Kate Pullinger - Landing Gear

She turned to face him. He brought his face close for a kiss. He lifted her leg and pulled her to him.

Harriet put her hands on her husband’s chest and gave him a great, heavy shove. She pushed him roughly again, and again, and again, and he grunted each time her hands landed on his chest, air whooshing from his lungs, his head snapping forward as she pushed him across the bed. As she pushed, she thought, poor man, he works long hours at a difficult job and this is what he gets. He didn’t deserve it. But that didn’t stop her from pushing him so hard that eventually she pushed him completely out of the bed. He hit his head on the sharp edge of the bedside table on his way to the floor.

“Ouch!” he said. “Harriet.”

She scuttled like a crab back to her side of the bed, turned over and snuggled down as though Michael was not back from work, was not in the house, let alone the bedroom.

“Harriet,” he said, his tone less surprised and a bit harsher this time. “Harriet.” Now he sounded angry. She heard him sit up and rub his head. “Ouch,” he said again, and she was reminded of the overpriced dancing robot they’d bought Jack one Christmas. It fell over all the time and would mournfully say “Ouch” before being set upright to resume dancing. Michael got up, pulled on a T-shirt and some underwear and his dressing gown, and left.

Harriet remained in bed. What just happened? What would happen next? She hadn’t realized how angry she was. She’d got used to the way they lived, she got on with things, Jack got on with things, Michael worked long hours and they’d given up living a normal family life years and years and years ago. What was a normal family like anyway? She loved him. And she’d pushed him out of bed and onto the floor.

The house remained quiet. She heard the toilet flush. She heard Michael make his way down the stairs.

Then, moments later, at the same moment that Harriet thought, oh no, Yacub , Michael began shouting.

Despite the lovely warm bath and the thick soft towels and the clean, perfect bed, Yacub could not sleep. Each time he closed his eyes it would happen again: with an enormous clunk and whirr, the landing gear began to unfold itself in front of him, the great pistons and wheels moving into place, the stink of fuel and oil and machinery. Caught off-guard, off-balance, dizzy, frozen, only half-conscious, afraid, he toppled from the shelf where he’d been trapped, crouching for hours and hours, and was cast out into the limitless sky, the ground rushing toward him much too quickly. And then he’d wake with a shout and a flail, landing in the clean, perfect bed, the most comfortable bed in the world. After what felt like hours, he gave up and resigned himself to lying there, awake.

He was beginning to fall asleep once again when the door to the room opened and light flooded in from the kitchen. In the door stood a man, not as tall as Jack and much heavier. Yacub knew immediately that he was the father of the household and that the father had come to kill him.

The man turned on the overhead light. At first it was as though he didn’t notice Yacub, as though he was looking for something else. But then the words rushed from his mouth: “What the fuck… who the fuck… what are you …?”

Yacub bolted from the bed. He threw back the curtains and tried to lever open the window. But it was heavy and in his panic it stuck. He turned, grabbed the wooden chair and wielded it over his head like a weapon, hoping the father was not armed.

“Put that down!” Michael bellowed. He stepped toward Yacub, who realized that if the man came any closer he was going to have to bring the chair down on his head.

Then Mrs. Harriet arrived, shrieking.

Pakistan is a hard country, quick to humiliate or otherwise destroy the wise, placing its profoundest hopes in fools. Yacub first decided to leave when he was a small boy and saw his fate mapped out for him by his father, and the alternatives on the television in the village café. But this decision, which led him away from his family, first to Karachi, then to Dubai, and now here, caused him pain. His father’s village, high in the mountain valley, had not fared well over the past decade. The men with beards. The Americans. The drones. The army. And the earthquake, followed a few years later by the floods. Nobody takes their holidays in the mountain valleys anymore. There was nothing there for Yacub. He’d spent four months in a bankrupted Dubai labour camp. He’d spent hours crushed on a freezing shelf at thirty thousand feet. And now, an angry goray was about to kill him.

He put the chair back down and sat on it. He was ready. It was time to die.

When Jack woke and heard the shouting, he assumed the worst, which, even though he was sixteen now and could in theory fend for himself, was that his mum and dad were having an enormous row and were splitting up and he’d have to choose between them.

But then he heard the noise was coming from the kitchen. Yacub, he thought. And Dad. Shit.

By the time he got down the stairs, his mother was trying to calm down his dad. Yacub was sitting in a chair, looking miserable and skinny, as though he’d rather go back to Afghanistan or wherever and be recruited by the Taliban than be stuck here with Jack’s lousy family.

“He landed on my car,” Harriet was saying, “in the supermarket car park.”

Of course. Where else?

His father stared at his mother.

“I thought he was dead.”

“Well, he’s not dead,” his father said, categorically.

Jack and Harriet both looked at Yacub. He definitely wasn’t dead. Jack felt a bit foolish for believing even a tiny bit that he might be.

“I’m not dead,” Yacub confirmed, though he sounded as though he wished he was or thought he would be soon.

“I wasn’t sure,” said Harriet. “He needed help. He needs us.”

“What?” said Jack’s dad. “Who is he? A refugee?”

“No—he—”

“You’re moving strangers into the house without even telling me?”

Jack noticed that his father was bleeding from a cut on the top of his head. Blood had snaked through what was left of his hair and was making its way across his forehead. Had Yacub hit him?! Jack felt an unfamiliar surge of anger; he couldn’t just stand by, yet again, when his parents were under threat. And he’d liked the guy! He pushed past his mother and into the little room and threw himself at Yacub, wrestling him off the chair and onto the floor.

“Jack!” Harriet shrieked. “Stop it!”

Jack expected Yacub to put up a fight, but he lay there on the floor without moving. Jack had him pinned down by the shoulders. Yacub looked up at Jack with an expression of such weariness that Jack stopped, confused.

“You didn’t have to hit my dad!” Jack said. “He’s an old guy.”

“Jack,” Michael said, “he didn’t hit me. Your mother did.”

“I did not!”

Michael sighed. “Let’s just say it was an injury from a previous incident that took place earlier this evening.”

“You’re bleeding,” said Harriet, and she moved toward her husband with a tissue from her dressing gown pocket, but he stopped her before she could touch him. He took the tissue out of her hand without touching her.

“Thank you,” he said, sounding oddly formal. “I’ll take care of it myself.”

Jack stood up and offered a hand to help Yacub off the floor. “Sorry,” he said. Yacub took his hand and sat down on the bed.

“I suppose he is,” Harriet said.

“Is what?” asked Michael.

“A kind of refugee.”

“I’m not a refugee,” Yacub said sharply. “I’ve come to work. I’m not staying in this country. I’m going to America.”