Interim to Arrival — Flight

Finn and I stand on platform 3 at Chester station waiting for the train that’s going to take us both to London — it’s 11.45am and it was due to arrive at 11.35. When it does pull in another ten minutes later we haul our bags over to coach D to climb aboard.

The information on the side of the train reads: ‘Next stop: Intrm Station — Destination: Arrvl Station’.  On board the train none of the seat reservation signs are working. Something’s wrong with the train’s internal system.

We sit at a table and chat for a while: about our parents, about the cost of housing in London and about the job he’s about to start. To my right the fields flit by and out of memory — I have no notes of this journey. But, as I mention to Finn, the route is familiar enough by now.

I remember seeing one field distinctly and it remains vivid in my mind. This field has changed each time I’ve taken this journey. Originally it was bare earth with arched poles running in rows and angled diagonally, like the poles were bent along the stripes of a big stick of rock. A month or two later these arches, just under a meter tall, were covered with thin white material to shield the plants growing below. Now there are tarpaulins 3 meters high that cover groups of these white, shielded strips below them, and the little plants now growing below that.

Besides this field I don’t recall much else. A dramatic gesture of cloud; changing tables to make room for a family of four; a castle or two; yellowed green grass, still recovering from the scorch of the summer. But really, I could make it up if I wanted. I could do it with my eyes closed — the train goes black.

I grope with my hands in the dark and hold on to the table in front of me. Besides this there’s no point of reference: no light and no noise besides the steady judder of the train against the track.  I speak and there is no response. Ahead, through the window to my right, I see three lights arranged in a T shape moving towards the train. The bottom one is green and the two across the top glow red. It’s nighttime. The floating lights slow down gradually before passing by the train as it comes to stop at a dimly lit platform. The lights flicker on up the carriage, one row at a time.

 “We would like to apologise for the lights ladies and gentlemen, the train has been having some technical difficulties. However, these seem to have passed and the train will be up and running again shortly.”

Finn is no longer sat across from me. Looking around, I realise that it’s only me on board. To my left a single girl stands on the platform staring squarely at me: brown hair, soft features and soft brown eyes. I stare back. Slowly she slides out of vision as the train moves out of the station.

“The next stop will be — Stansted.”

I’m staring at my own face now, reflected back in the glass of the train window. I look my features up and down. I need a shave. I look at my watch: the hands read 12.45. The train presses on firmly through the black.

“We are now arriving at — Stansted — our final destination.”

I’m towards the back of the plane by the window, seat 32F. By the time the aircraft begins to move my watch reads 2.30, but it’s been wrong since the lights went out.

The edges of the sky are just beginning to brighten.  I feel the concrete rolling slowly under-wheel, as the jet engine’s turbines begin their revolutions. Their whirr increases to a buzz. “Fasten your tapes over your waist, clip together like so.” The click of seatbelts is audible above the sound of the attedant, and there’s a soft bed of chatter between the passengers. “We wish you a pleasant flight with Easyjet.”

Outside I see the low lights of a luggage carrier easing its way along the runway in the opposite direction to the plane. I love the little vehicles in airports: the size of them, the gentle speed of them, how each of them only has one use. 

The plane turns to face the strip for takeoff. The turbines surge in pitch to a hum. The plane’s pace increases — at first, casually. Then faster. Then the plane is hurtling down the runway, the speed its gained already carrying its huge frame forward with the press of the wheels gripped firm against the concrete, though loosening, then fumbling with the floor as it leaves it behind and the velocity carries the aircraft onward, further off and up, up into the air.

Looking up the sky is black. Below the plane it’s inky blue, interspersed with lights gathered in constellations around the built-up areas; London glows a little way off. Then the view blacks out and the plane roars and bumps through cloud. Now looking down everything’s black. Above, the real constellations pan out against the night sky, like holes pricked out of a thick dark fabric that’s covered up the sun.

Bing! “Ladies and gentlemen, please keep your seatbelts fastened while the seatbelt sign is on.”

The man beside me has broad thick fingers that he rests on his broad thick belly as he sleeps. I trace each wiry black hair on his index finger as his hand rises and falls with his breathing. His middle finger: a golden ring. His ring finger: a wedding ring (golden again). His little finger as bare as his thumb.

Bing! The seatbelt sign goes off.

The woman two chairs from me lowers her table to prop her book on it: ‘In Search of Lost Time’. She’s wearing one of those travel pillows around her neck but she has it on backwards, so it looks like a neck brace.

Bright blue light diffuses along the curve of the horizon in the distance. Thick bunches of cloud zigzag towards the brightest point, where the sun must be rising below the grey meadows of nimbus. The clouds look so solid, like a monochrome landscape — those cumulus bunches lined up like a mountain range you could punch right through.

It’s another forty minutes before the seatbelt signs come back on. Bing! The broad man beside me doesn’t stir. The air is bright with fresh light. The clouds have cleared up and the landscape is flat below the plane, laid out in huge regimented squares. Neat little houses are collected in orderly groups with their long shadows striding out behind them. Black lakes spread like stains on a tablecloth. The plane tilts in its descent so that the sun catches on one of the lakes, and it lights up into a puddle of brass and ruddy gold. And bit-by-bit the buildings begin to cluster. A city takes shape.

Berlin begins in abstraction — a series of geometric forms that make up a tapestry on the ground: streets splay in stars from a point, meeting at angles to create blocks cut out in triangles, rhombuses, squares and trapeziums. The toothpick of the radio tower punctures the illusion of 2D, and gradually the forms of the buildings emerge from flatness as the plane draws closer to the ground.

The streets are all shadowed over, shadows that climb up the feet of the houses like mildew on one side — above that the morning light casts the buildings’ faces in white enamel. As we continue down, reflections on the city’s glass and metal details concentrate into a line drawn between the plane and the sun, which dances along the tops of the high-rises, then flashing along the communist low-rises that grow up taller and taller out from the floor. The red roofs of the grand old Altbau housing grow more distinct; I can count the chimneys. I can trace the skeletal silver frames of the TV aerials. And there isn’t a runway in sight, but I can see the roof tiles distinctly.

We’re far too close to the houses now. The other passengers are making noise — I glance and see the woman in her travel pillow neck brace gripping the chair in front of her — but I can’t focus on what’s going on inside the cabin. Outside we’re still descending.

We’re heading down the great broad boulevards and the wings of the plane are flicking up those tiles as the plane goes ‘Bing! Bing! Bing!’ with turbulence and rattles on. Now the wings are cutting through bricks of the buildings, scraping them to dust like Oxo cubes as the cabin plummets down toward the cobbled street. I squeeze my eyes shut and I grip onto the chair in front of me, pressing my head up hard against it.

Nothing. We pass straight through. I look up and see the window has gone black. The plane rocks a little but we carry on straight down. I could swear that for a second I hear the noise of the U-Bahn rattling by and a muffled German voice through a loudspeaker — “Zurückbleiben bitte!” — but it’s gone before I’m sure of it. Gradually, the black dilutes to a thin grey and the plane’s shudders lessen.

The view clears out as the plane leaves a ceiling of cloud behind it, and a new tapestry lies out below us — the neckbraced woman is leaning to peer out of my window. This land is mismatched, uneven and greener than the German countryside. The landscape approaches faster this time as we fly toward the city ahead — this one built on hills. I know its contours.

Closest to the plane’s approach and at the bottom of the city’s incline, Bristol’s houses lie flat and spread. The buildings are industrial and grey and low. A motorway and a bypass run through the area, and the motorway bridges the Avon River; little cars like coloured beads roll along these roads.

I turn my eyes a little further, past the grey spread. The Froom licks out from the Avon River toward the centre of the city, and to Bristol’s floating harbour. Past that and up Park Street from here, a steep ascent to the neo-gothic crest of the Wills Building cutting out at the top, right towards us. Not a runway in sight.

There’s a flat expanse of green there, Clifton Down at the top of the hill. Bristol’s pastel terraced houses detail the streets below here, all through Clifton in dusty pinks and faded blues and yellows ahead of us. I try to count them, but only reach five before they’re whipped out of sight. I crane my neck to peek in line with the flight of the plane, so I can just see the perfect curves of the Clifton Suspension Bridge spanning the Avon Gorge with the river below. The angle of the plane drops again and thirty seconds later we’ve flown beneath the Bridge.

The plane’s flight is smoother this time, heading between the cliffs of the gorge and down toward the river. The rock face flashes by, and the yellow observation deck that protrudes out of it visible for a fraction of a second. I can spot the caves worn into the cliffs from when the water rose way up in the gorge, far higher than we’re flying now. The tops of the cars make their way down the motorway that trails beside the river. For a second I can see into a Range Rover from the plane window — the woman driving tries not to look away from the road at the plane as it soars into the river.

“Bing! Bing! Bing!” It’s black and bumpy for a beat and we’re out again, hardly slowed this time around. The nose of the plane points about 55 degrees by now, down at the city below. I can hear the noise of screams, a baby crying near me, the mother whispering hush though her own voice is quavering. The woman two spaces across from me is still shaking, and she’s lost ‘In Search of Lost Time’. The man with the sausage fingers is still asleep, but his head’s fallen forward with the tilt of the plane while his seatbelt holds him in place.

The city below us is unmistakably London. The structures seem to spread forever and the roads are impossible to trace. There is no order to these streets: they run like the river Thames — that body that snakes through the center of the metropolis, around which the grandest buildings cling.  

The sun is setting, and the light catches along the river and sparks against the edges of the skyscrapers. It illuminates orange along the massive glass pane down one side of the Shard, curls gold round the edge of the Gherkin, and dances over the monolithic structures of central London. I try to count them — the walkie-talkie building, the cheese grater, Tower Bridge there — but they’re flying by too fast. The plane hurtles down.

Before we hit the Thames I’m already anticipating the next descent, while the screams behind me are only increasing in pitch like the air rushing past.

The window goes black. The noise of the air and the turbines and the screams adjusts to a single hum. We don’t come out the other side. The cabin’s main lights go off while the passenger reading lights stay on, like it’s time to go to sleep. It looks as though there are only the chairs and their passengers, floating in black empty space. And, in rows, the passenger lights flick off up the plane.

My row is last to go. I look at the broad thick man beside me and wonder whether he’s dead. He still hasn’t woken. The empty chair after that. Across the aisle I notice a young Indian family for the first time, and wonder whether it was their baby I heard crying. But even as I see the father grabbing onto the chair and shouting, the teenager holding onto his father’s arm beside him, the mother rocking a whimpering child as she whimpers, I can’t hear any of it. Just the hum.

The lights go out one by one: the father disappears; then the son; the mother and the baby; the empty chair; the big hairy man, suspended in sleep. The hum has gone. My watch reads 3:55. I look at my face in my window. My light goes out.