Nick is telling me about a man he knew when he was in an offenders’ resettlement hostel in Cambridge. This man’s great-grandfather was — or so he alleged — the last person in Britain to be hanged for cannibalism. As for Nick’s friend, he shot and snared rabbits and expertly cooked them. Human — rabbit — chicken nugget, that’s a meaty itinerary. Feral habits die hard on the road to deracination.
We turn off the Staines Road, cross a canal with the grandiose title ‘The Duke of Northumberland’s River’, and pass by a school, alongside a scrubby field of allotments, that turns into a dirty pasture grazed by knock-kneed old tool sheds. It’s four in the afternoon, and the kids are coming out of the chain-link gates, escorted by parents who look as if they might be the type to poke petrol-soaked rags through a paediatrician’s letterbox.
Then, at last, at the end of Cain’s Lane, we see it: the perimeter fence of Heathrow, and through its dull diamonds I can make out the tail fin of an intersuburban spaceship: ‘United Airlines’. The last bungalow on Cain’s Lane has a 1970s vintage white Cadillac parked outside of it, and in its front garden a mess of other, dismembered American cars. Can this, I wonder, be a harbinger of some kind?
Walking beside the Great South West Road is scary — heading up the slip road into Terminal 4 scarier still. We never knew how cosy the River Crane was until we found ourselves in this oily place, which repels us transparent, watery pedestrians. The sun has disappeared; the sweep of the grey-grassed embankments, the constriction of the knobbly concrete verges and the enfilades of dipping sodium lights that wade in them are all threatening. We are not wanted here, where there are no walkways, only forty-foot-high smiling Singaporean girls captioned: ‘First to Fly the A380 from Heathrow’. We trip across elevated roundabouts and squeeze alongside crash barriers, ever wary for the pounce of cops or security guards; when Nick and I at last gain the terminal we’re stressed out enough to find succour in a Starbucks tea and a bar of condensed muesli.
It’s time for us to part. In under half an hour the whole, loose skein of the afternoon will have been unravelled for Nick, when the Heathrow Express deposits him in Paddington Station, to become once more a lonely wanderer in the sea of city folk.
An Interlude: New-found-land
As for me, I check in and head through Security. They ask me if I mind having a full body scan, and I don’t demur. Why would I? We all have to do our bit; the threat of terror induces in us all the desire to fulfil our civic duty of being permanently under suspicion. This is a strange, self-accusatory doublethink.
Unlacing my walking boots, I wait behind blue nylon bafflers for my turn to be zapped, idly inspecting a clipboard that notes the remarks of those who have declined the signal honour: ‘Says she is pregnant’, ‘In a wheelchair’, and the outrageous: ‘Is it because I is black?’ This last is a play upon the shtick of the north London comedian Sacha Baron-Cohen in his alter ego as Ali G., the most famous resident of the nearby suburb of Staines. That Ali G. is fictional only confirms the fact that Staines is an unterburgh.
I call over the Security man:
‘That’s an extremely stupid thing to leave in plain view,’ I observe. ‘Someone could get themselves into a lot of trouble.’
‘You’re not meant to read that!’ he snaps, and snatches the clipboard from its peg.
‘I read everything,’ I say, quite as testily, ‘I’m a journalist.’
Seconds later I find myself sky side, unscanned and wandering in my stockinged feet through the shiny, happy chancel of this Aeolian temple, past Agent Provocateur, Harrods, Church’s and Austin Reed. The England of prosperity-through-ever-rising-consumer-demand is here writ small and cloistered. Normally, on my long-distance walks, anoesis descends within a few miles: the mental tape loop of infuriating resentments, or inane pop lyrics, or nonce phrases gives way to the greeny-beige noise of the outdoors. This time, however, the walk has been a clamber through a psychic lumber room; and it’s only now, as I watch a Bloomberg news thread spool across a monitor, that I realise — or rather fail to — that I’ve finally tranced out.
What can be more null than these, the last few instants before an intercontinental flight, meted out by the unwanted drags on a necessitated cigarette? There are Swedes at the next table in the Ask bar; beyond them Hassidim in their silky coats hustle Samsonite luggage; still other religious sectaries — women, this time — trip by me with white napkins pinioned to their hair. I rouse myself to stump along through this un-place and experience beneath my now weary feet the passive, feline sag of the travelator. Then the last, scuffed yards of corrugated corridor, then the last frayed strip of red and yellow duct tape.
In the upper cabin of the British Airways jumbo, secreted in my pod, I call a friend in London and tell him of my great achievement. He laughs: ‘Funny, you and Gaddafi both.’ I ask for an explanation, and it transpires that the Libyan leader, pissed off by the failure of his cavalcade to arrive on time, set out to walk into town from Lagos Airport.
‘How far did he get?’ I enquire.
‘Oh,’ my friend replies, ‘only a couple of hundred yards — he had three hundred heavily armed bodyguards with him.’
I push the slick nodule, and, slumbering, dream of the Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, his green robes flapping in the fume-laden convections as he trudges resolutely off on his walk from Tripoli to Lagos, a walk that sucks the very Sahara from the bedrock and sends it, a plume of sand, twisting into the sky. .
. . and wake to hear the tail end of the safety announcements, and the only address that truly matters, the one to the crew: ‘Doors to automatic and cross check.’ We’re off, the jumbo tromping leadenly around the precincts of the terminal, then picking up speed and trumpeting into the sky. Sequestered in the howdah sits a mahout in headphones, a sturdy unexcitable fellow: Saint-Exupéry with a semi in Staines.
I have no business here in business class. The man in the pod next to me — we form a copula, anonymous lovers spent by mercantile soixante-neuf — has a Ken Follett paperback tented on his thigh, while a VDU screen obscures his fleshy face. He changed into tan chinos before takeoff and asked the stewardess for a Diet Sprite that she was unable to provide. Hell, this is still England, after all.
When the seatbelt light is extinguished I rise and amble to a gap where I can do some stretching. First, hand on a seatback, I hold one leg up against the opposing buttock, like an ageing Antinous; then, arms braced against a bulkhead and the other leg extended, I push the plane westwards. My late friend Jason Schone taught me these simple exercises, ways of warding off stiffness, which even at the age of forty-two I knew nothing of.
That was on my first radial walk, out from the London epicentre. I picked Jason up at Pickett’s Lock, near Edmonton, and headed on with him, up into Epping Forest. It was a hot afternoon in early July 2003, and we talked and walked. I’d known Jason for four years, having met him the first day I’d cleaned up from drugs. He was on the same long walk back to some semblance of sanity — but he kept lagging behind, straying into methadone swamps and dopey thickets. His health was already poor — hepatitis, diabetes — he really needed to keep up. On that glorious, dappled afternoon we were in step and he told me much about his life. Then, like Nick Papadimitriou, Jason was abandoned — the first stage of a rocket I’d employed to exit the surly gravity of the conurbation. I left him at Epping Tube Station, and while I blasted on into the outer space of Essex, he fell back, end over end, and splashed down into the oceanic city.