A Week at the Airport (6 page)

11 At moments when I could not make headway with my writing, I would go and chat to Dudley Masters, who was based on the floor below me and had spent thirty years cleaning shoes at the airport. His day began at 8.30 a.m. and, around sixty pairs later, finished at 9.00 p.m.

I admired the optimism with which Dudley confronted every new pair of shoes that paused at his station. Whatever their condition, he imagined the best for them, remedying their abuses with an armoury of brushes, waxes, creams and spray cleaners. He knew it was not evil that led people to go for eight months without applying even an all-purpose clear cream polish. He was like a kindly dentist who, on bringing down the
ceiling-mounted halogen lamp and asking new patients to open their mouths (‘Let’s have a look in here, shall we?’), remains aware of how complicated lives can become and so how easily people may give up flossing their teeth while they try to save their companies or minister to a dying parent.

Though he was being paid to shine shoes, he knew that his real mission was psychological. He understood that people rarely have their shoes cleaned at random: they do so when they want to draw a line under the past, when they hope that an outer transformation may be a spur to an inner one. With no ill will, nor any desire to taunt me, he would daily assure me that if he ever got around to putting his experiences down on paper, his would be the most fascinating book about an airport that anyone had ever read.

12 Just past Dudley’s workstation, off a corridor leading to the security zone, there was a multi-faith room, a cream-coloured space holding an ill-matched assortment of furniture and a bookshelf of the sacred texts.

I watched a family from southern India coming to pay their respects to Ganesh, the Hindu god in charge of the fortunes of travellers, before going on to board the 1.00 p.m. BA035 flight to Chennai. The deity was presented with some cupcakes and a rose-scented candle, which airport regulations prevented the family from actually lighting.

In the old days, when aircraft routinely fell out of the sky because large and obvious components failed – the fuel pumps gave out or the engines exploded – it felt sensible to cast aside the claims of organised religions in favour of a trust in science. Rather than praying, the urgent task was to study the root causes of malfunctions and stamp out error through reason. But as aviation has become ever more subject to scrutiny, as every part has been hedged by backup systems, so, too, have the reasons for becoming superstitious paradoxically increased.

The sheer remoteness of a catastrophic event occurring invites us to forgo scientific assurances in favour of a more humble
stance towards the dangers which our feeble minds struggle to contain. While never going so far as to ignore maintenance schedules, we may nevertheless judge it far from unreasonable to take a few moments before a journey to fall to our knees and pray to the mysterious forces of fate to which all aircraft remain subject and which we might as well call Isis, God, Fortuna or Ganesh – before going on to buy cigarettes and Chanel No.5 in the World Duty Free emporium on the other side of security.

1 The security line was impressive as always, numbering at least a hundred people reconciled, though with varying degrees of acceptance, to the idea of not doing very much else with the next twenty minutes of their lives.

The station furthest to the left was staffed by Jim at the scanner, Nina at the manual bag check and Balanchandra at the metal detector. Each had submitted to an arduous year-long course, the essential purpose of which was to train them to look at every human being as though he or she might want to blow up an aircraft – a thoroughgoing reversal of our more customary impulse to find common ground with new acquaintances. The team had been taught to overcome all prejudices as to what an enemy might look like: it could well be the six-year-old girl holding a carton of apple juice and her mother’s hand or the frail grandmother flying to Zurich for a funeral. Suspects, guilty until proved innocent, would therefore need to be told in no uncertain terms to step aside from their belongings and stand straight up against the wall.

Like thriller writers, the security staff were paid to imagine life as a little more eventful than it customarily manages to be. I felt sympathy for them in their need to remain alert at every
moment of their careers, perpetually poised to react to the most remote of possibilities, of the sort that occurred globally in their line of work perhaps only once in a decade, and even then probably in Larnaca or Baku. They were like members of an evangelical sect living in a country devoid of biblical precedents – Belgium, say, or New Zealand – whose beliefs had inspired a daily expectation of a local return of the Messiah, a prospect not to be discounted even at 3.00 p.m. on a Wednesday in suburban Liège. How enviously the staff must have considered the lot of ordinary policemen and women, who, despite their often unsociable hours and wearying foot patrols, could at least look forward to having regular encounters with exactly the sorts of characters whom they had been trained to deal with.

I felt additional sympathy for the staff as a result of the limited curiosity they were permitted to bring to bear on the targets of their searches. Despite having free rein to look inside any passenger’s make-up bag, diary or photo album, they were allowed to investigate only evidence pointing to the presence of explosive devices or murder weapons. There was therefore no sanction for them to ask for whom a neatly wrapped package of underwear was intended, nor any official recognition of how
tempting it might occasionally seem to stroke the back pockets of a pair of low-slung jeans without any desire to discover a semi-automatic pistol.

So great was the pressure imposed on the team by the need for vigilance that they were granted more frequent tea breaks than other employees. Every hour they would repair to a room fitted out with dispensing machines, frayed armchairs and pictures of the world’s most-wanted terrorists, a series of angry-looking, prophet-like figures with long beards and inscrutable eyes, apparently holed up in mountain caves and reluctant ever to venture into Terminal 5.

It was in this room that I spotted two women who looked as if they might be students enrolled in some sort of internship programme. When I smiled at them, hoping thereby to make them feel a bit more welcome, they came over to greet me and introduced themselves as the two most senior security officers in the building. In charge of training for the entire security staff at Terminal 5, Rachel and Simone regularly taught teams how to disarm terrorists and what positions to adopt in order to protect themselves in the event of a grenade being thrown. They also gave individual employees basic instruction in the use of semiautomatic
weapons. Their close focus on anti-terrorism seemed to colour all aspects of their lives: in their spare time, they both read whatever literature they could find on the subject. Rachel was a specialist in the 1976 Entebbe operation, Simone a keen student of the Hindawi Affair, in which a Jordanian man, Nezar Hindawi, had given a Semtex-filled bag to his pregnant girlfriend and persuaded her to board an El Al plane for Tel Aviv. Though the plot had failed, Simone explained (unknowingly damning my naive conclusions on the wisdom of bothering to search certain sorts of passengers), the incident had forever changed the way security personnel the world over would look at pregnant women, small children and kindly grandmothers.

If many passengers became anxious or angry upon being questioned or searched, it was because such investigations could easily begin to feel, if only on a subconscious level, like accusations, and might thereby slot into pre-existing proclivities towards a sense of guilt.

A long wait for a scanning machine can induce many of us to start asking ourselves if we have perhaps after all left home with an explosive device hidden in our case, or unwittingly submitted to a months-long terrorist training course. The psychoanalyst
Melanie Klein, in her
Envy and Gratitude
(1963), traced this latent sense of guilt back to an intrinsic part of human nature, originating in our Oedipal desire to murder our same-sex parent. So strong can the guilty feeling become in adulthood that it may provoke a compulsion to make false confessions to those in authority, or even to commit actual crimes as a means of gaining a measure of relief from an otherwise overwhelming impression of having done something wrong.

Safe passage through security did have one advantage, at least for those plagued (like the author) by a vague sense of their own culpability. A noiseless, unchecked progress through the detectors allowed one to advance into the rest of the terminal with a feeling akin to that one may experience on leaving church after confession or synagogue on the Day of Atonement, momentarily absolved and relieved of some of the burden of one’s sins.