Some Things About Flying (8 page)

Oops. “Lila!” Tom is frowning. Did she laugh out loud again?

Sheila has stopped waving her arms and appears to be listening herself. How young she is, at least compared with Lila, if not, say, with Susie. Lila ought to feel grateful to have had so much more time.

Sheila must be pretty brave to stand on that seat, surveying the passengers, probably trying to gauge where trouble may erupt, who is most upset, and in what ways, and how they may have to be dealt with. Trying to look calm and strong herself; although she must also be assessing her own chances, wishing for lost joys, mourning lost years.

Maybe this morning, she was pulling herself slowly from the arms of a suitably young, ardent man, and dressing quietly in the dark, sorry to leave him, trying not to wake him, already missing him.

Or maybe she leapt up happily from her solitary sheets, turning on lights and the radio, dressing quickly, buttoning her blouse and drawing on her stockings, tying that vivid red scarf around her throat with eager fingers, anticipating love in another country at the end of this day.

Or there's Susie, just a little kid, with breasts and pleasures and choices and disasters and passions and pains and regrets all ahead of her. “My ears hurt,” she cries from the sanctuary of her mother's arms. “My head hurts. Make it stop.” How touching, that sort of faith.

Again, Susie is speaking for everyone, and again, Lila thinks it might be better for some things not to be put right out into the air like that.

It's true there's a drumming, and a kind of heavy sharpness. She sees a few people shaking their heads as if trying to dislodge an irritant, others poking fingers into their ears. Some are yawning, which usually works when pressures are changing. This feeling, whatever it is, isn't actually painful, despite Susie's complaints, but it does seem to create a sort of buzzing. Tom is also frowning and shaking his head. What's on his mind? Their thoughts, his and Lila's, are almost certain to be different in these circumstances.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the deep, dark voice is saying again. It must be nice, Lila thinks, to have so many people hanging on every word. Certainly different from standing in front of a classroom. Of course, this man has a captive audience. Nobody's likely to get bored and wander off.

This time, Tom pokes her. He is really getting annoying. It's her turn to frown. Any relationship is much more than love. It also, if it has any life to it, involves delicate balancings, little tugs and pulls of power, shiftings of position. Briefly, she glares at him, because in love, it's more than love that people need to be alert to.

Still, this is no time to fall out of touch. “Listen,” she says, and grips his hand hard.

five

The voice fills the air of the cabin. Or sucks it out. “What we are dealing with, as most of you are already aware, involves one of our engines.”

Engines? Lila almost turns to look again: it seemed to her the trouble was the fire on the wing. But then, engines are probably attached to wings, so any problems with one will be shared, willy-nilly, with the other. Like herself and Tom: a disagreement with his wife, or for that matter a moment of tenderness, naturally slips into Lila's existence in some unspoken, barely discernible fashion. Or a truculent student, a difficult paper, an evening or weekend of missing him, naturally ripples out of her, tipping into him.

And unlike her and Tom (actually more like Tom and his wife), parts of planes are bolted and welded together. So of course they affect each other, how stupid of her.

“What some of you have been able to see is a very small amount of fire”—does fire come in amounts?—“and there are several connected issues relating to stability and pressure. Your crew wants to reassure you that these circumstances may appear more serious than they are.” May, implying, just as easily, may not. “The important thing at the moment is to remain calm.”

Not necessarily. Calm is good, but keeping the plane in the air until it can land safely and peacefully where it's supposed to would be infinitely preferable; which doesn't mean bedlam isn't also dangerous.

“As those of you familiar with this type of aircraft will know,” and this does not include Lila, who has no idea what sort of plane they're flying in, except it's big and, she hopes, sturdy, “we have four engines, which means we have flexibility in dealing with that aspect of our current difficulty. So that a problem with one, while unusual and unfortunate, would not be a unique occurrence.”

Really? Lila bets it's a unique occurrence to everyone in this cabin, and likely unique to those in the cockpit, as well, unless they've had exceptionally unlucky careers. Some people (her mother was one) find comfort in the notion that at least others are enduring similar, or worse, misfortunes. Lila, on the other hand, considers “I'm not the only one” an odd proposition. It's no help to her if Tom, or Susie and her mother, or the big guy by the emergency exit, go down with her, and her own destination hardly improves theirs. How on earth would it?

“As to the fire itself, we are confident the aircraft's normal design and safety features will deal with that.” And what, exactly, does “deal with” mean? This whole speech strikes Lila as ominously padded and fluffy, with too many vague, rolling words and too few crisp-edged, clear ones. She would personally prefer to hear words like “extinguish” or “douse” or simply “put out.”

“We also want to assure you that your flight crew is highly experienced and dedicated to the safety of each one of you. Your captain, Luke Thomas, who spoke to you earlier, has been a pilot for eighteen years, and has asked me to advise you that he has every confidence in achieving a safe conclusion to this flight.”

Luke Thomas—now there's a solid name, a name to be trusted and reckoned with, a name with hair on its chest, and maybe even its back. Pity about his voice. Lila wonders, do his skills more resemble his name or his voice?

“As well, we are in communication with advisers at our departure location and also with those at several potential destinations, and we are continuing to evaluate a number of alternatives. You will be told of any decisions that affect you, for instance if a different landing location, such as Reykjavik in Iceland, is determined to be preferable to Heathrow.” Small subsidiary sounds of discontent rise up among the listeners; the thought of Iceland as distressing as the ocean? Surely not.

“Meanwhile, rest assured everything possible is being done.” Lila hears mournful medical tones trying to cushion bad news: “We're doing everything possible,” a sentence, in her small experience, of virtually certain doom.

That small experience came during three brief, endless days between the morning her brother's child was hit by a car and the late afternoon he died—doctors and nurses repeating and repeating those words, necessary but unbearable to hear.

Unbearable, also, watching over the tiny blond three-year-old who had been lively and glinting but now was abruptly broken and wired, tubed and wrecked. Lila, leaning over him, recalled with regret her irritation at his loud, high voice and his recklessness with delicate objects. His gravest recklessness, it now turned out, was with himself.

Poor helpless Sam, gazing up, wondering why the people he trusted didn't just fix him; as Susie, wrapped whimpering in her mother's arms, may be wondering much the same thing.

No one could fix anything. Don and his wife, Alice, couldn't fix themselves or each other, both blaming Alice, although more or less silently, for their darting child's impulse to dodge between parked cars into the street. The horrified, trembling driver of the car that hit him said, and the police agreed, that there was nothing that could have been done.

The only thing that could have been done was to keep him safer, hold him closer, not let the eye wander for even an instant, and this his mother had failed to do. Naturally his mother. Lila thought it could as easily have been his father, Don, her brother, except he was at work and free of keeping an eye, keeping near.

Lila loves her brother, although she doesn't always entirely like him, and imagines he feels similarly about her. She liked Alice well enough, a nice woman of modest, ruined hopes. She had struck Lila before this event as wispy and undefined, but her suffering turned out to be not wispy at all. It was loud and terrible and could not be helped, her grief rolling far beyond words into raw, howling purity. Don just rocked, arms clutching only himself.

If Lila could hardly contain herself and her helplessness to repair or undo, it must have been immeasurably worse for Alice and Don. Each of them. They remained separate in the aftermath, too, Alice with her splayed anguish, Don with his pale, silent mourning and evident blame.

In the long hospital hours, Alice and Don waited, waited, refusing to change clothes, or to eat, or to rest; whereas to Lila it seemed urgent to go home and then reappear showered and clean, in sharply ironed outfits, as if order of even that ordinary sort could restore order in the rest of their disrupted universe.

Everything was vivid beyond endurance; nothing could be muted, dimmed, turned down. The moment Lila stepped off the elevator at Sam's hospital floor, piercing smells cut at her nostrils, and high, remote lights began assaulting her eyes. The crispness of starched uniforms on nurses hurrying through corridors came to her ears as rasping, maddening static.

The words she mainly remembers are: “We're doing everything we can,” and “Everything possible is being done.”

“These awful things happen,” people said. “Tragic, just a terrible, tragic accident.” All true words. Obviously there are limits to what true words can repair.

Like Don, Lila was furious with grief; but while his rage was mainly at Alice, Lila's was at unfairness, the betrayal of assumptions and hopes, and at sorrow itself: Don's, Alice's and, most profoundly, Sam's.

Lila hasn't seen Alice since the divorce twelve years ago. She often sees Don and his second wife, Anne, and their three children, two daughters and a little boy. They are lovely kids, friendly as puppies. Lila is a more patient and attentive aunt than she used to be, as Don is a more patient and attentive father.

Robbie's four now, so has already outlived Sam. There's no forgetting, but life does go on, reconfiguring itself, patching over even the worst leaks and gaps that occur.

As it would go on without Lila, no question.

Who would miss her?

Tom, she hopes, would top the mourning list, if he weren't right here beside her. Otherwise, mainly, Patsy and Nell, sturdy comrades of years of laughter, achievements, sorrows, misunderstandings, secrets, and gallons of chocolate, oceans of wine.

Tears come to her own eyes, preparing to miss them.

But that's stupid. If she dies, she'll be gone and won't miss a thing. She hopes they'd miss her, though. And she'd have gone in such a spectacular way, there'd be that to remember as well. She would be an actual story, a character in a lively, public event, not merely a fond, personal memory.

Poor Tom, he must be considering entirely different family matters.

“At the same time,” the voice is continuing, “since we should be prepared for all eventualities, our flight attendants will shortly be repeating and augmenting their earlier safety instructions and pointing out emergency precautions and equipment. They would be grateful for your complete attention.” No problem this time, Lila bets. Everyone will be riveted, and no one will consider the attendants' gestures outlandish.

“Again, let me assure you we have full confidence in landing safely, and ask that everyone continue to act in a calm and responsible fashion. There is nothing to be gained by becoming overly concerned about difficulties that will almost certainly be resolved.”

He sounds to Lila like a man hedging his bets, that “almost” a dead giveaway.

So to speak. But she mustn't laugh.

Tom's hand is no longer exactly holding hers, it's just kind of lying there, limp. Sometimes, on those rare occasions they've been able to sleep together overnight, she has wakened with a feeling of being smothered, controlled by an arm or a leg slung heavily across her, and has needed frantically, carefully, to ease herself free.

Perhaps instead, she should have cultivated the ability to endure being pinned.

“Please stay in your seats and ensure your seatbelts are fastened. After their safety demonstration, your flight attendants will be offering soft drinks, coffee and tea, compliments of the airline. They will not be serving further alcoholic beverages, as we're sure you will understand. The attendants will also endeavour to answer any questions you may have, but they may not be fully able to do so. The aircraft is complex and so, of course, are some of the measures being taken to ensure our safe arrival.”

Good to know there are measures, however complex. Lila would surely be stumped if she had to figure out how to put out a blaze on the wing of an airplane, not to mention deal with whatever problems the fire is a symptom of, but if there are ways to do so, it's excellent somebody knows them.

Perhaps there's a manual. Maybe in the cockpit, crew members are thumbing through frantically in search of the page that gives them the particular answer to this particular disaster.

“Eject,” it might say. “Give up and get out.”

The big man by the emergency exit is sitting up taller, filling the space even more than before and turning this way and that to survey what's around him. He looks like a man who intends to look after himself. Lila has seen that kind of expression before on the faces of men: closed in, removed, hard.

Lila is not bad herself at being imposing when that's called for; it's not solely a matter of size. There's no way of knowing how useful that's likely to be, but at least it's a skill. In fact she has plenty of talents; only, some of her most prized ones aren't necessarily the ones that will come in most handy today.

She would say she is adaptable, fairly affectionate and a swift, cool analyst of some matters. She is pretty good at both hope and forgetfulness, which so often rely on each other. She is no use whatever at concrete skills like wiring or carpentry. She has read largely and widely, but can't, off the top of her head, recall any literature that would very usefully apply to the moment.

If it's not too much trouble, she tries to be nice. She also has an aptitude for ruthlessness when it has seemed to her to be required. And on and on. There is simply no way to tell what characteristics are useful today, and which may do harm to the cause of survival.

“Anyone with special concerns, such as a medical problem, should alert a flight attendant. Your crew will update you on our progress as developments occur. Thank you for your attention.” Abruptly there's a click, and the deep, assured voice is gone. Lila feels a tick in her heart of something like grief for its loss. Others may feel this, as well. People turn to each other, and there are renewed sounds of panic.

This is the kind of event that must elicit extremes. Whatever is at the very core and root of each human here will be called out, and called upon. Someone with a cheerier view of the nature of humans might feel safe, even protected, facing crisis in the company of so many. To Lila, it feels dangerous.

It's true not all the seats were filled for this flight, so there are slightly fewer concerns than there might have been. At least there's no one beside her in the window seat climbing or screeching or clawing to get out. Or, for that matter, patting her hand, speaking softly. But there are nevertheless many, many people, each an unknown quantity, in a space which was adequate for its original purpose but is entirely inadequate for explosions of despair and terror, or even great bursts of generosity and goodness.

As long as they were sitting neatly in rows, facing forward, eating and drinking, talking or reading or napping, merely passing dull hours, they were just people headed in a common direction, with their own stories and for individual reasons. Now, though, it could actually make a difference if Susie's mother's devotion to her child were so radical it caused her to abduct her. It might certainly make a difference if the man by the emergency exit really is the sort of fellow who could have murdered his wife last night.