“Marit.” Low and tight. “What’s going on. Where are they taking you.”
“I don’t know.”
He got hold of my arm above the elbow.
“I forbid you to go up there. Do you hear me. I forbid it.”
And the stewardess put herself between us without hurrying at all.
“Sir. Please go back to your seat.”
“I’m her husband.”
“And she’s been asked to come forward. Sit down, please.”
He did not sit down. He came after us as far as she would let him.
At the front galley the flight deck door opened and the captain came out.
Forty-something. Four bars. And I looked at that man’s face and I could not get any air at all.
And then I saw what was on the galley counter next to him.
My hand went over my mouth.
Behind me Gideon had got as far forward as the crew would allow, and he saw the captain, and then he saw what was on that counter, and his face went from red to white in about one second.
“What the hell,” he said. “What the hell is this.”
PART 2 — 1999
His name is Ilan Ferris and in 1999 he was fifteen and he lived four doors down from us on Kellard Road.
I am not going to write about what was happening in that house because it is his and because his mother is still alive.
What I will write is that from the autumn of 1999 until he was eighteen, that boy ate at my table most nights of the week.
Nobody arranged it. He came round for my son Bram and then he was just there, and I put a plate down and nobody ever discussed it, for about three years.
He did his college forms at my kitchen table with me sitting opposite him with a pen, because there was nobody at his to do it with.
And in the March of 2003 he needed four hundred and eleven dollars for a class one aviation medical, which is the first thing you have to pass and which you pay for yourself.
We did not have four hundred and eleven dollars. We had it in the sense that it was the tyres.
I gave it to him in an envelope and told him it was from a tax thing, and he was nineteen and he believed me, and I did the school run in a car with two bald tyres until the September.
