I lifted the box so that it was level with my face. My slack, sleepy muscles struggled with its weight. I shook it. I smelled it. The tang of metal and a shut-in odour of burned things. Plastic, aluminium, flesh. I closed my eyes and saw jerking passengers belted into their seats trying to scream, but there was no oxygen to feed them because the fire was stealing it from their lungs. I hurled the box as far as I could into the surf, rubbing and re-rubbing my hands on my jeans to get rid of the greasy feel of the thing.
I burned the cardboard and climbed the stone steps back to the promenade, suddenly bone weary. I kept looking back, expecting to see the orange casing tumbling ashore on the filthy brown curl of tide, but I knew it would not surface again without the help of a diver.
I walked around the village for a while, hoping to spot the person who had given the box to me. All I could think when I tried to picture his face was a number and a letter: 34A. I tried to remember if he had said that number in conjunction with the box he had handed over, but the upset of being given the CVR wouldn't let me settle on anything we discussed. By the time I reached Ruth's house, I was convinced the 34A was in my mind for some other, probably trivial, reason. His address, maybe. He must live in a flat. But how could I know that if I'd never seen him before?
I made a cup of tea I didn't want and settled on the sofa, feeling hot and agitated. The room had a feeling of absence. It was a cool room, with little in the way of decoration or ornament. There were no clocks, no pictures, no mirrors. No magazines lying on the floor. No flowers in vases. It felt like a waiting room. It felt like a place that was never meant to be lived in.
I grew impatient. Rest was the only word the doctors ever seemed to toss my way, but the moment I parked myself in a chair it was as if life started to accelerate around me. Tamara was getting older while I sipped tea. Her life, presumably, was thickening with other people, events, excitement, while mine spun like a dead thing caught in a web. Any doubt or regret she might be feeling was being erased every day that went by without my contacting her.
But there was also the possibility that she, like me, was failing to kick on after the breach. There were things to do, there was this old flame of hers trying his best to re-kindle what had existed between them, and she was either going for it, or she wasn't. And here I was wondering whether I ought to give a shit. She didn't stick with me, so who was to say, were she to come back, that she wouldn't hightail it again if some other catastrophe befell me?
The empty room sucked any noise I made into it and shared it around. I placed the tea cup on its saucer and the room filled with brittle echoes. Then I had to move again, to take the cup from the anaesthetic living room and deposit it in the kitchen, which contained a welcome chaos. I stood by the window and looked out at the massive Suffolk sky. There were no aircraft up there just now, but there were plenty of contrails to show where they had been. When there were no jets, it was easy to convince myself that they did not exist, that it was all a mental construct. How could they exist? How could something weighing the same as 800 elephants get off the ground? Lift and thrust. And bollocks. I passed my 'A' level in Physics, I had flown the bastards, but I still couldn't get my head around it. I think, maybe, that part of the accident - the
almost
accident - came about because at base I didn't have faith in these machines. I had trained for years and spent a lot of money following my dream, but that's all it was. A fancy created by an ambitious imagination.
It had been a year since the near miss; I could hardly remember what I needed to do to taxi from the apron to the runway. My hands no longer looked like the kind of things that were capable of the delicate manoeuvring that took a mass of metal up, or brought it down. And now, every time I saw a Trip-7, or a Jumbo, nosing into the blue, there was a frisson of disbelief - as if I was looking at a flying saucer - before the fear descended and rational thought went walkabout.
Rain was rearing up far south of the nuclear reactor at Sizewell. It was at once both a solid black wall and as soft and uncertain as gossamer. I thought of Charlie's nets once they'd been shot, the way they hit the water and then billowed, as if they'd expanded as a result of breath drawn. Black capture, sinking fast.
The other side of the sky towards Great Yarmouth, miles and miles away, but little more than a turn of the head, was as clean as a scrubbed plate. Supertankers spoilt the horizon's line.
There was a piece of paper lying next to the microwave oven. I went to retrieve it, thinking that Ruth had left me some instructions for dinner, but it was just a shopping receipt from the previous day.
Steaks. Broccoli. Orange juice. Folic acid.
I checked the fridge, thinking I might start cooking so that dinner would be ready for Ruth's return, but there were no steaks to be found. The fridge was pretty much empty, bar a bottle of milk, some butter and half a bag of salad. I felt cheated; I really fancied a steak now.
I slung a potato in the microwave and scooped the salad into a bowl. There was a tin of tuna in the cupboard; my fingers were on fire by the time I'd ground the lid off it with the can opener. I ate standing up, wishing there was something to do beyond physio, bathing and the constant dread of things arriving to destroy.
We would have had the B&B, Tam's Place, going six months by now. We wanted to be ready for the Christmas period; this part of the country was a popular place to spend the festive season. Our rubric was a hotel in Hertfordshire where we had retreated for a restful weekend shortly after the hardship of the enquiry. It had a quirkiness about it, despite its luxury. The wall behind the reception desk was covered with ancient keys. There was soft, recessed lighting but only so much as to produce moody pools of blue here and there, and a small bar. It was the subtle touches that we liked, and that we remembered when we started planning the B&B. We wanted to be a cut above. If someone ordered a drink there would always be a little complementary something to go with it. A wafer with a coffee, a small dish of spiced nuts with a beer. Tamara wanted stone-coloured towels rolled up into neat bundles, and sisal baskets in which to store them. There would be something nautical in each room, and each room would be named after a fictional seafaring character. We were going to paint the walls mushroom and have aubergine carpets. A solid oak front door with a bay tree and gravel. Fresh flowers. Fluffy bathrobes. I ached for that time, a promise that seemed to be calling to us from across the years.
I'd finished my meal without tasting it. I scraped the remnants into the bin and fed the plate to the dishwasher. I checked my watch. Ruth's shift had finished an hour ago. It took less than half an hour to drive from the hospital. Coffee with a friend. Loose ends at work that needed tying off. Supermarket trip to fill this refrigerator's belly. So why was I so concerned? Perhaps I was just missing her company. I'd only seen her for a fleeting moment in the past few days.
The rain waded in. It was the kind of weather that tapped politely on the window a few times and then unleashed all hell. I thought of her driving through this, everything - the roads, the windscreen, the black canopy over Bailey's Hollow - turning to oil. I started to shudder. I had to sit down.
I had been out walking that road in a storm like this. Apparently. I have no recollection. I was found twelve metres from the road at the edge of a ploughed field. I'd been hit by a 4x4, at a blind corner. A foot to my right was a ditch filled with water that would have drowned me. A foot to the right there was a gathered pile of dead branches upon which to impale myself. The flesh of my right arm was peeled back from the bone like a thick red sweater sleeve where it had plunged through the windscreen. I was lucky to be found as soon as I was. In all probability I suffered the first of my cardiac arrests out here and Ruth resuscitated me. She called Charlie, and 999. Charlie arrived first. They kept me warm until the ambulance turned up and then he visited me in hospital, with Ruth, a couple of times a week. They both talked to me for hours at a time. They kept me going when my body had forgotten what going meant.
I must have fallen asleep, because suddenly I was staring up at Ruth's face and it was upside down and I felt embarrassed, as if I'd been caught doing something inappropriate. For a few moments we were complete strangers. Ruth's face was inflexible. Maybe the cold had made her stiff. Her eyes were blank, uncomprehending. And then she thawed, or I saw her in a warmer light, or the spell was broken somehow. She smiled and I levered myself carefully upright.
'It's late,' she said.
'I wanted to wait up for you.'
She sat in her favourite armchair. The house ticked around us. There was something about her that I had sensed, without being able to pinpoint, something unusual. Now I had it: she hardly blinked. It was like being with an owl.
Of course, the fact that she had just come off a long shift might have something to do with it. Often, despite being pregnant, Ruth would overload on coffee, which meant that when she got home, although bone tired, she could not rest and had to wind down by watching a film, or reading one of her survival books. But even when she was relaxed, it was there. When you talked to her she would hold a level gaze without blinking. I wondered if she might even be aware of it, whether it was a technique NHS staff were taught to calm down nervous or agitated patients, or disarm troublemakers.
'Did you have a meeting?'
She gave me a blank look.
'After work. It's just, well you were late home.'
'Late home.'
'Yes.'
'I had a few things to do. But not a meeting.'
'How's the baby?'
She shot me a look. Something wasn't right, but I didn't know what to ask, or even if I had, how to couch it.
She didn't answer. Her lips had turned very thin, very white, as if she were about to say something venomous. But then she turned away and I saw the slightest shake of her head.
I was about to say goodnight, not wanting to trigger a rebuke, when she said, more tenderly than her appearance suggested: 'The baby's fine.'
Chapter Six
The Arch of Atlas
The two jets jammed together grunt through thin air on an uneven trajectory, a chum of human tissue foaming from the cracked, blistered exhaust nozzles. Fires break out along the fuselage only to be instantly doused by the intense cold. Charred pieces of the aircraft shear away and fall as aluminium rain. Limbs flail through fractures in the widebodies like aborted evolutionary afterthoughts.
Captain Sheedy's hand rests lightly on the stick; the rest of him is crumpled beneath the weight of the collapsed cockpit. Wires and hydraulics whip and thrash in the howl of air pouring through the windows. Captain Sheedy taps First Officer Roan on the forearm and jerks a thumb at the knot of hardware that has killed him. He opens his hand in a
so what now?
gesture.
First Officer Roan unbuckles himself and wriggles out of his seat, careful to not catch his head against the sharp fingers of torn metal pointing down at him. He presses and prods the new configuration of the overhead cockpit while Captain Sheedy drums his fingers against an armrest. He takes down the axe from its fixture and uses the poll to lever away some of the shattered moulding. Eventually a large section breaks clear of the roof. Above the wind's shriek he can hear the squeal of metal as it draws clear of Captain Sheedy's head, or what remains of it. Captain Sheedy has been untidily decapitated. Sheaves of glass and metal must have piled through his mouth as he opened it to scream: everything above his lower jaw is gone.
Captain Sheedy is trying to say something. First Officer Roan stares down at the transverse cross section of Captain Sheedy's head, at the sucking rings of the pharynx and trachea, the coin of white spinal column. His tongue squirms inside the bloody, broken cup of his mouth like some agonised bivalve on a half-shell. He has no hard palate against which to form his words. First Officer Roan wipes and rewipes his palm against his trouser legs and presses it down against the ring of teeth. He feels the dry tongue leap and dance against his skin. He feels the slashed, rubbery underpart of the cheek.
Captain Sheedy says, 'Jethuth Chritht... what have you been eating?'
I flew out of sleep. The acrid smell of aviation exhaust followed me. I stared at the patterns in the ceiling, wondering if it actually consisted of fissures and swellings or if it was merely the craquelure of my damaged eyes. The smell of burned fuel product disappeared; of course, it might never have been there. I looked down at my hand but could not see the mark of molars and bicuspids beyond the riot of scar tissue. Why should I? I had dreamed. I had wakened. That was all.
Life had become a series of layers. Time was a series of overlapping events, new routines: pills to be swallowed, rungs to be reached for on the ladder to recovery. Injuries were like a callus formed over the skin of what I used to be. Maybe that was what happened to thoughts too, after a serious accident. The brain rewired itself while its swellings and bruises reduced. Areas closed down; others sparked to life.
Some people with persistent pain get inadequate help from mild painkillers. Opioids might help you, but everyone is different.
I thought of the child on the beach, the startling pink of its skin against the hard, grey scab of shoreline. Blond hair like pale flame trying to catch. I wondered what was real and what was not. I thought of reaching out a hand for Ruth and clawing through mist. And Tamara, maybe she was some fanciful construct, made up of smiling models in glossy magazines, memories of other people's features, memories of other people's moods.