‘Emergency assembly in the control tower!” snapped the manager of Bhisho International airport into the microphone. ”This is not a drill. I repeat: this is not …” He paused, listening. The wind hissed softly across the great concrete steppes of the runway. He sighed, and trudged to the open window of the control tower. Phineas was sleeping where he always slept, splayed out face down on the warm cement just outside the International Departures gate.
”Phineas!” bellowed the airport manager. The man stirred and lifted his head, revealing a dark puddle of drool. ”Phineas! Please initiate the avian-related communication breakdown protocol!”
”Sharp,” said Phineas, and soon he was humming down the runway in a small service vehicle towards the distant loudspeaker on its pole. The airport manager watched him stop and give the pole a vigorous shake. A chicken fell out of the speaker, bouncing off the vehicle’s bonnet with a clang before stalking towards the empty workshops with as much dignity as it could salvage. Phineas fired the green flare, the one for chicken evacuations and goat extractions, and the airport manager cleared his throat once more.
”Emergency assembly in the control tower!” He smiled and stuck his thumbs in his lucky waistcoat as his voice echoed back from afar. You could almost hear actual words, he thought proudly. That’s progress. They were doing amazing things with airport acoustics nowadays. He turned to Snuggles Makazoma, chief air-traffic controller, who was gazing at his monitor with a faraway look. ”Who are we still waiting for?”
”You know,” said Snuggles, ”this online flight simulator here …”
”Snuggles!” exclaimed the manager, appalled. ”What have I said about using the big screen for games?”
”Chill, bra,” said Snuggles. ”How am I going to talk down a B-29 bomber with all its engines on fire and its pilots dead and its wheels shot off and its bombs armed but jammed in the bomb-bay and a cistern full of nitro-glycerin and ball-bearings sloshing around next to a hold full of nuns and puppies, if I’ve never landed one myself? See here, I’m going to try to set her down on the helipad of this oil rig. It’s pitching like a son of a bitch. But I wanted to ask: If you bank a plane in an online simulator, is that Internet banking?”
The manager sniffed and started a head count. One, two … one missing. The speaker whooped as he turned on the microphone again. ”Phineas,” he said. ”Phineas. Please report to the tower for an emergency assembly.” There was a faraway grinding of gears, and the service vehicle whined closer.
It was not so much an emergency, said the manager when Phineas had arrived, as a celebration. Yes, they’d been derided by Hotpants Hannekom in the George tower. Yes, they knew what everyone said about Bhisho International and white elephants. But, said the manager, where others saw an empty runway, he saw opportunity. He thrust forward a crumpled piece of newspaper, its edges faintly ruddy with that morning’s fish paste.
”The Sunday Times!” cried Snuggles. ”Hell, look at the picture. It’s…it’s … the runway! Our runway!” He rushed to the window. ”Check! It looks exactly the same here as it looks in the picture! Funky, man.”
”It says here there is nothing on the runway but a dead lizard,” said Phineas.
”Where others see dead lizards,” said the manager, ”I see extinct dinosaurs.”
”It says here no planes ever land here,” said Phineas. ”So you didn’t tell them about the microlite in June.”
The manager flinched imperceptibly. ”I thought it was better not to. I mean, I don’t know whether you could really call that ‘landing’.”
Phineas nodded contemplatively. ”It was a big crater.”
Later in the afternoon there was a near miss, a flight to Durban that flirted outrageously with Snuggles, giving every indication that it wanted to land, before passing overhead. Snuggles put the pilots on the loudspeaker, and the airport echoed with their laughter and the slapping of their high-fives. Bastards. The manager read the article again. Perhaps the braai, welcoming the journalist to the airport, had been a mistake. At very least he should have warned the fire crew about it. Thank God the article hadn’t mentioned it — the sudden alarm, a drenching spray of fire-retarding foam, the firemen tenderly wrapping each chop in a little silver blanket and carrying them to the waiting ambulance.
He went to the window and looked at the sky. Far away, a contrail headed north.
Twelve Rows Back, a collection of Tom Eaton’s Pitch & Mutter columns for the Mail & Guardian, is now available at all good bookshops