He unlocked the bathroom door and stepped out, treating the stewardess to a smile of manic proportions.

“Amazing. Really.” he told her, dirty looks and all.

Back in his seat, he squinted at the waters of the San Francisco Bay, worrying that they looked altogether a bit too close. Brain racing, he ran through a bit of "Anarchy in the UK", relishing his immortality, and Cheshire cat-grinning at how far he now was from the freezing steel cage of the The Septic Isles, Not So Great Anymore Britain.

The waters of the bay slipped away behind them, the plane screamed at the ground and at the last minute the ground decided not to leap up and smack them into a hundred square yards of scattered, flaming debris.

Nice of it really, Beckett thought as they bounced gently along the runway.

A stewardess told them to remain strapped in their seats until the plane had come to a complete standstill. This taxiing to a complete stop bollocks seemed to Beckett’s coke-fired lust for all things American to take approximately forever. That was America out there and he couldn’t wait to get his hands on it.

He’d spent months preparing for this, ducking and diving, cooking up false bank accounts, hoping no prior convictions were going to come up and bite his tourist visa in the arse, no mad old aunties who had been members of the Communist party back in the twenties or anything. He’d skimped and scraped and saved and stolen and connived and conned and begged and borrowed the one thousand and three dollars he had in his wallet. He fidgeted in his seat. There was nothing to see out of the window except a few other planes and the weed-spotted runway. Might as well be at Luton airport. Except that it’s sunny.

Finally they stopped rolling and turned off the engines, the seat belt signs, and the redundant no smoking signs. Everyone on board immediately turned into a herd of stampeding, luggage-wielding maniacs. Beckett fought his way to the front of the plane and ducked through the hatchway. The “thank you, goodbye, thank you, goodbye” drone of the stewardess fell behind him, and he stepped out into the ribbed, white-walled birth canal of the boarding corridor.