I’ve always liked airports. Call me an old romantic, but I used to get a kick out of watching families and lovers reuniting–that split second when the weary and sunburned emerge through the sliding glass doors and recognition lights up their eyes. So when Stephen asked me to collect him and the girls from Gatwick, I was more than happy to do it.

I left with a good hour to spare. I wanted to get there early, grab myself a coffee and people-watch for a bit. Odd to think of it now, but I was in a wonderful mood that afternoon. I’d had a call-back for the part of the gay butler in the third series of Cavendish Hall (type-casting, of course, but Gerry, my agent, thought it could finally be my big break), and I’d managed to find a parking spot that wasn’t a day’s hike from the entrance. As it was one of my treat days, I bought myself a latte with extra cream, and wandered over to join the throng waiting for passengers to emerge from baggage reclaim. Next to a Cup ’n’ Chow outlet, a team of bickering work-experience kids were doing an execrable job of dismantling a tacky Christmas display that was well-overdue for removal, and I watched their mini drama unfold for a while, oblivious that my own was about to begin.

I hadn’t thought to check the flight information board to make sure the plane was on time, so I was taken unawares when a nasal voice droned over the intercom: ‘Could all those awaiting the arrival of Go!Go! Airlines Flight 277 from Tenerife please make their way to the information counter, thank you.’ Isn’t that Stephen’s flight? I thought, double-checking the details on my BlackBerry. I wasn’t too concerned. I suppose I assumed the flight had been delayed. It didn’t occur to me to wonder why Stephen hadn’t called to let me know he’d be late.

You never think it’s going to happen to you, do you?

There was only a small group of us at first–others, like me, who’d arrived early. A pretty girl with dyed red hair holding a heart-shaped balloon on a stick, a dreadlocked fellow with a wrestler’s build and a middle-aged couple with smokers’ skin who were dressed in identical cerise shell suits. Not the sort of people with whom I’d usually choose to associate. Odd how one’s first impressions can be so wrong. I now count them all among my closest friends. Well, this type of thing brings you together, doesn’t it?

I should have known from the shell-shocked expressions on the faces of the spotty teenager manning the counter and the whey-faced security woman hovering next to him that something horrific was afoot, but all I was feeling at that stage was irritation.

‘What’s going on?’ I snapped in my best Cavendish Hall accent.

The teenager managed to stutter that we were to follow him to where ‘more info would be relayed to us’.

We all did as we were told, although I confess I was surprised the shell-suited couple didn’t kick up more of a stink, they didn’t look the type to take orders. But as they told me weeks later at one of our ‘277 Together’ meetings, at that stage they were in denial. They didn’t want to know, and if anything untoward had happened to the plane, they didn’t want to hear it from a boy who was barely out of puberty. The teenager scurried ahead, presumably so that none of us would have the chance to interrogate him further, and ushered us through an innocuous door next to the customs’ offices. We were led down a long corridor, which, judging by its peeling paint and scuffed floor, wasn’t in a section of the airport typically encountered by the public gaze. I remember smelling a rogue whiff of cigarette smoke wafting in from somewhere in a flagrant disregard of the smoking ban.

We ended up in a grim windowless lounge, furnished with tired burgundy waiting-room seats. My eye was caught by one of those seventies tubular ashtrays, which was half-hidden behind a plastic hydrangea. Funny what you remember, isn’t it?

A guy in a polyester suit clutching a clipboard waddled towards us, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down like a Tourette’s sufferer’s. Although as pale as a cadaver, his cheeks were alive with a severe shaving rash. His eyes darted all over the place, briefly met mine, then his gaze settled into the far distance.

It hit me then, I think. The sickening knowledge that I was about to hear something that would change my life forever.

‘Go on then, mate,’ Kelvin–the fellow with the dreads–finally said.

The suit swallowed convulsively. ‘I am extremely sorry to relay this to you, but Flight 277 disappeared off the radar approximately an hour ago.’

The world swayed, and I could feel the first wisps of a panic attack. My fingers were tingling and my chest was starting to tighten. Then Kelvin asked the question the rest of us were too afraid to ask: ‘Has it crashed?’

‘We cannot be certain at this time, but please be assured we will relay the information to you as soon as it comes in. Counsellors will be available for any of you who—’

‘What about survivors?’

The suit’s hands were trembling and the winking cartoon plane on his plastic Go!Go! badge seemed to mock us with its cheeky insouciance. ‘Should have called it Gay!Gay! Air,’ Stephen used to quip whenever one of Go!Go!’s dire adverts came on the television. He was always joking that that cartoon plane was camper than a bus-load of drag queens. I didn’t take offence; that was the sort of relationship we had. ‘Like I say,’ the suit flustered, ‘we have counsellors at your disposal—’

Mel–the female half of the track-suited couple–spoke up. ‘Sod your counsellors, just tell us what’s happened!’

The girl holding the balloon started sobbing with the gusto of an EastEnders character, and Kelvin put his arm around her. She dropped the balloon and I watched as it bounced sadly across the floor, eventually ending up lodged next to the retro ashtray. Other people were starting to drift into the room, ushered by more Go!Go! staff–most of whom looked as bewildered and unprepared as the spotty teenager.

Mel’s face was as pink as her shell-suit top and she was jabbing a finger in the official’s face. Everyone seemed to be screaming or crying, but I felt a curious distance from what was going on, as if I was on set, waiting for my cue. And this is a ghastly thing to admit, but I thought, remember what you’re feeling, Paul, you can use it in your acting. I’m not proud of that. I’m just being honest.

I kept staring at that balloon, and suddenly I could hear Jessica and Polly’s voices, clear as a bell: ‘But Uncle Paaaaauuuuul, what keeps the plane in the air?’ Stephen had asked me round to Sunday lunch the week before they left, and the twins hadn’t stopped badgering me about the flight, for some reason assuming I was the font of all knowledge about air travel. It was the kids’ first time on a plane, and they were more excited about that than they were about the holiday. I found myself trying to remember the last thing Stephen had said to me, something along the lines of, ‘See you when you’re older, mate.’ We’re non-identical, but how could I not have sensed something awful had happened? I dragged my phone out of my pocket, recalling that Stephen had sent me a text the day before: ‘Girls say hi. Resort full of twats. We get in at 3.30. Don’t be late ;).’ I thumbed through my messages, trying to find it. It was suddenly absolutely vital that I save it. It wasn’t there–I must have accidentally deleted it.

Even weeks afterwards, I wished I’d kept that text message.

Somehow, I found myself back in the Arrivals area. I don’t remember how I even got there, or if anyone tried to stop me leaving that ghastly lounge. I drifted along, sensing that people were staring at me, but right then, they were as insignificant as extras. There was something in the air, like that heavy feeling you get just before a storm hits. I thought, sod it, I need a drink, which, since I’d been on the wagon for a good ten years, wasn’t like me. I sleepwalked towards the Irish theme pub on the far side of the area. A group of suited yobs were gathered around the bar staring up at the TV. One of them, a florid-faced prat with a Mockney accent, was talking too loudly, going on about 9/11, and telling everyone that he had to get to Zurich by 5.50 or ‘heads would roll’. He stopped, mid-sentence, as I approached, and the others made room for me, drawing back as if I were contagious. Of course, I’ve learned since then that grief and horror are contagious.

The TV’s sound was up to full volume and an anchor–one of those botoxed American horrors with Tom Cruise teeth and too much make-up–was yabbering into shot. Behind her was a screen capture of what looked to be some sort of swamp, a helicopter hovering over it. And then I read the strap-line: Maiden Airlines Everglades crash.

They’ve got it wrong, I thought. Stephen and the girls were on Go!Go!, not that plane.

And then it hit me. Another plane had gone down.