A Week at the Airport Read online

  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.

  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 t
heir 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.

  2 There was a good deal of shopping to be done on the other side of security, where more than one hundred separate retail outlets vied for the attention of travellers – a considerably greater number than were to be found in the average shopping centre. This statistic regularly caused critics to complain that Terminal 5 was more like a mall than an airport, though it was hard to determine what might be so wrong with this balance, w
hat precise aspect of the building’s essential aeronautical identity had been violated or even what specific pleasure passengers had been robbed of, given that we are inclined to visit malls even when they don’t provide us with the additional pleasure of a gate to Johannesburg.

  At the entrance to the main shopping zone was a currency-exchange desk. Although we are routinely informed that we live in a vast and diverse world, we may do little more than nod distractedly at this idea until the moment comes when we find ourselves at the back of a bureau de change lined with a hundred safe-deposit boxes, some containing neat sheaves of Uruguayan pesos, Turkmenistani manats and Malawian kwachas. The trading desks of the City of London might perform their transactions with incomparable electronic speed, but patient physical contact with thick bundles of notes offered a very different sort of immediacy: a living sense of the miscellany of the human species. These notes, in every colour and font, were decorated with images of strongmen, dictators, founding fathers, banana trees and leprechauns. Many were worn and creased from heavy use. They had helped to pay for camels in Yemen or saddles in Peru, been stashed in the wallets of elderly barbers in Nepal or under the pillows of schoolboys in Moldova. A fraying fifty-kina note from Papua New Guinea (bird of paradise on the back, Prime Minister Michael Somare on the front) hardly hinted at the sequence of transactions (from fruit to shoes, guns to toys) that had culminated in its arrival at Heathrow.