Shannon Gormley: It's Christmas in South West London, a charming and ordinary area but for the lives and deaths of certain travellers
There’s a pretty little part of South West London where dead people fall from the sky. It’s a perfectly charming area. The bodies don’t fall on it all the time, of course, only more frequently than one might have obvious reason to suspect in Richmond-on-Thames, East Sheen, and Clapham Old Town, neighbourhoods ordinarily reputed for their high concentrations of French patisseries, Victorian terraced houses, and Fox & Etc.-ish pubs.
It is a special time of year, and this, a special year.
According to a footballer friend, the going-rate for stowing away on an international flight was about as much as Franklin could put away working as a Lagos bricklayer over two years. For two years Franklin carried mortar on his head. Brick by brick, he laid a path out of Lagos: Two years of hard labour and football practices had bought Franklin a plane ticket, sort of.
That was then. Now, fewer black and brown people are stowing away on the lorries that transport them and various dry goods and household appliances to a new life in England, or perhaps to an untimely death. Calais wants tourists—British ones, naturally—to take the trip across the Channel and sample its spiced wine: The migrants are gone, and Christmas is here!
Within moments the plane has disappeared behind some clouds; another will follow in 90 seconds or so. Geoff knows. Geoff times them. He knows everything about East Sheen and Richmond-on-Thames: that its enormous park was donated by Henry the VIII, that on a clear day you can see all the way to St. Paul’s Cathedral, and that one dead body fell from the sky some years ago near the supermarket where he lives, about a half hour walk away.
Goldsmith had a campaign event a block down the road and a few shops to the right at the Hare & Hounds Hound pub. Lisa and her husband manage this pub by day and live on its top floor by night. They met and fell in love over their shared passion for pub management; a few years ago she moved to East Sheen to be with him. She doesn’t know much about the body that fell down the road. Some people are so desperate to move.
Franklin surveyed. He inspected. He nodded his approval. He frowned his authoritative displeasure. That wing? Looking good, boys. Those luggage carts? Keep ‘em rolling. But wait: what about the baggage hold? Well gosh, Franklin had better step inside and take a look. Better take a good long look, go all the way into the hold, keep going in until he was right by the bags, right under the bags, so far in there was nothing to see here but bags. He was in.
Amin’s motives didn’t matter to the activist—getting out was the whole game. Whatever his reasons, Amin had survived the sea in a boat. He’d make it through a tunnel in a truck. The activist wouldn’t know whether to put Amin in a box marked “desperate refugee” or one marked “economic country-shopper.” Even if he did know, he wouldn’t do it. Boxes are violence.The households of Richmond-on-Thames can buy Christmas by the truckload at Homebase.
Tasha believes that life is hard enough in England without having to care for newcomers. Jake is less certain. He knows more about the bodies than he thinks is healthy: it is a grim hobby, he acknowledges, to keep track of corpses.
“I have actually thought, why aren’t we talking about it more?” Jake the gardener says of the bodies, maybe to Tasha the saleswoman, maybe to himself in the big-box Christmas tree forest. The fact of the skyfallers’ existence has vanished as swiftly as their lives.Airplane luggage holds aren’t built for people. There are the wayward bags, for one thing. And if the falling objects don’t get you, the air just might. Some holds are properly ventilated and temperature-controlled. Some are not.
So when the ground staff found him hiding behind some suitcases, when people in uniform screamed that they’d found a terrorist, when security officers rushed over, it was still for football and for freedom that Franklin brandished his bag. No bomb to see here, but behold—shin guards!—and tremble at the power of an aspiring professional athlete in your midst.“I’m! No! Terrorist!” he yelled at the men who came to take him away. “I AM A SOCCER PLAYER!”Truck trailers aren’t built for people.
Back up the road, outside the Grand Theatre, is a Christmas Market. Another merry-go-round spins; a child-sized tank on it sits empty. Treetoppers and candlesticks made of branches are sold in the couple of dozen stands that look like the wooden boxes migrants used to live in as they waited for the right moment to hide themselves amidst various parcels in trucks to get to England. That camp was dismantled, and the port the trucks depart from is more militarized than a standard army barracks.
The man would have run further up the street, past the coffee shop selling hand-stitched dish towels, past the real estate agencies selling million-pound flats, bright and spacious, past the novelty shop selling gold-embossed champagne flutes and books with titles like “Feminists Don’t Wear Pink, and Other Lies: Amazing Women on What the F-word Means to Them.”
First, the stowaway takes to the runway, with the lights along the tarmac. Sometimes he makes a game plan with a smuggler, a plan for freedom and for whatever else. And sometimes he just makes a mad break for it, running as if his life depends on it because he is certain that it does.
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