Big Boy Did It and Ran Away (3 page)

A more advanced version of the same pointless tokenism awaited at the passenger security check, where you queued up to have your hand luggage partially irradiated and your sides lightly patted if you’d forgotten to drop your house‐
keys in the dish. He’d had more intimate handling being measured for his suit. They were so tentative as to make an appropriate mockery of the whole process: they didn’t want to get too fresh in case you took the huff and pointed out what they well knew: that nobody had ever been – nor was ever likely to be – stopped with a gun down their jooks at this Legoland apology for an airport. And if that astronomical improbability ever did come to pass, did they think the gunman, having been asked to stand aside while they patted him down, would wait till they’d found it, give them a bashful grin and say ‘Well, you gotta try, aintcha?’ Unless, of course, that illuminated ad for the Scottish Tourist Board was concealing a false partition behind which a battery of heavily armed cops waited at all times, their trigger‐
fingers getting ever itchier through unuse.

‘Do you mind if we have a wee look in your briefcase, sir?’

‘No, help yourself.’

All these flights down the years and he still couldn’t guess what the selection criteria were for them opening your hand luggage. Sometimes they stopped him, sometimes they didn’t, with no consistency as to his appearance, destination, whether he was alone or in company, anything. Was it something unusual spotted by the glazed and constipated‐
looking bastard peering with chronic ennui at the X-ray monitor? Was it utterly random, to meet a percentage quota? Would they at that particular moment rather open your neat, shiny briefcase than the forbiddingly grubby overnight bag of the eye‐
stingingly sweaty gut‐
bucket ahead of you, who’d required a shove to squeeze him through the metal‐
detection arch? Or did they just fancy a nosey sometimes? He’d have no respect for them if they didn’t.

The bearded security officer gestured to him to open the case himself, an ostensible intimation of courtesy disguising the fact that he didn’t want to look like a twat by fumbling cluelessly around the latest needlessly complex latch‐
trigger system. He simultaneously pushed the buttons on either side, like it was a pinball machine and the ball was rolling lazily between the flippers. Turning the case smartly through one hundred and eighty degrees, he released the lid, its impressively gentle ascent smoothed by the telescoping aluminium supports that had added at least twenty per cent to the price.

There wasn’t much to see. A couple of folders, a magazine, a newspaper, mobile phone, hand‐
fan, Walkman, king‐
size Mars bar and two cartons of juice. Hard to imagine any of that lot had appeared particularly suspicious going through the conveyor. Nonetheless, the guy had stopped him now, so he had to make it look worthwhile. Beardie started with the mobile, raising and lowering it on his palm to emphasise its weight as he handed it over.

‘Would you mind turning it on?’

‘Yeah, no problem.’

He pressed the button, eliciting a cursory glance at the LCD window before Beardie took it back.

‘That’s fine. Bit of a monster, isn’t it?’

‘Tell me about it. Why d’you think I’m carryin’ it in the case? My new one’s knackered, so they’ve got me luggin’ this thing around. Surprised they let me take it on as hand luggage. Has to happen when I’m goin’ away as well.’

‘Sod’s law.’

Beardie moved on to the Walkman next, getting nodded assent to press Play himself. The tape turned to his satisfaction, though he evidently gave no thought to whether the passenger might have painstakingly cued up his favourite take‐
off track. He then held up one earphone. A quick tinny burst sufficed, the palpated hiss sounding, unfailingly, like Speed Garage, which presumably was the only musical genre to sound exactly the same whether your cans were on or not.

Beardie resumed his examination, undeterred by the lack of anything much to examine. He gave the fan a whirl; picked up the folders, magazine and newspaper, flicking through each in turn; then either out of admirable thoroughness or mild pique, checked out the Mars bar and finally the juice cartons as well. These last being his final chance to exert some authority, he gave each an inquisitive stare, before following it up with an investigative shake, which was the ultimate proof of the utter uselessness of the entire ‘security’ charade. If he was worried that the Ribena cartons actually contained nitroglycerine, would the advised procedural protocol be to give them a good shoogle?

‘Right, thank you, sir. Enjoy your trip.’

It was only once he was on board the aircraft, and had heard the enduringly futile announcements on what action you could take in the event of the fuel‐
laden plane plummeting vertically from the skies, that it occurred to him to worry about the implications of these two‐
dimensional defences. Because let’s face it, if this plane was sabotaged and crashed before he made it to Stavanger today, he would be one very unhappy dead person. To say nothing of the colossal fucking irony.

Oh well. Just as long as it didn’t mean you spent the afterlife in Aberdeen Hell.

The plane had touched down at 11:20 local time. Conditions clear and sunny, outside temperature eighteen degrees.

Stavanger. An appropriately inauspicious conduit in his grand scheme. There were no new beginnings to be found here, only transit lounges, flight information and a store selling cuddly gnomes and smoked salmon. Most of the times he had been here, it had been merely to get on another plane and travel somewhere else; somewhere else he didn’t particularly want to be either. Other people’s jobs took them to Barcelona, Milan, Athens, Paris. His took him to every austere, hypermasculine, over‐
industrialised fastness in Scandinavia, including – but more often via – Stavanger. For once, a flight would take him from here to where he wanted to be, but as ever, it wasn’t until he had got on and off one more plane that his journey would be ended, and another one truly begun.

He sat in the departure area, choosing a bench by the window upon his return from the toilets. The plane was sitting on the tarmac, yards away, the livery’s colours distorted by the bright sunshine, but the name legible on the fuselage: Freebird. He smiled. Couldn’t have named it better himself.

The clock read 11:55. Fifteen minutes to boarding. This was the hardest part: it wasn’t long to wait now, but waiting was all there was left to do. Waiting and thinking. There was no avoiding the former, but he sincerely wished he could prevent the latter. Seeing the jet through the window, it was difficult not to contemplate the enormity of what lay so imminently ahead, but he had to tune it out. Throughout these minutes, he knew, it would seem easy to back down, call it all off. Easy to feel the comfort of your chains.

It was the longest quarter of an hour of his life, limping its way through each minute that brought him tantalisingly closer to the point at which the torment of choice would cease. Once he handed over his boarding pass and walked down that gangplank, there would be no going back. Not without some very uncomfortable explaining afterwards, anyway.

Somehow, the laws of temporal physics prevailed, and the clock conceded.

At 12:12, the departure was announced.

At 12:15, he boarded the aircraft.

At 12:37, it took off.

At 12:39 and eighteen seconds, when the plane had reached exactly three thousand feet, a bomb exploded towards the rear of the passenger cabin. The charge wasn’t particularly big, but neither did it have to be, placed as it was within feet of the fuel tanks. The tail section was severed completely, causing the remainder of the aircraft to arc and then spin as it plummeted towards the fjord beneath.

That was the truly transforming moment, when life, whatever it had meant before, suddenly became unconditionally precious.

The job, the daily commute, the enslaving mortgage, the faceless suburb, the crumbling relationship, the arguments, the bills, the crushed ambitions, the castrating compromises: in an instant they went from being an inescapable hell to a lost paradise.

And the rate at which they underwent that change was ten metres per second squared.

At 12:40 and nine seconds, the front section hit the water, breaking the fuselage into two more parts and killing everyone on board.

This was a new kind of nervous. It wasn’t like the nervousness he felt before a match; that was more of an impatience, an unsteady feeling that set him off‐
balance until he got his first touch, sent his first pass, made his first tackle. After that, all was familiar, whatever challenge the opposition presented. And, thank God, it wasn’t like the nervousness he’d felt on Thursday, waiting for her to go on her break, trying to get the timing right so that it seemed natural and she didn’t know he’d been hanging around, worrying that her rota had changed and he’d already missed her; all of which being before he had to actually speak to her. He’d feared his voice would disappear, and then when it didn’t, that she could read his thoughts even as he chatted and joked. When he finally asked, he’d felt his words soften and tremble in his throat, his lips seeming to numb as though he had some kind of palsy, hardly presenting the strong‐
jawed image that would enhance his chances.

Her name was Maria. He’d known her for years in as much as they were in some of the same classes at school, but he hadn’t known her to talk to until recently. The guys just didn’t talk to the girls at school, not unless they wanted to lay themselves open to all manner of teasing and ridicule. Even among themselves, nobody talked about who they fancied, unless they meant models and movie stars. It was as though it was a sign of weakness, or something the others could use against you. Worse still, they could tell her, and then you might as well commit suicide.

Maria had a job at one of the big department stores over the summer holidays, and he had genuinely bumped into her on her break on Monday. It had taken him by surprise that they had been able to talk so comfortably, but what surprised him more was the way he felt after she was gone. He couldn’t think about anything or anyone else. From being just a girl he knew of, she became the only girl in the world he wanted to know.

He went back the next day, thinking he’d just try and catch a glimpse of her, but not let her see him (what would she think?), but it turned out to be her day off. On Wednesday he had to help his father lay chips in the garden, and the truck didn’t turn up on time, so the job wasn’t done until late in the afternoon. He thought about going into town and waiting to catch her coming out when her shift was over, but when he came downstairs after having a shower, Jo‐
Jo was in the kitchen, waiting for him to come and join a kick‐
around in the park. He would go tomorrow, he told himself, and he wouldn’t just sneak a glimpse, he would speak to her. He would ask her out.

She didn’t say yes. Instead she began nodding and smiling before he had even finished his tremulous, stumbling sentence, making it plain that she had read his thoughts, had known what was coming, and already knew her answer. It felt amazing.

They arranged to meet outside the cinema. She had surprised him by saying she wanted to see the American movie Close Action 2, which Tony hadn’t considered ideal date material, and he came close to blowing their relationship before it started when he suggested she must fancy the star, Mike MacAvoy. Maria didn’t regard herself as a ‘girly’ girl. She listened to The Offspring and Nine Inch Nails as her classmates drooled over the latest bubble‐
gum teen‐
idols, and while they gossiped about soaps, she could tell you everything about The X-Files and The Sopranos.

She was late. Not very late, not late enough for him to start seriously worrying about being stood up – yet – just late. The sense of anticipation had been present in varying degrees of intensity for at least thirty‐
six hours, but what he was feeling now was something different, something unique. This was a good nervous, an exciting nervous. He was trying to remember how she smelled, to picture what she’d wear, how she walked, the way she smiled, and marvelling that so many wonderful and fascinating things could be contained in one small frame. It tingled in his stomach and it quivered in his chest. It was as though he had to remember to breathe.

And then he saw her, suddenly emerging from behind two old women dressed in widows’ black. She wore a cornflower‐
coloured sundress that made her look like she ought to be barefoot and the pavement knee‐
high grass. Last month he’d scored from a direct free‐
kick in injury time in the last game of the schools season to clinch the point his team needed to win promotion.

This felt far better.

It was a miserable night, rain bouncing off the tarmac, swamping every windscreen and rendering the cars in front a mere blur of red tail‐
lights. Miserable, that was, for everyone else. For Nicholas, there was a paradoxical pleasure to be had in the sheer hideousness of the weather. Even having to drive through it had an inversely comforting effect, for the simple reason that at the end of the trip, he knew he’d be able to close the front door on it all and sit down to dinner with his wife.

He’d enjoyed stormy winter nights ever since he was a child, when he used to spend ages at the front window of his mother’s flat, looking down at the rain‐
washed street or watching the water streak the glass. It enhanced the feeling of snugness and security, made the place seem all the more cosy and his mother’s presence all the more warm. When he had first moved in with Janine, he had been pleased to discover that the feeling survived into adulthood. They’d always enjoyed the sense that sometimes they could shut the world out and exist only for each other, and it seemed accentuated when the wind was shaking the trees and the rain lashing the glass.

It was their second wedding anniversary, but the first one they’d be spending together, Nicholas having been abroad on business last year. It was also the last one they’d be spending alone for the foreseeable future, with Janine expecting next month. Nights like this made work worthwhile, like the wind and the rain made a small but double‐
glazed apartment a palace.