By then the overhead lights were switched off and it was movie time. The menu for the screen on the back of the seat in front gave me several choices including a remake of Solaris. I’ve never seen a good remake and I wasn’t going to watch this one but the title brought back something of the original film that I saw years ago. I remembered water and the sound of water, water in a stream, running over reeds, water in a pond, frozen in winter, water coming down in rain. And then there was the ocean on the planet Solaris. This ocean didn’t actually have water in it but a kind of plasma that reacted to what was in the minds of the men in the space station above it. It took their thoughts and memories and it made copies of people in their lives and sent them up to the station. These were flesh and blood just like the originals. The psychologist at the station was visited by what seemed to be his wife who’d killed herself ten years before. She was confused and frightened — she didn’t know what she was. She couldn’t bear to let him out of her sight, even broke through a steel door to be with him. At first he was so spooked by this that he put her in a rocket and shot her off, but the next day she was back. She loved him and he loved her too, even though he knew she wasn’t really real. ‘Love can only be experienced, it can’t be explained,’ he said. When the replica finally understood what she was she tried to commit suicide but failed. Poor thing — how real is anybody, really? I tried to recall the ending but I couldn’t. I know it was sad.
We were over the ocean while I was remembering Solaris. O God! I thought, if only the ocean beneath us could send up my dead son, alive and well, even if it was only a copy of him, but a warm and breathing Django I could hold in my arms and he would call me Mum.
The swarthy man touched my arm. ‘You all right?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘You crying,’ he said.
I put a hand to my face. My cheeks were wet. ‘Eyestrain,’ I said. ‘Too much reading.’
‘Me too,’ he said.
‘Reading too much?’
He shook his head. ‘Too much sad.’
‘How come?’
‘Dead. Gone for ever.’
‘Who?’
He shook his head again and put his hand over his heart. ‘Name is like gravestone in little cemetery inside me,’ he said. ‘I take flowers, go alone.’
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Little cemetery inside me.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Too much sad.’ He went back to his beads.
The last time I flew into LAX was for a gig at the House of Blues in Hollywood. We had electrical problems with the light rig and the show wasn’t one of our best. As the plane tilted I saw Los Angeles all spread out and sprawling and it just had a flat noplace look. Places do that for me, they change sometimes from one hour to the next; maybe another time it would’ve looked like someplace.
After my arrival at Terminal 4 of the Tom Bradley International Terminal there was a three-hour stopover before I changed planes for the flight to Honolulu. As always in airports there were bodied voices and disembodied ones. The bodied ones accompanied the swarming footsteps and the disembodied ones tried to find people. Señor Manuel Losano was being paged in English and Spanish. No one’s looking for me, I thought. What if I just stayed here and didn’t make any more decisions. But of course doing that would require a decision.
I had a club sandwich and several coffees sitting outside a Daily Grill restaurant that had SATISFACTION SERVED DAILY over its front. I thought that was a pretty big claim and I noticed that satisfaction wasn’t on the menu. I wandered around a little, bought a pair of Gucci sunglasses at the Sunglass Hut, and did a quick browse at WH Smith, which I was surprised to see so far from home. In the window there was a big display of Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard. L. Ron Hubbard! I’d thought he’d had his day and was long gone but here his book was, alive and well in LA. The Scientologists used to have a shop-front recruiting operation in Tottenham Court Road where they tried to get people inside for some kind of testing that involved tin cans as I remember. I guess the California climate favours Scientology and of course they’ve got Tom Cruise and John Travolta which can’t hurt sales. Nobody pulled me in for a tin-can test so I got away from there and walked about smelling stale fries and watching people coming from wherever they’d been and going to wherever they’d be next. There were monitors everywhere with flights that weren’t mine and announcements on the tannoy that had nothing to do with me.
I went halfway down the stairs to the Mezzanine to look at something I’d passed on my way up. At first glance it was like the large diagrams you see in the London Underground but it had moving parts. It was like a pinball machine stood on its side, up on easel legs like a lecturer’s blackboard, and you couldn’t do anything with it but watch it doing its own thing with balls dropping from one level to another in different ways and bells ringing as if it was demonstrating a pattern of meaningless events for no particular reason. ‘You talking to me?’ I said.
A woman with a small boy came along. Tight jeans, pink trainers, pink T-shirt that said LONG TIME GONE, big frizzy hair, unlit fag in her mouth, sunglasses. The boy was wearing a camouflage outfit. He might have been ten or eleven but looked old beyond his years. ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘it’s some kind of game.’
‘OK,’ said the woman, ‘so where’s the joysticks?’
‘Maybe it’s the kind you hold in your hand, only bigger,’ said the boy. They both studied it for a while and said, ‘Tsss.’ The woman had taken off her sunglasses and I saw that she had a black eye.
She put the glasses back on and turned to me. ‘Have you figured this thing out?’
‘Not yet,’ I said.
‘No buttons to push,’ she said. She and the boy tried pressing the glass in various places with no result.
‘Stupid thing,’ said the boy. ‘You can’t do anything with it.’
‘That’s life,’ said the woman, and they moved on.
I found myself humming one of the old Nectarine numbers I’d written, ‘A Long Way Down’.
I was high on the love we’d found,
and now it’s such a long way down …
It was raining the day Dick Turpin lost his footing on a roof and it was raining the day of his funeral. Dick’s mother was there, also his brother and Mrs Brother. Brother gave me a hard look and Mrs looked away. She was wearing a skirt as short as mine but she didn’t have the legs for it. Dick hadn’t ever made a will, so I got everything. I’d certainly earned it, and with his bank account plus the sale of the house and the business, I’d be able to set myself up comfortably in London and sleep in a bed that would never have anybody in it that I didn’t want.
‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord,’ said the vicar; ‘he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live …’ I didn’t recall that Dick had any belief in Jesus and I doubted that Jesus believed in Dick. When the vicar got to ‘We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out’ I nodded my head yes and wondered what I’d ever have that I wouldn’t want to leave behind. Now I was humming ‘Nuages’ and I shook my head and went back to my book.
The Woman in Black is only 160 pages but it was slow reading because I kept stopping and thinking my thoughts before going back to the page I was on. Some of it I read again and again, like the part where the narrator hears the sound of a ghostly pony trap, then the neighing of the horse and the cry of a child as they get sucked into the marsh.
I got to the end eventually and it left me with a feeling of dread. So why had I carried on to the end? Good question.
The plane for Honolulu was a 757 but the drinks trolley was the same size as the one on the 777. I didn’t bother with the movies or the headphone music and I didn’t start the Alice Munro book. I closed my eyes and listened to the whale music in my head and watched Django go over the edge of the cliff. This time it was a woman next to me who said, ‘Are you all right?’ American.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘You’re
crying.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s just that my eyes water a lot when I’ve had a few drinks.’
‘Oh,’ she said, nodding to show that she understood. She was young and pretty, with long dark hair and a serious face and just a little bit of that bulldog jaw some pretty young Americans have. ‘I don’t feel too happy myself. I was down in San Diego visiting my boyfriend. He’ll be shipping out for the Gulf soon.’
‘Army?’
‘Navy. He’s training dolphins to clear mines.’ She took out her wallet and showed me a photograph of a smiling man in a boat and a smiling dolphin leaping out of the water beside it.
‘Nice-looking guy,’ I said. ‘The dolphin looks happy. I’d have thought they were too smart to muck about with mines.’
‘Leroy — that’s my boyfriend’s name — he says they’re smart but they think it’s cool to hang out with humans. So they’ll do all kinds of things for a few fish, just to be buddies with their trainers.’
‘Does he just send them down to do the work or does he go down with them?’
‘He says he won’t have to get into the water with them once they’ve learnt what to do but I don’t believe him. I think about him over there, down in dark and muddy water with his dolphin. Either of them makes a mistake and Whammo! that’s all she wrote.’
‘Isn’t there still a chance that war won’t happen?’
‘It’ll happen. Bush thinks with his dick. He’s got all those planes and ships and tanks and bombs and he’s got a hard-on for Saddam Hussein. If it wasn’t Saddam it’d be somebody else. A while back it was Osama Bin Laden but you don’t hear much about him any more.’ She stopped talking but her lips were moving while we flew over banks of white clouds that looked as if you could walk on them if you were careful. Far down below was the sea.
‘I had a dream about Leroy’ she said. ‘I must have been underwater. The water was very clear and I could see him swimming toward me. But there were trees between us, thin trees not all that close together but he couldn’t get through.’
‘What happened then?’
‘I woke up with my heart beating fast. What do you think it meant?’
‘Well, there’s the thing with Iraq standing between you. And you could say you won’t be out of the woods until it’s cleared up.’
Her right hand was rubbing the third finger of her left hand, like a close-up in a movie. ‘I want us to get married before he ships out,’ she said, ‘but Leroy isn’t sure. He’s very superstitious and he says it’s like asking for something to happen and I’ll be the widow who gets the folded-up flag at the funeral. But if we don’t get married and it happens, then I’ll always think, at least we could have had that, at least I’d be his widow instead of just a grieving girlfriend.’
‘I’m superstitious too,’ I said. ‘I think if you get married it might keep him safe.’
Her face lit up. ‘I’ll tell him that,’ she said. ‘Thank you. My name’s Elizabeth.’
‘I’m Christabel.’ We shook hands. The captain announced that we were about to begin our descent. The sound of the engines changed and my ears popped. The sky was grey and so was the ocean.
Honolulu tilted into view with white buildings and soon the wheels touched the ground and we kept our seat belts fastened and the backs of our seats upright and so on until finally the captain thanked us for flying American and the time was now ten hours earlier than it was in London. ‘Are you here for business or pleasure?’ Elizabeth said to me as we left the plane.
‘Visiting a friend,’ I said. ‘You?’
‘Delivering ashes,’ she said, ‘to my grandparents. My mom and dad died on 9/11. They were born here and this is the first chance I’ve had to bring them home.’
‘Sorry,’ I said.
She nodded a couple of times. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘You have to move on.’
20
Elizabeth Barton
25 January 2003. That woman who sat next to me on the plane, Christabel, she was crying all right. I had a feeling about her, like that shudder you get when somebody walks over your grave. What she said about keeping Leroy safe by getting married, I wasn’t so sure about that. I didn’t think she knew anything about keeping anybody safe. When we were over the water I did ‘Eternal Father, Strong To Save’ like I always do, singing it in my head:
Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who biddest the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!
I just do the first verse. I don’t think God needs the whole thing every time.
21
Elias Newman
28 January 2003. I dreamt about a dog we had when I was a boy. Bo, we called him, short for Boris. He was a cross between a German shepherd and a collie, and my father used to walk him twice a day. He was about as old as I was, very quiet and well-mannered except that when he was off the leash he chased cars. One finally hit him the year after my father died. My sisters nursed him devotedly; they didn’t want to lose my father’s dog but his injuries were too severe and he had to be put down. I hadn’t thought about him for the last fifty years or so but here he was in a dream. He was very old and stiff but he took the leash in his mouth and went to the door and looked back at me. ‘Bo!’ I said, ‘Poor old Bo!’ and woke up to a grey day with a cold wind blowing.
For a moment I didn’t know where I was but I felt that something was missing. Then it came back to me — Christabel was on her way to Hawaii for her remembrance day. Yet another mystery. There were always new unknowns with her. In an effort to get my mind off her I phoned Peter Diggs and arranged to meet him for lunch.
I did a morning clinic, then I went to meet Peter at The Daniel Mendoza off Long Acre. I’d first heard about it from a patient who was a betting man with a keen interest in all sporting events. He strongly regretted that boxing had become what he called a namby-pamby sport and claimed that he had several times seen the real (and illicit) bare-knuckle thing. Being Jewish he longed for a new Daniel Mendoza to rise like the golem and show the gentiles how it was done. The restaurant is a dark brown place with prints of Mendoza and other bare-knuckle boxers: Tom Cribb, Jem Belcher, Deaf Burke, Ben Caunt, Bendigo and so on. Also Pierce Egan and various of the Fancy. ‘Patronised by HRH the Prince of Wales 1792,’ said the wooden banner over the bar. A framed poster showed Mendoza coming up to scratch under the words, in large capitals, MENDOZA THE JEW, HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF ENGLAND. There were several pen-and-ink portraits in which he looked more a poet than a bruiser. Although only five foot seven and a middleweight, he defeated much bigger men to become heavyweight champion and is credited with being the father of scientific boxing. He wore his hair long and curly, possibly with Samson in mind, but this proved his downfall in a bout with ‘Gentleman’ John Jackson who grabbed him by his hair and gave him a beating from which his status never recovered.
There was a clatter of cutlery and glassware and a clamour of high-cholesterol smells and conversation, much of the latter in Yiddish, with gestures. My people.
‘You come here often?’ said Peter.
‘From time to time when I need cheering up,’ I said, and I told him about the dream. ‘It was so vivid! I could even smell his old-dog smell, Bo looking up at me with a dried-up trickle from each eye — I keep wondering what it means.’
‘Well,’ said Peter, ‘are you an old dog wanting someone to take you walkies?’
‘All the time, but there was more to it than that.’
Peter looked at the ceiling, low and dark brown, with beams. ‘Of course, this may very well be Bo’s dream that you found yourself in.’
‘Bo is a dead dog,’ I said.
‘So? Who can say where dreams begin and end, and where they travel from and to?’
‘You’re strange,’ I said.
‘Everybody’s strange, only most people try to cove
r it up.’
A heavyweight waiter wearing a yarmulke arrived and we both ordered potato pancakes. ‘Latkes twice,’ he said, and wrote it down. ‘Anything to drink with that?’
‘What kind of beer have you got?’ said Peter.
‘Maccabee,’ said the waiter.
‘Haven’t heard of that one,’ said Peter.
‘You’re not Jewish, right?’
‘Right.’
‘The Maccabees killed a lot of goyim. So we have Maccabee beer.’
‘Bottled or draft?’
‘Bottled.’
‘But I can see beer pumps at the bar.’
‘Those are from a long time ago, never been taken out. Should I sit down and we’ll have a conversation or would you like to give me your beer decision?’
‘OK,’ said Peter, ‘I’ll have a Maccabee.’
‘Make it two,’ I said.
The waiter wrote down our order, frowned, shook his head, and withdrew.
‘I haven’t had this one before,’ I said.
‘Bare-knuckle waiting, would you call it?’ said Peter.
‘He’s a Jewish waiter,’ I said. ‘It’s a role that’s heavy with tradition and he’s doing it the traditional way. Where were we?’
‘Being strange.’
‘Right. You said that Bo was quiet and well-mannered but he chased cars, was hit by one and had to be put down. Did he have a death wish or what? Now he’s pulled you into his dream in which he’s old and you’re sixty-two and he wants to take you for a walk. Do you want to go with him?’
‘Peter, Bo’s dead, OK?’
‘Well, of course he’s dead — that’s not the sort of dream a live dog would have. Are you going to walk with him?’
‘If he dreams me again I’ll let you know what happens. What are you doing since your big success with “Death and the Maiden”?’
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