Loss of Separation by Conrad Williams Page B

was level with my face. My slack, sleepy muscles struggled with its weight. I shook it. I smelled it. The tang of metal and a shut-in odour of burned things. Plastic, aluminium, flesh. I closed my eyes and saw jerking passengers belted into their seats trying to scream, but there was no oxygen to feed them because the fire was stealing it from their lungs. I hurled the box as far as I could into the surf, rubbing and re-rubbing my hands on my jeans to get rid of the greasy feel of the thing.
    I burned the cardboard and climbed the stone steps back to the promenade, suddenly bone weary. I kept looking back, expecting to see the orange casing tumbling ashore on the filthy brown curl of tide, but I knew it would not surface again without the help of a diver.
    I walked around the village for a while, hoping to spot the person who had given the box to me. All I could think when I tried to picture his face was a number and a letter: 34A. I tried to remember if he had said that number in conjunction with the box he had handed over, but the upset of being given the CVR wouldn't let me settle on anything we discussed. By the time I reached Ruth's house, I was convinced the 34A was in my mind for some other, probably trivial, reason. His address, maybe. He must live in a flat. But how could I know that if I'd never seen him before?
    I made a cup of tea I didn't want and settled on the sofa, feeling hot and agitated. The room had a feeling of absence. It was a cool room, with little in the way of decoration or ornament. There were no clocks, no pictures, no mirrors. No magazines lying on the floor. No flowers in vases. It felt like a waiting room. It felt like a place that was never meant to be lived in.
    I grew impatient. Rest was the only word the doctors ever seemed to toss my way, but the moment I parked myself in a chair it was as if life started to accelerate around me. Tamara was getting older while I sipped tea. Her life, presumably, was thickening with other people, events, excitement, while mine spun like a dead thing caught in a web. Any doubt or regret she might be feeling was being erased every day that went by without my contacting her.
    But there was also the possibility that she, like me, was failing to kick on after the breach. There were things to do, there was this old flame of hers trying his best to re-kindle what had existed between them, and she was either going for it, or she wasn't. And here I was wondering whether I ought to give a shit. She didn't stick with me, so who was to say, were she to come back, that she wouldn't hightail it again if some other catastrophe befell me?
    The empty room sucked any noise I made into it and shared it around. I placed the tea cup on its saucer and the room filled with brittle echoes. Then I had to move again, to take the cup from the anaesthetic living room and deposit it in the kitchen, which contained a welcome chaos. I stood by the window and looked out at the massive Suffolk sky. There were no aircraft up there just now, but there were plenty of contrails to show where they had been. When there were no jets, it was easy to convince myself that they did not exist, that it was all a mental construct. How could they exist? How could something weighing the same as 800 elephants get off the ground? Lift and thrust. And bollocks. I passed my 'A' level in Physics, I had flown the bastards, but I still couldn't get my head around it. I think, maybe, that part of the accident - the almost accident - came about because at base I didn't have faith in these machines. I had trained for years and spent a lot of money following my dream, but that's all it was. A fancy created by an ambitious imagination.
    It had been a year since the near miss; I could hardly remember what I needed to do to taxi from the apron to the runway. My hands no longer looked like the kind of things that were capable of the delicate manoeuvring that took a mass of metal up, or brought it down. And now, every time