1001 Nights Cast

It’s the smallest plane I’ve been on in some time, although I’ve seen more confined spaces recently. Never felt comfortable in a window seat. Not scared of flying generally…Apart from that great heave as you leave the ground. That always gets me in the guts. I can feel the metal straining, wrenching, screaming. You know it’s screaming, you just can’t hear it for the whine of the engine. Anyway, I imagine that somewhere in the midst of all that straining, something paramount gives way, buckles and ruptures, and we drop, slowly—it would be slow if you were watching from the ground—to a paddock just beyond the edge of the airport.

Coming in to land never brings on thoughts like that but in the first minute after take off, what I see is: plane leaves ground, hangs for a moment, then drops to earth. Then there’s fire, sirens, blood and maybe even romance. For some reason I always envisage romance amidst disaster. But then I always see myself doing something heroic as well, something that would rule the front page of a tabloid newspaper. ‘Man Suffers for Child’…Perhaps the romance would be with the mother of the child that I saved…Or better yet, save a woman from ultimate peril IN FRONT OF her mother; they’re on a trip together you see, trip of a lifetime and everything looks set to go horribly wrong until the intervention of yours truly. Never have any trouble with the in-laws if you meet your wife while saving her life.

And so on, enlarging the fantasy with every take-off and landing.

We land with no trouble on the only runway. Out my porthole window I can see what looks like a shed with a few people standing behind a fence. The roof is corrugated iron, rusted, and the coloured skirts of the waiting women are all blowing to their right, as if the wind is borrowing the bright colours to point at something. Sandy used to have a skirt pretty similar to the woman on the right hand end. The woman is holding her hand up to shield herself from the sun and there are a couple of men next to her that have the hue of the law about them.

The engines wind down and the cabin bursts alive with chatter, shuffling and standing, the pop of overhead compartments, the pale cooing of a young mother. The bing-bong sound that usually denotes announcements seems to be on repeat and the sudden rise of action reminds me of the courtroom. All that thickness while the judge speaks, no words or sounds but his voice in the room, all in the air and soaking into the wood, a thick lacquer of pronouncement. And then the hammer and suddenly all laughing and smiling, exclaiming, like a busy restaurant. Two bearded men, white-haired, shaking hands vigorously at the other table, the tall double doors opening and the daylight streaming in as I am led away. I remember feeling hungry, maybe that’s why I thought of the restaurant.

One of my ‘valets’ raises his eyebrows at me and I know he is asking me if I’m ready. I put my left hand out and he cuffs it to his right. We stay seated and wait for the other passengers to leave. The woman on the end is embracing another woman and they’re both smiling. From a lean-to adjacent to the shed comes a four wheel drive with a baggage cart hitched on the back. There are a couple of young men sitting on the back of the cart. They stop right underneath me and I wish I could hear the laughter that I see in their eyes, but the glass is too thick.

We stand and the flight attendant smiles gently at the policeman attached to me and then awkwardly at me. For a few seconds I imagine rescuing her on another plane trip; just her, not her mother or her child, just her.

We take the stairs as slowly as I can make the officer walk without seeming to dawdle. The air is different here and has the smell of the bush on it. The forest seems to start just as deep as you like at the end of the runway. A tattered, once orange windsock flutters next to a house, which must be the control tower. A man is locking the door and walking back towards the shed, his day’s work done. The baggies are smoking cigarettes on a ledge as the last of the cases are collected from the trolley. I can hear them now, talking about the pub, about the football, about Shelley, about anything and I’m not interested any more.

The more senior of the two officers who’d accompanied me goes over and talks to the two men who I’d seen before. The baggies are suddenly silent, interested, their knees up on the ledge, heads cocked to one side trying not to make any secret of their eavesdropping. There is nodded agreement, the shaking of hands and then one of the officers comes over and gives me a new set of handcuffs to replace the ones that had traveled with me since morning.

The metal is cold and tight.

A roller door comes clambering down on the shed, parting salutations are swallowed up by the blue night and drone of crickets. The boys are walking towards the car park and the flight attendants and captain are behind them, their stylish city luggage in tow. They are headed for a hotel in town where they will stay the night before flying again tomorrow.

Somewhere outside that one-flight-a-day town I am to be incarcerated.

But I know if I hear the crickets on occasion and feel that warm breeze on the back of my neck once a year, that the time will probably pass with little event.