Kate Pullinger - Landing Gear

Harriet had given up asking Jack to set the table a couple of years back when his response to her request was such a gush of teenage hostility that she screeched at him that if he didn’t set the table RIGHT NOW she would never cook him dinner ever again. He laughed, of course. She knew that he knew the threat was meaningless and that she would be unable to act upon it no matter how hard she stamped her feet. She knew he knew that the result would be the polar opposite of the threat: she would not only continue to cook dinner for him every night, she would never ask him to set the table ever again. So she cooked, and she set the table, and peace reigned: Harriet in the kitchen, Jack on his games console, Yacub asleep in the little room off the kitchen, Michael at work.

Yacub had to be dead. Or, Harriet reasoned, she might have done what her son had long been suggesting: lost her mind.

She turned on the radio, half expecting to hear her own voice on it. If a man could fall out of the sky and survive, surely she could be in two places at the same time?

Yacub liked the room the woman put him in. The walls lined up with the floors. The window had two layers of glass in it and curtains. The door had a knob and a lock with a key in it. There were power outlets and shelves above a little table with a chair and a lamp, and a bed with sheets and blankets and pillows that were soft. There was a rug on the floor. Very very clean, everything clean, everything lined up straight. Tidy. New. He ran his hands back and forth over the bed, trying to convince himself it was real.

When they arrived at the house, she sat him down at the kitchen counter and wrapped a soft, tasselled blanket around his shoulders before making him a sandwich and a mug of milky tea. The kitchen was like something out of a movie. Not quite an American kitchen. But not like a kitchen he’d ever sat in before: they cooked on a fire at his father’s house in the Swat Valley, he had served food from a dim old kitchen in that house in Karachi, and in Dubai hundreds of men had jostled for space in the labour camp’s communal kitchen. He’d left his home and gone to work in Karachi; he’d left Karachi and gone to work in Dubai; he’d left Dubai and gone home to Pakistan where he paid Ameer to get him onto the plane that brought him here. He ached from his arduous journey. As he sat in that kitchen, he wanted to put his face down on the cool, clean, shiny counter, black with flecks of silver and gold beneath the hard surface. She saw that he was tired and so she showed him the room.

“You’ll be safe in here,” she said. “If you hear my family, just stay in your room. In case, well—in case you’re dead. We don’t want to alarm them.” She smiled and closed the door. Yacub listened, but she did not lock it from the outside.

Yacub was happy to stay in the room. There had been a lot of times in his life when he was confined or restricted, though never in such conditions of luxury. He lay down under the covers—layers of blankets and duvets—and fell into a deep, dark sleep.

In his sleep, he dreamed of flying. Not hunched up on a tiny shelf beneath the plane’s undercarriage, or packed into an old PIA plane with only a plastic bag for his luggage. He dreamed of flying through the soft night air above the green valley where he was born. Flying without effort, weightless and airborne, like the kites and gulls he used to watch hovering over Karachi. In Dubai he’d been amazed when Imran had shown him Google Earth on the glossy tablet an American client had given him to make good a debt. At first the sensitive touchscreen had alarmed Yacub, but only briefly. He used it to fly himself over the Arabian Sea, pausing over Karachi, then following the Indus and its tributaries up to the Swat Valley. He dropped down to a lower altitude to try to find his village, but the map had pixellated and frozen, and Imran had decided it was time to leave. But still, what he’d seen had entered Yacub’s dreams; when he dreamed of flying now, he flew via satellite.

When he woke up, the house was completely quiet, as was the street outside: nighttime. He switched on the lamp and noticed a plate with another sandwich and a glass of water beside it: did they eat nothing but sandwiches in England? There was a note as well but the handwriting was of poor quality and he could not read it. He tried to imagine what it might say, but there were too many possibilities: “Enjoy the sandwich and make yourself at home.” “Enjoy the sandwich but leave immediately as my husband will kill you when he finds you.” “Enjoy the sandwich, there’s plenty more where this came from, but I’ll make you pay for it by ensuring you become our family house-slave.”

Yacub had worked for a wealthy family in Karachi, and he was not going back to that again. In many ways his time working in that household was worse than his time working in Dubai, even after the building company was bankrupted. Of course the worst time of all was on that frozen shelf behind the giant burning wheels beneath the plane. But he’d survived and now he would have a new life.

He took a bite of the sandwich. Slightly stale bread. Cucumber. A sweet and sticky mango chutney. He was starving.

He’d thought he would land in the USA. When he paid Ameer to get him on the plane, he paid to go to the USA. But as soon as he landed and spoke to the woman, and looked around, and shook off the cramps in his legs, he realized he had landed in England. In Pakistan, Yacub thought, we love England but we also blame it for our problems, though not nearly as much as we love and blame the USA.

After he finished eating, he stood beside the door, listening. The house remained quiet. He tried to remember where to find the toilet. In the corridor on the way to the front door—that’s right. A tiny below-stairs cubicle with a minute sink. He washed as best he could, bent over beneath the sloping ceiling, cleaning his face with soapy water. He needed to wash properly; he’d be able to think straight when he was clean. He decided to explore the house a little more.

But as he stepped out into the corridor he felt overwhelmingly tired yet again. He thought of Raheela; he had given her his phone before he left Karachi. He would find a way to phone her later today. He went back to his room and this time left the door ajar, climbed into the bed and went straight back to sleep.

The next time he woke up, he could hear a gun battle.

Here was Jack at his happiest: in front of the TV with World of Battle Fatigues online, volume turned up so he could hear the Americans, who were also playing, talking to each other—Jack didn’t use the headset to talk while he was playing but he liked to listen to the other players. “Fuck you,” one American said. “Fuck that,” another replied.

Given that it was the end of the afternoon in London, it must have been morning where they were, but the Americans seemed to be online all day and all night. The graphics of the game—a burnt-out landscape that nature was reclaiming—were hyperreal and the game was light on gore, which Jack preferred: he liked to gun down his opponents in cold blood but he didn’t like to see them bleed. “Fuck you!” shouted the American. “Fuck that!” shouted another.

On Jack’s right, at a ninety-degree angle to the TV, accessible with a simple swivel of his chair, was the coffee table where he had the following to hand: a snack, preferably something sweet; a drink—some kind of smoothie as Jack’s mother wouldn’t buy fizzy drinks; his phone, so he could message with his friends; and his laptop. He had YouTube open so that he could play music videos; Facebook, with at least three, maybe even as many as fifteen chat windows open so he could chat with his friends in private; instant messaging as well so that all of his friends who were also online could join in the conversation, which mostly consisted of attempts to mimic the sound of their own farts through elaborate use of random fonts and keyboard symbols; one of the casual games sites Jack liked so that when the chat got boring and the texts stopped coming and his console was reloading he could race a car or two; Skype, in case he wanted to speak to someone face to face; and his Tumblr page so he could capture the best of it all for posterity. And his homework open in the background so when his mum came into the room he could show her what he was really doing.