Frank thought that he should buy something for Beth and Laura. He went into the main duty free shop. He looked at all the different alcohol on sale but he had no idea what they liked and certainly didn’t want to buy cigarettes. Perfume was out of the question. How could he possibly hope to choose the right one? And even free from duty it all seemed too expensive to make a guess on.
Frank looked at the chocolates. There really was such a thing as too much choice. He’d already packed two boxes of Matchmakers in both orange and mint flavours in his suitcase. He paused by a shelf of chocolate oranges and recalled how he’d once attempted to demonstrate to Beth how to ‘tap and unwrap’ one. His plan to tap the ball of chocolate lightly on the table so that Beth would see the segments break away like a magic trick failed and the chocolate stayed in one piece. Frank had to hit it with a hammer instead, which, it turned out, was a feat that Beth was more impressed with.
Frank gave up on the duty free shop; he walked past a luggage shop and considered buying a folding trolley for his suitcase but it might not fit and it would be just one more thing to carry. He went into a shop called Glorious Britain selling souvenirs. He doubted that either Beth or Laura would be interested in Manchester United, the Royal Family or flags. There was a lot of Beatles merchandise. Everybody in America loved The Beatles, didn’t they? Unless they hated them, of course. Frank thought they were one of those ‘Marmite’ things. Marmite. He should have bought Beth some Marmite.
He stopped by the postcards. They were mostly of London landmarks. He looked for a postcard with a picture of his friend Smelly John, taken back in his punk rock days. John had been dead for over a year and a half now and Frank missed him. If he’d still been alive, perhaps Frank wouldn’t have accepted the landlord’s offer so readily, fearing that once he was homeless he might be rehoused too far from John to ever see him again. Unless he’d bought them both tickets to America. After seeing Beth in LA they could have driven across the desert to Las Vegas in a hired convertible wearing the cowboy hats that they’d bought from a truck stop. They would have sat for days and days in front of the slots with a jug of frozen margarita and a bucket of loose change until they’d lost everything or had won enough to buy guns to shoot rattlesnakes on their way back to LA and the flight home. Frank suddenly felt very lonely. As romantic as the notion of the lonely traveller was, like Beth had said, even Michael Palin had a huge film crew with him. If nothing else, as John had been in a wheelchair they could have jumped all the airport queues and been given better seats on the plane. Frank gave up on the postcards. There were none with Smelly John on, just palaces, royalty and clock towers.
With John gone it occurred to Frank that while he was on holiday he wouldn’t have anyone to send a postcard to. He could post one to the library, or to Fullwind Food & Wine, or Eyes Facing South-West in the charity shop. But they wouldn’t know who he was – unless, perhaps, he signed it from ‘Giraffe Man’.
Postcards were another extinct tradition, killed off by technology and laziness, along with remembering the names of reindeers and dwarfs and pulling faces in a photo booth. Most of the postcards bought at Glorious Britain were probably being bought as souvenirs, never to be written on or sent. They were like the toys in Toy Story or Frank’s suitcase. An unwritten, unsent postcard was surely an unhappy postcard.
Frank followed a circular path around the departure lounge, browsing in shops and not buying anything and dodging everyone’s hand luggage, which also seemed to be on wheels. He walked past a tie shop and thought about going inside to ask if they could recommend something to go with the shirt he was wearing. Just to give them a challenge.
Finally, he sat down next to the departures screen and ate the sandwich that he’d brought with him while he waited for his gate number to come up.
8
Twenty minutes into the ‘fifteen-minute walk’ to the departure gate, Frank saw the plane that he’d be flying on. Through the window of the terminal it was obviously huge but it looked like an Airfix model or one of the toys they sold in the duty free shop. He sat down in the waiting area and tried to guess who would be in the seat next to him on the flight. He gave them Native American names – Voice So Loud on Mobile Phone, Boy Child That Cries, Carlos the Jackal, and so on.
When he watched a war film or disaster movie Frank would often play ‘background actor roulette’: he would choose an extra in the middle of a battle scene, flood or earthquake and imagine that he was that character. He’d watch the film, waiting to see if he survived or not. Frank had died in Zulu and The Last of the Mohicans, he’d been shot down from a crumbling wall of The Alamo, been blown up at Pearl Harbor and eaten by dinosaurs at the centre of the earth. He’d died under the sword at the Battle of Falkirk in Braveheart and didn’t make it up Omaha Beach at the start of Saving Private Ryan. He’d twice survived Apocalypse Now and, although he hadn’t seen it to the end, at the point that Frank had stopped watching Independence Day, he was still alive.
In the departure gate waiting area, he played a similar game with the other passengers, practically willing himself to be seated next to someone unbearable or stinky for twelve hours. He was psychologically profiling the other passengers. Working out who the heroin smugglers and the shoe bombers were. He wondered what they thought of him. Widower? Lost grandfather? Competition winner?
An announcement that the plane would soon be ready for boarding was made and passengers rushed to get to the front of the queue for the gate as though the plane might take off without them. Others stayed seated and carried on reading their newspapers, not even looking up, demonstrating how experienced and frequent they were as fliers.
Frank joined the back of the queue. A stewardess – whom Beth had told him to remember to call a flight attendant – invited him to come to the front of the queue with the adults accompanying small children, the physically disabled and the pregnant women flying for two. Frank didn’t like being pigeonholed as ‘elderly’, but he was willing to accept the few perks that it offered him and he walked past visibly perturbed younger, childless and better-abled passengers towards the front of the queue.
His ticket was checked and he followed the other passengers along the walkway to the plane, the walls and ceiling denying him a sense of the full scale of the aircraft. And unless there were steps leading down to the tarmac at the other end, he would also miss out on his ‘Beatles moment’ – waving from the top step – which he’d been looking forward to.
In the doorway of the plane he showed his ticket again and was pointed in the direction of the passenger seats (rather than in the opposite direction to the cockpit of the plane). He walked through Upper Class, which was more spacious and better furnished than his flat, and where there was a smell of leather and disposable income, and he went on through Premium, where passengers would have two more inches of legroom than he would and crockery made of real china, until he found his seat in the DVT and plastic cutlery section of the aircraft. He put his bag in the overhead locker and looked at his ticket and the number above the seat. He sat down and checked his ticket a few times until he was sure that he was in the right seat and then he fastened his seat belt. The plane was hotter than a maternity ward. His trousers felt cumbersome and overcomplicated with too many pockets. He unfastened his seat belt and stood up and took his jacket off. He took his bag out of the overhead locker, stuffed his jacket into the bag, put it back in the locker and sat down. He fastened his seat belt and looked down the plane at the other boarding passengers, resuming his game of ‘adjacent passenger roulette’.
There was music playing. It was a pop song that Frank didn’t know, possibly a song that was exclusive to the airline. From the moment that he’d climbed into the taxi that morning, his journey had been soundtracked with a musical bed of incidental music. In the taxi it had been homogeneous pop and dance music interspersed with shouted adverts and excitable early morning DJs laughing at their own jokes. At the airport there was a gentler stream of unrecognizable music, too q
uiet or distant to be heard properly in the vast space. Just quiet noise. It was interrupted every so often for an announcement, just as the music had been in the taxi and as it was now in the plane.
The longer the seat next to him remained empty the more Frank wanted it to stay that way. He wished traffic jams and broken-down trains on whoever’s seat it was. Mini cab no-shows and alarm clock flat batteries. As the plane was almost full and the seat still empty Frank was really hoping for something bad to happen to whoever had the corresponding ticket. Just as he opened the bomb doors over the missing passenger’s house, a man walked towards him. Frank willed him to sit down in one of the other few remaining empty seats before he reached the one next to him. The man was one of the blasé frequent flyers who hadn’t moved when boarding had been announced, casually waiting until the very last moment before getting on the plane. He stopped in the aisle next to Frank and put his bag in the overhead locker. He took his suit jacket off and put it in with the bag and sat down next to Frank, who did his best not to sigh openly.
They exchanged nods and, to avoid the nods turning into words, Frank stared out of the window. He watched the airport ground crew in their high-visibility safety vests and huge ear-defender headphones, waving brightly coloured marshalling wands and throwing suitcases around.
‘Could all ground staff please leave the aircraft, all ground staff please leave the aircraft. Ladies and gentlemen, as we are about to close the aircraft doors in preparation for our flight to Los Angeles, phones and portable electronic devices must now be in flight safe mode, Wi-Fi disabled and switched off and headsets stowed.’
The plane started to move and a video showing safety instructions appeared on all of the aircraft’s TV screens. Frank listened closely while the passengers around him carried on chatting and laughing. The man next to him was changing the time on his wristwatch. Frank felt like he was the only person on the plane interested in surviving a crash, even though he doubted that he would be able to manage the brace position without permanently putting his neck out.
‘Are you a nervous flyer?’ the man next to him asked.
‘I don’t know yet,’ Frank said, barely turning to face him.
‘It’s pretty safe these days,’ the man said. ‘And it’s getting safer all the time.’
Frank nodded and looked out of the window again. His body language said go away, shut up, stop talking to me.
When the plane reached the runway it picked up speed and suddenly seemed to be a few hundred feet off the ground. Frank gripped the armrest and took a deep breath. After a few bumps and shakes, and the opening and closing of the wing flaps – which Frank had to turn away from watching because it looked as though the plane was falling apart – they were in the air, the ground below looking like the map that was now showing on Frank’s seat-back TV screen, with its tiny aeroplane that was actually bigger than London showing the flight’s progress along a dotted line from Heathrow to LAX almost twelve inches away.
Frank wondered whether they would fly over his flat and if a late Fullwind-on-Sea riser would use the sound of the aircraft to tell them that it was time to get out of bed. He wondered if his flat had been sold yet, with the locks already changed and his furniture dumped outside in the garden. He pictured the flat’s new owner sweeping an open palm from one end of the living-room mantelpiece to the other, sending his collection of decorative fireplace animals into an open rubbish sack below like ceramic lemmings. He thought that squatters might have moved in already, cuckooing his home as soon as he was out of sight in the taxi. It didn’t matter now. Apart from faking a heart attack or writing ‘there’s a bomb on the plane’ in lipstick on the toilet mirror, there was nothing he could do about it now.
The pilot welcomed everybody on board and read the weather forecast for Los Angeles, giving an estimated arrival time. He apologized for the short delay and wished everyone a pleasant flight. The pilot sounded like Roger Moore, which was one of Frank’s impressions too, and he wondered if the pilot was raising a single eyebrow for his impersonation. Frank had never quite mastered it. Perhaps the pilot had.
‘You seem more relaxed now we’re up,’ the man sitting next to him said.
‘Yes, it’s just that first bit I suppose.’
‘It is an incredibly safe way to travel. There’s always the risk of debris on the runway, naturally. Hitting something that’s fallen from another aircraft – and the weather, of course. Ice and snow can make planes slide off the end of the runway and enough ice on the wings can affect the lift of the plane.’
Frank hoped that this wasn’t going to go on for the eleven hours and thirty-two minutes that Roger Moore had just mentioned.
‘Engine failure, of course,’ the man said. ‘This one has four engines, so it can still fly – or rather, emergency land – if one of the engines goes, say there’s a bird strike, for example. But most of these big jets can survive a few birds in the engine. And they have people on the ground with shotguns and falcons to deal with the birds before they become a problem. Once we’re up high it isn’t an issue anyway.’
‘Right,’ Frank said and looked out of the window, hoping the man would finally take the hint and stop talking to him.
The fasten seat belts sign pinged off and the woman in front immediately reclined her seat, reducing Frank’s leg-room by an inch. He reached down and pulled his pop socks up.
‘People. That’s what you can’t legislate entirely for.’ The man next to him hadn’t quite finished. ‘One drunk demanding more booze, or a religious nut – sorry,’ he said, stopping himself mid-flow. ‘You’re, er, not one of those, are you?’
Frank shook his head no, now concerned that he might be spending the next twelve hours with a man who had the Sioux name Racist Taxi Driver.
‘Anyway,’ the man said, ‘it is an incredibly safe way to travel.’
He then started listing the safety records of different airlines. Frank decided he would instead give him the Native American name: Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man.
9
Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man had finally bored himself to sleep with airline safety statistics and Frank was relaxed and watching his first ever inflight movie. At some point he was going to have to ask Dustin to get up so that he could go to the toilet. He was also worried that he might get deep-vein thrombosis if he didn’t move from his seat soon. But at the moment Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man was sleeping and not talking and Frank didn’t want to change that.
Before Frank had started watching the inflight movie, Dustin had offered to show him how to use the seat-back TV and Frank had politely declined. Technology was not yet his nemesis. He tapped at the glass of the screen and pressed the up and down buttons, learning how it all worked, trial and error, like a mouse discovering how to reach the cheese at the centre of a maze in a science experiment. All the time Dustin watched – out of the corner of his eye, via Frank’s faint reflection on the screen’s glass, and sometimes openly staring right at him like a curious child on a bus. Dustin was longing to share or rather show off his experience and knowledge with the old man and teach him how to operate this space-age machinery.
Without Dustin’s help, Frank navigated his way through the options: Movies, TV, Audio and games, Drama, Comedy, Documentaries, Kids and Radio. He browsed the Nordic Noir selection. He’d seen it all.
Frank had hoped that he might have subconsciously learned a new language by recently watching so much Swedish and Danish TV. But so far all he’d picked up were a few words that were either the same or similar in English, such as okej, meaning okay, and komma in, which he thought was come in, and a phrase that he was unlikely ever to use in English, let alone Swedish. Unless a member of Abba turned up at his front door, of course. Frank was quite fond of the music of Abba. It was one of the many surprising things about him. An eighty-two-year-old man who liked Abba would probably blow Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man’s mind.
A flight attendant leaned across the sleeping Dustin to clear away the empty teacup f
rom in front of Frank, and Dustin woke up. He yawned and shook his head like a wet dog.
‘Where are we?’ he said to Frank or himself. He tried to see past Frank through the window as though he was such an experienced flyer that he could tell their whereabouts by the cloud formation or the colour of the sky. He pressed the flight attendant call button above his head. There was a single ping and a light came on. An attendant walked along the aisle to him and Dustin asked for a drink.
‘Anything?’ he said to Frank, making it appear like the aeroplane was his house and the flight attendant was one of his staff. Frank took his headphones off. ‘I was having a drink,’ Dustin said. ‘Did you want one?’
‘Oh. No thank you,’ Frank said. He put his headphones back on.
‘Holiday?’ Dustin said and Frank took the headphones off again.
‘Yes.’
Dustin nodded. He was waiting for Frank to return the enquiry but Frank sensed that would lead to a long conversation and he’d miss the end of the film. Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man was bound to have some out-of-the-ordinary reason for being on the flight. He was probably a bounty hunter or a private detective. He’d be on a case now. Shadowing a perp across the ocean, Voice So Loud on Mobile Phone or Carlos the Jackal perhaps. Frank would then have to tell him about what it was he did. And he really had no great anecdotes about being a pensioner.
‘Do you fly often?’ Dustin said.
‘Not really,’ Frank said. ‘This is my first time in years.’
‘I love flying,’ Dustin said.
Frank couldn’t believe that anybody actually loved flying. He wanted to ask what it was that he enjoyed the most about it. Was it the queuing or the waiting?
Frank Derrick's Holiday of a Lifetime Page 7