Free The Blasphemer: A Novel by Nigel Farndale Page B

Daniel sat upright and saw they were within a few hundred feet of the water. The ocean was a deep, vivid blue, almost violet. A coral reef and dark shadows could be seen. It felt as though they were suspended. Time slowed down, distorted,warped, expanded. The intensity of the moment was almost physical, almost too physically painful to bear. Daniel sensed he was living more in the tissue of each of these last seconds, these final heartbeats, than he had in all the frozen years of his life so far.
    The plane trembled, dropped, pulled hard left.
    We get through this together.
    Continuous juddering now. Sporadic screaming. An overhead locker flopped open. Bags of peanuts flew around the cabin. Nancy was clenching her teeth. Her eyes were bulging. She made the sign of the cross. Snatches of the pilot and co-pilot going through a checklist could be heard: ‘Right condition. Lever right. Condition. Lever.’ They were talking in English, the international language of air traffic control. It sounded like an abstract poem. ‘We out at one zero. Angel. Repeat. We out at angel.’ Beeps and synthesized warning voices could be heard as well. A metallic voice confirmed: ‘Altitude one zero. Altitude angel. ‘There was another clatter, a howl of wind, and abruptly it felt as if the air had been sucked out of the cabin. The emergency door across the aisle had opened and the flight attendant had disappeared.
    The pilot’s voice came over the intercom: ‘ Brace! Brace! ’
    Noticing a tingling sensation in his urethra, Daniel looked down and became mesmerized by a creeping dark patch around the crotch of his shorts. The image of his father’s face flashed in his head again. The smell of Mint Imperials. The plane slewed left and right. It was soundless. Powerless. They were no longer at an angle to the horizon.
    Silver shards of glass silently filled the air. The left wing clipped the surface of the water and the plane started its violent cartwheel. This, Daniel thought, is it.

CHAPTER SIX
    THE ICE RINK IN FRONT OF THE TEMPERATE HOUSE AT KEW WAS, TO Martha, a sanctuary. When she skated here she could forget about insulin, about her condition, about what made her different from the other girls. With each graceful sweep of her blades she was able to slough it all off. From the moment her parents had driven away to Heathrow two days earlier, she had been lobbying her grandparents to bring her here. Though they always found the botanical gardens too crowded on a Saturday, and resented having to pay for the skating on top of their senior citizen’s admission fee, they could hardly refuse. It was a short distance from their house. But they did qualify their capitulation: they couldn’t stay long. They were worried that Martha’s blood sugar levels would drop if she exerted herself too much in the biting cold. The weather forecast that morning had predicted that this would be one of the coldest November days on record, with temperatures dipping as low as -15 in parts of the north. Even London was expected to be -10 by late afternoon, colder than Moscow. It was afternoon now.
    As Amanda strode off to the cafeteria for two glasses of mulled wine and a mug of hot chocolate, Philip watched his granddaughter describe lazy figures of eight in the ice. Though she was easy to spot in her pink, fur-lined coat, a freezing fog was descending and every time she disappeared behind other skaters at the far side of the rink, Philip’s eyes watered as he strained to see her. His breath was mushrooming visibly in front of him and, though he waswearing a Russian Ushanka with the flaps down, and an Aran sweater under a padded wax jacket, the wind chill was reaching his bones. To try to warm up, he stamped his feet and clapped his hands. Beside him was a Finding Nemo rucksack he was looking after for Martha. Because it was on his deaf side, he could not hear the mobile ringing inside it.
    When Martha scraped to a halt in front of him, sending up a spray of