Flight from Africa continued

“Good afternoon again Ladies and Gentlemen, this is Clive your Captain speaking again. We are now flying at around twenty-eight thousand feet and should be arriving at London Gatwick at 3.30 local time - about ten minutes ahead of schedule on account that we have a strong tail wind. The weather there is warm and sunny – in fact not dissimilar to the weather we’ve just left behind in Nice. I hope you enjoy your flight, thank you.” The annoying Australian accent of the pilot angered Justin. It’s OK him talking about the warm weather in Nice and Gatwick, he thought. What about the minus forty degrees or so that the stowaway is having to endure in the undercarriage bay at this very moment? How is he managing to hang on to his precarious perch in the piercing cold? The thin cotton shirt would be nowhere near warm enough for him to have any chance of surviving. Anyway, what was an Australian doing flying short-haul passenger jets in Europe – wasn’t he good enough for Qantas? Justin stared out of the window in an attempt to try to forget about the African under his feet. He stared out into the thin wisps of cloud that striped the sky and then down to the mountains of the Massif Central range that was starting to rise beneath the plane. The snow-capped peaks looked cold and sharp and uninviting. Cold enough to cause white frost to form on the skin of any person exposed to the inhospitable conditions, and for the throats of the same people to become dry and sore, making breathing arduous and painful. It is known that mountaineers and others exposed to extreme cold and dry conditions need to take on huge amounts of liquid because of the evaporation of water from their lungs – even without any physical effort being expended. Justin looked into his plastic glass, which now contained a healthy slug of Beefeater (but no ice!) from the bottle he’d secreted aboard to complement the tonic he’d purchased, and wondered just how thirsty the African was. Did he even have the time to realise that he was thirsty? Was the effort required to hang onto the undercarriage assembly and the need to stay conscious overriding his desire to drink? Was he still even conscious at all, or had his chilled body slumped disconsolately onto the inside of the doors awaiting their inevitable opening at the end of the flight and his ejection into the unseasonably warm air of southern England? Had his core temperature descended so far as to numb his synapses to the point of complete disorientation and a feeling of disembodiment from reality – or was the pain of his slow death being eased by the numbness caused by the cold?

So he’d killed him. Justin was now responsible for the death of another human being. It was something that he never thought that he would be guilty of – he’d been a choirboy at the same church that Anne was being married in later that afternoon. He knew that he knew better than to have allowed the man to continue with his foolish mission – the African probably thought that it was as warm up in the sky as it was on the ground – what would he know about the artificially sealed world of the inside of an airliner with its toilets, reading lights, reclining seats for those small enough to appreciate them and air-conditioning? It was Justin’s fault and he began to feel the full fear of realising that he would have to spend the rest of his life knowing what he had done.

Pierre’s hands were soft and Claire moaned softly under their gentle pressure. He had obviously done this many times before and was, therefore, in her mind, an expert. The warm sticky liquid between his fingers was causing her to enjoy moments of intense pleasure as he kneaded it into the back of her thighs. She’d only asked him, as it was his day off, if he would put some sun tan lotion on her back as she lay beside the pool. She’d explained earlier that Justin would be away until the next day and so she was on her own. Pierre hadn’t had sex for a week or so and knew that this one would be easy.

The plastic encased sheet of A4 was entitled, ‘The Boeing 737-300’. It was tucked into the back of the seats for travellers with no newspapers or books and who were not interested in the in-flight magazine, but who had an interest in the technical specifications of, well, just about anything. There were pictures of the cabin layout so that Justin could work out which seat he was sitting on and diagrammatic pictures showing front, side and top elevations of the plane so that Justin could work out which window he was looking out of. The question of why the windows were not always directly next to the seats had often occurred to him when travelling next a window that was either too far forward or too far back from the seat he was sitting in. The answer was in the diagrams. Obviously, when they design a plane they decide on the number of windows very early on. The different carriers who subsequently buy the planes decide how many people they wish to carry on them. For someone like Easy-Jet, the no-frills (thrills?) airline it is imperative that they are able to stuff as many people as possible into the available space meaning that anyone over five foot six will suffer discomfort. Other airliners that charge higher prices for their tickets, can afford to move the seats further apart and therefore make their fewer passengers happier to pay the higher price with the knowledge that at least they will be marginally more comfortable. The window, though never moves. Closer examination of the diagrams then had Justin trying to determine just how much space was afforded to the landing gear under the seats. The picture couldn’t be to scale, Justin surmised, else the wheel would be actually poking up though the floor against his feet. But there couldn’t be much space there, whatever. Once again his thoughts turned to the frozen body of the African beneath his feet. Would the man have cried out in his pain and anguish as he realised his fate, and would he have died with his eyes still open from the terror of what he’d just experienced? Was blood from the injury he’d undoubtedly received when the wheels retracted into the fuselage, still seeping from the wound? – Was there a small trail of frozen type B trickling along the bottom of the plane towards the tail plane?

Back