Milkshake (2 page)

David walked through the empty door frame of the scanner. He
felt its invisible rays amplifying his guilt. “Excuse me, Mr
Turner!” He felt his face flush red and his chest begin to thump as
he turned around. It was the same security guard. “It’s Gate 30.
Your wife is waiting. Go straight down this corridor, then take a
right and follow the signs. It’s about eight minutes at a brisk
walk. I’ll radio ahead to tell them you’re on your way.” David
looked at his watch. A brisk walk? He felt like
sprinting.

“Thanks for your help.” He may as well have just shouted,
“Look at me!’ having probably just created another few dozen
witnesses to the CCTV image likely to appear on the T.V. Breaking
News within the hour.

David stepped onto the moving walkway. The machine walked for
him. It was impossible to take normal steps. He reached into his
pocket, feeling the reassuring presence of his leather passport
cover.

He felt in his trouser pocket for the wallet he had placed
there moments earlier. It had been out of his possession for a few
short seconds as it passed through the x-ray scanner. Justification
for a quick check of the contents, not that there was much to
check. A brief glance confirmed everything was in place, except
there was something he was not expecting.

A small piece of yellow paper protruded from the credit card
pocket. He pulled and it came out, stuck to the front of an
unfamiliar credit card. He lifted the yellow label. It was plain,
mainly silver and, along the top, in bold black lettering
Associated Bank of Monaco
. To the left, the familiar logo of the credit card company,
and next to the expiry date the embossed name was clearly his own.
He turned the card over. The signature box was empty.

Was this really his card? He had received unsolicited
invitations to apply for credit cards from some pretty obscure
institutions recently. An ignored ‘gold card’ invitation was often
followed by an improved offer of the ‘exclusive platinum card’.
Some companies increased the marketing flattery and went straight
for the platinum offer. He had resisted them all. The yellow
sticker contained four hand written numbers - ‘1296’. The PIN
number for a card he knew nothing about?

The moving walkway gave way to marble. David still had the
credit card in his palm. He could easily snap it in two and throw
it into the next rubbish bin. He saw the sign for the ATM Machine.
Why would anyone want cash between the security check and the
departure gate?

There was no queue. It would only take seconds. Before he
realised, David had walked up to the machine, offered the card to
the slot and it was sucked in. David thought it would end there,
that it had been recognised as stolen or fake, and been retained.
Then the screen changed:

Please enter your four digit PIN and press #.

He glanced over his shoulder, then at the piece of
paper:

1-2-9-6

He was about to leave the country for good but the bill was
bound to catch up in the redirected mail, so there was really no
point. But the card seemed legitimate. It had allowed him to get
this far and he was curious to find out exactly how far it would
let him go. He pressed ‘balance enquiry print out’ and checked over
his shoulder again as the balance briefly flashed onto the screen
before:

If you do not want further services press enter to remove
your card.

He pressed and the card was ejected into his waiting hand.
Numbers on a piece of paper were sent out through a different
slot.

David looked but he couldn’t read it. It
was too long. There was no minus figure. This was a credit
balance.

If the card was valid, and the ATM machine wasn’t faulty,
David was holding a piece of plastic that potentially gave him
access to - he was trying to work out the decimal point - two
hundred and fifty five million, six hundred and forty thousand, two
hundred and eighty seven pounds.

Surely this was a stolen card, yet somehow it was in his
possession with his name clearly etched on it. He was too far from
the security gate to go back. In fact he was technically already
out of the country. He opened his wallet and placed the card and
the PIN number inside. Tearing the printout into tiny pieces, he
stuffed them deep amongst the other discarded receipts in the small
bin under the ATM machine.

Katherine stood at Gate 30, impatiently adjusting her hair and
thinking she should have tied it back. All except two passengers on
flight NZ001 were seated, waiting for the remaining pair to
board.

It could still be too late. Security could have radioed ahead,
instructing airline staff to hold him at the gate. Even now there
could be a dozen policemen behind him, trying to negotiate the
travelator.

The stewardess smiled her best professional ‘I don’t approve
but this is my job’ smile. “Ah, Mr Turner, I presume. We’ve been
expecting you. May I see your passport and ticket? The flight is
waiting to depart.” David detected her emphasis on ‘waiting’. It
was not just ready to depart; it was waiting. He was keeping an
entire plane load of people waiting.

“Sorry, I got a bit held up.” Trying to make his excuse
vague, fixing Katherine with his best ‘I’ll explain when we get on
board’ smile, he thought it would be better to try and nip any
public argument in the bud right there and then, and avoid the
‘where the hell have you been?’ scenario, or at least save it for a
confrontation once on board where it would hopefully be diluted by
the proximity of hundreds of other people.

“Where the hell have you been? You only
went for a pee. You’ve been gone ages. They called our flight. I
waited until the last possible minute and then I had to send
someone to find you. We nearly missed our bloody flight,
David!”

David smiled inwardly as he concluded that, putting aside the
tone in which it was delivered, this was probably a fair summary of
what had gone on during his enforced absence, and that frankly he
did not really care, given what he had just gone
through.

‘Boy’, he thought; ‘Do I have an explanation for
you!’

Chapter 2

David and Katherine took their seats. The doors were sealed.
The plane disconnected itself from the boarding gate and taxied
towards the runway.

David noted an incongruous ‘ker–thunk’ as the wheels bumped
over the joints in the concrete. Aircraft streaked past the window,
followed by a momentary roar from their engines. As the plane lined
up at the end of the runway, the flight crew made final pre-flight
checks.

David looked around the cabin. No talking, just nervous
yawning. People stared at the in-flight magazine. Some flicked
through the new book they had bought for the flight.

Like bumble- bees, jumbo jets are theoretically incapable of
flying. They leave the ground purely through the collective
willpower of those on board, hence the solemnity of the atmosphere
inside. Pre–flight food and drinks had been cleared away. Trays
were returned to the upright position, the onboard entertainment
system was paused and the lights dimmed.

Now everybody, concentrate.

The cabin crew sat, palms on knees, staring benignly down the
aisle. Then a silent chant began. Each passenger took up their own
internal incantation until three hundred people were of one
mind.

Quiet contemplation was broken as the captain pushed the
throttle forward. The passengers were forced back in their seats,
their knuckles whitening. They chanted louder, their voices drowned
as the roar of four giant turbines grasped at the air in front of
them.

Eyes closed as the speed increased.

Sheer human willpower was now seeping into the superstructure,
enveloping the entire airframe. The pilot glanced to his right,
then at his instruments as the plane passed the control tower.
Suddenly the runway lights dipped beneath the nose as it lifted,
carried by a cushion of collective mental effort into the clear sky
above.

Five hours into the flight, the meal, served as soon as the
plane had levelled out, was beginning to have an effect. The
ambient noise level disguised the sounds, and hence directions,
from where the various offensive odours were emanating. David
thought they were permeating through several rows of
seats.

The trick was to just sit and hold it in, hoping it would
return like warm wax in a lava lamp, and dissipate. He had read the
laminated sheet suggesting various exercises to pass the time. No
advice on how to safely and politely pass wind at thirty thousand
feet.

It was 4.00 a.m. Finally feeling drowsy, he closed his eyes.
His hearing became more acute, more attuned to sounds other than
the incessant low whistle of the engines. He thought he could hear
another noise hidden within the engine sounds, a metallic banging
as if someone was deep inside the fuselage hitting pipework with a
hammer. Each time he opened his eyes, the distinctive sound melted
away as he looked for any sign that other people could hear it too.
When he closed his eyes again, the sound returned.

Beneath shoeless feet, under the carpeted floor, below three
metres of airframe, there was nothing - an empty expanse of
screaming icy air. David resigned himself to being disturbed by his
latent fear and morbid imagination for the duration of the
flight.

He yelped as a loud bang woke him with a start, the pain deep
in his neck thrusting down his left arm as he straightened in his
seat. There had been no loud bang and the subdued scene around him
was as he had left it before drifting off to sleep. A screen
attached to the bulkhead displayed a map of the world indicating
that a small yellow aircraft, trailing a thin line of the same
colour, was now more than half way to Singapore.

It was reassuring the map showed no other planes in the
vicinity. In fact, according to the screen, no other planes were
currently in the air anywhere else in the world. He would be able
to anticipate the approach into Singapore by watching the numbers
on the altimeter decrease.

As the cabin crew processed along the aisle checking seatbelts
and clipping trays back into place, he turned to Katherine who had
been asleep for much of the flight. “I think we’ll be landing
soon.”

She nodded sleepily and he realised they had probably not
spoken more than a dozen words to each other since take–off. They
never usually spoke between eleven-thirty at night and seven-thirty
in the morning. The previous few hours of silence was no more than
habit.

The captain appeared to have browsed through the manual of
alternative landing techniques during the long flight. Whoever was
at the controls now decided to begin the descent in the manner of a
small child going down stairs on their backside.

Every few minutes the plane would suddenly descend as if from
one step to the next. This was not going to be a landing, it was
controlled dropping. The plane rolled alarmingly to the left, David
looked towards the window, two seats away, and saw sea, palm trees
and small boats just above the wing tip. The plane continued in a
sweeping arc before levelling off as sharply as it had
turned.

Through the window he could make out the unfamiliar skyline of
Singapore. It sped past at a crazy angle as if gravity itself had
suddenly been switched off and everything on the face of the earth
not firmly rooted to it was now rapidly sliding away. David
imagined every human, every building, sliding off as the oceans
poured themselves around the curvature of the earth before forming
a giant tear and dropping off at the South Pole.

There was a final plummet and the wheels banged hard onto the
runway, the combination of fierce braking and reverse thrust making
the cabin bulkheads shake violently from side to side.

As they stepped from the plane, it was as if they had flown in
a huge circle. The walkway to the terminal seemed identical to the
one in London, the baggage trolleys looked familiar and the
brightly–lit posters were advertising the same cameras, phone
companies and credit cards as the ones they had seen at
Heathrow.

It was not long before some of the essence of the true culture
beyond the airport began to infuse the surroundings. It began
simply - exotic foliage in locally decorated pots lined their path
and signs were bi–lingual, with English as the second language. As
they moved closer to Immigration, the hum of humanity grew louder.
So many different cultures and creeds were being drawn towards this
point.

Insomnia–induced meanderings abruptly halted as his mind
returned him back to London. By now the police would have viewed
the security camera footage and identified David Turner leaving the
car park shortly before the body was discovered. They had tracked
him onto the plane where he had remained secure and contained. The
authorities in Singapore had been contacted and alerted to his
imminent arrival, and armed police would be waiting to arrest him
as he approached the immigration desk.

Mingling with a nonchalant lack of interest amongst the slow
moving mass of new arrivals might just fool any welcoming party.
Katherine had joined the shortest queue. At least this would reduce
an unbearable sense of expectation that was now sending his stomach
into sickening spasms.