Landing Gear (21 page)

He nodded and adjusted the tray she’d presented him with. “You want one?”

“You go ahead.”

While she was fiddling with the lights, Jack relaxed a little. She placed her chair behind the camera and without telling him started to record.

He cracked his knuckles, one at a time.

He stretched out his long legs and rolled his head to ease the tension in his neck. Not for the first time Emily thought, it can’t be easy being so tall. Nothing in the world quite fits. Clothes. Chairs. Doorways. Other people.

“Ruby and I broke up,” he said. “You’re not filming yet, are you?”

“No.”

“I don’t know why we even tried going out—hopeless.”

“Why did you do it, then?”

He gave her a look. “It’s Ruby. She’ll always be—I don’t know—it’s like she is Essence of Girl to me. She’ll always be. Despite everything.”

“I’m sad to hear it didn’t work out. I like Ruby.”

“Everyone likes Ruby. But the girl has—Well, she has troubles.”

“How long had you been seeing her?”

“We weren’t really seeing each other. We went out on a date. That was it. But I had high hopes. Ridiculously fucking high hopes. As always. Why do I have such high hopes all the time? What is it with me?”

“You are one of life’s optimists, Jack. You always have been, you always will be.”

He shook his head. “So uncool.”

“Okay,” she said, pretending to put the camera on. “Tell me about that night at the river. Tell me what happened.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“Two years,” she said, “not so long, really.”

Jack lowered his head. She was worried for a moment that he wasn’t going to talk. But then he brought his head back up and looked toward the window. The light was perfect. “Yacub flew. The man’s a genie. Or he’s a cat with nine lives, most of which he’s already used.” He stopped.

Emily leaned forward. “Start at the beginning. That evening. That party.”

“Where I met you for the first time,” he said.

“That’s right.”

“Well, it’s all been documented already. It’s in the police report.”

“I want to hear it from you.”

“The party on Dukes Meadows. I took Yacub with me. He’d only recently … disembarked, as he says. I’d run into Ruby the day before—I hadn’t seen her for ages—and she invited us to the party.”

“Yes.”

Jack drew a breath and then spoke quickly. “Yacub and I drank a few beers, we met you, you were overly interested in Yacub, you knew he was the falling man and that was alarming. I didn’t know who you were, so I hadn’t even had a chance to be alarmed by that as well.” He stopped and looked stricken. “What if I’d tried to hit on you or something gross like that? Oh my god, it doesn’t even bear thinking about.”

Emily laughed. “I wouldn’t have let you. I knew who you were. At least, I thought I knew who you were.”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

“Let’s leave me out of this for the time being.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t want you to talk about us—you and me. I want you to focus on the river. And Yacub.”

“Oh,” he said, “okay.” He looked across the room. “Yacub and I drank a few beers, then Yacub wandered off, and I ran into Ruby. Ruby gave me—Well. This has been documented already, like I said. Ruby gave me a tablet, she wasn’t sure what it was, some kind of amphetamine. Some kind of hallucinogenic. A pill—a fucking powerful pill. I took it. I don’t know why I took it—I should have known. I’d avoided taking things like that before …”

He looked at Emily. She wondered what he wasn’t saying.

“A bit of draw, a few beers, the odd swig of vodka. I’d never taken anything, you know, chemical.” Jack’s face
reddened, and he covered his mouth with his hand.

“What is it?” Emily asked.

“We don’t really learn from other people’s mistakes, do we? Otherwise there’d be no more wars, and shit.” He cleared his throat and gave himself a little shake. “You’d think I’d be big enough—physically large enough—to absorb such a thing without losing my mind. But no. I’m six-five, with the constitution of a fairy princess. Ruby and I went down to the river, I think all Ruby wanted to do—she’d taken it as well, remember—was sit on a bench and watch the night pass by. But I, well, I decided I needed to get into the river. The River Thames … I’d never been in the Thames.”

Jack had forgotten about the camera. He addressed Emily directly. “Have you been in the Thames?”

“Yeah, I have. There’s a place near Henley that I’ve been to a couple of times with friends.”

“Really?”

“Yes—I’ll take you there sometime.”

“That would be good,” Jack said. “I’d like to have another go at it. Maybe without having on five layers of clothes and my trainers.”

“It’s a promise,” she said. “Start again.”

“Oh, yeah, okay.”

“ ‘I’d never been in the Thames,’ ” she prompted.

“I’d never been in the Thames. Getting into the water felt like the best thing I’d ever done. I had this idea that the river would be shallow and warm, with a smooth, sandy bottom, and that those steps on the other side were
easily within reach.” He slumped slightly on the sofa. “I don’t know where I got that from—shallow, warm, with a sandy bottom. When I was a kid—nine or ten, I guess—my parents and I had a holiday in a fairly remote part of Spain, sort of the middle, near the border with Portugal, and we found all these beautiful wide, empty, sandy-bottomed rivers. Nearly every day we’d go for a swim and have a picnic. My dad was really happy on that holiday. He said that his love of swimming in fresh water, in rivers, in lakes, was the thing that made him feel most Canadian. My mum and I laughed at him. But I knew what he meant. There’s something about clean, fresh water that makes you feel alive.

“But the Thames is none of these things—it’s tidal, it’s muddy, it’s rocky, it’s full of debris. People have been chucking junk in that river for thousands of years. And it’s deep, and there are powerful currents. It’s much wider than it looks, even at that narrowish point by Dukes Meadows. It’s also freezing. It was spring—it was a warm night, but the water was cold. The weird thing was that I didn’t notice any of this. To me, the water was warm and placid and soothing. It felt fantastic. The sound of it alone—that volume of water.” He stopped.

Emily waited.

“The water. The suck and hum of it.” He paused again. “I was in the water for a long time. It felt like a long time. Standing there—struggling to stand—but standing, nonetheless. The sky above me. The breeze. Little waves slapping against me.

“Then I heard shouting. Ruby’s voice. Shouting my name. So I turned to see where she was—I had this lovely image in my head of Ruby in her swimsuit, coming to join me—and that’s when I lost my footing and fell in. Right under. Mouth full of water. Trying to get a foothold. Struggling. Slipping. I remember thinking, I’ve got to swim, jesus it’s so fucking cold, I’ve got to swim to the riverbank. But my clothes—those giant trainers, my fucking hoodie …

“Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry. Are you going to have to bleep all that swearing?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll deal with that. My target audience is not children.”

“Your target audience,” Jack said. He became serious. “You think people will want to watch this?”

“That’s my aim,” Emily said. “But we’re a long way from that. Don’t worry about the swearing.”

“Okay.” Jack took a drink of smoothie.

Emily watched while he composed himself.

“I kind of woke up then,” he said. “At least, I realized where I was and what was happening. I thought I was going to drown. I kept being pulled under water by the current, slipping and sliding, trying to find a foothold in the mud and the stones and the crap—just when I’d think I had my footing, the river would shift and I’d go under again and when I came up I’d be farther away from the shore. I could see that people were running along the embankment, shouting. I was lucky the moon was out that night. And then I saw him.”

Jack stared at the wall blankly. He looked down at his hands.

Seconds passed, a minute. Two minutes. Jack shuddered, cleared his throat, ran one hand up and down his face, rubbed his eyes.

“He kind of flew toward me—Yacub. I don’t know how else to explain it. He was on the riverbank one moment, down at the edge of the water. I saw him before I went under once again. I was really losing it now. I’d swallowed a ton of water and my clothes were fucking heavy, and all of a sudden I was so tired, I—Well. I went under and when I came up he was swooping across the water toward me, and then he had me under the arms and—jesus—I’m nearly twice his size—and he hauled me out of the water. The moon was out, but it was dark and windy and—the next thing I knew I was in the ambulance and the crew was fussing over me and I was throwing up, and, you were there.

“You were there, and when they tried to make you leave, you said you were my sister. That’s what you said. And I was puking and coughing and freezing and still thinking I was about to die, but through all that I looked at you and I thought, I remember thinking—my sister, and here I am about to die. And then I thought, jesus fuck, Mrs. Harriet is going to kill me.”

Jack smiled, and then he grew serious again.

“He’s a genie, that’s what I tell him. He doesn’t like it when I say that. But there’s something, isn’t there, something. Some kind of magical power. How else can
you explain it? He survived that journey in the underbelly of the airplane. He fell out of the sky and onto my mother’s car. And before that, if you talk to him about his background, he survived so many things. Get him to talk about it. Magic. At least that’s what I think. No one agrees with me. Least of all him. Not even Ruby, and she was there that night.

“It doesn’t say anywhere that he flew into the river. It’s not in the police report.” He looked at the window, into the sky. “But I saw him.”

3

Emily got along well with Michael, but mainly because she flattered him by asking him for financial advice and, subsequently, acting on that advice. When her father died, she inherited a savings bond that matured soon after; she’d been sitting on the money. Michael had helped her invest it. He told her that he was impressed that someone so young was interested in her financial future. She wasn’t interested in her financial future; she was interested in getting along with Michael, so it had been a good investment. She thought that when Michael thought of her, if he thought of her at all, it was with a certain degree of fondness.

Of all her interviewees this week, it had been Michael who was the most difficult to persuade. “No,” he’d said the first time she asked. “No, not me.”

“But I need you to talk to me. If you’re not there, a piece of the story is missing.”

“This is about you and Harriet,” he said. “It’s not about me.”

“But you are important to the story. Look,” Emily said, “you might as well agree now. Otherwise, you’ll have to put up with my badgering until you do agree.”

“Why?” Michael asked. “What can I add? What is this documentary about, anyway?”

She badgered, and eventually he agreed.

She opened the door to him. He came straight in, took off his jacket and sat on the sofa. “Is this where you want me?” he asked, rolling up the sleeves of his white shirt. He was on his way home from work.

She looked at him through the camera. “Shift a little to your right, please.”

He shifted. She could smell the day on him.

They spoke at the same time. “So …” Emily began.

“Let’s get started,” Michael said.

“Okay,” she said, and she pressed Record.

She looked at him through the viewfinder. “Wait a minute.” She adjusted the lighting. Michael sat very still on the sofa, legs crossed elegantly, one arm along the sofa’s back. She looked at him again through the viewfinder. The effect was odd. She was startled by what she saw—Michael was one of those people, surprisingly rare, who look better on camera than in real life. The combination of lens and lighting did something to his face, made his skin look luminous, made the bones beneath his skin appear sharper, his whole face more focused. He’d got back into shape since they’d first met; he didn’t look any younger but had become handsomer somehow. He looked relaxed and at ease with himself in a way she would never have anticipated.

“Okay,” she said again.

Michael looked at his watch.

Emily felt slightly panicked. “You’ve been very kind to Yacub.”

Michael gave her a yes-of-course-what-did-you-expect look.

“Not everyone would have been so kind.”

“I wasn’t exactly thrilled when I first discovered Harriet had brought him into our home. But once he was there, not even I was heartless enough to throw him out onto the street. And Harriet, well, don’t forget, she’d been unemployed for two years then.”

Emily thought about Harriet.

Michael continued. “She needed a project. No, that’s wrong. Damn.” He shifted in his seat, looking pained.

“What?” said Emily.

“Sometimes when I talk about my wife I sound so patronizing. The truth is,
I
needed a project. We both did. Helping Yacub sort himself out—God, now that sounds
really
patronizing.”

“Start again,” said Emily. “Start again.”

“Harriet had not had a great couple of years. Being unemployed did not suit her. It wouldn’t suit me either—neither of us, we’re not hobby people. We don’t have
interests
. We like our jobs. We like our home. We like our son. We watch a bit of TV. We read. We go to the odd movie. Harriet inhabits the internet. I read the financial pages.” He laughed, then stopped abruptly. “We’re not itching to get on with that thing we’ve been putting off
all our lives, like some people—I don’t know—write that novel. Genealogy. Gardening. That kind of thing. If I got fired, I’d be one of those men who dresses for work every morning for the job that no longer exists and then sits on a park bench while trying to figure out the most efficient way to kill myself.”

Michael took a deep breath, uncrossed and crossed his legs. “You’re young, Emily, and you’ve never been married,” he said. He looked rueful.

She didn’t reply. Unlike the others, Michael didn’t seem to need her to reply. For all his reluctance, he was a natural.