In Flight: the 30-hour novel

IN FLIGHT

A novel by Chris Wright

Note: In early 2013 Kernel magazine set a challenge to produce an entire novel, completely from scratch in a single weekend. The project was known as NaNoWriWee. The judging was conducted by authonomy, the online writing community of HarperCollins. 330 people entered, with over 100 completing novels; In Flight was on a shortlist of 12 for the overall award.

1.

There may come a time when Barry Hadler is comfortable walking into a bar on his own, but it won’t be today, jetlagged and bamboozled in the Mumbai Hilton. This is not how he pictured India. The hotel lobby is streamlined glass and marble, straight-backed sofas, sofas to do business on. The air conditioning keeps the place in a sultry chill. There is an air of things happening, a feeling of money being made and changing hands. He looks at the Indians in clustered informal meetings around the lobby, and is troubled by an odd insecurity. Everyone is smarter than him, sharper than him: a scattering of venture capitalists and hedge fund managers, dealmakers, making things happen. Four hundred million in poverty in this country, yet he feels acutely underdressed.

The hotel bar is western, really, just a few incongruous Ganesh statues and colourful wall hangings to offer the faintest cultural reminder that it is in India. The staff, in pristine saris, greet him as he enters; extraordinarily, barely an hour after he has checked in, one greets him by name. “Have a good evening, Mr Hadler.” This sort of thing doesn’t happen back in Sydney. He nods and half smiles but struggles to meet their earnest, confident eye contact.

He has delayed his arrival to avoid being the first one there – because that, of course, is the worst outcome, sitting alone, pretending to study the BlackBerry, avoiding small talk with the barman, discomfort multiplied, squared – but for a moment thinks he hasn’t left it long enough. As men do, he needs a vantage point to take in the bar in small slices, a glance at a time.

Then he spots them, leaning on the circular bar in the centre of the room. Danielle Kasper he knows all too well, his opposite number at the National, covering the same foreign affairs beat from Sydney as he does for the Tribune. Naturally: she would never be late, and dare missing an opportunity. The woman with her he recognises as Sandra Donovan, Australia’s deputy high commissioner in India. He’s struck by their similarities: same height, barely five feet, but radiating energy and confidence. Dani is dark haired and Sandra a blonde, but otherwise, he realises, it’s a match: both power dressed, both emphasizing their words with lively, strident hands. You’d have a job spotting which is the diplomat and which the journo.

Danielle spots him first, and her expression, as ever, seems to convey a lot: civil but competitive, strong and carefully indifferent. Sandra sees her looking and turns. Barry has met  her only once before, at a function back in Sydney, and prepares to reintroduce himself.

There’s no need. “Barry! How are you?” She’s smiling, shakes his hand, her gaze steady.

“Good. Good to see you again, Sandra. Nothing wrong with your memory.” He remembers her – of course he does, she’s blonde, hot and charismatic – but he’s genuinely surprised and flattered she recalls him. He shouldn’t be surprised: she’s a professional. She has stuck in his mind from that brief meeting. Funny, irreverent, but on the job.

“When did you get in?”

“A couple of hours ago.” Qantas has axed the direct flights to Mumbai so he’s been pinballing around the region’s airports all day; it’s two in the morning in Sydney now and he can feel it. But he wants to have her attention: galvanised, helplessly, by a pretty face. He starts down a path of describing his trip, recognises the boredom of the topic as he begins, and bails out. “Do you live here, Sandra?”

“No, I’m in Delhi. That’s where the embassy is. We’ve flown over.” She gestures further along the bar where some other people, younger, are gathered, some Indian and some western, presumably junior embassy staffers.

“Been busy, I bet.”

“Oh yes,” she says, with feigned exasperation. She doesn’t mean it: you can tell she lives for this stuff. “Whenever the minister comes through, we don’t get a lot of sleep.”

“Is he in yet? Must be.”

“Yep. A lot faster than you. Government planes can go direct. He came this morning.”

He. Sebastian Kingsley, Australia’s foreign minister, a ludicrous rubber-faced twerp of a technocrat, in his view. Or perhaps Barry’s getting old and cynical. But really: even trying to put his Labor politics aside for this Liberal party veteran, there’s no way of avoiding the contempt. Sebastian Kingsley. Just listen to the bloody name. He should be English, should have a flowing mane, an accent of Noel Coward. Not our sun-stretched Australian vowels, that nasal whine of his. He speaks like a squeaking fart, an escape of helium from a kid’s balloon. Barry can’t stand him and has waged an unsuccessful effort to disguise the fact in his reporting ever since the man took office.

It is not really the moment to mention this.

He realises he and Danielle have not yet exchanged a word. “Hey Dani.”

“Barry. You look knackered.” Such a great voice she’s got. Such projection. Deep, too. You can’t imagine where it comes from, given her petite frame. She should be on radio, were there any need. There is not. She is the best in the industry and she probably knows it.

“Am a bit. You?”

“Fine. Just filed, actually.” His heart sinks: filed what? What has he missed? He knows when the National’s deadlines are: to have filed this late it must be on the front page. He pictures the morning call from the foreign editor in Sydney, telling him he’s been scooped by her once again.

“Yeah? What?”

“Oh, you know. Just the big news from the press conference. Kingsley resigning.” There follow about four seconds of heart-lurching lip-wobbling panic at her steady-eyed assurance before he realises she’s winding him up. The two women crack up.

“Bitch. I hate you.”

“I take that as a supreme compliment. Have a bloody drink and stop looking so fucking miserable.”

Sandra, unflapped by this friendly abuse, asks him what he’d like and he opts for Kingfisher, the local beer. He relaxes. What is it about this profession? He’s tense until somebody swears at him. Then it’s like going home. He drops the tension from his shoulders and smiles. With Dani it can go either way: the competitive award-winning foreign correspondent, or the persona she seems to have opted for today: bolshy, irreverent, funny. He likes this version. This is the one to be around.

More people arrive, embassy staffers and other Australian journos: the TV crews, with their usual unlikely combination of elegant, coiffed correspondents and grizzled cameramen in stained Iron Maiden T-shirts, their every wardrobe selection a practised expression of sullen contempt. He likes them, actually. He has attended state funerals with them pitching up looking like this, but then again, why not? If you’re going to be invisible behind a camera while someone else gets the fame in front of it, you might as well do your own thing. He takes a second beer, says hello, has the same conversation about the axed Qantas flights four or five times.

Sandra works the room. She’s extraordinary, knows every name, forgets nothing, charms the lot of them. She tells Barry how much she admired specific articles he has written recently, and despite himself, knowing she’s been prepped by some underling with a Factiva subscription, he’s flattered; praise is so very addictive. A third beer. He’s happy now, in his element. They talk a little about the upcoming trip, the morning flight to Hyderabad to meet with Australian business there, the return to Mumbai to see the banks and then to Delhi for the government stuff. They call these trips junkets, jollies, and he’s been looking forward to it for a month, but it’s hard going, too, he tries to tell her: finding the better angle, filing from different timezones, always the nervous eye on the competition and what they know. She smiles patiently. She could do this stuff standing on her head, he’s sure of it.

Every female pair of eyes turns suddenly to the door, accompanied by an audible intake of breath, and through this expedient mechanism Barry knows without looking that Gary Gillespie has entered the bar. He senses Gillespie’s approach behind him by the wide eyes following the man’s path towards them, then feels the matey clap on the shoulder.

“Barry.”

“Gary.”

“You rhyme!” says a junior embassy staffer, nervously; it is a moronic comment and she knows it, turning red. Gary has this effect on people. You just have to live with it. Barry’s been witnessing it for 10 years now. Not for the first time, he is torn between jealous contempt for his colleague-turned-rival at the Southern Cross, and pathetic lap-dog gratitude at being among his circle.

Sandra, of course, is above all this and her expression doesn’t change as she introduces him. “This is Gary Gillespie, from the Cross.” She introduces her team. Barry looks up at him and can’t really blame the descent of these clever, together, urbane women into nerves; the man is an Adonis. He just is. He’s like a Florentine statue of David, musclebound but boyish, and the magnetism comes from that fact that he doesn’t have to try. Look at him: jeans and a T-shirt. Hasn’t brushed his hair. Not showy, no wisecracks, just laid-back and comfortable. There’s no performance to him. Here I am. And there’s the trick: everybody wants to be him or to be with him.

Barry likes to think he’s got over his envy but he knows it’s ridiculous. Socially, professionally, the lot. Gary gets the girls and the industry awards, an implausibly unfair combination. You can’t put a price, in journalism, in being somebody that others want to impress, want to tell things to. Dani, who is good-looking behind the fierce walls she puts up, has it too, and Barry knows he himself lacks it: he can find a story and write a good angle and dig up a number with the best of them, but that charisma is something he just can’t nail.

Gary likes him, though, and he’s always been glad for that. They came through together as trainees, in the early days of being sent off to buy sandwiches for the Tribune’s heavy hitters, or to collect the editor’s dry cleaning, before Gary was poached young for the Cross. There’s no question Gary sensed his colleague’s sense of intimidation way back then and yet he never played it for advantage, nor ever has since. Gary is decent, which is, in its way, all the more annoying: there is just no foothold to dislike the man, when everything else screams that one should.

He is friendly, as always, and after a time they perch at the bar, catching up. He’s not one to talk shop and the conversation drifts inevitably to the Swans, on track for a Grand Final appearance, and then to the beer, which they agree is more than acceptable. “You can drink this stuff all night and not be hungover,” Gary observes. He’s been here before, of course.

“I doubt that. Tell me if you still think that tomorrow.”

“You on for a big one?”

“Not a good idea, I know. But I’ve got a thirst.”

Barry genuinely does have a thirst, but really, who doesn’t in this timewarp-trapped industry of boozers and smokers? Barry justifies to himself a certain social need for it: it loosens him up, gives him things to say that get caught in his throat when sober, frozen and awkward. It hasn’t done him any favours, physically: not fat by any means but far from thin. It has made him an indoors man, pasty when all around him are tanned. He means to do something about it, always; to find a routine, to improve. But who has the time.

They order more, rejoin the fray.

A band strikes up. A hotel band, Filipinos, inevitably. “If you like pina coladas,” sings a gloriously silver-voiced woman in a high-slit dress and heels, “and getting caught in the rain.” The correspondents, coming over all wise and experienced, talk about how many times they’ve seen this in Bangkok, Jakarta, KL; how the Philippines provides countless thousands who can sing and the same who can play any song, on any instrument, at any time. And yet they find themselves anchored in these hotel lobbies and cruise ships, playing these same feelgood ballads the world over. The journalists joke about what to request, an emphasis on cheesiness. A case is made for Copa Cabana, another for Achy Breaky Heart; Air Supply is a frontrunner, until it is realised nobody can remember any of their songs. The democratic process eventually yields Nilsson’s Can’t Live If Living Is Without You, which the band – singer, shy multi-instrumentalist, drum machine – carry off with effortless aplomb to radiant applause.

The Kingfisher keeps coming. Gary goes and joins the band, who good-naturedly let him belt out Mustang Sally. It is shaping up to be a lively evening. So late in the night, Sydney time, he is getting drunk too quickly and knows it, but the feeling is good. Warm in drink, he pauses to be proud of what he’s made of his life, so far from the sun-scorched superheated suburbs of Sydney’s outer west, beyond the sticky-tarred boiling asphalt of the ring roads and highways. This is what he always wanted to do.

“All right,” shouts Sandra, as the band traipse off for a break. “Business to deal with.” She’s not pissed at all; or if she is, she can hide it extraordinarily well. Barry admires, once again, just how capable the woman is, how in control. “Tomorrow’s flight.”

Everyone huddles in, for this is important. Kingsley and his close advisors will go on the government jet he came in on from Canberra today; the rest of them will be on a couple of commercial flights to Hyderabad, some on Indian Airlines, the rest on some new carrier called Chidiya. There is considerable debate about which is the least worst outcome – there is, received wisdom dictates, no possible positive outcome in a domestic flight in India – between the notoriously inefficient state carrier and this curious private-sector start-up nobody among them had heard of until last week. The process of sorting all this out has fallen to Sandra and the embassy team. Most of the TV guys, Sandra explains, will go on the Indian Airlines flight with some of the embassy staff, while she and most of the print journos will be on Chidiya. This conclusion has the effect of annoying precisely everyone, with each reasoning the other has the better deal. And there is worse: Kingsley will do a doorstep with the press before leaving for the airport, at 6.30am.

There is a groan at this news, but not a big one, for everyone wants to show they’re ready to do what’s needed to get the job done; admitting otherwise would be weakness, even among people who are, largely, friends as well as competitors. There is not much scope for sleep now, but still, the beer is good, and it keeps coming.

“There’s a sweetener, though, for those on the Chidiya flight,” says Sandra. “I’m in business class” – she pauses for a haughty mockery to subside – “and two of the economy tickets have been upgraded because the flight’s overbooked. Now, who wants them?”

There is something of the primal mob in the response to this ludicrous question, until, in a moment of lucid cooperation amid the mounting savagery, an agreement is made to do the only sensible thing: compete for them. Various options are considered in the Kingfisher haze – arm-wrestling, a race around the hotel, a quiz on 80s song lyrics – until it comes down, as these things inevitably do, to a game of Paper Scissors Stone. A complex knock-out formula is established, and Dani gets one of the tickets. Finally, it comes down to Barry and Gary.

They rhyme.

Barry knows from experience that the outcome is so extraordinarily predictable that he ought to arrange a side bet on it. Gary! As if he could lose! One should harness the man’s luck to generate power somehow. But he goes through the motions, they shake hands theatrically, and to loud and boisterous audience participation they commence a best of three.

Paper, stone. Unbelievable. Barry’s one nil up. It can’t last.

Stone, paper. It doesn’t. One one.

Stone, paper. The old trick: stick with your previous hand. Gary’s wise to it. And to the surprise of absolutely nobody, and certainly not Barry, Gary Gillespie takes the business class ticket. Their surrounding crowd roar and honk, wanting to share in Gary’s aura, to get a piece of his radiant bonhomie. Barry smiles, wryly he thinks, or maybe it’s a grimace; it’s just so hard to tell.

They are smashed. It is just stupid. But what can you do, really? They argue, with misplaced passion, about absolutely everything they can think of: the finest Dylan album, the ending of Life of Pi, the best Tasmanian beer, the state of their industry superannuation fund. So much opinion in this crowd, so much conviction.

“Gillespie,” Barry slurs, smarting for further argument. “I fucking hate you for winning that ticket.”

“Have it,” he says. That’s the end of that.

Full of booze and trying not to letch, Barry sidles up to Sandra, who, with acute antennae for a drunk and attracted man, swiftly brings out a photo of her children.

He is aware, of course, of her deft amputation of his intentions in this, but still, he’s struck by the photo and is suddenly brought to something like sobriety. A boy and a girl, young enough still to be cute and innocent, projecting unbridled joy and love to the camera and to whoever’s behind it, presumably Sandra.

“They’re beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

“No, I know you’re meant to say that” – he feels the familiar beery surge of emotional overspill, but can’t keep it in check – “but they really are beautiful. Look at them. They look so happy.”

She smiles. “Well, they don’t always look like that.”

“How old?”

She points to each in turn. “Five. Two.”

“How is it for them, living in India?”

“Fine. Good experience, I think. I mean, they’re at the international school, so in truth they spend most of their time with everyone but other Indians. But we try to mingle, show them what the place is about.” We. The security of it: the partner, no need to be named. We. The bastard, he thinks.

“Do they get hassle? They’re so blonde!”

“I don’t know if hassle is the word. Attention, for sure. They’re getting used to it, though.”

At this, conversation stalls; he doesn’t know anything else you’re supposed to ask about kids. The whole vocabulary of it all. There are conjunctions, phrases, forms about offspring; he just doesn’t know the language.

So she breaks the silence. “You’re not married? No kids?”

“No. Single.” He looks down at himself. That can’t be a surprise, he is sure.

“Well…” she looks mischievous. Maybe she is drunk after all. “Dani’s single.”

“Oh. Well. That. No.” He is reduced to stumbled syllables at this proposition.

Sandra laughs. “She’s pretty.”

“I know she’s pretty. But, you know. Can you imagine?”

There is so much unsaid in this remark that the only thing to do is laugh knowingly, which they both do, though neither are sure what he meant. Sandra puts the photo of her kids away. “We’ve really got to call it a night soon.”

There’s no denying that. But, still. It feels so good to be laughing. He finds Dani, bellowing by now, holding the embassy staff in stitches with an indiscreet story about an ageing and unreconstructed writer on her paper, known with reverence for his history of breaking news and with squirming discomfort for his attitudes that have not budged one iota since the 1970s. Barry reaches her orbit as she delivers her punchline: “Sniffing her fucking chair!”

The embassy crew dissolve in appalled laughter. Barry says: “I think I arrived at the wrong bit in that story.”

“Hadler!” she shouts now. It has reached the point when everyone must, for some reason that is never quite clear, be addressed by their surname. “I could tell you stories about this guy,” she tells her audience.

“Please don’t,” he says, though he is thrilled to be painted in this way, despite knowing there really aren’t any stories of sufficient interest and comedy to be told.

“Canberra!” she says, eyebrows raised in daring.

“I don’t think you want to tell that story,” he replies.

“No,” she says, suddenly finding restraint. “Perhaps I don’t.”

The two of them find themselves together at the bar. “What were you about to tell them?”

“Barry,” she says. “Barry, Barry, Barry.” And that is all she says.

The room is spinning and there is just nothing to be gained from staying here. He looks around for allies but finds none. It is, as he has said to himself for the last two hours, time to go.

Gary, obviously, has pulled; a young English woman, a tourist maybe, is hanging on to his arm, and to his every word. He watches the two depart the bar together and thinks:

We rhyme.

2.

The first myth about business travel is the glamour. You go to these places, with all the resonant poetry of their names: Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai, Taipei. But what do you really do there? Chiefly, if you’re Barry, you languish alone in a hotel room with half an eye on CNN, wanking incessantly because there’s nothing else to do. Are you really going to go out on the town on your own? Maybe a meal, a table for one, studying the Lonely Planet under the eye of a sympathetic waiter. But it’s not, he thinks, quite what it’s all cracked up to be.

This is certainly his view at 6.15am when the front desk wakes him with the alarm call he had, to his considerable surprise, had the wherewithal to order at quarter to one. The receptionist exhorts him, enthusiastically, to have a wonderful day but it is beyond him to respond in kind. The doorstep’s in 15 minutes. Fuck.

There is time for a hint of a shower, more of a dousing in water than any actual act of cleanliness, but not a shave, before he pulls on his clothes and heads downstairs with his minidisc recorder. The rest of them are clustered already in the lobby, a fug of regret hanging over the lot of them and a distinct cloud of booze-reeking breath, but nobody has missed the event. That’s just not how it works. There is a camaraderie in these hangovers.

In particular, he can’t help but notice how absurdly resplendent two of his peers look. Sandra is no surprise: she probably got to bed later than anyone and has no doubt been up for hours, but she is immaculate, hair curled, make-up precise, twin-set business suit pressed, heels elevating her to five feet two of contained, slick qualification. She greets the journalists with courtesy, skilfully ignoring their utterly abysmal condition. And then there’s Gary, who Barry strongly doubts has slept at all, but for the most triumphant of reasons. Yet there he is, on time, somehow looking rested, and exuding that unmistakable glow of recent spontaneous sexual success.

There is no time to dwell on this, for Sebastian Kingsley emerges from the lift, an expensive suit failing to levitate the undeniable piteousness of the man himself. You are representing my country overseas, Barry thinks; so why do you look so very much like you’ve been excreted?

Or perhaps he’s getting old and cynical.

“Good morning everyone,” Kingsley says, brisk, witless, whining. “I trust you’re all enjoying India.” He surveys the irretrievable carnage of the press pack around him. They stink. “I think perhaps some of you have already enjoyed it quite a lot.”

It’s meant as an icebreaker, but some people just can’t break ice; instead they inadvertently turn up the freezer, create icebergs, barriers where there weren’t any before. There’s a guttural grunt of acknowledgment and a moment of awkward silence, filled by Sandra, who sprints through the rules of engagement: the minister will speak for a moment, then take a few questions before we all head to the airport.

Kingsley says what we know he’ll say, about the importance of trade relations between Australia and India, about how Australia must look towards Asia for its future, about partnership and opportunity and growth. As is the norm in these situations, when he pauses for questions he won’t get a single one about the trip or India or indeed anything he actually wants to speak about.

Dani is in first. Dani is always in first. Precise, articulate, firm. “Minister, overnight the Australian Navy has apprehended another group of boat people attempting to reach Christmas Island. When are you going to present a clear policy for dealing with these attempts?”

Fuck. Really? Overnight? How does she know that. She’s had the sense to talk to her editors already, clearly – which, Barry realises, he hasn’t, despite the fact that it’s now lunchtime in Australia. Still, this is the beauty of the collective interview, the doorstep: now he knows it too, and will feign omniscient knowledge.

Kingsley, irritated already by this turn in the questioning, grumbles through a response that is, Barry must concede, a masterpiece of sounding sharp and engaged while saying precisely nothing. Dani’s not having it, and presses him, twice, until the TV guys leap in with a question about some confrontational remark from China’s Premier about Australia’s miners and the iron ore price. The stories they will all file take shape as if by symbiosis: Kingsley could say anything he likes about India but we know what the editors are going to want. There will be no scoop in tomorrow’s papers, today’s web site updates. They will all, intuitively, say roughly the same thing. Barry lobs in another question about boat people, gets a scowled snark of a response back again, and before long Sandra is wrapping it up and shepherding the minister to a waiting car. You can sense what he’s thinking: why do we invite these people to follow our trade visits when all they’re going to ask about is the fucking boat people anyway?

Sandra is back, giving nothing away about what she thinks. “We’re all being taken to the airport at 7.30, so please go and check out now,” she says. She hands out security passes with names on. The journalists scatter, call their offices in Sydney and Melbourne, pull out laptops and bark at passing staff about lobby wireless connections. Quotes are synthesised and analysed, passed back to subs and editors in Australia to be wrapped and squeezed and mangled into the broader theme of the day, about which the correspondents will all disagree once they see it.

Barry, back in his room, marvels at the mess he has managed to make despite having spent no more than one hour conscious in the room. He shaves, cutting his face on the blunt hotel razor, and tries to find an angle from which to view himself in the mirror so he might find his appearance acceptable. Finding none, he jams clothes into a bag, checks his passport and recorder are in his pocket, and shambles down to the lobby to check out.

The embassy has provided a minibus for the journos, and the TV crews snap at the baggage boys, wanting to put their camera gear in the hold themselves; the baggage guys want a tip and insist on doing it themselves, which they do, with infinite care, and then don’t get a tip anyway. They look unhappy, but then Sandra is there, dispensing smiles, gratitude and rupees, smoothing the way, ironing the creases, easing and settling.

Barry gets on the bus and sees only two free seats, one of them next to Dani. Well, why not, he thinks, and sits down next to her.

“This,” he announces, “is purest evil.”

She grants a smile. “Hungover?”

“Yes. Aren’t you?”

“Not so bad. It’ll probably hit me later.” No it won’t. She’s indestructible. You could put her in a coma and she’d still file on time. He marvels at her. “Where do you put it?”

“What?”

“The booze.”

“Urination, Barry,” she says. “Effective. Try it.”

He closes his eyes but the bus spins. He opens them again and tries to find purchase in another conversation.

“Get much from Kingsley? He didn’t like your questions.”

“Enough for a story. I should check if it’s online yet.” She taps at an iPhone. “Yep. They were fast with that.”

Knowing that any conversation about work can only leave him feeling somewhat reduced, he changes the subject once again. “How’s Danny?”

She gives him a look. “You’re out of touch. We broke up ages ago.”

“Really? I’m sorry. Dani and Danny. I liked that.”

“Not, in turns out, sufficient to sustain a relationship.”

He thinks, but doesn’t say: I’m not sure anyone would sustain a relationship with you. It would be fun, dynamic, rocket-fuelled at first. But how would you ever relax? Could there be down-time with you? Is there a moment when you sit around in pyjamas and put the TV on?

Despite himself, he drifts into a foolish reverie about her as they pull away from the Hilton into the traffic jams of Nariman Point, but dismisses it swiftly and studies the view from the bus. He has prepared himself for Indian traffic but nothing quite conveys the reality of it, the clogged swamp of buses and autorickshaws interspersed, in this bold new Mumbai, with incongruous Mercedes and the odd Toyota Prius, valiantly saving energy amid the shit-brown sump of the traffic fumes. A cow ambles serenely down the middle of the road, against the traffic, magnificently indifferent to its surroundings; India, as if a single sentient mass, simply moves around it, absorbs it, adjusts.

She sees his wonder. “Is this your first time in India?”

“It is.” He’s embarrassed to say it: something else to compete about. “Not for you?”

“No, I backpacked around here about a million years ago.” Backpacked? He can’t see it. Was there a time when she could conceivably have bounced around India in the back of public buses, smoking grass from a chillum in some Himalayan retreat? How did she shower? Where did she find the hairdryer? She sees his disbelief and expands on it. “I was doing voluntary work here. It was an inoculation awareness thing.” That’s more like it. That, he can see: travel with achievement, drifting but with social good. A better fit.

“And look at you now,” he says. “Business class, tracking a foreign minister.” It comes with a little scorn, unintentionally. She smiles but doesn’t reply.

He never backpacked, never did the year out thing, and wonders if he is somehow diminished for it. From school he went straight to Sydney Uni; from there, straight to cadetship. The rest has been a procession, predictable perhaps, but successful for all that, rising through the ranks, showing some ability, or more accurately, some reliability. This is all he ever wanted, and he has no complaints about the way things have turned out. People pay him to get on planes to foreign places: he still finds that remarkable. But what might he have done, had he dropped out for a year? Would he have found a certain social roundness from it, that swagger he spots in the travelled? He wouldn’t have done an inoculation awareness programme, that’s for sure.

The bus crawls steadfastly through the streets. They can see the water now, a surprisingly brilliant blue, though he suspects that up close it is anything but. Such density is a shock to an Australian, even a Sydneysider. There is simply no space, not an inch for someone to call their own. The roadsides are cluttered with stalls, their insides dark but spewing fruit, boiled sweets, shampoo, daal, nuts, spices, bikes, live animals. He loves the bright billboards and hoardings, in typefaces somehow old and agreeable: World’s No.1 Jewellers, above a shack. Good Luck Hairdresser. A sign: Our Public Bar Is Currently Not Open Because It Is Closed.

Closer to the airport, they are among slums, and near-naked children wander inches from the bus wheels. There is dirt, and cardboard, and rusted corrugated iron, and darkness. Washing lines slung between temporary rooves. Plastic bags in the mud.

“We’re lucky, aren’t we?” he says.

“We’re very lucky,” she replies.

*

Chhatrapati Shivaji airport shocks him, for the same reason the Hilton shocked him: it’s smart, gleaming and exceptionally functional. There are tell-tale signs of ordinary India shining through – the swaying, wobbling scrums of the check-in, a mighty crow flying around the high-vaulted steel beams beneath the roof – but he is left once again with a certain feeling of discombobulation, as if he ought to be feeling a western superiority to the misery around him but instead has found himself overtaken and surpassed. Sandra, mercifully, obviously, has organised a group check-in at a separate counter so the process is painless enough, and after security, with its globally accepted standards of inconvenience and impatience, there is time to look out the window for a moment.

“That’s our plane, I think.”

It is Sandra. I think? She knows. She is dumbing down, for him.

“Chidiya,” he replies. “Chidiya Airlines. Are we confident?”

“It means ‘bird’, apparently. Logically, that’s a good sign.”

Gary is with them now, looking typically chiselled and robust. “Business class, eh?” Barry says. “You might even get a chair.”

He laughs. “Right. A seatbelt, even. I’ll send one back to you in economy.”

After a moment he seems troubled by this.

“Anyway, I said you could have my seat,” Gary says.

“Did you?”

“Last night. How pissed were you?”

“I was very pissed indeed. I don’t remember. How do you remember?”

“You can have it. I honestly don’t care where I sit.”

“No. You won. You’re bigger than me, anyway. You’ll never fit in economy.”

This is beyond refute so he doesn’t challenge it. But he adds: “Yeah, but I’m not sure I did win. It was all a bit confusing.”

Barry turns to look at him. “It was paper scissors stone. What the fuck are you on about?”

Barry studies him for a moment and tries to decode what’s happening. Gary must feel sorry for him. Knows he is an object of some admiration, and is uncomfortable with it. So, Barry wonders, should he feel pleased or patronised? He leans towards the latter, and prickles, neither needing pity nor believing that the starkness of the physical and professional gulf between them can be in any way narrowed by a slightly bigger chair.

“Seriously,” Gary presses. “Take the seat.” He’s holding the business class boarding pass out to him. Barry looks at it: a sober blue compared to his own sickly green. He reaches for it, attracted, then pulls his hand back. He snorts, a bit unkindly, and waves it away. He turns without a word.

*

Boarding is a carnival. People in the wrong seats. Cloying, airless heat but no air conditioning before the push-back. Gary, Dani and Sandra pass him in the line, with their business class priority; they grin as they turn left, though as he glances through the curtains Barry doesn’t get a sense of unimaginable riches on that side of the bulkhead. He’s not going to get hung up on this but there’s just no denying a sort of natural selection taking place here. In the back is, compared to that company, where he fits. What’s he thinking? Of course he is going to get hung up on this. He’s hung up on everything, pretty much.

The guy next to him is from Channel 7, baffled as to why he’s been separated from the rest of his team on the Indian Airlines flight, but clearly enthused to be here at all. It’s his first assignment outside Australia, he says, and he brims with youthful ardour for anything remotely different to Sydney. He leans over Barry to crane at the window, finding wonder at the baggage crates, the vivid logos on the fuel trucks, the slums that fringe the airport. It reminds Barry of his first overseas assignment, to Jakarta, quite early in his career, and he remembers photographing the traffic jams, finding them exotic. That didn’t last.

They are delayed, to nobody’s apparent surprise, but eventually taxi across the apron and line up for takeoff. Barry thinks he should come up with a wisecrack ahead of the ascent but is just too hungover to think of anything and sinks into his seat with resignation as the engines crank up.

Then they are finally aloft over the sparkling Arabian Sea. From here, Mumbai’s unimaginable size and concentration is clear; more than 18 million people, they say, and that’s just the official numbers. The slum rooves spread out for miles like scattered brown playing cards, as far as he can see, punctuated now by the high rises of Banda-Kurla and the distant towers of Nariman Point on the threshold of the bay. The plane turns inwards towards the heart of India, which then is lost beneath them through the haze.

*

He dozes for half an hour until his ears start hurting, indicating descent. He wakes, drooling somewhat, and finds his companion staring past him once again, looking at the rice fields of Andhra Pradesh. But something has changed in his expression. The wonder has gone. In its place is concern.

“Fast,” he says.

“What?”

“Fast, fast. We’re coming in way too fast.”

Barry looks out of the window. They are still a few thousand feet up, and it’s hard to tell, but still, his neighbour is on to something. This is not the gentle glide of a controlled descent. The pitch feels wrong and the ground is moving by too quickly.

He looks back at the Channel 7 guy. “He’s in a rush, isn’t he?”

Around the plane there is a tone, a distinct tone. It is the note of collective concern, of a group of people looking around them for reassurance from their neighbour, and not finding it, instead observing a reflection of their own alarm, reinforcing it and spreading it around the plane. The lower they get, the clearer it is: this is a fast, absurd descent.

Channel 7 guy is talking again, his voice several notes higher. “The wings are wrong. They’re set wrong. Look at them.”

Barry doesn’t know a plane wing configuration from a bar of soap, but that’s worse, because now he believes his neighbour is an authority, and if there’s one thing worse than uninformed concern, it’s the sense of rising panic in someone who knows what they’re talking about.

The tone in the plane is changing, rising, tensing up. Something is wrong.

There is no worse feeling than the collective realisation among a group of confined people that something is wrong and there is nothing they can do about it. Eyes flit about the plane seeking professional guidance, looking for the flight attendants, but they too are looking out of the window and frowning, nudging one another. We are low now, so very low, and so very fast.

Barry considers the brace position, but finds himself ridiculous: just maybe, he recognises, my absurd concern about what other people think will get me killed one day. But air crashes are what happens to other people. You can fly, he recalls, every day for 56,000 years before you should expect to be caught in a fatal air crash. He read that. He doesn’t know where. He read that. He clings on to that. He spends his life disputing statistics but at this moment he wants them to be cast iron correct.

A lurch. A drop. Raised voices, in Hindi and Marathi. Another lurch, up this time, then down again. Barry is sweating. He grips the armrests.

They hit the ground. You wouldn’t call it a landing: it’s a hit, all right, an impact. But the plane does not crash, instead bounces high into the air, then rises again. It hits again, a little less fiercely, and stays down. Barry’s chin has whacked painfully into his chest but the plane is intact, landed, and he feels that tone again in the plane, a few notes lower, relieved now, a gathering chatter, already preparing to narrate the story to their friends when they get off the plane. They are on the runway now, careering along but unquestionably grounded, and the engines scream into reverse thrust.

“That,” Barry says, “was a bit bloody intense,” and he smiles, but the Channel 7 guy is not returning it. He is up in his seat, trying to get a view forward through the windows of passengers in the rows in front, and whatever he sees, it doesn’t reassure him. The engines are screaming again, but their rhythm and pitch is all over the place, and suddenly he crosses his arms on the seat in front and buries his head.

Barry: “What are you…”

*

The impact is like nothing any of them have ever felt or will ever feel again. As the plane leaves the end of the runway it collides with something – a building, he will later learn – and every second from then on is a bitter and miserable new experience.

Noise is new. Motion is new. Force and stress and strain are new. Heat and light are new. Panic, bowel-emptying helplessness is new. The fuselage bucks and leaps. Things, everywhere; things flying from overhead cabins, from floors, from people. Some of the things are people. They fly through the air and smash into bulkheads like paintballs. Cracks of bones are new. Screams are new.

This is a hell lasting forever. It won’t end. Each second is stretched and filled with ordeal. They are bouncing and banging, weightless then slammed. This noise! Metal is being rent. There is time to consider the absurdity of it, we fragile people, strapped in this tube in the sky. How could we ever have done this?

And then it stops. Barry is alive, this much is clear: breathless, hurt, bleeding, but alive. Arms, working. Legs, OK. He breathes in, and is alive.

He looks up and sees most of the plane reaching the same conclusion. There is light, for some reason, from the front, something out of place, but they are all alive. And after stunned and baffle-jammed seconds, there is motion, as the flight attendants, apparently OK, start opening the doors.

It is not calm. He would like to be able to tell you that it is calm. But it is not calm. People shove one another out of the way to get to the doors. People climb over the seats in front of them. People climb over the people in front of them. Children are not pushed automatically to the front. It is not how you would want it to be. But amid it all, there are crumbs of good news: the landing gear has shattered and gone and so people can jump a few feet out of the doors into wet paddy fields filled with rice. And though there is smoke, there is no sign of flame. It is light and people can see. Barry thinks: it’s going to be OK.

Steadily people clear in a seething, tangle-armed throng of primeval, desperate urgency. People are getting out. It is going to be OK. Barry is in the mass, the mash, moving forwards towards the doors by the bulkhead. He is going to be OK.

But.

That thing they say: about time telescoping in a moment of crisis. It is true. This is what he sees, and what he decides, and it happens in the space between one sprinting heartbeat and the next.

He sees that the front of the plane has snapped. It is still connected but has ripped, and that is where the daylight is coming from: a hole, to the sky. Through it, he can see flame and smoke, coming from the forward section, the cockpit and the business class part of the plane. He sees something else: that the escape doors for the business class section are not open. Nobody is getting out. And he hears something else too: he can hear screaming.

We are still between the two heartbeats. We will be here a while.

He thinks of Gary and his sober blue boarding pass, unlike his sickly green. He can see Gary’s hand held towards him, can recall his own cross rebuff. But he had wanted that seat, had reached out towards it, that place at the top table. It was there for him, on offer.

And it becomes clear to him, in an instant, that he will never get past this moment, this intertwining of lives and fates, if Gary now dies in that aluminum box at the front.

We are still between two racing heartbeats. Barry’s won’t beat again until a decision is made.

And yet there is time to weigh it up. To consider. Later they will paint it as heroism on his part, but they will never understand. Because as Barry steps away from the exit door and pushes through the ratted mat of curtains towards the business class section, he is not doing it through bravery, or altruism, or love, but through the fear of unpayable debt, of knowing, even in this moment, that this is something from which he will never be able to move on.

*

He walks into hell, which is odd, just a very few feet from salvation. There is flame, a solid wall of preposterous heat, and dense black smoke. There are no flight attendants to be seen. What he can see, instead, is this.

To his right, Gary is in his seat, still belted in, apparently unconscious.

To his left, Dani. He can look at her once and not a second time. She is looking dumbly at her legs, and there is not much recognisable left to see. She is conscious, and there is a moment when she turns wordlessly to him, with a look not of imploring plea, but of the most profound confusion, as if she has tried to drive off in someone else’s car, or woken to find herself where she didn’t go to sleep.

In front of her, Sandra, slumped in her seat, bleeding from her head, also unconscious.

The heat is like nothing he has ever felt, the smoke acrid and suffocating. He knows one thing, gleaned no doubt from some macabre Discovery Channel voyeurism or other, and that is that the clean air will be on the floor, and he drops to the ground and takes a lungful. He knows, time telescoping still, that this will be the only breath he will be able to take on this plane.

So he can save one person.

He will spend the rest of his life wondering about what happens next, but who could possibly judge him, crouched and burning on the floor of a deathtrap, with a second, less than a second, to decide what to do?

He weighs it up. It is a surprisingly calm experience.

He can’t save Gary. Too heavy. It is as coldly simple as that.

Dani or Sandra.

Dani: she’s alive, in pain, in need. She is his friend, and… well. He must pull her out. He moves towards her.

And then his mind fills with Sandra’s photo. The children. The uncomplicated, pure joy. That joy was directed at their mother. He pictures somebody telling them. A life without her.

It is over in an instant: her belt is off, he has hold of her under her arms, feeling wrong even as he does it that his arms brush her breasts. He drags her, his lungs agonising as that last breath of air exhausts its oxygen, back through the curtain, now aflame, and out the now-empty emergency exit in economy. He does not look at Dani as he passes her. He falls backwards and Sandra’s body lands on his, and for a moment he is bewildered to find himself swallowing water, but it is a paddy field, and a blessing, for it has put them both out and salved their burns. Then there are arms under his, and he sees the Channel 7 guy above him, pulling him clear, while two Indian men grab Sandra by the arms and feet and haul her away from the aircraft. Her skirt is up around her waist; she is exposed and open, vulnerable, and he looks at her with the greatest feeling of pity, this image of competence and capability reduced to a rag-doll flop. But there is no titillation, no crafty glances from her rescuers. Everyone has been changed.

He tries to tell people that Dani is alive in there but it is hopeless, and he watches the flame engulf the jet with a feeling of unspeakable misery and neglect. She is gone. Gary is gone. Paper scissors stone. They had lost. Sandra won. She got the life.

He is breathing and talking but unable to process anything, the impossible speed with which his friends have moved to the past tense. How can it be that he was, not he is? When they rhyme, the two of them?

And then there is a scream and he sees looks of appalled astonishment all around him. He follows their gaze and sees something aflame falling out of that gaping hole in the side of the fuselage. It could be a sack of food, a slab of meat, yet it is moving.

It is Danielle.

3.

It is not until much later, when the brutally slow procession of evacuation and triage has finally delivered everyone to a swamped and bursting hospital in Hyderabad, that Barry remembers he still has his phone. He calls, in this order, his office and his mum. It is during the second call, whose details he will never remember but his mum will never forget, that the office rings back. He takes it.

“Barry,” says the foreign editor. “If you can, you need to file something. Or you can just tell me about it if you want and we’ll do it at this end.”

Despite the tactless brutality of it all, he is glad of the direction. And, though he hates himself for it, there is the cold dark heart of it all that tells him: this is your moment. You can use this.

He tells the foreign editor that he will write it himself.

His laptop is still in the smouldering carcass of the plane, but he has his BlackBerry, and he ends up writing on this, tapping mechanically with his thumbs, trying to pour all of his focus into the little black machine in order to block out absolutely everything in the world. There are two pieces to write, as always: the news piece, swiftly dealt with, which in any case will be merged into a host of other information gleaned from the wire services updating on the crash by the minute, and the real meat of it all, the eyewitness account.

He plays it straight. Sticks to facts. Sharp, truncated sentences. No need for embellishment. He explains the descent, the chaos of evacuation. Yet he makes no mention of his run to the front of the plane to pull Sandra out. He’s not yet able to explain his decisions, and he’s not sure he ever will be. Better to leave it out: remain a witness, not a participant.

He is doing what he can do. Gathering and sorting information. There is a comfort in it, the familiar structures and syntax of reporting. It makes him feel, briefly, as if there is still some of him alive and alert, not lost in this shock and incomprehension. It makes him feel, too, as if he is outside it all, looking in, dispassionate and collected, not an actor in the play but a reviewer, and there is a safety and security in this that keeps him together.

He sends his stuff. Waits awhile. The phone rings: the foreign editor, who uses his familiar in-joke, impersonating the farmer from Babe.

“That’ll do, pig. That’ll do.”

The sense of some underlying kindness, though buried necessarily in deprecation and irony as we all must do in this world of ours where feelings are to be distrusted, is too much for him, and he hangs up the phone and breaks into wracking, high-pitched sobs. He can hear himself, as if from without, and is curious about the high notes of his shell-shocked grief. Where is this coming from, he thinks? It is coming from me. Who knew it was in there.

Seeking purpose, he looks for his friends.

For all the apparent chaos, the walking wounded and the debris of people who have forgotten for a while to care about banal possessions, there is order taking shape: skilled doctors have a triage going on and have made priorities of the worst wounded. Already there is a thirst for numbers, to make sense of it all, and it appears that about a dozen have died in business class at the front of the plane, though the rumour is that the pilot has survived, diving out of his own shattered windscreen. There is nobody, it is clear, anything like as badly hurt as Dani and still alive, and she is in surgery now. The brightest minds in India are here in Hyderabad or Bangalore to the south, he has heard, and he is glad that at least some have gone into surgery and not followed the flight to hedge funds and investment banking. Why, he wonders, didn’t we all become doctors? So we would know what to do, when knowledge is what will save you?

All he can glean is that she is in an induced coma. She is burned, clearly. But they will tell him no more.

Journalists from the other plane have made it to the hospital now, and are approaching the situation with a mixture of their usual blunt intrusion – no sense in getting precious about that, he does much the same himself – and concern for their own people. One, despicably but in truth somewhat usefully, has made it into the morgue, and brings confirmation of what he already knows: Gary is, well, he just can’t say it. Can’t use the word. He is grateful somebody else has to call the Cross and tell them.

He does manage to find Sandra Donovan. She is concussed, awake but making little sense; that apart, they say, she will probably be fine. She is surrounded by a flock of weeping embassy juniors, who are in touch with her family, able to tell them she will be fine. She will see her children again. He tries to feel something about this, but can’t. He squeezes her hand. She squeezes it back, though she doesn’t know who he is.

Sebastian Kingsley arrives at the hospital, in an apparently genuine state of grief. Reporters surround him, but Barry can’t take it. He can’t listen to platitudes. He wants to blame him. What the fuck are we doing in this rice field, following you around, waiting for you to say something that means anything? But there is no point in that, and certainly no fairness. The adrenalin seeps out of him and he is instantly exhausted.

There is nothing else to do. He is scarcely burned himself, though it seems his hair caught fire as he backed through the curtain before being extinguished in the rice field, never reaching his scalp. There is a smell to it, but no pain, just a feeling of scrubby dust on his head.

In one pocket he has both his passport and the reservation for his hotel in Hyderabad. In his other, his wallet. Lacking any other purpose, he walks out of the airport concourse into the siege of taxi drivers. He must be a bizarre sight, and they do look curiously at him, his wrecked clothes and his absence of possessions, but business is business and they fight for his custom. He slips into the back of an ancient Hindustan Ambassador and asks for the Marriott. The driver turns and stares at him, then goes and gets him a bottled water. He stares some more then turns around and drives, fast, to the hotel. There, with blankness, he stands patiently in line and checks in. The clerk asks if he needs anything, if he has any bags. He shakes his head.

He goes to his room and lies totally still, shrieking metal filling his ears, and doesn’t close his eyes for fear of the flame. He does not move all night.

4.

The Tribune gets him out. They swap him with another writer, a foreign affairs reporter called Glenn, one not obviously in shock; they meet at the airport and Glenn gets him on his way.

He is upgraded to business class. The boarding pass is a sober blue.

The flight attendants have been warned, clearly, and watch him closely through the flight, but even in the landing he doesn’t feel the sense of fear he probably should. Even now he can see that statistics, having let him down before, are now squarely on his side: nobody ever goes through this twice. At Singapore Changi he connects to Qantas, and when he hears the familiar accents he closes his eyes for the first time. He awakens as they land, and notes the cabin crew have not woken him to reset his seat, relieved to let him drift through the descent unconscious.

But something has changed while he has been in the air. The guy from Channel 7 has shared his story of Barry’s rescue of Sandra, and he lands to find himself a hero. Shuffling through the arrivals doorway he is confronted by a sea of Canons and Nikons. He recognises his colleagues even behind the lenses and flashes, and through force of habit wanders over to the haircut he connects to Jasper from the Tribune.

“Who’s coming in?” he asks, expecting a celebrity.

Jasper lowers his lens. “Mate,” he says. “You are.”

*

Thomas Keneally had a phrase for it: a massive, sharp-edged Sydney sky.  As he emerges into the Sydney morning he remembers once again just how big the skies seem to be in his home town, how unencumbered by pollution, how distant the horizon. All that sky, he thinks:  how irrational to fall from it.

His parents have met him at the airport and take him home in a wordless cocoon of snuffles and hugs. His mum sits in the back with him and will not let him go. He can’t really speak. His phone is going; not just the office but now others seeking to interview him. He ignores them all. The next morning he will be on the front of all the papers, even those he doesn’t work for, but it will be a long time before he is made aware of this, and when he is, it will strike him as some elaborate fiction or alternative reality. He writes for the papers. He’s the one who asks the questions. He’s not the story. He wouldn’t know how to play that part.

The Tribune puts him on indefinite leave. They are understanding, and arrange counseling. Professional people with patient expressions ask him how he feels. They explain to him the process of post-traumatic stress. Sometimes they are technical, talking about how the disorder alters the function of the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala and the hippocampus. Sometimes they talk about psychotherapeutic intervention and cognitive behavioural therapy. Sometimes they reassure him that it’s OK not to be able to sleep, not to be able to talk, not to be able to fulfill the most basic social functions. Sometimes they just want to listen, but he hates that, because he genuinely cannot think of anything to say.

It takes an intolerable age for Gary’s remains to be repatriated, his parents’ grief no match for the arcane banality of Indian paperwork, and his funeral is weeks after the crash. Barry is invited. He cannot go. He knows, now, that everyone is aware he went into the front of the plane and pulled one person out. How, then, could he ever look Gary’s parents in the eyes and explain why he didn’t choose their son? In fact, Gary’s parents contact Barry themselves. They wish him a recovery. They send a beautiful, heartfelt, considered note. They even send him flowers, which he has not done for them. Not for the first time, nor the last, the kindness undoes him, leaves him ruined and bereft; he’d find disinterest or even blame so much easier to deal with.

After a month he goes back to work, for something to do. Staff have shifted around and he now finds himself mainly commissioning correspondents and freelancers in Jakarta, Beijing, Doha, Moscow. It’s diverting enough: the sense that the world keeps turning, renewing itself with endless disruption, calamity and cruelty, turns out to be oddly reassuring. He feels his story, the one that he’s in, moving more deeply into the past tense, being pushed down the alimentary canal of contemporary journalism from news to response to analysis to recrimination towards year-end reviews and endless anniversaries, and is glad of it.

The interview requests keep coming in; his own editors tell him that, when he’s ready, he should tell the whole story. He can’t do it. It’s not that he can’t face it. It bores him. He is aware, amid that vacuous fog that clouds his thinking these days, that this is the event that will define his life; that if ever he warranted his own Wikipedia entry (maybe he has one by now, he’s never looked) then the top line will be about the air crash. Whatever else he does, that will always be his top line. He could spent 50 years doing other things, run for office, win a medal, and never change that top line. He resents this, wants to be something else, wants his life to be known for something in his future instead of his past. But he knows instinctively that it will pull him back in.

But most of all, he thinks. Not about Sandra Donovan, who is back at work now, fully recovered and apparently with no memory at all of the crash; she has been in touch, but he has found himself curiously indifferent to her poised and articulate thanks. Instead, he thinks about Danielle.

And eventually, they bring her home.

*

She has spent two months in Perth’s burns unit before coming back to Sydney, but in the last weeks has been in limited contact. He’s not sure how she can command a keyboard, but she has responded briefly to his emails, saying nothing with a hint of emotion to it, just dealing in the practical mechanics of dermatology, disinfectant baths, bandages and clinical cell culture. But she is at least in touch. His own recalcitrance in talking about anything to do with the crash has made her something of a celebrity, as she has become the focal point of the disaster, but her formidable strength has not left her: she is saying not a word for public consumption until she gets to write it herself.

He asks to see her once, twice, three times, then leaves it, until finally a message comes through: drop by. She’s still in hospital, somewhere off the Northern Beaches.

What to bring? Can she hold a book? Should he take cakes, flowers, cards? In the end, paralysed by the uncertainty of proper compassion as only men can be, he takes nothing.

She has her own room in the hospital, covered by the National, and from the outside it’s not such a bad place to be. On the street, a breeze comes off the Pacific, and you can smell the salt. But then, she’s never outside.

It’s time to go in.

*

He has disciplined himself at some length to show no reaction to whatever she looks like, and is ready when he goes in. But still, it is a shock. So much of her is bandaged, or in strange compression clothing to restore her skin. The flowing brunette hair is gone. There is livid scarring down one side of her face, lending her eyes a brilliant blue. There seems so little of her.

He says the first thing that he thinks of. “You look beautiful.”

He means it. It is the first true statement of emotion he has been able to make in two months. She is beautiful, because she is still there. Though damaged and tarnished, lopped and gutted, she is still in there, and her eyes show him a purity of extraordinary strength that he has never seen in anything before.

But seriously. What is she to think of this remark, sitting there in pain, her face like charred meat? She thinks he is being smart and she shakes with rage.

“Fffffuck,” she eventually manages to spit, then dropping to a harsh whisper, “Off.”

He has said nothing of consequence about anything for two months but now there is so much to say he cannot say it. He wants to tell her of how he found her, of how he decided who to pull out; he wants to explain why he couldn’t come back in for her, how others should have done so; how, at this moment, he would take it all back and pull her free first. But he can’t. He can only look at the floor and whisper: “I mean it.”

She is looking to the side, her jaw clenched, but probably she has learned by now how nobody has any idea what to say to her. She sits in silence, trying to level her breathing.

After an eternity, she says: “So how are you?”

To fill the gaps, he tells her, but the little things: the change in his job, the scuttlebut of print media, of job cuts and subs being moved to New Zealand. But it’s just air. He’s just expelling air. He wants to dive in to the truth of it all, to tell her things that matter, but he can find no framework to it, no entry point. Eventually he says:

“They fixed your legs.”

She glances down the bed at herself. “Yes. They did. The pins came out last week.”

“Can you… will you be able to…”

“A walking frame first. I have to learn to walk all over again. But they say I’ll be able to. Even to run, maybe.” She exhales. “That’s the least of it, really.”

He sits down. “I wanted to explain to you…”

“Don’t. There is just no need.”

More empty air.

“I understand,” she says, “What you did. And you should not beat yourself up about it. You saved a life. Nobody else came in. Didn’t you see the papers? Hero.”

There’s no denying some venom in the last word, and she regrets it. “You have nothing to feel bad about.”

“I couldn’t get back for you.”

She lets that pass without comment.

He asks her about her treatment: safe ground, he thinks. But it is not. She tells him about the process of recovery, what they do to her, the pain of the treatment leavened only by the hope of what it might lead to. Every day they pull off her bandages in a procedure of brutal necessity and then submerge her with a harness in a bath turned purple with disinfectant. Then they pull her out like a sheep from a dip and cover her burns, 60% of her body, in ointment. Then the bandages go back on, ready for the torture to be repeated the next day.

It is a process so extreme and unimaginable, but narrated with such steely and steady conviction, that he has no idea how to respond. He looks at her hands. “Can you type?”

“Not really. There will need to be operations. They have to pin the fingers to let the skin grow back.” She pauses. “The messages I send, I dictate them. Mum sends them for me. But I’ll get there.”

“I know you will.” Again, he fears he is skirting with being patronising. Why is it so hard to just say something, without this assumption of parenthesis, footnotes, undercurrents, context? But she takes this at face value.

“I meant it,” he says at last. “You are beautiful. Still beautiful.” He would take her hand, but there is nothing he can grasp without hurting her.

“I find it odd,” she says, “That you should wait until now to point this out. There was a better time to say this. Don’t you reckon?”

*

OK. It’s about time you knew.

Budget night, Canberra, two years earlier. The capital’s press pack had been swelled by bussed-in ranks of Sydney and Melbourne staff writers for the annual lock-in. It was a long-standing, traditional arrangement: the journalists would surrender their phones, then be locked into a room in Parliament House and given all the federal budget papers several hours before the Treasurer announced them to parliament and the world. The theory was that this would, under strict embargo, allow the nation’s press to come up with some reasoned analysis and commentary on the budget in time to meet their press deadlines. It was high-intensity, high-stress, three articles per writer in most cases, with every paper producing entire separate bound-out editions dissecting every last scrap of policy from big-ticket tax breaks to the minutiae of pension rules. It was greatly impressive in the aggregate, Australian journalism at its very best, and a point of pride for all involved. When the Treasurer hit the floor of Parliament, it would all go live, and after garnering some informed reaction from politicians and economists, the press pack would all go and get absolutely blind.

There was a pub, legendary really, where everyone would inevitably end up, sometimes with a bold politician daring to immerse themselves in the cauldron. It was a badge of honour to become sideways drunk with impressive abandon, and a budget night did not pass, not once, without an illicit liaison or two.

And so: Dani.

It had started when they both tried to dance on the same table. There was a band, ploughing through the classics, Cold Chisel and Midnight Oil and Blister in the Sun, and there was just nothing to be done but dance on a table. But it had tipped over, he’d ended up flat on his back with her on top of him, and right there in the beer and the trodden-down crud of the bar-room floor, he had kissed her on the spur of the moment, and she had kissed him back. Lying there, soaked and stupid, he had sung Johnny Cash at her: “Kicking and gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer.”

They had ended up back at the hotel. In truth he cringed to think of it. If there had ever been a more hapless sexual performance in his life he mercifully could not recall it. He had managed to fall over while lying down, on top of her, no mean achievement and somewhat against the laws of physics, and had cracked her on the cheekbone with his own forehead then kneed her between the legs while trying to extricate himself. Pissed enough to be anaesthetised, she had been forgiving, even amused, and the night had been fun. He was hopelessly flattered, lacking in confidence to such an extent that it seemed implausible anyone might want to go to bed with him, never mind this brazen, successful, beautiful woman. But he was sure he had never told her any of that. Why wasn’t there time, in the moment, to tell her that?

And the next day he had been weird. He knew it. He couldn’t help it. He was sick as a dog, embarrassed by how he must look and smell, and he thought he had blown it with a show that had gone beyond the usual common-and-garden woes of tanked-up flaccidity into an ineptitude that had left her with a rude smudge of a black eye. And he had compensated with indifferent rudeness, and made her feel bad. They had not spoken for months afterwards.

What he had wanted to say, on a hundred occasions in the following weeks and months and years, was: I would love another chance at that, and I don’t just mean the sex. He had wanted to say: I admire you, and everything about you, and if you could tolerate me we could make something work. But anxiety piled on doubt and came out as rudeness, again and again. It was only in recent months that anything like civility had returned to their conversations, necessarily so, as they found themselves covering the same foreign-affairs rounds.

And how, in the end, had he treated her when it really mattered? By leaving her to die in a blazing aircraft, abandoning someone he loved for the sake of a snapshot of strangers. It had taken him until this moment to realise he had loved her all that time. And still did.

So now you know.

6.

He is bored of himself and seeks inspiration. He finds it, after various hopeless digressions, in a kayak.

He will drive from his Paddington flat to Middle Harbour and rent a kayak and just paddle into the open water that leads from the Spit Bridge up to Roseville and beyond. It offers such endless scope for variation, so many nooks and inlets. What a city is Sydney. Born in it, he had been complacent, seeking to escape it, but increasingly now he wonders why. Where else could you possibly do this? To be within reach of the city – within its civic borders, no less – and to be alone on clear and pristine water, green rolling bush reaching down to the banks on either side, a sea eagle soaring overhead?

He learns the names: Craig Cove, Castle Cove, Sugarloaf Bay, Two Creeks, the Lyrebird Track. It becomes a habit, then an obsession. He spends whole weekends on the water, paddling miles to gain strength and then just drifting, alone, in serenity. No troubles out here, no spirited inquiry, no confrontation about numbers and facts and opinions. From time to time he glances up at the jets flying out of Kingsford Smith from the south, but by now he can separate them from his own experiences.

It has a positive knock-on effect on everything in his life. He can talk again. He rejoins the company of friends he has shut out, drinks socially but with an eye for the maintenance of fitness, and remembers, eventually, how to laugh. He has resolved never to write the piece everyone wants to see from him about the crash, but the paper has moved on from that, and is happy enough with his work on the foreign desk. He has a skill, it turns out, for editing and commissioning, for understanding how to marry the burning enthusiasms of correspondents on the ground in far-flung places with the needs and interests of an Australian readership. He can explain to anguished writers why their insights haven’t run, or have been presented in ways they don’t like, and they accept him, eventually coming to seek his advice.

If you’re not on the water in Sydney, you’re wasting your good fortune, he tells people, but he stops short of asking others to join him on his kayaking trips. The solitude is everything, the escape that makes normal life acceptable, and the plash of a paddle in the shallows of the coves becomes his favourite sound in the world. He thinks of the sound when he goes to sleep, and these days sleep has become a source of rest, not an ordeal to be feared, and the scorching heat and the screams no longer torture his unconscious hours.

He decorates his flat. It is catastrophic. But it doesn’t matter. New pictures on the walls, artfully placed to disguise the places where he has knocked errant holes in them or splashed the wrong sort of paint on the wrong sort of place, give him a sense of renewal. He learns to appreciate that he has missed death by the narrowest of margins, and that to fail to appreciate it and make the best of it is a sin and an affront to the ones who have died.

He contacts Gary’s family, and asks if there is anything they want to know. There is only one question: did he suffer? And he can say, in all honesty, that he did not. He is the only man alive who can tell them this with certainty and he feels bad that he did not realise this and tell them sooner. But they understand. They find peace in what he says, and so too does he. He stays in touch with Dani, visiting her when he can, and while he says nothing more about his feelings for her, nor any ill-timed observations about beauty, he tells himself that he can see her slow improvement and she seems to like to see him.

*

But then.

One day his editor calls him in.

“Barry. Have a seat.”

Nothing good ever comes of such an introduction, Barry thinks. He takes a seat. His editor, Jonathan Bryson, is an old school newspaper man, tough, and not one to massage an ego; you’d run through a lot of possible descriptions before you could possibly come up with ‘people person’. Tall and barrel-chested, with heavy brows and jowls and a shock of untamable white hair, he has an ursine bulk which can be encouraging when he is on your side, intimidating when not; but by and large, Barry feels he has been on his side, and has unquestionably been supportive in the dark times. Nevertheless. “Have a seat,” in his experience, is a segue to a bollocking or some uncomfortable addition to his workload.

“How you doing?”

“Good. Enjoying the job. And I’m not just saying that.”

“That’s good. We’re pleased with how you’re doing. It’s… steady. I like steady.”

He detects a damning with faint praise in that, but lets it go. He can live with steady.

“There’s something I wanted to put to you.”

“OK. Go ahead.”

Bryson normally maintains eye contact as if you might vanish with a puff of smoke if you broke his gaze, but he is different today, looking down at an early draft of a special report on his desk, tapping awkwardly with a pen. Then he looks up.

“Two weeks from now, there will be in inquest in New Delhi into…” he pauses for the right word, can’t find anything suitably euphemistic, and puts it to him straight. “Your crash.”

Barry is calm, but he feels the room reducing around him.

“Right.”

“Now clearly we need to cover this. All the papers will. Australians died in it and we have to be there.”

“Yes. Sure.”

“And I do feel, although mainly you’re editing these days, that you should have the right to go and cover it. If you want to.”

He thinks of a kayak, the paddle in the water. He can see the water from here, through the windows of Bryson’s corner office; the Darling Harbour ferries are chopping through the swell. Steady. He likes steady.

“When do you need to know by?”

“Next week. But while you think, put in for an India visa, because you won’t have time otherwise.”

There’s not much else to say, so he stands. He nods at Bryson and closes the door behind him.

*

That night, the terrors are back. He closes his eyes and he is there again, walking through that curtain, that cheap scrap of fabric whose texture he can still feel on his face even now, like a suffocating shroud at a burial when he hasn’t yet died. Once again, he is seeing what he saw, processing it, churning it, rearranging and dissecting it, narrating it to invisible sympathetic audiences.

I was past this, he thinks; I was moving on.

There is a simple answer. He can just say no. Maybe it’s better that way: let someone objective and dispassionate cover the hearing without his emotional entanglement. But Bryson has been doing this quite long enough to understand that already. He’s making Barry an offer: an opportunity for closure, even for revenge, if expressed only in words, in exchange for the raw emotion of the survivor that people just can’t get enough of reading.

Is he being exploited? Perhaps. But still. He understands the deal and it is not without merit. He ought to know what happened to him, what happened to Gary and to Dani, and why.

He doesn’t sleep. He watches the clock flick to 1am. He tries to dredge up some fantasy about Dani and attempts a few tugs half-heartedly, but there’s just no way of believing it credible, even in his head; his fantasies, he knows, are of the old Dani, the one gone forever, and his guilt at this date-stamped daydream ends any chance of him getting started. The clock flicks to two, three, four. What would he be doing, he wonders, if this had never happened in his life? What petty dilemmas would be bothering him? Passed over for promotion? A deposit for a bigger apartment? What used to be important this time last year?

He’s still awake when the first planes start taking off from the south, engines roaring as they pass over the Eastern suburbs. He hasn’t boarded a plane since he got back from India, hasn’t so much as hopped on a shuttle to Melbourne, and as he hears them go by he associates them not with escape, as he once did, but with being torn away from home.

By sunrise he knows what to do, and leaves a message at the paper that he will be in late. He needs to talk to Dani.

*

It is almost a year now since the crash, and Dani is out of hospital, fending stoically for herself in an apartment in Manly and refusing all kind offers of friends and family to move in. When she wants to leave the apartment, her mum comes by to help, but generally, she doesn’t want to leave at all, and appears to survive through a supermarket online delivery template with Coles. He has messaged ahead, and she has told him the door will be unlocked when he gets there; he knows this is because answering the door is no easy task for her.

He drives north, over the Bridge, from which Sydney is always at its best on a sunny day like this, the trails of skiffs in the water, the curves of the Opera House, and that inconceivable sky. He passes the Spit, from where his weekend salvations in the kayak set off, and turns right on Pittwater towards Manly and the beaches.

Her place does not have the best of Manly. How could it? She was a journo, not a banker, and is disabled, though still on full company pay. Her apartment is modest and faces inwards toward the land, and as he tries to park amid the jumble of car parking spots on the slopes, he wonders how she copes with moving around.

As instructed he buzzes the building’s caretaker to get in to save her walking to the intercom, then takes the lift up to her floor. The door is on the latch but he knocks to announce himself.

“Dani?”

A voice from within. “I’m on the treadmill.”

For a second, elated, he believes it, but it is gallows humour. In fact she sits, crutches at her side, on a winded sofa in the living room, watching the ABC (she was always too principled and worthy to get caught up with the commercial channels). All this time, and she’s still in those compression garments. She says they are beyond excruciating to get in and out of, a twice-daily torture to bookend the day in the worst possible terms, and he winces for her.

“What’s up, doc?”

“Hey. How you doing.”

“Peachy,” she says, with infinite contempt.

He has, for once, been practical and brought groceries, which he puts into a threadbare fridge. He frowns. “Are you eating?”

“Yes, mum.” It is going to be that sort of encounter.

He looks at her hands. That operation she talked about, pinning the joints, has taken place, and she can see through the bandages that her fingers point straight out.

“Can you sleep like that?”

At this, she tears up. It was the wrong thing to say. “Barry,” she says. “I have not slept in a year.” And she starts to sob. He wants to hold her but is confronted once again by the challenge of knowing where to do so, how to avoid the burns on this damaged body. He has duped himself, in this kayak haze of his, into thinking she is on the road to recovery. But looking at her now, he sees how much there is to do, and what tiny steps she has taken. And there is so much that will never be the same.

Eventually, he tells her why he is there. She is quiet for a long time.

“So,” he says, “I wondered what you thought.”

She looks at him. “Why?”

He thinks about this. “It matters to me what you think. Nobody was hurt more than you.”

“Gary might disagree with you on that.”

“You know what I mean.”

She thinks. “Do you want to go?”

“I just don’t know. I can’t decide. I’m not sure what can come from it.”

“Well, you’ve heard the rumours.”

He has. There are whispers, not yet in formal print but all over the internet, that the captain ignored numerous alarms on the way in, trying to save fuel in order to secure a bonus from his airline. There is muttering in Canberra of manslaughter proceedings against the airline, tempered with the bitter reality of the pace of the Indian court system.

“Yes, I have. But if that comes out in the inquest, it will be public whether I go or not.”

“So it depends if you want to see him. Look him in the eye.”

“The pilot? The captain? Well, this is preliminary, apparently. I’m not even sure he’s going to be there.”

“Nothing to fear, then.”

“So I should go?”

“Why do you keep asking me that? If you want to go, go.”

He thinks for a while. “I suppose what it’s really about is, do you want me to go? Sort of, on your behalf?”

She sighs, and her eyes fill with tears again. She fights them back, stubbornly.

“Nothing in this is going to help me. It’s not going to give me my skin back.” He can’t meet her eye. “But, you know, you should see Sandra. Don’t you think? You saved her life. If I were you, I would want to see that.”

Wanting to be useful, he vacuums her flat. This is more than a rarity in his own home. She looks at him quizzically before dismissing him.

“Barry.” He looks back from the doorway. “Thanks.” It is progress, a bare moment of reprieve.

7.

Qantas turns out not to fly into Delhi either, so after a sleepless night in a Singapore hotel Barry finds himself once again rattling around Changi in a state of advancing agitation, preparing for a Jet Airways flight to the Indian capital. Those statistics about flights and death have become an obsession, and he quotes them as a Catholic might count rosary beads, hanging on to them as if they were some kind of inescapable truth.

Changi’s not such a bad place to be marooned. There is no efficiency quite like Singapore. It hums with working order. There is a garden there, right in the middle of the terminal. He would have ignored it on every previous visit, but right now, it’s exactly where he wants to be. He closes his eyes, thinks of Middle Harbour, until they call his flight. He sits there a little longer until they call him by name. So he gets up.

He hates every second of the flight in, everyone on the flight reminding him of a year earlier, and he tries to make the hours go faster by reading the notes he has printed out about the inquest. It hardly helps. He has no problem with India. Indians saved his friend’s life, pulled another away from the wreckage. India, the story of the place, is inspirational. But it’s also the site of the worst memories of his 30-odd years of life.

He arrives in Delhi at 11 in the morning, the sun high in the sky and relentless. He has gone in on a journalism visa and the questions at immigration are tedious and exacting. His bag takes half an hour to come to the belts, then turns up on the wrong one. The clamour of the taxi drivers, each with their own patter, their own story, triggers memories of the Hyderabad airport forecourt a year ago. No longer is the carnival of it all exotic: the cows on the highway from the airport into the Hilton – another Hilton – are irksome now, and he is short with everyone from passport control to the taxi to the check-in. The streets are wider here in Delhi than in Mumbai, and he passes the grand Colonial government buildings on the way in, and a vast pink sundial two acres across. There was a time when he lived for moments like this. He probably will again. But not now.

The hearing is at the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, in an old and battered building back out near the airport, and it is clear from the outset that it is a colossal waste of time. The Indian government has invited the Australian press to attend as a gesture of goodwill and openness – and India, he’s long since learned, is a democracy with a biting free press to make Murdoch blush – but word has not got through to the institution’s security and there is a long, hot and boring row with endless waves of officialdom before he and two other journos – print only, no TV today – finally get in. They do so to find the whole thing on the point of adjournment, no evidence presented, no sign of the captain. The real inquest, a panel chairman announces, will take place two months from now.

Emotionally spent and furious, he calls the foreign desk, explains the situation, and takes himself back to the hotel. He gets changed and jumps in the pool. He holds his breath and stays under the water until his lungs burn, trying to shut out any suggestion that he is where he is. In the end the lifeguard asks him to stop it.

There is, though, one redeeming feature to all this, and that is that he has arranged to meet Sandra Donovan that night. He has high hopes for this meeting and what it will do for his inner peace. This is the moment, he hopes, that all his doubts about the decisions he made will be erased: that seeing a woman he saved, now raising a family who would never otherwise have seen her again, will finally set him free from his guilt about Dani.

At seven he goes downstairs to the hotel bar. It is the mirror image of its counterpart in Mumbai and he is caught by an oddly pleasant sense of deja vu. He knows why: he was happy, that night, not knowing that 12 hours later everything in his life would be changed for ever, and that for others, life would be over. He has never felt that undiluted happiness since.

Once again, he thinks he is there too soon, for there is no sign of Sandra. These days he’s not so bothered about sitting in a bar on his own, a pathetic first world problem he has long since learned to relegate for better things to worry about. But then he stops in his tracks. She’s there. At the bar, with her back to him. He can tell from the hair and from her tiny frame. But she’s as far removed from the person he remembers as it’s possible to be.

*

Even from a distance he can tell she’s already drunk. He can see by the angle she’s leaning on the bar, as if without it she would fall, which, he quickly realises, she would. Her hair, as he gets closer, is a matted mess. He can see the bar staff looking nervously at her, unsure whether they should still serve her. He walks slowly towards her and even considers turning around and walking back out, but he can’t, not now.

“Sandra.”

She swivels on her bar stool, nearly losing her iron grip on the bar, and shouts, very loud: “Lifesaver!” She makes the last syllable last for five throaty seconds. Everyone else in the bar turns to stare. She is hammered, and near unrecognisable. Her face is bloated and ruddy, suggesting to Barry that this is not an unusual state to find her in. “Another fucking Hilton bar.” She is louder still. “We must stop meeting like this. People will talk.”

“Hey,” he says, trying to be calming, as she drapes her arms around him. “How are you?”

She snorts. “As you can see,” she slurs, “I am dangerously well.”

He is profoundly uncomfortable. He ushers her from the bar, half carrying her, to the sofas at the side of the room. As she collapses into the cushions her skirt rides up, and for a moment he is returned to the paddy field and the outside of the burning fuselage, the two Indian passengers pulling her away from the flames, her vulnerable unconscious body stripped of its confidence. He breathes deeply, tries to bury it. This is what it’s done to him: a beautiful woman’s thighs in view, and he sees an air crash. She sees his discomfort.

“You, Mr Hadler, need to catch up with me.”

It is another big choice, he can feel it right there: sober her up and try to get some sense from her, or get as drunk as she is. There is only one sensible option. He has been looking forward to this but must stay sober and look out for her. She needs support, and he knows all about that now. Yet he is suddenly bound to her by a sense of shared ordeal that nobody else can understand. There is such allure in the idea! Drunk, with someone you can talk to. And god knows he’s got no work to do now after this wasted, pointless day.

Knowing, as he does it, where this will lead, he makes his decision.

“A kingfisher, please. And keep them coming.”

She can’t really drink any more, and doesn’t try, so the pace of his catching up with her blitzed condition is worrying swift. He hasn’t eaten all day, hasn’t slept enough, has not drunk water. Soon he doesn’t care about the noise either of them are making, and here, in the deference of a five star hotel, nobody is game to come and object. Each beer makes him feel more alive.

But he is lucid enough to gather what has happened to her in the year since he squeezed her hand on a hospital gurney in Hyderabad. And his private dream of her domestic contentment, using her survival as a springboard for a blissful life with her young family, is swiftly shattered.

In his time with the therapists and counsellors, he has heard plenty about survivor’s guilt, and she is textbook. They should put her picture in the medical manuals as a definition. She has had it all, as if ticking off a checklist: anxiety, depression, sleeplessness, social withdrawal, nightmares, uncontrollable crying matched by uncontrollable laughter, and crushing, suffocating guilt. Every bit of it is written all over her. But here’s the thing: he understands. He gets it. And this unusual sense of usefulness is empowering. He drinks some more.

She has kept her job, but god knows how, for she seems to have been an alcoholic for a year. Some people can function like this, he knows, and in his correspondence with her over the year there’s been no hint of any of this decay. Somewhere in there, that controlled capability survives. But you can’t see it from where he’s sitting, not right now, as she howls with laughter at all the wrong moments, cries at her own jokes, and shatters one glass after another on the marble floor. She is still married, but only just, and he dreads to think of the interaction with her children: to have her delivered back from the dead, and yet to find her irrevocably altered and shattered.

But he can talk to her, and suddenly he cannot stop. It all comes out, shouted and stumbled and sometimes in tears, and he forgets their public location and finds in it a therapy he has never found elsewhere. For all her pissed incomprehension, she is still smart enough to listen to him as the words tumble out of him unchecked.

After a while there are things he wants to know.

“Do you remember anything of it? Anything at all?”

She puts her drink down unsteadily. It wobbles and totters but does not fall. “I lose my way after we landed,” she says, forcing her words out one at a time with enormous effort, shaping them carefully in her mouth to make herself understood through the anaesthetic of a dozen margaritas. “We came in fast, and we hit the ground, and then we bounced. Then, nothing.”

“Until?”

“I woke in the hospital. I know you were there but I think I might only know that because people told me.” She is more lucid already, the memory suppressing the alcohol instead of the other way around. “I remember my staff around me.” She is quiet for a little while. “It was only a couple of days later that I heard you pulled me out.” She leans forward and puts her hands flat on the table, studying her fingers intently. “I have to ask you. Why me?”

He tells her. He explains exactly what he saw. How he dropped to the aircraft floor and got enough air into his lungs to get one person out. He tells her how time telescoped, how it really does that. He tells her about the cold options in the infernal heat. He tells her about the decision he made, and how he remembered her photograph.

Her hand moves instinctively to her purse, then stops. She looks down again. “I lost it. That photograph. I got drunk and lost my purse, that photo and everything.” She is lurching to one side, her head leaning far over, but she is the one who wants to talk about it now. “And I’ve lost them too, really. You should see how they look at me now. They’re scared. I’m scared. Of me.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “But I have never forgotten that photograph. The way those kids were looking at you, behind the camera. So completely devoted. You can get that back again.”

Her lips turn down in a cartoon arch. “They were looking,” she says through rucking sobs, “at their father. He took it.” And she cries, long and hard and loud.

He reaches across for her hand. Then he moves across and joins her on the sofa, and puts his arm around her. She buries her head into his shoulder, rests her hand lightly on his chest.

One more kingfisher and he knows exactly where this is going to end up.

“One more kingfisher.”

8

When he wakes with her, it is as if he has been emptied of everything that was ever good about himself.

He goes into the bathroom and raps his knuckles against the marble of the basin. He closes his eyes tight and tries to undo things. First he undoes last night. Then he undoes coming to Delhi. Then he undoes every fragment of the crash. He doesn’t pull her out. He doesn’t even go to save anyone.

In fact why not go further. He dreams of having swapped boarding passes with Gary, of having died unconscious and unknowing, an end to all choices and compromises, to recrimination and guilt. There would have been pain for his family, sure, but what is life if not delaying the inevitable? Yet again he finds himself envying his friend. Gary has a full stop, after a life he never fucked up. The legend’s even bigger in death than it was in life. His story is complete and it is a good one. Staying alive, Barry thinks, leaning his head against the mirror, is just a licence to fuck up anything good you already did. Every day’s another chance to fall off the tightrope. Why not have it over, like that, in the drama of a crash, but without pain or knowledge, as it was for Gary?

If they had swapped tickets, Gary could have been in economy, maybe saved both the women, so much bigger and stronger than Barry himself. Gary could have had the plaudits. He would have been a better hero. He looked the part. So much more able to handle it than Barry had found himself. That’s surely how it was all meant to be: swapped tickets, fate all in neat lines, a natural order preserved.

He wonders if Sandra’s family are worried about her but he suspects this is not an unusual occurrence. More textbook survivor guilt: self-destruction, throwing oneself into meaningless encounters just for the very damage it will cause. He can’t bear the fact that his happy vision, his justification for his choices that day, is a lost and broken photograph that bears no resemblance to today’s reality.

Speaking out loud without realising it, he spits out: “I saved the wrong one.”

“Yes,” she says from behind him. “You did.”

*

There’s no way he can know it at this point, but this is the bottom. For both of them. When he gives her a peck on the cheek but can’t meet her eye as she trudges, crumpled and reeking of tequila and cointreau, out of his hotel door, he can’t imagine that this is the inflexion point of her life: that having fallen, fallen, fallen for a year, she will see this as a floor from which to bounce. She will go home, confess, seek counselling, take time off work, kick the booze, and start the slow and steady process of rebuilding. She will become the person Barry thought he had created by pulling her from the plane: her kids, young enough to have short memories, will embrace this returning figure unquestioningly, and eventually, though with more pain, her husband will too. Barry can’t know that he has now saved her twice, first physically on the plane, then taking her to a point where she can fall no lower. One year, when you think of it, is just the slightest fragment of a life; it will be ‘that time’, ‘that year’, and it will enter the past tense of her existence, a challenge overcome. She will rise and rise, run embassies, shape policy, and in the end the crash will not be the top line of that wikipedia entry Barry so fears, but a sub-heading, an aside. It will not define her life. If only he could know this now.

The other thing he can’t know is that this is the bottom for him too. He can’t hate himself or his decisions any more than he does right now, scowling at a booze-swollen reflection in the spotless gilt-edged mirror of the Delhi Hilton. It would be so much easier if you could identify the bottom, the sandy floor at the depths of the ocean trench, so many miles down in the blue-black murk from the sunny redemption of the surface.

Only one person has further to fall.

*

The first thing he does, literally the very first thing, when he lands back in Sydney, is go to find a kayak. He doesn’t even go home. He cabs it all the way through Sydney, through the Harbour Tunnel, up the throttled urban gulch of Military Road and onto the Spit, and there, abandoning his bags to the trust of the boat-for-hire place, climbs straight into the kayak and paddles up Middle Harbour like his life depends on it. He is still in a bloody suit.

He goes miles, past the Roseville Bridge until he is fighting the flow of the river that feeds it. Finally unable to go any further, he turns the boat around and drifts downstream the way he came. He puts the paddle down and lies back in the boat, the sun on his face, his hand dipped in the water: plash, plash, plash.

He lies like this for an hour, knowing he is burning but welcoming the retribution from nature. Burn me, he thinks, like Dani was burned; I deserve it, it would be a relief to suffer. I’ll swap some of the pain with her. Maybe we could go 50-50. There is just so much to process, so much to banish. His mind is a confusion of interrupted circuits, unfinished paths, tangles. He wonders what possible point there is in ever getting out of this boat. But lying there drifting, plash plash plash, there is a semblance of a way forward. He knows it, but isn’t sure quite how to make it happen.

Eventually he sits up, fashions his suit jacket into a covering for his head, and paddles slowly back to the Spit. His bags are still there behind the counter.

The guy at the counter is studying him. “You alright, mate?”

“You know what?” he replies. “I think I will be.”

*

It’s no distance from here to Manly, and the buses from the city all pass across the Spit, so it’s not long before he finds himself outside her apartment block, his bags beside him. He hasn’t, though, phoned ahead, and he knows that he has made her suffer by summoning her to the intercom.

Finally: “It’s me. Barry.”

“What? You’re… alright then. Come on up.”

And then she has to get herself to the door, so she is breathless and in some pain by the time he is facing her in her apartment and helping her back to the sofa. She was preparing a sharp remark, but stops short.

“You look truly appalling,” she says. “And I know a bit about looking truly appalling.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I just got off the overnight flight.”

She looks at his bags. “And you didn’t go home?”

“No. I… well, I went kayaking first.”

This is such a preposterous non sequitur of an explanation she doesn’t comment, instead surveying him with some apprehension.

“I really need to talk to you.”

“About the inquest? I read. It didn’t really happen. Wasted journey, I guess.”

“That’s not it.”

He is going to say what he thinks. Just once, he is going to do that.

“I want to be with you. To be… you know. Your, what. Partner. Boy… whatever. I want to be with you. I just do.”

“Ohhh, for fuck’s sake.”

It is a response quite different to the one he had had in mind.

“Barry,” she says again, with a firmness of tone he was not counting on. “For fuck’s sake.”

“I should have pulled you out.”

“Barry, not this again. I told you…”

“I should…”

“Stop it! Stop it! Just, fucking, stop it! Do you think I have time for this? To fix your fucking guilt trips and your neuroses? Stop it! Look at me! Look at what I have to deal with, right here, without you and your fucking misery!”

One would think this would be sufficient to give him pause – god knows, he never normally needs an excuse to be quiet and inexpressive – but there are things he needs to say. Witlessly and to her complete astonishment, he presses on.

“That’s one of a lot of things I should have done. Canberra, I…” He can never be articulate when he needs to be. It’s like there’s a blockage in his mind between thinking something and finding any lucid way to express it. He wants to retreat to print, to write it down. That’s what he should have done, he thinks: I should have written a letter. Let her digest it. Print is what I can do, not this. But he tries to get to the heart of it. “Since the crash I have regretted it every day. Not just the plane. Everything. The two years before it. Everything. I want to fix it.”

What he is saying is real, but that’s only half the battle, isn’t it? A conversation is about two things, what you say and what the other person takes from it. And what she takes from it is not what he intends.

“I don’t need,” she says, “your pity. I can look after myself. Thank you.”

Again, there should be simple answer to this, but there’s that jam in his mind again, that blockage. Words don’t come. They just won’t.

If he could write it down, here’s what he wants to say: I do want to look after you, but that’s not the half of it. I do want to alleviate my guilt, but that’s not the whole story either. I have admired you for all of the time that I have known you and I have loved you for most of it too. But you intimidated me and I blew it, because at some level I never quite believed I was your match. I love you more now because you never give up. You have strength and determination that I have never seen in another human being. I could never be you. I don’t have it in me to be anything like you. You are crippled and burned and yet you are still beautiful. This is what he wants to say.

What he says is: “Sorry.”

Five minutes pass in silence and they are both lost in thought.

“How do you think it would be, Barry,” she says eventually. “Great sex life. Do you know what I look like under these things?” she raises an arm, still covered in compression clothes. “I was burned everywhere. I, was burned, everywhere. You can’t touch me. Either the pain will kill me or I won’t be able to feel a thing. All depends,” she says, matter of fact, “where you land. How much of me caught fire. How deeply it got to the flesh.”

He just looks at her.

“Look what they did to me,” she says, and her voice is trembling now. “I could spend the rest of my life trying to explain to you the pain and you would never be able to understand it. When they would put me in that bath and take my bandages off I would beg them to stop. I would offer them all my money to stop. I was serious. I would try to remember my bank account numbers so they could transfer it themselves. I would tell them I wanted to kill myself rather than let them carry on. I meant it. I would ask them for a razor. I would ask them to drug me to death.”

He can’t do anything but listen to her.

She raises her hands. “They took the pins out of my fingers when you were away. No anaesthetic. My heart’s not strong enough to take it.” She is sobbing now. “They pulled needles out of my bones with no anaesthetic. One at a time. One, two, three.” She studies them. “Medieval. You couldn’t think of anything with more cruelty to it if you tried.” She closes her eyes. “It’s not fair. They took everything there was of me. My job is gone. It’s never coming back. I can’t go out. I can’t have a life back. Do you have any idea how that feels?”

He shakes his head slowly.

“You want to do something for me? Go kill the fucking pilot.”

She doesn’t mean it. Or maybe part of her does. But still. A seed is planted. He will deny it to himself, that it is there. But it is. Sprouting silently beneath the soil.

*

She sends him home and he showers then collapses into bed. Next day is Monday and he is back in work, where he fronts up to Bryson.

“It was a wasted trip. I’m really sorry,” he says.

“It’s not your fault. We got dicked around. None of the other papers had anything.”

“Not cheap, though.”

“No. But we have to be there.” Bryson looks out the window. Darling Harbour glitters below. “And we will have to be there when the proper inquest happens in a couple of months. Do you want it?”

“Well, I might as well. Daft to go to the one that doesn’t happen and then miss the one that does.”

“Right. Good. And they say the pilots will speak?”

“They say. But I just can’t read these inquiry things. You never really know what’s happening.”

“OK. Well, the foreign ministry cares about this, it seems, so they’ll make representations to make sure we get the access and we’ll get you in. I don’t know if there’s going to be a chance for questions. I’d be surprised. I’m pretty fucking surprised they’ll let anyone in at all. I wouldn’t. But you should at least be able to see the panel questioning.”

*

He is not giving up on Dani, and when he sees her again she is kinder and calmer, but it is clear to him that her recovery, such as it is, has stalled. More than a year on the burns are improving and the removal of the pins from her hands allows her to use the crutches more easily, and she is not so far from walking unassisted or – perhaps the bigger deal, perversely – being able to type. But it’s the mental recovery that is so clearly in decline. She is not coping with the parameters of the recovery she can eventually expect to make. And it turns out the cliches are true: she needs some kind of closure.

It is in recognition of this that she puts it to him.

“There’s something you can do for me.”

“Anything. No, hang on. You’re not going to ask me to kill the pilot again.”

They both laugh nervously.

“No. But you are going to take me to Delhi.”

He doesn’t see this coming. “What?”

“I wanted to cover it for the National. They were having none of it. Which is no surprise, really, is it. But I want to be there.”

He thinks for a while. “Why?”

“You know why. I’m not getting better, Barry. Not up here.” She taps her head with still-bandaged fingers. “I need to see it. I need to understand why it happened.”

He thinks carefully, for once, about how to say the next bit.

“I think,” he says, “you might be disappointed.”

“I know why you think that,” she says. “Either nobody will say anything, or there will be a cover up, or someone will be paid off, or nobody will say sorry. I am ready for all of that. But I do need to see him. The pilot. I think you know,” she continues, selling it, “that this is part of recovery.”

She has thought this through, clearly, at immense length and there is no counter-argument he can make that she won’t already have thought of, dissected, analysed, and made ready to destroy. He can’t think at her pace, can’t do the weighing up, the thinking through.

“Are you in any condition to do this?”

“Well that depends who you ask. My doctors will say no. But I’m fit to fly. There’s no injury an airline or airport can’t deal with if we go slow. And I don’t care what my doctors say.”

“That’s no surprise.”

“No. Will you do it?”

He feels rushed, outmanoeuvered. Where did these women suddenly come from? Surely it wasn’t like this a generation ago. These five foot dynamos who can do anything. He’s powerless before them and feels some sort of confidence trick has been pulled on his generation of men, that the womenfolk in his time are just so much bloody tougher and smarter than he is. He wants to call his dad and ask him. Could they do this in your day? Tie you in knots with logic and charm and bulletproof bull-headed tenacity?

There is only one answer he can give to her question. “Yes.”

With infinite effort she rises to her feet and with slow, unassisted steps, walks over to him. She leans forward, and he can feel the scarring on the side of her face brush roughly against his stubble with an angry rasp. She kisses him lightly on the cheek.

“Thank you.”

*

Damn, that kayak is getting a battering. He is seriously fit these days, powering up and down the Middle Harbour coves, but he is fuelled by intense anxiety rather than any wish to look svelte. Any more anxious and he will cross the bloody Pacific in this thing, turn up in Auckland spouting crap about women and kerosene.

Plenty worries him: the logistics of getting her there, the responsibility of her welfare, and most of all, how she will react when she is there. Most of all, he fears failing her. He has already failed her once. Twice, really. What he absolutely cannot deal with is in any way letting her down yet again. And really, she was tough and unpredictable at the best of times. What’s she capable of now? Will she find a way to get a gun in somehow? Or just bring the place down with words?

All of this distracts him from the other unanswered question: how he will react. He ought perhaps to be focusing more on this, and in the long run, it would really serve him better if he did. But right now, his thoughts are filled with Dani, because if he saves her, he saves himself.

9

Their return to India is a national story in itself, and when they arrive at Kingsford Smith for the flight he is once again in the strange position of being on the wrong side of the ledger. He really can’t stand this: he likes to ask the questions, to view, to sift and balance, to interpret and analyse, to write. He can’t be the focal point. It is an inversion. It does not work.

But then again, all eyes really are on Dani, resplendently wounded and returning to the scene of her undoing. But, looking at her now, he believes she is anything but undone. Still hairless, wigless, hatless, she bears her scars without embarrassment, and her blue eyes fix the camera lenses magnificently. Oh, we love a hero in Australia, and as they pass through immigration, her in a wheelchair pushed by an upstanding lantern-jawed man clearly pleased to be a part of it, several of the battle-hardened cameramen drop their lenses and tell her: “Good luck, Dani.”

What will the picture editors append to the shots of the two of them. Journalist Barry Hadler with journalist Danielle Kasper, the one he didn’t save.

Qantas are more than ready for her, and Jet Airways too on the Singapore-Delhi leg; there is a clear point of pride here, a wish to show that not all Indian airlines are like the now-folded Chidiya. She has not been on a plane in a year, since the one that nearly killed her, and as the descent begins he notices that every steward is looking at her, ready for a breakdown, but it does not come. She sits there with determination and what might almost be a smile. Upon landing she turns to him. “That,” she dead-pans, “was altogether smoother than the last one.”

“Yes,” he says, relieved, trying to join in the grim badinage. “Better service all round.”

“I don’t know about you,” she continues, sprightly, “but I shall be withholding my custom from Chidiya. I found their post-flight service sadly lacking.”

He smiles. But his arse clenches in discomfort. He could crack a walnut in it.

Changi is its usual functional whirl but even at Indira Gandhi International in Delhi they are ready for her, with that exaggerated and flamboyant courtesy one can still find here, pushing her in another wheelchair while shouting grandly for the crowds to part.

As they pass out the front to a waiting hotel car, a thousand eyes are upon her. But she knows India, knows that stares are just part of it all, without malice; that in this urgent glut of pressed mankind everybody is everybody else’s property. She stares right back.

Mercifully, they are not in a Hilton this time, with all their bar-room memories, but a Marriott on Connaught Place. There truly is no madder road in India than this ludicrous 15-entry roundabout, and for a long while, once in the room, she just looks out of the window, marvelling at how it all works. An entire town seems to be on the roundabout, every possible form of transport and several cows, and yet nothing collides. They all adjust.

The two are in separate rooms, but he hangs around in hers, attentive, annoying. She tolerates him.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

“It’s good to be here. Which is strange,” she says. “I haven’t let myself think about India all year. But look at this.” A motorbike moves against the tide, a thousand people coming in the opposite direction. It gets through. Then, coming the other way, two men and a pig go past on the same bicycle. She laughs. “This country is going to rule the world, sooner or later.”

That night they eat publicly, in the hotel restaurant. She has no intention of hiding, and in any case, here in the womb of the hotel, people are not intrusive.

She is oddly bouyant. Self-deprecating and funny, gently mocking him constantly. They talk about old times, memories. They swap tales of their early days in the profession, the degrading subservience of their trainee days, though he knows that she didn’t spend long in that state, marked early for greater things, just like Gary. They speak with delicious snide spite about colleagues and bosses. They ponder who’s sleeping with who.

They swap tales of childhood, of maddening family holidays, 14-hour drives to Queensland in airless stinking vinyl-seated Ford Escorts, quirks of siblings, oddities of parents and selves. She’s not from big money, a daughter of state school teachers in Sydney’s south; everything that she is, she has made herself.

“I know you want forgiveness from all of this,” she says at one point. “But you’re completely missing the point. I never blamed you for the plane.”

“What, then.”

“I blamed you for headbutting me and giving me a black eye during sex.”

He snorts and blushes. “Yes. I’ve owed you an apology for that for quite a while.” He looks her gallantly in the eye. “I’m sorry.”

“I forgive you,” she says. “Hoofing me where the sun don’t shine, though; that’s a different matter.”

“Oh.” He is burning red. “You remember.”

“That, Mr Hadler, is not something a girl forgets.”

For the first time since forever, they are laughing together.

*

The building for the hearing is common of India: grand and stocky, if faded, on the outside, decrepit within. In the room where the inquiry will take place, loose wiring hangs from the walls, above chipped and peeling paint. The air is filled with the chesty hum of old iron fans moving from side to side.

India’s authorities have taken their presence seriously and there is no dispute on the door this time. Four TV crews – ABC, Seven, Nine and Ten – are outside and film them entering. They shout questions to Dani but she simply smiles. The Indian press pack, which is quite a thing, is here too, and furious: they are not allowed in. It’s an extraordinary gesture, really, this access the Aussie print media have been given, and he’s not entirely clear on why it’s been granted. He assumes there is some distant underlying motive around trade and politics, something agreed in a room he’ll never see among people he’ll never meet.

She and Barry, plus the National and the Southern Cross’s correspondents, are ushered to a bank of seats to the left of the hearing room. The National guy is deferent to Dani, knowing her reputation and her connection to all of this, but he says little to her, and concentrates on the job. No questions, they are all told by an administration official, but with graciousness; you’re here to watch.

It is stultifyingly hot. He looks often to her, and finds her calm, even serene.

“All right?”

“No,” she says. “I can’t get over the sight of you in a tie.” Bravado. It’s impressive. But he is acutely nervous about what will follow.

A panel of men sits behind a heavy wooden table. The chairman, a man of about 60, has chaired crash investigations before; in South Asia, one can be reasonably busy in this line of work. He has an air about him of a 19th century barrister, but Barry finds his presence and bearing reassuring. When Barry tries to introduce himself, the chairman is rude and blunt back. But he can live with that. Rude and blunt, when the captain comes up, will be quite the thing.

But there is a wait for that. First various people are called forward to talk about the day. Much of the initial material is technical or circumstantial, or both, and seems distant from the reality of the day: air traffic control, engineers who serviced the plane in Mumbai, some expert witness talking about wing flap control, another talking about weather and crosswinds. Hours pass, as things move at the speed they do in India. It can’t be rushed.  Everyone has something to say and they say it at length. There is no urgency. But then, from their perspective, why should there be?

He feels in limbo, preparing for a moment that will be crucial to his life and how he moves on with it, knowing it is coming and ready to meet it but unable to do anything to bring it forward, like a child in the back of a car willing their way to a destination that is always, they are told, five minutes away. He studies the walls, the people, their shoes, their hair. He makes notes to add a little colour to the piece he will later file.

And then it is time.

The co-pilot is the first one in. He looks young and terrified, and cannot make eye contact with his inquisitors. What might he be? 30? Barry’s age? He wears a junior air, of one who takes orders, doesn’t give them.

“Take a seat, please.” He does, and steals a momentary glance at the journalists; then, a second glance at Dani. He looks down once again.

They run through his name and rank, confirm the formalities: the flight number, his role, his position on the flight deck. He confirms that the captain, not he, had control of the plane on the descent.

“Now,” the chairman says. “We have the analysis of the black box and voice recorder here.” Barry and Dani turn to the document the chairman is holding: nobody has seen this. Nobody knows what is in it. Suddenly nobody seems to be breathing. Barry thinks: that’s my life you’re holding there. It should be mine.

“The first thing I want to point out to you,” the chairman says, “is that the black box data tells us that the aircraft was travelling at 400 kilometres per hour as it came in to land. Are you aware of that?”

“Yes.”

“What would you say is the appropriate speed for an aircraft to land at?”

“Approximately?”

“If you wish.”

“200 kilometres per hour, sir.”

Dani is suddenly tense beside him. They knew this, in a way: but here it is. In black and white. The numbers that took her skin from her.

“Do you know why the aircraft was travelling at that speed?”

“No, sir.”

“It was the captain’s decision?”

“Yes, sir.”

There is a pause while the chairman writes notes, somewhat theatrically.

“The second thing I want to put to you,” he says, “is that there were a series of automated alarms from the aircraft’s systems.”

“Yes sir.”

“There were 15 alarms.”

Dani breathes out, almost a retch, and leans forward. Instinctively Barry grabs her, but in some tender and ruined location, and she flinches away from him. She is breathing heavily, her teeth in a rictus. She shouldn’t he here, he thinks;  this was a terrible idea.

“Yes. Sir.”

“Why were these alarms ignored?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“The captain’s decision.”

“Yes sir.”

“Did you try to alert him to the danger of his approach?”

He does not answer.

“Did you try to alert your commanding officer about the danger of his approach.”

He is looking straight down, intertwining his fingers.

“Did you…”

“Yes, sir.”

There is a murmur around the room.

“How.”

“I told him to go around.”

The chairman, satisfied, taps the second of the two reports in front of him. “Yes, you did. The voice recorder caught it,” he says. “But what I want to be absolutely clear on is, when he did not go around, what did you do?”

The co-pilot swallows hard.

“Or if I may help you out, sir,” the chairman continues, sinister in his civility, “what did you not do.”

He is rocking in his seat, hugging himself now. He looks up at the documents on the chairman’s desk. The black box data: it has everything. There’s no hiding from it.

“I did not extend the flaps for landing.”

An audible cry comes from Dani, and she rocks in her seat, just as the co-pilot did. Security guards at the doors start looking nervously at one another.

The chairman, enjoying his moment, sits back in his chair and repeats: “You did not extend the flaps for landing.”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“I did not believe it was safe to land at that speed. I thought when I did not extend the flaps, it would make the pilot reconsider, and go around.”

“But he did not.”

“No, sir.”

“And why do you think that was.”

The co-pilot is beside himself, churning.

“Why, sir, do you think that was.”

“I can’t say.”

“This hearing compels you,” the chairman states grandly, leaning back in his seat, chest puffed out, “to give your opinion.”

“Bonus,” he whispers.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Bonus.”

“What bonus.”

“There was a bonus scheme at Chidiya. The more fuel you have in your tanks when you land, the more bonus you get.”

There is silence.

The co-pilot then claims to have lost consciousness, a story that bears little scrutiny since he got himself out of the plane, but it doesn’t matter, the facts are there. They have been given a window into their own ordeal, a view from the inside, and it is utterly dark.

More questions follow, most of them technical, until at last the co-pilot is dismissed. As he stands, he turns shakily to Dani. “I am sorry,” he says to her. “Miss. I am so sorry.”

She doesn’t look at him, just keeps rocking, her eyes closed tight now. Barry, appreciating the gesture, stands and nods at the man. But he knows, they all know, the wrong man is apologising.

The chairman looks over at Dani for the first time, then locks eyes with others around the room. “We will adjourn,” he decides. “30 minutes.”

*

They sit outside in a corridor, sipping bottled water. Barry kneels down in front of her.

“You know the pilot’s in next.”

She nods.

“We really need to think about whether you should be in there.”

She looks up at him, furious. “Of course I’m fucking going to be in there. You think I came all this way to buy a fucking carpet?”

“I know. But I think this is really going to hurt you.”

“There is nothing,” she spits, ”that they can do to hurt me that they haven’t done to me already.” She raises bandaged hands. “You know how long I will be like this? Three years. That’s what they tell me. Three years of this shit. And at the end of it, I’ll still be fucking burned.”

A trolley squeaks past laden with tea. He waits till it has gone.

“I just think we need to think,” he tries, “what you want to get out of this.”

She doesn’t answer this. The door opens to the hearing room and she rises and walks, unsteadily but unassisted, back in.

*

He is probably about 50, a little bald, a little thick in the middle. You wouldn’t give him a second look, this man. He is in a light beige shirt, the ubiquitous uniform of official India, and there are the beginnings of sweat circles around the armpits in this oppressive heat. But what you wouldn’t say, as much as you might want to, is that he looks troubled.

The chairman begins.

“Your name, please.”

He states it. He has none of the nervous deference of his co-pilot. He’s not scared of these men, does not perceive in them any authority.

“And your role on flight CD200, Chidiya Airlines from Mumbai to Hyderabad.”

“Captain.” There is pride in it.

Barry has a terrible feeling about what’s coming. The redemption he wants from all this, the peace; it’s not coming. He knows it. Dani must know it too.

The formalities follow: the checks before the flight, the process, the takeoff, the cruise. And then the meat of it.

“Why did you come in at twice the normal speed for descent?”

He sniffs. “I did not.”

“We have the black box data here,” he says. He taps the document in front of him again. It is treasure. Compelling. Absolute. “400 kilometres per hour.”

“That’s incorrect.”

“Once again, please?”

“Instrumentation was incorrect. I have flown for 30 years. We were at the correct speed.”

Barry feels himself sink into his chair. Not like this: please, not like this. Beside him Dani is holding it together, but is visibly shaking.

“You ignored,” the chairman says, “15 alarms.”

The captain does not respond.

“Fifteen. One-five.”

He is studying his fingers.

“Why.”

He looks the panel squarely in the eye, one man at a time. “Same reason. Instrumentation. It was responding to the incorrect airspeed indicator.”

She is shaking more violently now.

“Why didn’t you go around? Check instrumentation and make a second attempt at landing?”

“There would have been no point. The reading would have been the same. I have been flying for 30 years. I know how to fly a plane.”

Now Barry is shivering too in gathering rage. He is at school, listening to a fellow pupil lie about him to cover his own arse, thinking: this isn’t fair. This is not fair.

“Then why,” the chairman says, clearly exasperated too, and trying to keep steadiness in his voice, “did your aircraft” – he draws out the next word deliberately, savouring it – “crash.”

“Two reasons.”

“Which are?”

“A gust of wind.”

There is an audible guffaw from the other two members of the press pack here, swiftly suppressed as they glance guiltily at Dani.

“Once again, please.”

“As we came in to land we experienced a most abnormal cross wind. It was responsible for the… incident.”

The chairman consults his notes. “We have the weather readings from Hyderabad. We have heard from the tower. We have taken testimony from an expert witness. There were no unusual wind conditions that day.”

“Freak gusts can still occur. I have been flying for 35 years.” It’s going up. Where will it end, if the hearing goes on? Fifty? A hundred? “I have experienced this many times.”

“You overshot the runway, in a straight line, because of a crosswind.”

He sniffs again. “It was a contributory factor. I cannot help the wind.”

The chairman sighs. “You said there were two reasons.”

“That’s right.”

“And the other?”

“The flaps were not aligned for landing.”

“And why not?”

He looks at the panel members, one by one. “Ask the co-pilot. It was his responsibility. I asked him to extend the flaps and he did not. And so we crashed. And those poor people are dead because of it.”

Dani cannot bear it: she is emitting a low howl. The panel members look to her briefly, but press on.

“And how is it, sir, that you survived this, when so many behind you did not?”

“The windscreen blew out in the crash. I went out through the gap.”

“And did you render assistance to those trapped behind you?”

“I am certain you are familiar,” he says, “with the protocol of evacuation. It was the responsibility of the cabin crew. I had no way of knowing they had failed in their duties.”

More follows: the process of evacuation, the response of the fire crews. And finally.

“Is there anything else,” the chairman says, with a deliberate nod towards Dani, “that you wish to say?”

This is the moment, Barry thinks. This is where you can salvage something from this. You need to say sorry. Just say sorry. Look at her, look like you mean it, and say sorry to her. So we can go home.

“Yes,” the captain says. “Please God, let me fly again.”

The silence is infinite, left hanging for him to fill, but he does not.

It stretches, and Barry thinks for a moment that he will be trapped in this moment, this purgatory of fan noise and unsaid things, forever. It is Dani who breaks it.

“Look at me,” she says. Perfectly calm. “Just. Look at me.”

He does not. He does not look anywhere but at his fingernails. The indifference is intense and calculated. As if she is not there.

Another bleak silence in the humming heat.

Until, with practised contempt, he says: “If there is nothing else, I need to visit the bathroom.”

Through clenched teeth, the chairman gets out: “First. On. The left.”

*

She is broken. He can see it. She still, fantastically, has the strength not to be in tears at this, through some colossal effort of will; or maybe she’s gone beyond that, to some inexpressible emotion far deeper than he can see. She is shrunken somehow in this seat, powerless and winded, as if she’s fallen into herself and can’t find the handholds to pull herself back. Then she looks at him, and they lock eyes for a full minute, without a word. Those blue eyes. So fierce, so very much in them. He knows. He knows what to do.

*

So here he is, Barry Hadler, reporter, observing it all as if from above, with all the professional detachment he has prided himself on throughout his career. Here he is, watching himself from without, watching himself leave the room and take the First. On. The Left.

Objectively, an interested commentator, he watches himself enter the bathroom and find nobody else within it but the captain, pissing in syncopated bursts into the urinal. How strange to be able to report from this distance how he pulls off his tie and takes it between two hands! And what a shock, from this vantage point, to watch himself loop the tie around the man’s neck and pull it tight with kayak-strengthened arms.

The pilot lurches and reaches behind him, piss still flying around as he struggles, his flies still open, his cock still out. He drops to his knees and Barry drops with him, maintaining the pressure with strength he didn’t know he had. Barry Hadler, reporter, narrates the scene in his head, for his readers, his foreign editor. He thinks of the information that will be needed in the opening paragraph, the narrative flow of the piece. Will it be news style? Features? Eyewitness? For that is what he is, an eyewitness to this odd event, this intriguing human moment. Dimly aware of a door opening and swiftly closing again behind him.

And then he is back within himself again, and finds himself ridiculous. This is not him, it can’t be. For he is not the story, the central character. All he is is a man who has made choices, many of them wrong.

A choice. That word again. As if it conveys freedom, when all it does is give a chance to get things wrong. But it’s a choice, again. A choice about who will live and who will die. And the options are so much simpler this time, two options rather than three, the outcomes so much easier to establish, and nobody to be burned. He blinks, sees flames; blinks, sees Dani; blinks once more.

And lets go.

The captain falls wheezing to the floor, clawing at his windpipe, desperately trying to force air back into his lungs, and Barry thinks: at least now you know what it’s like to have one breath to make everything right.

The door flies open and then he is slammed against a wall, while security guards, screaming in Hindi, pin his arms tight behind his back. The tiles of the bathroom wall are cool on his face, not like the heat of the hearing room, not like the heat of the burning plane. He closes his eyes and smiles. Barry Hadler, reporter, narrates how he closes his eyes and smiles.

10.

A court, again, and this time there’s no denying he’s the story.

Things do not come quickly to trial in India, but really, it could have been worse. Not for him the shit-flecked pit of an Indian jail; somehow, strings have been pulled and he has awaited trial under house arrest in a Delhi apartment.

When he finds out how, he is genuinely shocked. Australia’s Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, through Sandra Donovan, had made representations that he had been suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and that his throttling of a senior civil aviation officer in a civic office toilet had been triggered by the memories unleashed in the hearing room. You know what? It might even be true, for one thing he’s learned in all this time is that there’s just no accounting for the behaviour of a mind under stress, and that the amount we don’t know about ourselves so dramatically outweighs what we do that it’s almost embarrassing. It remains to be seen if this argument is going to fly in the court, where he is up on assault charges – reduced, after some arcane negotiation, from attempted murder – but it has at least made the long recent months bearable.

But the real shock? Donovan’s name didn’t carry enough weight, but there was one that did. Sebastian Kingsley. He had intervened personally with the Indian state. Had flown here, partly with him in mind. In Australia, they were reporting that Kingsley had been in deep mental anguish since the crash, feeling responsible for those who died while following him as he cruised on a government jet; his intervention, for him, was a way of trying to settle a debt, to put some balance back into things, to pull the plug on just a little of the cloying residual guilt. Barry knew all about that feeling. There was never a less likely person for him to feel kinship with than Sebastian Kingsley, but you never do know how things will go. Or perhaps he was getting old and cynical.

Much has happened while awaiting trial. Dani, reunited with sufficient control of her fingers, sat down one day and returned to the keyboard as if everything she had been unable to write in the intervening time had to be caught up with. In an extraordinary, 30-hour sleepless marathon she had written an entire book. Thirty hours! HarperCollins had jumped on it and rushed it into print: it was a bestseller already. Banned in India, for legal reasons around the outstanding manslaughter charge that had since been pinned on the unrepentant captain, Barry had feared he would never see it, but Dani had found a way to get it to him electronically. He read with a mixture of apprehension and awe at her unflinching, soaring narrative. And he was all over it, of course. She painted him as a hero. Did more than forgive. Dedicated the book to him, with this inscription:

Kicking and gouging in the mud and the blood and the beer.

She was a loyal correspondent to him, in every respect: writing at length, and positively, speaking of renewal and ambition and faith; mobilising knowledge about him through her now-legion social network following;  and keeping his story in the papers, nowhere more so than the National. Email, in turn, freed him to say the things that were tangled and mangled when he tried to say them aloud. Three years too late, he told her he loved her.

She replied: “I know.”

Sandra Donovan, on home turf here, had been his most frequent visitor, though soon she would be leaving Delhi, having scored the top embassy position in Jakarta, a plum role for an Australian. She had turned her life back around extraordinarily and one day she brought the kids to the apartment. They were nothing like the kids he remembered from the photograph – two years will do that to children – but they brought energy and joy and entertaining plough-browed stubbornness and petulance into his world, and he was grateful in a way he would never have imagined. They hugged their mum; she hugged them back. It was all he needed to see.

There really was a danger that he was going to go down for a very long time, and no Kingsley intervention was going to be able to overrule a court. But there were reasons to be optimistic. The Indian press, roaring and seething, and still royally pissed off about the handling of the Chidiya hearing, had embraced Barry’s case as a wronged fellow scribe, and had found each new day another new way to inflame rage about the airline and the captain. No judge would be influenced by the press, he knew, and India hadn’t had juries since the 1950s, but at least popular opinion had come down firmly on his side.

Of course his parents had been horrified by what he had done, but there was an acceptance that trauma had driven him to it, and they had been swiftly supportive. The had visited as often as they could afford, said the right things; it was for them, now, that he felt guilt. Seriously: clear one debt of guilt, create another. There was no escaping it. You had to live with it.

Mainly, he had read. Indian writers, chiefly: Rushdie, Roy, Narayan, Seth, Desai, Ghosh. He was addicted. Mostly they moved at such stately pace, with such richness of language, that it was as if they could slow his heartbeat, to savour the empty stretching of time rather than to bemoan its slow locomotion. There was nothing else to do. He was suspended from work pending the trial, and in no position to research anything anyway. Indian literature taught him to like the spaces, the bits in life between things happening. When your life is defined by two decisions that take a second or so to take place, there’s a lot to be said for luxuriating in dead time.

*

And so, finally, to the trail. He is taken in a brand new Hyundai Accent police car, not the knackered Mahindra jeeps he’s more used to seeing on the road. There is time so savour India, now, the lunacy of it all, the graft of millions, somehow making it work. The District Court where his trial will be held is blocky and modern. Magnificently, a group of lawyers are holding a relay hunger strike outside on some point of dry principle. A relay hunger strike: they sit there for a couple of hours, then when one of them gets hungry, someone else takes their place while they go and get something to eat.

The photographers outside the court are thronged five or six deep, both Indian and Australian. He spots the floppy hair of Jasper behind his Canon again. “Mate,” he nods.

“Mate,” Jasper returns.

How odd to be the story. But he’s happier with it now. Not writing about others, he’s learned to immerse himself a little more in the sweep of his own life. He’s stopped narrating his own story to himself. Let someone else do it.

He’s not long in the holding cells before he’s led through musty corridors to the courtroom. An Indian flag hangs limp in airless heat behind the judge. He can’t help but admire the theatre of it all, the perspective from the dock. He feels he should burst into song.

Lacking a jury, there’s also no press gallery here, although a few, his parents among them, have been granted access to a bench at the back of the room. He smiles weakly at his mum and dad. They smile back, thumbs up. All that they can do.

But somehow, one member of the media scrum has got the right assurances and has made it through, presumably through the pretext of being an involved and supportive friend. Maybe she’s claimed to be his girlfriend. That would make him proud.

Dani. There she is: blue eyes brilliant between the burns.

She smiles at him.

And he smiles back.

THE END

Author’s note

Australian readers may note many similarities between the air crash in this book and Garuda Indonesia Flight 200, which crashed in Yogyakarta Airport, Indonesia, in March 2007. This much has been borrowed from that accident: the fact that it combined Australian press and embassy staff on a flight following a ministerial visit, killing several of them; and the circumstances of the plane’s speed and configuration for landing. But this book is a work of fiction, and the flight, which takes place in India not Indonesia, is fictional too.  In particular, none of the characters in this book are intended to represent any of the people who lived or died on the Garuda flight. Nevertheless, this story is dedicated to their memory and to the struggles of the people who were hurt.