Authors: Tony Parsons
I lay on my back in a field of wild flowers. Above me the sky was a cloudless blue dome.
I thought about the strangeness of being inside my own skin, about how absolutely mind-boggling it was that I was me and nobody else. And I thought about the enormity of the sky, and how it is nothing really, just mankind’s back yard, and just as my senses were reeling with all this stuff – guess what? A 747 roared across the heavens and made me gasp out loud with shock and joy. Then I heard the voice.
‘Sir?’ it said, that special kind of
sir
– the kind of
sir
where you feel that the person calling you sir wants to give you a slap in the kisser. I sat up and saw the two cops standing above me. Both uniformed, both young, but one looked neutral and one looked mean, and I thought that I would have to be careful with him.
They had pulled up beside my car. Aggressively close, right up tight against the front bumper, barring any sudden break for freedom. And although their siren was silent, the blue
light on the roof was lazily revolving. The mean one pointed at the hole in the wire fence.
‘You make that hole, sir?’ he said.
I got to my feet, brushing off the petals of wild flowers. They were purple and white. ‘No, officer,’ I said. ‘It was there already. I just crawled through it.’
He held out his palm. ‘Let’s see some ID,’ he said, making this impatient gimme-gimme gesture with his fingers.
I took out my wallet, flipped it open and gave it to him. He took it from me, stared at my face and laughed. Then he showed it to his friend.
‘Why didn’t you say?’ said the mean-looking one, closing the wallet on the plastic window of my Met ID card.
I took the wallet and put it back in the pocket of my jeans. I said nothing. We began walking back to the hole in the fence. The mean one held it open for me as I squirmed through.
‘Security’s being stepped up, mate,’ he said, slipping effort-lessly from the threatening sarcasm of
sir
to the unearned familiarity of
mate.
I think I preferred it when he called me
sir.
I’m not your mate, I thought. ‘We got a barrel load of loonies coming in.’
All at once I saw what he meant. On the far side of the road, there was already a gathering of the tribes. Coaches, tents, banners. PLANE BARMY, said one of them. PLANE MENTAL, said another. PLANE MAD. PLANE STUPID. NO MORE PLANES.
‘The new runway,’ said the mean-looking cop. ‘They don’t fancy it much. They want to change the world, but they can’t change their pants.’
‘You all right?’ said the other one, the nice one. ‘You look funny.’
I smiled at him. I knew what he was talking about. I was on so much Cyclosporine, Prednisolone and Azathioprine that I rattled. But it was more than that. He was right. I looked funny. How could I not look funny? I was not myself.
On the far side of the wire there were caravans of women and children and dogs, men with dreadlocks erecting portable toilets, women with shaven heads hammering in tent pegs. And I thought they looked like they were at the beginning of something momentous. I thought they looked like – I don’t know – history. They looked like history, about to be made.
‘They must go on holiday by canoe,’ said the nice cop, and both of them laughed.
Ruby was at her computer, her solemn face reflecting the shifting lights of the screen. I sat next to her, the pair of us squeezed on to the same chair but me taking up most of it. We sat in silence and in front of us were images of the end of the world.
Dead fish floating in brown rivers. Factories belching black smoke so thick that it covered the sun. And a ten-lane highway full of furious cars, none of them moving. Lara appeared in the doorway.
‘Penne arabiatta,’ she said.
Ruby looked at her and frowned. ‘Penne arabiatta?’ she said flatly. ‘Right.’
‘You can save the world after dinner,’ Lara said, and she looked to me for support. But I found I couldn’t place dinner above the fate of the planet. Lara folded her arms and leaned against the doorjamb.
‘They all used to come running for my penne arabiatta,’ she said, to no one in particular. ‘Whatever happened to the old days?’
Then she clapped her hands. My little spitfire.
‘This is
important
,’ Ruby said, in those exasperated italics that were so often the overture to screaming scenes and slammed doors. ‘Don’t you
understand,
Mum? Don’t you
get it yet
?’
Lara stared at the pair of us and said nothing. She didn’t need to. I knew exactly what she was thinking. She felt like wrapping that mouse-cord around our throats, and then listening to us beg for mercy as she told us how long it had taken her to cook the dinner that was now getting cold and hard on the table downstairs. But what she said before turning away and going off to eat dinner alone was, ‘And you need a haircut, George.’
I looked at her and then back at the screen. The end of the world continued to unfurl in front of us.
‘I was thinking of growing it,’ I said.
I was sitting at my desk eating a sandwich when Keith approached me. Avoiding my eyes, his meaty fingers fluttering over the stacks of files before me. He coughed, took the unlit cigarette from behind his ear and then put it back. I set down my paperback.
‘What you reading?’ he said shyly.
We both looked at the cover. The hood of a big fin-tailed fifties car was pointing down an empty desert highway, aimed at a distant range of mountains.
‘On the Road
,’ he said carefully, as though he were translating from the Hindi. ‘Any good?’
‘Brilliant,’ I said. ‘It’s about these two friends, Dean Moriarty and Sal Paradise, and they travel across America and down into Mexico.’
‘Hmm,’ Keith said thoughtfully. ‘And then what happens?’
I stared at him for a moment. ‘Well, that’s it,’ I said. ‘That’s what happens.’ Keith looked doubtful. ‘You should read it,’ I told him. ‘Everyone should read it. I’ll get you your own copy. Or you can borrow mine.’
‘Yeah,’ Keith nodded. ‘Well. All right.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Okay then.’
Then he wandered off, and before I went back to my sandwich and my Kerouac, I called out to him.
‘Read it, man,’ I said, and without turning round he raised one of those big red hands in acknowledgement, or farewell.
‘The news is on,’ Ruby said, and we quickly cleared the dinner table and legged it to the living room. But it wasn’t the first item. There was trouble in the Middle East and a politician on the take and caught with his trousers down before they got to the latest report from the airport.
There was not much happening. Protestors being held back by lines of relaxed-looking coppers. Shots of distant aeroplanes lazily snaking across the runway. Everything under control.
Lara came into the room and placed mugs of hot chocolate in front of us. I smiled my thanks and Ruby said, ‘Brilliant, Mum,’ and gave her mother a smile that was like watching the sun come out. Then she turned back to the TV and groaned. ‘Wish I could go to this,’ she muttered, already knowing the answer.
Lara perched on the arm of the sofa and kissed her head.
‘You’re just a little too young, angel,’ she said.
‘It can’t
wait
,’ Ruby said, in the same voice that not so many years ago had begged for a pet horse. ‘It’s so important to do something
now.’
Lara nodded. ‘I know you care, and it’s great to care, but
there will still be things to make right next year, and the year after, and all the other years. Come here.’
Lara held out her arms and Ruby sank into them. Sometimes they were fine. My wife and daughter. Sometimes they seemed to remember the old love, and realise that it was still there, unchanged and as strong as ever. And sometimes they forgot. Now they watched the news together, and they sipped their hot chocolate, and they held on to each other.
Rufus came and sat on the other arm of the sofa. I knew I wasn’t allowed to hold him the way that Lara held Ruby. It is different for fathers.
When they are babies you can revel in them, you can kiss their cheek as hard as you dare and get drunk on their smell and the velveteen sheen of their skin. When your children are babies, you can get stoned on the incredible living fact of them. That all changes as they grow. You hold them. And then one day you realise you have stopped holding them.
I watched my son’s face as he watched the news and I realised that by the time they are in their teens, you can let years drift by without really touching them. The physical expression of your love – the hugs, the kisses, the way you are allowed to touch their hair – all disappears. When Rufus and I came into shy, fleeting contact now – the hurried hug, the awkward kiss, those gestures of habit more than feeling – it was like an electric shock from the button of a lift, and we immediately recoiled with alarm. He saw me looking at him.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said, rearing away, and I shook my head and quickly looked back at the television. Long before your children are grown, you grow out of the habit of touching them.
He was about to go out, and he was wearing a leather jacket covered in pockets. Some kind of biker’s jacket. It had a small Union Jack on the sleeve and a belt tied up at the back, and it said
Belstaff
on a discreet metal tag. It looked like the kind of jacket you would wear for riding a motorbike in the 1940s. And I could smell him inside that leather jacket – the very essence of him, just as I had when he was a baby.
Now the milk and puke and sugar smell had been replaced by the scent of cheap aftershave and musky body odour and nights spent in boozy little clubs. It was a different perfume from another life.
But it was still him, and it was still me, and the years fell away.
There was an old lady on the news. Around Nan’s age. She was talking about her childhood in a hamlet called Heath Row, torn down at the end of the Second World War to make way for an RAF base.
‘I never knew that,’ I said. ‘Did you know that? About this little place called Heath Row?’
But my family didn’t hear me. They were listening to the old woman talking about spending a lifetime a few hundred yards from the airport’s perimeter fence. She had grown up, got married, and raised a family in a village called Sipson. But she wasn’t going to die there. Her home, the hospital where her children were born, her local church, the little neighbourhood of seven hundred houses – it would all come down if they built another runway, another terminal.
‘I’ve no idea where I’ll go,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to go into a home. I’ve written to the Queen.’
My daughter turned to her mother as they cut back to the bulldozers. Lara rubbed her back and smiled. There was
nothing left to discuss. And I looked at my daughter’s face, numb with the intolerable unfairness of this world. ‘I’ll take you,’ I said.
‘I don’t want to be the one who always says
no
,’ Lara said, as we lay in bed, on our sides, facing each other. Her voice was soft and our faces were almost touching. ‘I don’t think any parent should be put in that position. Being the bad one. The one who forbids everything. The voice of bloody reason. Do you know what I mean, George?’
I reached out and touched her face. It was the same face as the one I had first seen on Shaftesbury Avenue. The face of the girl who was the dancer, going out with someone far cooler, more handsome, more dashing, than I would ever be. Unchanged by the years, by marriage, by motherhood and all the rest of it. The face of the woman who chose me. How to thank her?
‘Just be careful,’ Lara said. ‘I know she’s a great kid. A smart kid.’ She rolled on her back and sighed at the ceiling. ‘It’s just that they do really stupid things when they’re young.’
I know, I thought. I’ll get a tattoo.
All at once the fence came down, and I was falling forward, bodies pressing behind me and pushing me on before I even had a chance to think about it. The cheers and screams were rising until they were obliterated by a plane suddenly filling the sky as it came in to land.
It was like being at the head of some great human wave, and we were all surging forward. The police fell back, and their mates who had been in the front line were scrambling out from under the collapsed fence as we stumbled and fell across it.
I looked back and saw Ruby’s face, and I saw her shouting something to me, but the air was full of the noise of planes and people and I was always being carried away from her.
Only one section of the fence had come down, and now the police were regrouping around this breach in the perimeter and I felt myself shoved up hard against a wall of rough blue serge, the breath squeezing from me and the fear of dying today coming out of nowhere. The crush of bodies. The smell of sweat and aftershave. My scar throbbed against the chest of a young policeman.
And then a helmet fell across a face, a baton flashed in the sunshine and somehow there was a gap and I was through it, past the line of police and sprinting across scrubby open grass, no idea where I was going, glancing from side to side and seeing that I was on my own. It was as flat as a field in a dream. In the far distance I could see a 747 taxiing towards the terminal. I began to jog towards it.
Suddenly I was knocked sideways and down, tackled hip-high by a copper who had probably played a bit of rugby in his youth. But that must have been a while ago now, because as we lay side by side on the ground he moaned in agony and furiously patted his knee as if he was trying to put out a small fire. I got on my knees and then on my feet and the fallen cop had a fistful of Rufus’ Belstaff jacket and he would not let go. So I shrugged off the jacket – let him have it, I would buy Rufus a new one – and began once more to jog towards the runway, one hand on my sore ribs.
I felt quite peaceful now. The sounds and the crush of the protest were far behind me and the airport’s cacophony of air and metal was still some distance away, although even from here the 747 looked gigantic, like some great ocean liner washed up on the surface of the moon.
I was running at a calm, measured pace. I could see little faces at the portholes of the 747 and I raised a hand in salutation. I was on tarmac now and I heard footsteps pounding behind me, getting closer, and then someone punched me hard in the back of the neck and I went down face first. After that I did exactly what I was told to do and I did it quickly.