We Are Now Beginning Our Descent by James Meek Read Free Book Online Page A

had bandages. It turned out that they did, a clinical range and variety, as if regiments of the wounded regularly stopped to change their dressings in transit through Heathrow. Four laden shelves barked the legacy of sawbones past, with layers of boast like the multidecker ads in old newspapers. Advanced First Aid – Stops Bleeding Fast – Dressings – For Larger Cuts And Grazes – Absorbs Blood – Hypoallergenic, said one box. Faster Healing – Skin Closure Kit – For Deeper Cuts. Kellas took two of these, and two stretch bandages (High Quality – Non-fray – Bandages To Hold Dressings Firmly In Place). He would use one of each, and the remainder would constitute his goods for the voyage to America. He didn’t want to enter the first-class saloon with frayed bandages. By the time he reached the washroom, a luxurious bead of fresh blood was stroking its way towards the saddle of his hand. Kellas yanked a wad of paper towels from the dispenser but still a drop fell onto the floor tiles before he could blot it up. A cleaner in a green polyester suit set down his bucket some distance away.
    ‘You can’t do that in here,’ he said, as if a place elsewhere in the airport had been set aside for that purpose, with its own pictogram. The bleeding man, black on yellow.
    ‘Sorry,’ said Kellas, ducking down and removing the spot with a dab and a smear. ‘I need a fresh bandage.’
    He took off his jacket, laid it next to the washbasin, rolled up his bloodied sleeve and ran the bandaged arm under a stream of cold water. He’d made a mess of it, and he was going to make a mess of it again, because it was hard to dress a wound on your ownforearm. He took off the ragged cloth he’d bound the cut with, using teeth as a third hand, a few hours earlier. Now the cloth looked a hundred years old. Washed, the cut was long, not deep, a sticky channel where the clot had split down the middle and begun to bleed again. A doctor might counsel stitches, but he could get by without. It was still difficult to understand how he’d done it, although he had filled the Cunnerys’ with sharp, jagged edges in a short time. He’d been efficient enough in that way and only when all the women, Melissa, Lucy, Sophie, Margot and Tara, were screaming and yelling at once had he grown tired and careless. All the men, too; a seamless bellowing and barking, like cattle and wolves in the pen together, disturbed from their struggle with each other by a more terrible common enemy from the plain beyond. It was perhaps the sight of the blood that had stopped them laying hands on him for long enough for him to run out of the house.
    He took the skin closure kit and bandage out of the Boots plastic bag, out of their boxes and out of their clear plastic wrapping and laid them on either side of the tap. The men coming and going from the washbasins on either side all glanced at his medical supplies. Nobody asked, and the question marks were hidden in the sound of flushing and banging cubicle doors and zips and hot air dryers. Kellas picked up the kit and prepared to use his teeth. He felt a hand on his shoulder and the cleaner took the kit from him. Without speaking, without looking at Kellas’s face until the end, the cleaner took charge of Kellas’s wound. He had warm, gentle hands, slightly rough, and treated Kellas with the fatherly, sceptical firmness of a cheap barber. He had grey curly hair and a grey moustache and North African features. He must have been in his fifties. A smell of cologne came from the warmth of his head and neck. Kellas was grateful for the help and more grateful still that the cleaner neither spoke nor expected him to speak. He had intended to ask his name, and where he was from, but when the cleaner finished his swift, neat work, stood back, grasped the haft of his mop and nodded at Kellas,Kellas only said ‘Shukran’, one of the cluster of words he’d memorised since beginning to learn Arabic a few months earlier in