SSCs. Death was too good for them.

Seriously.

These fuckers deserved to live forever. The sleepwalking suburban slave classes in their Wimpey mock-Tudor penal colonies. A jail that needed no walls because the inmates had been brainwashed into believing they wanted to be there. Incarceration by aspiration, all the time mindlessly propagating and self-replicating, passing on their submissive DNA to the next generation of glazed-eyed prisoners.

And every day they'd get up and pray that emancipation never came: 'Dear Lord, protect us from uniqueness. Grant unto us eternal conformity, and deliver us from distinction. Amen.'
There was one up his arse right then, flashing the headlights on his MX3, the bloke's eyes widening and nostrils flaring in time with the admonitory illuminations. An absolute fanny. Risking his life in an attempt to overtake before the crawler lane ends, so he'll be one car - one car - up the queue when he reaches the traffic lights. And what did that tell you about the life he was risking?

Exactly.

Suburban Sad Cunts. This was the real reason for road rage. It wasn't a symptom of growing traffic congestion (though it shared the single car-usage factor), it was that this was the closest they got to defiance, the last ghostly remnant of the will to assert some identity. It was the only time they got to express any sense of self: when they were behind that wheel, on their own, jostling for position with the rest of the faceless. Overtake the guy in the bigger, newer, shinier car, and it made you forget all the other, truer ways in which he was leaving you to eat his dust. Someone gets in your way, holds you back, and you transfer all your frustrations to him because it reminds you of just how many obstacles there are between where you are now and where you want to be. The car in front is your lack of self-confidence, bequest of your over-protective mother. The car in front is your fear of confrontation, inherited from your cowed and broken father. The car in front is the school you didn't go to, the golf club you didn't join, the Lodge you don't belong to. The car in front is your wife and kids and the risks you can't take because you've got responsibilities.

But the most tragic part is that you need the car in front, you need the obstacle, because it prevents you from confronting the fact that you don't know where you want to be. You'd be lost beyond the penal colony. It's scary out there.
You wouldn't fit in.

That was why billions were spent every year advertising near-identical vehicles as a totem of personal taste and discernment. Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Ford, Vauxhall, Rover, each with their hatchback, their coupé, their saloon, each model barely distinguishable from its competitor by anything more than the badge. The ads featured lantern-jawed beefcakes rescuing children, battling sharks, shagging like heroes, anything to keep your attention off the actual car. 'The new Vauxhall. Its headlights are shaped slightly different from the Nissan. Because you're slightly different.' Maybe not, eh?

But then that was where the four-by-fours and sports models came in. Guys driving off-roaders to the fucking video shop; the only time the thing was actually off the road was when it was in the driveway outside their Gyproc and plywood 'dream home', or when it was in the workshop after you took a bend at more than forty and rediscovered your respect for aerodynamics over sheer bulk. Sometimes there was a Dependants Carrier for the wife, or maybe just a four-door saloon, salary dictating. So you saved and strived and kissed ass to pay for that MRII or CRX or GTi, to hold on to some pitiful fantasy of your enduring virility. You might have the wife, the mortgage, the weans, and the in-laws round for dinner every Sunday, but part of you would never be tamed. Another slice of Viennetta, anyone?

This was the reason that no matter how steep the petrol price hikes, however many park-and-ride schemes were subsidised, urban traffic congestion was never going to diminish. In that journey to and from work, that half an hour you were at the controls of your thunderous roadbeast (going the same speed as the 2CV in front), you were able to live a pitiful little dream of yourself.
We would never car-pool. The SSC would rather sit in tailbacks every day, waiting for that brief moment when he can put the foot down and pretend he's going somewhere important, somewhere he wants to go, and fast. That power surge borrowed from the engine, the feel of the steering wheel in his hands, and Bryan Adams on the stereo. In that moment, he's cool as fuck: he's a secret agent, a maverick detective, an assassin, a terrorist. As opposed to an insurance adjuster.
What never occurred to him was that, if they existed, the secret agent, the maverick detective, the assassin and the terrorist would actually be driving some nondescript SuburbanSadCuntmobile, because they needed to blend in. Sure, maybe they drove something flashier on their days off, but you could bet it wasn't a fucking Mazda. And you could bet they weren't fantasising about being a family-man wage-serf while they burned rubber.

The SSC's fantasies are uniform and predictable because he has no imagination. He needs advertising to do his imagining for him. That's why, bereft of independent opinion or any informed sense of judgement, he thinks Denise Richards is sexy, that Sony make good hi-fi equipment and that drinking Becks makes him cooler than the bloke standing next to him with a pint of heavy. That's why he thinks he looks like a different guy driving the family six-seater than at the controls of his overpriced (and paradoxically worth every penny) ego-chariot. He thinks assassins and terrorists tool around in sports cars, and if you asked him what kind of motor Death would drive, (after you'd told him a hearse was too literal) he'd probably describe the vehicle of his ultimate fantasies, styled, of course, in black. A Lamborghini Countach or Ferrari Testarossa, or maybe some minor variation on the Batmobile; a sleek, powerful, dark and incomparably macho machine.

And he'd be wrong. Miles out.

Death would drive an Espace.

He'd drive an SSC family slave-wagon just to underline that the life He was taking wasn't worth living anyway; with plenty of seats in the back for the next generation when their turn came.


He was on the dual carriageway now, five minutes away from the airport at any other time of the week, but ten today, it being Monday morning. What better day for a new beginning than the start of the working week, the day that would for everyone else usher in yet another 104-hour vigil as they prayed for the deliverance of Friday night.

However, every new beginning was also an end, every rebirth first required a death. It would be respectful, even decorous (not to mention fun) to contemplate this life he was about to leave behind, this life that had so few hours left to run. With that thought, he reached to the stereo and popped out the cassette, then stabbed at the pre-set channels until he found the local commercial station. Might as well have the appropriately dismal soundtrack. A grim smile crept across his face as he recognised the song currently playing, the new chart-topping single by EGF. It was the standard homogenous Euro-dance number, another near-identical slice off this endless turd that was being shat out of the Low Countries via the Mediterranean teen-copulation colonies.
EGF. It stood for Eindhoven Groove Factory. Seriously. There had been a time, not so long ago, when if you had any ambitions for a career in the music biz, being from continental Europe was something you had to keep quiet, unless you were Einstürzende Neubaten and quite clearly too mental to care. It was commercial and credibility suicide. You just couldn't be from Europe and expect to sell records in the UK or US, the two biggest music markets.

The Scandinavians were inexplicably tolerated, benefitting perhaps from a cultural exemption that owed a little to geography and a lot to a natural preponderance of strapping blondes. From Abba to The Cardigans, via Roxette and Ace of Bass, it had never hurt the album sales to have a frontwoman who was blonde with legs all the way up to her head. At least you had to give the Scans credit for having sussed that this was the only recipe viable for export. All points south, however, they continued to labour under the misapprehension that their sub-Eurovision drivel would be interpreted in Blighty as something other than an act of international aggression. Hence, very little made it through quarantine at Dover. The occasional specimen was imported for zoological curiosity value, or more accurately to fuel our innate sense of musical superiority, such as Rock Me Amadeus or The Final Countdown.

There were those who believed the third Antichrist of Nostradamus's prophecies was, in fact, the European Union, and certainly something Satanic had been loosed around the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty in the early Nineties. How else could you explain the fact that the British public subsequently started buying records from the same forsaken region as had been found irrefutibly guilty of Live is Life and the ongoing catalogue of atrocities that was The Scorpions? What other explanation could be given for the traditional hard-working, hard-drinking four-piece being usurped as the pre-eminent group blueprint by two or three Evian-drinking spotty tossers playing synths in their mum's garage somewhere in the Benelux?

The latest (culminatory, as far as he was concerned) infestation was EGF, and their inescapably ubiquitous (it's really big in the clubs!) 'song', Ibiza Devil Groove.

There was never much to differentiate the work of any particular bunch of these mindless fuckers from that of their peers, but EGF had nonetheless managed the unlikely feat of truly distinguishing themselves in his eyes and ears. They had done this through their choice of which obligatory past standard to sample from (in lieu of spending two minutes coming up with a hook, or even a lyric). Not for them an old Andy Summers riff or Topper Headon beat; Eindhoven's finest had built the summer's biggest smash around the chorus of Cliff Richard's Devil Woman.

Rock and fucking roll.

He turned up the volume for maximum effect. It felt like the last day of school before the summer holidays in those odd classes where the teacher didn't let things slide: you could perversely luxuriate in the tedium of a double Maths lesson, immersing yourself in what you wouldn't have to put up with tomorrow.

He couldn't kid himself, mind you, that where he was going there'd be any escape from Ibiza Devil Groove. Christ, even if he topped himself he probably wouldn't escape it; the old Sparks track It's Number One All Over Heaven sprang to mind, and there was no doubt EGF was number one all over Hell. However, what he would be escaping was . . .

'. . . Silver City FM, bringing you a wee kick in the Balearics there, ha ha ha, with the magnificent EGF. It's just coming up to eight forty-nine on May the twenty-sixth, here in Europe's Oil Capital, where the temperature is eleven-point-five degrees . . .'

Europe's Oil Capital. Honestly. The first time he heard the expression, he'd assumed it was a bit of self-deprecatory humour. That was before he learned that there was no such thing as self-deprecatory humour in Aberdeen, particularly when it came to the town's utterly unfounded conceit of itself. It was a provincial fishing port that had struck it astronomically lucky with the discovery of North Sea oil, and the result was comparable to a country bumpkin who had won the lottery, minus the dopey grin and colossal sense of incredulous gratitude. The prevalent local delusion wasn't that the town had merely been in the right place at the right time, but that it had somehow done something to deserve this massive good fortune, and not before time, either. Nor did the billions ploughed into the area's economy stop them whining about every penny of Scottish public money that got spent anywhere south of the Stracathro motorway service station.

He didn't imagine the locals had first asked anyone else in the European oil industry whether they concurred before conferring this status upon their home town, but working in marketing he at least understood the necessity of such misleading promotion in face of the less glamorous truth. 'Scotland's Fourth City' wasn't exactly a winning slogan, especially considering that there was a dizzyingly steep drop-off after the first two, and it still put them behind the ungodly shit-hole that was Dundee.

The also self-conferred nickname 'Silver City' was another over-reaching feat of turd-polishing euphemism. It was grey. Everything was grey. There was just no getting away from it. The buildings were all - all - made of granite and the sky was covered in a thick layer of permacloud. It. Was. Grey. If Aberdeen was silver, then shite wasn't brown, it was coppertone. It was grey, as in dull, as in dreary, as in chromatically challenged. It was grey, grey, grey. And the only thing greyer than the city itself was the fucking natives. A couple of quotes to illustrate.

'An Aberdonian would pick a shilling from a dunghill with his teeth.' Paul Theroux.

'There's nae folk sae fine as them that bide by Don and Dee.' Lewis Grassic Gibbon.

Apposite as the former might be, it was actually the latter that offered a deeper insight, though not quite in the way the author intended. To understand, you first had to take a wild stab at what part of the globe you thought Grassic Gibbon might hail from. Then having miraculously plucked that one out of the ether, you might begin to develop a picture of a people who either didn't get around much, or wilfully failed to absorb anything if and when they did. How else could they remain ignorant of the existence of even the most basic foreign customs, such as smiling?

Living in Aberdeen had taught him the difference between the parochial and the truly insular. The parochial was defined by a naïve, even innocent ignorance of the world beyond its borders. The truly insular knew fine there was a world outside, they just didnae fuckin' like it, and had nae fuckin' need for it!

Living in Aberdeen had also taught him that as you only got one shot at life, it was way too precious to waste living in Aberdeen. The inescapable nature of this truth had only fully dawned on him when he realised that his life here had become just that: inescapable. It was the kind of place you only went to in the first instance because you assumed you wouldn't be there for long; you'd bide your time, serve your sentence and get back to civilisation at the first opportunity. But what you hadn't foreseen was that that opportunity might never come, and in the meantime circumstances could wrap themselves around you like the coils of a snake.

So if you only got one shot, what were you meant to do when you found yourself doomed to spend it here? Surrender and join the SSCs? Aye, right. Find some form of compensatory vice, like fucking your way around the neighbourhood's housequines on your flexi-time midweek days off? He'd tried. It grew tired very quickly, mainly due to the brain-deadening quality of their post-coital conversation. Five minutes after they came, some Pavlovian trigger mechanism invariably caused them to start wittering on about their progeny. That was if they weren't already kicking you out of bed because they had to go and collect the little bastards from nursery or wherever. You could kid yourself on that it was making you feel good, but to be honest you might as well take up golf. It was just your choice of recreation in the prison's exercise yard.

What did that leave? How about buying a fucking lottery ticket, and joining the acolytes of Britain's saddest new religion? It was also Britain's biggest, and no wonder, because unlike all the others, it was the only one that offered you a second shot in this life rather than the next. And yes, you could get a second shot, theoretically. Only one rule of life was truly hard and fast: the same one that demanded you make the most of it, and mocked you for your efforts from the wheel of its Espace.

But those precious second shots came to a paltry few, fewer even than the fourteen-million-to-one lottery winners, most of whom were far too dull to do anything remotely interesting with their new resources. Once they'd returned from the mandatory Caribbean cruise and bought the Ferrari, the motor launch and the new pad in a part of town where the neighbours will treat them like shite off their shoes, what next? Consumerist nirvana? Come on, there was only so much gear you could buy at Argos. Twenty mill could buy you a whole new life, but only if you knew where to shop. Otherwise you were just buying a bigger cell. Truly reaping the potential reward was a little more complicated than picking up a giant greenback from a B-list celeb and a tart in a bikini.

To get a second shot, he now knew - even if you were shackled here in the mock-Tudor gulag - you didn't need to win the lottery. What it took was the will to walk away. Quit whining, quit bitching, just quit.

Walk away. As simple, and as difficult, as that.

Leave everything behind.

Making the realisation was the hard part; taking the decision. Then from the other side of the resolution, it all looked laughably easy.

Leave your partner. No problem. Already done, in fact. The people they'd each once been had blown town years ago. Scratch that; the person he'd once been had been lost in transit during the move to the Sliver City. How did the song go? If you love somebody, set them free. He didn't love Alison, but he owed her that much at least. It wasn't just himself he'd be granting a second shot.

Leave your job. Are you kidding? What incentive was there - or had there ever been - to stick with that? Oh yeah, of course: security. As in maximum.
These chains only held you as long as you clung to them.

The machine spat out a parking ticket and raised its barrier as he pulled the cardboard chit through the open window. He dropped it on to the passenger seat and drove slowly forward, joining the automotive satellites in their outward-spiralling shallow orbit, making wider and wider circuits as they were forced on each pass to seek a space that bit further out from the terminal building. They'd spend five minutes, maybe more, doing that to save themselves an extra twenty seconds' walk. Right enough, most of them probably had a whole briefcase to carry. Or perhaps they thought they were more vulnerable to being picked off by predators if they appeared to be straggling outside the pack.

The parking ticket was the first thing that caught his eye as he killed the engine. 'Do not leave in car,' it said. It was one of many instructions that no longer applied to him. He popped it in his pocket all the same. There was no room for decadent gestures. This life had to be lived as normal and by all of its petty little rules right up until his connecting flight took off from Stavanger. The only concession right now was that he was wearing a polo-neck instead of a shirt and tie, necessary to cover up the change of clothes he had on beneath. He didn't want anyone to notice him leave, so when he walked away, he would already be a different person.

He still had the mandatory jacket and trousers too, but had picked something that would plausibly go with the polo-neck, affecting that 'business traveller dressing as casually as he dares but still wanting everyone to know he's a business traveller' look. It had to be one of the great equalising points against the female inequality grievance list that they had an endless variety of business garb to choose from, but guys were stuck with - let's be honest - minor variations on the monochrome theme of 'grey suit'. That there could be so much snobbery over the labels, styles and cuts was fucking laughable, but it was perhaps understandable (if pathetic) that any evidence of distinctiveness should be so seized upon. After all, there were probably angler-fish that were considered particularly unattractive by their peers, even though the entire species looked like Anne Widdecombe after a heavy night.

The worst of it was that he seemed to be in a minority in this sense of sartorial frustration. To the SSCs it was like a security blanket. They felt naked and exposed in anything else, and by God, they thought they looked good. The ties around their necks might be partially restricting their respiratory function, but it was also a comforting sensation, the pressure of a paternal hand reassuring them that their status was ratified and visible: they were suit-wearers, they had a suit-wearing career in a suit-wearing profession, and nobody, nobody was going to mistake them for faceless nonentities, oh no.

All around the car park, they were marching towards the terminal building as though spiritually drawn, suited to a man, briefcase fitted as standard. If you were travelling on business, on company business, the suit would be compulsory, but for these bastards the compulsion was coming from within. It overrode all other considerations, such as practicality. It wasn't comfortable attire for air travel, where the seat size, leg room and safety belt seemed designed to do roughly the opposite of a Corby Trouser Press, to say nothing of the constant precipitous fear that your in-flight meal, drink and tea or coffee (sir?) would end up in your lap. But still there endured this misguided notion that you had to look your best to fly, something that presumably had its roots in the earlier days when only the rich could do it. He remembered family package holidays as a kid, early Seventies, going to Palma or Malaga out of Abbotsinch. His dad told him you could always spot the wee Glasgow guys on their first-ever flight, because they looked like they were due in court. They'd wised up by the time they flew home, when they remained equally identifiable by their oversize comedy sombreros and near full-thickness burns covering all exposed flesh.

Time, experience and new generations had seen the discount leisure-travel look evolve, but it wasn't any more flattering. He'd always meant to investigate whether Airtours wouldn't actually let you board the plane unless your entire family were wearing matching shellsuits and had a combined kilogram weight in four figures.

He'd increasingly heard it said that cheap air travel was clogging up the skies, with dire accompanying predictions of an escalating incidence of disaster. The skies were indeed congested, and more so all the time, but as far as he was concerned, the blame shouldn't be laid at the Reebok-clad feet of the wobbling classes; at least there was some purpose to their trips, even if it was merely the opportunity to devour saturated fats in a warmer climate. The true cause of all these near-misses and twenty-minute holding cycles was all around him right then: pointless, unnecessary business trips.

This was the communications age, the era of video-conferencing, virtual exhibition software, emails, web catalogues, and yet every day, from every airport, suited SSCs were hording on to planes to fly to meetings where nothing would be achieved or agreed that couldn't have been resolved to equal satisfaction through a phone call or even an exchange of letters. They'd say it was about the personal touch, or the value of face-to-face relations, and while these things were to some extent true, the real purpose was to delude the SSC drones into thinking they were valued and important employees. It was certainly cheaper than raising their salaries, and the tax-deductible block bookings probably came with the sweetener of a few first-class long-hauls for the boss and whichever secretary he was banging.

It broke up the monotony if every few weeks you bunged them off somewhere overnight; made them feel they were on some kind of classified mission with which the firm had entrusted them. It made them more than suited professionals, it made them suited professionals who were so important, they had to fly places. No mere tooling around the sales territory in a Ford Mondeo for them. The vast majority of the time, however, the only practical consequence was to clog up the airports.
The check-in area was mobbed and chaotic, as per for Monday morning, with the added joy of a party of Euro-teens milling around with that particular gormlessness which only hormone-addled post-pubescent continentals could truly evince. The air was thick with the smells of Clearasil and damp backpacks. He listened apprehensively to their chatter, trying to get a handle on the language, praying it wasn't Norwegian. They sounded Italian, possibly Spanish. It was hard to make out which check-in desk they were queuing for, so sprawling was their mass, but it was soon evident that they were BA's problem today, and therefore not his.

He handed over his tickets at the ScanAir desk, where he was greeted with a smile from the girl behind the counter. The namebadge said Inger, which explained the unAberdonian flash of gnashers. Probably worked her ticket in the cabin crew then opted for a ground staff post as soon as she'd snared a well-heeled oil exec.

They went through the usual formalities of seat allocation and mutual flirtatiousness, before she got to the mandatory security questions: did you pack this bag yourself, has it been out of your sight, did somebody else ask you to carry anything, is that a surface-to-air missile in your pocket or are you just pleased to see me? The purpose of these exchanges escaped him. You'd definitely have to stay behind after class at terrorism school if that little polite query had you spilling your guts. Maybe it was about reassuring the passenger that all protocols were being followed to ensure their safety; if so, it was likely to have roughly the opposite effect, if that was the measure of their counter-terrorist savvy. What did they do if someone actually got through with a gun? Ask him nicely to put it down, crucially remembering to say please?

A more advanced version of the same pointless tokenism awaited at the passenger security check, where you queued up to have your hand luggage partially irradiated and your sides lightly patted if you'd forgotten to drop your housekeys in the dish. He'd had more intimate handling being measured for his suit. They were so tentative as to make an appropriate mockery of the whole process: they didn't want to get too fresh in case you took the huff and pointed out what they well knew: that nobody had ever been - nor was ever likely to be - stopped with a gun down their jooks at this Legoland apology for an airport. And if that astronomical improbability ever did come to pass, did they think the gunman, having been asked to stand aside while they patted him down, would wait till they'd found it, give them a bashful grin and say 'Well, you gotta try, aintcha?' Unless, of course, that illuminated ad for the Scottish Tourist Board was concealing a false partition behind which a battery of heavily armed cops waited at all times, their trigger-fingers getting ever itchier through unuse.

'Do you mind if we have a wee look in your briefcase, sir?'

'No, help yourself.'

All these flights down the years and he still couldn't guess what the selection criteria were for them opening your hand luggage. Sometimes they stopped him, sometimes they didn't, with no consistency as to his appearance, destination, whether he was alone or in company, anything. Was it something unusual spotted by the glazed and constipated-looking bastard peering with chronic ennui at the X-ray monitor? Was it utterly random, to meet a percentage quota? Would they at that particular moment rather open your neat, shiny briefcase than the forbiddingly grubby overnight bag of the eye-stingingly sweaty gut-bucket ahead of you, who'd required a shove to squeeze him through the metal-detection arch? Or did they just fancy a nosey sometimes? He'd have no respect for them if they didn't.

The bearded security officer gestured to him to open the case himself, an ostensible intimation of courtesy disguising the fact that he didn't want to look like a twat by fumbling cluelessly around the latest needlessly complex latch-trigger system. He simultaneously pushed the buttons on either side, like it was a pinball machine and the ball was rolling lazily between the flippers. Turning the case smartly through one hundred and eighty degrees, he released the lid, its impressively gentle ascent smoothed by the telescoping aluminium supports that had added at least twenty per cent to the price.

There wasn't much to see. A couple of folders, a magazine, a newspaper, mobile phone, hand-fan, Walkman, king-size Mars bar and two cartons of juice. Hard to imagine any of that lot had appeared particularly suspicious going through the conveyor. Nonetheless, the guy had stopped him now, so he had to make it look worthwhile. Beardie started with the mobile, raising and lowering it on his palm to emphasise its weight as he handed it over.

'Would you mind turning it on?'

'Yeah, no problem.'

He pressed the button, eliciting a cursory glance at the LCD window before Beardie took it back.

'That's fine. Bit of a monster, isn't it?'

'Tell me about it. Why d'you think I'm carryin' it in the case? My new one's knackered, so they've got me luggin' this thing around. Surprised they let me take it on as hand luggage. Has to happen when I'm goin' away as well.'

'Sod's law.'

Beardie moved on to the Walkman next, getting nodded assent to press Play himself. The tape turned to his satisfaction, though he evidently gave no thought to whether the passenger might have painstakingly cued up his favourite take-off track. He then held up one earphone. A quick tinny burst sufficed, the palpated hiss sounding, unfailingly, like Speed Garage, which presumably was the only musical genre to sound exactly the same whether your cans were on or not.
Beardie resumed his examination, undeterred by the lack of anything much to examine. He gave the fan a whirl; picked up the folders, magazine and newspaper, flicking through each in turn; then either out of admirable thoroughness or mild pique, checked out the Mars bar and finally the juice cartons as well. These last being his final chance to exert some authority, he gave each an inquisitive stare, before following it up with an investigative shake, which was the ultimate proof of the utter uselessness of the entire 'security' charade. If he was worried that the Ribena cartons actually contained nitroglycerine, would the advised procedural protocol be to give them a good shoogle?

'Right, thank you, sir. Enjoy your trip.'

It was only once he was on board the aircraft, and had heard the enduringly futile announcements on what action you could take in the event of the fuel-laden plane plummeting vertically from the skies, that it occurred to him to worry about the implications of these two-dimensional defences. Because let's face it, if this plane was sabotaged and crashed before he made it to Stavanger today, he 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.