Tony Parsons: Departures: Seven Stories from Heathrow

TONY PARSONS

Departures

Seven stories from Heathrow

Dedication

For David Morrison, Barry Hoy and Kevin SteeleSomewhere East of Suez

Epigraph

‘The midnight plane with its flying lights Looks like an unloosed star

Wandering west through the blue-black night

To where the mountains are.’

Frances Frost, ‘Night Plane’

Contents

Title Page TONY PARSONS Departures Seven stories from Heathrow

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One - The Green Plane

Chapter Two - Fur, Actually

Chapter Three - The Pilot’s Room

Chapter Four - Say Hello, Wave Goodbye

Chapter Five - No Tower for Old Men

Chapter Six - The Young Man and the Sky

Chapter Seven - Final Call

Acknowledgements

Catching the Sun

Praise

By the same author

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

The Green Plane

She was not a weak woman.

As she stood at the window, watching the pale blue sky and looking back on her twenty-nine years of life, Zoe could see no evidence that she was weak, timid, or what her three elder brothers would have sneeringly called a ‘wuss’.

When a girl grows up heavily outnumbered by brothers, Zoe thought, she learns to take the knocks, and never to let them see you cry, and always to be tougher than they expect.

Zoe had done all of that, and then when her brothers were all grown and gone and getting on with their lives, and she could have relaxed a little bit on the whole acting tough thing, she had spent a gap year wandering Asia alone (her best friend was meant to come but she met a boy – it was that old story). Zoe had ridden a prehistoric rented motorbike from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City, shivered with dysentery in Mumbai, and when the money ran out – Japan had been more expensive than she was anticipating – she had slept rough in a park in Kyoto while waiting for her parents to send her the fare to come home.

I am not weak, she thought, so vehemently that she almost said it out loud. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not.

But, as she stared at the sky, a small black line appeared against the perfect blue, as thin as a razor cut, and she felt her breath shorten and the sweat break out and the panic fly.

It moved so slowly. Though the plane must have been going at, what – 500 mph or so? – it seemed to move in slow motion as it crossed the London skyline, and then languidly turned, as if ready to meet its fate.

Zoe was not a woman who scared easily.

But Zoe was afraid of flying.

‘Angel?’

She turned from the window to look at her husband. He was sitting at the kitchen table, their three-year-old girl on his knees, attempting to keep her sticky little fingers away from the laptop in front of him.

‘It says here,’ he said, ‘that twenty-five per cent of people have some fear of flying and around ten per cent have a real psychological phobia.’

‘But I’m not afraid of flying,’ Zoe insisted.

In the silence her husband, Nick, and their daughter, Sky, smiled at her sympathetically, as if forgiving her this blatant lie.

Nick returned to the computer. Sky banged her small hands on the keyboard as if it was a toy piano. Nick gathered both of the child’s hands in one of his own, and pointed at the screen with an enthusiastic grin that somehow made Zoe’s spirits sink.

‘They do courses for people who, er, don’t like to fly,’ he said. ‘British Airways had a course called Fear of Flying – please don’t do that, darling’ (this to his daughter) ‘– and now they call it, um, Flying With Confidence.’

Zoe laughed bitterly. ‘That’s a smart move. Flying With Confidence sounds a lot more positive than Fear of bloody Flying.’

Nick looked hurt. ‘But that’s a good thing, isn’t it? To be positive about the . . . aversion.’

‘They make it sound irrational,’ she said. ‘You make it sound irrational. All those hundreds of people locked inside a metal tube above the clouds. Maybe it’s you that’s crazy for not being . . . a little bit . . . worried? You ever think about that, Nick? Maybe it’s you and the rest of the flying glee club. Maybe I’m the sane one.’

She turned back to the window. There were a few of them up there now – their west London home was directly under a flight path – moving like deep black wounds in the sky. So slowly, so slowly. As if they could fall at any moment. She wiped her hands on her jeans, and it all came back.

The noises that sounded like the end of everything. The engines starting – that screaming sound that froze the blood. The suicidal dash to the end of the runway. The mad sensation of leaving solid ground. Rising, rising, like the nausea in the pit of your stomach. And then – perhaps worst of all – the sound of the undercarriage being lifted, as final as the lid on your coffin slamming shut and the nails being banged in. That was the moment you knew there was no going back.

You were trapped.

Then Nick was by her side, Sky in his arms. The girl slipped from the arms of her father to her mother, the way monkeys and small children do.

‘I just want to help,’ Nick said.

She put her free arm around him.

‘I know you do,’ she said. ‘But the thing is, Nick – I really don’t have a fear of flying.’

He looked uncertain. ‘You don’t?’

‘It’s just that I have a problem with take-off and landing,’ she said. Then paused. ‘And the bit in the middle.’

‘One of these courses can help,’ he said. ‘I believe it. There are lots of people who feel like you, Zoe. You’re right – it’s not a mad way to feel. On these courses, pilots talk to you. They explain the sounds. I know you don’t like the sounds . . .’

She suddenly lit up.

‘Or we could do something else,’ she said excitedly.

‘Yes?’

‘Stay home,’ she said, jiggling the child in her arms, making her laugh, and smiling herself now. ‘We could just stay home, Nick. Not go.’

Nick stared at his wife for a long moment.

And then he shook his head.

‘But we have to go,’ he said.

The green plane burned.

The engine burned. The cockpit burned. The green plane burned in the galley and it burned in the undercarriage and it burned in the brakes.

The green plane burned more wildly as the firefighters jumped from the two fire engines – rigs, they called them, and they did not look like anyone’s idea of a fire engine. These fire engines, these rigs, looked more solid, more tank-like, and more ready for a war than a normal fire engine. They were built to go in a straight line. From one of two fire stations at either end of Heathrow to an aircraft in trouble. Like the green plane.

An oil spill spread quickly under the two sawn-off wings of the green plane, and that burned too, a sheet of fire that swiftly rose to a spectacular wall of flame, trailing black smoke as the four firefighters advanced towards it, crouching before the terrible heat, tasting it in the back of their throats, the hoses in their hands looking like small, ineffectual weapons, plastic swords against a dragon, until the moment they began covering the fire with foam, starving it of the air that it craved, choking it, killing it.

In one of the two rigs that faced the nose of the green plane, unloading their blankets of foam on top of the fire, Fire Officer Mike Truman watched the proceedings with quiet satisfaction.

Mike had watched Heathrow’s green plane burn hundreds of times. It was a strange-looking hybrid, made up of many aircraft. The tail of a DC-10. The fuselage of a Jumbo. Bits and pieces all combined into one so that the Heathrow Airport fire service could be prepared for any fire on any aircraft at any time.