Flight

by Adam Thorpe

  ‘Mum’s not having one.’

  ‘Oh come on, she’s been having this sort of really diluted one for years. Poor thing.’

  ‘She still signs off with an LOL, texting me.’

  ‘Dad, that means Laugh Out Loud.’

  ‘Does it? Oh. Well, not in her case. I hope.’

  They were both continuing to gaze at Siegfried, for some reason. It reminded Bob of a deadly virus under an electron microscope. He asked her if she had met Ben.

  ‘Yeah. He seems OK,’ she said, followed by a shrug. ‘A bit art-teachery. The multi-zip jeans are such a bad idea. I kept wanting to say, Ben, multi-zip jeans: why?’

  She takes Olivia’s part, but she’s so unlike her, he thought.

  They walked round Newcastle’s grandiose centre ignoring the usual blitzkrieg of 60s concrete, browsed in a labyrinthine record shop and ate at a ‘fab’ Indian where every plate was the same yellow mush (more or less). ‘I think the food’d be better in the mother country,’ he said, examining a bloated tandoori chicken. ‘This red’s a spray job.’

  He sat there and wondered why he hadn’t in fact decided on India, maybe an ashram, instead of sitting out the time somewhere wet, grey and windy.

  After the meal, they wove their way through a winter carnival of drunkenness to a concrete cellar in which Sophie played guest bass on a couple of songs with what looked like members of the heroin rehab unit. Bob was virtually the only person over twenty-five, yet it was so like the rock cellars he’d gone to thirty-odd years back that he lost internal decades. The music was louder than a Rolls-Royce Spey engine at three feet and he had to block his ears, which was impossible to do discreetly. Sophie, sporting 1950s sunglasses, laughed and danced and hugged her friends while her father stayed away from the press of bodies in a corner near the fire exit, keeping a smile stuck on and buoyed up by the occasional attentions of sozzled girls encouraging him to join in, mostly through sign language or by placing their lips against his better ear while gripping his upper arm. They must have assumed he was a grizzled talent scout.

  One of them, plump and pale with violet hair, said he looked like Harrison Ford – hopefully as he was a few years back. Another asked him what he did and he transfixed her by saying he was a photojournalist. ‘That’s just totally what I want to be!’ she yelled during a slow track. She asked him where he lived; he said he was off touring the world. There followed a tricky few minutes when he became uncharacteristically aloof as the girl tried to ask him further questions, mainly technical. He knew nothing about cameras. She still gave him a tender wave as she merged into the general seethe. Her name was Amy, she was pretty, with dimples and a sweet nose that creased up, her lips set off by three silver studs. He wondered what it was like kissing a girl with three lip studs. She had a coily tattoo well below her collarbone, with words only partly covered by her sleeveless top.

  Then Sophie grabbed his hand and got him jigging about. Endorphins started kicking in and his body took over, helped by several beers and a cocktail called Whippersnapper. The youngsters – so much nicer, he reckoned, than his own generation – didn’t even chuckle as he bobbed about, getting creative, sweat trickling down his back. Dubai clubbing tended to include the older age range. Here he was on his own, stranded by the years but having a whale of a time.

  Amy suddenly reappeared as Sophie went back up on stage. He found a pair of hands on his shoulders and Amy’s weight against his, her sweet breath on his neck. This went on for several numbers, the friction increasing, the others not giving them much choice but to be squeezed close. He crouched somewhat to be cheek to cheek and hers was silken. In his inebriated state he told her – shouted into her ear – how fascinated he was by her lip studs, that he’d never kissed anyone with a lip stud. She stuck out her tongue and showed him the silver bead in the middle of its glistening length. They laughed. Her hair smelt of meringues, her breath of lemons. Her dimples were bottomless, as his Arab friends in Dubai would have said. His heart was alternately thumping and turning gooey, or both at once. He imagined her piercings – especially the tongue one – as cool, polished moments in a general outlook of warmth and softness … his reverie was interrupted by the untimely arrival of her BlackBerry, suddenly in her hand and being concentrated on, the screen making her beads look like warning lights.

  She came off it with a shrug and grinned at him, throwing her head back. ‘I want to lock a photojournalist in my room all night!’ she shouted several times into his ear before he could pick it up.

  ‘Amy, you’re too lovely for me!’

  ‘No, I’m not!’

  ‘What does your tattoo say?’

  She started to pull her top away from her chest to show him, and he peered in, decoding the curly words in the poor light as they snaked either side onto the steep slopes of her breasts that didn’t seem to descend to the top of a bra but to yet more silken skin. He read, with some difficulty: This chest contains red carnations.

  ‘That’s beautiful!’ he shouted.

  A pincer on his upper arm, a pulling away. It was Sophie. She wasn’t pleased. Amy hung on, laughing.

  ‘She’s completely smashed out of her head!’ cried Sophie. ‘Let her go, Dad!’

  ‘I’m a free man! She’s lovely!’

  ‘She’s on Smirnoff Ice and acid! You’ll be done for date rape!’

  They hit the cold damp air with Amy lost somewhere behind in the teeming sauna of the club. It was three in the morning; they returned to base with the aid of a taxi. Sophie was silent. Bob’s ears were singing and his head spinning, while the pavement as they got out of the taxi was strangely sinuous. She said nothing until they got to her room; he angled into a beanbag with a grunt.

  ‘You’re not normally like that, Dad.’

  ‘What? It was good fun.’

  ‘That’s not the point. She’s not even twenty. She’s a teenager.’

  ‘Over eighteen, I presume. I was just dancing with her.’

  ‘You were not just dancing. You were clinging. Grinding, it’s known as. Hand on bum. Looking at her tits, practically diving in—’

  ‘I was deciphering her amazing tattoo. Red carnations—’

  ‘Yeah yeah. You’ve got a smudge of red there.’ She pointed to the corner of her mouth. ‘Yuk. Yuk and yuk and yuk.’

  He pouted like a teenager, his head a polyphony of swaying sounds. ‘Nice girl.’

  ‘She’d dropped some acid. She wasn’t in control.’

  ‘You mean it wasn’t my charms?’

  ‘So embarrassing. Just so incredibly embarrassing,’ she added, but vaguely: she’d started to check Facebook. He closed his eyes. This was his last night in England, he thought. A decent send-off. He was falling from a great height into sleep when he heard a voice saying, ‘The thing is, I’m in my final year. I’ve got the mother of all dissertations and I’ll be worrying about you. You could’ve waited. Mum agrees. So does David, underneath his totally this-is-trivia look.’

  ‘It was all decided for me by others.’

  ‘Others?’

  ‘Doctors. Hey, I’ll email. Phone now and again. It might only be a few months.’

  ‘Uh-oh,’ said Sophie. ‘Amy’s tagged me in a post.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘It’s a new thing, it comes straight onto my own Facebook page. Look.’

  Bob read:

  Sophie Winrush go back to nursury school. Your Dads proper fit.

  Sophie clicked on Amy’s name and Bob found himself looking at the girl’s sultry face, half in shadow. There was the same sentence, followed by ‘Charlie’s Cellar’ and the time about half an hour ago. Charlie’s Cellar was highlighted in blue – leading, Sophie explained, to its Facebook page.

  ‘What a gas,’ Bob said.

  Then he saw, below Amy’s compliment, a photo of a dancing couple that he realised with a shudder was Amy and himself, both looking surprisingly ill under the flash. Sophie ran the cursor over her father’s image and up popped ‘Sophie Winrush’s dad.�
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  ‘Shit,’ said Bob, this time.

  Sophie pulled a face. ‘Serves you right.’

  ‘I was just having some innocent fun, Sophie.’

  ‘I read this article about men going wild when they hit their fifties, acting like teenagers? Now I’ll be even more worried about you. You weren’t exactly 24/7 when we were kids, then you do a runner when you don’t really need to.’

  His heart gave a lurch: it had survived a three-hour bop, now it wanted to rest. ‘I was present one hundred per cent when I was off duty. I always remember you stroking that moss on the balustrade.’

  ‘Er, what?’

  ‘Your imaginary kitten. Snowball.’ She looked puzzled. ‘I was home ten days every month. You had lots of activities – maybe you didn’t notice. I didn’t even want you to board.’

  ‘You weren’t there when I was in hospital, after my accident.’

  This was Olivia’s technique as well: chipping away with serial accusations.

  ‘True. I was committed to a rotation thousands of nautical miles away. But I came back a week early.’ Half a week early, but we lie on average five times a day.

  ‘What was this commitment?’

  He thought about it. He honestly had to: he remembered Olivia’s panicked call coming through somewhere concrete with tiny windows looking out on grey-green bush. Around that time he’d done a few flights for Michael Harradine’s Jet Line International out of Brize Norton for the MoD, mainly humanitarian stuff for Kosovo, and then he’d got more Jet Line stuff into the Congo at $10,000 a month minimum later that year, and they were too short of pilots for him to abandon ship just like that. So he reckoned it must have been that rotation: mainly military, which one doesn’t talk about.

  ‘You can’t even remember, can you?’

  ‘I’d just started a tour,’ he said, ‘and they were short of pilots. Mainly humanitarian work. Africa.’

  Sophie laughed. ‘Oh Dad, I so believe you.’

  ‘I should have come back straightaway,’ he admitted, nodding his head slowly. His tinnitus was taking off. ‘I don’t know how, but I should have. I did repaint your room.’

  ‘I suppose I could’ve had a real geek of a dad like Lisa Hanson’s,’ she said, lighting a last cigarette. He joined her with a cigarillo, hoping it would remind her of his story about lighting up in the cockpit in Frankfurt and shocking the ramp agent. But it didn’t.

  The next morning, late, Sophie called him to the laptop: Amy’s remark had attracted a string of comments.

  ‘Are you A FREAK OR WOT fancying older men.’

  ‘Yeuch, Amy. We’s gonna to sleep now and we’re the same age.’

  ‘How old, like over 40?????’

  ‘Old men are 2 creepy and they smell yo.’

  ‘I wanna check the dude out!!’

  No replies from Amy. Sophie reassured him they were all students in higher education. One was studying English literature.

  He shrugged. ‘Like the telexes in the old days. Chattering away. No one took any notice. If they’re stupid enough to want to read this, how do they do it?’

  ‘Ask to be my friend. Or Amy’s.’

  ‘Would you accept them?’

  ‘No. Only if I knew them already.’

  He did a little test at the computer while Sophie spent hours in the bathroom washing her hair. Among the usual references to English setters, Florida apartments and the Gloucestershire river (it was an extremely rare name), the entry ‘Winrush’ yielded Sophie’s Facebook profile but not Amy’s kind words. It also yielded the membership list for something called Health ’n’ Well-Being: incredibly, it was the private gym in Crowthorne, his name and the date of his joining. How long had that been up there? When had he ever given permission?

  He could hear Gold Teeth’s sing-song voice in his head: ‘So, he is in Crowthorne. Here is the address. Give him my regards and say, “One swallow, it does not make a summer.” If he is not at home, he has a daughter. On Facebook. Find out the names of her friends …’

  Photojournalism had been a tactical error. He looked out of the window at rainy Jesmond and briefly considered posing as a writer: novels, something that required no special skills. Everyone seemed to be having a go, especially retirees. But there’s the snag, he thought: it sounds like a cover. It doesn’t explain the past. Besides, he had zilch imagination, and had come near bottom in English.

  He searched about for something unglamorous and solitary, the very opposite of an airline pilot; and it had to be connected with the Scottish islands. What did you find on rugged, isolated coastlines, apart from climbers with a death wish? Cliffs. Molluscs. Birds.

  It was a toss between a geologist, whatever you call someone who studies molluscs, or a bird-spotter.

  An avian expert rather than an aviation expert.

  Birders were not glamorous. He could be researching something straightforward like gulls. Their mating habits. No, their feeding habits, because they ate all the year round.

  By the time Sophie re-emerged in a fug of shampoo smells, her computer had delivered enough info about gulls in the Hebrides to get him by in an emergency. He had a laptop in the car, but he couldn’t be sure they’d have Internet or Wi-Fi that far north. He knew so little.

  ‘What’s all that you’ve been scribbling?’

  ‘Birdlife,’ he said, packing away the scribbles in his holdall. ‘I’m going to be a bird expert. There’ll be nothing else to do up there.’

  ‘You’ll be found out in ten minutes. The birders here are incredibly expert, like you are about boring planes.’

  ‘OK, I’ll just evince an interest.’

  He was hugging her goodbye within the hour. It began to rain.

  ‘Remember, Sophie, you don’t have a clue where I’m heading. Seriously.’

  ‘Do you, Dad?’

  ‘And sorry about the car.’

  ‘This one’s cool.’

  ‘You mean cheap. White cars are naff.’

  ‘Hey, they’re not. White’s cool.’ She showed him her iPod and laughed. ‘You’re so out of date, Dad.’

  She went back in. Despite the wet, he bent down to inspect the underside of the Polo, not realising she was watching from the porch.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she called out. ‘Checking for a bomb?’

  ‘I thought I heard Amy under there, OK?’

  ‘Yeah yeah, Dad. You’re not in some kind of horrible danger, are you?’

  ‘Hanging by a thread, sweetheart.’

  ‘If you want to really disappear, OK, you remove the SIM card and battery and chuck your mobile into water, use prepaid phones with one time use, and put a stone in your shoe to walk different. And in your case, pursue that beard.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Sophie laughed, resting a hand on the porch pillar. ‘It’s everyone’s dream, right?’

  Part Two

  1

  THE CROFT-HOUSE was as cold as a sauna is hot. Its draughts were audible.

  Al had omitted to mention that the place had last been rewired in the 1960s. Despite a droopy cable on a line of thin poles staggering off into the mist, there was no power. Bob phoned him about this and other things from Scourlay’s only call box, having memorised the unhackable number; because the call was international, the preparatory pile of two-pound coins dropped like mercury. Jane and Al were basking in the sun of the British Virgin Islands. He said there had been power when he last visited.

  ‘When was that, Al?’

  ‘Let me see now. There’s no salmon there. Nineteen eighty-one?’

  ‘That’s why you didn’t know about the causeway.’

  ‘What causeway?’

  ‘Precisely.’

  Al’s picturesque rowing boat full of sacks and lambs had been superseded in the 1990s by a stone causeway that had cleared out the licence-free rust buckets, moving or otherwise, and permitted some flashy four-wheel drives to jar with the landscape.

  The skeletal young estate agent claimed he’d
had no idea about the lack of power until the pulling of the mains switch in Bob’s presence; his was the first customer enquiry, at least in person.

  After a crossing of the Minches that had swept the glasses off the bar and set everyone (bar real sailors and the few who had taken the right pills) into what Al would call, back in his passenger days, the lobster thermidor crouch, Bob recovered overnight in a chocolate-coloured hotel room in Stornaway. He’d followed the agent’s car the next morning: island-hopping, they’d taken a couple of calmer ferries, the man’s hatchback nipping along the winding roads so fast it was all Bob could do to keep up. The first ferry was late, and they sat in a glassed-in shed with a couple of depressed locals and, despite it being January in the Outer Hebrides, some cheery German bicyclists in bright yellow cagoules. They thought Bob, with his scraggly new beard and shapeless fisherman’s woollen hat, was a picturesque local and began taking photos: he made himself even more authentic by objecting. Within hours the snaps could be in global view on the Internet.

  The agent had chuckled. ‘Maybe you’re a famous actor going to ground, Mr Webb. We’ve had one or two o’ them.’

  ‘Rats, I’ve been rumbled,’ Bob joked, secretly dismayed. He would have to act casual.

  After another ferry and some more catch-me-if-you-can motoring by the youth, they’d crossed onto Scourlay and pulled up at a broken gate with no house in sight, just pools and rocks and rough humpy pasture. The agent, called Ken, pulled on his gumboots and Bob did the same. It was raining … in the way, he suspected, the sun shines in the desert. Umbrella handling was made trickier by the gusts. The raised track avoided most of the wet parts, wiggling about like a worm in the hand until it rounded a small hill and the house hove into sight. No view: the cloud sliced off everything above about knee height. There was the beginning of either the loch or the sea disappearing into the mist. It was even colder than he’d expected, and the rain seemed to have sharp points.

  Despite his age, Ken could remember when all this was a croft, with common rights to grazing: an undefined part, some three (not five) acres, was now ‘decrofted’ and ‘all yours, to do with whatever you’ve a mind to, Mr Webb. You’ve certainly got the isolation,’ he added, as if his latest client was cooking up some crazed sci-fi experiment to end the world. ‘The summer sees one or two hikers and second-homers. They call this blackland,’ he said, consulting his agency clipboard and then waving it at the peninsula’s shortened horizon. ‘You want to watch the ditches and drains.’