This Other Eden (24 page)

It took
some guts to say it. There were four Garda officers in the room, and any one of
them, including the woman constable, could have just about put Judy in their
pocket. They laughed at him, of course. Even Rosalie could not help sniggering
at the man’s front.

‘So
what you’re saying, Agent Schwartz,’ the Inspector asked, ‘is that, in the
event of the suspect playing silly buggers, you feel that you will be better
placed to prevent her escape than my officers? Is that it?’

‘I have
been very highly trained, sir. No offence is intended.’

The
Inspector just laughed again and instructed his man to handcuff the suspect to
the American, if that was what he wanted. Judy asked for the key but was told
perfunctorily that it was not Garda policy to leave the key with the man
wearing the handcuffs. Judy could have it when they were on the plane.

And in
this manner they left for the airport, Judy, Rosalie and two Garda officers. It
was pretty much at the same time that Max and Nathan were heading out the same
way. Rosalie, however, was destined to miss her plane.

Riveting
viewing.

Judy and Rosalie stood
apart from the queue as one of the officers checked them in for their flight.
There were, as in all airports, numerous television sets hanging from the
ceiling and attached to the walls. Some offered flight information, others
offered what could loosely be called ‘entertainment’: cable music video
channels, local morning TV and interactive games.

Many
years previously, it had been decreed by the moguls of media and marketing that
the human race was so utterly devoid of originality and creative powers that it
was incapable of getting through even the simplest activity without some
electronically delivered stimulus. Hence, shopping malls were suddenly suffused
with tinny renditions of classic pop songs, wafting hither and thither amongst
the discarded litter, dried up fountains and utterly repulsive sculptures. It
was possible for old people to stand for ever on escalators that had never
worked and die to the sound of ‘Wonderful World’. Lifts, shops, even buses, all
began to sing. When people rang up for mini-cabs they were forced to sit
through fifteen minutes of commercial radio before being told that there was a
three-day wait for cars at the present time. Noise joined the dazzling pot
pourri of pollutants that the industrialised world was devising in order to
make the fact of being alive ever more unpleasant.

Nor was
it just aural ‘entertainment’ that was forced upon people who had previously
been capable of doing their shopping without having to listen to orchestral
arrangements of Beatles’ hits. Televisions began to appear everywhere. The
logic was that, because people liked to watch the television in their
living-rooms, then they would surely like to watch it in all other
circumstances. Coaches, shops and particularly pubs and bars were invaded. The
appearance of TVs in pubs was surely the cruellest blow of all, for a pub is
above all a place of social intercourse. It evolved out of a natural human
desire to go out, meet other people and talk to them. A telly has no place in a
pub. People do not have beer-taps in their living-rooms. A telly utterly
destroys all possibility of conversation, for it is a physical property of all
televisions that
the eye is inevitably drawn to them.
Its hypnotic
powers know no bounds. If a telly is on in a public place, people cannot avoid
staring at it. The sound does not even have to be on. No matter how boring the
programme, and no matter how interesting the conversation one is having at the
time, the eye will slowly drift over to the television and have to be
constantly dragged back. TVs can now be found in post offices, banks and police
stations. Surely it is only a matter of time before they appear in operating
theatres, which will mean a lot of wrong bits get cut off.

Handling
the handlers.

Socially disastrous though
these electronic intrusions usually are, they were good news for Rosalie,
although she did not yet know it.

Judy
had been waiting for his chance and now he saw it. One police person was
checking them in, the other was momentarily transfixed by the silent broadcast
of a morning shopping show being presented on a wall-mounted television nearby.

‘Hope
the flight’s on time,’ Judy ventured.

‘Mmm,’
the policeman replied, his attention elsewhere.

‘I’ll
bet the VR helmets on the plane don’t work,’ Judy mused.

‘Mmm,’
replied the distracted policeman.

‘Would
it be OK if Rosalie and I were to jump across that empty check-in position and
disappear through the rubber curtains on to the luggage belt?’ Judy asked in a
bored voice.

‘Mmm,’
the policeman replied.

Fortunately
Judy had squeezed Rosalie’s hand to get her attention, for she too had been
staring at a TV set.

‘Thanks,’
said Judy. ‘Let’s go, Rosalie.’

And,
handcuffed together though they were, they jumped across the check-in bay and
pushed themselves through the rubber curtains.

‘What
in the name of goodness is going on?’ Rosalie cried as they began to glide
along the conveyor belt with all the luggage.

‘I
don’t think now is the time to explain,’ Judy answered.

Up
ahead of them, the baggage handlers were performing their duties as laid down
by the airport authority. These consisted of flipping one catch open on every
fourth bag, sprinkling red wine and bits of broken glass on everything and
loosening one wheel on each baby carriage.

‘Airport
cops behind us,’ Judy shouted at the baggage handlers.

He was
pretty sure what their reaction would be, and he was right. The idea that the
airport police had been set upon them yet again was a red rag to a bull for
airport baggage handlers. They are notoriously easy to offend. Baggage handlers
know that everybody hates them. They know that every individual passenger feels
personally victimised by them, believing that their own particular bag has been
deliberately held back. They know that everybody firmly believes the lengthy
time it takes to get the bags to the carousels is caused by the handlers trying
to decide what to steal. They know that the tatty, forlorn little unclaimed
suitcase which seems to have been bolted to every carousel by the manufacturers
is taken by the public as evidence that the handlers remove only one bag at a
time from the aeroplanes and refuse to get another until that one has been
claimed. All this the baggage handlers know and they do not like it. They
believe it is the public who are the unreasonable and indeed immoral ones. They
believe that the public deliberately fill any excess spaces left over after
they have packed with lead ballast, in order to ensure that an adequate level
of spinal injury is inflicted upon the handlers. They believe that it is the
public who neglect to fasten their luggage properly, so that the bags explode
in a flurry of dirty knickers on the conveyor belt. The handler is then
expected to restuff them whilst all the while an inadequately wrapped granite
boulder is bearing down upon him.

The
public hates handlers and handlers hate the public. It is a universal truth and
cannot be altered. If there is life elsewhere in space then it may be safely
presumed that there are little green men and women exchanging horror stories
about how their cases ended up in the wrong solar system.

‘What
aliens must think of our planet when they visit I just don’t know,’ the little
green creatures will declaim loudly to each other as they mill aimlessly around
the baggage collection transporter rooms. ‘When we can’t even beam down a few
damn cases from the mother ship.’

All
this antagonism has led to a sullen touchiness on the part of baggage handlers
worldwide. It was these feelings of persecution that Judy was attempting to
exploit when he announced that the two figures emerging through the rubber
curtains behind them were airport police. He had judged the situation well.

‘Right,
that’s it,’ the handlers said to each other and turned off the conveyor belt.
‘Yet again, we’re being harassed by the company. Yet again, we’re being
categorised as a bunch of thieving job’s-worths who have to be constantly spied
upon in case we try to pinch a plane.’

And so
a strike was called, which left the two Garda minders stuck on the stationary
belt, struggling to follow Judy and Rosalie, whilst angry handlers expressed
their antagonism to authority by heaping luggage in their way.

A
not very alert security alert.

Outside in the arrivals
hall alarm bells were ringing and police and soldiers had started to run around
all over the place. This was all to the good, as far as Judy was concerned. For
the airport, like all European airports, was on hair-trigger alert for
terrorist attack. Every day, the authorities planned in meticulous detail where
every soldier and every police person should run to the moment the alarms went
off. They held a full dress-rehearsal once a week with smoke and blank bullets
and everything. There were also regular false alarms which occurred when old
ladies forgot to inform the authorities that they had packed a small handbag
mounted mortar for personal protection. All this training meant that when the
alarms went off, the soldiers and police at the airport operated with
machine-like efficiency … only, however, if there was a terrorist attack
underway. If, for instance, two handcuffed people were trying to slip quietly
out of the airport together, the activities of the security forces were not
merely irrelevant but actively counter-productive.

‘This
way,’ Judy instructed Rosalie and, jumping off the conveyor belt, he pulled her
towards the next set of rubber curtains along the line.

‘But
that’s back into the check-in area,’ Rosalie protested.

‘I
know,’ said Judy, trying not to resent her for acting as if he was an idiot.
‘Do what I tell you and we may get out of this

OK?’

Rosalie
had nothing to lose.

‘OK,’
she said.

‘Good.
Now when we go through the curtains, hold up your arm so that everybody can see
the cuffs, right? And shout out that it’s all right, you’ve got me and
everybody should be calm. All right?’

‘But…’ Rosalie attempted to interject.

‘Look!
You’re a tough, beautiful Irish girl, right? I’m an American nerd. In terms of
bluffing our way out of Dublin airport, who do you think should play the good
guy?’

Rosalie
could see the logic. She dragged him through the rubber curtains, emerging
behind an Aer Lingus check-in girl who was in the process of telling everybody
to be calm. The whole hall was a mass of confusion.

‘Garda
Special Branch,’ Rosalie shouted, holding their arms aloft. ‘It’s fine. I have
him.’ And with that she thrust herself forwards past the Aer Lingus desk and
into the astonished line of travellers. For a moment the crowd did not part,
and Rosalie experienced a split second of panic as she thought the bluff had
failed.

‘Make
way now! Clear a path,’ she shouted, pushing on, dragging Judy with her.
Rosalie need not have worried. The momentary hesitation on the part of the
crowd in front of her was merely due to the fact that, even during a terrorist
attack, the first instinct of a person in an airport queue is to protect their
place. The nagging suspicion that everything that happens is a ploy by some
other traveller to push in dies hard. Fortunately, Rosalie’s natural ability to
command and the inherent dignity of her bearing won through.

‘Get
out of the fucking way, all of you! I’ve got a killer here,’ she screeched,
flailing her free arm about and the people parted. They did more than part,
they cheered and clapped. Judy had again judged the psychology of the situation
to perfection. The sight of a pretty little local girl with flashing green eyes
capturing such a nasty looking foreign weasel of a man filled the crowd with a
sense of romance and pride.

‘Death
to all papists!’ Judy shouted in his broadest Southern US accent. ‘The Elitest
Church of Christ the Crew-cut is the one true faith.’

Judy
knew that Ireland is a country that has suffered more than most from religious
bigotry over the years, and he reasoned that people would be pretty happy to
see a bigot busted, particularly a Protestant one. He reasoned correctly. How
they cheered as their brave girl cop escorted the evil zealot across the
arrivals hall. People from other queues heard the commotion and walked across
to see what the fuss was about. In a few moments, a large crowd was celebrating
the victory of law and order over bigotry and violence.

‘OK,
let me through, this is isn’t a freak show,’ Rosalie shouted as the crowd
pressed in. Judy began to regret inflaming the crowd, but help was on its way.

‘Get
back there, sharp now!’

The
voice was that of an army sergeant who, seeing that a capture had been made,
was following statutory instructions to facilitate an orderly arrest. Before
they knew it, Rosalie was escorting Judy up an avenue of soldiers who, whilst
grinning broadly, were holding back the cheering and rapidly growing crowd. People
usually felt so helpless in the face of terrorism, that to see it temporarily
vanquished was a massive thrill for everybody at the airport, soldiers and
public alike.