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  Kate nodded, and politely allowed just one second to go by.

  “It’s just that the flight’s about to leave,” she said then. “I have one bag, I have my ticket, I have a reservation. It’ll take about thirty seconds. I hate to interrupt, but I’d hate even more to miss my flight for the sake of thirty seconds. That’s thirty actual seconds, not thirty ‘just one’ seconds, which could keep us here all night.”

  The check-in girl turned the full glare of her lip gloss on to Kate, but before she could speak, the large blond man looked around, and the effect of his face was a little disconcerting.

  “I, too,” he said in a slow, angry Nordic voice, “wish to fly to Oslo.”

  Kate stared at him. He looked thoroughly out of place in an airport, or rather, the airport looked thoroughly out of place around him.

  “Well,” she said, “the way we’re stacked up at the moment it looks like neither of us is going to make it. Can we just sort this one out? What’s the holdup?”

  The check-in girl smiled her charming, dead smile and said, “The airline does not accept checks, as a matter of company policy.”

  “Well, I do,” said Kate, slapping down her own credit card. “Charge the gentleman’s ticket to this, and I’ll take a check from him.”

  “OK?” she added to the big man, who was looking at her with slow surprise. His eyes were large and blue and conveyed the impression that they had looked at a lot of glaciers in their time. They were extraordinarily arrogant and also muddled.

  “OK?” she repeated briskly. “My name is Kate Schechter. Two ‘c’s, two ‘h’s, two ‘e’s and also a ‘t,’ an ‘r’ and an ‘s.’ Provided they’re all there, the bank won’t be fussy about the order they come in. They never seem to know themselves.”

  The man very slowly inclined his head a little toward her in a rough bow of acknowledgement. He thanked her for her kindness, courtesy and some Norwegian word that was lost on her, said that it was a long while since he had encountered anything of the kind, that she was a woman of spirit and some other Norwegian word, and that he was indebted to her. He also added, as an afterthought, that he had no checkbook.

  “Right!” said Kate, determined not to be deflected from her course. She fished in her handbag for a piece of paper, took a pen from the check-in counter, scribbled on the paper and thrust it at him.

  “That’s my address,” she said. “Send me the money. Hock your fur coat if you have to. Just send it to me. OK? I’m taking a flyer on trusting you.”

  The big man took the scrap of paper, read the few words on it with immense slowness, then folded it with elaborate care and put it into the pocket of his coat. Again he bowed to her very slightly.

  Kate suddenly realized that the check-in girl was silently waiting for her pen back to fill in the credit card form. She pushed it back at her in annoyance, handed over her own ticket and imposed on herself an icy calm.

  The airport loudspeaker announced the departure of their flight.

  “May I see your passports, please?” said the girl unhurriedly.

  Kate handed hers over, but the big man didn’t have one.

  “You what?” exclaimed Kate. The airline girl simply stopped moving at all and stared quietly at a random point on her desk waiting for someone else to make a move. It wasn’t her problem.

  The man repeated angrily that he didn’t have a passport. He shouted it and banged his fist on the counter so hard that it was slightly dented by the force of the blow.

  Kate picked up her ticket, her passport and her credit card and hoisted her garment bag back onto her shoulder.

  “This is where I get off,” she said, and simply walked away. She felt that she had made every effort a human being could possibly be expected to make to catch her plane, but that it was not to be. She would send a message to Jean-Philippe saying that she could not be there, and it would probably sit in a slot next to his message to her saying why he could not be there either. For once they would be equally absent.

  For the time being she would go and cool off. She set off in search of first a newspaper and then some coffee, and by dint of following the appropriate signs was unable to locate either. She was then unable to find a working phone from which to send a message, and decided to give up on the airport altogether. Just get out, she told herself, find a taxi, and go back home.

  She threaded her way back across the check-in concourse, and had almost made it to the exit when she happened to glance back at the check-in desk that had defeated her, and was just in time to see it shoot up through the roof engulfed in a ball of orange flame.

  As she lay beneath a pile of rubble, in pain, darkness, and choking dust, trying to find sensation in her limbs, she was at least relieved to be able to think that she hadn’t merely been imagining that this was a bad day. So thinking, she passed out.

  2

  THE USUAL PEOPLE tried to claim responsibility.

  First the IRA, then the PLO and the Gas Board. Even British Nuclear Fuels rushed out a statement to the effect that the situation was completely under control, that it was a one in a million chance, that there was hardly any radioactive leakage at all, and that the site of the explosion would make a nice location for a day out with the kids and a picnic, before finally having to admit that it wasn’t actually anything to do with them at all.

  No cause could be found for the explosion.

  It seemed to have happened spontaneously and of its own free will. Explanations were advanced, but most of these were simply phrases which restated the problem in different words, along the same principles which had given the world “metal fatigue.” In fact, a very similar phrase was invented to account for the sudden transition of wood, metal, plastic and concrete into an explosive condition, which was “nonlinear, catastrophic structural exasperation,” or to put it another way—as a junior cabinet minister did on television the following night in a phrase which was to haunt the rest of his career—the check-in desk had just got “fundamentally fed up with being where it was.”

  As in all such disastrous events, estimates of the casualties varied wildly. They started at forty-seven dead, eighty-nine seriously injured, went up to sixty-three dead, a hundred and thirty injured, and rose as high as one hundred and seventeen dead before the figures started to be revised downward once more. The final figures revealed that once all the people who could be accounted for had been accounted for, in fact no one had been killed at all. A small number of people were in hospital suffering from cuts and bruises and varying degrees of traumatized shock, but that, unless anyone had any information about anybody actually being missing, was that.

  This was yet another inexplicable aspect to the whole affair. The force of the explosion had been enough to reduce a large part of the front of Terminal Two to rubble, and yet everyone inside the building had somehow either fallen very luckily or been shielded from one piece of falling masonry by another, or had the shock of the explosion absorbed by their luggage. All in all, very little luggage had survived at all. There were questions asked in Parliament about this, but not very interesting ones.

  It was a couple of days before Kate Schechter became aware of any of these things, or indeed of anything at all in the outside world.

  She passed the time quietly in a world of her own in which she was surrounded as far as the eye could see with old cabin trunks full of past memories in which she rummaged with great curiosity, and sometimes bewilderment. Or, at least, about a tenth of the cabin trunks were full of vivid and often painful or uncomfortable memories of her past life; the other nine tenths were full of penguins, which surprised her. Insofar as she recognized at all that she was dreaming, she realized that she must be exploring her own subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was very clear what the other nine tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.

  Gradually the trunks, the memories and the
penguins began to grow indistinct, to become all white and swimmy, then to become like walls that were all white and swimmy, and finally to become walls that were merely white, or rather a yellowish, greenish kind of off-white, and to enclose her in a small room.

  The room was in semi-darkness. A bedside light was on but turned down low, and the light from a streetlamp found its way between the gray curtains and threw sodium patterns on the opposite wall. She became dimly aware of the shadowed shape of her own body lying under the white, turned-down sheet and the pale, neat blankets. She stared at it for a nervous while, checking that it looked right before she tried, tentatively, to move any part of it. She tried her right hand, and that seemed to be fine. A little stiff and aching, but the fingers all responded, and all seemed to be of the right length and thickness, and to bend in the right places and in the right directions.

  She panicked briefly when she couldn’t immediately locate her left hand, but then she found it lying across her stomach and nagging at her in some odd way. It took her a second or two of concentration to put together a number of rather disturbing feelings and to realize that there was a needle bandaged into her arm. This shook her quite badly. From the needle there snaked a long thin transparent pipe that glistened yellowly in the light from the streetlamp and hung in a gentle curl from a thick plastic bag suspended from a tall metal stand. An array of horrors briefly assailed her in respect of this apparatus, but she peered dimly at the bag and saw the words “Dextro-Saline.” She made herself calm down again and lay quietly for a few moments before continuing her exploration.

  Her rib cage seemed undamaged—bruised and tender, but there was no sharper pain anywhere to suggest that anything was broken. Her hips and thighs ached and were stiff, but revealed no serious hurt. She flexed the muscles down her right leg and then her left. She rather fancied that her left ankle was sprained.

  In other words, she told herself, she was perfectly all right. So what was she doing here in what she could tell from the septic color of the paint was clearly a hospital?

  She sat up impatiently, and immediately rejoined the penguins for an entertaining few minutes.

  The next time she came around she treated herself with a little more care and lay quietly, feeling gently nauseous.

  She poked gingerly at her memory of what had happened. It was dark and blotchy and came at her in sick, greasy waves like the North Sea. Lumpy things jumbled themselves out of it and slowly arranged themselves into a heaving airport. The airport was sour and ached in her head, and in the middle of it, pulsing like a migraine, was the memory of a moment’s whirling splurge of light.

  It became suddenly very clear to her that the check-in concourse of Terminal Two at Heathrow Airport had been hit by a meteorite. Silhouetted in the flare was the fur-coated figure of a big man who must have caught the full force of it and been reduced instantly to a cloud of atoms that were free to go as they pleased. The thought caused a deep and horrid shudder to go through her. He had been infuriating and arrogant, but she had liked him in an odd way. There had been something oddly noble in his perverse bloody-mindedness. Or maybe, she realized, she liked to think that such perverse bloody-mindedness was noble because it reminded her of herself trying to order pizza to be delivered in an alien, hostile and non-pizza-delivering world. Nobleness was one word for making a fuss about the trivial inevitabilities of life, but there were others.

  She felt a sudden surge of fear and loneliness, but it quickly ebbed away and left her feeling much more composed, relaxed, and wanting to go to the lavatory.

  According to her watch it was shortly after three o’clock, and according to everything else it was nighttime. She should probably call a nurse and let the world know she had come around. There was a window in the side wall of the room through which she could see a dim corridor in which stood a stretcher trolley and a tall black oxygen bottle, but which was otherwise empty. Things were very quiet out there.

  Peering around her in the small room she saw a white-painted plywood cupboard, a couple of tubular steel-and-vinyl chairs lurking quietly in the shadows, and a white-painted plywood bedside cabinet which supported a small bowl with a single banana in it. On the other side of the bed stood her drip stand. Set into the wall on that side of the bed was a metal plate with a couple of black knobs and a set of old Bakelite headphones hanging from it, and wound around the tubular side pillar of the bed head was a cable with a bell push attached to it, which she fingered, and then decided not to push.

  She was fine. She could find her own way about.

  Slowly, a little woozily, she pushed herself up on to her elbows, and slid her legs out from under the sheets and onto the floor, which was cold to her feet. She could tell almost immediately that she shouldn’t be doing this because every part of her feet was sending back streams of messages telling her exactly what every tiniest bit of the floor that they touched felt like, as if it was a strange and worrying thing the like of which they had never encountered before. Nevertheless she sat on the edge of the bed and made her feet accept the floor as something they were just going to have to get used to.

  The hospital had put her into a large, baggy, striped thing. It wasn’t merely baggy, she decided on examining it more closely, it actually was a bag. A bag of loose blue and white striped cotton. It opened up the back and let in chilly night draughts. Perfunctory sleeves flopped halfway down her arms. She moved her arms around in the light, examining the skin, rubbing it and pinching it, especially around the bandage which held her drip needle in place. Normally her arms were lithe and the skin was firm and supple. Tonight, however, they looked like bits of chickens. Briefly she smoothed each forearm with her other hand, and then looked up again, purposefully.

  She reached out and gripped the drip stand and, because it wobbled slightly less than she did, she was able to use it to pull herself slowly to her feet. She stood there, her tall, slim figure trembling, and after a few seconds she held the drip stand away at a bent arm’s length, like a shepherd holding a crook.

  She had not made it to Norway, but she was at least standing up.

  The drip stand rolled on four small and independently perverse wheels which behaved like four screaming children in a supermarket, but nevertheless Kate was able to propel it to the door ahead of her.

  Walking increased her sense of wooziness, but also increased her resolve not to give in to it. She reached the door, opened it, and, pushing the drip stand out ahead of her, looked out into the corridor.

  To her left the corridor ended in a couple of swing doors with circular porthole windows, which seemed to lead into a larger area, an open ward perhaps. To her right a number of smaller doors opened off the corridor as it continued on for a short distance before turning a sharp corner. One of those doors would probably be the lavatory. The others? Well, she would find out as she looked for the lavatory.

  The first two were cupboards. The third was slightly bigger and had a chair in it and therefore probably counted as a room, since most people don’t like to sit in cupboards, even nurses, who have to do a lot of things that most people wouldn’t like to. It also had a stack of Styrofoam beakers, a lot of semi-congealed coffee creamer and an elderly coffee maker, all sitting on top of a small table together and seeping grimly over a copy of the Evening Standard.

  Kate picked up the dark, damp paper and tried to reconstruct some of her missing days from it. However, what with her own wobbly condition making it difficult to read, and the droopily stuck-together condition of the newspaper, she was able to glean little more than the fact that no one could really say for certain what had happened. It seemed that no one had been seriously hurt, but that an employee of one of the airlines was still unaccounted for. The incident had now been officially classified as an “Act of God.”

  “Nice one, God,” thought Kate. She put down the remains of the paper and closed the door behind her.

  The next door she tried was another small side ward like her own. There was a bedside table an
d a single banana in the fruit bowl.

  The bed was clearly occupied. She pulled the door too quickly, but she did not pull it quickly enough. Unfortunately, something odd had caught her attention, but although she had noticed it, she could not immediately say what it was. She stood there with the door half closed, staring at the floor, knowing that she should not look again, and knowing that she would.

  Carefully she eased the door back open again.

  The room was darkly shadowed and chilly. The chilliness did not give her a good feeling about the occupant of the bed. She listened. The silence didn’t sound too good either. It wasn’t the silence of healthy deep sleep, it was the silence of nothing but a little distant traffic noise.

  She hesitated for a long while, silhouetted in the doorway, looking and listening. She wondered about the sheer bulk of the occupant of the bed and how cold he was with just a thin blanket pulled over him. Next to the bed was a small tubular-legged vinyl bucket chair which was rather overwhelmed by the huge and heavy fur coat draped over it, and Kate thought that the coat should more properly be draped over the bed and its cold occupant.

  At last, walking as softly and cautiously as she could, she moved into the room and over to the bed. She stood looking down at the face of the big Nordic man. Though cold, and though his eyes were shut, his face was frowning slightly as if he was still rather worried about something. This struck Kate as being almost infinitely sad. In life the man had had the air of someone who was beset by huge, if somewhat puzzling, difficulties, and the appearance that he had almost immediately found things beyond this life that were a bother to him as well was miserable to contemplate.

  She was astonished that he appeared to be so unscathed. His skin was totally unmarked. It was rugged and healthy—or rather had been healthy until very recently. Closer inspection showed a network of fine lines which suggested that he was older than the mid-thirties she had originally assumed. He could even have been a very fit and healthy man in his late forties.