Tony Parsons - Departures - Seven Stories from Heathrow

Mike showed her around the fire station. The giant four- and six-wheel rigs. Rows of harnesses, helmets and hoses so infinitely long that they looked as though they could stretch around the world. He showed her all this with a kind of wild pride and she thought of a book she had read at school: Gatsby throwing his shirts on the bed to impress Daisy. Everyone was very friendly. Everything was spotless. It was a world of men waiting for something catastrophic to happen.

‘It’s very clean,’ she said.

Mike looked a bit embarrassed. ‘Friday is our wash-up day,’ he said. Today was a Friday. ‘Perhaps it’s not always quite so clean.’

They gave her a cup of tea with lots of sugar and Mike talked all the while, explaining how there are 110 firefighters at Heathrow, with 27 men on a watch – a twelve-hour shift – and four watches around the clock. One watch on days, one watch on nights, and two at home, resting.

‘Which watch are you?’ Zoe asked.

‘We’re green watch,’ said Mike.

‘Like the plane you set fire to,’ she noted.

‘Yes,’ he said, as though it had never occurred to him before, the way green watch was colour-coordinated with the green plane. ‘There’s something I want you to see,’ he said.

It was the tallest ladder in the world.

Mike called it an ALP – everything was an acronym with the men at the fire station, Zoe realized – and she had to get them to tell her twice that it was an Aerial Ladder Platform before she got it straight in her head.

Then one of the firefighters was helping her into an orange harness, and when that was comfortable she joined Mike on the metal platform of the ALP. He clipped them both to the rail of the platform and the thing, the ALP, began to rise.

It rose above the fire station.

It rose straight up and then it seemed to unfurl itself, and discover another ladder that had been hiding inside it, and rise even higher.

There were the runways down there, Zoe saw – two of them, she noticed for the first time – and there were the planes parked in their stands or taxiing to the runways or rising gracefully into the blue summer sky.

And then, impossibly, the ladder unfurled itself yet again and they were looking down on the roof of Terminal 5 and the Air Traffic Control tower was at eye-level. They were thirty metres high and still rising on a ladder that was far higher than any ladder on any fire engine in existence.

And for the first time she saw the secret city of the airport. She saw the secret city in all its calm glory, and its unruffled order, and the way everything worked and nothing bad happened. From up there on the fireman’s ladder, Zoe looked down at the airport, and she saw a safe world.

Mike was talking all the while. Zoe found that she could tune in and out and get the general gist of it.

‘There would be two of us up here and we would have one hundred metres of hose that can unload eleven thousand litres of water in four minutes,’ Mike said.

Zoe smiled. ‘That’s nice, Mike.’

They both looked at the airport. It looked like a place where nothing bad could ever happen. Even high in the sunlit calm, Zoe knew that wasn’t quite true. But she also knew that they were ready. And that she was ready too.

‘What’s in Toronto?’ Mike said.

‘My parents are out there,” Zoe said. “My father – he’s not very well. They say – the doctors – that he hasn’t got very long. And he’s never seen our daughter. So . . .’

She turned away so that he couldn’t see her face.

‘That’s no good,’ Mike said. ‘That’s rotten luck.’

‘It’s okay,’ Zoe said. ‘Or at least, it’s a lot better now.’

Just before their plane pierced the clouds a man in a window seat gave a strangled gasp.

‘A green plane!’ he said. ‘On the ground! I saw it! A green plane and it was on fire!’

Across the aisle, sitting calmly between her husband and her daughter, Zoe sipped her champagne and smiled to herself.

She felt the plane rise higher.

Chapter Two

Fur, Actually

Tim got down on his knees to take a better look at the white lion cub.

It was inside a green crate with a small barred window and even in the cool shadows of the cargo terminal at Heathrow its fur looked as white as bone.

‘Hello there,’ Tim said softly, smiling with shy delight at the sight of this creature. The white lion cub looked far more like a dog than a cat, a surly pup that now strutted on bandy legs to the front of its crate to bare its fangs at Tim, as if unsure whether it should play with him or rip his face off.

Tim peered at the documents in his hand. He cleared his throat.

‘You’re going to be staying with us for a while,’ he said. ‘I know you thought you were going to a zoo in Belgium, but whoever packed your crate in South Africa did a lousy job.’

He looked disapprovingly at the green crate that housed the white lion cub. The air vents were not big enough. There was no real bedding, just a scrap of blanket. And the crate itself was just about the right size for a domestic moggy, but way too small for a white lion cub.

‘There are strict regulations about transporting live animals,’ Tim said, and the white lion cub cocked its head to one side, as if this was news to him. ‘And this shoebox they stuck you in breaks all of them. We’re going to contact the airline and give them two days to re-crate you to my satisfaction. After that, you’re the Property of the Crown.’ The cub showed its teeth and Tim let it have a bit of a chew on his fingers until he could no longer stand the pain. ‘Now, how about a saucer of milk back at my place?’ he said.

A small blonde woman crouched down beside him and looked into the crate. The white lion cub con­­sidered her for a moment and then lifted a front paw, as if to strike.

‘What is it?’ said Jaswinder ‘Jazz’ Smith of the UK Border Agency. ‘Some kind of exotic dog?’

‘It’s a lion,’ Tim said. ‘And it just missed its flight to Belgium. What else you got for me, Jazz?’

‘Plenty,’ she said.

The pair of them stood up and Jazz leafed through the sheaf of papers in her hand.

‘At T5 there’s a giant scorpion that crawled into the suitcase of a honeymoon couple coming back from Cancún in Mexico,’ she said. ‘And there’s a white-throated monitor that’s been seized by UKBA. Endangered species, right?’

Tim nodded, picturing the lizard with its large muscular body, its strong short legs and thick vicious tail. He would have to watch out for that tail.

‘Someone tried to smuggle it in?’ he said, wondering how much a white-throated monitor lizard went for on the black market these days.

Jazz shook her head. ‘It was in a crate of Golden Delicious from the Cape,’ she said.

Tim smiled. ‘Nobody wants their organic fruit sprayed with pesticide these days,’ he said. ‘So we get all sorts of stowaways. That it?’

‘Not quite – some nutter came back from Las Vegas with two rattlesnakes in his rucksack,’ she said. ‘They escaped just as the in-flight entertainment was being switched off for landing. The cleaners are refusing to go on board. I’ve got some seized rhino horns that may or may not be fake that I want you to take a look at – but they can wait. Everything can wait. The priority is the rattlesnakes on the flight from Vegas.’

‘I’ll get my pillowcase,’ he said. ‘It’s in the car. They’ll be quite happy in my pillowcase.’

‘Oh, good,’ Jazz said. ‘Because that’s really what’s con­­­cerning me, Tim – the happiness of the rattlesnakes.’

Tim took one more look at the white lion cub and then followed Jazz to the exit of the cargo terminal. She paused in the doorway and as he reached her side he saw what she was looking at. A dozen horses were leaving a giant Airbus and being gently led onto three caged lorries by their grooms.