Come Dance With Me

by Russell Hoban

  When I got home I opened the door, took a deep breath of silence, turned on some lights, took my coat off, got Top Hat off the video shelf, poured myself some cask-strength Bowmore Islay Malt, added water judiciously, and settled back to watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Fred by himself has never interested me much despite the wonderful things he could do; the enchanting Ginger, however, as a partner of independent spirit, gave him importance and validated his masculinity by acknowledging his mastery and following his lead. Seeing the grace and joie de vivre of their silvery ghosts as they danced ‘Cheek to Cheek’ filled me with delight and sadness. When they were alive I was glad to know that somewhere they were among us; when they departed this life they left the world poorer. Their dancing was real. Unlike western stars who perform impossible feats with handguns and western presidents who command hundreds of thousands of expendable stuntmen and women, Fred and Ginger actually did what they did. With tears running down my face I drank my whisky, finished the film, phoned Christabel at home and at her mobile number, got not-available messages at both numbers, and went to bed.

  15

  Christabel Alderton

  25 January 2003. I was hoping to see Elias in the entertainment suite after the show but he didn’t turn up. I was stuck talking to D.O.A. executives, and when I got clear and rang his number I got the answering machine, so he must have already gone to sleep.

  I’d especially wanted to talk to him because I’d be flying to Honolulu in the morning. The tenth anniversary of Django’s death would be the 30th January and I’d booked my flight a couple of weeks before this. I hadn’t told Elias about Django, we hadn’t yet got that far. I’d booked a return flight for the 2nd February, so I wasn’t going to be gone long, but I wanted to hear Elias’s voice before I left.

  Every year as the 27th approached I thought of Django as I last saw him and tried to imagine how he’d look now. I’d seen Anthony Hopkins as King Lear at the National some years back, and at the end, when he holds the dead Cordelia in his arms and says:

  … no, no, no life!

  Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,

  And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,

  Never, never, never, never, never.

  I wept as quietly as I could while everything spun around me and I tried not to faint. I bought a copy of the play and read those lines until they burned themselves into my brain and now I hear them when I’m brushing my teeth, crossing the road, all kinds of moments when I’m not even thinking of my lost boy. Consciously. Now, before my flight to Honolulu, I kept seeing him with the grey sky and the dark sea beyond as he went over the edge.

  I put on my Django Reinhardt record and that brought back Django’s dead father, Adam Freund. I can’t control the pictures in my head, and when the music started I saw Adam shagging the stone sphinx to the tune of ‘Limehouse Blues’. ‘Nuages’ brought back naked Adam, the red lampshade and the spires of the Stephansdom. And ‘Herr Oluf’. And Elias. Can a person be a bad-luck carrier and am I one? Up to now, four men (counting Ron) and my son were dead. I’ve had my share of one-night stands and sport fucking and I don’t know if any of those men who didn’t mean anything to me ran into the Curse of Christabel. Should I break things off with Elias for his own good? Thinking tired me out and I fell asleep and dreamt that Django was with me. ‘Mum,’ he said, ‘I’m tired. Can we go home now?’

  ‘But we are home,’ I said, and my voice woke me up. My American Airlines flight was due to leave Heathrow at 11:05 but I was advised to arrive three hours early because of security checks. So I ordered a minicab for 07:15, got to Heathrow Terminal 4 at 07:45, wondered if I should phone Elias, decided it was unlucky, loaded my things on a trolley and joined a very slow-moving check-in queue. I eventually reached the counter, and after assuring the woman that I’d packed my own luggage and nobody had given me anything to take on the plane, asked for an aisle seat towards the rear, got a boarding pass, went through Passport Control and the metal detector, and found myself with about an hour and a half to get through before boarding time.

  This is the time of year when I feel like a hermit crab without a shell, exposed and vulnerable. But airports have always been safe houses between what’s behind me and what’s in front of me. Except of course no place is safe now. In spite of that I like the smell of blankness and carpet shampoo and I like the stale recycled air and the lighting that’s neither day nor night. I’m comfortable with my book and my ticket and my boarding pass and all the strangers who are between me and the Erlking, the Cyclops, whatever.

  I couldn’t help asking myself why, on this tenth anniversary of Django’s death, I was going to the place where he died. The answer will sound strange but I guess that’s how I am. Strange. My night in the Mini Hotel in Honolulu International Airport in 1993 had kept me from falling apart and I wanted to be kept from falling apart now. I’d phoned ahead so I knew that the Mini Hotel had been shut down after 9/11 but I thought that just being in the airport overnight might help me get my head straight about Elias. Did I want to drag him into my bad luck or should I turn him loose?

  I had an Aroma coffee and went to WH Smith to get a book. I was thinking of Donna Leon’s latest but The Woman in Black by Susan Hill saw me first and jumped into my hand. I don’t have to buy this, I thought, I’ll just glance at the first couple of pages to see what it’s like. But after the opening lines of the first chapter, ‘Christmas Eve’, it refused to let go of me and I was afraid I’d finish the whole thing before we took off, so I’d need another book for the ten hours to Los Angeles and somehow I missed Donna Leon and was waylaid by Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Covering all that, it had to be value for money, so I bought it.

  I found a seat with a good view of the monitor screens and noticed that there was a Middle-Eastern-looking man three seats away in the same row. Three seats on the other side of him were also vacant. He was reading an Arabic paper and I wondered if there was any way of spotting a suicide bomber just by looking at him. I probably look suicidal as often as not; lots of people with thoughtful faces might be about to do anything at all.

  Boarding was at 10:40, and at 10:15 I rang Elias on my mobile. ‘Hello?’ he said.

  ‘Hi. It’s me. I was hoping to see you last night.’

  ‘I was hoping to see you too, but the debate on the international situation was too much for me so I left. I tried to reach you on your mobile but you weren’t available.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but I was surrounded by record company execs and by the time I got away you weren’t available either.’

  ‘So anyhow, can we meet tomorrow?’

  ‘That’s why I wanted to see you after the gig. I’m at Heathrow now. My flight’s leaving soon and I’ll be gone for a few days, back on the 2nd February’

  ‘What are you doing at Heathrow? Where are you going?’

  ‘Honolulu and Maui. It’s nothing that’s happening now, it’s to do with the past — a kind of remembrance day. I’ll tell you about it when I get back.’ I couldn’t quite say what I wanted to say next.

  ‘What?’ he said after a few seconds.

  ‘How do you feel about luck?’ I said.

  ‘Some days I feel lucky, some I don’t. How about you?’

  ‘Sometimes I feel unlucky. Sometimes I feel like a bad-luck carrier.’

  ‘You’re not. Finding you has been the luckiest thing that’s happened to me in a long time.’ Pause. ‘I miss you when you’re not here. When does your return flight get in? I’ll meet you at Heathrow.’

  ‘Don’t do that — with two long flights and a stopover at LA there are bound to be delays. I’ll come straight to you when I arrive, leave a key for me in case you’re out.’

  ‘Yes! I’ll leave a key under the right-hand box tree, under the pot so you can let yourself in any time of the day or night.’

  ‘Right. I’ll see you soon then.’

  ‘Yes. Please fly carefully’

  ‘I�
��ll try. See you soon, God willing.’ I did a phone kiss and rang off. I’d never said ‘God willing’ before. I hadn’t given him a phone kiss before either. Now I almost didn’t want to go.

  16

  Elias Newman

  25 January 2003. ‘A kind of remembrance day,’ she said. Whom was Christabel remembering? Sid Horstmann? A wave of unreasoning jealousy swept over me but then it subsided and left me with the blueness and the dark that had come to me last night at the Hammersmith Apollo. This Saturday was a working day for me: I had a neuropathy piece to finish for the Lancet as well as my aetiology notes to organise. I’m a very disciplined person but today the discipline wasn’t working — I put on a coat and a woollen hat and muffler and went out into the cold and the greyness.

  I walked up the New King’s Road and the King’s Road to Beaufort Street, then down to the Embankment. The wind was making wavelets on the river and the sailboats and power boats were rocking at their moorings. I headed towards the Albert Bridge, and as I approached the bronze Daphne I was passed by a jogger who reached her before I did, slapped her on the bottom, and rapidly grew small in the distance. ‘Cheek,’ I said aloud.

  There’s a bench near the statue, and I sat down and looked at the bridge. Over troubled water, I thought. Sixty-two was hardly an age to think of new beginnings but Christabel might at this very moment be flying away from me to keep a date with the dead and I didn’t want her to be away from me.

  26 January 2003. BIO-WAR SUITS FOUND IN LONDON MOSQUE, thundered The Sunday Times. Next to that was a smaller headline: ‘Bush to secure Baghdad after Saddam ousted.’ Good luck to us all, I thought. I put the paper down, wondering where Christabel was this morning. She left yesterday morning around 11:00. Figure two ten-hour flights plus a three-hour stopover in Los Angeles — that would put her in Honolulu today, maybe even on her way to Maui by now.

  Here it was another cold grey day. After breakfast and a second cup of tea I put on Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and listened to their version of ‘Midnight Special’. That didn’t do it for me so I went to ‘Sonny’s Squall’ and that didn’t do it either. I tried ‘Just a Closer Walk with Thee’ and that was better although it wasn’t Jesus I wanted to walk with. I ended up with ‘Freight Train’ and that one did it for me. Here I was, a respected consultant, and I felt that my life was a train that I had no ticket to ride. I was riding the blinds or, worse than that, riding the rods and holding on for dear life while the sleepers and rails and the roadbed rushed backwards beneath me. ‘It’s a long low rail and a short cross tie,’ I sang along with them. ‘Ride the rods till the day I die, just don’t tell ‘em what train I’m on and they won’t know what route I’ve gone.’

  Then I turned off the CD player and dug up the notebook I’d used when I was writing poetry. Had it come to that? It seems it had. I wrote:

  Under the ocean deep and deep,

  remembering nothing, dead owls weep.

  ‘Please, Rodney,’ I said, ‘you’re embarrassing me.’ I shook my head to clear it, dressed up warmly and went out for another walk. After a while I found myself on Putney Bridge. Below me the tide was out, the river had narrowed and the mud had widened. The wind was riffling the water, the sky was grey, the wind was cold. A rower in a single shell appeared from under the bridge and his oars walked him across the water and away. I thought of drowned cities, went home, opened a bottle of French Full Red, and watched Deliverance on video. I made a cheese omelette, finished the bottle, and settled down to do a little work on the neuropathy piece. Very little.

  27 January 2003. Monday morning I put on my professional identity as Elias Newman, Diabetes Consultant, and did my regular round with Registrar Titus Smart, Senior House Officer Istvakar Rana, House Officer Brendan Yee, Clinical Pharmacist Winston Davies, and medical students Nancy Kwan and Elizabeth Yonghe, a vigorous team of fully shod verticals looking in on the barefoot horizontals in our care in various wards.

  In Bay B of Samuel Plimsoll, in Bed 3 by the window, was Abraham Selby, a burly black man with a rugged face and an ironic smile. The grey daylight illuminating him was, like hospital food, not quite the same as what you get outside. He was reclining against several pillows with his left leg elevated by a stack of folded blankets and a couple of towels. As we approached he put down The Times. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘Job’s comforters.’

  Brendan Yee read from his notes: ‘Mr Selby is fifty-six, insulin dependent with a long-standing history of Type I diabetes. There is diabetic polyneuropathy. He suffers from ischaemic heart disease, had a coronary thrombosis in 1993 and a triple bypass in 1994. He was admitted on the twenty-first of January with cellulitis in his left leg. He is being treated with intravenous benzylpenicillin and flucloxacillin, also prophylactic heparin to reduce the risk of DVTs.’

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked Selby.

  ‘Overloaded,’ he said.

  ‘I know the IV is a bother and clearing this up is a slow business but the antibiotics will do the job.’

  He nodded in a resigned way. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Do you believe in God?’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  He showed me a photograph in The Times, a close-up of a bat with long ears and a thoughtful face. I’d noticed the picture in my own Times when I was having breakfast and I’d been thinking about it. Selby said, ‘I’m wondering if His eye is on the bat.’

  ‘I’ll have to get back to you on that,’ I said.

  ‘Sure you will. I’ll be here.’

  After the round I surprised him by appearing at his bedside again. He handed me the paper and I reread the caption under the bat portrait which identified the animal as a European free-tailed bat. It had come down, ‘exhausted, starving, and injured’, in a Cornwall graveyard. ‘It is believed it had been blown off course from its migration route to the Iberian peninsula’, wrote the reporter, Simon de Bruxelles. He went on to say that ‘European free-tailed bats are high fliers and have been spotted by airline pilots several miles up’.

  ‘“Nineteen-inch wingspan,’” I read. ‘That’s a pretty big bat.’

  ‘That’s what you could call a batline,’ said Selby. ‘Bat Air, last of the independents. Pilot sitting in his 747 looks out of his window and there’s Bat Air flapping along beside him. What’s Bat Air doing up there with the big guys?’

  ‘Migrating, it says here.’

  ‘But why so high?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s picking up a favourable air stream.’

  ‘I think there’s more to it than that. What if those are souls flying up there?’

  ‘Why would souls take the form of bats?’

  ‘Maybe when you die you stop being separate from every other animal. Maybe you take on a bat shape or a wolf shape or an elephant shape or a whale shape. Maybe the world is full of souls walking or swimming or flying around, and when some of those animals get extinct, those souls die. What if that, eh? Think about it.’

  I did.

  17

  Abraham Selby

  25 January 2003. What I like about Dr Newman is that he makes me feel a little less horizontal. He might be working too hard though, and not getting enough sleep. On his way out of the ward he walked into a bucket one of the cleaners was using and he almost fell over.

  18

  Anneliese Newman

  25 January 2003. Sometimes now I dream of music. Not opera music, what it is I don’t know. Over me, under me, all around me. I can hear it, I can feel it. When I wake up it is gone. Lost, nothing remembered.

  19

  Christabel Alderton

  25 January 2003. ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ treacled down the aisles as if a big can of bossa nova in the galley had sprung a leak. I know that the international airport in Rio was named after Antonio Carlos Jobim after his death but I don’t think he acquired posthumous performance rights in public conveyances worldwide. The 777 was no more than half full but people still managed to get in each other’s way as they found their seats and put things in the o
verhead compartments.

  I was in 28C and I wasn’t surprised to find that the swarthy man between the empty seats in the departure lounge was next to me. We were on the left-hand side, about halfway back in Economy. I was aisle, he was middle, and window was a very fat man who smelled like Burger King and breathed heavily. Because Mr Window overflowed his space Mr Middle’s right arm sometimes pressed against my left arm. He smiled apologetically and made himself small. Then he took out a string of worry beads and began to worry them.

  The flight attendants did their thing with pointing out the emergency exits and demonstrating the life jackets, we hung about for a while queueing for takeoff, then the 777 got serious, pulled itself together, started rolling, gathered speed and let go of the ground. London tilted away below us and the drinks trolley slowly, slowly arrived. I had two gin and tonics, the worrying man had orange juice and the fat man had two Diet Pepsis. The captain told us about the weather and how high we’d be flying and how long it would take, then we all settled back to breathe the low-oxygen air and wait for lunch. I like those little time-outs between what you’ve just left behind and what’s waiting up ahead; they never last long enough.

  I opened The Woman in Black. This was a really classy ghost story of the old-fashioned kind. The Alice Munro book had a bright cover and seemed to have at least one story with a happy ending but the ghost story pulled me first. I was just settling into the atmosphere of it when lunch came and I had coq au vin and some white wine. After lunch I had a bit of a kip and then got well stuck in to Eel Marsh and Nine Lives Causeway and the tides and weathers of the story which took me up to the next drinks, followed by Dover sole and more white wine.