Big Boy Did It and Ran Away Read Online Free Page A

would be one very unhappy dead person. To say nothing of the colossal fucking irony.
    Oh well. Just as long as it didn’t mean you spent the afterlife in Aberdeen Hell.
    The plane had touched down at 11:20 local time. Conditions clear and sunny, outside temperature eighteen degrees.
    Stavanger. An appropriately inauspicious conduit in his grand scheme. There were no new beginnings to be found here, only transit lounges, flight information and a store selling cuddly gnomes and smoked salmon. Most of the times he had been here, it had been merely to get on another plane and travel somewhere else; somewhere else he didn’t particularly want to be either. Other people’s jobs took them to Barcelona, Milan, Athens, Paris. His took him to every austere, hypermasculine, over‐
industrialised fastness in Scandinavia, including – but more often via – Stavanger. For once, a flight would take him from here to where he wanted to be, but as ever, it wasn’t until he had got on and off one more plane that his journey would be ended, and another one truly begun.
    He sat in the departure area, choosing a bench by the window upon his return from the toilets. The plane was sitting on the tarmac, yards away, the livery’s colours distorted by the bright sunshine, but the name legible on the fuselage: Freebird. He smiled. Couldn’t have named it better himself.
    The clock read 11:55. Fifteen minutes to boarding. This was the hardest part: it wasn’t long to wait now, but waiting was all there was left to do. Waiting and thinking. There was no avoiding the former, but he sincerely wished he could prevent the latter. Seeing the jet through the window, it was difficult not to contemplate the enormity of what lay so imminently ahead, but he had to tune it out. Throughout these minutes, he knew, it would seem easy to back down, call it all off. Easy to feel the comfort of your chains.
    It was the longest quarter of an hour of his life, limping its way through each minute that brought him tantalisingly closer to the point at which the torment of choice would cease. Once he handed over his boarding pass and walked down that gangplank, there would be no going back. Not without some very uncomfortable explaining afterwards, anyway.
    Somehow, the laws of temporal physics prevailed, and the clock conceded.
    At 12:12, the departure was announced.
    At 12:15, he boarded the aircraft.
    At 12:37, it took off.
    At 12:39 and eighteen seconds, when the plane had reached exactly three thousand feet, a bomb exploded towards the rear of the passenger cabin. The charge wasn’t particularly big, but neither did it have to be, placed as it was within feet of the fuel tanks. The tail section was severed completely, causing the remainder of the aircraft to arc and then spin as it plummeted towards the fjord beneath.
    That was the truly transforming moment, when life, whatever it had meant before, suddenly became unconditionally precious.
    The job, the daily commute, the enslaving mortgage, the faceless suburb, the crumbling relationship, the arguments, the bills, the crushed ambitions, the castrating compromises: in an instant they went from being an inescapable hell to a lost paradise.
    And the rate at which they underwent that change was ten metres per second squared.
    At 12:40 and nine seconds, the front section hit the water, breaking the fuselage into two more parts and killing everyone on board.
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sending a message to the man.
    This was a new kind of nervous. It wasn’t like the nervousness he felt before a match; that was more of an impatience, an unsteady feeling that set him off‐
balance until he got his first touch, sent his first pass, made his first tackle. After that, all was familiar, whatever challenge the opposition presented. And, thank God, it wasn’t like the nervousness he’d felt on Thursday, waiting for her to go on her break, trying to get the timing right so that it seemed natural and she didn’t know he’d been hanging