The Aircraft

The Aircraft
Cold here did not behave the way cold behaved in other countries.
Cold here was a creature. It got into the seams of his parka. It found the small soft place at the back of his neck where his hair met his collar and it pressed there with the particular cruelty of a thing alive on this rock since before any human had named it. He had been telling himself, for the better part of a long time, that he was used to it. Standing on the lip of the moraine in the small grey hour before dawn, satellite phone unfolded against his ear and the wind doing its slow patient work along the line of his jaw, he understood, with a kind of dry private amusement, that he had never been used to it. He had simply outlasted his own ability to feel it.
Until last night.
Now he could feel everything.
The dream-marks had not faded. Two of them. One along the inside of his left forearm, where her teeth had sunk in at the precise moment the bond had finally given itself to them. One at the soft place under his sternum, where her palm had been flat when the second wave hit. Under the parka, under the thermal, under the thin cotton of the shirt he had pulled on in the dark without paying attention, he could feel them. The way a man feels stitches. The way a man feels a pulse that is not, technically, his own.
On the descent he had been trying not to think about them.
He had been failing.
Above him, the sky was the colour of an old knife. Pale grey at the ridge. Darker grey at the centre. Stars still pinned in the high reach where the dawn had not yet bothered to arrive. The mountain behind him, the one he had been climbing on and off for the better part of a decade, was the same mountain it had been yesterday, and he registered, in the small private way a man registers these things on the morning he leaves a place, that he was not coming back to it.
Not for a long time.
Maybe not at all.
The number on the folded paper was the same number he had dialled yesterday afternoon, on a ledge sixteen thousand feet up, in the soft careful first hour of his life that had not, in the better part of a decade, been organised around solitude. He dialled it now from muscle memory.
The line rang twice.
She picked up.
“Lad.”
The voice was warm and brogued and small in the tinny speaker, and he was, for a long second, unable to make any sound come up out of his throat to meet it.
“Gran,” he managed.
A long quiet beat held the line.
“You’re at the airfield,” she said. Not a question. The way she said it, he understood she had known he was going to call before he had known he was going to call. The way grandmothers knew. The way this grandmother, whose own line ran with the same gold he had been carrying in his blood since the morning he was born, knew.
“Plane lifts in the hour.”
“Aye.”
“Heathrow tonight. Domestic in the morning. Hire car on the other end.”
“Aye, lad.”
He closed his eyes.
A small sound on the line that was, he thought, a kettle. Two voices in the background, neither resolving cleanly. One of them, by the soft careful warmth of it, laughing.
“Who’s with you, Gran.”
“Mora.”
A small pause.
“And the young one.”
The young one.
Heat moved through his chest the way heat had moved through his chest at three this morning, in a tent he could no longer remember unzipping, with the soft full weight of a body that did not exist on this continent pressing him backward into a couch in a room that did not exist on any continent at all. He had to put a hand against the canvas of the airfield tent to steady himself. The radio operator inside, registering the gesture through the open flap, looked up briefly and looked back down. The radio operator had been working alongside him long enough to know.
“Gran.”
“Aye, lad.”
He had to breathe through it before he could ask.
“She’s there. With you.”
“Aye.”
Another beat.
“Has been for days.”
He opened his eyes. The mountain was still the mountain. The wind was still the wind. The cold was still doing what the cold did. None of that had changed in the eight seconds since she had said the word days. What had changed was the architecture inside him.
She had been at his grandmother’s cottage for days.
The dream he had been having for a fortnight, the woman whose body had been finding his in increments since the first night her hum had reached him at altitude, the body that had in the small dark hour after three this morning made a circuit with his own across the curve of an entire ocean, had been sleeping under his grandmother’s roof since Saturday.
Jean had known.
Jean had been keeping her. From him.
Not cruelly. He understood that without being told. Jean had been keeping her safe, the way Jean had been keeping the line itself safe for the better part of a decade, in the long careful protective habit of a woman whose daughter the world had taken once already.
But she had known.
A small soft sound came up out of him that he would, much later, not be able to describe to himself. It was not a laugh. It was not a sob. It was the small involuntary release of a man whose entire long lonely architecture had, in the space of three syllables, been redesignated as no longer necessary.
“Does she know me, Gran.”
“She knows what’s hers, lad.”
The pause held.
“Whether she’s put a name to ye yet, I cannae say.”
He nodded into the cold thin air. She could not see the nod. He nodded anyway. The dream-marks under the parka were, he registered now, warm, and the warmth was not coming from his own body. The warmth was coming up the line. From the kitchen at the foot of the mountain on the other side of the world. From the woman at the table whose laugh he had almost been able to resolve a moment ago and whose hand, two weeks of dreams ago, had pressed against the soft place where one of those marks now sat.
She did not know yet who was on the other end of his grandmother’s phone.
She knew anyway.
He understood the difference.
“I’m coming, Gran.”
“Aye, lad.”
A long quiet beat.
“Lad.”
“Aye.”
He waited. He had been waiting, in some private corner of himself, for the better part of a decade.
The sentence she said next did not arrive the way important sentences usually arrived. It did not crescendo. It did not announce itself. It came in the soft flat brogue of a woman opening, on her own kitchen line, a door she had not opened on any kitchen line in years.
“Come home, lad.”
The world went very still around him.
Not metaphor. Actually still. The wind, the cold, the small mechanical hum of the airfield generator behind him, the stars in the high reach. All of it suspended in the small private second a man hears the sentence his grief has been refusing him permission to hear for the better part of his adult life.
He nodded again. She still could not see it.
“I’ll see you, Gran.”
“Aye, lad. Ye will.”
The line clicked.
The phone in his hand was warm.
Wind found its way back into the seams of his parka. Cold resumed its slow patient work. The mountain behind him remained the mountain. Above the eastern ridge, the first thin edge of a sun he had not, in the better part of a decade, watched rise from this side of his own life pushed itself into the grey, and the dream-marks under the parka, in the small definite warmth that had not, on the line, gone anywhere, stayed lit.
Inside the tent, the radio operator looked up.
“Aircraft is ready.”
The pack came up onto his shoulder.
Across the moraine, in the cold thin air of a morning he had not, by any small careful arrangement of his own life, expected to live to see, the body that had spent the better part of a decade refusing to be loved walked toward the small definite weight, in his sternum, of the woman who had this morning loved him anyway.