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

anticipation of the invasion of Iraq.
    The cleaner smiled. ‘You’re welcome,’ he said. ‘Have a nice flight.’
    When he came back out into the lurid mall of departures Kellas felt an unpleasant tang at the back of his mouth and began to blink. The cleaner had been kind; kindness was not good for Kellas now. It would have been better if the cleaner had punched him in the face. Kindness was fine by itself, but shame was always tagging along behind it, wanting to join in. When you saw kindness, you knew shame was around the corner, with all its snivels, whimpers and regrets. Where are you flying to today, sir? New York? That’s lovely. And could I just ask, what are you flying from? Your enemies? That’s not what it says here, sir. Look, it says ‘Friends’.
    What he needed was to see the aircraft, the broad, heavy, thick-winged, four-engined ones, quaking along the runway and floating free of the ground like mercy, like a miracle, towards the ocean. When he saw them move and take off, he would be all right. One of them would carry him away into the clouds and out to the blue west. He was not a fugitive, although others could think it. He had gone back before dawn and pushed a blank cheque through Cunnery’s letterbox, with ‘Whatever it takes’ written on the back, in capitals, for some reason. They could think that he was on the run from them but that was because they did not know he was running towards someone else. He had wanted to see her for a year and now she had asked to see him, and he was coming. Kellas started to walk towards the departure gate.
    He passed a woman in low-cut jeans and a cropped green woollen cardigan which showed her belly and her shoulders. She had her hair in lacquered ringlets and scarlet lipstick over a deep tan and a gold stud in her belly-button and she went by on heels, hauling a carry-on bag behind her. She glanced at him and looked away. He would like to have been sure he wasn’t crossing the Atlantic for sex. People did this. Men and women flew tens of thousands of miles,expending hundreds of pounds and thousands of litres of jet fuel, in order to have sex, and not only middle-aged, rich-world sex tourists in Bangkok or Zanzibar, but fit, attractive young men and women from London or Brisbane or Buenos Aires who’d got tangled up with somebody who lived on the other side of the world and who, even though they were not fond enough of each other for either to settle closer at hand, found it easier to cross the oceans every six months to touch their counterpart’s naked body than to find somebody new to share their bed in their own towns. It wasn’t that. Part of the idea of travelling so light was his hope that, when he arrived, the woman he’d travelled to see would need less weight to hold him there. He didn’t want to lose his nerve. Of course she was pretty, but an awful lot of people were, and they were no good to be around; they were only curators of their own beauty. They could show you it, but once the tour was over, there was nothing left. Astrid was one of those other ones, who inhabited her looks. They were hers and she lived there.
    He’d met her after dark, in the gardens of the Northern Alliance guesthouse in Faizabad, in the October of 2001. The generators were down and all he could see of her to begin with was her silhouette against the stars. The stars were thickly sown and distinct and the river roared where it bent around the rocks at the foot of the outcrop the guesthouse stood on. To Kellas it seemed that he and the other foreigners spread out among the bushes and trees, murmuring into their satellite phones, were sitting on the shore of the cosmos, listening to the roar of time. He was crouching on the grass with his head back, gawping at the Milky Way, when he heard her moving, and she stood over him.
    Astrid’s satphone batteries were all used up. She asked if she could call her editor and her father on Kellas’s phone. He’d already made the same