Doctor Who_ Cat's Cradle_ Warhead - Andrew Cartmel [60]
The dolmus for the airport left late that evening. Ace killed time packing and reading a battered English‐language paperback she’d taken from a stack in the lobby. Most of the books in the stack were about murder. Ace was left with a choice between the complete English poems of John Donne and a slavery‐and‐plantation‐saga. Ace took the John Donne. The book of poems fell open at ‘The Anniversarie’:
When man doth die. Our body’s as the womb
And as a midwife death directs it home.
Ace went back for the plantation novel.
This last hotel of Ace’s journey was called The Dove. It was located among a cluster of similar square white tourist units in Icmeler, a resort west of Marmaris. Ace bought a chilled bottle of apricot juice in the small hotel bar – three stools, a shelf and a freezer – and sat with her bags in the lobby. She had almost no luggage left now, having shed things at every stage of her journey, then leaving the rest of it last night on the road and in the ditch. Ace read her book and didn’t think about Massoud. When the dolmus came it was full of suntanned secretaries from the north of England, drinking to kill their depression at having to fly home to the rain and word processing. Ace sat beside a young woman with tattoos and a tee‐shirt that had a hologram decal of Alistair Crowley on the front of it. They passed two camels on the road and the woman photographed both of them. In the fields on either side of the road people were labouring, working their smallholdings by hand.
* * *
The flight was late. Ace had checked in and received her boarding pass three hours ago. The duty‐free shop sold expensive boxes of Turkish delight, cheap computer memory and a selection of spirits. Ace was tempted to buy a bottle to obliterate the waiting. Drink half of it and simply wipe out the interval, wake up when the plane arrived. A new form of time travel. Instead she joined the other passengers stranded in the departure lounge. Their flight had been late out of Heathrow. Unexpected atmospheric conditions.
The airport was echoing and hollow, the occasional announcements ringing off the tiled surfaces, in Turkish then in English. It was three in the morning and the returning holidaymakers looked pale and exhausted under the cruel lighting. Children were crying and in one corner a young couple were having an intense argument, conducting it in whispers. Every face she saw was tired and defeated. Ace sat on one of the plastic Eames chairs as far as she could get from the smell of the brimming ashtrays. Then she lay down on the cold gritty marble floor, airline bag for a pillow. Other people were lying down around her, trying to sleep. The children had stopped crying but the young man from the arguing couple was sobbing quietly in the corner, alone. A squaddie in a grey‐blue sweater and a beret tried to strike up a conversation with Ace. She picked up her bag and moved to a new position on the floor. The squaddie didn’t follow. He had a downy blond moustache and a rolled‐up copy of Hustler magazine. Ace lay staring at the airport ceiling. The floor felt good against her back. Infinitely solid.
Ace liked solid reality, when she could get it.
Uniformed guards wandered across the floor, carrying machine pistols, stepping carefully across the sleeping passengers. The departure lounge was silent now. Beyond the wide glass windows there was the black of the sky and the gleaming silver and white noses of grounded jets. Ace was thinking that the blackness was her destination. She’d be flying into it soon. Or maybe it would be blue by then. Ace saw a guard step across her. High above her. He smiled. She was certain he smiled. Ace weighed his smile against his black shoulder‐slung weapon and decided the weapon won. Ace saw a pistol in her own hand. Her heart raced, a surge of fear that the guard would see it, that everyone in the room would see it. But the gun wasn’t real, only a memory, and her hand was curled on the floor at her side, holding nothing. Her shoulder ached. She adjusted her position without thinking about it.