by Minnie Darke
TWO NIGHTS LATER, on the twenty-sixth floor of a glassy hotel in Singapore, Diana lay between the starched white sheets of a king-sized bed, not sleeping. Against her floor-to-ceiling windows, heavy droplets of monsoonal rain exploded into rivulets. The city beyond was a bright matrix of coloured lights and slashes of gleaming black water.
Diana’s famous red dress was draped across a plush armchair and a pair of high-heeled shoes lay kicked off on the carpet. Diana didn’t like performing in heels; she much preferred her trusty old Converse sneakers, but a newspaper arts reporter had offered the opinion that it was time – now that Diana was thirty-two – for her to ‘relinquish the trappings of her wunderkind days’. Maturity, Diana thought, was enough to give you blisters.
The bedside clock announced the local time was just past midnight, which meant that back home it was past three. Even so, Diana was not the least bit sleepy. On a bench beyond the foot of the bed, its silhouette reflecting in a huge mirror, was the enormous bouquet she had been given at the end of tonight’s performance. Tropical and lush, the arrangement was full of large-scale foliage and the pink orchids that were the Singaporean national flower. But, like pianos themselves, bouquets were hardly something that could be taken on the road. Tomorrow, when the blooms hadn’t even begun to wilt, she would leave her flowers behind in the hotel’s ice bucket and hope that someone else would have a chance to enjoy them while she was making her way to Paris.
Diana wished she were not so very wide awake. Not now. She needed to be rested if she was going to arrive in the French capital ready to begin several days of demanding orchestral rehearsals for the Prokofiev concerto. For another half a deluded hour, she lay with her eyes closed and tried to sleep. But it was futile.
Switching on the light, she had to admit that the hotel room had been thoroughly Diana-fied. Her suitcase appeared to have coughed three-quarters of its contents out onto the floor, where there lay a tangled pile of garments and shoes, toiletries and sheet music. From the chaos, Diana tugged out a light dress and a pair of sandals, her notebook and a pencil that would have to do, even though it needed sharpening. Then she stepped out into the hallway and set off in search of the hotel’s piano.
When it came to accommodation, the presence of a piano was Diana’s only hard and fast requirement. Sometimes the instrument would turn out to be nothing more prepossessing than a tinny upright, tucked against a wall in the kind of parlour where guests were invited to have a late-night cup of cocoa. Other times, it would be a grand piano in pride of place in an echoing, marble-floored lobby. Here in Singapore, the piano she found was a glossy black Kawai, full sized and nearly new, occupying a commanding position on a balcony above the hotel’s rattan-furnished lounge. It was cordoned off with red velvet ropes strung between chrome bollards, but its curved lid was propped, invitingly, open.
Diana could hear, drifting up from the room below, the chink of ice in substantial tumblers, streams of chatter and bursts of laughter. Over the railing she could see men in boat shoes and open-necked shirts toasting each other with beer bottles wedged with lemon. Women with the aura of off-the-leash flight attendants sipped cocktails, their bright dresses showing off the kind of flawless brown ankles and shoulders that made Diana envious.
The ropes and bollards, Diana decided, didn’t apply to her. She stepped over a low loop of velvet, and sat down at the piano. By way of a few exploratory scales, she introduced herself to the instrument, which met her touch with a reassuringly warm, even sound. A good piano, in Diana’s world, was one that allowed her to imagine its sound rising off it in a lovely round bubble. And this was a good piano – good enough that she briefly considered putting herself through the paces of the Prokofiev concerto. But, no. Sleep did not lie in that direction.
Tonight was a night for her almost-finished love song. She set her fingers on the keys and softly began, hoping that the momentum of the music would carry her all the way to the last, perfect note.
As she played, she thought of Arie, about how it felt to love him, and be loved by him. She thought about all the things that people, and sometimes even Arie himself, couldn’t see, or didn’t understand.
Diana had never wished for a man of a certain height, or with a particular angle to his jawline, or with a dazzling future in some particular high-calibre profession. What she’d been looking for was something infinitely more precious – a certain architecture of the heart. Immediately that she met Arie, she’d been able to sense it within him – like a pale marble palace with open walls. Stable but delicate, solid but airy. From the very first, she’d known that in him, she had found a place that she could trust without question, a place she could rest, a place where she would always be free.
Somehow her song had to convey all of this, as well as how treasured she felt when he set down a cup of tea each morning at her bedside, and how she loved his voice, which was mellow and gentle and sexy, whether on the other end of a telephone or in her ear in the darkness, and how grateful she was each time he refused – with perfect diplomacy – to be goaded into an argument with her mother; and also how it felt each time she arrived home at the end of a tour, scanned the airport arrivals hall for his face in the crowd, and found it.
She thought about how it would be, at the end of this trip, to take him into the piano room and play her song for him, and how good it would feel when he understood that she had made up her mind.
Have I? she asked herself.
Yes, she thought, yes. She would marry him. Even though she was afraid, even though she wasn’t sure she would always get every part of it right. If it really was so important to him, then she would do it. And with that, her hands mapped their way across the last short stretch of the melody. E chord to A chord. A perfect cadence. It was obvious really, she thought, as the rightness of the chord progression raised pinpricks of tears at the back of her eyes.
‘Yes,’ Diana murmured to herself. ‘That’s right.’
She lifted her hands from the keys and smiled as the final notes of her love song hovered in the muggy air of the hotel balcony.
A fact of Arie’s life was that if Diana was at home, there was music. She liked it loud, and had once explained to Arie that for her there was such a thing as a perfect volume. The way she described it, it was as if the music were being siphoned into her skull, and as it got louder it took up more and more space, until there came a moment of equilibrium when the sound precisely occupied the contours of the bones, squeezing out all other thought.
For Diana, Arie had learned, music was an all-purpose medication. She used rousing music to stir herself to action, maudlin music to soothe herself in distress, violent music if she needed to vent, and bittersweet music if she felt like crying.
Usually, if Arie woke on a Sunday morning to find Diana’s half of the bed empty, there would already be music somewhere in the house. Whether she was singing in the bathroom, playing the Steinway behind the frosted glass doors of the piano room, listening to the radio in the kitchen or cranking the stereo so that sound filtered into every room of the house, the nature of the music would tell Arie everything he needed to know about Diana’s mood.
This particular Sunday morning, though, the house was quiet. The only accompaniment to Arie’s solitary routine – make coffee, shower, shave, wander down to the bakery for a pain au chocolat, read the newspaper at the kitchen bench – was a tune he was humming, unsatisfactorily, to himself. It was that tune she’d been playing in the middle of the night when he’d gone into the piano room to coax her back to bed. He made a mental note to ask her again what it was. When she got home.
Travelling, for Diana, almost always brought on the slightly suspended feeling she had now, as she stood in the queue to board the Sunday night Air Pleiades Flight PQ108 from Singapore to Paris. No matter how far or how often she journeyed, travelling never made her feel that the world was small. Rather, it reminded her how vast and complicated the planet was – how many different people there were living inside thei
r individual orbits, walking their particular streets, visiting their local shops, eating their accustomed foods, speaking their one or many languages.
Thinking of Arie, she took out her phone. The message she wrote was only one word long: Sonder.
It was Diana who’d come up with the name for Arie and Richard’s business. Sonder – a word from the internet phenomenon the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows – was a word to describe the sudden feeling or knowledge that everyone else around you was experiencing a reality as deep and complex as your own. It could happen in a busy street, or on a subway train, or – as it so often did for Diana – in an airport. All these people, and every single one of them full to the brim with pasts and futures, hopes and fears, friends and enemies, loves and losses.
She added an emoji to her message, the one of a smiling face with blushing cheeks, but then, calculating that it would be almost midnight back at home, and that Arie was likely to be asleep, she decided not to press send. She didn’t want him sitting bolt upright in their bed and fumbling for his phone; she didn’t want him worrying. She would send the message later, she thought, because in that moment Diana Clare was a woman who thought there was plenty of later to come.
She put her phone away and watched the people around her. Her attention was drawn to a small girl with large brown eyes and impossibly long black hair, who held tightly and proudly to the handle of her very own ladybird suitcase. She observed a handsome Nordic-looking couple who stood in the queue, each of them wearing a BabyBjörn carrier that held a small, white-haired baby. Each parent was clearly exhausted, but equally clearly on a mission to surmount their exhaustion without losing their shit.
Diana admired the flight attendants behind the check-in booths, all of them with silver Pleiades constellation brooches pinned to their immaculate navy lapels. She had no way of knowing that they had all been away from home for the entire previous week, and that this was to be the last flight of their roster. Neither had she any way of knowing that they had arrived late at the airport, the crew bus having been delayed when a collision between a motorbike and a delivery van caused a pile-up on a rain-slicked freeway. With their beautifully pressed shirts and blouses, their polished black shoes, the women with their buns carefully sprayed, the men with their chins newly shaven, they concealed perfectly the rush they now faced to achieve an on-schedule departure time of 10.35 pm.
After flashing her passport and boarding pass, Diana made her way down the airbridge and stepped onto the plane. Inside, the air retained something of the warmth and humidity of the local conditions; Diana found it hard to believe that she would step off this plane into the pre-dawn of Charles de Gaulle Airport, where she would need her coat, scarf, hat and gloves. She was pleased to find she had been seated by a window, with a luxuriously empty seat next to her. Even better, the woman in the aisle seat, who wore a pair of expensive noise-cancelling headphones, showed no early signs of wanting to chat.
Beyond her porthole window, on the far side of a stretch of wet tarmac, lightning forked brightly on the horizon. Diana did not switch on her seat-back television, or open her novel to read. She tucked the airline’s thin blue blanket around her, put her pillow against the arm of her seat to cushion her hip, and closed her eyes, so that she was already half asleep when the plane heaved itself up off the ground and into the air.
A flicked switch.
That’s all it was, really – a switch flicked in the wrong direction, and one that someone on the crew might have noticed, had their flight preparations not been so rushed. But Diana would never know the details. She would never know that this particular plane had arrived earlier that day from Beijing with its crew reporting a frozen seal in the rear service door. She would never know that a ground engineer had switched the aircraft’s pressurisation system to ‘manual’ for the purposes of his inspection, but neglected to switch it back to ‘auto’ when he’d finished. Neither would she know that because the system was set to manual, the valves controlling the flow of air into the cabin remained where they were – slightly open – when the engineer completed his investigation, so that as the plane climbed into the night sky, thinner air from outside seeped silently inside.
There were so many reasons to say ‘if only’. An alarm sounded in the cockpit as the craft continued to ascend, alerting the captain and his co-pilot to the fact that the cabin had failed to pressurise. If only that alarm had not been identical in tone to the take-off and landing configuration warning that the pilots routinely tested before each flight. If only the pilots had not wasted crucial minutes in the cockpit with that distracting horn blaring in their ears. If only they’d realised what was really happening, instead of sending messages to their maintenance operations centre about how to turn off what they believed to be a false alarm. If only they’d recognised the beginnings of their disorientation and made recourse to their emergency oxygen supplies.
The cruel irony of oxygen deprivation is that it reduces the brain’s ability to recognise the symptoms. As the pilots descended deeper into confusion, Diana woke from a dozing sleep, aware of a vague sense of unease among the passengers around her. Also, she felt strangely warm. Her toes tingled and . . . now she came to think of it, it was a little hard to catch a proper breath. She didn’t understand that she and everybody else on the plane were now inside an incredibly brief window that is called – in the context of extreme oxygen deprivation – ‘the time of useful consciousness’.
But if hypoxia is cruel, and deadly, it also comes with the blessing of a strange, dissociated euphoria. As the aircraft continued to climb, the temperature in the cabin fell. The air inside condensed, filling the plane with a ghostly cloud that Diana found curiously beautiful. She lifted a hand to touch it, and was almost surprised to find four pale fingers and a thumb there at the end of her arm. When an oxygen mask dropped from its overhead panel, Diana had a few seconds left before unconsciousness would claim her, but given that there was nothing she could have done to save herself, it was probably a mercy that the only thought triggered by the strange plastic jellyfish that dangled in front of her face, was the word yellow.
IN MUSICAL NOTATION, the ‘fermata’ symbol – – is an invitation from composer to musician to hold a note, a chord, or a pause in the music, for as long as the musician deems necessary. It is a statement of trust, an acknowledgement that the player will know, under the circumstances, what is best.
So hold the thought of Flight PQ108 making its way on autopilot through a cold, dark sky, not one of the 312 people aboard still alive.
After message upon message from Malaysian and Indian air traffic control authorities failed to re-establish contact with the flight, two Indian Air Force Flanker fighters were dispatched. Closing to within 200 feet of the airliner, the pilot of one of the Flankers adjusted the night-vision goggles that enabled her to confirm that both Air Pleiades pilots were in their seats, though their bodies were slumped forward over the controls.
Hold the thought of those Flankers continuing their escort, following the airliner westward, before breaking off at the far reaches of Indian airspace, where the pilots conducted a terse but professional handover to Pakistani officers, who carried on the vigil in their sleek F-16s. The stripes of the escorting planes changed several times more as the airliner made its way across the Middle East into Europe, crossing the Caspian Sea, clipping the northern shore of the Sea of Azov.
Meanwhile, news of the ghost flight was breaking on the networks, the plane-tracking enthusiasts of the world having detected the unusual military activity in the skies. Embassy telephones rang and senior officials were pulled out of meetings or woken from their sleep as the plane followed its curving path over Ukraine, Poland and Germany, remaining for hours in a strange extended dawn, its western trajectory keeping it always just ahead of the morning’s light. Fuel reserves spent at last, after fifteen hours Flight PQ108 spiralled into the Atlantic Ocean about 300 nautical miles west of the French coast.
Hold the thought of A
rie Johnson at his desk at Sonder Digital late on a Monday afternoon when Richard got back to the office from a meeting with a serious face, and joined together two questions that on their own might have meant nothing much – ‘Have you seen the news?’ and ‘Is Di already in Paris?’ – but that, together, caused Arie’s pulse to race. A story was just breaking, Richard said. A plane had gone down, he said. The words were still coming out of his mouth when Arie’s mobile, its number listed on Diana’s travel documents as the contact for her next of kin, began to ring.
The phone call over, Arie felt as if the earth had shifted and the rafters were collapsing around him and the walls were turning to rubble. Somebody who was probably Richard was asking questions, but Arie could barely hear him. Though the world was falling off its hinges, if he knew one thing in that moment, it was that Belinda Clare could not be allowed to hear this news through a telephone the way he had just done.
Arie snatched up his car keys.
Richard said, ‘Mate, there’s no way you should be—’
But Arie was already at the door.
Hold the thought of Arie driving out of the city, hoping against hope that he arrived at his destination before his mother-in-law switched on the television. He made his way to her as fast as he could, though it was necessary every now and then for him to pull over to withstand a crashing wave of grief.
Hold the thought of Belinda opening the door, of Arie uttering the words. Hold the thought of him trying to catch her as she buckled to the carpet.
Across the country, around the world, people watched the news. Some shivered at the thought of a plane flying through the night sky with nobody aboard left alive, an aerial Mary Celeste; others could not stop themselves from picturing the cold tableau of the plane’s interior; others sent their hearts out to the people waiting for a plane that never arrived. Reports explained that the plane disintegrated on impact, that there would be no bodies to recover, no remains to be repatriated.
