Loss of Separation

by Conrad Williams

  Yet I went to bed feeling an uneasy mix of hope and dread. I had made the first steps to finding Tamara. At the very least, I would have it from her mouth what it was she wanted to do. I would not allow her the comfort of a clean break. Craw, I thought. It made me think of famished black birds. It made me think of choking to death on splinters of bone.

  In the night I was disturbed by the sound of Ruth moving through the house. It was late, past two, when I heard the front door open and close. Some time later, maybe half an hour or so, I heard it open and close again. I dreamed of Tamara's mouth opening and closing too, as she struggled to put into words the nightmare that she had designed for me.

  Chapter Four

  Black Landings

  I wear the same clothes nearly every day. Soft, elasticated jogging bottoms. A hooded top with a zipper (I can't pull clothes over my head). Slip-on sandals. I consider it a uniform, just the same as the one I wore at Lufthansa. Maybe a little less glamorous. It's one less thing to worry about. I can move more freely. Sometimes I wish I could climb out of this tight, inflexible skin too. I feel hemmed in, trapped. The pills don't cancel the pain, they just move it out of reach for a while. It's still there, in view, like a dangerous thing put on a high shelf away from the children. And you can't stop glancing at it. You know it will be returned to its normal place before long. Decide what you reasonably feel that you would like to achieve in your life and think about how using opioids can help you. Set yourself some realistic goals.

  A plastic doll's head with a lazy eye. A Hähnel battery charger. A tube of discoloured Berocca vitamin tablets. A pencil case with a hole in it. An abandoned letter, one sentence long: I don't know how to say this to you, so I'm writing it instead.

  I take the box to the beach. The sky is porridge. It's unlikely to clear all day, according to the forecast. Dampness in the air, finer than mist. You can't see it, but by the time I reach my little nest of cinders, my skin and clothes are jewelled with moisture. The box too. At first I doubt this will burn, but it's as always: first match. The flame skates slowly along the lip of cardboard, darkening and warping in its wake. It moves fast, dipping into the contents like something hungry chasing down its next meal. The orange curl becomes a bright yellow fan. The smell of smoke as it thickens, turning into a pumping black column, is new, different to the last time. It smells synthetic today, probably because of the plastic. It works hard, this fire, a little industry of obliteration. It won't clock off until everything is gone. Fire is efficient, sometimes horribly so. As a pilot, you don't consider the awful ramifications of a crash. You prepare for an emergency. You do not prepare for your own death.

  I toed the remnants into the shingle and stood up. I did some light stretching, trying hard not to think of my new skin separating under the stress. I walked the mile or so between the pier and the harbour wall, looking at the green bite indicators of the nightfishermen hanging above the shoreline like static fireflies. By the time I reached the wall, my top was sodden, clinging unpleasantly to my back. I sat down and pulled the length of yellow string from my pocket. My fingers itched, though I wasn't sure if this was part of their recovery or in anticipation of the task ahead. I didn't practise any of the knots I'd learned, I just played with the string, allowing my fingers to produce their own configuration of bights and falls. The sea was calm, despite the frowning sky. I saw a seal's head break the surface. It watched the beach for a while and then dived down. I looked all over but I didn't see it come back up.

  I kept picking at the strands of my life, pre-crash, trying to find some reason for Tamara's departure. But there wasn't one. Not unless she was secretly disgusted by the near miss. If she was, she'd hidden it well. She stood by me all through that summer of meetings, hearings and reports. She stepped between me and the father of a young girl who had been on the flight. He spat at me, tried to punch me, his face turning black with rage as if there had been a crash and she was dead. Tamara talked me down when I was angry and talked me up when I was miserable. At night she held me and kissed me and whispered Ukrainian into my hair. Ni zhyty, ni vmeraty. So there was only the hit-and-run that could have driven a wedge between us. Every time I thought of her, the way she behaved prior to her leaving, it would not sit right with events. She had acted out of character.

  The ends of the string had disappeared. Somehow I had massaged it into a knot that contained no protrusions. It was folded and dimpled like a navel. I couldn't begin to unpick it. It was seamless. I put it in my pocket, more disturbed than I ought to have been. The fishermen were trudging off the shingle. I never saw anybody catch anything. I was about to follow them, appalled by how the beach seemed to have grown while I was resting, when I noticed a tiny figure at the far end, close to the site where I lighted my fires. I felt a moment of panic, but I knew I never left a fire unattended. I waited until whatever it was had been consumed, and then I put it out and I made sure. If it was a child, it would not be burnt.

  The child seemed very small. And naked too. It was a long way away, but although my vision had been affected by the accident, it wasn't so bad as to instil doubt. There didn't seem to be any parents nearby. I shouted at the fishermen, who were much closer, but they didn't hear me. Nor could they see, apparently, what I was seeing, despite their heads occasionally raising to gaze down the beach at the lights on the pier.

  But then the figure was gone and already I was questioning what I had seen. Naked babies did not play on the beach, not in winter at any rate. There must have been a guardian nearby who had scooted it back into a buggy. Maybe they had to change its clothes because it had soiled itself.

  I thought to go and check, but Charlie was coming down the harbour path, whistling me as if I were a dog. He asked me again if I was up for a fishing trip and this time he wouldn't take no for an answer. When I mentioned the weather, he told me it would clear up within the hour.

  'Blue skies and sunglasses 'fore we get to the fishing grounds or I'll buy y'a pint and y'supper when we get back.'

  'I saw a child,' I said. 'A baby.'

  He gazed back over my shoulder and nodded. 'Yes. We have babies here. They grows up into reg'lar folks an' all, just like you 'n' me. Well, me anyways.'

  'I just thought, in light of what happened...' My words tailed off.

  'So,' he said. 'Fishin'.'

  He wore a happy, expectant look. I'd been putting him off ever since returning from the hospital, citing my weakness, injuries, seasickness, fear of drowning... He was hungry for company, perhaps even seeing me as a surrogate for Gordon, who no doubt would have followed his dad into the fishing business.

  'I really have no clue about boats, or fish,' I said, pathetically, as he led the way to the Gratitude. 'I'm not even dressed for it.'

  He handed me a thick jumper, which he helped me put on, and a pair of boots. 'Now y'are,' he said.

  He started the engine and cast off the moorings. I strapped on a lifejacket and sat on a bench to watch him steer the boat out of the harbour. He told me of the Viking rudders that had been dredged up in the fishing nets over the years. He mentioned how the fishing had changed over the fifty years he had lived here. There had been shrimp in abundance once, available the whole summer, but then the beamers would come and hoover the whole lot up in one day. Reduced stocks and punitive EU restrictions meant that the fishing industry was all but dead here; a terrible brake applied to a tradition that had lasted a thousand years. Trawlers were illicitly selling over-quota fish.

  Charlie could remember the good times. Fish gold: cod, monkfish and hake, and also dogfish, lemon sole, turbot and lobster. Scallops dredged up from the bed. Exotics such as red mullet and uglies: angler fish, conger eel. Now you could spend a day out on a boat and you'd be lucky to recoup your fuel costs.

  There were some still making a living in this line, but not many. Those that did were either escaping from something or had no choice. He'd met a couple of Eastern Europeans who worked on crabbing boats. They were making between thirty and fort
y thousand pounds a year, but it was breakback work. You lived on board and worked three months before you had a month off. Accommodation and meals were taken out of your pay packet.

  Charlie had considered moving on many times - the crabbing boats had attracted him for a short time - but he could never leave the place where he had been born. 'I get headache if I'm away too long,' he said.

  He owned a small fish shed from which he sold herring and sprat during the winter ('But only to the older ladies and gents... they're not a fish the young like much'), cod, Dover sole and turbot in the summer. He especially liked selling turbot to Londoners who came out to the village. He could put whatever price he liked on them and they paid without question. And he could still make more money charging the best part of a thousand pounds to groups of fishing buddies that wanted to charter a boat to the wrecks.

  'How long before we get to where we're going?' I asked him. The wind was charging the boat, rocking us from side to side. The sea had decided to take up the challenge thrown by the sky and had turned moody. Plenty of chop now. I received an occasional slap of cold spray across the face.

  'Just thirty miles or so. We'll drop a net or two and then move on, maybe shoot some lines over a wreck. Bigger fish there. Can't dredge so the bigger boats don't bother.'

  I felt as if I was an understudy drafted in to take the place of the lead actor who has suddenly fallen ill. Everything felt unreal, staged. Even our dialogue seemed scripted. It was too mannered, too polite. This wasn't my normal life, and yet it was, now. I had been present, yet absent, and routines had been prescribed without my involvement, and it was all for my benefit, supposedly. I felt as if I were being channelled, though, forced along corridors of behaviour that I wouldn't normally travel. I did not feel free.

  This was not just as a result of the restrictions of my injuries, or the exercises I needed to do just to be able to get out of bed in the mornings. It went deeper than that. Southwick might just be a façade, a two-dimensional Hollywood film set. Somehow I needed to get behind the scenes in order to understand fully my role. Or maybe this was how everyone who had once lived a busy, demanding life felt when reverse thrust was engaged and you were forced to be still.

  I allowed myself to be pressed and shaped and moulded. I did as Charlie said. I baited hooks. I took the wheel when he wanted to go for a piss. I helped him, after a fashion, to manipulate the heavy nets and their bobbins through the gallows and into the churning, black water. We drank tea laced with rum and watched the restless ocean.

  'Y'got y'sea legs yet?' he asked.

  'I'm getting there,' I told him. 'Took me long enough to get my air legs.'

  'Well, there's a thing. Don't know about flying. Never been up. But I can read the sky a little.'

  'You've never been in an aircraft?'

  He shook his head. 'Not that odd. Plenty haven't, 'specially my age and older. Never thought to travel. Got everything I want here. And I don't trust those big bastards anyway. It's not right.'

  I said: 'I flew with a captain, Captain Sheedy his name was. He was a very experienced pilot. He'd flown nearly thirty thousand hours on a variety of aircraft. Big ones, in the main. 767s, 747s, you know. He was a good guy. A good pilot to learn from.'

  Charlie didn't seem to have a clue what I was talking about. I kept going, if only to stop him from asking me if he flew all those hours without a break. I don't know why I was talking at all. I kept my eyes on the sea; I felt slightly nauseous. I was probably talking to try to stave off seasickness. I really didn't want to vomit on Charlie's boat.

  'We had this thing, this agreement, that if we were ever involved in a bad incident, an emergency landing on water, say, or mechanical failure, whatever, we would give the details to the passengers "quick and dirty" style. Tell them straight and tell them fast, albeit couched in polite language, that we were fucked. And then get on with trying to save the plane.

  'It went a bit further than that. I had a drink with Joe Sheedy one evening in Singapore. We had one too many vodka martinis and he said that if he was ever in a position where it was really bad, where the likelihood was that there was going to be an unrecoverable spin, or total engine loss, he would look to slam the plane into the ground as soon as possible. Get it over with fast. Better that than getting people's hopes up and filling the cabin with shit and chunder for half an hour before death.'

  'Plenty o' death out here too, o' course,' Charlie said.

  He was regarding me intensely. I wondered if he was trying to goad a reaction out of me, that this might be his own way of helping with my recovery. Maybe he thought I was too passive, too soft. The accident might well have smacked more than tissue, blood and consciousness from my body. I felt permanently jarred, like something viewed in soft focus, its edges indistinct. A blurred outline that could not recover itself.

  'So how did y'get interested in all them big birds?'

  The question knocked me back a bit. I was about to tell him that I didn't know, I couldn't remember, but then it was there, as, of course, it had always been there. I just hadn't thought of it in all these years.

  'My dad,' I said. I paused, composing myself, trying to put some muscle behind my voice. Speaking of Dad always knocked the breath from me. I didn't often do it, because there was little to remember, and few occasions when it was needed. I missed him, but hardly knew him. I regretted that we'd never had the time to build a relationship. But what there had been was gold. Charlie unfolded his pocket knife and cleaned the blade. I was grateful that he didn't pry, didn't ask my what was wrong. He was old enough to know, to understand. Something to do with his own father, perhaps. Something to do with Gordon.

  'We were up north. In Cumbria for some reason. Visiting relatives, maybe. Maybe just a drive to the Lakes. I don't know. It was winter. I was, what? I was maybe four or five years old. There had been a heavy snowfall. On the way back I needed the toilet, so he took me to a park he knew. We were in south Manchester, close to the airport. This park... I can't remember its name. There was a frozen duck pond and a play area. And a café overlooking large gardens with a massive tree in the middle of it. It was misty and sunny at the same time, you know? Weird, but beautiful weather.

  'There were kids sledging down the slope towards the tree. My dad must have felt sorry for me - we didn't have a toboggan - so he nipped into the café and came back with a black plastic bin bag. It worked, kind of... but it didn't matter. I was having fun with Dad and it was a great day. But then there was this noise. Big, big noise. I was scared. But I couldn't run to Dad because I was on the bag and I was sliding down the incline. It sounded like the world was shattering. Thunderous. Getting bigger, closer all the time.

  'And right at the moment when the bag stopped sliding, I fell back against the snow and looked up at this golden mist, and a shadow passed through it. Huge. Like a shark. And the roar was on top of me. And I remember reaching for it, as if I might be able to just grab it out of the cloud like a toy. Suddenly I wasn't scared any more. I was shaking, but it was from excitement, not fear. Dad thought I was having some kind of panic attack. All I could talk about from then on was aeroplanes. They became my world. I was such a jet nerd after that. All I ever wanted to do was go to air shows or visit the viewing platforms at Heathrow. My bedroom was filled with plastic models.'

  Charlie was still inspecting his knife. He seemed unimpressed. And why should he be? It was my thrill, my passion. I probably sounded like a complete arse to him.

  'Anyway,' I said, 'flying... it's pretty straightforward. It's just physics. It's just lift and thrust.'

  'And crash, far as I can see it.'

  I kept my mouth shut. I could have quoted the facts and figures, how, if you had been born on an aeroplane and lived on board 24 hours a day, the likelihood was that it would take over a hundred years before you were involved in a fatal accident. But there was no point with Charlie. There were some who flew their entire lives - the front-seat people, the tea-and-coffee chuckers, the self-loading
baggage - and the worst that happened was the occasional hard landing, or a prolonged bout of heavy turbulence. I could tell him we were far more likely to die on his boat, but I didn't want to start a fight.

  'These wrecks,' I said. 'From the world wars?'

  'Yep. There's about 150 off these shores alone. And from the battle of Winter Bay, y'still get stuff cropping up even now. Y'know, cannonball, and the like.'

  'Winter Bay,' I said, nodding. 'Sixteen seventy-two?'

  'That'll be the one.'

  'I saw something about that the other day. Something about children.'

  'Children?'

  'Yes. Someone had written in a book. Scribbled on the back pages about children. About suffering. Something took them.'

  'Took?'

  I waited for a moment, but Charlie was obviously struggling past one-word statements. I said, 'I'll dig it out when we get back. Do you know what it means?'

  He shook his head. 'Bit 'fore my time, Winter Bay.'

  I wasn't convinced. He knew Southwick inside out, possibly better than anyone living in the village.

  'Are you superstitious, Charlie?' I asked.

  'O' course,' he said, and for a moment I thought his face might collapse. I wondered if his superstitions were tied up with Gordon. I wondered if he refused to come to sea without a photograph of his little boy in his wallet. Or maybe he murmured a little prayer before he shot the nets. I was about to apologise. I was doing a lot of it and getting sick of having to pussy-foot it everywhere.

  He said, 'And so should you be, son.'

  We went back to work. It was time to haul the nets in. I took it easy, but I was enjoying it and I overdid things a little. It was like stretching. You get into a good stretch after a long drive or sleeping in an uncomfortable position, and it feels as though you're rediscovering your body, giving it a freedom it didn't usually enjoy. This was the same. I wanted to haul on the ropes until I felt them burn the skin off my palms and the muscles on my shoulders bulged and sang. I glanced at Charlie's hands and they were like folds of oilskin, the colour of strong tea. He seemed to be palming a million lines: lifelines, love lines, wisdom lines; if he turned his fist over and opened it they might spill out over the deck. I had to rest after a while.