A Week at the Airport (5 page)

8 For many passengers, the terminal was the starting point of short-haul business trips around Europe. They might have announced to their colleagues a few weeks before that they would be missing a few days in the office to fly to Rome, studiously feigning weariness at the prospect of making a journey to the wellspring of European culture – albeit to its frayed edges in a business park near Fiumicino airport.

They would think of these colleagues as they crossed over the Matterhorn, its peak snow-capped even in summer. Just as breakfast was being served in the cabin, their co-workers would be coming into the office – Megan with her carefully prepared lunch, Geoff with his varied ring tones, Simi with her permanent frown – and all the while the travellers would be witnessing below them the byproducts of the titanic energies released by the collision of the Eurasian and African continental plates during the late Mesozoic era.

What a relief it would be for the travellers not to have time to see anything at all of Rome’s history or art. And yet how much they would notice nevertheless: the fascinating roadside advertisements for fruit juice on the way from the airport, the unusually delicate shoes worn by Italian men, the odd inflections in their hosts’ broken English. What interesting new thoughts would occur to them in the Novotel, what inappropriate films they would watch late into the night and how heartily they would agree, upon their return, with the truism that the best way to see a foreign country is to go and work there.

9 A full 70 per cent of the airport’s departing passengers were off on trips for pleasure. It was easy to spot them at this time of year, in their shorts and hats. David was a thirty-eight-year-old shipping broker, and his wife, Louise, a thirty-five-year-old full-time mother and ex-television producer. They lived in Barnes with their two children, Ben, aged three, and Millie, aged five. I found them towards the back of a check-in line for a four-hour flight to Athens. Their final destination was a villa with a pool at the Katafigi Bay resort, a fifty-minute drive away from the Greek capital in a Europcar Category C vehicle.

It would be difficult to overestimate how much time David had spent thinking about his holiday since he had first booked it, the previous January. He had checked the weather reports online every day. He had placed the link to the Dimitra Residence in his Favourites folder and regularly navigated to it, bringing up images of the limestone master bathroom and of the house at dusk, lit up against the rocky Mediterranean slopes. He had pictured himself playing with the children in the palm-lined garden and eating grilled fish and olives with Louise on the terrace.

But although David had reflected at length on his stay in the Peloponnese, there were still many things that managed to surprise him at Terminal 5. He had omitted to recall the existence of the check-in line or to think of just how many people can be fitted into an Airbus A320. He had not focused on how long four hours can seem nor had he considered the improbability of all the members of a family achieving physical and psychological satisfaction at approximately the same time. He had not remembered how hurtful he always found it when Ben made it clear that he disproportionately favoured his mother or how he himself invariably responded to such rejections by becoming unproductively strict, which in turn upset his wife, who liked to voice her opinion that Ben’s reticence was due primarily to the lack of paternal contact he had had since his father’s promotion. David’s work was a continuous flash-point in the couple’s relationship and had in fact precipitated an argument only the night before, during which David had described Louise as ungrateful for failing to appreciate and honour the necessary connection between his absences and their affluence.

Had the plane on which they were to fly to Athens burst into flames shortly after take-off and begun plunging towards the Staines reservoir, David would have clasped the members of his family tightly to him and told them with wholehearted sincerity that he loved them unreservedly – but right now, he could not look a single one of them in the eye.

It seems that most of us could benefit from a brush with a near-fatal disaster to help us to recognise the important things that we are too defeated or embittered to recognise from day to day.

As David lifted a suitcase on to the conveyor belt, he came to an unexpected and troubling realisation: that he was bringing
himself
with him on his holiday. Whatever the qualities of the Dimitra Residence, they were going to be critically undermined
by the fact that
he
would be in the villa as well. He had booked the trip in the expectation of being able to enjoy his children, his wife, the Mediterranean, some spanakopita and the Attic skies, but it was evident that he would be forced to apprehend all of these through the distorting filter of his own being, with its debilitating levels of fear, anxiety and wayward desire.

There was, of course, no official recourse available to him, whether for assistance or complaint. British Airways did, it was true, maintain a desk manned by some unusually personable employees and adorned with the message: ‘We are here to help’. But the staff shied away from existential issues, seeming to restrict their insights to matters relating to the transit time to adjacent satellites and the location of the nearest toilets.

Yet it was more than a little disingenuous for the airline to deny all knowledge of, and responsibility for, the metaphysical well-being of its customers. Like its many competitors, British Airways, with its fifty-five Boeing 747s and its thirty-seven Airbus A320s, existed in large part to encourage and enable people to go and sit in deckchairs and take up (and usually fail at) the momentous challenge of being content for a few days. The tense atmosphere now prevailing within David’s
family was a reminder of the rigid, unforgiving logic to which human moods are subject, and which we ignore at our peril when we see a picture of a beautiful house in a foreign country and imagine that happiness must inevitably accompany such magnificence. Our capacity to derive pleasure from aesthetic or material goods seems critically dependent on our first satisfying a more important range of emotional and psychological needs, among them those for understanding, compassion and respect. We cannot enjoy palm trees and azure pools if a relationship to which we are committed has abruptly revealed itself to be suffused with incomprehension and resentment.

There is a painful contrast between the enormous objective projects that we set in train, at incalculable financial and environmental cost – the construction of terminals, of runways and of wide-bodied aircraft – and the subjective psychological knots that undermine their use. How quickly all the advantages of technological civilisation are wiped out by a domestic squabble. At the beginning of human history, as we struggled to light fires and to chisel fallen trees into rudimentary canoes, who could have predicted that long after we had managed to send men to the moon and aeroplanes to Australasia, we would still
have such trouble knowing how to tolerate ourselves, forgive our loved ones and apologise for our tantrums?

10 My employer had made good on the promise of a proper desk. It turned out to be an ideal spot in which to do some work, for it rendered the idea of writing so unlikely as to make it possible again. Objectively good places to work rarely end up being so; in their faultlessness, quiet and well-equipped studies have a habit of rendering the fear of failure overwhelming. Original thoughts are like shy animals. We sometimes have to look the other way – towards a busy street or terminal – before they run out of their burrows.

The setting was certainly rich in distractions. Every few minutes, a voice (usually belonging to either Margaret or her colleague Juliet, speaking from a small room on the floor below) would make an announcement attempting, for example, to reunite a Mrs Barker, recently arrived from Frankfurt, with a stray piece of her hand luggage or reminding Mr Bashir of the pressing need for him to board his flight to Nairobi.

As far as most passengers were concerned, I was an airline employee and therefore a potentially useful source of information on where to find the customs desk or the cash machine. However,
those who took the trouble to look at my name badge soon came to regard my desk as a confessional.

One man came to tell me that he was embarking on what he wryly termed the holiday of a lifetime to Bali with his wife, who was just months away from succumbing to incurable brain cancer. She rested nearby, in a specially constructed wheelchair laden with complicated breathing apparatus. She was forty-nine years old and had been entirely healthy until the previous April, when she had gone to work on a Monday morning complaining of a slight headache. Another man explained that he had been visiting his wife and children in London, but that he had a second family in Los Angeles who knew nothing about the first. He had five children in all, and two mothers-in-law, yet his face bore none of the strains of his situation.

Each new day brought such a density of stories that my sense of time was stretched. It seemed like weeks, though it was in fact just a couple of days, since I had met Ana D’Almeida and Sidonio Silva, both from Angola. Ana was headed for Houston, where she was studying business, and Sidonio for Aberdeen, where he was completing a PhD in mechanical engineering. We spent an hour together, during which they spoke in idealistic and melancholy ways of the state of their country. Two days later, Heathrow held no memories of them, but I felt their absence still.

There were some more permanent fixtures in the terminal. My closest associate was Ana-Marie, who cleaned the section of the check-in area where my desk had been set up. She said she was eager to be included in my book and stopped by several times to chat with me about the possibility. But when I assured her that I would write something about her, a troubled look came over her face and she insisted that I would have to disguise her real name and features. The truth would disappoint too many of her friends and relatives back in Transylvania, she said, for as a young woman she had been the leading student in her conservatoire and since then was widely thought to have achieved renown abroad as a classical singer.

The presence of a writer occasionally raised expectations that something dramatic might be on the verge of occurring, the sort of thing one could read about in a novel. My explanation that I was merely looking around, and required nothing more extraordinary of the airport than that it continue to operate much as it did every other day of the year, was sometimes greeted with disappointment. But the writer’s desk was at heart an open invitation to users of the terminal to begin studying their setting with a bit more imagination and attention, to give weight to the feelings that airports provoke, but which we are seldom able to sort through or elaborate upon in the anxiety of making our way to the gate.

My notebooks grew thick with anecdotes of loss, desire and expectation, snapshots of travellers’ souls on their way to the skies – though it was hard to dismiss a worry about what a modest and static thing a book would always be next to the chaotic, living entity that was a terminal.