The Flight’s End

"I used to think that arriving somewhere meant relief. A kind of ending. But the ground does not feel any safer when a man is standing on it with something in his pocket that he has stolen."

We came down onto the tarmac with a jolt that went straight up through the frame of the aircraft and into my spine, and the wheels shrieked in protest at the heat coming off the runway, and the whole cabin shuddered as the reverse thrust came in—and it hauled me up out of the broken, unrestful half-sleep I had slipped into somewhere over the top of the Adelaide Hills without ever meaning to.

My hand went to my trouser pocket before I was properly awake.

The Portal Key was there. Cold, and smooth, and far too heavy for a thing its size, sitting in among my loose change and the lint at the bottom of a pocket exactly as though it belonged there. As though it were a set of house keys. As though it were a receipt I had forgotten to throw away.

And it had worked. That was what I could not get past, sitting there with the aircraft still rolling. Saint Phillis was not a dream. I had gone out through the wall of a moving aeroplane, and I had come back, and I had left something in the dust of another world—and the whole of it was in my head with the edges still on it.

And the seat beside me was empty. Untouched. As entirely and comprehensively vacant as though a woman had never sat down in it at all.

Around me the spell was coming off the cabin. Belts came undone with a cheerful rattle of clicks. Arms went up over heads. People began digging bags out from under seats and reaching up into the lockers, and the whole aeroplane went from a place where time had been suspended to a place where time was suddenly and urgently running—arrival, and connections, and lifts, and somebody waiting in a car park.

A baby started up near the back, loud and insistent and distressingly human, and the sound went through my head and settled in behind my eyes. Those two glasses of wine had not, in retrospect, been the most astute decision of my career. My stomach was still turning over on them.

Out through the smeared oval of the window the terminal came sliding towards us, all mirrored glass and steel, shimmering in the savage clarity of a South Australian summer afternoon. I have landed at that airport dozens of times. I have walked out of that building into that heat and got into a taxi and thought about nothing at all.

And it looked wrong. Every part of it looked wrong. It was as though I were seeing the whole of it about a quarter of a second late.

The seatbelt sign stayed lit. The engines wound down. And I sat there with my thumb hovering over a telephone that was still switched off, as though the sheer force of my wanting might get the aircraft to the gate any faster.

Then we came to a stop with a small hydraulic sigh, and the sign went off with a ding, and an attendant's voice said that we were free to use our devices.

I had already pressed the button before she finished the sentence.

The screen came up, and the thing shuddered in my hand, and everything I had missed came down out of the air at once. Emails. Alerts. A promotion from a hardware chain. A missed call from a number I did not recognise. And I went through the whole of it with the practised desperation of a man hunting for exactly one name.

And there it was.

Josh.

It had come in a little over half an hour earlier, somewhere in the middle of the descent, while I had been sitting in a metal tube in a daze of engine noise with the dust of another world still under my fingernails.

Just passing through Burra. Meet me at the Elizabeth train station instead of the airport.

I read it. Then I read it again. Then I read it a third time, and a fourth, as though the words might rearrange themselves into something that made sense if I only kept at them long enough.

And it went into the pit of my stomach like a blow.

Because there was no greeting on it. There was no mate, and no yep, and no no worries, and not one of the small thoughtless courtesies that had gone back and forth between the two of us our entire lives. There was no explanation for the change, and no apology for it, and no question about whether it suited me.

There was a place, and there was an instruction. That was the entire content of it.

And Josh did not change plans.

People have been misreading my brother his whole life and I have watched them do it. He was easy-going. He could turn up two hours late to a barbecue with a slab under his arm and no apology and be entirely forgiven for it inside about four minutes. But when it came to me—when he had said he would do a thing—he did the thing, and he had never once in thirty-three years told me he would be somewhere and then not been there.

And he had just moved the meeting at the last possible moment, from an airport to a suburban train station, in eleven words, with no reason attached to any of them.

Which meant that something had gone wrong. Something outside his control.

And, a great deal worse, something he could not put in writing.

Burra made sense. Burra made sense the way arithmetic makes sense—it was on the road down from Broken Hill, and he had driven through it a hundred times, and if he had been at Burra when he sent it then he was about two hours out and the timing worked perfectly.

But Elizabeth?

Elizabeth was forty minutes north of that airport, out in a suburb that had been having a hard decade, and there was nothing in it that either of us had ever had the smallest reason to go to. It was not convenient. It was not on his road. It was not on anybody's road. It was a train station in the middle of a shopping precinct—and a brother who is coming to collect you drives to the airport, because that is where the aeroplane lands and he knows it, and Josh had been picking me up off aeroplanes since I was twenty-two.

Unless he did not want to be seen at the airport.

Unless there was something at the airport.

I typed a reply with my thumb going considerably faster than my head.

Why? What's going on?

And I sent it, and the small sound it made going away was absurdly gentle for what it was carrying, and I sat in seat 24C at Adelaide Airport and watched the word underneath it change from delivered to read.

Read.

He had seen it. He had the phone in his hand. He was looking at that screen at that exact moment, somewhere on a highway with the air-conditioning going and the sun coming in over the bonnet, and he had read my question.

And nothing came back.

I sat and watched the space where the answer was supposed to be, and my pulse came up through my collar. Four days of nothing, and then eleven words, and now this—and this was not the same thing at all. For four days I had been telling myself that he had not looked at his phone.

He had looked at it. He had read the question. And he had decided not to answer it.

All around me the cabin had gone into that peculiar rehearsed frenzy that came over every aeroplane I had ever been on the moment it stopped moving. Belts clicking. Lockers banging up. Bodies levering themselves out into an aisle that was not going anywhere, and stacking up in it, and standing there. A businessman in the row in front of me hauled an overstuffed laptop bag down out of the locker with a grunt and very nearly delivered it into the side of my head, and I got out of the way of it a fraction of a second before it would have mattered.

And through the whole of it those eleven words sat in my head like a flare in fog. Perfectly readable, and telling me nothing whatever about what was underneath them.

Elizabeth train station instead of the airport.

Why?

The light coming in through the windows was the kind that city only produces in January, bleaching everything it touched, and the heat was standing up off the asphalt outside in visible ripples. And I did not move. The queue built and the aisle filled and I stayed exactly where I was, with my phone gripped far too hard in a hand that had gone damp, reading eleven words over and over—and every time I read them the silence underneath them got louder.

Something was wrong.

And I had just begun to lever myself up out of my seat when I saw her.

She was coming back down the aisle towards me, against the flow, moving fast.

The woman. Her.

The woman who had told me to shut up. The woman who had gone into a sealed box at the back of that aeroplane and had not come out of it, and whose seat had been empty for an hour, and whose backpack was lying under a rock on another world.

My heart stopped and restarted somewhere considerably higher up in my chest.

She was not composed any more. That was the first thing about her. Every scrap of that terrible flat professional calm had gone out of her, and what was underneath it was pure velocity. Her hair was stuck to the back of her neck. There were strands of it across her temples in a sheen of sweat. She was coming through that crush of standing passengers with one arm up across her body, twisting, cutting, taking gaps that were not really gaps, and her face was tight and set and she was not looking at a single one of them.

"Excuse me," she said to a tall man fumbling with a coat, and it was not a request, and he moved.

She came past my seat without so much as glancing at me, muttering something low that I did not catch—and she bent straight down at the waist and put her hand in under the seat in front of her own.

And her hand stopped.

Everything about her stopped. She went rigid from the shoulders down, all at once, in the way that a person's whole body will lock when the fingers close on nothing and the nothing is the wrong answer.

She came back up, and her eyes went across that empty floor space like a torch beam, and I watched her face go through the whole of it in about a second. Confusion. Then alarm. Then fear.

And then, very fast indeed, fury.

"Where is it?" she said.

Her voice was low and tight and it sounded as though it were being forced out through something, and it went across my skin like cold water.

She went down again, further this time, right down onto her knees in the aisle, and her hands went scraping along the carpet—patting, sweeping, feeling in under the seat frame, going back and forth across eighteen inches of industrial nylon that had absolutely nothing on it, as though the bag might be persuaded back into existence by sheer force of application.

It was not going to be.

And I sat four feet away and could see precisely where it was: black canvas pushed back under a rock overhang, in a shadow, on a plain where a sound died before it could get anywhere at all.

She sat back on her heels and let a breath out through her teeth. And then she was up, all at once, with her hands in fists.

"Where the bloody hell is it?"

And that time her voice carried.

Heads came round. All down that side of the cabin people turned and looked—eyebrows up, conversations stopping in the middle of a word—and the ordinary dull irritation of a hundred people waiting to get off an aeroplane sharpened all at once into something a great deal more alert.

And I could not move. I did not sit there in any cool calculated stillness; my legs had gone, and my chest had gone, and I sat in that seat like a thing that had been nailed to it while a woman stood two feet from my knee and did not yet know that I existed.

And then she did.

Her head came round and her eyes came onto mine, and it was like being found by something.

"You were sitting right here the entire time," she said.

It was not a question. It was a statement of established fact, and it was the opening line of an examination, and every word of it landed exactly where she had put it.

"Did you see what happened to my bag?"

And my stomach went into a knot, and my mouth went dry, and my throat physically resisted the thing I was about to do with it.

"No," I said.

One syllable, and I heard the tension go into it and could not get it out again, and it hung there in the air between us sounding exactly like what it was.

"I honestly didn't see anything unusual." And then, because I could not leave it there, because I have never in my life been able to leave a silence alone: "Perhaps someone… took it. Opportunistically. While I was in the bathroom."

The words came out of me like sand. Grainy, and dry, and unnatural, and audibly rehearsed—because they had been rehearsed, in a lavatory, in front of a mirror, and I had thought at the time that I was doing rather well.

Her eyes flickered. She did not blink.

"You've been sitting here the entire flight," she said, harder this time. "You must have seen something."

"I wasn't here the entire time."

And that one came out better, because it was true. There is nothing in this world that will carry a frightened man across open ground like a true sentence. "I stepped away for a bit. It could have happened then."

She looked at me. She looked at me for what cannot have been more than three seconds and which I felt in my back teeth for a fortnight afterwards. And she read my face exactly the way I have spent eleven years reading a document that somebody very badly wants me to sign—not looking at what is in it, looking for the place where it has been smoothed over.

And a lie gets out of a man. Mine got out through my shoulders, and out through my hands, and most of all it got out through the two or three extra words I had put on the end of it because I could not stand the quiet.

I had put on three.

And then, quite abruptly, she stopped looking at me.

Her attention went past my shoulder to the elderly gentleman in the window seat, who had been sitting there since Melbourne with his hands folded in his lap and had not said one word to anybody, and whose existence I had entirely forgotten.

And the relief that went through me when her eyes came off my face was so enormous, and so physical, and so completely undeserved, that I very nearly made a sound.

"Did you happen to see anything?" she asked him.

Her voice had changed. The hostility had come off it and something else had come up underneath—not softness, exactly, but a kind of pleading, and it was a very great deal worse to listen to than the anger had been.

He blinked at her, mildly, and adjusted a pair of delicate wire-framed glasses, and gave her a small apologetic smile that had a lifetime of good manners folded up inside it.

"I'm terribly sorry," he said. "I was taking a brief nap."

And I sat there and let an old man corroborate my lie for me.

He had no idea. He had no idea at all. He had told her the plain and courteous truth about a nap on an aeroplane, and in the doing of it he had quietly shut the last door I had been afraid of, and I put my hands flat down on my thighs to stop them shaking and I did not say one word.

"This is absolutely ridiculous," she said, to nobody, to the aircraft, to the universe at large for having permitted this to occur.

And she went down again, onto her knees beside my row, and swept her hands across the carpet under the seats—and her knuckles knocked against my shoe twice, and each time it went through me like current, and each time I sat perfectly still and let her do it. I had a half-formed lunatic conviction that she was going to feel it. That her hand would go through the space where the bag was not, and would somehow know.

There was something animal in the way she was moving by then. That confined space could not hold what was coming off her.

She stood up sharply, breathing hard, jaw set, and her eyes went to the overhead lockers.

And I watched hope come up in her face, and it was the worst thing I saw all afternoon. She needed to believe that the bag had somehow gone up into a bin. That a passing passenger had shifted it. That an attendant had stowed it and had simply forgotten to mention it to anybody.

And I knew precisely where it was.

She stepped out into the aisle and her head went left and then right, and then she raised her voice.

"Excuse me!"

She was not addressing anybody. She was addressing everybody, and there was something in the pitch of it that was closer to a warning than a request, and I sat in my seat and made my face into nothing at all.

She got hold of the nearest locker and hauled it open hard enough to make the hinge complain, and a couple of jackets came out over her arms, and she swore under her breath and stuffed them back and slammed it shut with a bang that went down the whole length of that cabin like a starter's pistol.

People jumped. Heads came up over the seat backs. And the expressions on them moved from curiosity towards something a good deal less charitable.

"Has anyone seen a black backpack?"

Louder. Very nearly a shout, and there was a tremor right through the middle of it.

And nobody answered her.

That is what I have never been able to put down. A cabin full of people, and she stood in the middle of them and asked, and a few of them shrugged, and a couple shook their heads without any interest whatever, and two teenagers about six rows back looked at one another with the delight of an audience getting rather more out of a flight than they had paid for.

Nobody helped her. Not one person on that aeroplane so much as stood up.

And I sat in the middle of it and said nothing, and the Portal Key in my pocket had stopped being cold and had begun to feel like something that had been left in a fire.

One of the attendants came down the aisle towards her—a tall woman in her thirties with her hair up—and the professional smile faltered by about a millimetre when she got close enough to see the state she was in.

"Is something the matter, madam?"

It was the voice they are trained to produce. Level, and warm, and entirely without give. The voice for a frightened child, or for a man who has had four drinks and is thinking hard about a fifth.

"Yes," she said, and there was a shake in it now that she could not get out of it. "My backpack has vanished. I left it under my seat. I know that for a fact. And now it is gone. Somebody has taken it."

Somebody on this aeroplane is a thief.

It went out into that cabin and it landed, and every hair on my arms went up, and a line of sweat came down my spine one vertebra at a time.

The attendant's face did something small and administrative. "I'll do everything I can to help. If you could just stay calm, I'll speak to the rest of the crew—"

"I don't need to calm down," she said. "I need to find my bag."

And she went at the next locker.

Coats. A plastic shopping bag that went on the floor. Nothing. Her hands were quite visibly shaking now, and every person in that section of the aircraft was watching her do it—and a man two rows up with a toddler on his arm shifted the child round onto his other hip, away from her, without ever once appearing to make a decision about it.

And I sat there.

I wanted to tell her, and I have never been able to make that sound like anything other than an excuse. I wanted to lean over and say: it has not been stolen. It is safe. It is in a crevice under a rock in a place where nobody will ever find it, and I put it there, and I did it because I could not think of one other thing to do with it.

And I could not say any of that to a woman standing in the aisle of a commercial aircraft in front of two hundred people, and so I said nothing whatever, and let her go on tearing open other people's lockers.

And while she was doing it, I got up and left.

Because the whole of that cabin was looking at her. Every single face in it was turned towards the noise, and a gap had opened up in that room, and I saw the gap, and I did not hesitate over it for one second.

I slid out of my seat and into the queue and became one more tired body in a slow line of tired bodies, and nobody looked at me at all.

My bag was over my arm. My eyes were down. Every step up that aisle felt like trespassing.

"Excuse me," I murmured, edging past a man wrestling with a case, and I kept my face turned down to the floor while I did it, because faces are what get remembered and voices are not.

"Watch it, mate." Flat, and rural, and thoroughly unimpressed.

Further up, a woman in a cream blazer turned about a third of the way towards me and sighed with a great deal more theatre than the situation strictly required.

"Some of us are waiting our turn."

"Terribly sorry," I said, and it came out automatically and meant nothing whatever, and it was one more small lie on a day that was already bloated with them.

Behind me I could still hear her. Her voice came up over the top of everything—the shuffle, and the lockers, and the low apologetic drone of a flight attendant trying to get a situation back under control—and it climbed a little higher every time she asked.

And at the front of the cabin, standing beside the open door in a navy uniform with a collar sharp enough to cut a man, there was a steward.

And he looked at me.

"In a particular hurry, are we, sir?"

His voice was pitched perfectly neutral and there was nothing neutral about it at all, and his eyes went over my face and my shoulders and my hands in rather less than half a second.

And I stopped, and I put a tired apologetic smile onto a face that did not want to make one.

"Terribly sorry. My wife's just gone into labour."

I have no wife.

I have never had a wife. I have never been engaged. I have not been in a relationship of any consequence since Rhys, and I had not so much as thought about the concept of a wife at any point in the preceding four days.

And it came out of my mouth fully formed, in a warm and slightly harried tone, with exactly the right amount of embarrassment in it—and it was the most convincing thing I had said to another human being since Wednesday morning.

The steward frowned for half a second.

And then he nodded, and stood aside, and put his hand out towards the door in a small formal gesture of release, and let me go.

The jet bridge was cool and shadowed after the cabin, and it smelled of aluminium and hydraulic oil and something chemical, and my shoes went down the corrugated flooring with a sharp metallic report that followed me the whole way along it like something walking behind me. I went faster than I needed to and I could not help it. I was going somewhere, and going somewhere felt, for about eleven strides, exactly like getting away from somewhere else.

I had not got away. I had changed the backdrop.

Because she was going to stop shouting at strangers eventually. She was going to stop tearing open lockers, and she was going to sit down somewhere with her head in her hands, and she was going to do the thing that she had very obviously been trained at some point in her life to do, which was to go back over it in order.

The bag was under the seat when I left it. I was gone for a short time. When I came back the bag was gone.

Who was sitting in that row?

Where is he now?

A man in the seat beside her. A man who had been turning one of the devices over in his lap in a public cabin like an idiot. A man who had sat perfectly still while she searched the floor around his feet, and had answered her questions with three words too many, and who was no longer on that aeroplane.

She was not going to have to be clever about it. She was going to have to be awake for about ninety seconds.

I came out of the bridge and into the terminal, into the cold recycled air and the polished floor and the fluorescent light, and I looked back once over my shoulder—which is the single most memorable thing a man can do in an airport, and which I did anyway—and the aircraft sat out there on the apron in the sun, white and gleaming and entirely serene, with a row of small oval windows down the side of it.

And behind those windows a woman was going through other people's luggage with her hands shaking.

I had done that. Not the men who were hunting her, whoever they were. Not the thing that had taken a parcel out of the record of an entire country. I had. I had taken her bag, and I had put it somewhere she could not follow it, and I had watched her come apart about it from four feet away and had said no.

I have thought about her a great deal since, and never about the bag. About the moment her hand went in under that seat and found nothing.

I had taken more than a bag off her. I had taken the last solid thing she had left, and I had done it while she was looking the other way, and no amount of arithmetic about what would have happened had I left it lying there has ever entirely cleaned that off me.

And there was no way back. There had been no way back from the moment I stepped through a wall with her bag in my hand.

So I walked out into a terminal I have walked through more times than I could count, and it was as foreign to me as anything I had seen on that plain. My own reflection came and went across the glass beside me, thin and washed-out and not entirely convincing.

And in my pocket, underneath the device, my phone sat with eleven words on it.

Just passing through Burra. Meet me at the Elizabeth train station instead of the airport.

I did not know what he meant by it. I did not know whether he was protecting me or avoiding me. I did not know whether somebody had been standing behind him while he typed it, or whether he had chosen those particular words because they were the only ones he could safely send, or whether something had got to him the way something had got to Seth.

And I could not have told anybody which of those frightened me most.

Perhaps it was not an escape at all. Perhaps it was simply a transfer—out of one kind of danger and into another, arranged for me by a man I had trusted my entire life and could no longer read a single line of.

But whatever was waiting for me at Elizabeth, I was already walking towards it. My legs had made that decision somewhere back in the jet bridge and had not troubled to consult me about it.

And I kept walking, because moving was the only thing standing between me and the full weight of everything I had just done.