The Carrier Read Free Page A

fly
into
Dusseldorf,’ I continue with my mission to spread peace and understanding. ‘It’s never been here, it isn’t here now, and your suitcase, if you had one, wouldn’t be on it, and wouldn’t need to be taken off it. The plane is somewhere in the sky.’ I point upwards. ‘It was heading for Dusseldorf, and now it’s changed course and is heading for Cologne.’
    ‘No-o,’ she says unsteadily, looking me up and down with a kind of shocked disgust, as if she’s horrified to find herself having to address me. ‘That’s not right. We were all sitting there.’ She waves an arm towards the curved orange plastic seats on their rows of black metal stalks. ‘It said to go to the gate. It only says that when the plane’s there ready for boarding.’
    ‘Normally that’s true, but not tonight,’ I tell her briskly. I can almost see the cogs going round behind her eyes as her mental machinery struggles to connect one thought to another. ‘When they told us to go to the gate, they still hoped the plane would be able to make it to Dusseldorf. Shortly after we all pitched up here, they realised that wouldn’t be possible.’ I glance at Bodo Neudorf, who half nods, half shrugs. Is he deferring to me? That’s insane. He’s supposed to know more about Fly4You’s behind-the-scenes operations than I do.
    Angry Weeping Girl averts her eyes and shakes her head. I can hear her silent scorn:
Believe that if you want to.
Bodo is speaking into a walkie-talkie in German. Choirgirls nearby start to ask if they’ll get home tonight. Their parents tell them they don’t know. Three men in football shirts are discussing how much beer they might be able to drink between now and whenever we fly, speculating about whether Fly4You will settle the bar tab.
    A worried grey-haired woman in her late fifties or early sixties tells her husband that she only has ten euros left. ‘What? Why?’ he says impatiently. ‘That’s not enough.’
    ‘Well, I didn’t think we’d need any more.’ She flaps around him, accepting responsibility, hoping for mercy.
    ‘You didn’t
think
?’ he demands angrily. ‘What about emergencies?’
    I’ve used up all my interventional capacity, otherwise I might ask him if he’s ever heard of a cashpoint, and what he was planning to do if his wife spontaneously combusted and all the currency in her handbag went up in smoke.
What about that emergency, Bully-breath?
Is your wife actually thirty-five, and does she only look sixty because she’s wasted the best years of her life on you?
    There’s nothing like an airport for making you lose faith in humanity. I walk away from the crowd, past a row of unmanned boarding gates, in no particular direction. I am sick of the sight of every single one of my fellow travellers, even the ones whose faces I haven’t noticed. Yes, even the nice choirgirls. I’m not looking forward to seeing any of them again – in the helpless, hopeful gaggle we will form outside the Departures Hall, where we will stand for hours in the rain and wind; across the aisle of the coach; slumped half asleep at various bars around Cologne airport.
    On the other hand. It’s a delayed plane, not a bereavement. I fly a lot. This sort of thing happens all the time. I’ve heard the words ‘We are sorry to announce . . .’ as often as I’ve seen the flecked grey heavy-duty linoleum flooring at Combingham airport, with its flecked blue border at every edge, for contrast. I’ve stood beneath information screens and watched minor delays metastasise into cancellations as often as I’ve seen the small parallel lines that form the borderless squares that in turn make-up the pattern on a million sets of silver aeroplane steps; once I dreamed that the walls and ceiling of my bedroom were covered with textured aluminium tread.
    The worst thing about a delay, always, is ringing Sean and telling him that, yet again, I’m not going to be back when I said I would be. It’s a call I can’t