“All right, I get it,” I said. “Britain is on strike. What next?”
Next was a press release from British Airways, notifying the public that all their domestic flights as well as all international flights departing from the UK had to be cancelled because of the strikes, and that their international long haul flights from Africa, Australia, Asia and the Americas that were destined for Britain were being diverted to Dublin, Paris, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Stockholm. BA staff at these destinations were prepared to help passengers who were arriving from overseas make travel arrangements to continue their trips to the British Isles.
I was slowly beginning to get an idea what MINDY was trying to tell me, and it turned out that I was right. Next MINDY showed me a PDF file. It was the passenger list of BA flight 282 that had left Los Angeles for London but had to be diverted to Dublin instead, where it had landed at 12:10 p.m. yesterday. It listed two passengers by the names of Tholen, Peter, and Monk, Julian, booked on seats 1A and 1K in first class.
Pretentious bastards, I thought.
MINDY had documented Julian’s trip seamlessly. CCTV footage showed him disembarking his flight in Dublin with Tholen at 12:25 p.m. Another camera caught them getting in a taxi cab outside the airport. Traffic cameras followed them to the harbour. According to Tholen’s credit card statement, they took the ferry from Dublin to Liverpool. Eight hours later a security camera recorded Tholen running amok at a Hertz rent-a-car desk in Liverpool. Because of the breakdown of almost all public transport, they had run out of cars, so Tholen and Julian were forced to book two seats on an overnight coach down to London. The last screen that MINDY showed me came from a traffic camera on the M1 north of Milton Keynes. From half a mile away it had caught the coach veering off the road and tumbling down the ravine, out of sight of the camera.
A few seconds later, a huge plume of fire rose from the crash site as the bus exploded.
I kept replying that last video over and over, while at the same time trying to come up with any kind of scenario that would allow for Julian not having been on that bus when it crashed. I had MINDY check CCTV footage from every single service station along the M1 to see if maybe they got off the bus at some point and checked into a hotel or something. But they had made only one quick stop at a service station south of Stafford to refuel, and none of the passengers had gotten off the bus. As much as I tried, I could find no reasonable explanation why Julian and Tholen would not have been on that bus at the time of the accident.
I checked the TV screen again.
Fatal coach crash near Milton Keynes – rescue workers on scene.
Still no further details. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to think. I didn’t even want to think, because all my thoughts kept coming back down to one terrifying conclusion: Julian was either seriously injured, or dead.
I jumped out of my bed, paced up and down my room, took a deep breath and sat down on my bed again. “Come on, Michael,” I said to myself, “calm down and think.”
Now the TV showed new ambulances arriving as others sped away with flickering blue lights and blaring horns. They wouldn’t do that if they had dead bodies on board, so there had to be survivors. That’s all I could tell from my limited vantage point in front of the telly. I picked up my phone and speed-dialled Tummy’s number. He answered after the fifth ring.
“Sweet Jesus, Michael,” he mumbled. “This better be good. Do you even know what time it is?”
“It’s 4:43. Turn on the TV. MMC News 24. And let me talk to Momoko.”
“What? Why would I ... why would you think that Momoko ...?”
I rolled my eyes. “For Christ’s sake, Tummy, cut the crap! We don’ have time for this. She’s lying right next to you. Look under the bloody duvet!”
“All right, all right! Jesus. Wanna tell me what this is all about?”
“Julian’s been in an accident. Now let me speak with Momoko!”
Without another word Tummy handed the phone over to her.
“Herro?”
“It’s Michael. Did Tummy turn on the TV yet?”
“Yes. What are we look at?”
“Julian was on that coach,” I said. There was silence at the other end of the line. “We need to go there. Can you get us there?”
“My god,” she said. “Yes. Yes, we must go. Are you at home?”
“Yes, I’m at home. Get here as quickly as you can. I’ll be waiting outside.”
“Yes.” She hung up.
Next I speed dialled Ginger.
* * *
In the afternoon the police held a press conference at a hotel just outside of Milton Keynes near the crash site. The chief inspector confirmed that of the 52 passengers that had been on the bus 24 had been confirmed dead. 17 had been taken to hospitals around the area with injuries that ranged from severe to life threatening. Six had been treated by paramedics on the scene for minor cuts and bruises and were now resting at a local hotel while arrangements for their onward journey to London were being made.
“That 47,” Momoko said and raised her hand.
The chief inspector peered over the rim of his spectacles. “Excuse me?”
Momoko cleared her throat. “If 24 decease, 17 in hospital, six with minor injury, that 47. According to passenger list there were 52 passenger. Where are other five?”
“Yes.” The chief inspector nodded slowly. “I can confirm that five of the 52 passengers are still unaccounted for. It’s possible that they suffered a shock from the crash and wandered off into the woods. We have 20 police officers with sniffer dogs currently searching the surrounding area. However, it’s also possible that they were still on the bus when the fuel tank exploded, in which case it might prove very difficult to find any remains.”
Over the murmur that went through the press crowd a BBC reporter asked, “Can you confirm that Julian Monk and Peter Tholen were among the passengers?”
“Provided that the passenger list we have received from Cross Country Coaches is accurate,” the chief inspector said, “and we have currently no reason to believe otherwise, yes. To the best of our knowledge the two individuals you mentioned were on the coach at the time of the accident.”
“Are they alive?” several reporters asked simultaneously.
“We have yet to formally identify most of the deceased and some of the injured, so I cannot answer that particular question at this point.”
“Are they among the six people with minor injuries?”
The chief inspector paused for a moment. “No.”
I looked at Tummy. He looked back at me, almost ready to burst into tears. Who could blame him? I felt like crying myself.
“Can you tell us more,” another reporter asked, “about how you are going to identify the deceased and injured?”
“Yes,” the chief inspector said, “in some cases we have found photo ID—passports, driving licenses—in the clothing of the deceased or injured. We have also found identification documents scattered around the crash site and we’re in the process of matching these with the persons yet to be identified. In addition to that, we are currently trying to establish contact with the families of every person on the passenger list. For those that we can reach, arrangements are being made to get them here so they can be reunited with their loved ones.”
“Have you talked to Mrs Monk?”
“At this point we are not ready to discuss individual cases.”
“Can you tell us anything about the cause of the crash?”
We snuck out of the press conference. None of us were interested in any of the details that may or may not have led to the crash. All we wanted was to find out whether or not Julian was still alive.
“I’ll try her again,” I said and took my mobile out of my pocket. On our way to Milton Keynes I had tried calling Julian’s mum several times, but my calls to her mobile went straight to voice mail, and she didn’t pick up her land line.
“Still nothing,” I said after two more unsuccessful tries.
“So what are we gonna do now?” Tummy asked.
“I have to get back to studio to get ready for show tonight,” Momoko said. “Is no point in stay here anyway. They won’t let us in hospital.”
“Or the morgue for that matter,” Cameraron added.
We all stared at him, speechless.
He shrugged. “I’m just saying.”
“Anyway,” I said, “I need to get back home. Maybe I can track Julian’s mobile or something, but I need my computer for that.”
After two excruciatingly long hours on the M1, Cameraron dropped Tummy and me off at my place.
“Can I stay with you?” Tummy asked. “I don’t want to be alone right now.”
“Sure,” I said. I didn’t feel like being alone with my thoughts either. They weren’t happy thoughts. In my mind I kept playing back all the events from the last couple of weeks, especially those hours on the plane on our way to New York. I thought about all the things Julian had said and all the things I had said back to him. We had both had good points, and we had both said some things that we probably regretted by now. I knew I did, and the thought that this conversation on Tholen’s private jet might have been the last time I ever got to talk to my best friend freaked me out. I couldn’t be alone right now. I needed someone to peek over my shoulder to make sure I didn’t let my sorrows eat me from the inside, because I needed to stay focussed.
Never before in my life had I felt so happy to have Tummy around.
The Gospel According to Ginger – 15
As soon as Michael had told me what had happened, I called British Airways to book a flight back to London. I didn’t even talk to my parents first. We only had a couple days left in Japan, but there was no way I was going to stay while Julian was missing. But I also didn’t want my parents to cut their well deserved vacation short, so I thought it would be best to go back home on my own four days early.
My departure happened so quickly that I forgot to bring my surgical face masks. While we were still boarding, a queue of four Japanese youth volleyball teams on their way to a tournament in Europe stretched from my seat in business class all the way back to the economy class lavatories at the back of the plane. They all wanted my autograph, and it caused a massive disruption to the boarding process. I was busy signing my name on in-flight magazines and paper napkins when one of the flight attendants came up to me and said, “I’m terribly sorry, madam, but I’m afraid we’re going to have to re-seat you.”
“What? Why?” I asked.
“This flight is overbooked. Please follow me to your new seat.”
She led me to the front of the aircraft and into the half empty first class section.
“Again, I’m terribly sorry for the inconvenience,” she said and winked.
“That’s quite all right,” I replied as I settled into the comfy leather of my luxury first class seat.
“Enjoy your flight. If you need anything, just press the call button.”
“All right,” I said, knowing very well that it would be difficult to enjoy being locked up in an aluminium tube for eleven hours, wondering what had happened to Julian or whether or not he was still alive. At least we had free Internet access on board so I could stay in touch with Michael, who didn’t have anything new to report, and I could catch up with what the news—and everyone else, for that matter—had to say about what was going on back home.
A couple of hours into the flight I was looking down at the hundreds and hundreds of miles of spruce and pine trees that covered the vast Russian taiga, and I was thinking about Julian’s last two days in New York. A day after his appearance on that epic last-ever episode of The O’Reilly Factor, he met up with a personal hero of his, the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson. After meeting Professor Tyson, Julian posted a series of tweets expressing his utter excitement about the fact that almost all the elements that made up our planet and, indeed, ourselves, all the oxygen in the air that we breathed, all the carbon in our bodies and the calcium in our bones, were cooked up in stars that had lived and died billions of years ago. When those stars exploded at the end of their life cycles, they hurled all those heavy elements out into space where they would millions of years later form the planets in our solar system and ultimately give rise to all life on Earth.
Julian’s last tweet before he boarded his flight back home read, ‘Stars had to die so that we may live.’
Those were the last words the world heard from Julian Monk before that accident that left him missing and presumably dead, and no one, no one in the entire world failed to pick up on the irony.
Stars had to die so that we may live.
Julian was a star, he was the biggest star of all, and now he was—presumably—dead. The smoke was still rising from the smouldering wreckage of that coach at the bottom of a ravine next to the M1, but nobody bothered to wait for the official confirmation of Julian’s death. It was just too good, too irresistible a story. All the tragedy and the poetic martyrdom of his death fed right into his public image, an image that despite his best efforts he had long lost control over. His famous last words and his apparent death only reinforced the way the world chose to see him.
Julian had, in the eyes of the public, been ready to die for the world’s sins. He had been ready to sacrifice himself. He wanted to take on the responsibility for everything that was wrong with today’s world. He saw himself as a child of that world, and he deemed it perfectly normal that every generation had to pay the price for the wrongs of previous generations. In his mind, paying the price meant learning from the mistakes of previous generations and not making those same mistakes again. It may not have been fair, it may not have been just, but it was the way the world worked.
I didn’t know why he felt that way. I don’t think anybody did. All I knew was that he had an impact. He had changed the way people perceived things, and he had changed the way people perceived themselves. He was a role model. That’s what he was, and it was all he ever wanted to be. He had always wanted to inspire people. Unfortunately, there were some people whom he inspired to kill themselves. Those poor souls would write down a manifesto, spewing out their discontent with the world and the life that this world forced them to live, and then they would hang themselves in their bedrooms or take their daddy’s gun and blow their brains out. Those were terrible, terrible tragedies, but they, too, had an impact on people, and in some weird way they enforced the very message that Julian had wanted to convey.
As I was browsing Twitter and Facebook and YouTube comments, I found that many people likened Julian to people like James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, John Lennon, or Princess Diana, all of whom had died way too young but at the height of their fame, long before they had the time to let their careers fizzle out and be forced to spend the rest of their days leading a life of miserable obscurity. It was only in their early, tragic deaths that these people found immortality, and now, it seemed, Julian had joined them.
But of course there were also those who weren’t unhappy at all about Julian’s demise. They were a small but vocal minority, and they chose to point out the famous last words of someone else, those of Bill O’Reilly who only three days before Julian’s accident had famously said, “I hope you die and rot in hell until the end of time!”
They went trolling all over the Internet, quoting Bill O’Reilly, and asking, “Who’s your prophet now?”
The Gospel According to Tummy – 19
Back at Underground Zero, Michael fired up his computer and told his virtual girlfriend to track Julian’s phone, but she came up blank.
“That’s odd,” he said. “I should be able to locate Julian’s mobile even if it’s turned off.”
He stared at his computer screen, unsure what to do next.
“Can you track phones only in real time?” I asked.
“How do you mean?”
“I mean, when you track somebody’s phone, can you only check where they are right now, or can you, like, track where they’ve been earlier?”
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Idolism Page 27
