I just laughed and, of course, I knew why he had said it. Knew what he wanted. Kamilla. He was secretly in love with her; she was not quite so secretly in love with me. At the class party I had had a grope to feel what she had under her jumper. Which was not a great deal. I had mentioned it to a couple of the boys and I suppose Didrik must have picked up on it, and decided to shut me out. Not that I was so bloody concerned about being ‘in’, but bullying is bullying. So I went to Tutu at the MC club, the bikers. I had already done a bit of hash dealing for them at school, and said that I needed some respect if I was going to do a decent job. Tutu said he would take care of Didrik. Later Didrik refused to explain to anyone how he had got two fingers caught under the top hinge of the boys’ toilet door, but he never called me ‘brown rat’ again. And – right – he never became a concert pianist, either. Shit, this hurts so much! No, I don’t need any consoling, Dad, I need a fix. One last shot and then I’ll leave this world without any bother, I promise. There, the church bell has rung again. Dad?
2
IT WAS ALMOST midnight at Gardermoen, Oslo’s principal airport, as SK-459 from Bangkok taxied into its allocated spot by Gate 46. Captain Tord Schultz braked and brought the Airbus 340 to a complete halt; then he quickly switched off the fuel supply. The metallic whine from the jet engines sank through the frequencies to a good-natured growl before dying. Tord Schultz automatically noted the time, three minutes and forty seconds since touchdown, twelve minutes before the scheduled time. He and the first officer started the checklist for shutdown and parking as the plane was to remain there overnight. With the goods. He flicked through the briefcase containing the log. September 2011. In Bangkok it was still the rainy season and had been steaming hot as usual, and he had longed for home and the first cool autumn evenings. Oslo in September. There was no better place on earth. He filled in the form for the remaining fuel. The fuel bill. He had had to find a way of accounting for it. After flights from Amsterdam or Madrid he had flown faster than was economically reasonable, burning off thousands of kroner worth of fuel to make it. In the end, his boss had carpeted him.
‘To make what?’ he had yelled. ‘You didn’t have any passengers with connecting flights!’
‘The world’s most punctual airline,’ Tord Schultz had mumbled, quoting the advertising slogan.
‘The world’s most economically fucked-up airline! Is that the best explanation you can come up with?’
Tord Schultz had shrugged. After all, he couldn’t say the reason, that he had opened the fuel nozzles because there was something he himself had to make. The flight he had been put on, the one to Bergen, Trondheim or Stavanger. It was extremely important that he did the trip and not one of the other pilots.
He was too old for them to do anything else to him but rant and rave. He had avoided making serious errors, the organisation took care of him, and there were only a few years left before he reached the two fives, fifty-five, and would be retired whatever happened. Tord Schultz sighed. A few years to fix things, to avert ending up as the world’s most economically fucked-up pilot.
He signed the log, got up and left the cockpit to flash his row of pearly-white pilot teeth set in his tanned pilot face to the passengers. The smile that would tell them that he was Mr Confidence in person. Pilot. The professional title that had once made him something in other people’s eyes. He had seen it, how people, men and women, young and old, once the magic word ‘pilot’ had been enunciated, had looked at him and discovered not only the charisma, the nonchalance, the boyish charm, but also the captain’s dynamism and cold precision, the superior intellect and the courage of a man who defied physical laws and the innate fears of mere mortals. But that was a long time ago. Now they regarded him as the bus driver he was and asked him what the cheapest tickets to Las Palmas were, and why there was more leg room on Lufthansa.
To hell with them. To hell with them all.
Tord Schultz stood at the exit next to the flight attendants, straightened up and smiled, said ‘Welcome back, Miss’ in broad Texan, the way they had learned at flying school in Sheppard. Received a smile of acknowledgement. There had been a time when he could have arranged a meeting in the arrivals hall with such a smile. And indeed had done. From Cape Town to Alta. Women. Many women. That had been the problem. And the solution. Women. Many women. New women. And now? His hairline was receding beneath the pilot’s cap, but the tailor-made uniform emphasised his tall, broad-shouldered physique. That was what he had blamed for not getting into fighter jets at flying school, and ending up as a cargo pilot on the Hercules, the workhorse of the sky. He had told them at home he had been a couple of centimetres too long in the spine, that the cockpits of Starfighters, F-5s and F-16s, disqualified all but dwarfs. The truth was he hadn’t measured up to the competition. His body was all he had managed to maintain from those times, the only thing which hadn’t fallen apart, which hadn’t crumbled. Like his marriages. His family. Friends. How had it happened? Where had he been when it happened? Presumably in a hotel room in Cape Town or Alta, with cocaine up his nose to compensate for the potency-killing drinks at the bar, and his dick in not such a Welcome-Back-Miss to compensate for everything he was not and never would be.