The Professor of Truth (5 page)

I went out.

When air traffic control lost contact with the plane it was flying in a north by northwesterly direction at 31,000 feet. A lot of experts had been found and placed in front of TV cameras to give their opinions on what had happened. There had been no Mayday call, nothing at all from the pilots. One second the aircraft was there, the next it was gone, its single radar echo multiplying, scattering and fading on the monitors. The
wide dispersal of wreckage on the ground indicated that the plane had come apart at a great height. The general consensus was that, whatever had caused the catastrophe, it would have taken about a minute for the largest pieces of the plane to reach the ground. Passengers and crew, if not strapped in seats or otherwise attached to the fuselage, might have plummeted through the night for two minutes, perhaps a little longer. They would have fallen with everything else, suitcases, handbags, blankets, the paraphernalia of air travel, a precipitation of human lives and possessions. That terrible downpour filled my head. Day and night, it never ceased.

In a newsagent’s I found a battered Ordnance Survey map of the area, missing half its cover, and bought it. Then I went back to the field where the dead nose lay. I had been told that the bodies of the pilots had remained in the cockpit for two days, while men peered in and gingerly worked around them, assessing their last actions—what switches they had switched, whether they had had time to fit oxygen masks. I had also heard that the cockpit voice recorder had been discovered in a nearby field. Official-looking people came and went. I watched, and whenever I got the opportunity I asked—could I speak to someone who knew about the physics of trajectory and descent? I didn’t put it like that. I said, “Is there someone who can tell me how an aeroplane falls out of the sky?” Eventually a man with little round glasses, curly hair and a beard was pointed out to me. “He’s your man.”

He was writing on a clipboard. He looked up as I approached and immediately saw the map in my hand. He said, “Oh, these are like gold dust, where did you find it?”

I said, “In a shop. It was their last one.”

“We need all the maps we can get,” he said, reaching for it.

I did not let it go. “You can have it when I’m done with it.”

The man stared at me and seemed about to lose his temper. It was only then that I saw how tired and distressed he looked. I wondered how I looked to him.

“My wife and child were on the flight,” I said. “I need your help.”

I unfolded the map and asked where on it—above what point on it—the disintegration had most likely happened.

He scowled through his round lenses. “Impossible. I couldn’t be that precise.”

“Be as precise as you can be.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“I’m not asking for it to be simple. I want you to make an informed guess.”

“How can I? We don’t even know the cause yet. I mean, if it was structural failure or something else. We just don’t know.”

“It must have been very sudden,” I said. “Mustn’t it?”

“Yes, very sudden.”

“You can’t rule out an explosion, can you?”

“I’m not ruling anything out.”

“Suppose it was an explosion?”

“I’m not saying it was an explosion.”

“I’m not either. But if it was? Where above this map would that have been?”

“It’s just not possible to say,” he said, so aggressively that I took a step back. He saw this, and added, more gently, “I wish I could be more definite.”

“Please help me,” I said. I did not recognise my own voice.

The man looked at me afresh but could not hold the look. He took a pencil from his pocket and held it over the map, shook his head as though about to give up, then rapidly drew a circle.

“Don’t hold me to this,” he said. “There are so many variables. But if. Roughly. Roughly here.”

He stabbed the map with the pencil. “I’m sorry,” he said. I folded the map, thanked him, walked away. He called after me, “Wait!” but when I turned he only said again, “It’s not possible to say,” as if I were blaming him for the crash. Later, the next day, I would seek him out and give him the map. But for now, roughly, I knew what I was going to do next in this place and time of madness.

I boarded a local bus heading south on a route that went to various tiny settlements and villages, but I was not going to any of these. There were only two other passengers, both women, sitting silent and apart. The driver, a fat man, greeted them by name when they got on. He would be cheery and loud in normal circumstances, I guessed, but his hellos were quiet and brief and so were their replies, and he looked at me with a knowing deference—an expression I would recognise only too often in the years to come—when he saw me board.

“Where to, sir?” he said. I told him I wanted to go only a few miles, and he said that the minimum fare was to the first village on the route. I paid him and received my ticket. The bus set off. My finger traced the journey on the map. I watched it doing so, as if it did not belong to me, and when
after several minutes it approached and entered the pencilled circle, I called to the driver to put me down at the next stop. The bus pulled in a hundred yards later beside a wooden shelter opposite some farm buildings. Next to the shelter a broad track led into a dense plantation of conifers.

“Are you sure this is where you want off?” the driver said. Yes, I said, I was going to walk back into town, but not on the road, I wanted to stretch my legs and get some fresh air. I pointed up the track. “Up there.” The driver leaned from his seat to see where. “You’ll be one of the relatives,” he said. Suddenly unable to speak, I acknowledged this with a nod.

He tugged on the handbrake, switched off the engine and hauled himself out of his cabin. He stepped from the bus and gestured for me to follow.

“You’ll get fresh air up there all right,” he said. “Follow the track for half a mile and where it splits go left. It’ll take you to the top of that hill, see? You get a good view, even on a day like this. It’s a long time since I was there but you can see for miles.”

“Thank you,” I said.

A few spots of rain fell. The driver glanced at my shoes, already scuffed and filthy from walking among the ash and debris of the town. “Sure now? You can stay on board if you like. I end up back in town. No extra charge.”

“I’m sure,” I said. He seemed to want more. “You’re very kind.”

“What else can we be?” The words burst from him. “What sort of people would we be if we weren’t kind?” Then he got back in the bus, started the engine and drove off. He gave
me a wave, or perhaps it was more a kind of salute. The faces of the two women stared as they went by, their mouths moving as though trying to whisper something to me. I set off up the track.

I had not gone a quarter of a mile when I came upon a white van parked across the track. The van was unmarked but, as I approached, the driver and passenger doors opened and two men in police uniform got out. One was wearing a radio and it was he who spoke first.

“Afternoon, sir. I’m afraid access to the hill is closed.”

“I’m only going for a walk,” I said.

“Sorry, sir. Access is closed.”

“Because of the crash?”

“That’s right, sir.”

“They’re searching for wreckage,” the second policeman said. “Nobody’s allowed up there unless they’re authorised. Are you authorised?”

“No,” I said. “No, I’m not authorised.”

They both shrugged. They might have been choreographed.

“I’m not going to touch anything,” I said. “I just want to walk.”

“Sorry, sir,” the first one said. “We can’t let you beyond this point.”

I thought about arguing, and I thought about telling them who I was, using the instrument of my loss to break open their compassion as I had with the bearded, spectacled man. But I could see that this would not work on these men. I saw that if they knew I was a relative they would be even less
likely to let me past. So I shrugged too, turned and headed down the track, until I was out of sight round a corner. There I paused until I heard the van doors slamming shut again. Then I stepped across the drainage ditch and pushed off into the trees, taking an angle that I thought would cut well below the van but bring me out, eventually, far beyond it.

It was tough going through those whippy, spiky, close-set trees, but the climb and the stings and scratches of the branches were a distraction from the endless rain of death in my head. After a while I emerged into a firebreak, and tramped up a steep, grassy slope, protected from view by the tall trees on either side, slipping occasionally in my unsensible shoes. I came to a deer fence at the upper edge of the plantation, walked along it till I reached a corner post that I could get some purchase on, and hauled myself up and over the wire. A few hundred feet below lay the road where the bus driver had set me down. Ahead lay the grassland and heather of the hillside. My socks were already soaking, the shoes ruined. The sky was full of cloud.

I put back my head and looked skywards. Up there somewhere was where it had happened. The bomb, if it was a bomb, exploded. Then what? The plane coming to bits like a balsawood model of itself, the cockpit, the front part of the cabin, the wings, the engines, the rest of the fuselage—all separating. No time for brace positions, oxygen or prayers. The aircraft was no longer an aircraft, contact between crew and passengers over—no time for responsibility, no time for reassurance or warning from flight deck to cabin. The ruthlessness of the moment was also its only grace: there
was hardly time, perhaps none, for fear or pain or thought of what was coming.

So I fervently hoped as I stood on the hillside below, roughly, where it had happened.

I imagined a gale-force wind howling through the main part of the plane. The experts in the media—but could you have expertise without experiencing what it was like?—had painted their pictures well. I felt intense chest pain, a desperate struggle for breath. I thought I would pass out. I saw the wind ripping clothes, jewellery, headphones from unconscious people; a storm of personal possessions—books, papers, toys—roaring in the broken tube that was all the cabin now was; people not wearing their seat belts, or who were standing in the aisles, becoming part of this storm. Some would be sucked out into the ice-cold night—as cold as Antarctica in winter at that height—and some seats too would become detached and would fall with their occupants still in them.

I pushed on a few hundred yards, then stopped to get my breath back. How carelessly we use such phrases. To get my breath back! I looked up again. It was still early afternoon, but the light was poor and the sky loomed with dull menace. It was impossible
not
to think of those terrible things happening above the clouds, not to see a plane full of people breaking into many pieces. I stared, searching for the first drops of human rain. I thought of the two minutes of falling, that long, brief, breathless tumble, as of parachutists without chutes, the blacking-out, the faint, feeble grapple for consciousness, the agony of cold, the bursting lungs, the
rush of the air and the distortion of vision, the stars spinning and mixing with the lights of earth, that infinite, aching two minutes in which your brain is too scrambled to say no, or call for help, or reach for the child who so recently, so long ago, was beside you, or say goodbye to the man who loved you. I stood staring to heaven and nothing came from there, no mercy or redemption. Whatever had come had come already and it was not sent by God. I stood, arms outstretched and empty, like a man praying but I was not praying, I was crying, because it had come to this and I had come to this place, and they were not with me, Emily and Alice, they were gone for ever.

I lurched forward through grass and heather. Then I stumbled and went down, clutching at a thick clump of grass to stop myself sliding. I wiped my face with a muddy sleeve. I wiped the hand that had clutched the grass, and got off my knees. As I pulled myself upright I saw something resting on the heather. I reached, lifted it, turned it over between my fingers. It was nothing, yet it was something, a man-made thing in this inhuman expanse. A kind of peg, plastic, greyish, with a hole on one side into which something else had fitted or by which it had fitted on to something. It had been dropped or had fallen there. I looked up at the sky again, then back at the object. It was the colour of the cloud. A piece of cloud.

Whatever had come had come already
. I recognised the thing. It was the rotating clip with which, on an aeroplane, you secure your table to the seat in front of you. It was not cloud, it was aeroplane.

I looked around more closely. Could it have fallen there alone? Surely there must be other debris near by. But I could see nothing else. I held the clip tight in my fist. It was so light. Perhaps that was why it was where it was. The chaotic confusion of shockwaves and winds had conspired to send this tiny, almost weightless thing tumbling and jerking five miles to land there, at my feet.

I heard a shout and looked up. A line of men in visibility jackets had appeared on the crest of the hill above me. I thought one of them had called to me and I nearly called back but then realised that they had not seen me, that the shout had been among themselves. They were walking slowly, methodically, four, five, six of them. There would be more beyond my vision. If they did see me they would challenge me. They would want to know where I had come from, who I was, what—if anything—I had found. And I knew at once that I was not going to hand over the clip, not to these men nor to anybody else. Nor was I going to leave it where I had found it. Would anyone else find it if I did? What possible use could it be to them? What value could it have for anyone but myself? It was mine. It was what I had come there for. I felt its smooth, already familiar shape in my hand, then slipped it into my trouser pocket. I turned and made my way back to the fence, and from there to the road, and in the gathering darkness of the afternoon began to walk back into town the way I had come by bus.

When I finally arrived at Mrs Hastie’s house, she had a message for me. I was to go to the police information centre. “Have they found them?” I asked. “They didn’t say,” Mrs
Hastie said. What else could they want me for? I went, trembling with tiredness and cold and fear. But as I learned soon enough, there was nothing left to fear.