Departures: Seven Stories from Heathrow

Departures: Seven Stories from Heathrow
Tony Parsons

Seven short stories from bestselling author Tony Parsons, based on his week as Writer in Residence at Heathrow airport.Here is Heathrow as it has never been seen before – a secret city populated by the 75 million travellers who pass through every year, a place where journeys and dreams end – and begin.From the brilliant twenty-something kids who control the skies up in Air Traffic Control to the softly-spoken man who cares for the dogs, lions and smuggled rattlesnakes at Heathrow’s Animal Reception Centre, from the immigration officers who have heard it all before to the firemen who hone their skills by setting the green plane on fire, from the armed police who watch for terrorist attacks to the pilots who have touched the face of god – Heathrow teems with life.In Departures, his first collection of short stories, Tony Parsons takes us deep inside the secret city.

TONY PARSONS

Departures

Seven stories from Heathrow

Dedication

For David Morrison, Barry Hoy and Kevin SteeleSomewhere East of Suez

Epigraph

‘The midnight plane with its flying lights Looks like an unloosed star

Wandering west through the blue-black night

To where the mountains are.’

Frances Frost, ‘Night Plane’

Contents

Title Page (#u6b022661-d105-5d51-bd69-06b291c6aed2)

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One - The Green Plane

Chapter Two - Fur, Actually

Chapter Three - The Pilot’s Room

Chapter Four - Say Hello, Wave Goodbye

Chapter Five - No Tower for Old Men

Chapter Six - The Young Man and the Sky

Chapter Seven - Final Call

Acknowledgements

Catching the Sun

Praise

By the same author

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Chapter One

The Green Plane

She was not a weak woman.

As she stood at the window, watching the pale blue sky and looking back on her twenty-nine years of life, Zoe could see no evidence that she was weak, timid, or what her three elder brothers would have sneeringly called a ‘wuss’.

When a girl grows up heavily outnumbered by brothers, Zoe thought, she learns to take the knocks, and never to let them see you cry, and always to be tougher than they expect.

Zoe had done all of that, and then when her brothers were all grown and gone and getting on with their lives, and she could have relaxed a little bit on the whole acting tough thing, she had spent a gap year wandering Asia alone (her best friend was meant to come but she met a boy – it was that old story). Zoe had ridden a prehistoric rented motorbike from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City, shivered with dysentery in Mumbai, and when the money ran out – Japan had been more expensive than she was anticipating – she had slept rough in a park in Kyoto while waiting for her parents to send her the fare to come home.

I am not weak, she thought, so vehemently that she almost said it out loud. I’m not, I’m not, I’m not.

But, as she stared at the sky, a small black line appeared against the perfect blue, as thin as a razor cut, and she felt her breath shorten and the sweat break out and the panic fly.

It moved so slowly. Though the plane must have been going at, what – 500 mph or so? – it seemed to move in slow motion as it crossed the London skyline, and then languidly turned, as if ready to meet its fate.

Zoe was not a woman who scared easily.

But Zoe was afraid of flying.

‘Angel?’

She turned from the window to look at her husband. He was sitting at the kitchen table, their three-year-old girl on his knees, attempting to keep her sticky little fingers away from the laptop in front of him.

‘It says here,’ he said, ‘that twenty-five per cent of people have some fear of flying and around ten per cent have a real psychological phobia.’

‘But I’m not afraid of flying,’ Zoe insisted.

In the silence her husband, Nick, and their daughter, Sky, smiled at her sympathetically, as if forgiving her this blatant lie.

Nick returned to the computer. Sky banged her small hands on the keyboard as if it was a toy piano. Nick gathered both of the child’s hands in one of his own, and pointed at the screen with an enthusiastic grin that somehow made Zoe’s spirits sink.

‘They do courses for people who, er, don’t like to fly,’ he said. ‘British Airways had a course called Fear of Flying – please don’t do that, darling’ (this to his daughter) ‘– and now they call it, um, Flying With Confidence.’

Zoe laughed bitterly. ‘That’s a smart move. Flying With Confidence sounds a lot more positive than Fear of bloody Flying.’

Nick looked hurt. ‘But that’s a good thing, isn’t it? To be positive about the . . . aversion.’