Kate Pullinger - Landing Gear

Michael snorted.

“You’re going to the US?” Jack asked. He wasn’t sure why, but he felt like crying. Luckily he had learned how not to cry two years back. “Who will play World of Battle Fatigues with me?” he asked, immediately regretting it—pathetic whinger.

“You’ve met?” Harriet asked. “You’ve played games?”

“You can’t hide someone in our house and expect me not to notice,” Jack replied. “It’s my house too. I live here.”

“Okay,” his mother said. “Let’s go back to bed. We’ll talk this through in the morning.”

So that’s what they did. They all went back to bed.

Jack couldn’t sleep. So he did what he always did when he couldn’t sleep: he thought about Dukes Meadows on a sunny summer’s day, and he thought about Ruby.

Harriet listened to Michael breathing, knowing he was listening to her.

After a while, she spoke into the darkness of the room. “He’s just a boy.”

“Where’d you get him from?”

“You make it sound like I bought him at the supermarket.”

“Harriet, who is he and what is he doing here?”

“We’ll talk tomorrow, Michael.”

“I’ll be home late. I’ve got a meeting.”

“On a Friday night?”

“There are people here from New York. I have to be there.”

“Of course.”

They stopped talking and rolled over, away from each other. They pretended to fall asleep for so long, they fell asleep.

In the morning, as usual, Michael was gone before either Harriet or Jack was up. Jack announced that when he got home from school he would take Yacub shopping for clothes. “I’ll introduce him to the joys of British high street shopping,” he said. “I’ll take him for coffee and load him up with the latest stuff.”

“Okay,” said Harriet, relieved at the thought that she wouldn’t have to do this herself. “Great.”

“You’ll need to give me cash,” Jack said. “Lots.”

He packed the sandwich she had made him and left.

There was no sign of Yacub; she would leave him to sleep. Harriet took a shower, dressed and got ready to walk down to the cash machine. She would go to the supermarket later, maybe while the boys—she laughed to herself at that, “the boys”—were out shopping. As she emerged from her house, she noticed the young woman on a bicycle across the street. As always she was stationary, one foot on the ground. She was staring straight ahead, as though waiting for an invisible traffic light to turn green.

Harriet never got a really good look at the girl on the bike; she wore a helmet, sunglasses, scarves. For a while Harriet thought she must be a new neighbour, but she knew most of her neighbours—their large terraced houses were under-occupied and over-renovated, like hers—and no one had moved in or out. Perhaps the girl was staying in the house across the street, though Harriet doubted that the retired circuit judge was the sort to let out rooms. From time to time Harriet wondered if the cyclist could in fact be Emily, but then thought it was too unlikely, couldn’t be.

It looked like it might rain, so Harriet went back inside to get an umbrella, and when she came out again the girl was gone.

Every morning Michael walked to the station to take the train to work. The train to Waterloo, followed by the Drain into the City. He liked his commute, truth be told—it was a blank space between home and work. He left early and came home late so he avoided the crowds. He did his commute empty-handed—there weren’t enough hours left in the day for him to have to work at home, so he didn’t carry paperwork. He didn’t read the newspaper, he didn’t do email, he didn’t shuffle through documents, he didn’t fiddle with his phone; he walked, he sat, he looked out the window, he watched his fellow commuters and he thought about nothing. It was a forty-minute meditation at each end of the day. It kept him from going crazy.

Michael was at a loss. He’d spent the last two years at a loss. He had no idea how to make amends to his wife; he wasn’t in the habit of making amends simply because he was not in the habit of doing wrong. He thought perhaps—was it possible?—he’d never done anything wrong before in his entire life. No, he must have done something wrong at some point. But maybe not. He handed in wallets and umbrellas to lost property, he offered his seat on the train to older people, his expense account was pristine. He wasn’t a big talker, so he’d never had occasion to exaggerate or, indeed, lie. He liked the same bands he’d listened to as a student, even when their reunion albums were lousy. When the Occupy people had been camped in front of St. Paul’s, he bought them food and donated money, even though what they were protesting against in their vague, all-embracing way was him. Well, not him directly—he wasn’t a banker—but his friends. Except, he corrected himself again, he didn’t have any friends, he’d never been a person who made friends. His colleagues.

If there is an advantage to leaving where you come from and making your life somewhere new, it is that you can leave your past behind. Michael had left his past behind. He’d wobbled that time in Toronto, he’d allowed a combination of nostalgia and cocktails to morph into desire. But he’d left that behind as well.

The disadvantage to leaving where you come from and making your life somewhere new is that once enough years have passed, the new place is no longer new, and you find yourself burdened with a past after all. Michael had a long history in London; he’d lived in London for more years than he’d lived anywhere else. And he coped with this by becoming absent. He was absent from his family; he was absent from his life. He was the Man Who Wasn’t There, except he was there, eating and working and taking the train into work every day. Going to meetings. Moving figures around spreadsheets. Estimating and assessing risk while remaining truly risk-averse himself.

And he had let people down. He had done wrong. To Harriet. Jack as well.

And now Harriet had invited a stranger into their house. Was this his punishment? A man who fell out of the sky?

On his way to school Jack thought about Yacub. Now that he was allowed to leave the little room out back and go into the world like a real person, not a ghost, Jack was looking forward to showing him round. After we’ve been to the shops, he thought, we’ll visit the supermarket. It would be like a visit to Mecca for Yacub, Jack reckoned, or maybe not Mecca, since Yacub might be an actual Muslim and that might offend him. While out, they’d watch the planes lower their landing gear. He’d get Yacub to tell him what it was like to fall out of a plane. Jack could take him to the multiplex. He’d like that. And he could take him over the river to Dukes Meadows.

When Jack was fourteen, he and his friends fell into the habit of meeting at Dukes. But then David McDonald died. It all came to an abrupt end. Jack had handed the bag of weed to Ruby. It contained three little tablets. He saw Ruby take one. David McDonald probably took one. David McDonald died. Jack carried this knowledge around with him like an extra limb he kept hidden under his hoodie.

He kept track of Ruby and Frank on Facebook, but it wasn’t the same as seeing them every day at school. Ruby was probably still down at Dukes with her cartwheels and her older brother who Jack had never spoken to but who, he felt sure, was as terrifying as ever.

While Jack was suspended, his mother had insisted on taking him with her that night she was covering the election, the night they got into trouble with George Psycho. The “events” changed Jack. Changed Jack and his mother. It was pretty spectacular, the video of her moment in front of the cameras, and it had a perpetual afterlife online. Jack sometimes watched it to remind himself that it really did happen, that he hadn’t made it up. He had been standing behind the cameraman in the drafty town hall, watching the live broadcast, almost ready to admit that it was pretty interesting to watch his mum on TV. The producer with her clipboard, the candidates lined up on the stage, the ballot boxes, the party workers, all the purposeful activity. It took only a few moments—the man brushed by him on his way toward the stage. He ran straight for Jack’s mum, he grabbed her and knocked her off her feet and they slammed into the row of politicians behind them, and everyone fell, like dominoes, clack, clack, clack . His mother had shrieked when George Sigo grabbed her, and that shriek was lodged in Jack’s brain, would always be.