Landing Gear (9 page)

“Where is everyone?”

Mahmoud rubbed his eyes and looked at Yacub. “What are you doing here? You have papers.”

“I have papers—yes, of course I have papers. Where is everyone?”

“Oh man oh man oh man,” said Mahmoud, shaking his head. “Bad luck bad luck bad luck, Yacub.”

“What?” said Yacub. “What bad luck?”

“You, my brother. You.” Mahmoud shuffled back over to his bunk and sat down. “You see, I don’t have papers. I came here under a false name. Because of that business in Karachi. Stupid. It wouldn’t have made any difference anyway. So I don’t have papers.”

“Stop talking about papers! What happened?”

“Pakistani airlift, my man. Ministry of Labour. One hundred and fifteen of them. The coaches arrived yesterday afternoon, took everyone with papers to a plane. Where were you?”

“I went with Imran and the girls.”

“Ooh, what was that like?” Mahmoud’s look went from mournful to lascivious. “Maybe not such bad luck after all?”

Yacub could not reply.

“Okay, I’m sorry. Listen, if you go to the council with your papers, I’m sure …”

But Yacub wasn’t listening. He walked along the landing to the stairs. He went down to the big kitchen. A group of Indians he knew were sorting through the food supplies and cooking. “What are you doing here?” they asked. “You have papers.”

“Don’t ask,” he replied. He slumped against the kitchen wall. His friend Ravi helped him up and over to a seat. He ate a bowl of rice and dhal, but he couldn’t taste it. Last night with Imran he’d eaten chicken for the
first time in five months, he’d eaten chicken and thought he was the luckiest man in Dubai, while one hundred and fifteen of his Pakistani colleagues were being airlifted home without him.

The limo driver had dropped the girls off at the hotel, before delivering Yacub and Imran to Imran’s surprisingly modest flat. They sat outside on plastic chairs around a plastic table and the bug zapper buzzed violently overhead every few minutes. Imran drank whiskey and talked. “If you worked for me you’d make enough money in a month to leave this place.”

Yacub sipped his lemonade and nodded politely. The night air was dry and warm and the city glowed behind them.

“I am doing so well now, I don’t need the construction business,” Imran continued. “I work for myself. I could go back to Karachi, but what would be the point of that? There’s no money for people like you and me in Pakistan.” He put his arm around Yacub’s shoulder. Yacub could smell the alcohol on his breath. “There’s no way to get ahead.”

Yacub felt bemused that Imran would speak so freely, as if the two men had something in common beyond their Pashtun heritage. If Imran wanted to pretend that they were friends for the evening, equals even, and that Yacub was not a former worker left to suffer in the dust of the abandoned labour camp, that was fine with him.

“But I’ll bet you a thousand dirhams that after a month of working here, you won’t want to leave. That’s not a job offer, mind you,” he said. “Don’t get any ideas.”

Yacub rinsed his bowl and placed it on the big metal drainer. He went to his room—his roommates were well and truly gone. He packed his few possessions into a plastic bag. Yacub set off, walking.

22

I was up and dressed and had made the house respectable. My son was upstairs asleep. It was eight o’clock on Sunday morning, and I was listening to the news on the radio in the kitchen when I heard my husband come through the front door.

I walked through the door and into the house.

I had no idea what to say to my wife.

We’d been married for fourteen years.

We’d got married the month before Jack was born;

we moved into this house two months before that.

My wife kept her secrets, but they were old

secrets now. What was I going to say to her?

I called out, “Is that you?”

“It’s me,” I replied. I put down my suitcase.

I took off my coat and hung it up. I stood

for another moment in the doorway.

“I’m in here,” I said.

I went through to the kitchen. I was wearing the

new clothes that Marina had helped me buy.

Dark grey trousers, a cashmere pullover, a pair

of shoes. I’d had a haircut. I’d lost a bit of weight.

I’d brushed my teeth on the plane. I smiled at

my wife.

“Oh,” I said, “you look different.” I put one hand on the counter to steady myself. “You look …” I stopped talking.

I could see that she knew. “Yeah,” I said,

and I nodded. “Yes.”

I took a step toward him. I hadn’t trusted anyone in my life as much as I trusted Michael. It couldn’t be true. But it was true. I could see it on his face. My heart stopped and started again, as though it was freezing. Tiny shards of ice pierced my skin as I moved through a vast cloud of ice toward him—my hair snapping, my face cracking, my hands and feet becoming brittle and sharp. I felt myself shatter. As I moved toward him I felt a great wide surge of pain.

I watched Harriet and felt nothing. In my mind’s

eye I saw Marina’s hair as it fell against my face,

as she leaned low to push her body against mine.

I kept hearing that Prince song, “Purple Rain.”

It took all my concentration to prevent myself

from singing. But then as I moved toward Harriet,

I was overwhelmed by a terrible vertigo, as though

if I looked down I’d see the earth was no longer

beneath my feet. I had stepped through the front

door of our house and into a gaping void, a hole,

an empty sky, and I was falling out of my marriage.

I was falling out of my life.

23

Upstairs, Jack was not in fact asleep but wide awake, had been for hours. Information was flooding in through his networks, and he had no idea how to tell which bits were true and which were not. David McDonald had died in Ruby’s arms. David McDonald had died in the street. Six people—no, ten people—no, two people—were in intensive care, Ruby among them. Half the kids at the party had been arrested and charged with drug offences. No one had been arrested. David McDonald had taken smack, he’d taken K, he drank a whole bottle of vodka and choked on his own vomit. He’d jumped off the roof of his house because he thought he could fly. He’d taken a little red pill with a devil’s face on it that someone at the party had given him.

Jack heard his dad come through the front door, but he stayed in his room for a moment longer. He needed to figure out what to do. Ten kids had been arrested for drugs offences. Five kids. Twenty. The others were busy turning each other in. The police had a big list of kids they were picking up from their houses and taking in for questioning. David McDonald was dead. Ruby was not responding to his texts and he was too afraid of being—what, he wasn’t sure: implicated?—to contact anyone else he knew had been at the party.

He closed his laptop, pulled himself together. Best to pretend nothing had happened. He’d go downstairs and say hello to his long-lost father.

Jack entered the kitchen in time to see his mother slap his father across the face.

24

Emily rode her bicycle up the sleepy, tree-lined street on Sunday morning. It was a picture-book southwest London suburban street with big, white, substantial houses, both terraced and detached, with front gardens and footpaths and artfully overgrown hedges, wisteria coming into flower. There was a preponderance of hybrid and electric cars parked along the street. Emily thought the whole neighbourhood smelled better than where she lived, as though every room had its own subtly scented candle, every kitchen its own cappuccino machine. She spotted the house number and cycled past slowly. She paused at the end of the row of houses before turning around to cycle back.

Her skills as a researcher had come into their own as Emily parsed the posts and pages of Crazeeharree. It hadn’t taken long: Crazeeharree wasn’t particularly adept at hiding her identity. She was Facebook friends with a handful of Emily’s friends. In fact, Crazeeharree had only one friend who wasn’t also a friend of Emily’s—Harriet Smith. Emily had sat back in her chair and looked at the screen. “There you are,” she said. “Gotcha.” Harriet Smith. She clicked. Telephone number. Place of work. Home address. She even knew Harriet’s voice—her dad had had the radio tuned to that station permanently. The thought of her
father and his radio had made Emily’s pulse dip and she’d slumped farther into her seat.

“How am I supposed to keep going without you?” she’d said out loud. “I was looking forward to being annoyed by having to take care of you when you were old.”

She cycled slowly back up the street, toward the house. The front door opened, and a woman she knew straight away was Harriet walked out. The woman moved swiftly into the road without looking in either direction, straight over to her car. She did not look happy; she was clutching her handbag across her chest as though it was a shield. Her face was red, as though she was angry, as though she’d been crying. Emily held back, out of mirror range, she hoped, one foot on the ground for balance. Harriet started the car, pulled out and drove away quickly.

Emily stood rigid, one foot on the ground, the other on a pedal. It was her. Emily knew it.

25

Marriage is such a fragile thing, Harriet thought. What is it? Two wedding bands and an engagement ring. A set of vows, made in front of whomever you want, wherever you want. After that, an accumulation of years. An accumulation of experiences, disappointments and ambitions, failed and achieved. A house or flat, a bed. Sex. Children, if you’re so inclined, if you’re lucky. Christmas and New Year’s and a few other holidays. But mostly just years. Years and years. And stuff and things.

What will happen if this marriage breaks down? What have we got to show for it, besides our stuff and our things?

After Harriet slapped Michael and saw Jack standing there in the door of the kitchen, she put on her coat, picked up her bag and walked out of the house. She got in her car, drove across the river and strode out along the Thames riverpath.

Tough on women, good for men, isn’t that what the sociologists say about marriage? What to do, what to do? What to say? Michael had made her happy. Michael showed up when Harriet had given up on the idea of love: she was too old, too cynical, too busy for all that. She was twenty-eight. The idea of being twenty-eight almost made her smile: young, but not so young, really. She was
doing well at work then, with her own little flat, her own little car, her own friends. She’d got over it, the thing that had happened, the thing that made her feel different from other people. She’d cut herself off from her own family, but she’d overcome that as well. She was fine.

Then Michael came along. They’d been together less than a year when she got pregnant. He was so sure of everything, he calculated the risk involved and made the necessary arrangements. He proposed to her, and gave her a big, fat diamond engagement ring. She was shocked by how much she loved that ring. She was shocked by how happy that ring made her feel. A few swift months, fourteen years ago: they bought their house, got married and Jack was born—bang bang bang. And ever since then they’d been … accumulating.

And now he’d trashed everything. It was as though he’d opened the door of the house and thrown all their possessions into the street. It had never occurred to her that Michael might be unfaithful. It had never occurred to her that he was anything less than completely trustworthy.

Life was split open. Harriet’s past pushed through the crack. There were things that she regretted. Now was the time to act.

She spotted a bench farther up the path. When she reached it, she sat down and took a long look at the Thames. The tide was coming in high and the river flowed past Harriet in the wrong direction, heading inland instead of out to sea. She got out her phone and opened up Facebook to Emily’s page. She couldn’t contact her—not
yet. She wasn’t ready. But there was someone else she could try.

She did a quick search and found him: George Sigo. Most of his information was private, for friends only. She was sure it was him, though; like many people their age, he used an old photo of himself in his profile. The photo was from around the time Harriet knew him, maybe even a bit before. A young George Sigo, 1986. The year Emily was born. Harriet wrote a brief message and pressed her finger lightly on the touchscreen. Easy.

26

On Monday morning, Jack was up and dressed and ready for school early. His parents were up as well, getting ready for work. They bumped around each other in the kitchen in a way that Jack thought was oddly normal, despite what had happened the day before. Jack’s mum had hit his dad. What the fuck? His dad seemed okay, but no one had ever hit anyone in Jack’s house. And then, after Jack’s mum hit his dad, she went out and stayed out all day. His dad spent the afternoon doing laundry and cooking. When his mum came in, she said she wasn’t feeling great and went upstairs to lie down. Jack and his dad ate dinner together and tried to converse, but Jack’s head was too full of unmentionables—his parents’ row, of course, which he did not want to talk about, but mainly David McDonald, and Ruby—he still hadn’t heard from Ruby. David McDonald was dead, and Jack did not want to have to tell his father he’d been at the party. Luckily for Jack, he wasn’t asking questions.

There was the problem of the bag of weed. He’d given the tablets to Ruby and had left the party with the bag of weed. Jack had to get rid of it. If the rumours were correct and the police were questioning everyone who had been to the party … his name might well be on some list
somewhere. And the police might arrive, and they might search the house, and then what would happen? Jack pictured police officers rooting around his bedroom. If they found the drugs, maybe he’d be accused of dealing. They’d do their forensic thing on it and discover there’d been other drugs in the bag, and that maybe David McDonald had taken those missing drugs, and that maybe that was what had killed him. And that Jack was, in fact, responsible for his death.