November 16, 2009

1

WE left Koh Samui on the last flight out to Bangkok on a Friday, something after 10pm.

It's an hour's flight.

On arrival I turned my phone on and took a frankly awful call from a friend in the UK, which would have made my blood run cold had a) I not been in a massively over-air conditioned airport and b) it'd been cold with fear for three weeks anyway.

From the Bangkok internal flight gates, we found a man to wheel the drunk, walking-stick waving fool in a chair half the way to our gate at international departures, a mere 479 miles away. Mum and I walked.

From there, we had to give up his chair and find a way to get to gate 9,468 of Terminal X, somewhere at least a quarter of the way past the horizon, and only that on a good day.

The fool was going nowhere fast. I organised a chair, somehow. He sat and waited for it while we rushed down to the gate.

As usual, our spastic passes rushed us through to the plane, where he then proceeded to make the most least effort one could possibly make to get out of a chair he was perfectly able to get out of; walk down the aisle to our seats, of which he bagged the best one, while I stored the overhead luggage; then had a row with a Dutch girl sitting behind us for having the sheer temerity to put some of her luggage in our (shared) overhead locker.

2

The return food was abysmal. Two meals in eleven hours. Fish with something reeking like grated dog's excrement, on a bed of what smelled suspiciously like solidified urea. Or beef with (perhaps) centipede's feet. Except they'd run out of beef, of course. But then we were in the spaz seats, after all.

Marvellous. Welcome back to China Airlines.

3

Same story at Amsterdam.

The drunk, who in fairness is not now actually drunk, as he's slept all the way through (unlike me, naturally), but is punch drunk from the jet lag, and exhausted by the overnight flight, and on a tremendous comedown (more of which much later), and has remembered through sudden, unexpected sobriety that he can convince himself and thus all around him that he is paraplegic again, sits grumpily waiting for his wheelchair 'caddy', the staff member who will assist us.

He discovers he has to share one of those whirly electronic six-seater chariots through to our departure gate for Manchester, again about four thousand miles away - and that's if you're a fucking crow, which my mother and I actually aren't.

So next thing, we're legging it down packed aisle after packed aisle of an extraordinarily busy Schipol airport on what is now a Sunday morning - we left Samui on Friday night - after a cart full of smug, drunken misfits that are so far gone even the airlines believe they're genuinely disabled.

It's like an episode of Benidorm in reverse. Thank christ mum wasn't wearing dreadlocks.

But then we haven't got to Manchester yet.

4

FOG into Amsterdam had forced our pilot to do that stacking thing pilots do, in huge sweeping circles in a 'tower' formation in the sky, in thick cloud, no doubt hugely safely thanks to computers and air traffic control, but also no doubt tucking onto a decent Singapore Vermicelli and a bag of fairly recent prawn crackers while yours truly here shat himself about how much fuel was left exactly after eleven hours flying into the wind and, indeed, the approaching Planet Earth itself.

Not that I fret, much, obviously.

It's only horrific death we're talking about, after all.

But the resulting factor of this, of course, is that we're late into Manchester.

Which means we now slip seamlessly into Mum's Got A Serious Panic On mode.

"Well, what about the taxi?" she asks, walking 438mph towards she knows not where, because I'm pushing the idiot and we have to take the wheelchair routes.

"It'll wait," I grate, through teeth now ground down to fine Italian marble.

"But it might not!"

[Sigh] "It will."

"But it might not."

(Please repeat the above three sentences a hundred thrice - Ed)

5

"I NEED the toilet," declares the seated idiot, not a million miles away from Andy Pipkin, but without the humour, dress sense or physical charm.

"Right!" I bark, at both of them. "You," I say, pointing at mum, "go to the carousel and look for the bags. Don't worry, I'll get them, but I'll take him first," I continue, scowling at the useless sack of equalling scowling shit in the wheelchair before me.

And off she goes, knocking past Jamaican sprinters in her wake lest God strikes her down for being a second late to pick up a sodding suitcase from a system that, last time I remembered, worked cyclically until all were retrieved or stored for safe keeping.

One down, one to go, I thought, wheeling him towards a cripple crapper in the Terminal Two arrivals lounge.

I was starting to flag. And badly. The three weeks, and especially the first and last two days of them, were really now taking their toll.

6

I GAVE up smoking last year, but personal events earlier this year led me back into it. (Funny, actually. They say relationships can't kill you: How very, very untrue. But anyway.)

But I'm by no means a heavy smoker. It doesn't bother me if I don't have a cigarette from one day, or week, to the next, provided I'm not actually prevented from it for whatever reason (which just makes me want one more).

Right then, though, stood outside the cripple crapper, I do now need a cigarette. My father has been inside there for some fifteen minutes; I can see my mother springing up and down like Zebedee on the edges of the carousel looking for her bright red cases, complete with rainbow belts and - believe me - yellow bows "so we can recognise them". She is wild-eyed with terror that The Taxi Man (who was late taking us out there) might be annoyed we're a bit delayed.

I make a tentative knock on the toilet door.

"What?"

"You okay?"

"Bloody hell. Just hang on, will you. (Indeterminate muttering)."

Then, after another couple of minutes, the door opens, and out he walks, backwards, falling into the waiting wheelchair, steered by me.

As I turn it around to head towards our carousel, which is naturally as far away as possible from the toilet, I get a full, stomach-tippling lungful of stench from the cubicle we're leaving behind.

Whatever he'd eaten, it certainly wasn't anything nearly as nice as fish in urea or centipede's feet.

7

THERE is an eclectic, international crowd of us now, stood next to the carousel. Some people have taken their suitcases. Several - many in fact - have not.

My father is sat, slumped Hawking-like in his chair, half nodding off, when he suddenly sits up with a (nother) scowl and demands: "Where's my bag?"

I see my mum's hackles rise. Mine instantly rise with her not to rise with him because then I'll rise with both of them.

We are all, in fairness, very, very tired.

"Your bag," I say, "has not come through yet. We're still waiting. We're all-" I cast my hand around the luggage area- "still waiting."

He groans. Winces down, looking at his lap. Rubs his hands together in that particularly annoying way he does.

"Not those bags," he says. "My rucksack!"

Now let's think, I think, having been one step ahead for the best part of a month.

Oh.

Yes.

He last had it in that disabled toilet.

8

HAVING had less than three hours sleep in what is now something like 36 hours, I am doing my best impression of sprinting through the concourse of the luggage area at Manchester Airport's Terminal Two.

Sweat is dripping off me and I don't mind admitting I was wheezing a bit, too. It was all of 200 yards, after all.

On arrival at the disabled toilet, I see the door is open but a "wet floor" yellow sign is placed in the doorway. Also, balanced across the doorframe, is a mop.

Beyond it, on a shelf next to a sink, itself adjacent to the cripple crapper its very self, sits my father's sodding rucksack.

Fuck it, I think. And I go in and grab it.

As I pick it up, I get another incendiary lungful of the Devil's gruel he'd expelled minutes earlier, surely the kind of excreta that has such an enduring half-life you'd imagine nuclear science would be taking an interest.

Spluttering and gagging backwards, I half-trip over the balanced mop and thank heavens I got the bloody thing back.

Then:

"Er, excuse me - that's just been reported."

I turn.

There is a cleaner accompanied by An Official Man With Lapels.

"Yeah - it's mine," I said. "Well, it's not... I wasn't in the toilet-" I'm thinking of the smell- "it was someone else. It's his bag."

"Well we've got to repor-"

I cut them off: "Look, it's my dad, right? He's the one over there in the wheelchair? He's incontinent, I had to take him, we're rushing to get our bags, we're late for the taxi, he just forgot it."

The Official Man With Lapels said: "Oh, all right son. As long as it's yours."

"Well, it's not mine, but it is his," I said. "Over there. In the chair."

They turned and looked and saw the idiot in his chair, next to Zebedee, who was still manically bouncing up and down looking for suitcases.

"Do you want to search it?" I asked, a little desperate now, not so much about security but because the air around the terminal seemed to be turning green from the foul waft from the cubicle.

Lapels, who seemed to have picked up on the gaseous encroachment, too, replied: "No, son. No problem. But make sure you pick your bags up in t'future."

Then he winked, and walked away.

Great.

He thought I'd shat the bowels of a thousand rotting otters into a cripple crapper.

And just to put the tin-fucking-hat on, the suitcases didn't make it from Amsterdam and we had to leave Manchester without them.

* ALL this - and I haven't even included what else happened while we were there yet. More soon.