A Week at the Airport (12 page)

5 Yet the baggage area was only a prelude to the airport’s emotional climax. There is no one, however lonely or isolated, however pessimistic about the human race, however preoccupied with the payroll, who does not in the end expect that someone significant will come to say hello at arrivals.

Even if our loved ones have assured us that they will be busy at work, even if they told us they hated us for going travelling in the first place, even if they left us last June or died twelve and a half years ago, it is impossible not to experience a shiver of a sense that they may have come along anyway, just to surprise us and make us feel special (as someone must have done for us
when we were small, if only occasionally, or we would never have had the strength to make it this far).

It is therefore hard to know just what expression we should mould our faces into as we advance towards the reception zone. It might be foolhardy to relinquish the solemn and guarded demeneaour we usually adopt while wandering through the anonymous spaces of the world, but at the same time, it seems only right that we should leave open at least the suggestion of a smile. We may settle on the sort of cheerful but equivocal look commonly worn by people listening out for punchlines to jokes narrated by their bosses.

So what dignity must we possess not to show any hesitation when it becomes clear, in the course of a twelve-second scan of the line, that we are indeed alone on the planet, with nowhere to head to other than a long queue at the ticket machine for the Heathrow Express. What maturity not to mind that only two metres from us, a casually dressed young man perhaps employed in the lifeguard industry has been met with a paroxysm of joy by a sincere and thoughtful-looking young woman with whose mouth he is now involved. And what a commitment to reality it will take for us not to wish that we might, just for a time, be not our own tiresome selves but rather Gavin, flying in from Los Angeles after a gap year in Fiji and Australia, with whose devoted parents, exhilarated aunt, delighted sister, two girl friends and a helium balloon we might therefore repair to a house on the southern outskirts of Birmingham.

At arrivals, there were forms of welcome of which princes would have been jealous, and which would have rendered inadequate the celebrations laid on at Venice’s quaysides for the explorers of the Eastern silk routes. Individuals without official status or distinguishing traits, passengers who had sat unobtrusively for twenty-two hours near the emergency exits, now set aside their bashfulness and revealed themselves as the intended targets of flags, banners, streamers and irregularly formed home-baked chocolate biscuits – while, behind them, the chiefs of large corporations prepared for glacial limousine rides to the marble-and-orchid-bedecked lobbies of their luxury hotels.

The prevalence of divorce in modern society guaranteed an unceasing supply of airport reunions between parents and children. In this context, there was no longer any point in pretending to be sober or stoic: it was time to squeeze a pair of frail and yet plump shoulders very tightly and founder into tears. We may spend the better part of our professional lives projecting
strength and toughness, but we are all in the end creatures of appalling fragility and vulnerability. Out of the millions of people we live among, most of whom we habitually ignore and are ignored by in turn, there are always a few who hold hostage our capacity for happiness, whom we could recognise by their smell alone and whom we would rather die than be without. There were men pacing impatiently and blankly who had looked forward to this moment for half a year and could not restrain themselves any further at the sight of a small boy endowed with their own grey-green eyes and their mother’s cheeks, emerging from behind the stainless-steel gate, holding the hand of an airport operative.

At such moments, it felt almost as if death itself had been averted – and yet there was also a sense, lending the occasion more poignancy still, that it could not go on being cheated for ever. Perhaps this was a way of practising for mortality. Some day, many years from now, the adult child would say goodbye to his father before going on a routine business trip, and the reprieve would abruptly run out. There would be a telephone call in the middle of the night to a room on the twentieth floor of a Melbourne hotel, bringing the news that the parent had suffered
a catastrophic seizure on the other side of the world and that there was nothing more the doctors could do for him – and from that day forward, for the now-grown-up boy, the line in arrivals would always be missing one face in particular.

6 Not all meetings were so emotional. One might have come from Shanghai to join Malcolm and Mike for a drive down to Bournemouth to learn English for the summer: a two-month sojourn in a bed and breakfast near the pier, with regular lessons from a tutor who would teach her class how to say ‘ought’ and help them master business English, a subcategory of the language that would vouchsafe future careers in the semi-conductor and textile industries of the Pearl River delta.

For his part, Mohammed was waiting for Chris’s flight from San Francisco. The former, originally from Lahore, was at present based in Southall, while the latter, from Portland, Oregon, now lived in Silicon Valley – not that either man would attempt to discover these details about the other. In an otherwise uninhabited universe, how strange that one should so easily be able to sit in silence with another human being in a black Mercedes S-Class sedan. For both driver and passenger, the trip would be counted a success if the other party proved not to be a murderer or a
thief. The hour and a half of stillness would be punctuated only by the occasional electronic command to turn left or right at the next junction, until the Mercedes reached a glass-fronted office building in Canary Wharf, where Chris was due to attend a meeting on the storage of financial data and Mohammed returned to the terminal to begin another journey, this time to Kent, with the no less mysterious or more talkative Mr K from Narita.

7 Many of the more conventional reunions seemed to beg the question of how their levels of excitement could be kept up. Maya had been waiting for this moment for the previous twelve hours. She had had butterflies since her plane crossed the coast of Ireland. At 9,000 metres up, she had anticipated Gianfranco’s touch. But finally, after eight minutes of a sustained embrace, the couple had no alternative: it was time for them to go and find his car.

It seems curious but in the end appropriate that life should often put in our way, so near to the site of some of our most intense and heartfelt encounters, one of the greatest obstacles known to relationships: the requirement to pay for and then negotiate a way out of a multi-storey car park.

Then again, as we strain to remain civil under the unforgiving fluorescent lights, we may be reminded of one of the reasons we went travelling in the first place: to make sure that we would be better able to resist the mundane and angry moods in which daily life is so ready to embroil us.

The very brutality of the setting – the concrete floor marred with tyre marks and oil stains, the bays littered with abandoned trolleys and the ceilings echoing to the argumentative sounds of slamming doors and accelerating vehicles – encourages us to steel ourselves against a slide back into our worst possibilities. We may ask of our destinations, ‘Help me to feel more generous, less afraid, always curious. Put a gap between me and my confusion; the whole of the Atlantic between me and my shame.’ Travel agents would be wiser to ask us what we hope to change about our lives rather than simply where we wish to go.

The notion of the journey as a harbinger of resolution was once an essential element of the religious pilgrimage, defined as an excursion through the outer world undertaken in an effort to promote and reinforce an inner evolution. Christian theorists were not in the least troubled by the dangers, discomforts or expense posed by pilgrimages, for they regarded these and other apparent disadvantages as mechanisms whereby the underlying spiritual intent of the trip could be rendered more vivid. Snowbound passes in the Alps, storms off the coast of Italy, brigands in Malta, corrupt Ottoman guards – all such trials merely helped to ensure that a trip would not be easily forgotten.

Whatever the benefits of prolific and convenient air travel, we may curse it for its smooth subversion of our attempts to use journeys to make lasting changes in our lives.