Iain Sinclair - Millennium People

I lay beside her on the sofa, our glasses tapping, and listened to the traffic. It was noisier than usual, the Heathrow tailback feeding its frustration into inner London.

‘Ten minutes.’ I finished my Scotch, already thinking not of the next drink, but of the one after that. ‘I have a feeling we’re not going to make it.’

‘Relax…’ Sally poured her whisky into my glass. ‘You didn’t want to go in the first place.’

‘Yes and no. It’s having to shake hands with Mickey Mouse that drives me up the wall. Americans love these Disney hotels.’

‘Don’t be mean. They remind them of their childhoods.’

‘Childhoods they didn’t actually have. What about the rest of us – why do we have to be reminded of American childhoods?’

‘That’s the modern world in a nutshell.’ Sally sniffed her empty glass, nostrils flaring like the gills of an exotic and delicate fish. ‘At least it gets you away.’

‘All these trips? Let’s face it, they’re just a delusion. Air travel, the whole Heathrow thing, it’s a collective flight from reality. People walk up to the check-ins and for once in their lives they know where they’re going. Poor sods, it’s printed on their tickets. Look at me, Sally. I’m just as bad. Flying off to Florida isn’t what I really want to do. It’s a substitute for resigning from the Adler. I haven’t the courage to do that.’

‘You have.’

‘Not yet. It’s a safe haven, a glorified university department packed with ambitious neurotics. Think of it – there are thirty senior psychologists cooped up together, and every one of them hated his father.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘I never met him. It was the one good thing my mother did for me. Now, where’s Prashar?’

I stood up and went to the telephone. Sally picked up the TV remote from the carpet and switched on the lunchtime news. The picture swam into view, and I recognized a familiar airport concourse.

‘David…look.’ Sally sat forward, gripping the sticks beside her feet. ‘Something awful…’

I listened to Prashar’s voice, but my eyes were held by the news bulletin. The reporter’s commentary was drowned by the wailing of police sirens. He stepped back from the camera as an ambulance team pushed a trolley through the mêlée of passengers and airline personnel. A barely conscious woman lay on the trolley, rags of clothing across her chest, blood speckling her arms. Dust swirled in the air, billowing above the boutiques and bureaux de change, a frantic microclimate trying to escape through the ventilator ducts.

Behind the trolley was the main arrivals gate of Terminal 2, guarded by police armed with sub-machine guns. A harried group of hire-car drivers waited at the barrier, the names flagged on their cardboard signs already at half-mast. A man carrying an executive briefcase stepped from the arrivals gate, the sleeveless jacket of his double-breasted suit exposing a bloodied arm. He stared at the signs raised towards him, as if trying to remember his own name. Two paramedics and an Aer Lingus hostess knelt on the floor, treating an exhausted passenger who clutched an empty suitcase that had lost its lid.

‘Mr Markham?’ A voice sounded faintly in my ear. ‘This is Prashar speaking…’

Without thinking, I switched off the phone. I stood beside the sofa, my hands steadying Sally’s shoulders. She was shivering like a child, her fingers wiping her nose, as if the violent images on the screen reminded her of her own near-fatal accident.

‘Sally, you’re safe here. You’re with me.’

‘I’m fine.’ She calmed herself and pointed to the set. ‘There was a bomb on a baggage carousel. David, we might have been there. Was anyone killed?’

‘”Three dead, twenty-six injured…”’ I read the caption on the screen. ‘Let’s hope there are no children.’

Sally fumbled with the remote control, turning up the sound. ‘Don’t they issue a warning? Codewords the police recognize? Why bomb the arrivals lounge?’

‘Some people are mad. Sally, we’re all right.’

‘No one is all right.’

She held my arm and made me sit beside her. Together we stared at the pictures from the concourse. Police, first-aid crews and duty-free staff were helping injured passengers to the waiting ambulances. Then the picture changed, and we were watching an amateur video taken by a passenger who had entered the baggage-reclaim area soon after the explosion. The film-maker stood with his back to the customs checkpoints, evidently too shocked by the violence that had torn through the crowded hall to put down his camera and offer help to the victims.

Dust seethed below the ceiling, swirling around the torn sections of strip lighting that hung from the roof. Overturned trollies lay on the floor, buckled by the blast. Stunned passengers sat beside their suitcases, clothes stripped from their backs, covered with blood and fragments of leather and glass.

The video camera lingered on the stationary carousel, its panels splayed like rubber fans. The baggage chute was still discharging suitcases, and a set of golf clubs and a child’s pushchair tumbled together among the heaped luggage.

Ten feet away, two injured passengers sat on the floor, watching the suitcases emerge from the chute. One was a man in his twenties, wearing jeans and the rags of a plastic windcheater. When the first rescuers reached him, a policeman and an airport security guard, the young man began to comfort a middle-aged African lying beside him.

The other passenger gazing at the baggage chute was a woman in her late thirties, with a sharp forehead and a bony but attractive face, dark hair knotted behind her. She wore a tailored black suit pitted with glass, like the sequinned tuxedo of a nightclub hostess. A piece of flying debris had drawn blood from her lower lip, but she seemed almost untouched by the explosion. She brushed the dust from her sleeve and stared sombrely at the confusion around her, a busy professional late for her next appointment.

‘David…?’ Sally reached for her sticks. ‘What is it?’

‘I’m not sure.’ I left the sofa and knelt in front of the screen, nearly certain that I recognized the woman. But the amateur cameraman turned to survey the ceiling, where a fluorescent tube was discharging a cascade of sparks, fireworks in a madhouse. ‘I think that’s someone I know.’

‘The woman in the dark suit?’

‘It’s hard to tell. Her face reminded me of…’ I looked at my watch, and noticed our luggage in the hall. ‘We’ve missed our flight to Miami.’

‘Never mind. This woman you saw – was it Laura?’

‘I think so.’ I took Sally’s hands, noticing how steady they felt. ‘It did look like her.’

‘It can’t be.’ Sally left me and sat on the sofa, searching for her whisky. The news bulletin had returned to the concourse, where the hire-car drivers were walking away, placards lowered. ‘There’s a contact number for relatives. I’ll dial it for you.’

‘Sally, I’m not a relative.’

‘You were married for eight years.’ Sally spoke matter-of-factly, as if describing my membership of a disbanded lunching club. ‘They’ll tell you how she is.’

‘She looked all right. It might have been Laura. That expression of hers, always impatient…’

‘Call Henry Kendall at the Institute. He’ll know.’

‘Henry? Why?’

‘He’s living with Laura.’

‘True. Still, I don’t want to panic the poor man. What if I’m wrong?’

‘I don’t think you are.’ Sally spoke in her quietest voice, a sensible teenager talking to a rattled parent. ‘You need to find out. Laura meant a lot to you.’

‘That was a long time ago.’ Aware of her faintly threatening tone, I said: ‘Sally, I met you.’