Blackbox Read online

  DEDICATION

  To Anne

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Characters

  The Troposphere

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  CHARACTERS

  John Heron. Unfunny John. Comic.

  Emma Heron. His wife. Morgue assistant.

  Penny Lock. Talk-show host.

  Graham Johansson. Pilot.

  Samuel Thorn. Actor. Wooden.

  Cody Jameson. Writer. Real name Lily Frankburg.

  Dr. Frankburg. Father. Self-help therapist.

  Dan Bronski. Air crash investigator.

  Ali Bronski. Daughter. Counterfeit therapist.

  Stephanie Wiltshire. Ex-stewardess. Speaking to you.

  Edward Wiltshire. Ex-fireman. Shouting at you.

  Beth Davies. Née Wiltshire. Sister. Aerophobe.

  Michael Davies. Husband. Air traffic controller.

  The pharmaceutical CEO.

  Tamy. His daughter.

  The ex-government agent. No gun.

  Miles. Nightclub manager.

  Clara Redlake. Therapist. Eye catcher.

  Kirsten Henderson. Dead actress.

  Ronald Henderson. Dead father.

  THE TROPOSPHERE

  Five miles high, over the Atlantic. The jet stream pushing east, atmosphere thin, pressure low, the world spinning counterclockwise.

  A plane finds a swift westerly and hitches a ride. Five hundred knots. Crossing time zones.

  Its name is SA109. Its tail fin is green and so are its passengers. The cabin crew smile but unconvincingly.

  The sea, the sky, and the spirit are all black.

  Not the flight recorder though. That’s orange. There are arrows on the wings pointing to its location. Recording now. One, two, one two.

  It is a decisive journey. For me, at least.

  I have a little radio with me. I twist the dial trying to find a phone-in, “Flight Fright,” or “Funny Phobias.” Or even Tommy Tempo’s Nite Moods Orchestra. He’s a catchy arranger. You can dance all night long with Tommy Tempo. He does a smooth “Don’t Fence Me In” by Bing Crosby using a tenor sax for Bing’s voice and some clarinets for the Andrews Sisters.

  It would be good to have some music now. It’s good for keeping the spirits up.

  But the plane flies through frequencies so fast I can’t find any stations. Either that or it’s broken. Or there’s something wrong with my ears.

  And I am freezing.

  And I am light-headed.

  And it is very hard to keep a train of thought.

  There are stewardesses aboard this plane, and a flight engineer, and a copilot, and a pilot with good teeth and a deep voice.

  He is in the toilet. Washing his face, looking at himself in the mirror, he feels old, muttering his thoughts: Not everyone so well. Not everyone so happy. Not everyone so glad.

  He feels a sense of relief now and he’s counting down the seconds and there are not so many of them now and they get shorter and shorter and he tries to remember, but it’s all too late and his uniform’s too tight and he smells of sweat, and in his dream he’s on his best behavior and he’s dancing in a little white suit by a river where it’s muddy and he’s singing for his parents the song they want to hear and he’s not swearing like a bastard now because he doesn’t want to upset them and he’s trying to make friends with all the other children and he’s covering his toys in shit because he’s starting to lose hope and it better come soon because he’s not as patient as he hoped he was and he’s older now and he can’t remember numbers and he’s frightened that it’s going to hurt and so if it isn’t quick he may start crying and he’s got to stay calm and he’s got to bite his tongue and grip his wrist and he’s got to remember to smile.

  He dries off his face and rejoins his colleagues in the cockpit. And they ask him how he is and he says he’s fine. He says he’s good.

  And there’s a passenger on this plane who thinks of herself as a flower on a cherry tree, opening her petals and falling through the sky. Scattering her sweet blossom bravely and beautifully on the ground. She thinks about writing a little poem about it on her drinks napkin, but she hasn’t got a pen.

  And I thump out a little rhythm. Bump bump bump. Bump bump bump.

  But it is an erratic beat. Like my heart. And my head is full of distracting questions. I am wondering how much physical hardship a human body can endure. I am wondering about the effects of oxygen on the function of memory. I’m wondering what sort of lard sea swimmers use to keep warm and where they get it from. I’m wondering if these are really the best circumstances under which to be telling a story.

  And we are higher than a mountain and there’s no air above us. It’s all below us, at ground level, and it’s compressed by the atmosphere. And the pressure’s one kilo on a square centimeter, but it doesn’t bother them there as the blood is thick and it can stand it just fine.

  And breathing this air is an air traffic controller who looks at blips. And the blips swim in front of him because he’s tired and unhealthy and when he shuts his eyes they’re still there, expanding and shrinking and pirouetting under his lids. But today he’s not at his screen. He’s not in the tower. He’s in a field and his feet are wet and there’s sick on his shirt and his breath is frosting and he’s looking up and waiting and wishing things were different.

  And his breath floats upward and he’s wondering what has happened to the trade winds. Perhaps they’ve died. Perhaps he’s in the doldrums. He’s thinking of dead calm and slow-moving surface winds, Horse Latitudes, above and below the equator, where sailing boats floundered and had to throw precious cargo overboard in an effort to lighten the load. Horses were discarded. Valuable but heavy.

  He wonders how they got them over the side. Did they make them jump? Perhaps they were made to walk the plank. Blindfolded. He imagines a slow drifting vessel in a sea of thrashing horses. Crew praying for a wind. Water screeching. Perhaps some of the horses swam after the crawling ship, hoping to get pulled back on board.

  He thinks of tragic cargo as he waits and waits.

  No light breeze here though. No need to jump ship unless I make the choice myself. I’m in a jet stream. The wind is at my back. And Solomon said, “Around and around goes the wind, and from its circuits returns again.” And he was right and if you’re facing the wrong way it can hit you square in the face and knock you off your feet. He should have pointed that out.

  I say Solomon; in fact it was someone pretending to be Solomon, writing Ecclesiastes and calling himself the son of David. High risk. You’re bound to get found out sooner or later. You’ve just got to hope it’s after you’re dead.

  But I am real. I’m pinching myself and though my fingers are numb and the thing I’m pinching is numb, and though I can’t see myself because it’s so dark and I can’t hear myself speak because it’s so loud, I know I exist. Cogito, ergo sum. And the story is mine and this plane is its end.

  Another plane is its start.

  And its arrival is the point of departure.

  Its name is SA841 and it took off from New York City and landed six and a half hours later at Birmingham International Airport, UK, at 7:05 GMT. The day is yesterday.

  I don’t know how they number planes. Were there eight hundred and forty planes before SA841? Eight hundred and forty pitiful journeys where the reading lights cast their limp beams over damaged cargo and the safety film stars Kurt Cobain. And what is SA? Sorry Ass? I don’t know the answer so I shall tap my feet and rock to and fro and I will count them all. From SA841 to nothing. Each one a little dedication. A little disappointment. A little journey to the here and now and when I reach nothin
g, I will be nothing, and all will be well and all will be over.

  Wings level, the hover over, friction howl and reverse thrust. The plane touches down. In the control tower it is the last plane of Michael Davies’s shift.

  This is the start of my countdown.

  840

  Another black scar on the runway.

  839

  Michael guided the plane to its gate, clocked off and an hour later pulled onto the A45 and put his foot down hard. Reaching into his breast pocket he fished out the cassette that Rose had given him. Rose was a cleaner at the airport. He put the tape into the machine and a rich Welsh voice greeted him.

  “Hello, I’m Dr. Frankburg Ph.D. Before we proceed I should tell you that there will be times during this tape when I will be encouraging you to concentrate solely on my voice. This is to draw you into a state of deep relaxation. So I’m asking you now to put yourself in an environment that is free from distraction. One where it is safe to close your eyes.”

  Michael Davies hit seventy.

  “This tape is designed for you to overcome your fears and become a more confident and relaxed person.”

  838

  Rose said the tape was a head cleaner of sorts.

  837

  A piano played gently in the background.

  “It may be that you are listening to this tape because you are feeling unhappy with life’s pressures. It may be that you are finding things more difficult to cope with. You have become more tense recently. Perhaps you are having problems in a relationship. You may have a big decision pending, or perhaps you have a stressful job . . .”

  A speed camera flashed in his rearview mirror.

  He cursed Dr. Frankburg Ph.D. and hoped for his sake the camera was out of film. This relaxation tape was having the opposite effect to the one intended.

  836

  According to Aviation World, the ten most stressful jobs ranked:

  10. Air traffic controllers

  9. Football players

  8. Astronauts

  7. Policeman

  6. Surgeons

  5. Taxi drivers

  4. Undercover agents

  3. Chief executive officers

  2. Firemen

  1. U.S. president

  835

  Michael thought it was nice to get into the top ten of anything. Even bad things.

  And he was in pretty glamorous company. Except taxi drivers.

  “. . . find you are talking to yourself . . .”

  Michael Davies had missed a bit of tape. He rewound.

  “. . . are listening to this tape because you are feeling unhappy . . .”

  Too far, he skipped on.

  “. . . sexual impotence . . .”

  He rewound again.

  “. . . listening to this tape because you are feeling unhappy . . .”

  He turned the cassette off. He would arrive home pent up. He’d argue with his wife.

  834

  Michael’s wife is called Beth.

  She is agoraphobic and won’t have left the house. She listened to world events on the radio. Trying to get her mind outside, even if her body couldn’t.

  As Michael drove toward home, she was sitting on the stairs and a World Service newsreader was telling her that a group of people had set fire to themselves in China. They had emptied plastic bottles of fizzy pop, filled them with petrol, taken them into a public square, drenched themselves and lit their clothes with cigarette lighters. It took three minutes from when the fire was first set to the time it was extinguished. Two out of the eight lived, but only just. Beth hoped that the next day’s delivery of the newspapers would print photographs of the event and perhaps include a picture of the survivors. Then she could cut it out and put it into her scrapbook. Alongside the others.

  She thought about ringing her newsagent to ask him to add The South China Morning Post to her paper delivery but suspected he wouldn’t have it. He already went out of his way to get her a dozen internationals. The paper delivery boy was only twelve but had a hernia coming.

  Beth has other phobias too. And she has phobophobia: fear of one’s own fears.

  833

  Michael assumed that Beth would prefer a familiar row to an unfamiliar calm brought about by a self-help tape. He assumed she’d get suspicious that he was having an affair or hadn’t gone to work at all.

  Beth, in fact, couldn’t give a shit one way or the other. Wouldn’t mind if he got pissed and crashed his car. It would serve him right for pretending to recycle her newspapers but actually dumping them on the A45.

  832

  Beth’s favorite cutting is a picture of Thich Quang Duc, who immolated himself on a busy crossroads in Saigon in 1963. He’d remained seated in the lotus position and hadn’t moved a muscle or uttered a sound. It was the crowd surrounding him who had wailed and sobbed.

  Beth had also been burned in 1963, almost on the same day, and almost as badly. She was fourteen, but unlike Thich Quang Duc her picture hadn’t made Life magazine. Not even The Surrey Gazetteer.

  831

  Michael let the car be silent. The day’s anxieties stayed crackling below the surface like static on a muggy day. The road slipped under him. A page from The New York Times blew onto his windshield. Michael flicked it away with his wipers.

  He is an unhappy man but would hate anyone to think so.

  830

  In the back room of the Wellington Arms in the same city and at the same time, a man calling himself Unfunny John paced behind a damp curtain.

  The cigarette smoke made him wheeze. The temperature in the room made his face flush red and his ruffled shirt stick to his body. There was a patch of eczema on his chest that had flared up. He resisted the urge to scratch it. If he scratched it he would get blood underneath his fingernails and it would make him hate himself.

  829

  John has a wife too. She is called Emma; he hasn’t seen her for ten days and if he’s not careful he’ll never see her again. Emma worked at a morgue and thought about death, on average, every moment of her working day. She thought about it in her leisure hours too but she kept it hidden. Like people do.

  Ten days ago she asked John if he knew what the “divine wind” was. John felt a gag of indigestion coming, but swallowed it. Emma got withdrawn if he didn’t take her seriously. So withdrawn she looked like she was on the slab herself, and John thought the look unflattering.

  828

  Unfunny John worried about his stage name. Was it ironic or was it true? Perhaps he should change it to Suicide John.

  No, who’d laugh at that?

  He used to be a magician. Old school, despite being a young man. Sleight of hand. Illusions. Escapology.

  Emma had been his assistant. She didn’t want to be, she said she was already an assistant. He said a morgue assistant was no kind of assistant so he’d put her onstage, locked her in boxes and put swords through her. He’d made her cap her teeth, lose weight, and wear body stockings. She was better than this, she told him, she saw real men cut real people in two and magic didn’t come close.

  So Emma went back to the morgue and John became Johnny John, a knowing, politically conversant wisecracker doing open slots. Then he became the Mysterious Monsieur Jay, performing stream-of-consciousness observations on life that went down badly in working-men’s clubs. Then Screaming Johan, Political Fury. It was too hard to sustain and he’d croaked offstage after only half a set. He tried to be Comic John Heron but that was too exposing because John Heron was his actual name.

  Ah, what the hell. Names were for tombstones.

  He gouged a small hole in the black backcloth. Front side, the backcloth supported a banner reading WELLINGTON COMEDY NIGHT. Back side he was using the hole to scope the crowd. Looking for troublemakers. Looking for goofy laughers. Looking for psychos who might glass him.

  In order to get a panoramic view he had to twist the curtain around, making the banner crumple and read WELLINGTON CODY NIGHT.

  One au
dience member laughed at this, but her name was Cody so she was the only one.

  827

  Cody Jameson was a writer. She was roughing it because she was blocked. She’d dyed her hair and was wearing tinted contact lenses to stay incognito. She was sitting at the back and thinking about crime and nerve.

  826

  From the hole John didn’t spot a single familiar face. Not Benny. Not the hen party of stewardesses the manager had promised. Not no one.

  He went back to pacing.

  825

  Today Michael Davies had had no panics, no complicated vectoring. The weather had been decent. His coffee hot. His new shirt complimented. His chair refurbished.

  But there had been more traffic than normal. A couple of planes diverting from East Midlands. A light aircraft was off course. Nothing you’d call an emergency, just a little more concentration needed, and he felt he was running short.

  He wondered if his mind was losing its sharpness. He did mental arithmetic: forty-five times thirty-seven. He timed himself.

  824

  You Too Can Fly. Rose the cleaner said it wasn’t really about flying, it was about fear. She’d found the tape in a bin at the airport and had listened to it on her headphones. She gave it to Michael as he left the tower.

  He insisted he didn’t need it. Rose said ’course he didn’t and patted him on the shoulder.

  823

  One thousand four hundred and eighty. Twenty-four seconds. Mind razor sharp. Michael Davies overtook and undertook and cut people up.

  He would give You Too Can Fly to Beth.

  Beth could only manage very short flights to Europe and only if she was dosed up with drink and tranquilizers. Aerophobia. Or pteromerhanophobia, depending on which sort of flying one was afraid of. Beth believed she had both.

  She thought she’d try boring herself out of the problem. Skipping the Channel was never going to give her long enough to exhaust the phobia but if she flew to another continent her body might run out of energy to worry anymore.

  Tomorrow she’d fly to New York City. There and back, first class.

  It would cost her more money than she could afford, but if it worked, money well spent.