A Week at the Airport (3 page)

3 In the end it was a 5.30 a.m. arrival (BA flight from Hong Kong) that called a halt to my perturbed night. I showered, ate a fruit bar purchased from a dispensing machine in the car park and wandered over to an observation area next to the terminal. In the cloudless dawn, a sequence of planes, each visible as a single diamond, were lined up at different heights, like pupils in a school photo, on their final approach to the northern runway. Their wings unfolded themselves into elaborate and unlikely
arrangements of irregularly sized steel-grey panels. Having avoided the earth for so long, wheels that had last touched ground in San Francisco or Mumbai hesitated and slowed almost to a standstill as they arched and prepared to greet the rubber-stained English tarmac with a burst of smoke that made manifest their planes’ speed and weight.

With the aggressive whistling of their engines, the airborne visitors appeared to be rebuking this domestic English morning for its somnolence, like a delivery person unable to resist pressing a little too insistently and vengefully on the doorbell of a still-slumbering household. All around them, the M4 corridor was waking up reluctantly. Kettles were being switched on in Reading, shirts being ironed in Slough and children unfurling themselves beneath their Thomas the Tank Engine duvets in Staines.

Yet for the passengers in the 747 now nearing the airfield, the day was already well advanced. Many would have awakened several hours before to see their plane crossing over Thurso at the northernmost tip of Scotland, nearly the end of the earth to those in London’s suburbs, but their destination’s very doorstep for travellers after a long night’s journey over the Canadian
icelands and a moonlit North Pole. Breakfast would have kept time with the airliner’s progress down the spine of the kingdom: a struggle with a small box of cornflakes over Edinburgh, an omelette studded with red peppers and mushrooms near Newcastle, a stab at a peculiar-looking fruit yoghurt over the unknowing Yorkshire Dales.

For British Airways planes, the approach to Terminal 5 was a return to their home base, equivalent to the final run up the Plymouth Sound for their eighteenth-century naval predecessors. Having long been guests on foreign aprons, allotted awkward and remote slots at O’Hare or LAX, the odd ones out amid immodestly long rows of United and Delta aircraft, they now took their turn at having the superiority of numbers, lining up in perfect symmetry along the back of Satellite B.

Sibling 747s that had only recently been separated out across the world were here parked wing tip to wing tip, Johannesburg next to Delhi, Sydney next to Phoenix. Repetition lent their fuselage designs a new beauty: the eye could follow a series of identical motifs down a fifteen-strong line of dolphin-like bodies, the resulting aesthetic effect only enhanced by the knowledge that each plane had cost some $250 million, and that what lay
before one was therefore a symbol not just of the modern era’s daunting technical intelligence but also of its prodigious and inconceivable wealth.

As every plane took up its position at its assigned gate, a choreographed dance began. A passenger walkway rolled forward and closed its rubber mouth in a hesitant kiss over the front left-hand door. A member of the ground staff tapped at the window, a colleague inside released the airlock and the two airline personnel exchanged the sort of casual greeting one might have expected between office workers returning to adjacent desks after lunch, rather than the encomium that would more fittingly have marked the end of an 11,000-kilometre journey from the other side of the globe. Then again, the welcome may be no more effusive a hundred years hence, when, at the close of a nine-month voyage, against the eerie blood-red midday light bathing a spaceport in Mars’s Cydonian hills, a fellow human knocks at the gold-tinted window of our just-docked craft.

Cargo handlers opened the holds to unload crates filled with the chilled flanks of Argentine cattle and the crenellated forms of crustaceans that had, just the day before, been marching heedlessly across Nantucket Sound. In only a few hours, the
plane would be sent up into the sky once more. Fuel hoses were attached to its wings and the tanks replenished with Jet A-1 that would steadily be burned over the African savannah. In the already vacant front cabins, where it might cost the equivalent of a small car to spend the night reclining in an armchair, cleaners scrambled to pick up the financial weeklies, half-eaten chocolates and distorted foam earplugs left behind by the flight’s complement of plutocrats and actors. Passengers disembarked for whom this ordinary English morning would have a supernatural tinge.

4 Meanwhile, at the drop-off point in front of the terminal, cars were pulling up in increasing numbers, rusty minicabs with tensely negotiated fares alongside muscular limousines from whose armoured doors men emerged crossly and swiftly into the executive channels.

Some of the trips starting here had been decided upon only in the previous few days, booked in response to a swiftly developing situation in the Munich or Milan office; others were the fruit of three years’ painful anticipation of a return to a village in northern Kashmir, with six dark-green suitcases filled with gifts for young relatives never previously met.

The wealthy tended to carry the least luggage, for their rank and itineraries led them to subscribe to the much-published axiom that one can now buy anything anywhere. But they had perhaps never visited a television retailer in Accra or they might have looked more favourably upon a Ghanaian family’s decision to import a Samsung PS50, a high-definition plasma machine the weight and size of a laden coffin. It had been acquired the day before at a branch of Comet in Harlow and was eagerly awaited in the Kissehman quarter of Accra, where its existence would stand as evidence of the extraordinary status of its importer, a thirty-eight-year-old dispatch driver from Epping.

Entry into the vast space of the departures hall heralded the opportunity, characteristic in the transport nodes of the modern world, to observe people with discretion, to forget oneself in a sea of otherness and to let the imagination loose on the limitless supply of fragmentary stories provided by the eye and ear. The mighty steel bracing of the airport’s ceiling recalled the scaffolding of the great nineteenth-century railway stations, and evoked the sense of awe – suggested in paintings such as Monet’s
Gare Saint-Lazare
– that must have been experienced by the first crowds to step inside these light-filled, iron-limbed
halls pullulating with strangers, buildings that enabled a person to sense viscerally, rather than just grasp intellectually, the vastness and diversity of humanity.

The roof of the building weighed 18,000 tonnes, but the steel columns supporting it hardly suggested the pressures they were under. They were endowed with a subcategory of beauty we might refer to as elegance, present whenever architecture has the modesty not to draw attention to the difficulties it has surmounted. On top of their tapered necks, the columns balanced the 400-metre roof as if they were holding up a canopy made of linen, offering a metaphor for how we too might like to stand in relation to our burdens.

Most passengers were bound for a bank of automatic check-in machines in the centre of the hall. These represented an epochal shift away from the human hand and towards the robot, a transition as significant in the context of airline logistics as that from the washboard to the washing machine had once been in the domestic sphere. However, few users seemed capable of producing the precise line-up of cards and codes demanded by the computers, which responded to the slightest infraction with sudden and intemperate error messages – making one
long for a return of the surliest of humans, from whom there always remains at least a theoretical possibility of understanding and forgiveness.

Nowhere was the airport’s charm more concentrated than on the screens placed at intervals across the terminal which announced, in deliberately workmanlike fonts, the itineraries of aircraft about to take to the skies. These screens implied a feeling of infinite and immediate possibility: they suggested the ease with which we might impulsively approach a ticket desk and, within a few hours, embark for a country where the call to prayer rang out over shuttered whitewashed houses, where we understood nothing of the language and where no one knew our identities. The lack of detail about the destinations served only to stir unfocused images of nostalgia and longing: Tel Aviv, Tripoli, St Petersburg, Miami, Muscat via Abu Dhabi, Algiers, Grand Cayman via Nassau … all of these promises of alternative lives, to which we might appeal at moments of claustrophobia and stagnation.