worked. Frank stopped speaking.

“Listen,” said Jack, and he pointed upward. “No planes.”

And they all looked up and they all remained silent, and for a moment Jack thought that, together, they’d seen God, but of course it was only the monumental shock of noticing the blue silent sky. Sometimes at Dukes the planes seemed so low that Jack felt that if he jumped high enough or stood on Frank’s shoulders, he could reach up and brush his fingers along a plane’s silvery undercarriage. But today the sky was empty.

“Freaky,” said Frank after a while, and a collective shudder passed through them.

“A volcano,” said Ruby.

“What?” asked Frank.

“A volcano in Iceland.”

“This is what it will be like when we run out of oil,” said Jack.

“He’s seen the future, man,” said Frank, “and it’s bleak.”

Ruby stood up as though she’d suddenly remembered she needed to leave. Jack began to stand as well but she pushed him back down, saying, “Wait, I’ve got something to show you.” She ran out onto the damp grass and did a cartwheel.

Frank shouted, “The midget performs for us!”

They laughed, Ruby as well. It was true she was tiny, she hadn’t grown at all over the past two, nearly three years, since they started secondary school, whereas Jack was
growing so rapidly his friends claimed they could see him sprouting. Frank said he was doing a photography project, taking a picture of Jack every day and then running them together to create one of those YouTube time-lapse videos so that everyone in the world could see what a freak Jack was.

Ruby stood on the grass in front of them and shouted “Oi!” They stopped talking and looked at her obediently.

The silent sky brought with it a sense of occasion. Ruby sat down cross-legged. She jammed her hand in the pocket of her jacket and pulled out a sandwich bag full of marijuana.

At least, that’s what Jack guessed it was, given that he had never seen a bag of marijuana before in real life. He corrected himself: “draw,” that was what you were supposed to call it. Draw. She held it over her head and waggled it back and forth. “A gift from my big brother. A taster. For free.”

For once, no one knew what to say.

“His evil plan,” she added, “is to get you all hooked so that you become his devoted customers forever more.”

Pause. Then Frank spoke up. “Does he offer some kind of loyalty scheme?”

Moments later, as Jack inhaled for the first time through a taut mix of fear, desire and curiosity, he thought, am I doing this because there are no planes? Or would I be doing this anyway?

5

Work was frantic, everyone bursting with this weird news story, watching the satellite images as the ash cloud morphed, getting bigger and bigger, stretching south and east, covering more and more of Europe. Several reporters and presenters were away because of the school holiday, and with most European airspace shut, anyone abroad would now have difficulty returning home. With a jolt, Harriet realized that this presented her with an opportunity, a way to act on her desire, long dormant but still present: to get back into reporting after her years and years of continuity announcements, program links and news reading. In her current job she did a bit of everything—writing the news, reading it, editing together packages—that was how local radio worked. But here was a chance to get back out there in the field once again, away from the studio.

Everyone was startled by the absence of planes over London that morning. Five airports serviced the city, including, to the north, Luton, to the east, Stansted and London City, and in the south, Gatwick. At Heathrow the planes land and take off every forty-five seconds, from five in the morning until midnight, and no one who lived in West London failed to be anything other than amazed by the effect of the planes stopping. Richmond, where Harriet
lived, was right there, just a few kilometres from the airport, right under the flight path.

Harriet was not good at recognizing professional opportunities when they came her way. She never noticed the door opening until after it had shut again. It began to happen when she was young and starting out in her career, and it happened when she returned to work after Jack was born; her chance departed before she noticed it had arrived. She had never intended to stay at the local radio news desk for all this time, but she had. And today the opportunity was right there in front of her. Harriet had done her research. This was
the
local story, and the station did not have enough reporters to cover it.

She grabbed her producer by the sleeve as he walked past her desk. Even that was a complete departure. “Let me do a story,” she said. Steve looked down at her, almost wriggling with impatience.

He didn’t speak, but she could see he was considering it.

“I’ll go out west, toward Heathrow, right under the flight path. Onto the streets. Record the silence. Talk to people. See what they think.”

Steve straightened his sleeve where she had rumpled it. “Take Barney,” he said. “Just this once.”

Barney was a sound engineer who, like Harriet, had got stuck in the studio, in his case behind the sound desk. He had a disabled wife at home, so he worked short days and had curtailed his ambitions in the same way that Harriet had curtailed her own after she had Jack. For
Barney this had worked out rather well, as the new technologies had eliminated the need for much of what in the past had been necessary for sound recording. He’d kept his radio job, while a lot of his old friends had had to retrain.

They made a plan: after the lunchtime news, they’d go out. They cackled together in the newsroom, full of glee at the prospect of escape. Harriet noticed the younger staff watching, and saw herself and Barney from their point of view: middle-aged, wild-eyed, slightly deranged. Pah, she thought, who cares?

The conversation with Barney left Harriet wound up, so she went into the loo to calm down. She had a good voice for radio, warm, sisterly, calm, confiding. She could announce that one hundred people had died in a bomb explosion, or thousands had died in floods, in exactly the right tone, at exactly the right pace. But she had started out in TV and now, she told herself, she was ready to return to TV. She stood in front of the mirror and looked at herself. Despite working in radio, she always tried to look professional, unlike her colleagues who wore their jeans and nubbly fleeces, old stretched cardigans and faded hoodies, whether they were in front of the microphone or not. Today she wore a smart jacket, nipped in at the waist, flaring around the hips, over a summery dress, heels. A chunky necklace, discreet but sparkly earrings, a cocktail ring. She hauled her makeup out of her handbag and touched up her foundation and her under-eye concealer. She layered on the bronzer. Gave her straight hair a brush. “I’m glad I didn’t
cut it,” she said to the mirror. She felt a moment of pride at her appearance, but then … “Too old,” she said. “I’m too fucking old.” She applied her lipstick very carefully, to prevent it from seeping up into the cracks around her lips. “It’s radio, Harriet. Local radio.”

6

In Dubai, the building company that Yacub worked for went bust.

When he first arrived, he’d been shocked to discover that the labour camp’s terms and conditions, to which he’d agreed in the recruiting office in Karachi, were meaningless. Not only was the salary lower than he’d been promised—instead of three thousand dirhams a month, he was paid seven hundred—but the workers’ accommodation was not provided for free, and he was required to pay for his rent and food, leaving him with around two hundred dirhams a month. At that rate, it would take him years to earn back the fee he’d paid the recruiter in Karachi. The work was tough, mostly unskilled, loading and unloading materials, but Yacub worked hard, and gained his foreman’s trust, and after three months, his wage was raised to a thousand dirhams, with a promise of more to come. The story in the camp was that there had been an inspection, and the American company that was going to occupy the office building once it was finished was not happy about the workers’ conditions.

“You were right, Yacub,” said his boss. Imran was a Pakistani too, a fellow Swati, as tall and fair skinned as Yacub was small and dark. He loved his mother and
“football, not cricket,” as he was fond of stating, “Manchester United.” Imran hated the UAE, “a country,” he said, “that will rape you and then ask you to pay for it,” even though he was one of the people making money, one of the people making those beneath him pay for it. He was seated at the temporary office he set up in the camp courtyard on payday every month—a desk, a folding chair, a large sun umbrella, a cooler full of ice and cans of Diet Coke that he dispensed to the men he favoured. “Terms and conditions, my son,” he said, speaking their native Pashtun instead of Urdu, “it’s all about terms and conditions.”

Five months later, the company had gone bust, and Imran disappeared, along with his temporary office.

“So,” Yacub’s friend, Farhan, said, the first morning they stood in an impatient crowd waiting at the camp bus stop for a bus that, as the sun came up and the heat of the day rose, was clearly not coming, “the rumours are true.”

Farhan was a boy from Lahore who’d abandoned a half-finished degree in dentistry when his father died. Despite his nearly middle-class origins, Farhan had thought it would be lucrative to spend a year working as a labourer in Dubai, sending money home to his widowed mother, but once there, he found himself as trapped as the lowliest Lahori streetsweeper. His partial degree meant he was able to practise rudimentary dentistry in the camp on his day off. However, he made little money this way, because his fellow labourers had little money with which to pay him. “But still,” he’d say to Yacub, “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a hundred dirhams. Better than nothing.”

“What are the rumours?” Yacub asked, keeping his voice low. Despite sharing a room with seven men who took every opportunity to exchange unfounded reports and outrageous gossip, Yacub was never in the loop, unable to pick out the real story from the broiling stream of misinformation that passed through the camp every evening.

“That’s it,” Farhan said.

“What do you mean?”

“We’re bust. Shut down. The company has pulled out. And left all of us to rot.”

Yacub stared down the road. Identical three-storey blocks of the labour camp stretched as far as he could see. Ordinarily he’d have to pull a chaddar across his face to prevent the dust raised by the traffic from choking him. This morning there was no traffic. No dust either. Just the great crowd of mostly silent, waiting men.

“Have you got enough money for the airfare home?” Farhan asked.

Yacub felt his stomach turn over. He shook his head.

“Stupid question,” said Farhan. “Me neither.”

After they’d contemplated the empty road for a little longer, Farhan spoke up once again. “He has a sideline in girls.”

“Who?”

“Imran.”

“Girls?” Yacub frowned. One of the astonishing features of life in Dubai was the complete absence of women. Yacub could not recall the last time he’d spoken to a woman. He’d seen them, in cars that ran alongside the
transit bus as it took him from the camp to the building site and in the distance near the big hotels where the road ran along the beach. But that was it.

At that moment, when Farhan said the word “girls,” Yacub felt a homesickness for his sister, Raheela, that was so deep it was almost crippling. He blinked and tried not to think about her, about the journey they had made to Karachi after their father, then their mother had died. Now, he had come to Dubai in order to earn money to send home to her. Raheela remained in Karachi, in a domestic job in a good household; she sent him cheerful postcards covered with her tiny, careful handwriting. He wanted her to go to college, but she was becoming increasingly devout; the last time he saw her, she had covered herself entirely, even when they were alone.

“Our lovely Pakistani sisters and aunties work for Imran,” Farhan continued. “The lighter-skinned, the better. Gulf girls are worth the most, of course, and Chinese girls the least, but our sisters do all right.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Imran told me. If you would ever do as I ask and sit up late with us, you’d have figured out that what he’s been drinking from that flask all day is whiskey. And when he’s drunk, he likes to chat. I’ve learned many things this way.”

“What do the girls do here?” As soon as he’d said it, Yacub wished he could unsay it.

Farhan looked at him. “They don’t have to pay the recruitment fees. They just turn up, apparently. And
they
are the ones who are making real money here in Dubai. Well, them and Imran.”

“Oh,” said Yacub. He felt a bit sick.

“Anyway, Imran was always saying that it turned out his night job was much more lucrative than his day job. So that’s what he’s doing, I reckon.”