Chapter 25

CHAPTER 10 — BOOK II

 

The Airport Corridor

 

(Late January 2002, Sydney)

 

The airport smelt the same.

 

That was what made it worse.

 

Coffee, disinfectant, recycled air. The faint metallic tang of escalators and luggage wheels. The smell of people leaving and arriving with the same optimism they always carried, as if travel itself was proof the world remained negotiable.

 

The check-in hall was bright enough to flatten everyone into the same colour.

 

Lines formed and unformed. Screens blinked with flight numbers. A child cried, then stopped, then cried again. A man laughed too loudly into a phone.

 

Geoffrey stood beside Embong with their bags between them, watching the movement like it was a language he had known once and didn’t trust anymore.

 

Embong looked ordinary.

 

That was the problem too.

 

Ordinary didn’t protect you from being noticed.

 

They approached the counter when their turn came. The attendant’s smile appeared, automatic and pleasant.

 

“Passports, please.”

 

Embong handed his over first.

 

The attendant took it, glanced down, then paused.

 

Not a dramatic pause.

 

Not long enough to justify complaint.

 

Just long enough to register.

 

Her eyes moved across the page again.

 

The photograph.
The name.
The place of birth.

 

Her smile remained in place, but it stopped belonging to her. It became something attached to policy.

 

She typed.

 

Embong waited without shifting.

 

Geoffrey felt his own body tighten as if it had been trained for this, the way he used to tighten when someone raised their voice in a room that didn’t belong to him.

 

The attendant looked up.

 

“Is this your current address?”

 

Embong answered calmly. “Yes.”

 

More typing.

 

A small printout appeared. She tore it neatly.

 

Then, still smiling, she placed a marker strip on Embong’s boarding pass.

 

Geoffrey saw the colour immediately.

 

He pretended he hadn’t.

 

“Thank you,” the attendant said, as if nothing had happened.

 

They moved on.

 

The line into security was longer than usual, or maybe it only felt that way. People stood too close. People stood too far. Everyone watched the same points—shoes, belts, passports—like ritual might prevent catastrophe.

 

Embong slipped his watch into the tray. Geoffrey followed. Their bags rolled forward.

 

A security officer lifted Embong’s bag.

 

Not randomly.

 

Not “because everyone gets checked.”

 

He lifted it with a practiced certainty, set it aside, and opened it.

 

Embong stood with his hands at his sides.

 

Geoffrey’s mouth went dry.

 

The officer moved through the bag efficiently—textbooks, a jumper, toiletries, nothing interesting. He paused at a small notebook.

 

He opened it.

 

Embong didn’t flinch.

 

The officer flipped two pages, three, as if expecting words to become evidence.

 

What he found was a list of assignments and a half-finished paragraph in Malay about a film they’d watched in class.

 

He closed the notebook.

 

He moved on.

 

When he found nothing, he looked almost faintly disappointed, like a man whose day was improved by suspicion and dulled by its absence.

 

He closed the bag.

 

“Thank you,” he said, without gratitude.

 

Embong nodded once.

 

They moved through.

 

On the other side, Geoffrey grabbed their trays too quickly, hands clumsy with anger he did not know where to put.

 

Embong reassembled himself with methodical calm—watch on, belt through loops, shoes tied, bag on shoulder.

 

Geoffrey waited until they were out of the bottleneck, standing near a wall where people no longer had to keep moving.

 

“That wasn’t random,” Geoffrey said quietly.

 

Embong adjusted his strap. “No.”

 

Geoffrey stared at him, waiting for more.

 

Embong’s expression didn’t change.

 

“It’s fine,” Embong said.

 

Geoffrey heard the lie immediately.

 

“It’s not fine,” he replied.

 

Embong finally looked at him.

 

His eyes were steady. Tired, maybe. But steady.

 

“I didn’t say it was right,” Embong said. “I said it’s what happens.”

 

Geoffrey swallowed hard.

 

“I hate it,” he said.

 

Embong nodded once, as if allowing the feeling to exist without feeding it.

 

“I know,” he replied.

 

They walked toward their gate.

 

Around them, people hurried with duty-free bags and holiday plans, already arguing about seats and snacks. The airport held all of it at once—the ordinary and the suspicious, the freedom and the narrowing.

 

At the gate, Embong sat down and pulled out a book.

 

Geoffrey sat beside him, still too alert.

 

After a moment, Embong nudged Geoffrey’s knee with his own.

 

Light.

 

Deliberate.

 

A gesture that meant: stay here.

 

Geoffrey didn’t move.

 

He watched Embong read as if reading could still be trusted, as if the world could still be held at bay by ink and quiet.

 

Across the hall, a television played with the volume turned down.

 

Geoffrey didn’t look at it.

 

He looked at Embong.

 

And in that corridor—bright, busy, pretending to be normal—Geoffrey understood something he had not been able to name before:

 

it wasn’t only grief that had changed them.

 

It was the way the world had started to look at the ones he loved.

 

He sat closer.

 

Not for protection.

 

For declaration.

 

Embong didn’t react.

 

He simply turned the page.

 

And that, Geoffrey realised, was its own kind of refusal.

 

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