Lavie Tidhar - Osama

They couldn’t know he was going to the airport because he had only made the booking that morning, and so he felt reasonably calm. He had not spotted a tail on the road either, and that was good too. There was the other possibility of course — that they knew he would be going to Paris because that way the trail leading to Mike Longshott lay and they knew about that, about Longshott and Osama, but it wasn’t an option he was entertaining just then. He finished the espresso and bought another and searched for black shoes. An elderly Indian man went past, dressed in a suit, wearing an expensive-looking gold wristwatch. A Chinese family went past, the father ramrod-straight, the mother plump and wearing a loose dress and a worried expression, then two children, a boy and a girl, the boy holding a soldier doll, the girl a paper-bound book, a Lao nanny bringing out the rear of the campaign with the youngest member of the regiment in her arms, a boy or a girl it was impossible to tell. Three white men casually dressed — the kind of casual it cost money to achieve — two in their twenties, one with silver hair and black shades, talking to each other in French. During the war the airport had been used as a base for a loose unit of French pilots who worked under the guise of a civilian airline company. They were called Ravens, and flew missions across the border, into Vietnam. The Secret War, they called it. Some of the old-timers stayed on, still, but the only remains of French Indochina these days were the coins that now sold to tourists in the Talat Sao market. A woman carrying a bamboo basket with two chickens inside. Five Africans in flowing robes, and escorted by Laotian functionaries — a diplomatic delegation from Ivory Coast or Senegal, maybe. Two young European women carrying backpacks. One smiled at Joe as she went past him. A bearded Muslim cleric wheeling a suitcase. Two Japanese, a man and a woman, power-walking, movements synchronised, not speaking. A group of Hmong villagers, carrying baskets, one imprisoning the singing of live frogs. Dark shapes peered at Joe through the woven bars of their jail. Joe ground his cigarette into the espresso cup, threw it in the bin, and went to catch his plane.

He always felt most alone when he was flying. On a plane, he felt as if he did not exist. There were the overhead lights and the bulky earphones and the canned music, dead notes and dead voices scratchily coming through a tiny socket in the armrest. Outside the world was vanished; once he was above the clouds, all he could see was a white landscape, sheer mountains, deep gorges, bottomless chasms where the clouds momentarily opened, with nothing at all beneath. The cloudscape was not real. It was insubstantial, had no concrete existence. The blue sky was a cold and waterless sea.

The flight to Bangkok took one hour. Once there, at the modern chrome and glass airport with the king’s picture hanging everywhere, he waited. Airports were made for waiting, sometimes forever. He sat on a public bench and watched people come and go past him, unnoticed by them. When he went to the restroom his urine smelled of coffee. He washed his hands and toweled them dry. There was no day or night inside the terminal. It was a place where time stood still, a pause, a place where there was only a before or after, but no now.

For some reason he thought about the cat. He had tried adopting one a few months before. It was a little stray kitten, dirty-black, with big round eyes and a skinny neck and a big belly, bulging from intestinal worms. It had come up to him outside the Morning Market, just like that, and put its paw on his foot, and looked up at him.

He took it home in a blue plastic bag and fed it tuna and held it on his lap. It was a little cat, two months old and comical with its loping, ungraceful gait and its enthusiasm. He called the cat Small One, because it was small, and one. There was a veterinarian clinic on Don Palang road, and the nurse came to the apartment and she said Small One needed an injection for worms and also for an ear infection, and she injected him twice. Joe had paid her and she left, and twenty minutes later Small One was dead.

Small One’s body could not take the injections. He ran across the room, faster than Joe had seen him move before, and then stopped as abruptly, and crawled under the chair, feet splayed, his body wracked with spasms. His eyes stared at Joe as he peed himself, lying there in his own pool of urine, unable to move. Joe had put him in his box and mopped up, not thinking, and then held Small One close to him, and felt him go, the body becoming limp in his arms and the eyes remaining open but no longer seeing Joe, and there was no heartbeat.

He hated the nurse for doing what she did but he hated himself more for not stopping her, not telling her Small One was too small, too fragile for the injections. He let her do it because he thought it was the right thing to do, and she did what she thought was right, too.

He had buried Small One at night. The moon was one day short of being full. He dug the earth and put Small One into the ground in his box, and covered him again.

‘TransContinental Airways flight to Paris now boarding at gate thirty-five,’ a woman’s voice said on the public announcement system. Joe stood up; he had been day-dreaming. It was the only kind of dreaming he did any more. He picked up his bag and looked up at the great departure board, where destinations and flight numbers on moving slats click-clacked into position incessantly, when he felt a hand on his arm and a voice said close by, ‘Please, don’t go.’

He turned, startled. A small, rotund Asian woman stood beside him. He had not heard her approach. She wore a baggy dress and soft-soled shoes, and her face looked up at him pleadingly with short-sighted eyes. Joe said, ‘I’m sorry—’ and the woman sighed and said, ‘I am sorry too. You are lucky. You can find your way. I am still looking.’ And her eyes left him and went to the departure board, and she sighed, and said, ‘It should be silent and shining with words of light. Not like this. It should be… it should be like the marker to paradise, I sometimes think. But I don’t know where my flight is. I don’t know which gate to go to. I’ve tried them all.’

Joe put his hand on the woman’s shoulder. He couldn’t say why he did that. He felt in himself something responding to her, sensing her pain, not a knowing but feeling, and it was strange to him. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Let me get you something to eat. Everything is better after you’ve eaten.’

‘On board meal,’ the woman said. ‘That’s all I can taste now. And apple juice. I never drink alcohol on flights. Only apple juice. In those transparent plastic cups with the wrinkles. Now I hate the taste, but it won’t go away.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Joe said again. He didn’t know what to say. He felt powerless before her. The woman was still staring at the departure board. After a moment Joe removed his hand, gently. He thought she had forgotten he was there, but then he heard her speak. ‘Go,’ she said. She spoke very quietly. ‘I shouldn’t have come to you. But sometimes I get so lonely — where are we?’

‘Bangkok,’ Joe said.

‘Bangkok? I’ve never been to Bangkok before.’

He left her there. She never once took her eyes off the departure board.

The man was part Jamaican and part English, and close to two meters tall. He spoke with a South London accent, having been born in Bromley and educated at Thomas Tallis School in Kidbrooke. He had deep set eyes and thick black hair, and there were over one hundred grams of Pentaerythritol tetranitrate and Acetone peroxideplastic high-grade plastic explosives hidden in the hollowed soles of his black hiking shoes. His name was Richard Reid.