completely the wrong context. Vernon found it quite endearing, for the short-term anyway.
‘Yeah, it’s been good. Listen, Shirl, I gotta go. I’m picking up my boy from the airport and he’ll be through any minute. I’ll call you, OK?’
‘OK sugar. You take care now. Kissy kissy kissy.’
‘Kissy kissy kissy,’ Vernon muttered back, as quietly as he possibly could. A little Jamaican boy of about seven still managed to overhear, though, and mimicked him with glee.
Vernon glared at him, putting his cellphone back in his jacket pocket, and glancing at his watch again. Where the hell were they?
A young couple pushing a trolley piled high with suitcases came through the barrier, causing the entire Jamaican clan to leap up and shout for joy, running out to greet them as if invading a soccer pitch, jumping and clapping and embracing them. Vernon could hear them talking excitedly, and the word ‘London’ came up several times. So they must have come off the same flight as Kate and Jack. They’d be out any minute.
Another thirty-five minutes later, he was still waiting. All the people who had been standing with him were long gone, and a whole new set had taken up their places at the barrier. He tried to call Kate, left a message for her. A stream of passengers in saris and turbans were now coming through, not remotely looking as if they were recently arrived from London.
Vernon tutted. He was busting for a piss, but he didn’t want to leave in case he missed them. Besides, he really needed to get back to his office – he had seventeen student papers on symbolism in classic American literature to grade before the end of term next week. Keeping an eye on the sliding doors, he walked across to the Information kiosk, and waited in line there for five minutes while the man behind the counter explained to an elderly Irish couple the procedure for tracking missing luggage.
‘It wasn’t there!’ the woman, who had patchy grey hair and an anxious face, kept saying. ‘All the bags were off, the belt was empty, and ours wasn’t there! Has someone taken it by mistake, do you think? We had presents in there, for our grandson! What’ll we do now if you can’t find it?’
Her husband turned to her and put a placatory hand on her tweedy sleeve. ‘Stop fretting, would you, Deirdre! It’s not helping things, now is it? This gentleman will phone through to London for us, and check it got on the plane in the first place, isn’t that right, sir?’
Vernon interrupted. He had a very bad feeling growing in the pit of his stomach. ‘Excuse me. Did you just say you came from London, and all the bags are through?’
‘Not ours,’ replied the woman. ‘Ours is lost, you see, and it’s full of –’
‘Were you on flight BA0213?’
‘We were, but –’
‘And there’s nobody back through there still waiting for their luggage?’
‘I wouldn’t know about that, now,’ said the man, slightly impatiently. ‘But I can tell you that the luggage conveyor belt was empty, so I suppose not.’
He turned back to the man behind the counter, who was dialling numbers on a telephone.
Vernon stepped away from the kiosk, his mind racing. The flight had landed. The bags were through. Kate’s phone was off. He was almost certain that he’d have seen them if they’d come through those sliding doors. Had they missed the flight? Then why hadn’t she called to tell him? Surely she wasn’t so dumb or thoughtless that she’d omit to do that?
He stood very still amid a sea of people weaving their way around him, motionless as they bumped into him with suitcases and trolleys, looking down at bodies of all different shapes, sizes and colours, trying to spot the woman he had once loved.
A horrible recognition swept over him; a distant memory breaking through the surface with sudden, perfect clarity. Something about Kate going over to England for Lil’s ninetieth birthday had been nagging at him all week, but it wasn’t until now that he realised what it was: the last time Kate had planned to go to England for one of Lil’s birthdays had been five years ago, for Lil’s eighty-fifth. Jack had just been a baby, coming up to his own first birthday. Kate was going to take him with her, ‘so they could celebrate both birthdays together.’ But at the last minute Jack had come down with a fever, and she hadn’t wanted to go without him. Vernon had been secretly delighted – he’d been pissed that Kate would deny him the opportunity to be there for his own son’s first birthday.
Jack’s birthday was September 1st. And it was now June.
Vernon let out a noise which was a cross between a roar and a frustrated sort of yelp, causing the Irish couple with the lost luggage, as well as most of the passengers in the vicinity, to whip their heads around and stare at him.
‘That goddamn bitch!’ he yelled, kicking hard at the end leg of a row of seats, spilling the coffee of the woman sitting at the other end and causing her to jump up in alarm.
She won’t get away with this, he thought, stalking back towards the car park before Security were summoned to escort him off the premises. No way is she taking my son. No way is she having him; he’s mine. I’ll hunt her down like a dog, and she’ll be sorry she ever messed with me. She can have the fucking divorce, I’ll be glad to see the back of her whining miserable back. But there is no way on God’s earth that she’s having my boy.
When he got to the ticket machines to pay for the several hours he’d been parked in Short Stay, he dug angrily in his pockets for change, waiting in line behind a young bespectacled man who couldn’t seem to fathom how the machine worked. The man had a huge suitcase standing on its end beside him, and Vernon’s rage increased as the man dithered and flapped, trying to put his ticket in the slot for banknotes. Vernon could not contain himself any longer.
‘It’s simple, jerkoff ! Put the goddamn ticket in THERE, and the goddamn money in THERE. What’s your fucking problem?’
Before the young man could reply, Vernon pushed over his suitcase, causing it to thud heavily against the ticket machine. He took out his cellphone and hit the speed-dial to call Kate. It went straight to voicemail. He strode back towards the terminal again.
He’d had an idea.
Taking a deep breath to try and calm himself down, he forced himself to walk slowly up to the British Airways Reservations desk.
‘I want to buy a ticket to London. Leaving tomorrow, as early as possible.’
They drove in silence for a while, creeping through traffic lights and across zebra crossings towards London’s western edge. These outer reaches of the city seemed so sad and run-down, the bright sunshine exposing the cracks and the filth, the boarded-up shops, black bin liners spilling their guts on every kerb. Kate couldn’t help but see it as a kind of virus that had spread through the city, so that every borough looked the same: the same shops on every high street, identical gangs of teenagers in identical clothes. Actually, there was something hopeful about the kids, the way they thrived in the most barren places, their adaptability, making their own fun and enjoying life though it appeared the world hated them. Again, like viruses. And soon these parts of London would be stricken by another disease: gentrification would come and prices would soar, and that branch of Tennessee Fried Chicken would become a nice little deli, and the kids would be driven
