Loss of Separation

by Conrad Williams

  Loss of Separation

  Conrad Williams

  Solaris Books

  For Rhonda. I burn for you.

  First published 2010 by Solaris, an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd, Riverside House, Osney Mead, Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-84997-245-1 (.mobi/Kindle)

  ISBN: 978-1-84997-246-8 (.epub)

  Copyright © 2011 Conrad Williams.

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Also by Conrad Williams

  Decay Inevitable

  One

  The Unblemished

  London Revenant

  The Scalding Rooms

  Rain

  Head Injuries

  Nearly People

  Game

  Use Once Then Destroy

  Part One

  Cheyne Stoking

  Loss of separation between aircraft occurs whenever specified separation minima are breached. Loss of separation may ultimately result in a mid air collision.

  source: www.skybrary.aero

  Flight Z

  Departure

  The dead captain peers through cockpit windows flecked with blood and the fear-spittle of screams. Vomit, like panic paint. The wipers work at this grue, smearing, turning the control tower into a Grimm's windmill with ghost sails. This monster should not be able to fly.

  - Roan ground from Flight Z on stand Lima Three-Zero requesting start-up clearance.

  - Flight Z is cleared to Tamara Airport. Your initial routeing is Dunwich One-Niner. Cleared to line-up and hold on runway One-Niner Left.

  - What are you doing? We can't just leave him like this. We have to...

  Engulfed by black carbon, two giant passenger jets have become fused together in an unimaginably violent collision. The shark's head of a Jumbo jet seems to erupt from the mangled wreckage of a Boeing 777, like something struggling for air. One massive wing hangs from this convolvulus of aluminium, dragging and sparking on the apron as the molten shreds of the landing gear carry the jets along the taxiway. Its blistered engines - nacelles flayed open to reveal the weird anatomy of these powerhouses - stutter with flame, drizzling aviation fuel across the tarmac. Humours haze the black hulk, rendering its shape uncertain. Fractures in the fuselages are bonded shut by human glue.

  The aircraft is the pilot; the pilot is the aircraft. The captain feels the jet a part of himself, as all pilots do. Must. He might look down and see his body blend sinuously with the seat, a molecular marriage of biology and mechanics. The blasted airstrip: pockmarked and strewn with skulls and naked, wrenched corpses bearing astonished expressions. He aligns the jet with the runway, and the engines clear their throats. He plays the throttles against the brakes and feels the tonnage pulling against them. The aircraft wants to be back up there, screaming in the night.

  - Flight Z, this is Roan ground, you are cleared for take-off. Wind two five zero at fifteen.

  Setting power. Brakes off.

  We have to what?

  We have to finish him off.

  Gathering pace, Flight Z grinds over the runway. Skulls and ribcages pulverise beneath the massive wheels; clouds of bone dust rise in their wake.

  Eighty knots... one hundred fifty one knots...

  Vee-One...

  ... one hundred fifty eight knots

  ... Rotate...

  He's dead. Look at him. He's dying. Leave him.

  Engines screaming, the nose lifts and Flight Z arches into the night, wings flung out like something in the act of capitulation.

  ... Vee-Two... Positive rate of climb...

  ... Gear up...

  We can't leave him. What if someone comes? What if he wakes up?

  The bay doors wail open, fighting against the buckle of that previous impact. The howl of wind as drag is increased. Body parts fall away like titbits picked from a tooth. The bogies retract. At 300 feet the crosswind slams into the fuselage and the aircraft turns into it, crabbing against the airstream, inviting turbulence.

  I can't do this. I can't do this. I won't do this.

  The 777 hangs from the body of the Jumbo like a forgotten stillbirth. This abomination shrinks into the violet night, guided by a heartbeat beacon, otherwise flying blind. No porthole lights. No pre-flight safety announcement. No in-flight entertainment. A troubled, monotonous banshee call rises into the troposphere. And then, after a short while, even that is gone.

  Chapter One

  The Dead Baby

  While I was in a coma, surgeons operated on my spine. Cancellous bone chips were harvested from my iliac crest (they told me later) and placed carefully between the damaged dorsal vertebrae. Wires and glue held these plugs in place. They stabilised the spine with a metal brace to assist the fusing of the damaged spinal column. I was an Airfix kit for four months. At least I didn't know anything about it. The hit-and-run left me with so many broken ribs. It left me with a punctured lung; I almost drowned in my own fluids. Both femurs fractured in three places; the bones of my lower leg had impacted up through the patella in my left knee. I came off the bonnet and my face was the first thing to hit the ground. There are fourteen bones in the face, not counting the teeth, the ossicula auditus and Wormian bones. The orbit of my right eye turned into so much calcium dust. When I revived, six months of my life had been pissed through a catheter and my muscles were porridge. They took the bandages off and I found myself wishing that they would just keep unravelling, to a point where I would no longer fill the shape they had suggested. I didn't look at myself; I still haven't, three weeks later. I was no longer capable of crying.

  'Where's my girlfriend?' I asked - or tried to ask - the surgeon, while he was prodding my back with a pencil, telling me how extremely lucky I was. My mouth felt alien, as if it had been grafted on to me, courtesy of a donor. Perhaps it had. I felt as if my skin had been removed and then stretched back over me the wrong way around. Nothing fit; nothing felt comfortable. Everything hurt, even the space that I occupied.

  I had no idea what an iliac crest was.

  There was a gull lying on the beach, trying to move its broken wings, making a pathetic sound among the pebbles. I wondered if it had been attacked by a seal. Surf frothed beneath the bird's throat, turning pink. I might have gone to help, If there was anything I could have done, but I was just as ruined. Out of hospital three weeks and I was determined to celebrate. Here's to pain; I raised the miniature bottle of rum and swigged it down. All along the beach, fishermen were switching off the ochre lamps in their tents, thoughts turning to breakfast. Rods were dismantled and stowed in tackle bags, old bait heaved into the sea. Beyond them, the land took over, flat and unyielding, save for the jutting thumb of an abandoned mill stuck on its own in a fallow field.

  The idea of nightfishing had horrified me as a child, before I realised what it really was. I used to imagine hooks spiralling into the sky, cast by madmen. Barbs snagging on the velvet, tearing it open, tearing it down. It bothered me that anyone would want to do that, let alone try. Precious little bothered me now. A dying bird on the beach. A metal rod in my spine. Nearly three hundred people on a flight out of Heathrow airport missing death by seventy feet. You begin to learn how to keep a lid on it.

  After the fishermen had gone I noticed there was another figure, much further alon
g where the sand gives way to greater fans of shingle, and the dunes with their punk tussock hairstyles rear up between the beach and the caravan park. It was hooded, staring out to sea, stock still. Some time later it moved off in the direction of the harbour and something in the way it moved called to me. It was as if the figure was aping my shuffling gait; but then, it could just have been the unstable shoreline, dotted as it was at this hour with the detritus the surf coughed up.

  I returned my attention to the job at hand. I shifted in the shingle and stared at the box for a long time. It was an Umbro shoe box, a new one. Someone with size 9s had bought something coloured LIGHT SILVER/VAPOUR/BLACK GOLD. I patted my jacket pocket for matches.

  BURN THIS FOR ME.

  I don't spend too much time on the contents. It's too much like prying. But sometimes you can't avoid the objects that tumble out; they contain their own force, a fearful potential. A map of Alaska slashed with black biro. Aeronautical charts (which gave me pause) with their dense codes, vectors and warnings to pilots. CAUTION: Severe turbulence may occur over rugged terrain. CAUTION: Numerous windmills. CAUTION: Intensive aerobatic practice area. A letter so old the page is as fragile as an insect's wing. A cat's collar. A photograph of a man in khaki shorts whose ice cream has fallen from its cone. Something grey, excised, rattling in a clear plastic tub. A promise, or a threat, of fidelity.

  It takes to the flame every time, first match in. It goes up as if it were created for this moment. I get a few looks from the fishermen as they trudge up the beach to their kippers and their coffee, but some of them keep their eyes averted and in this way I know that I have burned secrets for them.

  PLEASE GET RID OF THIS FOR ME, PLEASE?

  A while yet before the sun comes up. Its colour surprises here, where the skies are so big you could be forgiven for seeing a curve to the horizon. The flames change. They bend and arch and quiver. The things they eat into produce unnatural colours; belches of black, chemical smoke. It all ends up as ash. When it's spent, I toe it into the sand. I go out in the dark only. I haven't yet the guts to show my face in daylight.

  It takes me an hour to get back, whatever that means. On the way I find an infant's blue romper suit, washed up by the tide.

  Dist.

  Black cellulose. Purple sky. Silver rain. Grey skin.

  Distance. I was always good at judging how far off a car was at night, in the wet. Coming on. Speeding. I could tell. Look both ways. Look both ways again. Swell of headlights. The growl of the engine.

  I was fascinated, when I was a kid, by this thing called the dichotomy paradox. It was a daft thing, really, easily disproved by mathematics, but theoretically difficult to argue against. It was all about how getting from A to B was actually impossible. All motion is an illusion. The car can never get to where it needs to be because, to paraphrase Archimedes, it must first make it half way before it reaches its destination. But before you can get halfway there, you must get a quarter of the way there. Before that, you must travel one-eighth; before that, a sixteenth; and so on, ad infinitum. But you can't tell a ton of metal this. You can't reason with it.

  Black cellulose. Grey skin. Red bone. White light. White pain.

  Dist. Distance Is Speed times Time. Forty miles an hour. Fifty. Sixty. Ear to the ground. Nose to the grindstone. Back to front. Hell to pay. How far from me was it when I realised what was going to happen? Six months. Where did all the distance go? Inside me. That's where. I paid it out jealously. It filled me up so completely there was hardly any space left for life.

  Deceleration. Stall warning. Brace for impact. Controlled landing into terrain.

  The road. The car. The rain. The shine. The engine. The chest. The collapse. The pain. The blood. The hiss. The engine. The drowning. The glass. The eyes. The kiss. The blanket. The love. The engine. The dark. The engine. The heartbeats. The cry.

  Acceleration. Diminishment. Flatline.

  I'm Paul Roan. I am Paul Roan. I used to be First Officer Paul Roan. Now I'm plain Paul Roan, but that's good, I suppose. By rights I should be Paul Roan RIP. I clocked nearly 4000 flying hours with Lufthansa, the German airline. I was in command of a Boeing 777 when it was involved in what we call an airprox incident. There was what we call a loss of separation caused by what we call a level bust that resulted from poor communication and a lack of coordination on the flight deck. Density of traffic. Simultaneous transmissions. Lack of hearback. Bottom line: I was tired and not paying as much attention as I should. There was what we call a fuck-up. We nearly hit a 747 en route to New York out of Madrid. Nearly never counts. But it does in this industry. There was an enquiry and I was suspended from my job. I was encouraged to appeal, but I lost my nerve. I couldn't stop thinking about what might have happened had I pulled back a little more on the control column. There were 412 passengers and crew on the 777; 289 on ours. That amounts to nearly 800 gallons of blood redecorating the cabins on impact.

  I walked.

  After that, whenever I was close enough to an airport to see a jet taking off I'd feel a cold choker fasten around my throat, even as I was running through my mind the procedure the pilots were likely to be following at that moment as they climbed steep and fast, adjusting trim, thanking air traffic control before being passed on to their next point of contact.

  I had to move away from London. I became convinced that a jet would come out of the sky, plough into homes, through my living room, dragging an orange forest of flaming aviation fuel with it. Tamara, my girlfriend, was happy to move. She had not settled, despite having arrived from Ukraine four years previously. She found it difficult to make new friends; she found the women in the city too inattentive.

  'Like butterflies,' she described them. Her friends from home were loyal, stuck fast. She couldn't understand meeting someone just for coffee; she expected to spend the day with them, sometimes longer, shopping, cooking meals together. 'Everyone's in such a rush to get on. To get to next thing. Nobody ever looks at you.'

  So we sold our two-bedroom flat in Camden and decided to use the profit to buy something modest on the coast. A B&B that needed a bit of work. A new life. Away from the flight paths.

  I'm on the beach every day, but not always to burn secrets. Part of my physiotherapy involves walking. I was told by the doctors at the hospital that walking in sand was much better than on any other surface. I put in the hours. I walk until my back is on fire and the shape of my legs has been forgotten. I know I'm gritting my teeth because a thin layer of sand builds up on them. Every so often I'll jar my foot on a concealed rock and swear I can feel the brace in my spine grate against the vertebrae. An illusion - the steel is fused with the bone - but I can't shake it.

  I'm a badly constructed Jenga tower. I've lost weight. I've lost height. My legs are so scarred they resemble snakes winding around thin boughs. My face feels punched in and carved out. A bruise in the shape of a 7 sits low on my torso; it hasn't faded in almost seven months. I'm convinced there's a dusting of rust compacted into the flesh. My left eye is permanently bloodshot. Even if I wanted to go back to flying, I'd never be allowed near a cockpit. I'm in persistent pain. I take strong opioid drugs. I take so many, I have a special plastic drugs case to remind me what to take and when. Some tablets I take every four to six hours. I take Solpadol to combat pain. I'm addicted. Addiction is the alternative to killing myself. I sit and watch far too much TV and take none of it in. I drift, only coming to when I drool on my bare knees, or when Ruth comes in to rouse me with a fruit smoothie, or a cool hand on mine.

  There's a story, though, in the news, that finds its way through. Possibly because the footage spoken over by the reporter (favouring emphasis on consonants rather than vowels) is of Southwick beach, and the pier. In some footage I can clearly see the black, ashen pits of my own bonfires. A child was killed here, recently. I was still in hospital at the time. Kieran Love, his name is. Was. I watch a Detective Inspector wearing a hat, like some Chandler reject, reciting policespeak to the cameras: appeals for witnes
ses. If anybody saw anything... it's imperative that we catch this man... I'd ask that he think hard about what he's done and give himself up... We fear he may strike again.

  The last time I remember being with my girlfriend.

  We'd spent a few hours apart. She wanted to buy me something from the junk shop. Go mad, I said to her as she leaned in, giggling, and kissed the tip of my nose.

  While she was gone, I wandered through the village, nodding at people, trying on the size of the place, wondering how long it would take for me to feel comfortable calling it home. I picked through trinkets in an antique shop. I bought a postcard and drank tea in the Rose café, where a woman in a black pinafore brought me a paper napkin and a bone china cup and saucer.

  I bought a newspaper at the corner shop and turned left, up towards the junk shop. I peered in through the window and saw Tamara chatting with the proprietor, who sat in a deep, tatty armchair behind the counter. She was holding a brown paper bag. I went in and moved towards their murmurs, picking things up, putting them down. There were layers of junk. Some of them were so deep behind shelves and furniture that it was impossible to reach them, or make out what they were. I wondered how long they had been there.

  Tamara saw me and waved me over. She introduced me to Ray, who told me he had owned the junk shop for twenty years. I wanted to ask him about the stuff that was buried, but Tamara was already saying goodbye, shooing me out of the shop. We went to the pub where she bought me... and then she gave me the bag... and I put my... or did I kiss her first? And then I opened the bag... and she said... or did I say?...