Конрад Уильямс - One

‘We should have taken it easy, shouldn’t we?’ Jane asked, patting his own stomach. ‘We’ll probably cramp up something chronic.’

Aidan nodded. ‘We should get some stuff for Becky,’ he said. His voice wavered for a second, as if he was going to start crying. Nothing strange about that , thought Jane. A young lad who finds something tasty for the first time in many months, maybe a year or two. Even I’m filling up . And all the while, beneath that, Something is wrong, something is very wrong .

He followed Aidan to the next galley, stepping over withered limbs sticking out into the aisle; his feet turning tacky in whatever had washed and set upon the floor. They unloaded the bagged snacks from the trolleys and stashed them in Jane’s backpack. They found miniatures of gin, rum, vodka and whisky; tins of mixer. There was Coca-Cola and 7-Up and Carlsberg lager.

‘Let’s get sloshed,’ Jane said, and mixed himself a gin and tonic. ‘No ice, no lemon. Hardly a civilised drink.’ But it sluiced through the desert of his mouth like a monsoon. ‘Bubbles,’ he sneezed. ‘Jesus, that’s good.’

Aidan refused the alcohol, sipped instead at a can of lemonade. Jane felt bright, alert, refreshed, but Aidan did not look as though he was returning from his enervated state. His eyes retained their dull lustre; they resembled glass eyes. They almost fooled you, but they lacked that essential something.

‘Are you OK?’ Jane asked, hating the wheedling in his voice; he’d asked the question already a dozen times since they’d met.

‘I’m fine,’ Aidan said.

‘Becky was worried about you,’ Jane said. ‘She misses you when you’re not around.’

Now the gloss came to his eyes. He was crying and trying to hide it, his small chest barely able to keep from jerking. Jane was conscious of the small boy still within Aidan, and when he dropped his head he could almost believe that this was how Stanley might look. It was gloomy in the passenger cabin. He might be standing here with his own son; his boy needed him.

Jane put out a hand, whispered, the words barely denting the air as they slipped from his lips: Stan .

‘Don’t you!’ Aidan screamed, whipping his head up and fixing Jane with a hot stare. He shook his head, nodded, shook his head again. A knowing smile deepened the shadows in his face.

‘I’m sorry,’ Jane said. ‘I meant nothing by it.’

‘Ever since I saw you. That first day in the hospital. You’ve been looking at me like you love me and you hate me at the same time.’

‘That’s not—’

‘It is true. You want me to be Stanley. And you hate me for not being him. You hate me for surviving and you wish he had lived and I was dead.’

Jane reached for him again, but Aidan flinched, stepped back. His foot landed on a shin which crumbled like chalk. ‘Stanley’s alive, Aidan,’ he said.

‘See?’ Aidan yelled, gesturing wildly, as if he were beseeching the passengers around him. ‘See? You can’t leave him alone. When it’s the two of us alone in a room? It’s actually three.’

‘You can’t condemn me for that, Aidan. It’s not my fault. You—’

‘HE’S DEAD! HE’S FUCKING DEAD!’

Jane only realised he had hit the boy when he felt the raw sting in the knuckles of his right hand. Aidan was on the floor, one hand covering his mouth, the other scrabbling against an armrest as he tried to pull himself upright.

Jane held up his hands. ‘Aidan. God, I’m sorry. I’m… I was bang out of line. I should not have done that.’

The spark was gone from Aidan. The matte eyes blinked at Jane. He wiped blood from the corner of his lip, regarded it for a long time with some fascination, as if he were looking at a rare jewel. He stared back at Jane and his voice was no longer edged. ‘He is dead.’

They spent the next few hours at separate ends of the aircraft. Aidan would not leave, despite Jane’s pleas. It was getting dark. Figures were moving around the edges of the airstrip, stopping, and turning their way. Even if they could not see Jane and Aidan maybe they were nonetheless baffled by the new scents. It was early enough, and there were sufficiently few Skinners around, for Jane and the adolescent boy to make a getaway, but they had to go now.

‘Why did you bring me out here, Aidan?’

Aidan wouldn’t answer.

The dark came on, creeping through the fuselage like black ink drawn into the reservoir of a fountain pen. The emptied windows provided soft charcoal shapes against the jetblack. Jane heard the shuffle of feet on the runway apron. After a while he could hear the phlegmy breath of them beneath the aircraft. Something barged against the stairs, causing them to rattle massively. Jane remembered he had left the door open. He ran to it now and shut it, locked it. Hissing and howling from outside; they knew there was something to be had in here.

Jane glanced at the ragged hole in the tail. If they moved the stairs and came up there they would not fit through, but they would shred the thing wider within minutes. He had to hope that their being unable to see the hole was enough. You couldn’t smell what wasn’t there, surely. But then they did move the stairs. Jane heard them being wheeled away from the door. He cast around for a weapon, expecting them to attack, but they were returning the stairs to the main building.

‘Just great,’ he murmured. ‘Three storeys up now, Aidan. What are we going to do? Jump down in the morning? We going to carry each other back to the centre with broken legs?’

Aidan wasn’t saying anything. Jane looked down the aisle at him; he could just make out his shape, limned by the palest ambient light, sitting in the dark like a Buddha. His head was down over his chest, his hands resting on his crossed legs. He might have been asleep, but Jane didn’t think so.

He wanted to say something, but there seemed to be no way back from what had happened. Aidan was right. All this time he had looked at Aidan and seen his own son. He wondered if he shouldn’t be excused for that. But then he realised that Aidan had lost everyone too: his father, his mother, his sister; a worse scenario than Jane’s in many ways, but he had been too wrapped up in the epic scenes of his own mind – the eventual reunion with Stanley chief among them – to show even a rudimentary empathy. Becky had been the gauze on his wounds, the kiss goodnight, the arms to fall into during the worst of the nightmares. Jane had either been turned in on his own reveries or trying to measure Aidan for a body cast that would never fit, and should never have been tried on in the first place.

He looked out at the night. Tow tractors crouched low at the edge of the airfield, as if trying to dodge out of view. Shreds of a windsock rippled violently against the sky like an escaped, frantic thought.

‘Why did you bring me here, Aidan?’

He thought of Becky at Plessey’s shop, sorting through batteries or touching an alligator clip to the crystal radio, listening to voices hundreds of miles away offering hope or some bastardised version of it. He thought of a raft so great that you could build villages on it. He thought of fetching up on Normandy beaches lined with a welcoming party of skeletons in their millions, or Skinners sharpening blades on strops made from the hides of children.

He dismissed the image and turned away from the window, disgusted with himself. The grim thought had never been far from his mind, even during the days of normality. Evenings sitting on the balcony with his wife, sharing a bottle of wine, listening to Johnny Mercer or Bobby Darin, the bricks, the roads, the sky touched by that soft pink stain of summer, he’d envisage, suddenly, Stanley falling from the heavens to impale himself on railings. He’d imagine a gas pipe shearing and igniting, hosing his son in the face with thousands of degrees centigrade. The balcony crumbling, sending him to unforgiving concrete twenty yards below. The worry could never be confined, it was never something over which he held sway. It was always a wild uncontainable panic that had so many strands to it that he could not keep track. It was like trying to put an eel in a jam jar with greased hands.