She moved towards the tunnel. Her legs felt as if somebody else was operating them. The leather bag smelled of animal death. She wished she'd taken the pills the doctor had prescribed. She wished she'd got drunk. She wished she'd told them at the start she wouldn't be able to go abroad with the orchestra. She wished she'd turned down the job. She wished she was somebody else, or somewhere else. She wished for a broken leg or a ruptured appendix; anything to stop her having to board the plane.
The tunnel finished her. The smell of fuel, the sound of an engine, the quiet flow of people in the windowless corridor, tipping towards the corner that led to the plane itself. She stopped, letting people go past her, staring ahead; Chizu and Yayoi stopped too, in front of her, talking to her (but she couldn't hear what they were saying). They touched her, guided her to the side of the corridor, where she stood shivering in a cold sweat, smelling that fuel smell and hearing the increasing whine of the engines and feeling the list in the floor tipping her towards the craft the people were filing into, and she could not think and could not believe this was happening to her.
So well. It had all gone so well. She'd fitted in, she'd made friends, she'd enjoyed the concerts and hadn't been very nervous apart from the very first one, and recording could be boring but you could switch off to some extent; nobody expected to do their most inspired work after thirty takes… She had money, and a new cello, and her mother was proud of her; her life looked set and certain, and her future bright and exciting, and she'd wondered what could go wrong, because she was used to things balancing out, and this was it.
What was ironic was that the balancing disaster came from inside, where she was most vulnerable. She'd never needed to develop the spurious justifications and excuses, or the fragile ego-props and unlikely hopes so many other people had to construct to cope with their lives.
She'd lived with some inner certainty that they hadn't had; safe inside, defences turned outwards, weapons trained beyond her immediate space… and now she was suffering for her hubris.
They did get her on to the plane eventually; Mr Yano, the orchestra's tour manager, and Mr Okamoto, the leader of the orchestra, came to talk to her, and gently guided her down the rubber slope, between the metal corrugations of the white walls, to the open door of the plane, where stewardesses waited and the plane was big and full of bright seats inside, and the thick door sat, a curved slab, against the bulge of the plane's skin. She was shaking. They took her inside.
She wanted to scream. Instead she moaned, went down on her haunches and curled up around her bag, as though trying to press herself inside it and hide, and crying into her folded elbows, her hands gripping the top of her head. She was being stupid. She had to act sensibly. She had to think of the others in the orchestra. What would her mother say? Her cello was already on board. There were three hundred passengers waiting on her; an entire plane. America; think of that! All those great cities, the thousands of people, waiting. Her ticket had been paid for, all her tickets paid for, hotel rooms reserved, programmes printed. It was unheard of to be so selfish, so self-obsessed.
She knew all this. All these things had convinced her over the months since the tour had been announced and the various arrangements made — that when it came to it, she would find it simply unthinkable that she could turn round and not go. Of course it would be appalling, disgraceful, unutterably contemptuous of everybody else in the orchestra, irredeemably self-centred. She was grown up now and some things just had to be done; fears had to be conquered. Everybody was relying on her, expecting her to behave like everybody else, like any normal person; that wasn't much to ask.
She knew all that; it didn't help. It meant nothing — a set of irrelevant symbols in a language that was not the reverberating note of her fear. Mere scrawls on a page pitched against the resonating physical chord of terror.
They tried to lift her, but she thought they were going to drag her to a seat and belt her in, join her to this hollow machine which smelled of jet fuel and hot food, and she cried then, dropping the leather bag and clutching at somebody and pleading with them. Please no. She was letting everybody down. Please don't. She was behaving like a child. I'm sorry I'm sorry I can't. A spoiled child, a spoiled foreign child. Please don't do this to me. A gaijin brat tantrumming for cookies. Please don't. She would be in disgrace. Please.
She was led out eventually, up the welcoming slope of the jetty, back to the lounge again, then to the restroom. A JAL ground staff lady comforted her.
The plane was delayed by half an hour. She would not leave the restroom until it had taken off.
Alternate feelings of relief and guilty dread flowed through her in the taxi back to the tiny apartment she shared with Chizu and Yayoi. It was over. The ordeal had finally ended.
But at such a cost. What shame she had brought upon. herself and the others in the orchestra! She would be sacked. She ought to resign now. She would. Could she ever look any of them in the face again? She thought not.
She went home that night, setting off for the station and Hokkaido with the bag she'd bought for the trip and had almost left on the plane and then almost left in the restroom; a beautiful bag in soft, natural glove leather, still containing her virginal passport and a guide to the United States, and as she sat, red-eyed and miserable on the train heading north through the night (her friends, her workmates, would be somewhere over the North Pacific just then, she thought, crossing the date line, defying the sun and gaining a day while she lost her career), she looked down at the glowing, pale brown skin of the bag, and noticed the deep, dark dots marring its silky surface, and could not brush them off, and realised, with another twist in the deepening spiral of her self-inflicted dejection, that the marks were her own, produced by her tears.
Sucre looked wide-eyed at her for a second. She stared back. The firing deep inside the ship went on. Sucre grabbed her hand, spun her round in front of him and threw her through the door, back into the corridor he'd bundled her out of minutes earlier. 'Down! he shouted, ramming the rifle into her back, making her run. She half-fell down the stairs, Sucre clattering behind her. The firing stopped beneath them as they went down the next companionway.
Grey smoke drifted from the doorway of the Nadia's saloon into the corridor. She could hear crying and shouts. Sucre screamed at her to keep going; the gun hit her in the lower back again.
The saloon was thick with acrid, stinging smoke. Bodies lay amongst the plush chairs and couches like obscene scatter cushions. She was standing behind one of the venceristas; he was shouting, waving his gun around. Another vencerista stood behind the bar, heavy machine-gun poised, smoke curling from it.
She looked at the bodies. The ringing in her ears made it difficult to hear things, but she thought somebody was calling her name. The bodies covered much of the floor, almost from end to end of the room. A few of the dark-skinned men were still at the far end, standing there with their hands behind their heads, looking cowed and terrified.
'Hisako! She heard her name, and raised her head. It was Philippe. She was shoved towards him anyway, pushed in the back so that she had no choice but to move, and so ran across the bloody carpet, stumbled over bodies to him. He hugged her, mumbled in French into her hair, but the ringing noise smothered all his words.