Some Things About Flying (19 page)

Tom turns awkwardly, generously, towards her; puts a hand on her face, the other on her arm, constrained by his seatbelt. “Almost there. Nearly safe.” His long fingers are light on her cheek, and the faint brown hairs on the back of his other hand are light also. He is very kind, especially considering his fears at the end of even ordinary flights.

She has been delighted by his hands, and intimately fond of the dustings, wherever they occur on him, of fine hairs. He has strong bones, especially sturdy at the wrists. There have been times she has dug her fingers into his flesh to find his skeleton, feel his structure, determine its soundness.

How arduously he has laboured on occasion to have everything. Everyone.

Do the words “arduous” and “ardour” have a common root?

Pay attention to the plane, suffering and determined, shuddering and trembling, trying so hard. It needs every strength she can give, and she has a great deal, it turns out: no end of passions, desires and hopes. Her enormous, thwarted will, and enormous, thwarted love.

It takes another dip and a swerve, but feels as if it has a better grip on itself. Tom's arm tightens. “Lila, I love you. Okay? If something happens, I love you.” And if it does not?

“I know,” she tells him.

These downward lurches must be bringing them closer and closer to the ground. After all, the ocean may have been a softer, more forgiving destination. People below, are they looking up, wondering? Are their attentions caught by a roaring much too near? Does the grinding make their teeth ache? How about the moans and screams, do they carry in the air, to the earth?

Or it's dark, and raining a bit, and most people have gone indoors for the evening. They're relaxing around fireplaces, television sets, kitchen tables. They've turned up lights, and children are laughing and squabbling, grown-ups are cooking or washing up and chatting over their various days, or quarrelling or gossiping or falling silent. Do they feel a sudden chill? A darkness? An unfamiliar kind of quiet? A shiver they can't put their fingers on?

It's hard to imagine that the rampaging emotions up here aren't leaking out, causing their own kind of lightning and an ominous thundering in the hearts of people passed over.

It would be gone quickly. Then, Lila imagines lights briefly looking brighter, and voices sounding clearer; figures more sharply perceived and more acutely considered. There is a brief, unaccountable moment in which people can see. An arm goes around a shoulder; a child is lifted into the air and embraced; people smile, expressions soften, eyes grow kind.

Or with a sudden pure vision a knife finally enters a belly that is no longer bearable.

“Lila,” Tom says. His eyes look clear of feeling. She touches his hand but with her free hand strokes the armrest: dear plane, brave plane, stay up, do well. It rears and shudders, throwing Tom into her shoulder. “We must be close.”

“I think so.”

There ought to be so much to say.

“Ladies and gentlemen.” The deep voice returns, and on the screen the movie skids to a ragged, quivering halt.

“We are now approaching Heathrow.” There are scattered cheers, but also a further urgent tightening of belly muscles, shoulders, calves, biceps, backs. “Since this is being considered an emergency landing, we have been given priority and assistance. As you know, among our concerns is the damaged wing, which creates a number of difficulties, some of them quite minor.” Some of them evidently major, as well, and by and large undefined.

“As a precaution, we are asking you to assume emergency landing position, which your flight attendants will demonstrate again and help you with. It's important everyone follow all instructions quickly and without discussion.

“When we're on the ground and have come to a halt, you will leave in orderly fashion through the emergency exits, which open automatically into slides to the tarmac. It is essential to proceed calmly.” The big man by the nearest exit is sitting very straight and listening hard.

It's difficult to believe this is happening. Lila shakes her head, but it will not clear.

“Under no circumstances from this point may you leave your seat or undo your seatbelts. Parents must ensure their children are securely fastened and that they also follow all emergency instructions. We regret this has been a difficult flight, and wish to thank you all for your continuing co-operation. We have every confidence of achieving a safe landing within the next few minutes, and the next time you hear my voice, we'll be saying hello in a bright and comfortable airport lounge.”

This is said in such a determinedly cheerful and confident tone, some people break into applause. As if they're already safe; or as if the outcome amounts only to some clever balancing trick. Still, they have done well, to this critical point. Nothing actually brutal has occurred as far as Lila can tell, and it will soon be over.

Now that the moment has come, she misses the waiting. After all, she shouldn't have complained about it; this immediate judgment, fate, event, is surely harder than mere suspension.

She has been wrong about a number of things.

“I feel sick,” Tom moans.

“Take deep breaths. Close your eyes.”

Not quite yet. First they watch Sheila show them once more how to position their bodies: heads down, hands gripping ankles, if possible. Lila wraps her purse strap over her shoulder and around her body, the purse itself tight under her left arm. Women aren't like men, with all their essentials in pockets. Her purse contains money, passport, identification, the essentials of her existence. She hopes other women are taking the same care to preserve the necessities.

The heads-down posture must be quite a strain for the large or unfit. Lila is pleased by her own flexibility.

“That's better,” says Tom. “You okay?”

“Yes. Thanks.” It's hard to talk or even breathe properly, bent double like this, but there must be something to say. Something profound, or summarizing. “I don't regret us, you know,” is what comes out. “I'm entirely grateful.”

“I know. Me too.”

There is still his letter. There is time only for small, sad, upside-down smiles before the plane takes an awful dive, then a terrible leap, and their heads hit the seats in front of them, hard. Lila hears a child, probably Susie, wailing close by.

They are diving steeply and also dancing in the air. When the plane tips to the left, Tom tips into her and she is aware of his shoulder and arm touching her. When he rights himself, she misses him and extends a hand. He reaches out and takes it.

There'll be no warning of ground. She is rigid in anticipation. Tom must be petrified. She can feel the hard bones of his fingers. The skeleton of the plane trembles, its skin bubbles. It's doing its best, and so is she.

Metal is cracking and screeching, the plane's heart is breaking around them. Leaning into soft, long-ago, smooth red velvet, she can only see darkness ahead.

She is flung hard into the air, and the seatbelt grabs at her hips. Her hand flies free of Tom's. The grinding is ear-splitting.

Again she is thrown upward, Tom flying and bouncing beside her, their heads bashing the seatbacks ahead. The plane is shrieking. She could stay bent and blind this way forever, if that's what it takes. Other people's screaming is terrifying, but Lila is silent, beyond jolting breaths. Her body feels as if it's breaking and shaking apart, and it hurts, she hates pain, and here they go, tossed up again. And again, more gently this time.

And again, more gently, and again. Until it stops, and everything is abruptly quiet; perfectly still.

ten

Graceless and flailing, Lila hurtles through a long darkness into high, flaring sunlight.

She hurts, in her heart and her head.

The sudden light stabs. She shakes her head, and bits of knowledge fly upwards, sideways, falling disordered here and there.

The radiance isn't sunshine at all, it's the shocking white lights of a great many cameras. Lenses dance on shoulders straining over barriers all around.

She rolls upright with the help of the outstretched hand of a stranger. Good thing she wore slacks. It must be too late to cover her face, but she tucks her head momentarily anyway into the shoulder of her yellow-rain-slickered rescuer, who folds a grey woolly blanket around her and steers her gently, relentlessly forward.

These colours! His slicker is such a brilliant golden yellow, and so shiny, Lila thinks she can see her own blurred reflection. And those red and white whirling lights—are colours always this vivid, and she's just never noticed?

Looking down, she sees even the tarmac is glittering, pitted by small holes in which black shiny rain gathers.

It ought to be smoother. It doesn't look safe.

The moment must be very noisy, she can see people's mouths open, apparently shouting, and a good deal of running about. Maybe it's the trucks and ambulances that create this rhythmic underbeat, thud-thumping in tune with her heart. Otherwise sound is distant, a kind of buzz and whir, like rain.

It
is
raining. Well, they're in England, what else? The grey woolly blanket is getting colder and damper—why is she wrapped up in it, while her rescuer gets a bright slicker? And why are they walking? Wouldn't you think there'd be vehicles to ride in, wherever they're going? Besides those ambulances, she means, and fire trucks.

She could have hidden in an ambulance if she had managed to break something, like a leg.

It looks as if some people did break parts of themselves. There are stretchers, and here and there the men and women carting them about break into a run. The cameras zoom in on them, which is all to the good.

There will be order and patterns in what is occurring, she just can't discern what they are. After that long period of suspension and waiting, events are now going too fast. Not being able to hear properly makes the confusion hard to unravel, as well.

She must be a mess; everyone else is.

They are caught now, she and Tom, wherever he is, in the glare of this happy outcome.

She doesn't much care, and if she did, it wouldn't make any difference.

What will he do with that precious letter of his; will it do him much good? She giggles and the arm around her loosens, then tightens, as if it is nervous.

She bets the man it belongs to has no idea what fear is.

She, on the other hand, must now be in a whole new category: people who know what fear is and what it can do. Is that something to be proud of?

It's certainly different, anyway. She feels herself grinning, and snuffles merrily into her protector's bright shoulder.

Where the hell are they going, and why is it taking so long? She is so very thirsty; she could drink dark water from puddles, sweat from her companion's skin, ice from wings, blood from a stone. She would kill for a coffee, die for a Scotch.

Well no, hardly that.

Suddenly they're passing through a set of automatic doors into a blast of heat and damp-woolly smells, a huge blank grey high-ceilinged room filling rapidly with vivid rescuers and drab rescuees.

So many faces! Some ring a bell, but from what circumstances, exactly? Moisture rises, making the atmosphere steamy.

The smell of coffee is filtering through the air. Shrugging the heavy blanket back off her shoulders, Lila heads for the source, and the yellow arm falls away, too. There are no cameras here.

She's still grinning, and why not? Why isn't everyone? But uneasy people shift out of her path, as if she's the odd one in a room filling with shivering, stunned survivors.

They, too, should get rid of those awful wet blankets.

Isn't this lovely, isn't it kind—thoughtful people have set up a long table with cookies, and glasses of orange juice in rows, and huge urns of coffee and tea. Just the thing.

Lila smiles at a plump woman behind the table, takes a cold orange juice, downs it in a swallow. “Coffee too, please.” She can at least hear her own voice, and is gratified that it's steady and firm.

It's a bloody great miracle, this hard, durable floor under her feet. Looking around, she sees yellow-slickered figures moving through the growing crowd like fireflies, and survivors emerging from their blankets to reveal jungle-bird splendours.

Her own flattened reflection in the shining, silvery urn is briefly startling. Doesn't she look younger than when she started out, and wouldn't it make better sense if she looked considerably older? She leans forward, peering, and her features flatten further in the percolator's curve. Her hair is godawful, all over the place.

Her hair is brown. That's why she looks younger, she dyed it last night. She'd forgotten. Just last night. Time is as distorted as reflections in curved, shiny surfaces.

The plump coffee woman looks both concerned and benevolent; the kind of person Lila imagines would be a good mother. Lila would not have been a good mother. For one thing, she lacks the sweet, come-to-my-bosom countenance of good mothers, like this woman.

“Thank you,” she says, taking the cup, taking a sip. But it's loaded with sugar, practically syrup, not straight and spine-stiffening the way Lila likes it. “Could I trade this for a black, please?” She offers the cup back. “And is there a bar someplace here? Is there a real drink to be had?”

She can't quite make out the answer, but concentrating on the plump woman's lips, trying to read them, she also can't make out a clear yes or no. The woman is frowning slightly, in a worried, not disapproving, sort of way, and pushes the sugary coffee back, nodding insistently. She has spoken what look like several full sentences before she gestures to someone over Lila's shoulder. Lila supposes she may have one of those accents that are hard to understand anyway, never mind having to lip-read.

Turning, Lila finds a man at her side. He, like the woman, looks earnest and concerned, although lacking her maternal appeal. He's wearing a white jacket, somewhat stained and disordered, and she assumes he's somebody medical. “I can't hear what you're saying,” she tells him loudly, as if he's the deafened one. She keeps smiling widely, though, in what ought to be a reassuring way but apparently is not.

Nobody seems as pleased by events as she is. Of course there are flaws, naturally there are. What pleasure is ever quite pure? But they're here, they're alive, and that's as good as a day like this gets.

It doesn't look as if Tom would agree.

It's a shock to see him coming through the door under the guiding arm of his own slickered protector. Her heart leaps at the sight of him, out of habit, or love.

She didn't exactly forget him, but she did somehow forget she is not entirely solitary here.

He isn't grinning, or even smiling. He looks, in fact, decidedly grim. She should be hurrying towards him, arms open.

She sips her sweet coffee. He is a balding, beautifully boned, slightly pot-bellied man whom she has apparently loved mainly for his energies and appetites. Even morose or disgruntled, he has felt big to her, oversized in his desires, wanting much and daring quite a lot.

Now he looks ordinary. Deflated and fretful. Wild-eyed, of course, but who isn't? One arm of his shirt is ripped, and his trousers, like her own, are grimy. He has a bruise on his forehead, which is purple and bleeding a little, but it doesn't look serious.

He looks very serious.

“I would really, very much, like a Scotch right now,” she tells the white-jacketed man. Through the peculiar din in her head, she makes out a few words: “medical ... wait” and even “forbidden.” Imagine forbidding anything to the people in this room! Surely they are no longer likely to be, if they ever were, people who take no for an answer.

At least she's beginning to catch words here and there. Before she approaches Tom, though, she wants to be able to hear precisely the words he says first, when he sees her alive and uninjured. “Oh my darling, you're safe, nothing else matters, you are the world to me now,” she imagines, and hears herself snort. The medical person looks very concerned and reaches out for her arm.

A day like this does not make them children. Quite the reverse, Lila would say. This fellow, whoever he is, knows nothing at all.

She is dazzled by life, amazed by death, and astonished by what the tiny space in between can contain. Parts of her, and not just parts of her body, feel wrenched into unfamiliar shapes and postures. In time they will probably come to feel natural.

She is blessed with time, thanks to the determined struggles of the plane, now abandoned out in the chilly darkness, terribly wounded. How carelessly she hurried away from it the first chance she had. That's very sad. Only, it was a mad scramble, confused and noisy and desperate, and she simply forgot to feel grateful or tender.

Tom, of course, that good man, behaved well.

He is looking around anxiously, presumably for her. Is it cruel of her to take shelter behind a tall back?

Someone else who behaved well was the big man by the emergency exit. As it turned out, he was a cool and orderly figure who must have saved a number of people, including herself, and possibly Tom.

That moment of silence when the plane trembled to its halt was only that: a moment. Then, terrified people scrambling over seats and each other in the sudden darkness, struggling and pushing, discipline and civility, as she'd suspected, mainly vanished.

Tom, gripping her wrist, shoved his own body forcibly into the aisle past pressing bodies and loud voices, pulling her after him, making space for her firmly in front of him. His eyes were narrow, lips tight. Also as she'd suspected, there was no way to make out the emergency lines beneath all the trampling feet.

A voice from the cockpit was only dimly audible in the uproar. Some people shouted, “Let's keep calm, take care,” but the message wasn't widely heard or heeded.

Tom, behaving well and sternly, as no doubt other quiet, decent people did, released Lila's wrist and pushed her forward, letting Susie and her mother into line between them. Lila heard a man protesting, Susie and her mother crying, and Tom's hardest, coldest tone of voice. She lost track of him then.

He is a good man. A man who does good. She watches him take a coffee from a woman, with a quick, distressed smile that gets nowhere near his eyes.

Her heart goes out to him, but the rest of her is still unwilling. She isn't ready to deal with his despair; although it's possible this day has transformed his heart, as well, and despair may be the farthest thing from his mind.

It would be difficult, from his bleak expression, to imagine so, however.

The plane's emergency exits opened into tunnels, dark flowers blooming downwards. The big man braced himself against the open space. “One at a time,” he commanded. “Go easy, don't push. Efficient and safe, that's what we want.” He had a rumbling, chesty sort of voice which, if it didn't exactly stop people in their tracks, at least held authority.

Where was Sheila? Saving lives, maybe, or dealing with injuries, or overcome. Lila didn't hear anyone question why the big man should take charge, and found she rather wanted, herself, to live up to his demands.

He counted off people with a touch to the shoulder and down they went, into the chute, vanishing into the night. “You there,” he ordered someone pushing behind her, “get back and be quiet. Your turn's coming.” She felt almost docile, nearly safe. She turned briefly, searching for a glimpse of Tom, but then the big man touched her shoulder, said “Go!” and she slipped obediently past him, onto her ass and down.

Where is he now? “I'll come,” he said, “when you've all gone through properly.” As if his restraint guaranteed their survival, and as if his appearance would be a reward for their restraint. Who was he before today, and what was he flying towards? No fleeing wife-killer, after all. Was he surprised by himself, taking charge in a critical turn of events, or is that normal for him?

If it's the kind of decisive, stony man he always is, what sort of day-to-day companion would he be? Rather difficult, perhaps.

Lila once had great, if ill-defined, hopes. She sees, peering towards Tom around shoulders and between bodies, that love has been one great thing; if hardly the only thing.

Who else is here? Who else is okay?

She can't spot Sheila, but perhaps the crew was taken elsewhere. They probably have more difficult hours ahead; obviously there will be investigations.

Susie's mother is sitting cross-legged on the floor, against a wall off to Lila's right. Her face is buried in Susie's neck, with Susie curled into her lap, and they are rocking back and forth together. Now there's relief, and joy, and love.

Jimmy and Mel are obviously fine, too. They stand out even in this brightening crowd, all high handsomeness and striking posture. They're twenty steps and a world away from Lila, narrow bodies folded together, heads tipped into each other's shoulders, swaying as if they hear slow music playing.