This was not the city of his memory. From the air it was another place entirely – unsettling, uninviting. When he’d last seen it from a plane he was a backpacker crammed into the middle seat, straining over Lucy to snatch a first glimpse of that fabled harbour. Its totemic bridge. The Opera House. Everything had been so radiant then, the sky and water the most vivid blue, a luminosity he’d never known. It had all been there. Waiting for him. Just as it had on the TV travel shows he’d savoured in Oxford’s winter gloom. Just like in the brochures: the only place, besides Santorini, that the advertising pictures did justice to. The city had been Ben’s to uncover. A new now.

But tonight, close to dusk, the view from the window of Seat 2A in Business Class was malevolent. Banks of crimson-edged dark cloud and sheets of thick black smoke obscured so much of what he’d been yearning for, although occasionally the sea would snag a bolt of eerie yellow light on its inky surface. There was a dystopian, though quite spectacular, end-of-days unearthliness about the scene. Then, as the plane banked it offered a gun-barrel view of the red glow of uncontrolled bushfires south of the city. They looked like the fleshy, gaping mouth of an active volcano. He used his phone to snap a few photographs.

Should he be worried? Ben wondered. He well knew the havoc airborne soot could pose to aircraft mechanics. Indeed, the pilot had warned that the plane might divert if there was too much ash in the air – to avoid potential engine interference.

Engine interference? Ben had a pilot’s licence himself, and a good appreciation of aerophysics. Learning to fly in his forties had been a matter of doing something that he could fully control. An assertion of doing over being done to. As pilot, he would be responsible for every decision – each instrument reading, control execution, and aircraft movement – on-ground and in the air. The pre-take-off checks of fuel and rudders and hydraulics; the constant in-air gauging of wind speed versus pressure, altitude and thrust – it all assuaged his desire for control after a period of being subjected to the vagaries of circumstance. In the cockpit he alone set the course. If something were to go wrong it would be on him.

As the aircraft banked again, and bounced and shook on the updrafts, the chatter of the crew strapped in their seats was dulled by whining hydraulics. Ben pressed his face to the window as the plane arced deeply into a descending turn over the Pacific, black and shimmering now, immediately below. That glorious ocean. He’d dreamt for decades of being back in it. And so he had planned a quick dip in the Bondi surf if he got out of the airport in time, but the dusky light and the smoke and the grimy
air would probably cheat him of that.

Despite the turbulence, it was a light, tiptoe landing. He smiled. The wonder of flight. He turned his phone on. Global roaming quickly connected to 4G. He chose his most dystopic shot of daunting fire and smoke, strobing yellow light and ash. He posted it on Instagram.

Ben shivered from a little dopamine spike as the likes dashed in. They included one from his eldest daughter Suze, preceding the comment Ewww! Looks like Armageddon!! He thought it unusual she was awake so early in London. They always had to drag her out of bed for school. And was she never offline, day or night?

But she was spot-on. Armageddon seemed to be right outside the aircraft…