My first thriller is about to be published. I spent the best part of two years writing about a hero named Michael Violet, and it really put any notions I had about my own bravery into perspective. It’s hard to be heroic when you’re neurotic, and neurotic I most certainly am. From subtly chipped coffee cups to ‘What’s this red spot on my arm?’ my day-to-day is littered with micro-events that I magnify out of all proportion. And while conquering any fear is heroic to some degree, it’s not like anyone’s going to give me a medal for conquering mine. If I drink from a chipped coffee cup, about the best I can hope for is my brother telling me that, ‘Finally, you’re not being such a complete dick about everything.’
But it was flying that was the big one for me. I don’t know what happened – I reached my late twenties and suddenly the idea of being in two hundred tonnes of aluminium, thirty thousand feet in the air was just wrong – if God had intended man to fly, he would have made the ground further away. It’s not like I had a near miss or a bad flight or anything – it just hit me out of the blue. I’m not sure why, it might be age. When you’re young, you think life’s going to last forever – when you’re old, you hope it doesn’t – but when you’re stuck in the middle, you just get scared of stuff. Anyhow, I couldn’t travel, which was annoying enough, but then I got offered work in America, and I had to do something about it. So I signed up for a ‘Fear of Flying’ course. It turned out to be a horrifically entertaining day out.
I sat in a Heathrow hotel function room with another one-hundred-and-nineteen neurotics, all of us silent. Ahead us, eight hours of classes followed by the climax to the day – a forty minute flight around London. The first thing that surprised me was how many of us in the room were smiling – a surprise, at least, until I spoke to a few people and realized that it was nine in the morning and almost everyone here was already smashed out of their faces on Diazepam. A British Airways pilot then arrived and started giving the first lecture – the theory of aerodynamics. Everyone smiled – he was a nice man. As we learned how a wing shape causes air pressure differential, a guy in his fifties sitting next to me named Harvey started looking very uncomfortable. The pilot explained how easy it was for almost anything that adhered to the basic rules of aerodynamics to stay airborne, and Harvey got annoyed.
Harvey raised his hand. ‘What if you run out of fuel?’
The pilot smiled. ‘Don’t worry, passenger jets always carry more fuel than they need.’
‘What if they don’t? What if there’s been a mistake?’
‘Then they’ll just land at the nearest airport and refuel.’
‘What if there isn’t one nearby?’
‘Modern passenger jets can glide on zero fuel for over a hundred miles.’
‘But what if you’re over the pacific?’
The Pilot paused a moment and took deep breath. ‘If a plane is forced to ditch at sea, it tends to stay afloat. There’s electronic beacons, inflatable rafts, an entire range of safety measures.’
‘What if they’re all broken?’ said Harvey. ‘What if the plane sinks?’
‘Sinks?’
‘To the bottom of the ocean. Then explodes!’
The pilot sighed. ‘Well…then…you might die.’
‘A-ha!’ shouted Harvey. ‘You see!’
A point well made, I thought. I nodded at Harvey like we were long lost brothers.
At lunchtime no one ate anything – visions of Harvey floating past a burning aircraft engine had made the menu pretty much redundant. However, the rattle of tiny pill bottles filled the restaurant and soon we were all flying with confidence again. Psychology was the next class. A softly spoken therapist in his sixties told us all to close our eyes and picture that we were sitting on a plane – he was going to talk us through an imaginary take-off and landing. I don’t know what other people saw in their mind’s eye, but as I tried to imagine myself on a plane, all I could see were ostriches, emus and penguins – expert witnesses proving that even birds had begun to realize that flying was a really stupid thing to be doing. I heard the therapist’s calming voice. ‘Now look out of your window,’ he said. ‘As the plane tilts back on the runway…and slowly takes to the air.’ It was pointless. My imaginary plane had only been airborne for three seconds and had already suffered a massive mid air collision with a 747. I opened my eyes and looked around – only half the class were still in the room. The therapist gathered us all and we tried again. We all sat back down. I shut my eyes and tried to imagine my plane taking off once more. It was different this time – no mid air collision with a 747. This time it was an Airbus.
There were plenty of classes that day, but as we got closer to the flight finale they became lost in a mist of panic – I’m not sure I can remember what the final class was even about. What I do remember was a guy arriving at the hotel and telling us that the buses to take us to the airport were waiting outside. It was a seriously fucked-up moment. The plan was to just sit on the runway for an hour and get used to being in a plane. We were told that if any of us felt it was getting too much, we could just opt out – that they’d open the cabin door and we could leave. It was this freedom that got us all onto the plane – a small two-engine Airbus. We slowly filled it up from the rear seats forwards. Everyone wanted to sit at the back – I discovered the reason for this is that planes rarely reverse into cliff faces. We all sat there, and even bearing in mind the pills, I was surprised at how calm we were. What changed everything was when they closed the cabin door. Harvey started to cry, and they opened it again. This sequence of closing the door, tears, and opening the door, happened three times before Harvey finally accepted that he was going to die that afternoon and sat down near the front of the plane.
We taxied out onto the runway. A pilot stood in the cabin with a microphone, explaining every sound that we heard coming from the plane. We stopped for a moment and were told that we were just waiting for clearance from the tower. But there were a hundred-and-twenty neurotics on this plane, and every one of us was now waking up to the fact that this was a really bad idea. It doesn’t matter whether you believe in God or Evolution, neither had decided to give us wings, and they’ve had four billion years to consider it. But it was too late – with a huge surge the plane accelerated. The engines – only two of them for Christ’s sake – grinded outside, and with the subtlest of dips, the plane took to the air. But it’s air. It’s just fucking air! Passengers burst into tears all around the cabin. The therapist grabbed the microphone and told us all to do our deep breathing exercises. But how the fuck was that going to help – unless I’m about to cough up a parachute, why bother? For two minutes no one could sit still, only a few of us could even open our eyes – all we could hear above the engines was Harvey whispering prayers into a soaked handkerchief.
Then a strange thing happened – the plane levelled out above the clouds. And it’s beautiful up there. Even those of us who’d flown before – we’d forgotten quite how beautiful. The mood changed. Outside the sky was blue and the plane felt almost at home there. We circled London, and before we even knew it, we’d landed. We didn’t crash, we didn’t explode, the plane hardly made a squeak without the pilot telling us it was going to happen before it did. And one by one, we all started to feel like heroes. And that was the moment that really stayed with me. The looks on our faces as we emerged from the plane – swaggering out of the cabin like we were invincible – like we were a herd of John McClanes emerging from the Nakatomi building, ‘That’s right, we lived through it, motherfucker. Now get me a shot of Bourbon. Just make the sure the glass isn’t chipped, that’s all.’
