Leseprobe

The howling blast of air knocks the wind out of me and I lose my balance, keeling over flat on my
face. My jaw slams against the giant expanse of aluminium and I feel myself start going woozy from the nasty whack, but right now a few chipped teeth are the least of my worries compared to blacking out on the wing of a Jumbo Jet.
As my vision starts to go fuzzy around the edges some remote part of my consciousness watches with calm interest as a thin line of blood trickles away from my mouth. Knowing I’m just a few seconds from passing out, I shake my head viciously to clear my mind and come back to reality with a shock. But it’s not the blood which rivets my attention - I know I must be bleeding somewhere - it’s that other thing. Frowning hard, I try to concentrate: why is my blood flowing away from me? Uphill towards the front of the wing? Against the wind?
Your blood isn’t moving, stupid, my mind screams at me the same instant sick fear kicks me in the stomach. YOU’RE the one that’s moving! I can feel the metallic taste of fear and blood in my mouth as I realize I’m slipping down the wing of the 747 towards the flaps, pushed backwards by the slipstream of air rushing towards me.
Only a few seconds have passed but it seems like an eternity, one of those sections of normally
featureless time imbedded on a three-dimensional variable, like some life-sized rubber band. Maybe it’s Einstein’s theory of relativity. These few seconds relative to the remainder of my life. If I live that long.
‘HANG ON, Edward,’ I hear a voice shriek and I whip my head up to catch sight of Colin’s face
yelling encouragement. It’s great for him to talk, he’s got a bloody safety line clipped around his waist against the windy onslaught. I have nothing but my bare hands. And utter desperation.
My sweaty palms push harder against the cold metal, sheer panic gripping hold of my throat more
securely than my fingernails clawing at the smooth rivet heads surrounding me. The same ones which stud the wings on every passenger jet. The ones you see out your aircraft window from the comfort of your seat as you sip on your aperitif. Neat double rows of them, regiment after regiment lined up in geometric patterns like a tin soldier army seen from above, their miniature helmets painted a dull silver.
Hundreds of them. Thousands of them, interrupting the brushed finish of the aluminium parade ground, guarding the borders of where each metallic sheet of barrenness joins the next.
I grit my teeth, focusing my attention on the red trail of my blood growing alarmingly longer in the
sunlight. Throwing a panicked glance over my shoulder I can see the hind edge of the mammoth wing is now just inches from where my shoes are pawing frantically for a foothold. Then, nothing. Nothing but a wide open void. And emptiness.
‘Hold On!’
‘What do you think I’m bloody trying to do?’ I curse back at Colin, suddenly blindly angry at his
inept encouragement. ‘Trying to jump without a ruddy parachute?’ Of course he doesn’t hear a word I say above the screaming wind and the roar of jet engines, but it makes me feel better, sharpening my mind, defining my purpose. ‘THROW ME A LINE, YOU MORON,’ I shriek against the blast as it whips my hair into my eyes, filling them with tears.
I feel the toe of my left shoe slip off the wing, my shin scraping against the edge, but I’m too scared to feel any pain, too preoccupied trying to stay up here on top. My belt buckle snags a rivet next, arresting my body’s backward slide for a few seconds. Or is it less, and seems to last so long? Sick fear kicks me in the stomach as my right shoe reaches the edge and slides into space as well. How high is this 747 above the ground again?
I look up imploringly at Colin and in that instant the buckle slips free. The sound of my heartbeat
pounding in my ears is the only thing I can hear as my legs slip over the edge, pulling the rest of me with them. I watch the wing fall away above me, then clamp my eyes shut against the terrible reality as I feel myself falling helplessly towards the ground . . .
@ @ @
What was I doing here, anyway? Hanging off the wing of a Jumbo Jet, my fingers fighting
desperately not to lose their grip? Believe me, I asked myself the same question. After all, it seemed a bit unreal at the time.
‘Wait a minute!’ you’re probably screaming out loud, ‘a bit unreal? here you are just seconds from
getting blown off a bloody airplane wing and your whole life doesn’t flash before your eyes before you plummet to your death!?’ Well, in short, no. Not really.
See, I guess I never started at the beginning, and a few rather important details would help fill in the plot a bit. Unlike the time when my Uncle Ted avoided telling me how he got his black eye, artfully sidestepped my question with ‘Well, it’s a long story . . .’
My long story is I was born in Kensington twenty-nine years ago and I live alone in a cramped little
flat in Hammersmith. Presently I find myself in that no man’s land between congratulations-you’re-finished-college and accepting that commit-for-the-rest-of-your-life job offer I just spent four years training for at UCL. So until I decide, I’m still working in some unknown travel agency in Notting Hill where I apply my high tech computer sciences to their low-tech, decade old computer system.
I’m also stuck in the middle of a year-long panic attack as the dwindling years of my third decade
wind down before my eyes. Right now I’ve got my fingernails embedded so tightly onto those last few months before oh-my-God-I’m-turning-thirty arrives I can hardly breathe. Which is what I suspect caused this whole adventure to begin with . . .
The only thing I have going for me it seems, is my narrow escape from the wing of that 747. But of course, you figured that one out by the fact that I’m here to write about it. Not that I had to see a shrink for post-traumatic stress sessions, but still, I am scarred for life. Whenever I look in the mirror I see it: a tiny white line where one of my teeth cut through my lower lip.
If it had been up to my dear old Dad I never would have been there to begin with. But throwing
tantrums over some important issues during my childhood gave me good training for being such a pig-headed bloke today. See, this particular thing was something I wanted to do, and nothing was bloody well going to stop me.
>From the luxury of hindsight I can now see why: I stumbled on something far bigger than the wing
of that jumbo jet. In a metaphorical sense, I mean. It’s not that large physically, but incalculably
valuable. And in the end I ended up finding something even more priceless.
So then, let’s go back to the beginning . . .