Free We Are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek

easier if she were there. The only thing he was sure he was remembering right was the tiny sound that came from inside her as she hoisted a load onto her back. He listened to his memory of the sound of the life in her until it got dark and the Uaziks’ headlights swept at last onto a metalled road.

4
    A n automated voice at Heathrow called the boarding of Kellas’s flight. He passed the last cluster of shops before the walk to the gate. There was a bookshop, and he had nothing to read. He stood a few feet from the entrance, staring at the first table, which was stacked with copies of an American revelatory liberal tract called From Plato to Nato . If he went any closer there was a risk he might see copies of a book with a green-and-red cover that he had been avoiding since it was published, although he had read it twice. He’d seen it last night, at the Cunnerys’. It’d been brought out; it’d been signed. Conversations had followed and events had occurred, the memory of which snapped at and menaced his footsteps. He turned away from the bookshop and walked to the departure gate, empty-handed, injured and eager for champagne.
    He walked down the gangway into the electric smell of the aircraft and the whine of the generator. For a moment he was part of the tired shuffling in the plane’s porch, a procession fenced-in toughly by the bared teeth of the crew, until they found him to be one of the privileged, and directed him left into the first class cabin. The passengers already boarded there lolled in bloated loungers, sunk in the pleated folds of dyed cowhide like child kings. He found his place by the window. In the aisle seat next to him was a tall, heavily-built woman in her twenties wearing pearls and an expensively tailored suit the colour and texture of white water-lily petals. Here in the nose of the 747 there was so much space that she didn’t need to move her feet, let alone standup, as he came past her. She looked up from the book she was reading. He could see it was Chinese or Japanese. She smiled at him and they said ‘Hi’ to each other. Kellas fastened his seatbelt. He fidgeted with the buckle and bit his nails and sweated. He was not a bad flyer. It was the ground that was making him ill. The longer the aircraft stood at the gate, the more rituals, the hot towels – why did people wipe their faces with them? Did they have dirty faces? – the more calm drivel from the pilot, the more unlikely it seemed that this lumbering, thin-skinned metal crucifix stuffed with travellers could fly him off the island and across the ocean and away from the shame that was growing in him. Like prayer beads through his fingers, he felt and counted the things he had done and said at the Cunnerys’. It was still possible that – if a Mr Kellas was on board, could he make himself known? He anticipated the cold of the handcuffs against the skin of his wrists, and their weight. He looked over his shoulder. There were fast feet down the aisle, almost running, and dark cloth. It was one of the cabin attendants. He looked at Kellas, put his hand to his mouth, bent his knees, reached out and touched him on the shoulder. ‘Did I frighten you? Oh, I’m ever so sorry. I’m in such a hurry today! Everything all right?’
    ‘It’s OK, I’m fine,’ said Kellas, feeling he’d spilled something on himself. He was placing the eight guests around the Cunnerys’ table. Cunnery to his left. Sophie M’Gurgan on his right. Lucy Flagg facing him, Pat M’Gurgan next to her, Joe Betchcott in the too-tight sweater and Margot and Melissa at the far end. Your own mind was a hard thing to manipulate: it had so many automatic processes. Where he wanted to tab it was the question about Afghanistan to which he’d given such a plain answer. He would rather hold that as the start point of this sagging weight of guilt, heavy on his stomach. He would have preferred to keep the other details as another class of remembered things, moated from