Kate Pullinger - Landing Gear

Emily leaned forward. “Start at the beginning. That evening. That party.”

“Where I met you for the first time,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“Well, it’s all been documented already. It’s in the police report.”

“I want to hear it from you.”

“The party on Dukes Meadows. I took Yacub with me. He’d only recently… disembarked, as he says. I’d run into Ruby the day before—I hadn’t seen her for ages—and she invited us to the party.”

“Yes.”

Jack drew a breath and then spoke quickly. “Yacub and I drank a few beers, we met you, you were overly interested in Yacub, you knew he was the falling man and that was alarming. I didn’t know who you were, so I hadn’t even had a chance to be alarmed by that as well.” He stopped and looked stricken. “What if I’d tried to hit on you or something gross like that? Oh my god, it doesn’t even bear thinking about.”

Emily laughed. “I wouldn’t have let you. I knew who you were. At least, I thought I knew who you were.”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

“Let’s leave me out of this for the time being.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t want you to talk about us—you and me. I want you to focus on the river. And Yacub.”

“Oh,” he said, “okay.” He looked across the room. “Yacub and I drank a few beers, then Yacub wandered off, and I ran into Ruby. Ruby gave me—Well. This has been documented already, like I said. Ruby gave me a tablet, she wasn’t sure what it was, some kind of amphetamine. Some kind of hallucinogenic. A pill—a fucking powerful pill. I took it. I don’t know why I took it—I should have known. I’d avoided taking things like that before…”

He looked at Emily. She wondered what he wasn’t saying.

“A bit of draw, a few beers, the odd swig of vodka. I’d never taken anything, you know, chemical.” Jack’s face reddened, and he covered his mouth with his hand.

“What is it?” Emily asked.

“We don’t really learn from other people’s mistakes, do we? Otherwise there’d be no more wars, and shit.” He cleared his throat and gave himself a little shake. “You’d think I’d be big enough—physically large enough—to absorb such a thing without losing my mind. But no. I’m six-five, with the constitution of a fairy princess. Ruby and I went down to the river, I think all Ruby wanted to do—she’d taken it as well, remember—was sit on a bench and watch the night pass by. But I, well, I decided I needed to get into the river. The River Thames… I’d never been in the Thames.”

Jack had forgotten about the camera. He addressed Emily directly. “Have you been in the Thames?”

“Yeah, I have. There’s a place near Henley that I’ve been to a couple of times with friends.”

“Really?”

“Yes—I’ll take you there sometime.”

“That would be good,” Jack said. “I’d like to have another go at it. Maybe without having on five layers of clothes and my trainers.”

“It’s a promise,” she said. “Start again.”

“Oh, yeah, okay.”

“ ‘I’d never been in the Thames,’ ” she prompted.

“I’d never been in the Thames. Getting into the water felt like the best thing I’d ever done. I had this idea that the river would be shallow and warm, with a smooth, sandy bottom, and that those steps on the other side were easily within reach.” He slumped slightly on the sofa. “I don’t know where I got that from—shallow, warm, with a sandy bottom. When I was a kid—nine or ten, I guess—my parents and I had a holiday in a fairly remote part of Spain, sort of the middle, near the border with Portugal, and we found all these beautiful wide, empty, sandy-bottomed rivers. Nearly every day we’d go for a swim and have a picnic. My dad was really happy on that holiday. He said that his love of swimming in fresh water, in rivers, in lakes, was the thing that made him feel most Canadian. My mum and I laughed at him. But I knew what he meant. There’s something about clean, fresh water that makes you feel alive.

“But the Thames is none of these things—it’s tidal, it’s muddy, it’s rocky, it’s full of debris. People have been chucking junk in that river for thousands of years. And it’s deep, and there are powerful currents. It’s much wider than it looks, even at that narrowish point by Dukes Meadows. It’s also freezing. It was spring—it was a warm night, but the water was cold. The weird thing was that I didn’t notice any of this. To me, the water was warm and placid and soothing. It felt fantastic. The sound of it alone—that volume of water.” He stopped.

Emily waited.

“The water. The suck and hum of it.” He paused again. “I was in the water for a long time. It felt like a long time. Standing there—struggling to stand—but standing, nonetheless. The sky above me. The breeze. Little waves slapping against me.

“Then I heard shouting. Ruby’s voice. Shouting my name. So I turned to see where she was—I had this lovely image in my head of Ruby in her swimsuit, coming to join me—and that’s when I lost my footing and fell in. Right under. Mouth full of water. Trying to get a foothold. Struggling. Slipping. I remember thinking, I’ve got to swim, jesus it’s so fucking cold, I’ve got to swim to the riverbank. But my clothes—those giant trainers, my fucking hoodie…

“Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry. Are you going to have to bleep all that swearing?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll deal with that. My target audience is not children.”

“Your target audience,” Jack said. He became serious. “You think people will want to watch this?”

“That’s my aim,” Emily said. “But we’re a long way from that. Don’t worry about the swearing.”

“Okay.” Jack took a drink of smoothie.

Emily watched while he composed himself.

“I kind of woke up then,” he said. “At least, I realized where I was and what was happening. I thought I was going to drown. I kept being pulled under water by the current, slipping and sliding, trying to find a foothold in the mud and the stones and the crap—just when I’d think I had my footing, the river would shift and I’d go under again and when I came up I’d be farther away from the shore. I could see that people were running along the embankment, shouting. I was lucky the moon was out that night. And then I saw him.”

Jack stared at the wall blankly. He looked down at his hands.

Seconds passed, a minute. Two minutes. Jack shuddered, cleared his throat, ran one hand up and down his face, rubbed his eyes.

“He kind of flew toward me—Yacub. I don’t know how else to explain it. He was on the riverbank one moment, down at the edge of the water. I saw him before I went under once again. I was really losing it now. I’d swallowed a ton of water and my clothes were fucking heavy, and all of a sudden I was so tired, I—Well. I went under and when I came up he was swooping across the water toward me, and then he had me under the arms and—jesus—I’m nearly twice his size—and he hauled me out of the water. The moon was out, but it was dark and windy and—the next thing I knew I was in the ambulance and the crew was fussing over me and I was throwing up, and, you were there.

“You were there, and when they tried to make you leave, you said you were my sister. That’s what you said. And I was puking and coughing and freezing and still thinking I was about to die, but through all that I looked at you and I thought, I remember thinking—my sister, and here I am about to die. And then I thought, jesus fuck, Mrs. Harriet is going to kill me.”

Jack smiled, and then he grew serious again.

“He’s a genie, that’s what I tell him. He doesn’t like it when I say that. But there’s something, isn’t there, something. Some kind of magical power. How else can you explain it? He survived that journey in the underbelly of the airplane. He fell out of the sky and onto my mother’s car. And before that, if you talk to him about his background, he survived so many things. Get him to talk about it. Magic. At least that’s what I think. No one agrees with me. Least of all him. Not even Ruby, and she was there that night.