IN TRANSIT

a cold and waterless sea

——

He always felt most alone when he was flying. On a plane, he felt as if he did not exist. There were the overhead lights and the bulky earphones and the canned music, dead notes and dead voices scratchily coming through a tiny socket in the armrest. Outside the world was vanished; once he was above the clouds, all he could see was a white landscape, sheer mountains, deep gorges, bottomless chasms where the clouds momentarily opened, with nothing at all beneath. The cloudscape was not real. It was insubstantial, had no concrete existence. The blue sky was a cold and waterless sea.

The flight to Bangkok took one hour. Once there, at the modern chrome and glass airport with the king’s picture hanging everywhere, he waited. Airports were made for waiting, sometimes forever. He sat on a public bench and watched people come and go past him, unnoticed by them. When he went to the restroom his urine smelled of coffee. He washed his hands and toweled them dry. There was no day or night inside the terminal. It was a place where time stood still, a pause, a place where there was only a before or after, but no now.

For some reason he thought about the cat. He had tried adopting one a few months before. It was a little stray kitten, dirty-black, with big round eyes and a skinny neck and a big belly, bulging from intestinal worms. It had come up to him outside the Morning Market, just like that, and put its paw on his foot, and looked up at him.

He took it home in a blue plastic bag and fed it tuna and held it on his lap. It was a little cat, two months old and comical with its loping, ungraceful gait and its enthusiasm. He called the cat Small One, because it was small, and one. There was a veterinarian clinic on Don Palang road, and the nurse came to the apartment and she said Small One needed an injection for worms and also for an ear infection, and she injected him twice. Joe had paid her and she left, and twenty minutes later Small One was dead.

Small One’s body could not take the injections. He ran across the room, faster than Joe had seen him move before, and then stopped as abruptly, and crawled under the chair, feet splayed, his body wracked with spasms. His eyes stared at Joe as he peed himself, lying there in his own pool of urine, unable to move. Joe had put him in his box and mopped up, not thinking, and then held Small One close to him, and felt him go, the body becoming limp in his arms and the eyes remaining open but no longer seeing Joe, and there was no heartbeat.

He hated the nurse for doing what she did but he hated himself more for not stopping her, not telling her Small One was too small, too fragile for the injections. He let her do it because he thought it was the right thing to do, and she did what she thought was right, too.

He had buried Small One at night. The moon was one day short of being full. He dug the earth and put Small One into the ground in his box, and covered him again.

‘TransContinental Airways flight to Paris now boarding at gate thirty-five,’ a woman’s voice said on the public announcement system. Joe stood up; he had been day-dreaming. It was the only kind of dreaming he did any more. He picked up his bag and looked up at the great departure board, where destinations and flight numbers on moving slats click-clacked into position incessantly, when he felt a hand on his arm and a voice said close by, ‘Please, don’t go.’

He turned, startled. A small, rotund Asian woman stood beside him. He had not heard her approach. She wore a baggy dress and soft-soled shoes, and her face looked up at him pleadingly with short-sighted eyes. Joe said, ‘I’m sorry –’ and the woman sighed and said, ‘I am sorry too. You are lucky. You can find your way. I am still looking.’ And her eyes left him and went to the departure board, and she sighed, and said, ‘It should be silent and shining with words of light. Not like this. It should be… it should be like the marker to paradise, I sometimes think. But I don’t know where my flight is. I don’t know which gate to go to. I’ve tried them all.’

Joe put his hand on the woman’s shoulder. He couldn’t say why he did that. He felt in himself something responding to her, sensing her pain, not a knowing but feeling, and it was strange to him. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Let me get you something to eat. Everything is better after you’ve eaten.’

‘On board meal,’ the woman said. ‘That’s all I can taste now. And apple juice. I never drink alcohol on flights. Only apple juice. In those transparent plastic cups with the wrinkles. Now I hate the taste, but it won’t go away.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Joe said again. He didn’t know what to say. He felt powerless before her. The woman was still staring at the departure board. After a moment Joe removed his hand, gently. He thought she had forgotten he was there, but then he heard her speak. ‘Go,’ she said. She spoke very quietly. ‘I shouldn’t have come to you. But sometimes I get so lonely – where are we?’

‘Bangkok,’ Joe said.

‘Bangkok? I’ve never been to Bangkok before.’

He left her there. She never once took her eyes off the departure board.

— black hiking shoes —

The man was part Jamaican and part English, and close to two meters tall. He spoke with a South London accent, having been born in Bromley and educated at Thomas Tallis School in Kidbrooke. He had deep set eyes and thick black hair, and there were over one hundred grams of Pentaerythritol tetranitrate and Acetone peroxideplastic high-grade plastic explosives hidden in the hollowed soles of his black hiking shoes. His name was Richard Reid.

When Richard was born his father was in prison. By the time he left school at sixteen, he was already stealing cars like his old man. He did some time for mugging. “I was not there to give him the love and affection he should have got,” his father would later say. When Richard ran into the old man at a shopping mall some years after his first arrest, Robin Reid had a word of advice for his son. Muslims treat you like a human being, he said. And they get better food in prison.

Richard took the name Abdul Raheem after his conversion at the Feltham Young Offenders Institute. A few years after that he disappeared. His mother thought he was in Pakistan. Records obtained later suggest that he was trained in Afghanistan. He resurfaced in Amsterdam, where he worked in a restaurant. From Amsterdam he went to Brussels, and from Brussels to Paris.

December was cold and dark, and the days were short. It was on the seventeenth that Richard bought a round-trip ticket to Miami, flying with American Airlines. He spent his time in Paris around the Gare du Nord, not staying in a hotel; when he arrived at the airport on December twenty-first, he looked rough.

He had no luggage. French security personnel interviewed Reid, but they could not find a reason to hold him. Having missed his flight, he returned the next day and this time successfully boarded the Boeing 767 flight.

It was a Saturday morning. There were a hundred and eighty five passengers on board. There were, as mentioned, explosives, as well as a detonator, in the soles of Richard Reid’s shoes. Once the flight was airborne, and after the in-flight meal (which Richard did not share), the smell of smoke began to waft through the cabin. A stewardess, Hermis Moutardier, discovered him trying to light a match and warned him that smoking was not allowed on board. Reid promised to stop. He picked his teeth with the blackened match instead. He had a window seat, and no-one beside him. Moments later, Moutardier returned, finding Richard bent over in his chair. She thought he was smoking. ‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘what are you doing?’ He did not reply. When she demanded an answer Reid turned in his seat, exposing the shoe now between his legs, a fuse, and a lit match. Moutardier grabbed him. He pushed her away. She tried to take hold of him again and he pushed her, hard, until she fell across an armrest in the next row of seats. Moutardier ran back down the plane, shouting, ‘Get him! Go!’