Kate Pullinger - Landing Gear

Yacub looked surprised. Then he said, “I like beer.”

Jack wasn’t convinced. “I guess they don’t drink much in your part of the world,” he said.

Yacub shook his head, and squared his shoulders. “I like beer.”

“Okay then,” Jack said. And they headed into the crowd.

It was a mild evening. It hadn’t rained much of late, so the ground was hard. They made their way down to the river, which was where Ruby and a few of her friends had been saying they planned to hang out. The crowd was thinner there, so Yacub and Jack sat down and leaned against a tree—at least Jack sat down and leaned against the tree. Yacub didn’t want to sit on the ground in his new trousers.

It was great to be back at Dukes Meadows. No one had figured out how to rig up a sound system—bit of an oversight—so though the common was full of people, it was oddly quiet, voices snatched away by the breeze. Some kids were doing that thing of dancing with their headphones on, no one listening to the same music, but they were a bit half-hearted, as though they’d read about flash mobs online but actually doing it was, in fact, really boring. Like so many things in life, Jack thought.

A while later, music started up in the distance; it sounded like it was coming from a car. Jack got up and brushed himself off and suggested to Yacub that they head over. Yacub looked a little reluctant until Jack said, “Maybe we’ll find Ruby.” Everyone perked up at the thought of Ruby.

After the plane had risen thousands of feet into the air and he realized that there was no way off the shelf where he was crouching and into the plane itself, Yacub decided that, if he survived the journey, he would have a beer to see what it was like. Alcohol was illegal in Pakistan, and he hadn’t drunk in Dubai, not even when he worked for Imran, who was half-drunk most of the time. But on that flight, squashed into a metal corner, he decided he would embrace becoming an American. He would play baseball. And he would drink a beer and raise a farewell toast to the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and no one would arrest him.

And here he was with Jack at a party, his heart already racing. Jack had given him three cans of beer and he drank them, one, two, three. He was determined to like it.

Yacub followed Jack through the crowd toward the pulsing bass of the music. On the way they passed girl after girl who looked like Ruby, though none was as lovely. Yacub had seen western teenagers in movies and on television, though none of them were quite like this. Here people shouted at each other above the noise of the crowd and built pyramids out of empty beer cans before using another can to knock the pyramid over and then laughing like this was the funniest thing they had ever seen. There were couples kissing right in front of everyone else and Yacub even saw one couple lying on the ground together, kissing.

The music was getting louder as they drew closer to its source. But then the sound switched off abruptly, they heard a car door slam and an engine start. As the car pulled away, people shouted and booed, and soon the party was quiet once again but for the noise of talking and, in the distance, girls singing.

There was still no sign of Ruby. A girl with bright red hair, like hair that had been soaked in blood, came up to Jack; she had a video camera and she was filming him. When she turned her camera on Yacub, he put his hand over the lens. “No thank you,” he said. He’d seen Imran do this to a reporter in the hotel.

She persisted in aiming her camera at him. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“I will not be giving you that information,” Yacub replied.

She lowered her camera. She blinked once, twice. “Are you the falling man?” she asked.

As soon as she said that, Jack stepped between them, and his height completely blocked Yacub’s view.

“That’s a nice camera,” Jack said. “What’s your name?” As he spoke he put his hand behind his back and waved Yacub away. Yacub took his chance and slipped into the crowd. He had begun to feel very unwell. He had started to feel very, very unwell indeed.

He went along, trying not to stumble, not wanting to fall onto the ground in his new clothes. There was nowhere to sit, nowhere to go at all, in the darkness and the great heaving mass of people.

Yacub remembered when he flew back from Dubai to Karachi. After he got beyond passport control and through the exit doors, he emerged into a vast crowd, women, children, men, young and old, jammed into the arrival hall, all waiting for some longed-for family member—he’d never seen such a tight-packed crowd of people. The floor was strewn with rose petals and the crowd jostled in the intense heat as they struggled to spot their relatives. He felt happy to be among his own people at the same time as feeling annoyed that there seemed to be no way to get through the crowd, no way at all out of arrivals.

Tonight the crowd was almost as dense, but whereas in Karachi airport everyone was Yacub’s colour and height and size, here they were enormous, tall goray like Jack or tall and black, tall and skinny, but also lots of huge people, people with acres of extra flesh on display, popping out between their T-shirts and their jeans. Yacub was among the giants, all speaking in their indecipherable slang. Having to look up to see their faces was making him feel dizzy.

He stumbled, landing on his hands, which were now covered in mud. When he stood up again, there they were in front of him, the three desi boys he had seen in the American shop.

“Oi!” said one. “You! What’re you doing here?” Now there were more boys in the group, six or seven, Yacub thought.

“He’s got his new clothes on,” another said, as though this in itself was ridiculous.

Yacub swayed slightly.

“He’s fucking hamstered! A good Muslim, you cunt.”

They were also drunk, clutching cans of beer. Yacub found their comments baffling.

“Oi! Speak up,” one of them said, but he didn’t want to talk to them. The crowd came to his assistance, surging around him, and once again, he disappeared into it. He had to find Jack. In the distance, he saw the trees, black against the night sky. Where was Jack?

Harriet was at her workstation in the kitchen, checking her Facebook. The boys had gone out to their party. Michael was slumped in front of the TV, catching up with the shows he had recorded. Jack had unfriended Crazeeharree almost immediately but remained friends with the more recent Tracy Wentworth-Fitch; she half suspected that he knew it was her but chose to ignore that fact.

For the last few years, Harriet had fought against the urge to monitor her son online; she was mostly successful. She wanted him to have his own life, a private existence that she knew nothing about, a rich, complex and secret realm. The astonishing truth was that he was a good boy.

But this evening, she gave in to her baser instincts. Instead of worrying less because Jack was with Yacub, she found herself worrying more. Someone had witnessed and photographed Yacub’s fall. And were they out there, looking for him? She checked her feeds once again but found nothing, so she scuttled around the internet, catching up with the plans for the party. Dukes Meadows. Okay. Deep breath. Jack had said the party was at Abdul’s but that didn’t matter. At Dukes there was a good chance the police would shut the party down. If that didn’t happen, she would get in the car and drive over at around midnight; once there, she’d phone Jack and offer him and Yacub a ride home.

Harriet clicked around the friends’ pages. Photos from the party had begun to appear already. Jack wasn’t posting photos yet but Harriet saw from earlier postings on his page that he had renewed his acquaintance with Ruby.