by M. T Hill
Freya puts her face in her elbow.
‘Well, fine, look… Dalle wants an essay. An investigation, I suppose. A sort of biography – the boy’s climbing, the risks. Beats me, to be honest. They said it was good fortune I got in touch – they’d been keeping an eye on it all. Tight-knit scene, isn’t it?’
Freya blinks at her.
‘I’ll forward you their brief. And if it’s any good, they’ll sell it on to America if there’s a buyer. Their print circ figures are steady enough, but they’re also growing their content arm.’
‘I don’t know what to say.’
‘Apparently. I did mention your urbex angle, by the way. They loved that – had no idea he was involved.’
Freya is increasingly glad she’s sitting down.
‘Are you going to speak?’ her editor asks.
‘I just… Why would they want some English hack with no climbing experience to write it?’
‘Economics. The impressions on your piece added up.
* * *
That, and I’ve been pitching features for donkey’s years. Your ideas are fine – you only needed a kick up the arse.’
‘I just don’t know why you’d—’
The editor shakes her head. ‘How long will you need for fifteen thousand words? These juniors will live to regret their griping if you’re missing too long.’
‘Fifteen? Maybe a fortnight, if I’m on other stuff.’ Freya thinks of a woman and a baby without a father. A bunker. A steeplejack. The thought of writing solely about a subject she’s already pursuing is heady. ‘Or I can take it as holiday.’
‘No, no. I think this will be good. Call it a sabbatical, with one caveat. I don’t want any of your conspiracies.’
Freya keeps a straight face. ‘I’ll need to travel,’ she says. ‘To do it justice.’
‘Trains? A hire car? The package is attractive, Freya. It’s not Ratler.’
‘No. Plane tickets.’
The editor baulks. ‘Where for?’
Freya steals a breath. She wants to say it firmly. She wants to sound assertive. She wants the editor to agree to anything. No more leakage.
She opens her mouth. She touches her belly. She says, ‘Reykjavik.’
The Steeplejack
Despite his indifference to heights, Shep isn’t one for flying. Something about not being in control. So as the transfer plane taxies across a bleak Heathrow runway, he washes down a half-day sloth pill with a complimentary vial of vodka and hopes he’ll see less than an hour of the flight to Los Angeles. After the trip down here – not including the taxi incident, which seems illusory now, harder to recall the more he focuses on it – he needs to rest.
The sloth pill, ordered from the recesses of the internet, is meant to treat insomnia, but it should make short work of long haul. Along with reducing appetite and slowing the digestive tract, the pill contains a thinning agent, so you don’t have to worry about clots. The comedown – general aches and fogginess, sometimes the visual distortions a person with epilepsy might describe before a seizure – is worth the sensation of burning through time. When they land in LA, Shep can neck some orange juice and get on with it.
He settles in his seat. The plane’s engines soothe him. He idly scans his section of the cabin and waits for the pill to kick in. The other travellers around him weigh each other with the same curiosity. Who will they end up belaying? Handing tools to? Bunking up with?
Soon the plane receives clearance. Shep relaxes into the lurch of take-off and watches London retract, flatten. When they pierce the cloud canopy, the sun is an immense white bluff, and the plane’s reactive windows darken instantly. Shep’s stomach fizzes around the pill. For a moment he’s sure someone says his name – but no one’s looking, and everyone in his line of sight has put on their in-flight VR glasses.
Minutes later, a smartly dressed woman comes to sit with Shep. Possibly a flight attendant, or a Vaughan representative. Shep realises he can’t acknowledge her properly. He’s slipping away, rope out, rappelling into the throat of a warm red cavern. The woman frowns concernedly at him from above. As he comes off the conscious ridge, and his seat fabric takes on the consistency of scree, he’s sure the woman reaches towards his rucksack.
He tries to stay awake. He tries to fight back to the surface.
‘Is it in here?’ she asks from the distance.
What? he wants to ask.
‘Your child. Is it in here?’
The woman flickers. Holographic, almost. How can she know what he’s carrying? Shep has no choice but to let go of his rope. The woman smiles and gets up. Dank animal musk. A wave of sweet petrol. Maybe it doesn’t matter what she knows, he decides. Not really. Same goes for if she’s even there or not. After the bunker, the real and imagined have long since converged.
• • •
Violent turbulence drags Shep from the sloth-hole. He pats his face, dry as bone, and is alarmed to feel bright and alert. His stomach is rumbling, which isn’t supposed to happen, and his mouth tastes clean, a hint of peppermint.
Noticing Shep’s movement, the window blind slithers into the trim, and the glass lightens. The western seaboard greets him, a textbook Californian night vista. Pastel-purple sky, gradated into deepest black. On the ground, the LA megalopolis itself – an endless, intricately woven tapestry of light, impossible to process by dint of scale and sheer population. It’s like the biggest oil refinery he’s ever seen. Clemens times a million.
‘Awake, are you?’
This was a passenger in the next row, a man in his mid-forties. He’s wearing a pair of army surplus cargos, a camo jacket. He has the complexion, the waxiness, of someone with a chemical dependency.
‘They’ll be screening us the second we touch down,’ the man says. ‘You daft fucking prick. They’ll sling you on the next flight back.’
Shep rubs his eyes. Sloths are blood-soluble, won’t leave a trace. And anyway, it hardly feels like he took one at all. He blinks and focuses on the man’s mouth. A cold sore. Uneven stubble.
‘You what?’ Shep says.
The man shakes his head. ‘How’d they let a squeaker like you on this flight?’
‘I’m not a squeaker,’ Shep tells him.
‘No?’
‘No.’
‘What’s that boner about, then?’
Shep gazes down. His erection is visible through his trousers. He covers himself and turns back to the window – starfield Los Angeles. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he whispers. That’s not meant to happen on sloth pills, either.
‘Disgrace,’ the man says. ‘Absolute disgrace.’
Shep keeps his face to the window.
* * *
Soon the jet banks, loops the grid to start its descent. The landing gear engages, the lights of LAX blur into hard white lines, and Shep continues to question his alertness. The clarity of thought. He should be ill, or bleary, or both, but the only physical marker is a mild tingling in his forearms.
The jet touches down. The airbrakes roar. When the roaring stops, someone in front actually claps.
‘Welcome to Los Angeles,’ a synthetic voice announces. ‘Local time is 4.20 a.m. On behalf of the Vaughans, we wish you a great layover in LA.’
The belts come off. Groggy passengers stumble from the cabin. The grizzled man who’d reproached Shep makes a point of shoving past him. Shep finds it hard to care. He steps onto the skybridge and smells America.
Opposite him stands the woman who sat down next to him during the flight.
‘Feeling better, sir?’ she says.
‘You sat next to me,’ Shep says. ‘After take-off.’
The woman’s expression doesn’t change. ‘Sorry? I don’t understand.’
‘You did. You went in my bag.’
Now a look of awkwardness. Her colleagues have started listening.
‘You snored from the moment we left,’ she says. ‘We did try to wake you for refreshments. We thought you’d stopped breathing at one point. You were… writ
hing. Like you had a fever.’
Shep is dumbfounded.
‘But you’re okay now,’ she says. ‘Aren’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ Shep replies. ‘I don’t know.’
* * *
LAX expands into a lattice of control. They’ve thought of everything. Even the armed surveillance drones, dallying above the fine mesh overhead, emit calming birdsong. At the passport stiles, a squad of border guards pick through the jet’s hold luggage. Shep’s case has been emptied out, Tupperware tub on top of his kit-roll. He drops his rucksack into the hand luggage chute and heads through various bombproofed cells, bulletproof tunnels and body scanners. At the far end he’s invited forward by a woman wearing what looks like an industrial worker’s exoskeleton.
‘Hold baggage?’ the guard says, passing over his rucksack.
‘Yeah,’ Shep says, pointing to his open case on the conveyor. A large yellow sticker has been added to its side.
‘Wait there,’ the guard says, nodding to another guard who points his maser at Shep. The guard seals the case and brings it back to Shep, carrying it effortlessly on the last joint of a mechanised finger.
‘Please come with me,’ the guard says. Shep follows her to a brushed steel countertop.
‘Does this case belong to you?’ she asks.
‘Yeah,’ Shep says.
‘Did you pack it yourself?’
‘Yes,’ he says.
‘Are these yours?’
A set of overalls.
‘Yes.’
‘And this?’
The Tupperware.
Shep nods unsurely. His bowels squirm. He’d added a concealment liner, a reflective weave that fires innocuous shapes back at security monitors, but it’s a cosmetic. If she decides to open it—
She opens it.
The moment dilates.
‘Come with me,’ she says. Voice restrained. She strides to a room lit by a single harsh bulb. ‘Stand in that corner,’ she tells him. ‘Do not speak.’
Shep stands in the corner.
‘Turn away from me,’ she says. ‘Hands open.’
Out of the rucksack come his belongings. The slam of his keys. The snap of his wallet. A pack of tobacco skittering over the floor. The crackling blister pack his sloth pills came in. The wadded Portsmouth literature with a weighty slap.
‘Is this all yours?’
Shep turns back. All his things are out on the table. His boots and tools. His Stillson and his podgers.
‘What’s this?’ the guard asks.
‘Gear,’ he says.
‘For what?’
‘Work.’
Eyebrows furrowed. ‘And this?’ The tub again.
‘Food,’ he tells her.
The guard removes the lid and casts it aside. Her suit’s servos sound precise in the smallness of the room. She shakes off the exoskeleton arm so she can use her own hand to hold the tub closer to her face. She tilts it back and forth so the contents slide around.
‘It’s disgusting,’ she says.
‘I’m on a diet,’ Shep says. ‘For my joints.’
The guard tilts the tub.
‘Try some,’ Shep says.
The guard glares at him. ‘You can’t take this with you.’
Shep tenses.
‘Sir…’
Before he can think more about it, Shep comes off the wall. He pulls the tub from the guard’s real hand, slopping it over the table, his clothes and tools. He pours what’s left into his mouth.
The guard’s exo whines angrily as she re-sleeves her arm. With her other clawed hand she snatches back the dripping tub and clamps Shep by the throat, scooping him almost clean off his toes before driving him into the wall. Shep coughs a clump of wet hair down his chin, a bone fragment onto the guard’s front. His lips are on fire. The guard locks his wrists together with her spare hand.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’
Shep forces down a breath, tonguing the mixture into the gullies of his mouth. The taste is sweet and sharp, and there’s an unlikely mass pressing into his gums. Freya’s hair and sweetened bone. Marrow and jelly. He can feel tiny abrasive nodules working against his tongue, his saliva flowing.
‘I don’t have time for this,’ the guard says. She shakes her head, revolted, and liquefies Shep’s tub with a single blast of a device on her arm.
Shep wants to laugh. He wants to shout at her, tell her how perfect it all is. How light and alive he feels. How nothing can change this now. He won’t fail his bloods. He won’t fail anything. Not today, or tomorrow, or probably ever again. Not now.
‘Put the rest of this shit away,’ the guard says, ‘and get out of my airport.’
Shep swallows what’s left in his mouth.
The Journalist
Freya piles through Manchester Airport, a woman on a mission. Her shaking hands betraying the urgency behind her ribs. Call it nervous excitement, call it release, but for the first time in a long time she isn’t churning with dread. Not running from something, only towards it. For the first time since her break-up, since what happened in the Lakes, there’s a vividness here. A breathless contentment, pulsing vessels, her teeth set. A fizzing at her bony edges, her shins and fingers, her skin sensitive to even the lightest touch. Drawing her on is a mental image of her final article published in Dalle magazine – the thing written and rewritten and subbed and flowed in elegant type. Dalle’s editor calling to congratulate her on its quiet power or startling insight or—
‘Steady on, Frey,’ her father might say. Because, of course, the work is still to be done – a living thing to carve from her planners and Dictaphone recordings, and intimidating because it’s still impossible to see its final shape or tone, the sense of its ending. While long features are usually written after the fact – planned, paragraph to paragraph, argument to counterargument, within tight parameters – this is a story without constraint or oversight. And that’s it, in essence. To actually own the blank page is exhilarating. For the first time in her professional career, Freya has the opportunity – is being paid – to write about what obsesses her, to properly engage with it. If Stephen and Alba and Shep posed the question, Dalle allows her to respond. She needed it, and now she has it.
Before she knows it, the man at the plane door wants to see her boarding pass. She’s come all the way through the terminal shops, the flight gate, right up the stairs to the plane itself, with no recollection of doing so.
‘Getting too used to autopilot in my car,’ she says, smiling a little. And she scrabbles through her bag and flashes the man her phone screen.
‘Sure,’ the attendant says.
Then – then Freya’s mood crashes. Stalking up that plane aisle, alone, the situation collapses in on her. Nothing goes this right for you. Here you are, you sneaky bitch. And as she stows her bag and sits down in her empty row, the self-doubt glimmers and grows. As much as Freya has control – can take responsibility for her final draft, owes to her editor and Dalle’s commissioning editor a standard of quality that justifies their faith (never mind expenses) – she wonders if she’s setting herself up for failure. Today, she’s up and away. Tomorrow she might come unstitched entirely. It matches up with a familiar dejection: the fear of writing she has to manage every day, made worse by her growing distrust of the outside, of the dark. The fear she’s missed a signal, a clue; that she’s getting too deep, too infatuated; that she doesn’t deserve this job at all. That Alba and Oriol don’t deserve her invasion. That Shep’s grinning face will be watching through every blackened window. That the earth at her feet will only give way.
Sneaky. Bitch.
Freya wants to get off the plane. But the belt sign is on, and how the hell has she already reasoned herself out of feeling so good, out of being giddy that the world might not be as unkind or cold or cynical as she usually reads it?
Because you’re you, she thinks. When her friends call her down-to-earth, they’re lying. When her editor says she only expects the worst, sh
e’s right. Freya isn’t down-to-earth at all. She just knows how to poke holes in her own wings.
* * *
The plane readies for departure. Freya opens a novel pinched from her mother’s bedside table. The writing is smooth and tidy, very matter-of-fact. Nothing much seems to happen, though in the second chapter a woman describes her joyless affair to a friend until they both fall asleep on the settee, holding hands. It’s quite a powerful scene, Freya reckons. Fiction being pat like that.
The plane reaches cruising altitude. Freya closes the book and then her eyes. Her thoughts turn to her own affair, her joyless tryst with the photo editor. She winces, a hot blister of remorse. Freya’s ex must never know their relationship ended for so little satisfaction. A few shags that, in the beginning, occurred through raw opportunity and circumstance – late nights in the office, stress, caffeine – and only then when Freya was ill, or a bit down, or felt like a boring local hack with no prospects beyond the walls of the sixties block they worked from. Her ex’s faults – his sour-smelling jogging bottoms, the way he chewed, left an inch of cold tea in his mugs, resented going down on her – never even figured. Freya betrayed him consciously and without excuse.
‘Causality doesn’t even apply here,’ her ex spat when he found the text messages. ‘You’re just fucked up.’
The photo editor was single and quietly egregious and an enthusiastic kisser, and Freya liked him droning on about cameras and photo sales because it was white noise. All she really wanted was the smell of someone else against her, a different body, skin with a different tone, elasticity. Electrified she’d even allowed herself to try.
But then? After that? Empty in the office, as those beige walls came back into view?
Freya opens her eyes. The man in front has reclined his seat and Freya’s tray is digging into her belly. If there’s anything to glean from the whole mess, it’s that the affair’s pointlessness can’t hurt her ex now. The truth is sealed up in Freya, and she’ll make up for it in her own way.
