A Week at the Airport (11 page)

1 There used to be time to arrive. Incremental geographical changes would ease the inner transitions: desert would gradually give way to shrub, savannah to grassland. At the harbour, the camels would be unloaded, a room would be found overlooking the customs house, passage would be negotiated on a steamer. Flying fish would skim past the ship’s hull. The crew would play cards. The air would cool.

Now a traveller may be in Abuja on Tuesday and at the end of a satellite in the new terminal at Heathrow on Wednesday. Yesterday lunchtime, one had fried plantain in the Wuse District to the sound of an African cuckoo, whereas at eight this morning the captain is closing down the 777’s twin engines at a gate next to a branch of Costa Coffee.

Despite one’s exhaustion, one’s senses are fully awake, registering everything – the light, the signage, the floor polish, the skin tones, the metallic sounds, the advertisements – as sharply as if one were on drugs, or a newborn baby, or Tolstoy. Home all at once seems the strangest of destinations, its every detail relativised by the other lands one has visited. How peculiar this morning light looks against the memory of dawn in the Obudu hills, how unusual the recorded announcements sound after the wind in the High Atlas and how inexplicably English (in a way they will never know) the chat of the two female ground staff seems when one has the din of a street market in Lusaka still in one’s ears.

One wants never to give up this crystalline perspective. One wants to keep counterpoising home with what one knows of alternative realities, as they exist in Tunis or Hyderabad. One wants never to forget that nothing here is normal, that the streets are different in Wiesbaden and Luoyang, that this is just one of many possible worlds.

2 In the brief history of aviation, not many airports have managed to fulfil their visitors’ hopes for an architecture that might properly honour the act of arrival. Too few have followed the example set by Jerusalem’s elaborate Jaffa Gate, which once welcomed travellers who had completed the journey to the Holy City across the baked Shephelah plains and through the thief-infested Judean hills. But Terminal 5 wanted to have a go.

In the older terminals at Heathrow, it was a certain sort of carpet that one tended to notice first, swirling green, yellow, brown and orange, around which there hovered associations of vomit, pubs and hospitals. Here, by way of contrast, there were handsome grey composite tiles, bright corridors lined with glass
panels in a calming celadon shade and bathrooms fitted out with gracious sanitary ware and full-length cubicle doors made of heavy timber.

The structure was proposing a new idea of Britain, a country that would be reconciled to technology, that would no longer be in thrall to its past, that would be democratic, tolerant, intelligent, playful and lacking in spite or irony. All this was a simplification, of course: twenty kilometres to the west and north were tidy hamlets and run-down estates that would at once have contravened any of the suggestions encoded in the terminal’s walls and ceilings.

Nevertheless, like Geoffrey Bawa’s Parliament in Colombo or Jørn Utzon’s Opera House in Sydney, Richard Rogers’s Terminal 5 was applying the prerogative of all ambitious architecture to create rather than merely reflect an identity. It hoped to use the hour or so when passengers were within its space – objectively, to have their passports stamped and to recover their luggage – to define what the United Kingdom might one day become, rather than what it too often is.

3 Upon disembarking, after a short walk, arriving passengers entered a hall that tried hard to downplay the full weight of its judicial role. There were no barriers, guns or reinforced booths, merely an illuminated sign overhead and a thin line of granite running across the floor. Power was sure of itself here, confident enough to be restrained and invisible to those privileged, by an accident of birth, to skirt it. Three times a day, a cleaning team came and swept their brooms across the line that marked the divide between the no man’s land of the aircraft on the one side and, on the other, the well-stocked pharmacies, benign mosquitoes, generous library lending policies, sewage plants and pelican crossings available to visitors and residents of Great Britain alike.

With just a single unhappy swipe of the computer, however, all such implicit promises might be prematurely broken. A guard would be called and would lead the unfortunate traveller from the immigration hall to a suite of rooms two storeys below. The children’s playroom seemed especially poignant in its fittings: there was a Brio train, most of the Lego City range, a box of Caran d’Ache pens and, for each new child sequestered there, a box of snacks and plastic animals, his or hers to keep.
In the imaginations of certain children in Eritrea or Somalia, England would hence always remain a briefly glimpsed country of Quavers, Jelly Tots and squared cartons of orange juice – a country so rich it could afford to give away small digital alarm clocks, and one whose guards knew how to put wooden train tracks together. Next door, in a barer room in which every word was being captured by a police tape recorder, their parents would experience another side of the nation, as they delineated their unsuccessful applications to an impassive member of the immigration service.

4 Over the course of history, few joyful moments can have unfolded in a baggage-reclaim area, though the one in the terminal was certainly doing its best to keep its users optimistic.

It had high ceilings, flawlessly poured concrete walls and trolleys in abundance. Furthermore, the bags came quite quickly. The company responsible for the conveyor belts, Vanderlande Industries from the Netherlands, had made its reputation in the mail-order and parcel-distribution sectors and was now the world leader in suitcase logistics. Seventeen kilometres’ worth of conveyor belts ran under the terminal, where they were capable of processing some twelve thousand pieces of
luggage an hour. One hundred and forty computers scanned tags, determined where individual bags were going and checked them for explosives along the way. The machines treated the suitcases with a level of care that few humans would have shown them: when the bags had to wait in transit, robots would carry them gently over to a dormitory and lay them down on yellow mattresses, where – like their owners in the lounges above – they would loll until their flights were ready to receive them. By the time they were lifted off the belt, many suitcases were likely to have had more interesting travels than their owners.

Nevertheless, in the end, there was something irremediably melancholic about the business of being reunited with one’s luggage. After hours in the air free of encumbrance, spurred on to formulate hopeful plans for the future by the views of coasts and forests below, passengers were reminded, on standing at the carousel, of all that was material and burdensome in existence. There were some elemental dualities at work in the contrasting realms of the baggage-reclaim hall and the aeroplane – dichotomies of matter and spirit, heaviness and lightness, body and soul – with the negative halves of the equations all linked to the stream of almost identical black Samsonite cases that
rolled ceaselessly along the tunnels and belts of Vanderlande’s exquisite conveyor apparatus.

Around the carousel, as in a Roman traffic jam, trolleys grimly refused to cede so much as a centimetre to one another. Although each suitcase was a repository of dense and likely fascinating individuality – this one perhaps containing a lime-coloured bikini and an unread copy of
Civilization and Its Discontents
, that one a dressing gown stolen from a Chicago hotel and a packet of Roche antidepressants – this was not the place to start thinking about anyone else.