11

In the check-in area of Heathrow airport the airline staff were whispering mangled panicked instructions through dated radios. Which queue? How long? Just calm down, sir, you will make your plane.

Only Dad had flown before, only to unimaginable South Africa and only to return a different man. The routine of air travel, the hurried banality of it, was as alien to us as climbing stairs in preparation for sleep. To Mal, on all-fours, the snaking queues were a maze of trees with trunks of legs to traverse. I sat on our suitcase listening to Dad espouse the benefits of a southern Spanish summer. Mum had glazed over, so rapt was she at the idea of stepping from a plane onto foreign soil. In her head it was with dainty ankle, the camera panning up slowly to reveal a wonderful Christian Dior dress in emerald green and half a million pounds’ worth of diamonds dripping from a silver chain around an elegant neck, like a starlet to the red carpet of a film premiere. She was so engrossed that she didn’t notice the tuts of disapproval being made by the two old ladies behind us in the queue, the whirr of insects in the reeds. Slowly the unrest spread backwards down the line until a curt man with damp circles the size of pie tins under his arms approached. He placed a firm hand on Mum’s shoulder like one might grip the throttle of a motorbike and registered the unanimous unhappiness of the stony-faced assembly.

‘If you cannot control your son,’ he said, in a way fear dictated he couldn’t to a man whose neck was as thick on shoulders quite as wide as Dad’s, ‘then perhaps someone else should.’ In his hand hung one of Mal’s socks.

Our eyes followed the trail of Mal’s clothing across the cold marble flooring of the terminal. A sock, trousers that would no doubt soon become mine, two shoes and a t-shirt formed a ragged pathway that led towards the conveyor belt carrying the luggage to the plane. Our eyes reached the thick black flaps of vinyl that formed the doorway just as Mal disappeared through them, flinging his underpants onto the head of the only security guard that had managed to get within ten feet of him with the studied panache of James Bond tossing his bowler hat at the rack in Miss Moneypenny’s office.

If Mal was to become the first person checked onto a flight as luggage, it wouldn’t be today.

We missed our plane. I had been looking forward to seeing how big it was.