Ian Sansom - Ring Road - There’s no place like home

Marie Kincaid, who lives in town and who commutes up to the airport, sees people facing up to this question every day, as they step off planes on to the tarmac and into the drizzle, and wonder exactly how they got here and whether there might possibly be a chance to go back. Marie is a Baggage Reclaim Supervisor: she calls the loading bay her Bermuda Triangle and her life is spent attempting to discover its many mysteries. Despite closed-circuit television and X-rays and searches, there’s still a lot of theft and loss of baggage: it’s almost as if the luggage knows something that the passengers don’t, and when they pass through on the conveyor belt at the point of departure they think, well, actually, I quite like it here, thank you very much, and I think I’ll stay. There is luggage belonging to people from our town in all the major cities of the world, living under an assumed name.

Davey had set off with two suitcases, which he’d somehow acquired over the years, graduating first from a grip to a rucksack. They were suitcases which Davey had never in fact used except to store his CDs and cassettes, which he’d sold before returning. He’d found it hard to part with some of them, not so much because he wanted to be able to listen to the music, but because he didn’t want to forget what it was once like wanting to listen to music, but then he thought, well, I have a working radio, what more do I need? *What he needed was the money, so he sold his memories, and he reclaimed the suitcases from under his bed and packed.

In the airport, when everyone else had claimed their luggage and the carousel had shut down and his cases hadn’t arrived, Davey went to see Marie at the Baggage Reclaim desk and Marie smiled her widest, most uncompromising and half-humorous smile and said, ‘Nothing we can do about it, I’m afraid.’

Marie has had the opportunity to practise this particular smile over a number of years now, and it hardly ever failed to work its magic, even on non-native speakers of English. It was a philosophical smile, a smile that suggested that although the loss of luggage obviously caused her pain, she understood from a wider and longer perspective that it was a small matter and that you, the unfortunate but undoubtedly reasonable passenger, should regard it as a small matter also, for thus and this way, the smile implied, lay the path to enlightenment. Davey interpreted this complex smile correctly and filled in a pink form without protest under Marie’s benign gaze. The luggage, said Marie, might be over on the next flight. Or it might not. And then she checked Davey’s name and signature on the form, which was when it happened. ‘I know you,’ she said.

‘You do?’

‘Of course. I know you.’

‘Right,’ said Davey.

‘David Quinn?’ She wagged a finger at him.

‘Yes,’ said Davey.

She’d caught him: she had him bang to rights. ‘The son of David Quinn?’

‘Yes,’ he agreed mournfully. He knew what was coming.

‘The seventh son of the seventh son?’

What could he say? They were words that he hadn’t heard for twenty years and he could live without hearing for another twenty more. But he couldn’t deny it, although he’d hoped that perhaps he could have got away with it. He’d thought that if he stayed away long enough he might have become unrecognisable to the past, but it was not to be so; the past has a very long memory.

For most of us, for those of us who return home out of necessity, or in mere shame or pity, rather than in triumph and trailing clouds of glory or with our reputations preceding us, the journey home is always a disappointment. For most of us there’s never going to be ticker tape and no free pint, no surprise pick-up at the station or the airport, and the best we can hope for is a mild handshake from our father and a teary hug from mum. Which is never enough.

But Davey had wanted nothing more. He’d have been happy to creep back unannounced and unnoticed – a quick pat on the back, then pick up the car from the Short Stay car park and home for a nice cup of tea. That would have been just fine.

They say that everybody wants secretly to be recognised, but Davey Quinn really had wanted to be left alone and it had suited him, the years of anonymity, it had given him space to breathe and to get to know himself. Living away, he thought he’d finally begun to grow into his face, the jut of his own chin, the set of his own nose, the furrows of his own brow: he felt pretty sure that they all reflected his new, different, more secure sense of himself. He thought that he’d found the perfect disguise.

‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ said Marie, hand on hip.

‘Really?’

‘You get back a lot?’

‘I haven’t been back in twenty years,’ he said.

‘Living in London?’

‘Yes,’ he agreed.

‘You’ll see a lot of changes.’

‘Uh-huh,’ he said. ‘Right.’

‘I’ll see what I can do about the luggage,’ said Marie, picking up her walkie-talkie.

‘Thanks,’ said Davey, turning to walk away.

‘Honest to God, you look just the same,’ repeated Marie.

‘Good,’ said Davey.

‘And that extra bit of weight suits you.’ And then she spoke into the walkie-talkie. ‘Maureen?’ she said. ‘You’ll never guess who I’ve got here.’

There was a crackle.

‘David Quinn.’

And then more crackle.

‘Yes. Him.’

And then crackle again.

‘Maureen says welcome home. And Happy Christmas.’

‘Thanks,’ said Davey. ‘The same to you.’

It was getting late and he caught a cab. The driver was humming along to a tune on the radio, a typical piece of bowel-softening Country and Western, sung in an accent yearning for America but tethered firmly here to home. Davey sat down heavily in the back, dazed, and stared out of the window.

So this was it.

Home.

Marie was totally wrong. There weren’t a lot of changes. In fact, everything looked exactly the same: the same rolling hills, the same patches of fields and houses, the same roundabouts, the motorway. It was all just as he remembered it. A landscape doesn’t change that much in twenty years.

Or the weather.

It had been fine when they left the airport, but now the rain was sheeting down and about twenty miles along the motorway one of the windscreen wipers popped off – the whole arm, like someone had just reached down and plucked it away, like God Himself was plucking at an eyebrow.

‘Jesus!’ screamed the driver, having lost all vision through the windscreen in what seemed to be a massive and magic stream of liquid pouring down from the heavens, as if God, or Jesus, were now pissing directly on to the car, as if He were getting ready for an evening out, and they swerved across three lanes and pulled over on to the hard shoulder.

‘Did you see that?’

‘I did,’ said Davey.

‘Jesus Christ. Blinded me.’

‘You OK?’

‘Yeah, thanks. Yeah. I’m fine.’

The car was rocking now, as lorries passed by, and then there was a sudden clap of thunder in the distance.

‘You wouldn’t be any good at repairs, would you?’ asked the driver, turning round.

‘No, not really,’ said Davey.

‘Would you mind having a look, though? It’s just, I don’t know anything about cars. And this asthma.’ The man coughed, in evidence. ‘It gets bad in the rain.’ He reached for a cigarette, put it in his mouth ready to light it and waited, his hand shaking slightly.

‘Right,’ said Davey, who did look as though he knew about cars and who felt sorry for the man, who reminded him of his father: it was the shakes, and the cigarette, and the thickset back of the neck; the profile of most men here over forty, actually. ‘I’ll just go ahead then, shall I?’