The Three (2 page)

She squeezes her eyes shut, opens them. Blinks to clear her vision. Tentatively she tries to turn her head to the right, and this time she’s able to do so without that horrible, intrusive pain.
Good
. A bruise of orange light in the background casts everything in silhouette, but she can make out a thick grove of trees–strange
twisted trees, ones she can’t identify–and there, just in front of them, a curved piece of twisted metal. Oh Lordy, is that the plane? It is… she can see the oblong shape of a window. A pop, a hissing sound, a soft boom and the scene is suddenly lit up clear as day. Her eyes water, but she won’t look away. She won’t. She can see the jagged edge of the fuselage, cruelly sheared from the rest of its body–where is the rest? Was she sitting in that part? Impossible. She couldn’t have survived that. It’s like a huge broken toy, makes her think of the yards around the trailers where Jim’s mother used to live. They were scattered with debris and old car parts and broken tricycles and she hadn’t liked to go there, even though Jim’s mother had always been kind to her… Her vision is limited due to her position, and she ignores the cracking sound she hears as she cranes her head so that her cheek is resting against her shoulder.

The screaming ceases abruptly, mid-howl.
Good
. She doesn’t want this time to be muddied with someone else’s pain and noise.

Wait… Something’s moving, just over by the tree line. A dark shape–a person–a small person, a child? The child who was sitting in front of her? She’s flooded with shame–she hadn’t given him or his mother a moment’s thought as the plane dropped. She’d only thought of herself. No wonder she couldn’t pray, what sort of Christian is she? The figure flits frustratingly out of her line of sight, but she can’t inch her neck any further over.

She tries to open her mouth to shout; can’t seem to make her jaw move this time.
Please. I’m here. Hospital
.
Get help.

A soft thud behind her head. ‘Ack,’ she manages. ‘Ack.’ Something touches her hair, and she feels tears rolling down her cheeks–she’s safe. They’re here to rescue her.

The shush-pad of running feet.
Don’t go
.
Don’t leave me
.

Bare feet suddenly appear in front of her eyes. Small feet, dirty, it’s dark, so dark, but they look to be smeared with black goop–mud? blood?

‘Help me, help me, help me,’ that’s it, she’s talking now. Good girl. If she’s talking she’s going to be fine. She’s just in shock. Yep. That’s all. ‘Help me.’

A face looms towards her; it’s so close she can feel the whisper of the boy’s breath on her cheeks. She tries to focus on his eyes. Are they…? Nuh-uh. It’s just the poor light. They’re white, all white, no pupils
oh Jesus help me.
A scream grows in her chest, lodges in her throat, she can’t get it out, it’s going to choke her. The face jerks away. Her lungs are heavy, liquid. Now it hurts to breathe.

Something flickers in the far right of her field of vision. Is it that same child? How could he have got all the way over there so quickly? He’s pointing at something… Shapes, darker than the trees around them. People. Definitely people. The orange glow is fading, but she can see their outlines clearly. Hundreds of them, it looks like, and they’re coming towards her. Drifting out of the trees, those strange trees, knobbled and bubbled and twisted like fingers.

Where are their feet? They don’t have feet. That’s not right.

Uh-uh. They aren’t real. They can’t be real. She can’t see their eyes, their faces are inky black blobs that remain flat and unmoving as the light behind them blooms and dies.

They’re coming for her–she knows this.

The fear ebbs away, replaced with a certainty that she doesn’t have long. It’s as if a cold, confident Pam–a new Pam, the Pam she’s always wanted to be–enters and takes over her battered, dying body. Ignoring the mess where her stomach once was, she gropes for her fanny pack. It’s still here, although it’s shifted around to her side. She closes her eyes and concentrates on opening the zip. Her fingers are wet, slippery, but she’s not going to give up now.

The whup-whup sound fills her ears, louder this time, a light floats down from above and dances over and around her and she can make out a row of disembodied seats, the metal struts catching the light; a high-heeled shoe that looks brand new. She waits to see if the light will halt the crowd’s approach. They continue to creep forward, and still she can’t make out any facial features. And where is the boy? If only she could tell him not to go near them, because she knows what they want, oh yes, she knows exactly
what they want. But she can’t think about that now, not when she’s so close. She digs inside her bag, yips with relief when her fingers graze the smooth back of her phone. Careful not to drop it, she ekes it out of the bag–has time to marvel at the panic she felt earlier when she couldn’t remember where she’d put it–and instructs her arm to bring it up to her face. What if it doesn’t work? What if it’s broken?

It won’t be broken, she won’t let it be broken, and she caws in triumph when she hears the chiming do-do-do-dah welcome message. Nearly there… A tut of exasperation–she’s such a messy bunny, there’s blood all over the screen. Using the last of her strength to concentrate, she finds her way to the applications box, scrolls to ‘voice recorder’. The whup-whupping is deafening now, but Pam shuts it out, just as she ignores the fact that she can no longer see.

She holds the phone to her mouth and starts speaking.

There can be few readers who do not feel a frisson of dread when the words Black Thursday are mentioned. That day–January 12, 2012–when four commuter planes went down within hours of each other, resulting in the deaths of over a thousand people, has joined the annals of the devastating disasters that have changed the way we look at the world.

Predictably, within weeks of the incidents, the market was flooded with non-fiction accounts, blogs, biographies and opinion pieces, all cashing in on the public’s morbid fascination with the accidents themselves, and the child plane crash survivors known as The Three. But no one could have predicted the macabre chain of events that would follow or how fast they would unfold.

As I did in
Snapped
, my investigation into gun crime perpetrated by US children under the age of sixteen, I decided that if I was going to add my voice to the mix, the only way forward was to collate an objective account, letting those involved speak in their own words. To this end, I have drawn from a wide variety of sources, including Paul Craddock’s unfinished biography, Chiyoko Kamamoto’s collected messages, and interviews personally conducted by me during and immediately after the events in question.

I make no apologies for the inclusion of subject matter that some may find upsetting, such as the accounts of those who were first on the scenes of the tragedies; the statements from former and current Pamelists; the
isho
found at the crash site of Sun Air Flight 678; and the never-before-published interview with the exorcist hired by Paul Craddock.

While I freely admit to having included excerpts from newspaper reports and magazine articles as context (and, to some
extent, as a narrative device), my main motivation, as it was in
Snapped
, is to provide an unbiased platform for the perspectives of those closest to the main players in the events that occurred from January to July, 2012. With this in mind, I urge readers to remember that these accounts are subjective and to draw their own conclusions.

Elspeth Martins

New York

August 30, 2012

The last words of Pamela May Donald (1961–2012)

I’ve always liked airports. Call me an old romantic, but I used to get a kick out of watching families and lovers reuniting–that split second when the weary and sunburned emerge through the sliding glass doors and recognition lights up their eyes. So when Stephen asked me to collect him and the girls from Gatwick, I was more than happy to do it.

I left with a good hour to spare. I wanted to get there early, grab myself a coffee and people-watch for a bit. Odd to think of it now, but I was in a wonderful mood that afternoon. I’d had a call-back for the part of the gay butler in the third series of
Cavendish Hall
(type-casting, of course, but Gerry, my agent, thought it could finally be my big break), and I’d managed to find a parking spot that wasn’t a day’s hike from the entrance. As it was one of my treat days, I bought myself a latte with extra cream, and wandered over to join the throng waiting for passengers to emerge from baggage reclaim. Next to a Cup ’n’ Chow outlet, a team of bickering work-experience kids were doing an execrable job of dismantling a tacky Christmas display that was well-overdue for removal, and I watched their mini drama unfold for a while, oblivious that my own was about to begin.

I hadn’t thought to check the flight information board to make sure the plane was on time, so I was taken unawares when a nasal voice droned over the intercom: ‘Could all those awaiting the arrival of Go!Go! Airlines Flight 277 from Tenerife please make their way to the information counter, thank you.’
Isn’t that Stephen’s flight?
I thought, double-checking the details on my BlackBerry. I wasn’t too concerned. I suppose I assumed the flight had been delayed. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why Stephen hadn’t called to let me know he’d be late.

You never think it’s going to happen to you, do you?

There was only a small group of us at first–others, like me, who’d arrived early. A pretty girl with dyed red hair holding a heart-shaped balloon on a stick, a dreadlocked fellow with a wrestler’s build and a middle-aged couple with smokers’ skin who were dressed in identical cerise shell suits. Not the sort of people with whom I’d usually choose to associate. Odd how one’s first impressions can be so wrong. I now count them all among my closest friends. Well, this type of thing brings you together, doesn’t it?

I should have known from the shell-shocked expressions on the faces of the spotty teenager manning the counter and the whey-faced security woman hovering next to him that something horrific was afoot, but all I was feeling at that stage was irritation.

‘What’s going on?’ I snapped in my best
Cavendish Hall
accent.

The teenager managed to stutter that we were to follow him to where ‘more info would be relayed to us’.

We all did as we were told, although I confess I was surprised the shell-suited couple didn’t kick up more of a stink, they didn’t look the type to take orders. But as they told me weeks later at one of our ‘277 Together’ meetings, at that stage they were in denial. They didn’t
want
to know, and if anything untoward had happened to the plane, they didn’t want to hear it from a boy who was barely out of puberty. The teenager scurried ahead, presumably so that none of us would have the chance to interrogate him further, and ushered us through an innocuous door next to the customs’ offices. We were led down a long corridor, which, judging by its peeling paint and scuffed floor, wasn’t in a section of the airport typically encountered by the public gaze. I remember smelling a rogue whiff of cigarette smoke wafting in from somewhere in a flagrant disregard of the smoking ban.

We ended up in a grim windowless lounge, furnished with tired burgundy waiting-room seats. My eye was caught by one of those seventies tubular ashtrays, which was half-hidden behind a plastic hydrangea. Funny what you remember, isn’t it?

A guy in a polyester suit clutching a clipboard waddled towards us, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a Tourette’s sufferer’s. Although as pale as a cadaver, his cheeks were alive with a
severe shaving rash. His eyes darted all over the place, briefly met mine, then his gaze settled into the far distance.

It hit me then, I think. The sickening knowledge that I was about to hear something that would change my life forever.

‘Go on then, mate,’ Kelvin–the fellow with the dreads–finally said.

The suit swallowed convulsively. ‘I am extremely sorry to relay this to you, but Flight 277 disappeared off the radar approximately an hour ago.’

The world swayed, and I could feel the first wisps of a panic attack. My fingers were tingling and my chest was starting to tighten. Then Kelvin asked the question the rest of us were too afraid to ask: ‘Has it crashed?’

‘We cannot be certain at this time, but please be assured we will relay the information to you as soon as it comes in. Counsellors will be available for any of you who—’

‘What about survivors?’

The suit’s hands were trembling and the winking cartoon plane on his plastic Go!Go! badge seemed to mock us with its cheeky insouciance. ‘Should have called it Gay!Gay! Air,’ Stephen used to quip whenever one of Go!Go!’s dire adverts came on the television. He was always joking that that cartoon plane was camper than a bus-load of drag queens. I didn’t take offence; that was the sort of relationship we had. ‘Like I say,’ the suit flustered, ‘we have counsellors at your disposal—’

Mel–the female half of the track-suited couple–spoke up. ‘Sod your counsellors, just tell us what’s happened!’

The girl holding the balloon started sobbing with the gusto of an
EastEnders
character, and Kelvin put his arm around her. She dropped the balloon and I watched as it bounced sadly across the floor, eventually ending up lodged next to the retro ashtray. Other people were starting to drift into the room, ushered by more Go!Go! staff–most of whom looked as bewildered and unprepared as the spotty teenager.

Mel’s face was as pink as her shell-suit top and she was jabbing a finger in the official’s face. Everyone seemed to be screaming or
crying, but I felt a curious distance from what was going on, as if I was on set, waiting for my cue. And this is a ghastly thing to admit, but I thought,
remember what you’re feeling, Paul, you can use it in your acting
. I’m not proud of that. I’m just being honest.

I kept staring at that balloon, and suddenly I could hear Jessica and Polly’s voices, clear as a bell: ‘But Uncle Paaaaauuuuul, what keeps the plane in the air?’ Stephen had asked me round to Sunday lunch the week before they left, and the twins hadn’t stopped badgering me about the flight, for some reason assuming I was the font of all knowledge about air travel. It was the kids’ first time on a plane, and they were more excited about that than they were about the holiday. I found myself trying to remember the last thing Stephen had said to me, something along the lines of, ‘See you when you’re older, mate.’ We’re non-identical, but how could I not have sensed something awful had happened? I dragged my phone out of my pocket, recalling that Stephen had sent me a text the day before: ‘Girls say hi. Resort full of twats. We get in at 3.30. Don’t be late ;).’ I thumbed through my messages, trying to find it. It was suddenly absolutely vital that I save it. It wasn’t there–I must have accidentally deleted it.

Even weeks afterwards, I wished I’d kept that text message.

Somehow, I found myself back in the Arrivals area. I don’t remember how I even got there, or if anyone tried to stop me leaving that ghastly lounge. I drifted along, sensing that people were staring at me, but right then, they were as insignificant as extras. There was something in the air, like that heavy feeling you get just before a storm hits. I thought, sod it, I need a drink, which, since I’d been on the wagon for a good ten years, wasn’t like me. I sleepwalked towards the Irish theme pub on the far side of the area. A group of suited yobs were gathered around the bar staring up at the TV. One of them, a florid-faced prat with a Mockney accent, was talking too loudly, going on about 9/11, and telling everyone that he had to get to Zurich by 5.50 or ‘heads would roll’. He stopped, mid-sentence, as I approached, and the others made room for me, drawing back as if I were contagious. Of course, I’ve learned since then that grief and horror
are
contagious.

The TV’s sound was up to full volume and an anchor–one of those botoxed American horrors with Tom Cruise teeth and too much make-up–was yabbering into shot. Behind her was a screen capture of what looked to be some sort of swamp, a helicopter hovering over it. And then I read the strap-line: Maiden Airlines Everglades crash.

They’ve got it wrong
, I thought.
Stephen and the girls were on Go!Go!, not that plane
.

And then it hit me. Another plane had gone down.