Millennium People

A telephone call was our first warning of Gould’s arrival. My mobile rang as we were leaving for Heathrow Airport and a three-day conference of industrial psychologists in Florida. I was steering Sally down the staircase and assumed the call was one of those last-minute messages from the Institute designed to unsettle my flight across the Atlantic – the resignation of a valued secretary, the news that a much-liked colleague had gone into rehab, an urgent e-mail from a company chairman who had discovered Jung’s theory of archetypes and was convinced that it outlined the future of kitchenware design.

I left Sally to answer the phone while I took our suitcases into the hall. A natural mender and healer, she had the knack of making everyone feel better. Within minutes the check-in queues at Heathrow would melt away, and the Atlantic would smooth itself into a dance floor. I stood outside the front door and scanned the crescent for our hire car. A few taxis penetrated into this quiet turning off the Abbey Road, but were soon commandeered by Beatles fans making their pilgrimage to the recording studios, or by well-lunched MCC members swaying from Lord’s cricket ground into the unsettling world beyond pad and crease. I had booked the car to arrive two hours before our Miami flight from Terminal 3, but the usually reliable Mr Prashar was already twenty minutes late.

Sally was still on the phone when I returned to the sitting room. She leaned against the mantelpiece, smoothing her shoulder-length hair with a casual hand, as handsome as an actress in a thirties Hollywood film. Mirrors held their breath around Sally.

‘So…’ She switched off the phone. ‘We wait and hope.’

‘Sally? Who was that? Not Professor Arnold, please…’

Gripping a walking stick in each hand, Sally swayed from the mantelpiece. I stepped back, as always humouring her little fantasy that she was handicapped. Only the previous afternoon she had played ping-pong with a colleague’s wife, sticks forgotten on the table as she batted the ball to and fro. She had not needed the sticks for months, but still reached for them at moments of stress.

‘Your friend Mr Prashar.’ She leaned against me, scented scalp pressed to my cheek. ‘There’s a problem at Heathrow. Tailbacks as far as Kew. He thinks there’s no point in leaving until they clear.’

‘What about the flight?’

‘Delayed. Nothing’s taking off. The whole airport is down.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘Have a large drink.’ Sally pushed me towards the liquor cabinet. ‘Prashar will ring in fifteen minutes. At least he cares.’

‘Right.’ As I poured two Scotch and sodas I glanced through the window at Sally’s car, with its fading disability sticker on the windscreen, wheelchair folded in the rear seat. ‘Sally, I can drive us there. We’ll take your car.’

‘Mine? You can’t cope with the controls.’

‘Dear, I designed them. I’ll use the hard shoulder, headlights, plenty of horn. We’ll leave it in the short-term car park. It’s better than sitting here.’

‘Here we can get drunk.’

Lying back on the sofa, Sally raised her glass, trying to revive me. The war of succession at the Adler, the struggle to replace Professor Arnold, had left me tired and scratchy, and she was keen to get me to the other side of the Atlantic. The conference at Celebration, Disney’s model community in Florida, was a useful chance to park an exhausted husband by a hotel swimming pool. Travelling abroad was an effort for her – the knee-jarring geometry of taxis and bathrooms, and the American psychologists who saw a glamorous woman swaying on her sticks as a special kind of erotic challenge. But Sally was always game, even if for much of the time her only company would be the minibar.

I lay beside her on the sofa, our glasses tapping, and listened to the traffic. It was noisier than usual, the Heathrow tailback feeding its frustration into inner London.

‘Ten minutes.’ I finished my Scotch, already thinking not of the next drink, but of the one after that. ‘I have a feeling we’re not going to make it.’

‘Relax…’ Sally poured her whisky into my glass. ‘You didn’t want to go in the first place.’

‘Yes and no. It’s having to shake hands with Mickey Mouse that drives me up the wall. Americans love these Disney hotels.’

‘Don’t be mean. They remind them of their childhoods.’

‘Childhoods they didn’t actually have. What about the rest of us – why do we have to be reminded of American childhoods?’

‘That’s the modern world in a nutshell.’ Sally sniffed her empty glass, nostrils flaring like the gills of an exotic and delicate fish. ‘At least it gets you away.’

‘All these trips? Let’s face it, they’re just a delusion. Air travel, the whole Heathrow thing, it’s a collective flight from reality. People walk up to the check-ins and for once in their lives they know where they’re going. Poor sods, it’s printed on their tickets. Look at me, Sally. I’m just as bad. Flying off to Florida isn’t what I really want to do. It’s a substitute for resigning from the Adler. I haven’t the courage to do that.’

‘You have.’

‘Not yet. It’s a safe haven, a glorified university department packed with ambitious neurotics. Think of it – there are thirty senior psychologists cooped up together, and every one of them hated his father.’

‘Didn’t you?’

‘I never met him. It was the one good thing my mother did for me. Now, where’s Prashar?’

I stood up and went to the telephone. Sally picked up the TV remote from the carpet and switched on the lunchtime news. The picture swam into view, and I recognized a familiar airport concourse.

‘David…look.’ Sally sat forward, gripping the sticks beside her feet. ‘Something awful…’

I listened to Prashar’s voice, but my eyes were held by the news bulletin. The reporter’s commentary was drowned by the wailing of police sirens. He stepped back from the camera as an ambulance team pushed a trolley through the mêlée of passengers and airline personnel. A barely conscious woman lay on the trolley, rags of clothing across her chest, blood speckling her arms. Dust swirled in the air, billowing above the boutiques and bureaux de change, a frantic microclimate trying to escape through the ventilator ducts.

Behind the trolley was the main arrivals gate of Terminal 2, guarded by police armed with sub-machine guns. A harried group of hire-car drivers waited at the barrier, the names flagged on their cardboard signs already at half-mast. A man carrying an executive briefcase stepped from the arrivals gate, the sleeveless jacket of his double-breasted suit exposing a bloodied arm. He stared at the signs raised towards him, as if trying to remember his own name. Two paramedics and an Aer Lingus hostess knelt on the floor, treating an exhausted passenger who clutched an empty suitcase that had lost its lid.

‘Mr Markham?’ A voice sounded faintly in my ear. ‘This is Prashar speaking…’

Without thinking, I switched off the phone. I stood beside the sofa, my hands steadying Sally’s shoulders. She was shivering like a child, her fingers wiping her nose, as if the violent images on the screen reminded her of her own near-fatal accident.

‘Sally, you’re safe here. You’re with me.’

‘I’m fine.’ She calmed herself and pointed to the set. ‘There was a bomb on a baggage carousel. David, we might have been there. Was anyone killed?’

‘”Three dead, twenty-six injured…”’ I read the caption on the screen. ‘Let’s hope there are no children.’

Sally fumbled with the remote control, turning up the sound. ‘Don’t they issue a warning? Codewords the police recognize? Why bomb the arrivals lounge?’

‘Some people are mad. Sally, we’re all right.’

‘No one is all right.’

She held my arm and made me sit beside her. Together we stared at the pictures from the concourse. Police, first-aid crews and duty-free staff were helping injured passengers to the waiting ambulances. Then the picture changed, and we were watching an amateur video taken by a passenger who had entered the baggage-reclaim area soon after the explosion. The film-maker stood with his back to the customs checkpoints, evidently too shocked by the violence that had torn through the crowded hall to put down his camera and offer help to the victims.

Dust seethed below the ceiling, swirling around the torn sections of strip lighting that hung from the roof. Overturned trollies lay on the floor, buckled by the blast. Stunned passengers sat beside their suitcases, clothes stripped from their backs, covered with blood and fragments of leather and glass.

The video camera lingered on the stationary carousel, its panels splayed like rubber fans. The baggage chute was still discharging suitcases, and a set of golf clubs and a child’s pushchair tumbled together among the heaped luggage.

Ten feet away, two injured passengers sat on the floor, watching the suitcases emerge from the chute. One was a man in his twenties, wearing jeans and the rags of a plastic windcheater. When the first rescuers reached him, a policeman and an airport security guard, the young man began to comfort a middle-aged African lying beside him.

The other passenger gazing at the baggage chute was a woman in her late thirties, with a sharp forehead and a bony but attractive face, dark hair knotted behind her. She wore a tailored black suit pitted with glass, like the sequinned tuxedo of a nightclub hostess. A piece of flying debris had drawn blood from her lower lip, but she seemed almost untouched by the explosion. She brushed the dust from her sleeve and stared sombrely at the confusion around her, a busy professional late for her next appointment.

‘David…?’ Sally reached for her sticks. ‘What is it?’

‘I’m not sure.’ I left the sofa and knelt in front of the screen, nearly certain that I recognized the woman. But the amateur cameraman turned to survey the ceiling, where a fluorescent tube was discharging a cascade of sparks, fireworks in a madhouse. ‘I think that’s someone I know.’

‘The woman in the dark suit?’

‘It’s hard to tell. Her face reminded me of…’ I looked at my watch, and noticed our luggage in the hall. ‘We’ve missed our flight to Miami.’

‘Never mind. This woman you saw – was it Laura?’