Departures: Seven Stories from Heathrow

And they went.

Mike led a responding team of five out to the rig. When they answered the call on the fire station’s tannoy, they knew nothing about what they were heading towards. It could be anything. And anything was what they trained for, what they steeled themselves for. It was only when they were in the rig and on their way that the airport’s central operations room, the Star Centre, filled them in.

There were codes used for certain emergencies. Terrorist activity. Physical assaults. But there was no code for this one.

‘Fire in departures, Terminal Five, ladies toilet adjacent to Gordon Ramsay’s. Terminal staff attending.’

Mike’s driver chuckled, but did not touch the brakes of the rig as they hurtled towards the terminal building. Even if it was next door to nothing, they still had to respond.

‘There will always be some idiot sneaking a smoke before they board,’ the driver said.

Mike watched the airport flash by, his face set in the hard lines of a man who is trained to risk his life for strangers, and he found that he could not smile with the others.

As if in a dream, the firefighter appeared before Zoe in full firefighting regalia.

He wore a bulky-looking blue suit with flashes of silver and yellow on the jacket and trousers. He had a bright yellow helmet and heavy rubber black boots. He had a sort of utility belt around his waist, such as Batman might approve of, containing a bewildering array of tools. Zoe thought he was like a walking Swiss Army knife. Later, when she thought about the first sight of him standing outside the toilet door, in her imagination she could have sworn that he was carrying a hose. But that wasn’t possible, was it?

‘Hello,’ Mike said to Zoe. ‘Have you got a minute?’

‘I was scared,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’

‘But there’s no need to be scared,’ he said. Zoe followed Mike out of the toilet. There were four more firemen outside. People were looking and pointing at Zoe. But she saw that Mike was staring up at the Departures board. ‘Where you off to?’ he asked her.

‘Canada,’ Zoe said. ‘Toronto. The BA flight.’

Mike smiled. ‘You’ve got ages yet,’ he said. ‘You like getting to the airport early, don’t you?’

‘Not me,’ Zoe said. ‘That’s my husband. I would be happy to never get here.’

Then Nick and Sky were there, staring at Zoe and the fireman, and wondering what she had done.

‘Can you spare her for a while?’ Mike asked them.

Zoe rode back to the fire station with them.

On the way they passed the green plane, the fires all out now, and Zoe thought she was seeing things when she noticed that the perimeter of the training ground was covered in smashed cars. Every kind of car in every degree of destruction. Vans and trucks too. On their side and upside down. Smashed up and bashed up and trashed. Windows caved in and engines pulped and roofs flattened.

‘We cut them up,’ Mike explained, following her gaze. ‘To get the people out. And you see that green plane? We set fire to it in twenty-six different ways. That’s what we do most of the time.’ He glanced at her face. ‘Nothing bad is going to happen,’ he said. ‘I promise you. But if it ever does – we’re ready.’

Mike showed her around the fire station. The giant four- and six-wheel rigs. Rows of harnesses, helmets and hoses so infinitely long that they looked as though they could stretch around the world. He showed her all this with a kind of wild pride and she thought of a book she had read at school: Gatsby throwing his shirts on the bed to impress Daisy. Everyone was very friendly. Everything was spotless. It was a world of men waiting for something catastrophic to happen.

‘It’s very clean,’ she said.

Mike looked a bit embarrassed. ‘Friday is our wash-up day,’ he said. Today was a Friday. ‘Perhaps it’s not always quite so clean.’

They gave her a cup of tea with lots of sugar and Mike talked all the while, explaining how there are 110 firefighters at Heathrow, with 27 men on a watch – a twelve-hour shift – and four watches around the clock. One watch on days, one watch on nights, and two at home, resting.

‘Which watch are you?’ Zoe asked.

‘We’re green watch,’ said Mike.

‘Like the plane you set fire to,’ she noted.

‘Yes,’ he said, as though it had never occurred to him before, the way green watch was colour-coordinated with the green plane. ‘There’s something I want you to see,’ he said.

It was the tallest ladder in the world.

Mike called it an ALP – everything was an acronym with the men at the fire station, Zoe realized – and she had to get them to tell her twice that it was an Aerial Ladder Platform before she got it straight in her head.

Then one of the firefighters was helping her into an orange harness, and when that was comfortable she joined Mike on the metal platform of the ALP. He clipped them both to the rail of the platform and the thing, the ALP, began to rise.

It rose above the fire station.

It rose straight up and then it seemed to unfurl itself, and discover another ladder that had been hiding inside it, and rise even higher.

There were the runways down there, Zoe saw – two of them, she noticed for the first time – and there were the planes parked in their stands or taxiing to the runways or rising gracefully into the blue summer sky.

And then, impossibly, the ladder unfurled itself yet again and they were looking down on the roof of Terminal 5 and the Air Traffic Control tower was at eye-level. They were thirty metres high and still rising on a ladder that was far higher than any ladder on any fire engine in existence.

And for the first time she saw the secret city of the airport. She saw the secret city in all its calm glory, and its unruffled order, and the way everything worked and nothing bad happened. From up there on the fireman’s ladder, Zoe looked down at the airport, and she saw a safe world.

Mike was talking all the while. Zoe found that she could tune in and out and get the general gist of it.

‘There would be two of us up here and we would have one hundred metres of hose that can unload eleven thousand litres of water in four minutes,’ Mike said.

Zoe smiled. ‘That’s nice, Mike.’

They both looked at the airport. It looked like a place where nothing bad could ever happen. Even high in the sunlit calm, Zoe knew that wasn’t quite true. But she also knew that they were ready. And that she was ready too.

‘What’s in Toronto?’ Mike said.

‘My parents are out there,” Zoe said. “My father – he’s not very well. They say – the doctors – that he hasn’t got very long. And he’s never seen our daughter. So . . .’

She turned away so that he couldn’t see her face.

‘That’s no good,’ Mike said. ‘That’s rotten luck.’

‘It’s okay,’ Zoe said. ‘Or at least, it’s a lot better now.’

Just before their plane pierced the clouds a man in a window seat gave a strangled gasp.

‘A green plane!’ he said. ‘On the ground! I saw it! A green plane and it was on fire!’

Across the aisle, sitting calmly between her husband and her daughter, Zoe sipped her champagne and smiled to herself.

She felt the plane rise higher.

Chapter Two