‘Just great,’ he murmured. ‘Three storeys up now, Aidan. What are we going to do? Jump down in the morning? We going to carry each other back to the centre with broken legs?’
Aidan wasn’t saying anything. Jane looked down the aisle at him; he could just make out his shape, limned by the palest ambient light, sitting in the dark like a Buddha. His head was down over his chest, his hands resting on his crossed legs. He might have been asleep, but Jane didn’t think so.
He wanted to say something, but there seemed to be no way back from what had happened. Aidan was right. All this time he had looked at Aidan and seen his own son. He wondered if he shouldn’t be excused for that. But then he realised that Aidan had lost everyone too: his father, his mother, his sister; a worse scenario than Jane’s in many ways, but he had been too wrapped up in the epic scenes of his own mind – the eventual reunion with Stanley chief among them – to show even a rudimentary empathy. Becky had been the gauze on his wounds, the kiss goodnight, the arms to fall into during the worst of the nightmares. Jane had either been turned in on his own reveries or trying to measure Aidan for a body cast that would never fit, and should never have been tried on in the first place.
He looked out at the night. Tow tractors crouched low at the edge of the airfield, as if trying to dodge out of view. Shreds of a windsock rippled violently against the sky like an escaped, frantic thought.
‘Why did you bring me here, Aidan?’
He thought of Becky at Plessey’s shop, sorting through batteries or touching an alligator clip to the crystal radio, listening to voices hundreds of miles away offering hope or some bastardised version of it. He thought of a raft so great that you could build villages on it. He thought of fetching up on Normandy beaches lined with a welcoming party of skeletons in their millions, or Skinners sharpening blades on strops made from the hides of children.
He dismissed the image and turned away from the window, disgusted with himself. The grim thought had never been far from his mind, even during the days of normality. Evenings sitting on the balcony with his wife, sharing a bottle of wine, listening to Johnny Mercer or Bobby Darin, the bricks, the roads, the sky touched by that soft pink stain of summer, he’d envisage, suddenly, Stanley falling from the heavens to impale himself on railings. He’d imagine a gas pipe shearing and igniting, hosing his son in the face with thousands of degrees centigrade. The balcony crumbling, sending him to unforgiving concrete twenty yards below. The worry could never be confined, it was never something over which he held sway. It was always a wild uncontainable panic that had so many strands to it that he could not keep track. It was like trying to put an eel in a jam jar with greased hands.
Another thought cut across all this, unbidden, unconnected: What if Becky is dead?
It was no effort, really, to imagine her being peeled while something drooled above her, staring into her with black sockets, its teeth manifold, curved, like the spines you might find within an exotic carnivorous plant if you pushed it inside out. Beyond those rows of canines, something like the grinding bits at the business end of tunnelling machinery. He had heard that bizarre mouth working on occasion, mincing the life out of whatever it came into contact with.
Jane did not realise he was dreaming by now. The shadow line between real life and unconsciousness seemed to be growing softer by the day, a charcoal border smudged by a thumb almost to invisibility. He was aware of the bodies sitting all around him in their cramped rows. A Japanese woman in the next seat turned her head on the grinding apex of her barebone neck and leered at him. Her jacket yawned as she leaned nearer; he saw mould spots on the cup of her bra, the grey, sagging puffball within it. Flakes of her snowed on him as she struggled to speak.
Much more leg room now, don’t you think? It’s the ultimate diet.
Jane started awake. He was holding the famished claw of the woman next to him. He bolted out of the seat, disorientated. He had thought of his flare-up with Aidan, and was now convinced that when Aidan had screamed he’s dead he had meant himself, not Stanley.
‘Aidan?’ he called out. But there was silence. ‘Aid?’
For a second he thought the boy had left him, monkeying out of the aircraft and down to the tarmac, abandoning him here. But then he saw him where he had been all along, tipped forward, hands curled into his lap. The ghost of Stopper seemed to shimmer at his shoulder, a suggestion that this was the classic position of the vein-opener, and he rushed to Aidan, convinced he had killed himself. But the truth was far worse.
Jane stopped six feet short of the boy. Already he could see that Aidan, or what had once been Aidan, was near death if not dead already. The dull sound of gristle popping, like someone jointing a chicken, was a queasy explosion in the base of Jane’s head. He put his hands to his ears, but it was as persistent as a bad tune heard on the radio.
He could do nothing to save Aidan. By the youngster’s side he saw perhaps two dozen duotone capsules: protein-pump inhibitors that Aidan had saved but not ingested over the past three weeks or so. He was allowing himself to be hollowed out. He saw the physicality of what was invading him move through his bones, dissolving him, absorbing him, filling his shell. Aidan’s slender muscles bulged and deflated. His eyes, filling with red, sank into his face as his head tilted back.
‘Why?’ Jane asked it. Aidan’s shoulders jerked back, a violent shrug. His lips grimaced and pursed; blood pulsed from between them. The ring of his teeth was ejected; his jaw and soft palate slithered down the slick on the front of his jumper. Jane moaned, covered his mouth. Aidan’s hair jumped and danced as if it were teeming with lice. His hand turned from a fist to a star: a Stanley knife popped clear of it. Jane snatched it up. The blade was black with dried blood, the edge uneven where it had blunted itself against bone. A rag of cleanly shaven flesh had jammed in the slot where the blade could be retracted. Jane could almost smell Fielding’s cologne upon it.
He threw the tool away. He had maybe fifteen minutes before the Skinner emerged; already there were strains appearing in the thinned cyanotic flesh of the boy. He would begin to tear soon. Perhaps Aidan had come out here having duped Jane into making the trip. Perhaps he had intended to apologise. But it was too late; he had been doomed long before this moment, probably at the time he stopped taking the drugs. Possibly earlier, in the second they clapped eyes on each other in a Newcastle hospital.
Jane went back to the door at the rear of the 747. Long way down. He heard the splash of Aidan’s internal organs as the picky Skinner evicted them. There was a deep grunt, deeper than anything Aidan had ever said. Like the rest of him, his voice was broken for good.
Jane unclasped the overhead storage bins and swept through the luggage, looking for something that might help. Too late, he realised there would be an axe in the cockpit, but he would not be able to get past the Skinner in the starboard aisle now. The flight deck would be secured from the inside anyway.
He had to accept that Aidan was gone for good. What hulked and slobbered in his place, though it resembled the boy, was one hundred per cent meat-head. No reasoning. No compassion. No guilt. Aidan, at least, at last, had been unable to live with what he had done. It didn’t matter that he had put Jane in a dangerous position; he hoped that, in extremis, Aidan had failed to grasp that. He couldn’t believe he could be so calculating, no matter how thoughtless and unsympathetic Jane had been towards him over the years.