The Boudicca Parchments

Chapter 49

“Why can’t we go through there?” asked Shir.

She was pointing to a bank of machines at the far right end of passport control where people were just placing their right hands and then walking through. Julia thought about how to explain it to an eight-year-old.

“It’s a special machine that can read people’s hand prints.”

“What do you mean ‘reading’ them?”

“It can tell who they are by their handprint. And if it recognizes them, it lets them through automatically, so they don’t have to stand in the queue like us.”

The queue was long and didn’t seem to be moving, so as usual the girls were getting impatient.

“So why can’t we use it?”

“Because it’s only for Israelis.”

“That’s not fair,” said May.

“In order to use it, you have to register with them beforehand and they can only register people who live in Israel.”

Romy was pointing in another direction.

“Then why can’t we stand in that line over there?”

Julia looked round, wondering if she had indeed missed the chance to stand in a shorter queue. Of course the problem was you could never really tell. You could join what looked like the shortest queue only to discover that another queue was moving faster. In fact in Julia’s experience, that was usually the case.

“That’s a queue for Israelis only too.”

“But why can’t they use the machine? Then we could stand in that line?”

“Because not all Israelis have registered to use the machine. And if they haven’t registered, then it hasn’t got their records.”

The discussion fizzled out, but the twins and Romy kept looking over at the hand-scanner wistfully, as if wishing that they too could use it. Julia relied on the scanner to keep them distracted and pre-occupied while the queue crawled slowly forward. She knew that it would be another long wait at the baggage reclaim, but she remembered that the carousel had held the girls spellbound at LAX on their way to Disneyland and she assumed — translation: hoped — that it would be the same here in Ben Gurion Airport.

It was over an hour later that she passed through customs with the suitcase on a trolley and the girls on the suitcases, having relegated airport safety rules to obscurity. By that stage her mother, Helen, was going frantic with worry, as Julia had forgotten to switch her mobile phone back on after the flight. When the Sasson’s finally emerged groundside, it was Shir and May who spotted their grandmother first, followed a second later by Romy. But it was Romy who tugged at her mother’s arm and pointed to alert her.

“Julia,” said Helen with a smile. She wanted to embrace her daughter, but it was hard to when she was being swarmed by the equally loving embrace of her granddaughters. When she finally extricated herself from the zealous affections of the happy threesome, Helen and Julia exchanged a quick hug before Helen exerted her matriarchal authority to restore some discipline to the situation.

“All right girls,” she said firmly, “to the car.”

This produced a quickly scramble back to the luggage trolley which very nearly degenerated into a three-way fight. But Helen made short shrift of this.

“Cut it out girls! No you can’t ride the trolley. You’ll have to learn to walk. You’re not babies.”

Coming from their grandmother, this seemed to work.

It was a long walk to the car, especially in the humid heat. The airport town of Lod was on the coastal strip and on hot days, with the humidity from the sea, it could feel like a sauna. To Helen this was nothing, but neither Julia nor the little ones were used to it. Still, they were troopers and none of them wanted to wilt or succumb to complaining before the others did. Soon they were in the car on the way to Jerusalem, with the air conditioning turned up to high.

Julia thought she noticed a car behind them that had pulled out of the airport car park at the same time as hers. Presumably the driver of the vehicle was going to Jerusalem too, or at least somewhere near Jerusalem. At any rate, she thought nothing more of it.