In-Flight Entertainment

by Helen Simpson

  Nobody else seemed bothered.

  ‘It’s getting serious over there,’ he said, pulling off his headphones and addressing Jeremy in a low voice. From the corner of his eye he could see Cary Grant running for his life.

  ‘Oh?’ said Jeremy.

  ‘They’ve rigged up a drip,’ said Alan. ‘It all looks a bit DIY. One of them’s shining a torch. You don’t think they’ll try to, uh, operate?’

  ‘Extremely unlikely,’ said Jeremy. ‘Not the right conditions for that, really. Think of the litigation, too – it would take a brave doctor to operate these days; particularly in First Class to America.’

  Alan looked back at the furtive drama playing itself out across the aisle, at the hot unhappy faces of the participating cabin crew. The doctor pushed down rhythmically, with pauses, straight-armed and grim. CPR, thought Alan, recognising the procedure from countless episodes of Casualty and ER.

  ‘This is your captain speaking,’ came the aircraft sound system. ‘Unfortunately, as some of you are already aware, one of our passengers has been taken ill and needs more help than we can provide on board. Accordingly we have arranged to land at the next available opportunity in order to provide this passenger with the medical attention he needs. We will be landing at Goose Bay in approximately two hours.’

  ‘Goose Bay!’ said Alan. ‘Where the hell’s that?’

  There was a murmur of discomfiture all around him, a general raising of eyebrows, and a barrage of discreet but questioning looks directed at the ongoing life-and-death spectacle.

  ‘It’s in Labrador,’ said Jeremy.

  ‘How far is that from Quebec?’ asked Alan. ‘Montreal?’

  ‘Oh, hundreds of miles,’ said Jeremy. ‘It’s north of Newfoundland. We’ll be up near Greenland, or what’s left of it.’

  Alan swore softly to himself. Four hours’ delay at Heathrow, now this. He had to give his presentation in exactly thirteen hours’ time. Great.

  ‘Anyway, I’ll tell you why there’s no point in us trying to cut back on carbon emissions and all the rest of it,’ he snapped at Jeremy, aware that he was allowing himself to slide into a rage. ‘In a word, pal – China!’

  ‘China,’ said Jeremy, mildly amused. ‘Yes, yes, the Yellow Peril.’

  ‘If everyone in China gets on a plane, we’re stuffed,’ said Alan.

  ‘Agreed. Though do remember they’ve only got four hundred or so airports at the moment, as opposed to five thousand plus in America.’ He turned to the air stewardess at his side. ‘I’ll have the Swiss white-chocolate pavé please, with the Tayside raspberry coulis.’

  There was a flurry across the aisle and Alan craned his neck to make out the doctor arming himself with some sort of wired machine. Whump, it went; whump, whump. Pause. Alan saw the old man’s hands fly up in the air and come down again.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked the air stewardess with a jerk of his head. Her eyes were suspiciously watery despite her professional smile. She shook her head and moved away.

  ‘That’ll be the defibrillator,’ said Jeremy.

  Alan realised she had failed to take his pudding order, and wondered if he could call her back. Probably not a good idea under the circumstances. Now Cary Grant was climbing up the President’s stone nose. Pudding was the best part of the meal for him. He allowed himself to be distracted by the Mount Rushmore chase sequence for a few minutes, and the next time he looked up he saw the doctor shaking his head and rolling down his sleeves. Did that mean …? Apparently it did, because a tartan blanket was being pulled up over what must now be the corpse.

  Jeez. It made you think.

  ‘Jeremy,’ he said, after a few seconds, leaning across, ‘er, something’s happened over there, I think.’ Jeremy looked up from his book, sharp eyes greatly intensified for a moment by the lenses of his glasses. He peered at Alan.

  ‘He’s gone, then?’ he said.

  ‘Incredible,’ said Alan. ‘I don’t believe it. Right beside us.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve seen it before on aeroplanes,’ said Jeremy. ‘It happens more than you might think, particularly in First Class. If they’re taken ill in Economy, they’re brought through here because there’s more space. Quite a cause of bad feeling sometimes.’

  ‘How so?’ asked Alan, shocked.

  ‘Well, people don’t want to pay out several thousand for a ticket and then find they have to sit beside a dead body all the way to Hong Kong.’

  Alan glanced involuntarily at the shape beneath the blanket. Put like that. Hardly ideal. Still, the poor guy.

  ‘The poor guy,’ he said, reprovingly. ‘Looks like he was on his own, too. Far from home and family. Poor guy!’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Jeremy. ‘Or maybe it was as good a way to go as any: quick, up in the air, helped on his way by kind cabin crew. Certainly better than a hospice or a geriatric ward or at home alone in front of Countdown.’

  Weirdo, thought Alan. He drew back into his broad winged chair. It was unsettling, all this. Next thing he felt a tap on his shoulder, and turned round to the enquiring face of the sudoku man sitting across the aisle behind him.

  ‘Do you think,’ asked the man, ‘do you think we’ll still have to land at Goose Bay now that, er?’

  ‘That’s a point,’ said Alan.

  ‘We’re six hours behind schedule as it is,’ said the man, tapping his watch.

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘Because there’s nothing they’ll be able to do for him in Goose Bay.’

  ‘No,’ said Alan. ‘With the best will in the world.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  When they asked the air hostess about this a little later however, she told them that they would still have to land there as the request had been acted upon by Air Traffic Control, it was all logged in and un-deprogrammable.

  Once stationary on Goose Bay’s landing strip, it became apparent that they would be stuck there for quite some while. A coroner had to be found before the body could be taken off the plane, and tracking down a coroner in Goose Bay in the middle of the night was proving difficult.

  ‘No,’ said Jeremy when Alan enquired, ‘this hasn’t happened to me before. The other deaths took less time, I suppose, and the flights carried on to their destinations. No, I haven’t had to make an unscheduled landing like this before.’

  Great, thought Alan, staring furiously through the little aeroplane window. Outside was a desolate runway and a couple of hangars with corrugated-iron roofs. It was snowing heavily.

  ‘Think of the problems for his next of kin,’ said Jeremy. ‘Having to fly here and identify the body. Repatriation won’t be the easiest thing to organise from Goose Bay, one imagines.’

  ‘We’re in the middle of nowhere,’ snapped Alan. ‘Ridiculous. Look at that weather. Don’t tell me you still believe in global warming. It’s fucking freezing out there.’

  ‘It’s not a question of belief,’ said Jeremy. ‘It’s happened. It’s happening.’

  ‘Not out there,’ snorted Alan. ‘Not from what I can see.’

  ‘In fact, someone really should declare a global state of emergency, given the evidence. The scientists are quaking in their boots.’

  ‘There’s your so-called evidence,’ said Alan, now in an evil temper. ‘Look at that snow. If we hang around here for much longer, they’ll find it’s impossible to take off.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ soothed Jeremy. ‘I won’t preach. I used to try and explain it to everyone I met, but last year I could see that was futile, so I gave up. After all, it’s quite an unpleasant chunk of information to absorb.’

  ‘So what do you think will happen?’

  ‘No, no, I don’t want to bore you.’

  ‘I’m asking, pal.’

  ‘Oh, in that case. Well, it’ll all get very nasty.’

  ‘We’ll be swimming round the Statue of Liberty’s torch,’ sneered Alan. ‘I saw that film.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Jeremy. ‘Crops will fail first. Food shortages will kill off four-fifths of
the population, along with malaria and bird flu and so on. There’ll be warlords and fighting in the streets. By the time you’re my age you’ll be beating them off your vegetable patch and your last tins of tuna.’

  ‘Super,’ said Alan.

  ‘And don’t think you’ll be able to escape by moving to Canada,’ Jeremy continued playfully. ‘That’s where the Americans will go – it’s the same continent after all, and lots of them are buying up real estate in this sort of area even now. No, you’ll probably have to make your way back to Bonny Scotland and hope for the best.’

  ‘Oh cheers,’ said Alan. ‘And what about you? You don’t seem too worried yourself, I can’t help noticing.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Jeremy. ‘I think you’ll find most people over seventy are the same – at some level we’re banking on current fuel stocks to see us out. By the time rationing comes in, it’ll all be someone else’s problem.’

  ‘So you’re all right Jack!’ snorted Alan.

  ‘I’ll tell you when I stopped trying to change things. It was when I realised that nothing was going to stop people flying.’

  ‘Are you saying I shouldn’t fly now?’

  ‘I don’t care what you do,’ said Jeremy peaceably. ‘I don’t care about you. You don’t care about me. We don’t care about him.’ He indicated in the direction of the dead man. ‘We all know how to put ourselves first, and that’s what makes the world go round.’

  ‘Because I’m a Frequent Flier,’ insisted Alan. ‘My job requires me to fly in excess of fifty thousand miles a year.’

  ‘I wouldn’t boast about that when the floods come,’ said Jeremy, ‘or you’ll find yourself strung up from the nearest lamp post. No, self-interest is usually the most efficient form of insurance, but it doesn’t seem to be working here. You and nearly everybody else are such scientific ignoramuses that you can’t take on board what’s about to wipe you out.’

  ‘You seem very sure that you’re right about everything,’ said Alan nastily.

  ‘Not really,’ said Jeremy. ‘But I am about this.’

  Just my luck, thought Alan, to get stuck with a moralising old wise guy in the middle of nowhere.

  ‘We need heat and light and food for survival,’ continued Jeremy. ‘We don’t need to fly. But nobody’s going to give up flying, because it’s the biggest perk of modern life – so cheap and fast and easy.’

  ‘You’d rather,’ said Alan loudly, ‘you’d rather keep it only for the rich, eh? You’re just being elitist.’

  ‘Elitist!’ laughed Jeremy. ‘You’re the elitist, Alan. Even if you were dragged up on the meanest of shoestrings through your recent gadget-ridden childhood, you’re still one of the world’s rich. It’s us rich ones that jet around the globe guzzling untaxed kerosene and ploughing up the stratosphere like there’s no tomorrow.’

  ‘I took my family snorkelling in the Maldives last year,’ said Alan, ‘and all the people we met there were one hundred per cent dependent on our holidays for their livelihood. Lovely people they were. What about them? Tourism employs almost one in ten people worldwide, did you know that? Do you want them to starve?’

  ‘Ha! The Maldives are about to go under, literally, and how will their people live then?’

  ‘That’s nothing to do with flying. Aeroplanes are a drop in the ocean compared to all the other stuff.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’re labouring under a misapprehension there, Alan. Flying is far and away the fastest-growing source of man-made greenhouse gases.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah.’

  ‘Over two billion people flew last year, even though ninety-five per cent of the world’s population has never been on a plane,’ continued Jeremy, imperturbable. ‘So a few people are flying a lot. But it’s the non-fliers who are first in line to pay the price.’

  ‘We’re getting floods too,’ said Alan, aggressive, defensive.

  ‘And it doesn’t look like we’ll be voting for constraints on our flying until there’s mass death at home. First to go under will be Bangladesh, but until Miami and Sydney join it we’re not only not going to stop flying, we’re not going to fly less either. In fact, quite the opposite, we’re all set to fly more. Much more.’

  ‘You’re right there at least,’ said Alan, yawning and stretching.

  ‘Listen, you can turn off your mobile-phone charger and drive an electric car and all the rest of it, but if you take just one flight a year you’ll cancel all the savings you’ve made. Flying is incredibly harmful to the atmosphere. Haven’t you even heard of contrails?’

  ‘You’re on a hiding to nowhere,’ smiled Alan. ‘The aircraft industry is where it’s at. Mega growth predicted. It’s set to treble in the next twenty years; it’s going through the roof.’

  ‘Yes. I know.’

  ‘Heathrow will get its third runway any time now.’

  ‘Good for you. Nowhere else on the planet are the skies as crowded as over London and the South-east. That must make you very happy. Now, I wonder where this coroner can be? By my calculation we’ve been in Goose Bay for nearly three hours.’

  ‘Unbelievable,’ said Alan with a seismic yawn. ‘I cannot believe this journey. We’re going to be stuck here for ever, frozen to the tarmac.’

  ‘They’ll discover us in a million years’ time, the archaeologists,’ said Jeremy. ‘A perfectly preserved fossil from the late carboniverous period.’

  At this point the coroner arrived, scowling and dishevelled, trailed by four big sullen stretcher-bearers in plaid shirts.

  ‘He looks like they had to drag him out of a bar,’ said Alan, watching as this man was led to the shape beneath the blanket. ‘He looks well over the limit.’

  ‘The limit is probably higher in Goose Bay,’ said Jeremy, surveying the cheerless scene outside. ‘And who can wonder.’

  Red-eyed, dehydrated and exhausted, Alan declined the next glass of champagne and ordered a black coffee. They were up in the air again. About bloody time. Less than two hours until he set foot on American soil. He couldn’t wait. He missed its lavish confidence and grandeur, the twelve-lane highways of gigantic cars, the insouciance with which his friends there used planes like buses. Hell, loads of them commuted by plane every day, Burbank to LA, that sort of thing. They just got on and did things; they were always coming up with something new. Think of last year and the heated pavements in that ski resort in Colorado.

  It was a real problem these days, finding a decent skiing holiday. Europe was useless. Penny was suggesting Dubai for next year. She’d heard it had guaranteed metre-deep snow everywhere, real snow topped up every night; and the shopping there was amazing, too, the Mall of the Emirates was right next door to the ski dome. It occurred to him that Jeremy would probably disapprove of this too, which made him angry again.

  ‘What I can’t understand,’ he said unpleasantly, leaning over the seat divide, ‘with all due respect, Jeremy, is: why are you even on this plane? If you think flying’s so bad, why are you here?’

  ‘Might as well be,’ shrugged Jeremy. ‘Once I realised the world’s going to hell in a handcart, or rather in a Boeing 747, or on an Airbus or a Dreamliner, I thought, Might as well. Haven’t you noticed the old people at airports? All those beeping cartloads of us with our replacement hips and knees? It gets us out of the house, and we don’t care about the delays because it makes the time we’ve got left seem longer.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Alan, taken aback.

  ‘Plus,’ said Jeremy slowly, ‘I wouldn’t mind joining the other Mile High Club. Eventually.’

  ‘The other what?’

  ‘Well, I am already a member of the original Mile High Club. Believe it or not. I was enrolled a few decades ago under a blanket in Business Class with the girl next door, so to speak. It’s not humanly possible in Economy – you’d have to go off for a tryst in the toilet and call me an old romantic but that never appealed. Business Class is fine, though, if you’re good at keeping quiet.’

  ‘What do you mean, the other Mile High Club?’ s
aid Alan, gawping at him.

  ‘The one our friend’s just joined,’ said Jeremy.

  ‘What friend?’

  ‘You know. The one we left behind in Goose Bay.’

  ‘You mean …?’

  ‘Yes. A more distinguished way to go, don’t you think? Nearer to heaven, and so on.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Alan. He couldn’t believe his ears. He couldn’t think of anything to say. He stretched his eyes at Jeremy, then gave a weak smile and feigned sleep behind a padded satin eye mask.

  Sleep would not come to him, however. Pictures of Scotland danced behind his eyelids. Raspberry canes in the rain. Gloom and doom. Tatties and neeps. Penny and the kids were turning their noses up. Barbed wire round his allotment, right enough. A big solid house near the Cairngorms, with a view of Ben Macdhui or Braeriach. He’d better buy a dinghy. A gun. That should hold them off for a while, until … Until what? A cataclysmic snort from his own nasal cavity shocked him awake.

  ‘Coffee, sir?’

  He took a cup before he was quite compos mentis, then sipped as he stared, sore-eyed, at their on-screen progress. The aeroplane-jewel was nearly at the gold dot marked Chicago. The Atlantic had been left behind, along with the frozen wastes of Goose Bay. They were high above Earth zooming along at five hundred miles an hour. Of course he accepted this on a superficial level but deep down did not believe it. It was like when the physics teacher had tried to explain about magnetism, or when he’d told them that everything was really bundles of atoms holding hands. Pull the other one!

  All the alarmist crap that old creep Jeremy had been coming out with, it just seemed like a fairy story now. He wasn’t a six-year-old to believe in magic. Nothing but hot air. He drained his coffee cup and handed it back to the air stewardess.