THIS FLIGHT TONIGHT
THIS FLIGHT TONIGHT
A collaboration with Gary Couzens
Ten minutes before he died, Andrew James Crichton selected a drink from the bar. A single Southern Comfort with ice. He pushed away the remains of his in-flight meal and gazed out of the window at the deep blue of the sky. At 30,000 feet he could look down at the clouds, thick and drawn up into ice-cream peaks, or single tufts like cotton-wool.
Five minutes before he died, he continued to sip at his drink. He switched on his laptop. Two minutes later, feeling distracted, he gazed up at the seatbelt sign, which was unlit. He was lost in a reverie for a minute and a half before he returned to the laptop.
He was so engrossed, all he knew was a loud roaring in his ears, intense heat and splintering, and a sense of infinite space around him as he fell.
*
Statistically more people are killed every year on the roads than in the air, but air disasters are more newsworthy. A car accident will normally kill at most four or five people, maybe seven or eight, but unless it's a major pileup it won't make the news. And because it takes place on terra firma, it's more survivable. A plane crash will eliminate more than hundred people at once, and if your vehicle disintegrates several miles up you have no chance.
*
There's a sick feeling in Jane's stomach as she sits down and fastens her seatbelt. It's not the wine she drunk the evening before, at their wedding reception. After they'd made love, Simon slept easily, strange bed and all, and woke up refreshed. Jane tossed and turned all night. It was the thought of this flight, her first since the bomb which tore apart that 747 and everyone on board. Including her father.
After the take-off, after that rushing of blood to parts of the body gravity normally fails to reach, Jane gains comfort from the ordinariness of her surroundings. A stretched-out hotel foyer. Simon, by her side, leans back. A man, across the aisle, tapping at his laptop. The plane's hum of power, a throbbing which could easily be mistaken for a deep-throated central heating system. She relaxes. A honeymoon is not a time to allow an embolism into the mind: a memory of a father who died after surely comforting himself with similar ordinariness.
*
Statistically more people die before their predetermined mind-stop than otherwise...and so they hover onward like misbegotten memory forces - or anachronistic ghosts - blotting up further thoughts and, yes, memories. They skim and soar in the same air through which sleek metal monsters divert them into a mixed backwash of mentalities.
*
Peter Clayton had risen that morning, not knowing he was to fly later in the day. Business trips were often abruptly arranged by the Director in charge of his area. Based in London, Peter often flies to Birmingham or Manchester or Glasgow or Edinburgh or Southampton. Not for him the nervousness of the infrequent flier; nor the boredom of the long-haul traveller. An hour to check in, an hour to fly, and he is at his destination, fuelled by plastic-wrapped food and airline coffee. All airports are basically the same - the details and language spoken may differ - but there is no plunge into disorientating strangeness. Later in the day he returns, sustained through the tedium of the meeting by company catering - all laid on, of course: keep the important delegates happy.
Today, Manchester; next week, Dublin, the location of the farthest-flung present, a pretty thirty-year-old redhead called Roisin, representing the company's Irish holdings. A few months ago, in an overnight stop in a Glasgow hotel, in an access of loneliness he and Roisin made love. A moment in time, nothing more: a meeting of tired bodies and bored minds. Now and then he thinks of her: of her slim boyish figure, her small breasts and tight upward-pointing nipples, the sensation as her legs clasped his hips and he slid warmly into her. It never happened. The next morning they went separately to breakfast and were later debating fervently from either side of the meeting table. It never happened: he has a wife and three children he adores. He's forty years old, with thinning hair, a developing spare tyre and a blood-pressure problem; Roisin is ten years younger than him, unmarried but with a live-in boyfriend of two years' standing. The hurt they'd cause if what they did became known, and the consequent misinterpretation: they'd meant no harm, it was just a gesture of friendship. It never happened.
*
Jane watches the landscape veer away, as roads become lines and fields green and brown mosaic tiles - a flush of white as they break through the clouds. The sign ahead of her still burns its red message: FASTEN SEAT BELTS. Her hand inches sideways and meets Simon's. He wraps his fingers about hers.
She remembers the dream she had sometime during last night's fitful sleep. She was on a plane similar to this one. She tapped a passing stewardess on the arm. "Excuse me...?" The stewardess turned; instead of her face there was a skull. Jane screamed. She jumped past the stewardess, who reached for her, her bony fingers touching the fabric of Jane's blouse but sliding off as Jane ran up the aisle. She reached the cockpit and tugged at the door –
"Excuse me, Madam, you're not allowed in there - "
- and finally she forced it open. It was noisier in the cockpit, and as she half-stepped, half-stumbled in, the co-pilot turned. His face was another skull. And the pilot's face too. As she stood there and screamed, she saw through the window the plane's nose tilt downwards until she could see no clouds no sky just the ground rushing up faster faster and faster -
She woke up choking back a scream. Simon was there, holding her, soothing her.
"Are you okay?" Simon asks, bringing her back to the present.
The sky: an intense unbroken blue. The clouds below: a thick clotted white.
"I'll get you a drink," he says. "You're shaking like a leaf."
As he reaches past her to attract the stewardess's attention, Jane lightly closes her eyes. Her blouse is damp under the armpits, her sweat glands defying her antiperspirant. Face your fears. Well, so far she has done this. That was her first take-off. Overcome your fears. As if by shining a light on them they shrink, become trivial, instead of letting them lurk in darkness, your imagination doing the rest. She feels light-headed. It's the pressure: hold your nose and pop your eardrums. Well, if she is to overcome her fears, what better than an hour-long flight from Heathrow to Dublin? Short and sweet - soon be over.
*
Peter Clayton spends the hour's flight reading through the paperwork he'll need to get through before tomorrow's meeting. He breaks for the in-flight meal - lamb chop and creamed potatoes and green beans - and towards the end of the flight gives up reading and stares out at the darkening sky over Manchester. He thinks of collecting his luggage after disembarking, then the bus into the city centre and the at-first-overwhelming largeness of Piccadilly Square, and then checking into the hotel. He'll phone Helen, his wife, then there'll be the evening to kill. Hopefully Roisin will be there; they'll share a drink for old times' sake. Old times: the memory of that never-mentioned, half-denied infidelity.
In fact she's in the queue ahead of him, waiting to register. The only woman there, amidst all the anonymous men in suits. At first he doesn't recognise her, not even when she turns to face him: her hair has been cut to collar-length and she's wearing wire-rimmed full-moon glasses. It makes her look older, more like her actual age instead of just out of her teens. She waves to him and after she's registered walks back down the queue to where he's standing.
"Hi."
"Hello Roisin, how are you?"
"I'm fine, thanks. How was your flight?"
"Oh, nothing special."
She touches her hand to his elbow. "You going to have dinner with me?"
"I had something to eat on the plane."
Head-and-shoulders shorter, she gazes up at him with something he reads as disappointment. Atavistic gallantry gnaws at him.
"But I'm still hungry," he says.
She smiles.
The meal doesn't live up to expectations. Roisin, changed into a lavender-coloured top and black leggings, eats voraciously. Peter forces himself to finish his meal, knowing he'll have to do some exercise to burn it off. He feels bloated as he stands up and they move to the bar. He has a second drink although he knows he shouldn't; he feels himself become light-headed.
Conversation remains on the surface: how are his wife and children, how is her boyfriend Seamus (fiancé now), company gossip - the substance of many past face-to-face, phone and email conversations. As he slides into tipsiness, he slips his arm about her shoulders. He senses her discomfort, but she doesn't resist. He thinks guiltily that he hasn't rung Helen, but he feels in no condition to do so. At ten o'clock, Roisin yawns.
"Long day. I need to go to bed."
He escorts her to her room, one floor below his. They say goodbye. He wants to kiss her; he's tempted to reach out and put his hand on her breast. But he knows he shouldn't. And he doesn't.
*
Statistically, Andrew James Crichton was one of those exceptions that prove the law of averages - by accidentally dying at the precise moment he was meant to die - which made everybody else on the plane victims of synchronicity, spear-carriers in the unique drama of self-reality.
*
Soon be over. Jane notices that the laptop has ceased tapping.
She glances towards the man whose name she'll likely never know. She can just discern the gold-embossed initials AJC on his samsonite briefcase, its black cuboid untidily tilted on the spare seat next to the aisle.
Probably an executive or maybe a politician. He probably needs to sleep. Such thoughts allow her to maintain equilibrium - as if altruism is an aid to safety.
Planes and spiders, her only known phobias, she thinks. No spiders on planes, though - unless they get in with the food or cargo. Do spiders have phobias? Her wandering thoughts are akin to returning to dream, but not quite.
AJC, she sees, is indeed sleeping, just as she must have done when dreaming for real.
Simon too now is sleeping. Sweet dreams, Simon. Sweet dreams, AJC - whoever you are.
Soon be over.
*
He should have made a move. Peter Clayton is only Peter Clayton by virtue of his impulses. His whole career up to the age of forty has been a series of unexpected moves from company to company, each one a slight jump up the ladder. His current job in itself comprises surprising changes of plan, with meetings galore abruptly cropping up for the firm's troubleshooter - as he describes himself. He has sometimes spent a whole week chasing meetings without ever attending one of them. Ever a more important meeting around the next corner. Late cancellations. Sudden appointments. Chasing crises. Chasing shadows. Chasing...
Hang his blood pressure! Cabin fever, nothing more.
He needs a cuddle. Roisin now asleep just one floor below. What a waste of resources!
He hears the sound of long-haul aeroplanes plying their invisible paths above the Manchester hotel. Their droning - although a sign of humanity - enhances the night's solitude. He thinks of Helen and the kids, nearly cries - but falls asleep before remembering why he wants to cry.
He dreams of a plane crashing. He watches from a creeky terrain as it banks steeply, then seeming to splutter to a halt. No sooner seen, it slices into some far-off trees with a splintering roar. It is up to him to scramble across the squishy marshes to save any survivors. He is horrified when he arrives on the scene. The flaming trough which the nosecone of the plane has divotted is at least a highrise-block deep. A number of passengers still trying to clamber out, despite the ferocity of the fire: they are flickering shadows, actually part of the living flame. The plane itself seems to have disappeared altogether. Surely it can't have taken off again, after allowing the maimed and half-dead to disembark? The fire-pit created by the crash gradually relinquishes its imitation of a long vertical volcano, but dark perforations and fragile black sculptures of ash still float intermittently upwards from the former core. He squints into the sky where he can just discern the wrecked aeroplane gliding with the large black birds...
Peter Clayton is woken by a soft tap-tap on his bedroom door, as if someone is typing out a message. He hopes it's Rois�n with her own share of impulse.
"Come in," he says.
*
As he fell, Andrew James Crichton thought: Is this what it's like to die? Deep azure sky above him, sun shining bright on white clouds below. To his satisfaction he learned that what he was always told was true: his life flashed before him. He saw again himself at school, at university; he remembered how he lost his virginity at the age of seventeen; he met again his wife. He saw through a mist of tears his only child Jane pulled bloodily from his wife's vagina, her first gurgling scream.
Then he fell into a cloud.
As far as he could see was greyish white. The only direction indicator was the sun, above him. He couldn't breathe - a burning in his lungs - as he fell. And finally - a matter of seconds in real time - the white darkened, became red, then black, as Andrew died.
Minutes later his body hit the Atlantic.
And, somewhere else, someone drew out his life's thread, lined up the scissors, and cut.
*
Her bladder full, Jane undoes her seatbelt and stands up. She glances down at Simon, asleep now. His head lolls to one side, exposing his double chin. You really must exercise more, she thinks. She doesn't want to nag, but she sees Simon in ten years, after his sedentary job has taken its toll: puffy-faced, face mottled with broken blood-vessels, a spare tyre.
She's a little unsteady on her feet, her legs numb from sitting down. The plane is on a tilt: the windows to her right face upwards into the sky, the sun burning out the blue; to her left, she can see through a gap in the clouds the Irish Sea, grey-green flecked with white. She can see individual waves.
She walks the length of the aisle to the toilet. It's occupied. She stands there, stepping aside to let the stewardess pass. The stewardess - Jane can read her namebadge: GRAINNE O'HARA, a real Irish name - smiles at her.
"All right?"
Purse-lipped, Jane nods, smiles politely in return, and watches Grainne O'Hara's retreating back. Professional to a fault: Jane is just one more nervous passenger. There are probably many like her.
The toilet door opens and a middle-aged man, with thinning hair, overweight, comes out. He smiles encouragingly at her as he returns to his seat.
I must look nervous, thinks Jane as she shuts the door behind herself. She's always been small - her full height is five feet one - slim-built, looking younger than her years. She seems to inspire men to want to protect her, always older men. From her father onwards.
Her father. She rarely thinks of him now. She was six when he died: his face is a vague blur. The man in the old photographs is almost a stranger to her, even in the picture of him with her one-year-old self on his lap. She remembers more vividly her mother, racked with grief, bent over and crying. The grey shell of a woman she was in the ten years before she died.
After she has finished, she pulls up her underwear and straightens her skirt. She walks back down the aisle and sits again next to Simon. He is still asleep. She crosses her legs, reaches out and puts her hand on his knee. Let me protect you for a change, she thinks. She's calmer now, but there's still the landing to come and of course the return flight. But I've got this far. It's not so bad.
She gazes out of the windows to her left. The plane is tilting in the opposite direction, lifting up and away from the seascape. In his seat AJC is still asleep.
*
The knock on the door again. "Come in," Peter repeats, before realising that he's locked the door from the inside. He stands up and opens the door.
Roisin stands in the corridor. Her hair is loose to her shoulders, and she is wearing a long bottle-green-and-red-squared dressing-gown. It's open just below her knees, and he can see the lace hem of her nightdress and below that her slim hairless legs and her feet in blue fluffy slippers.
"Roisin..."
"I couldn't sleep," she says. "There's - just something. I can't explain it."
"Come in."
Her words skitter from her mouth; she seems much less composed, much less poised than she is by day. He's only seen her once before like this - that night they made love.
She sits on the armchair, he on his bed.
"Is it just because it's a strange bed?" he says.
She shakes her head. "No, it's not that. It's not the nightclub on the ground floor. I've slept through worse than that, believe me. I just can't sleep."
"What's on your mind, Roisin? Tell me. Is it Seamus?"
She shakes her head again, more vehemently. "No. No. I don't know how to say it."
Peter's heart misses a beat. It's about me. It must be. He swallows, takes her hands in his. "Just try, Roisin."
"Last night I had a dream. I dreamed I was in the cemetery." Her hands grip his; she looks down at her lap. "And I saw a gravestone with your name on it."
Peter's stomach clenches.
"I woke up in a sweat. There were tears in my eyes. I realised how much I care for you. It scared the shit out of me."
"Shhh," he says. He takes her in his arms. She seems very small, very fragile. She slips her arms about his shoulders.
"Just hold me," she says.
He rocks her gently, as he would a young girl. As he's done to his own daughter. As to Helen, when something had upset her.
Tears track down from her eyes, down her cheek, drip onto his trousers. "Hey, come on," he says. "Don't cry." There's something about women's tears that strikes deep to the heart of him, reduces him to inner trembling. And something erotic. He gently pats her back; she holds her clinch tighter. He puts his hand under her chin, lifts her face, leans down to kiss her. He moves his hand down, undoes one of her dressing-gown buttons, slips his hand inside. He pushes the fabric of her nightdress aside, and runs his hand over her breast. He hears her breath, sharply indrawn, in his ear.
Once can be excused as a lapse, he thinks. But not twice. Twice has to be deliberate.
He sits on the bed and undoes his shirt. He watches her as she stands, undoes her dressing-gown and pulls the nightdress off over her head.
*
Statistically, dreams are most often dreamed in pairs. Ranging from a couple entwined in bed to two individuals continents apart who may never become acquainted. The strangest element in this already strange waltz of sleep rhythms and mutual mind adaption is that the partner leading the dance forgets the dream when waking, whilst the one twirled and led remembers it...perhaps forever.
*
Peter does not ask Roisin what she dreamed tonight, if she remembers it. In the darkest hour of the night, he feels her warm smooth flesh slide over his own, tender and sensitised by the memory, the dream, of their lovemaking. A faint kiss on the cheek, a soprano whisper I love you in his ear. A sleep-bleared view of her pulling her nightdress on over her head, letting it drop to cover her nudity, doing up her dressing-gown. Tiptoed steps, the quiet opening and shutting of the door. The memory of her words in his ear, her sighed and gasped orgasm, his final inward thrust.
Guilt. He should feel guilty. If it was casual dalliance, just a fuck, then maybe he wouldn't. When Helen rings him up first thing he'll be cheerful, he forgot to ring her just one of those things you know how it is had a bit too much to drink you know how business trips are. But he knows his mood is fragile, a shell. What he and Rois�n have done goes beyond a mere lapse, and sometime soon they may have to pay the penalty. They have made a mistake by making love a second time; they've bound themselves together too tightly now, and he won't be able to free himself without leaving part of his flesh behind. And if Helen and the kids found out...
He and Roisin breakfast together. Next week they'll meet again in Dublin, her home town. Perhaps if he were to arrive the night before...she'll make some excuse to her boyfriend, say a girls' night out, and she'll stay with him in his hotel room... He nods; he knows he wants to, but he wonders what he's doing to his marriage to Helen. Poisoning it from within.
Roisin is in good form at today's meeting. Changed into a pinstripe suit, her hair gathered up at the back, her face subtly made up, she seems the model of a professional woman. But he can't think of her now without seeing the image of her, naked, walking towards him, arms outstretched.
He wishes he could leave. Be at rest. No more meetings. No more treachery. But then what would he do, with a wife and children and a mortgage? No, he's in a rut, no matter how comfortable it may be. What you regret most are the risks you don't take. A lifetime of if onlys, until you wake up one day to find it's getting dark and it's much too late.
*
In his seat AJC taps into his laptop. The woman opposite seems nervous...has been all flight. A phobia for flying: understandable. He taps a key sequence and her file is presented before him. No, it's not her time yet: there's still part of the long string left. She's only just got married; that's her husband next to her. What a tragedy if she died on her honeymoon. So much potential. Future generations sleeping inside her, silent eggs in a full ovary. Conception on her wedding night: the traditional way. How romantic. AJC hasn't been totally eaten up by cynicism.
He looks at her name, in bold type at the top of the file: DAVIES, Jane Mary (nee Crichton). There's something familiar about her, something he can't quite trace. He's encountered so many men and women, they all tend to blur into each other...
He presses another key and wipes the display. He calls up another file.
*
Jane is looking the wrong way when it happens. She is distracted by Simon's muttering something in his sleep, a disruption to his quiet snoring. So she hears a thump as something hits the floor and, as one with the crowd, turns to see what has happened. Behind her, wakened, Simon does the same.
At first something clenches in her stomach - what's gone wrong something wrong with the plane am I going to die now like this? But no, the plane is steady, nothing interrupting its serene onward journey.
She sees a pair of legs lying in the corridor, and Grainne O'Hara's green-beskirted backside as she bends over him. The other stewardess helps her lift the man but he's too heavy for them; a male passenger helps out. Jane leans out into the aisle and watches as the three of them carry the passenger (collapsed? dead?) down the aisle out of sight. When they've gone, the passengers sit back in their seats, relax.
Jane sits back and closes her eyes. Silently she reaches out and clasps hold of Simon's hand. "What happened?" he says.
"Don't know," she mutters.
She leans out and attracts Grainne's attention as she passes. "Excuse me...is he going to be all right?"
"I hope so," smiles the stewardess. "There'll be an ambulance on the runway when we land. About ten minutes."
"Fingers crossed," says Jane.
Grainne smiles and walks past.
In a seat ahead, Jane can see an attaché case, lying unattended. Now she knows who the man is who has just collapsed: the one who used the toilet before her. A middle-aged man, balding, overweight. She can read the gold-embossed initials on the case: PHC. Jane thinks to call Grainne back, but doesn't. Someone will notice it.
Whoever you are, I hope to God you're all right.
"A heart attack. Or a stroke," Simon is saying.
Jane nods.
"He'll be okay." A voice behind her: male. She turns, to see AJC sitting to her left, watching her. "It'll act as a warning, that's all, Jane. He needs to slow down."
Jane says nothing, just stares in disbelief. How do you know? How did you know my name? But Simon didn't hear: he distracts her by tugging at the sleeve of her blouse.
"Look, there's Dublin."
In the wonder of the sight - the illuminated, nighttime city from the air, laid out like a gigantic jewelbox - Jane forgets everything else.
I've got this far. It's not too bad.
The plane banks - a huge dark kite - over the sleeping city. It is silent, as silent as most graves.
*
The man who collapsed - PHC - is let off first, carried off by two ambulance men on a stretcher. Then the other passengers disembark, row by row. There's a buzz of conversation, brought about by the unexpected drama in the routine flight. Jane wants to confront AJC, ask him how he knew what she believed he knew - but she loses him in the crowd.
They collect their luggage and make their way out into Dublin Airport. They change some traveller's cheques for Irish currency, have a coffee, wait for the coach to Busaras, the central bus station.
On their way out, a woman comes up to them. She's about the same age as Jane, a couple of inches taller, in a sweatshirt and black leggings, with collar-length red hair and glasses. "Excuse me?" she says - and Jane notices her accent: she's a local. "Were you on the flight from Heathrow?"
"Yes we were," says Simon.
"Are you waiting for someone?" says Jane.
The woman nods, obviously glad for Jane's perceptiveness. A woman-to-woman exchange, excluding Simon for the moment.
"He's probably got lost," says Jane. "He might be wondering around the airport looking for you."
The woman smiles thinly, anxiety undercutting her goodwill. "Is this your first time in Dublin?"
Jane nods.
Simon says: "We're here on our honeymoon."
The exchange over, the woman smiles. "It's a beautiful city. "I hope you have a great time."
"Thank you," says Simon. "Jane, there's our coach."
"Good luck," Jane says over her shoulder to the woman as they make for the exit.
Published Substance (1994) and as part of Gary Couzens’ Second Contact And Other Stories (Elastic Press 2003)
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