Loss of Separation (2 page)

PLEASE GET RID OF THIS FOR ME, PLEASE?

A while yet before the sun comes up. Its colour surprises here, where the skies are so big you could be forgiven for seeing a curve to the horizon. The flames change. They bend and arch and quiver. The things they eat into produce unnatural colours; belches of black, chemical smoke. It all ends up as ash. When it's spent, I toe it into the sand. I go out in the dark only. I haven't yet the guts to show my face in daylight.

It takes me an hour to get back, whatever that means. On the way I find an infant's blue romper suit, washed up by the tide.

Dist.

Black cellulose. Purple sky. Silver rain. Grey skin.

Distance. I was always good at judging how far off a car was at night, in the wet. Coming on. Speeding. I could tell. Look both ways. Look both ways again. Swell of headlights. The growl of the engine.

I was fascinated, when I was a kid, by this thing called the dichotomy paradox. It was a daft thing, really, easily disproved by mathematics, but theoretically difficult to argue against. It was all about how getting from A to B was actually impossible. All motion is an illusion. The car can never get to where it needs to be because, to paraphrase Archimedes, it must first make it half way before it reaches its destination. But before you can get halfway there, you must get a quarter of the way there. Before that, you must travel one-eighth; before that, a sixteenth; and so on, ad infinitum. But you can't tell a ton of metal this. You can't reason with it.

Black cellulose. Grey skin. Red bone. White light. White pain.

Dist.
Distance Is Speed times Time. Forty miles an hour. Fifty. Sixty. Ear to the ground. Nose to the grindstone. Back to front. Hell to pay. How far from me was it when I realised what was going to happen? Six months. Where did all the distance go? Inside me. That's where. I paid it out jealously. It filled me up so completely there was hardly any space left for life.

Deceleration. Stall warning. Brace for impact. Controlled landing into terrain.

The road. The car. The rain. The shine. The engine. The chest. The collapse. The pain. The blood. The hiss. The engine. The drowning. The glass. The eyes. The kiss. The blanket. The love. The engine. The dark. The engine. The heartbeats. The cry.

Acceleration. Diminishment. Flatline.

I'm Paul Roan. I
am
Paul Roan. I used to be First Officer Paul Roan. Now I'm plain Paul Roan, but that's good, I suppose. By rights I should be Paul Roan RIP. I clocked nearly 4000 flying hours with Lufthansa, the German airline. I was in command of a Boeing 777 when it was involved in what we call an airprox incident. There was what we call a loss of separation caused by what we call a level bust that resulted from poor communication and a lack of coordination on the flight deck. Density of traffic. Simultaneous transmissions. Lack of hearback. Bottom line: I was tired and not paying as much attention as I should. There was what we call a fuck-up. We nearly hit a 747 en route to New York out of Madrid. Nearly never counts. But it does in this industry. There was an enquiry and I was suspended from my job. I was encouraged to appeal, but I lost my nerve. I couldn't stop thinking about what might have happened had I pulled back a little more on the control column. There were 412 passengers and crew on the 777; 289 on ours. That amounts to nearly 800 gallons of blood redecorating the cabins on impact.

I walked.

After that, whenever I was close enough to an airport to see a jet taking off I'd feel a cold choker fasten around my throat, even as I was running through my mind the procedure the pilots were likely to be following at that moment as they climbed steep and fast, adjusting trim, thanking air traffic control before being passed on to their next point of contact.

I had to move away from London. I became convinced that a jet would come out of the sky, plough into homes, through my living room, dragging an orange forest of flaming aviation fuel with it. Tamara, my girlfriend, was happy to move. She had not settled, despite having arrived from Ukraine four years previously. She found it difficult to make new friends; she found the women in the city too inattentive.

'Like butterflies,' she described them. Her friends from home were loyal, stuck fast. She couldn't understand meeting someone just for coffee; she expected to spend the day with them, sometimes longer, shopping, cooking meals together. 'Everyone's in such a rush to get on. To get to next thing. Nobody ever looks at you.'

So we sold our two-bedroom flat in Camden and decided to use the profit to buy something modest on the coast. A B&B that needed a bit of work. A new life. Away from the flight paths.

I'm on the beach every day, but not always to burn secrets. Part of my physiotherapy involves walking. I was told by the doctors at the hospital that walking in sand was much better than on any other surface. I put in the hours. I walk until my back is on fire and the shape of my legs has been forgotten. I know I'm gritting my teeth because a thin layer of sand builds up on them. Every so often I'll jar my foot on a concealed rock and swear I can feel the brace in my spine grate against the vertebrae. An illusion - the steel is fused with the bone - but I can't shake it.

I'm a badly constructed Jenga tower. I've lost weight. I've lost height. My legs are so scarred they resemble snakes winding around thin boughs. My face feels punched in and carved out. A bruise in the shape of a 7 sits low on my torso; it hasn't faded in almost seven months. I'm convinced there's a dusting of rust compacted into the flesh. My left eye is permanently bloodshot. Even if I wanted to go back to flying, I'd never be allowed near a cockpit. I'm in persistent pain. I take strong opioid drugs. I take so many, I have a special plastic drugs case to remind me what to take and when. Some tablets I take every four to six hours. I take Solpadol to combat pain. I'm addicted. Addiction is the alternative to killing myself. I sit and watch far too much TV and take none of it in. I drift, only coming to when I drool on my bare knees, or when Ruth comes in to rouse me with a fruit smoothie, or a cool hand on mine.

There's a story, though, in the news, that finds its way through. Possibly because the footage spoken over by the reporter (favouring emphasis on consonants rather than vowels) is of Southwick beach, and the pier. In some footage I can clearly see the black, ashen pits of my own bonfires. A child was killed here, recently. I was still in hospital at the time. Kieran Love, his name is. Was. I watch a Detective Inspector wearing a hat, like some Chandler reject, reciting policespeak to the cameras: appeals for witnesses.
If anybody saw anything... it's imperative that we catch this man... I'd ask that he think hard about what he's done and give himself up... We fear he may strike again.

The last time I remember being with my girlfriend.

We'd spent a few hours apart. She wanted to buy me something from the junk shop.
Go mad
, I said to her as she leaned in, giggling, and kissed the tip of my nose.

While she was gone, I wandered through the village, nodding at people, trying on the size of the place, wondering how long it would take for me to feel comfortable calling it home. I picked through trinkets in an antique shop. I bought a postcard and drank tea in the Rose café, where a woman in a black pinafore brought me a paper napkin and a bone china cup and saucer.

I bought a newspaper at the corner shop and turned left, up towards the junk shop. I peered in through the window and saw Tamara chatting with the proprietor, who sat in a deep, tatty armchair behind the counter. She was holding a brown paper bag. I went in and moved towards their murmurs, picking things up, putting them down. There were layers of junk. Some of them were so deep behind shelves and furniture that it was impossible to reach them, or make out what they were. I wondered how long they had been there.

Tamara saw me and waved me over. She introduced me to Ray, who told me he had owned the junk shop for twenty years. I wanted to ask him about the stuff that was buried, but Tamara was already saying goodbye, shooing me out of the shop. We went to the pub where she bought me... and then she gave me the bag... and I put my... or did I kiss her first? And then I opened the bag... and she said... or did I say?...

I can't do this.

The first time I saw my girlfriend.

She emerged from the first class lounge at Heathrow holding a Selfridge's bag between her teeth. She was so beautiful that I laughed out loud.

Chapter Two

Bights, Ends and Falls

The bookshop is on a road running parallel to the beach. It is hardly ever open. The only clue, when it is, is not in any door sign but in the presence of a chocolate-point Siamese cat lying on a blanket in the window. Go through the door and there's a long corridor of books, too narrow for more than one person at a time. An old school desk with a cash register, a plastic molded chair and a hand-sewn cushion. A notebook, a volume of non-fiction, a mug of something that will cool to tepid before being drunk.

The shop is empty. I don't know where Ruth is. I've asked her why she doesn't lock the shop when she nips out to buy a snack from the delicatessen, or fruit from the greengrocer's in the square. But she just gives me this pitying look and pats my hand. It's the look people who have never lived in London give to Londoners. It's a look that says: yes, there really are places left on Earth where you can go out and leave the door unlocked. There's an honesty box on the windowsill, next to the slumbering Vulcan, but it's always empty.

'Because people are stealing your stock,' I tell her.

'Because it's winter. There are no visitors,' she counters.

She opens the shop because she likes to sit there at her desk and read with the portable heater and a short-wave radio tuned to something far away, exotic, faded, unintelligible. She comes here too, to look after me, to keep me company.

'You're very kind to me,' I say, again.

'Shush.'

At the end of the corridor is a room where Ruth keeps the children's books, the science fiction and fantasy novels. There is a door that says STAFF ONLY. Behind it is a staircase up to Ruth's living quarters. There is another door next to a small bookcase with a cardboard bat glued to it and a legend: MASTERS OF MMMWAHAHAHAHAHAAA!!! The bookcase is crammed with paperbacks by Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, Clive Barker, Peter Straub. There are warped and foxed copies of The Pan Book of Horror in a cardboard box. Fifty pence each. Five for two pounds. Skulls and candles and snakes and rats. I slide a key into the lock and turn the handle. I go inside. The horror room. The room where I exist.

There is a CircOlectrio orthopaedic bed, a chair and a small table. An en-suite bathroom contains a sit-in-bath, a toilet with a raised seat, a red emergency cord and a saucer of pot pourri. This extension to the bookshop had been added to house Ruth's mother, who died a few days after moving in, having funded its construction. I've been here for the best part of three weeks. I've seen Ruth's certificates. She wanted to look after me. She felt as if she had been chosen for the task because she had saved my life after the hit-and-run.

'I found you on that B road, just on the edge of Bailey's Hollow,' she told me. 'It was a miracle I was out at all that night. I shouldn't have been. My God, neither should you. Terrible storm. Winds gusting hard, fast. Trees down all over the county. A Range Rover, or something similar I think it must have been. One of those big 4x4s anyway, going too fast, drifting out over the middle of the road. It clipped you. You flew through the air. It was hard to believe you broke so many bones when you looked as if you didn't have any.'

I'd asked her where my girlfriend was, apparently, before the pain grew so big I could no longer hold it inside me. I couldn't remember where I'd left her or where she'd gone. I asked her again when I came out of the coma, half a year later. It might have been seconds. Ruth's hair was long. Her belly was big.

She took me home, even though I'd told her I would be all right. I said I was going to live at the B&B - Tam's Place, we were going to call it - but she insisted. She brought me back here and read to me. My life was measured out in chapters. I'd dread the moment the bookmark was slid into place and the book closed. I was worried I might die before we reached the end of the stories she was reading me. But it hasn't happened yet.

Tamara was gone. I should be dead, but I survived. I was alone. How could she leave someone, her man, her love, so wrecked? Did she leave me when she saw how destroyed I appeared? Perhaps she thought I would be a vegetable for the rest of my life and could not live with the responsibility of that. Did she stay for long? Was there any kind of vigil? Did she light a candle? Did she cry? Did she kiss my cheek? Winners and losers. Heroes and villains. Who was wearing which mask? I couldn't even begin to take a guess.

I drew a bath; it didn't take long. It was the only bath that would fit this space, Ruth told me, and anyway, her mother would never have been able to use a conventional tub.

After Ruth was raped, she used this bath all the time. It made it easier to hide the bruises. This style is popular with the Japanese, apparently. It looks like a ceramic well. There are steps up the side.

I poured in some bath foam. I don't like it; it irritates my skin, but, like Ruth, I don't want to see anything of me beneath the waterline. Somehow, I managed to undress. My clothes smelled of smoke. I couldn't bend down to clear them from the floor. Somehow, I got in. There are occasional, panicky moments when I feel I've not healed, that there are cracks and splits in me that will leak into the bathwater, turning it red. I feel like a thin bag filled with knuckles of bone. I feel like something continually on the brink of failure.