In-Flight Entertainment

by Helen Simpson

  I thought of calling it Team Hundred, because we in the motivational world have a belief that it takes a hundred days to change a habit; plus, there are only a hundred months left in which to save the world, apparently. Then I tried Enough’s Enough, but that was too strict, and possibly a teensy bit judgemental. Finally I came up with Ahead of the Pack, which I think you’ll agree sounds both positive and urgent plus it has the necessary lean competitive edge. Perfect!

  It’s simply a matter of time before it’s compulsory for everyone, but those who’ve managed to adapt by choice, in advance, will be at a huge advantage. Ahead of the Pack! I mean, think of the difference between someone who’s achieved gradual weight loss by adjusting their portion size and refusing second helpings, and someone else who’s wolfed down everything but the kitchen sink for years and years and then wonders why he needs gastric banding. I know which one I’d rather be.

  Yes, you’re right, that is exactly what I’m proposing – to set up as a personal Carbon Coach! In fact, I think you’ll find that very soon it’ll be mandatory for every company to employ an in-house Emissions Expert, so you might well find me useful here too in the not-too-distant future, if we’re counting our chickens. The thing is, I have this programme tailor-made and ready to rock. I’ve already test-driven it for free on several of my clients, and it’s been fantastic.

  First off I take their measurements, calculate the size of their carbon footprint – very like the BMI test, obviously, as carbon dioxide is measured in kilos too – and work out how far outside the healthy range they’ve strayed. We talk about why shortcuts don’t work. Carbon capture and control pants, for example, squash the bad stuff out of sight rather than make it disappear. And, somehow, magic solutions like fat-busting drugs and air-scrubbers always seem to bring a nasty rash of side-effects with them.

  Anyway, we visit the fridge next, discuss the long-distance Braeburn apples and the Antipodean leg of lamb, calculate their atmospheric calorie content. My clients generally pride themselves on their healthy eating habits and they’re amazed when I tell them that a flight from New Zealand is the equivalent of scoffing down two whole chocolate fudge cakes and an entire wheel of Brie. We move on, room by room, talking weight loss as we go, how to organise loft insulation, where to find a local organic-box scheme; I give advice on fitting a Hippo in the loo, and practical help with editing photo albums.

  Photo albums? Oh yes. Very important.

  In ten years’ time we’ll be casting around for scapegoats. Children will be accusing parents, and wise parents will have disappeared all visual evidence of Dad’s gap year in South America and Mum on Ayers Rock and the whole gang over in Florida waiting in line to shake Mickey’s hand. Junk your fatso habits now, I advise them, get ahead of the pack, or you’ll find yourself exposed – as hypocritical as a Victorian adjusting his antimacassars while the sweep’s boy chokes to death up the chimney. Nobody will be able to plead ignorance, either. We can all see what’s happening, on a daily basis, on television.

  And if they have a second home I advise them to sell it immediately – sooner, if the second home is abroad. Of course! Instant coronary time! Talk about a hot potato.

  Really? Oh. Oh.

  I hear what you’re saying. You think I’m going directly against my target client base with that advice. Yes. Well, maybe I do need to do some tweaking, some fine-tuning.

  Basically though, and I’m aware that I’ve had my ten minutes, and I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you for your time – basically, is it your feeling that you’re prepared to invest in Ahead of the Pack?

  You’ll get back to me on that one. I see. I see.

  So, you happen to have a house near Perpignan, do you? Yes, it certainly is your hard-earned money. A bit of a wreck but if you can get there for twenty-nine pounds, why shouldn’t you? No reason, no reason. O reason not the need, as Shakespeare says! As long as you know of course it means that, globally speaking, in terms of your planetary profile, you’ve got an absolutely vast arse.

  Scan

  SHE WAS DEEP in London clay, a hundred feet underground, the train having paused for a rest just short of Baker Street. In the darkness outside was visible the enfolding curve of the tunnel and also, at a distance, a gleam of yellow, a worm with lampy eyes making its way in another direction altogether. There came into her mind wartime images of burrows and shelters, the leaf-encircled entrance to a green lane; landlocked landscapes with no sky or sea, no people bar the odd melancholy dreamer like her reflection in the window. The urge to hide was what powered so many children’s books of that time, escaping into wardrobes or living under the floorboards; the Hobbit in his cosy bunker; midnight gardens silvered with nostalgia, clocks transfixed so that time stood still. Since last week’s diagnosis she had herself fallen out of time.

  Perhaps this was what it was like, being born, the claustrophobic tunnel; you were being squeezed by the passage walls themselves, you were being pressed on centimetre by centimetre, with no inkling of the future but that far gleam of light. What about before you were born, though; before you were conceived? Well, you can’t remember it, so it can’t have been too bad, she told herself; presumably it will be the same after you’ve died. The trouble with this idea was, before you’ve been born you’ve not been you; but once you’ve been alive, you definitely have been you; and the idea of the extinction of the you that has definitely existed is quite different from the idea of your nonexistence before you did exist. Why were they stuck here? Had the train broken down?

  She peered through the window and was able to make out thick cables running along the walls of the tunnel, regions of ribbed felty dust. When you’re dead, surely you don’t know you’re dead. That would be too horrible. That would be a contradiction in terms. No, it would be like when you passed out; there was no memory of that afterwards. She’d started collapsing, blacking out, which was why she was now on her way for another test. ‘Let’s take a look inside that head of yours.’ They wanted to see whether it had spread.

  Now when she woke up in the morning the old unconscious happiness only lasted a few seconds before she remembered and thought, ‘I wish this hadn’t happened.’ But it had. There was an Anglo-Saxon word that meant ‘terror in the morning’. Morgencolla, that was it: morgencolla. You’d wake just as it was getting light, and see death coming up the river, the men with axes poised to leap out of their longboats and set fire to your home and disembowel you.

  There came a whir, a whirring grumble, then a tense high-pitched hum and a rhythmic chunk-a-chunk vibration. Come on, she thought, come on or I’ll be late. She glanced at her watch. There was a lurch, then nothing; another lurch, and they were inching towards the platform. It’s all right, she thought once the doors had opened, it’s all right, I’m not late yet, and she hurried with the others along tiled tunnels and up flights of sliding stairs.

  Outside, on Baker Street, there were six lanes of traffic under a veil of fine-needled rain. A tall beaky sad-faced boy in deerstalker and tweed cape from fifteen decades ago stood handing out leaflets to a general lack of interest. She took one and glanced at the sketch of Sherlock Holmes peering through his magnifying glass, the great detective on the trail of Moriarty. Past the shops selling bears in beefeater outfits she hurried, past the tourists struggling with maps and collapsible umbrellas, then turned right at a church courtyard where cherry trees were loaded with sodden blossom, foolishly pink against the downcast sky. Another short cut and she was into the windy wastes of Harley Street with its heavy one-way traffic. She checked the number of the place where she was to have this scan, and saw how near it was. She wouldn’t be late after all. A family dressed in full-length black stood weeping on its steps, their robes flapping in the wind. She averted her eyes and made her way inside.

  Here, everybody was brightly lit, neutral and flat-faced. Thirty-four. Single. No children. Journalist. Yes, her employers provided private health insurance. MasterCard. The girl didn’t look up once.

/>   She paused at the mouth of the waiting-room as if it were the entrance to the cave of suffering. Instinctively she knew about what went on in there, the long waits, disappointments, apparent improvements and the ugly reversals. She grabbed a magazine from the central table and stared at it. How to get the body you always wanted.

  So it was her fault, then, what had happened. She hadn’t been trying hard enough. In the absence of trouble she had imagined herself to be well, but now it seemed health was something that must be worked at, it must be courted with blueberries and pedometers and other expensive tokens of love. You had to be constantly on the qui vive for signs of betrayal or you were a fool. I thought I was my body, or at least friends with it, she observed; but obviously not. ‘No truly happy person grows a teratoma,’ said the reiki healer she had consulted in her initial alarm. ‘Have you allowed yourself to be angry in your life?’ Angry?

  It was tempting to turn the blame inwards, but it wouldn’t do. ‘Am I responsible for the filth in the air I breathe?’ she railed silently. ‘Is the arrival of electrosmog my fault? My workplace is now an official Wi-Fi hotspot where we’re all gently microwaving our internal organs, Bluetoothed radiation nibbling away at the blood–brain barrier. Maybe that’s why I’m here, that bit further along the electromagnetic corridor, waiting for an exposure of my insides, and the promise of gamma rays next week.’ She was allowing herself to be angry now, certainly.

  In the mirror of the changing cubicle her flesh looked denatured beneath the shadowless halogen light. Remove all jewellery. Once naked she realised she was still wearing her watch, and unstrapped it. She was outside time now, along with the sick and the dead.

  Last of all she shed her earrings, the starfish studs he had bought her in Brighton. Mr X was how he was known at work – her new mystery man. She placed them carefully in one of her shoes. It was a definite farewell. She hadn’t known him long enough to claim his company on such an unlooked-for journey. ‘This has all been very sudden,’ she murmured, which was what you used to say when someone asked you to marry them. It wasn’t just him, she hadn’t told anybody yet; she needed to get used to the idea.

  He might have enjoyed this unseemly hospital gown under other circumstances, open at the back, inadequately secured with tapes. Never mind seeing her with no clothes on; she was about to be seen with no flesh on. The medical gaze was nothing if not penetrating.

  They were after pictures of the inside of her imploding head. She lay down in the white gown on the motorised bed and inch by inch was drawn inside. The inexorable gliding pomposity of it reminded her of something, but she couldn’t immediately think of what.

  What was it? she wondered as she lay stiff and still in the viewless tunnel. Oh, of course, she thought as it came to her, it was the coffin’s slow glide to curtains hiding the fire. There was a very loud noise, the same as the walloping grumble and whine of the Underground this morning but magnified tenfold. Someone had used the phrase ‘in case of claustrophobia’ when they were explaining about the process and now she realised why: the curved tunnel wall was six inches above her forehead.

  So there would be twenty minutes of this, and she was still in the first. Her mind began leaping around all over the place. Keep calm. Think of something else. She’d been ignoring his texts and emails and the flashing answerphone. She felt pulled towards him but she must push him away; she couldn’t face him but she wanted him. In her dream last night she’d been immune to traffic jams, high on a velvety camel swaying down St Martin’s Lane. It would be good if all this was just a dream, if in a little while she might wake up out of it, and stretch, and shrug it off.

  It wouldn’t work, she wouldn’t be able to play at being a corpse for another eighteen minutes if she didn’t get a grip. Time was getting stuck again, like the train in the tunnel. Time equals distance over speed. Time was supposed to slow down as it approached a black hole; the gravitational pull was so strong there that even light couldn’t escape. A black hole was a star that had collapsed in on itself. She would have to harness her mind, put blinkers on, for the duration; otherwise she’d moan and groan and spoil the scan. Think of some careful time-consuming process, spin it out. Risotto, that would do.

  She took an onion, hard and sound in its papery brown coat, and slit off its tight skin, sliced it in half. This loud grinding and thumping was like being deep in the bowels of a ship, down in the engine room with the men in boiler suits.

  Narrowing her eyes against the tear-producing fumes she cut the onion halves into fine layered crescents, then turned each half and diced the slices into lozenges. Think it through, she told herself, if you really can’t stop thinking about what’s happening. Magnetism is measured in gauss and tesla. Concentrate. Remember how it works. A fridge magnet has a pull of about 100 gauss, or 0.01 tesla. This machine has a magnetic field of one tesla, or ten thousand gauss.

  Once she could smell the oil heating, she used the blade of the knife to send her diced onion over the edge of the chopping board and into the pan. There was a small sizzle and she turned the flame down. People would look uncomfortable or upset and say, Anything we can do, and treat her like a trip to the dentist.

  So when the onions were soft and see-through, she’d add the rice. Flesh itself had become see-through thanks to the X-ray, whose discovery at the turn of the last century had whipped the press into a state of lubricious excitement. Not only could you see up her skirt, leered the papers, but with this machine you could now see all the way.

  Push the enamelled grains round with a wooden spoon, oiling them all over, introducing them to the onions. So here she was lying in a powerful magnetic field and next they would unloose a flood of high-frequency radio waves onto the scene. At this, all the water in her body – about 70 per cent of her – would rise up. The hydrogen nuclei within her myriad water molecules would respond in a dance, aligning themselves into patterns which a computer would transform into images of whatever monster it was that was crouching in there.

  Add some stock, then wait until it’s absorbed; add some more and stir again. The tesla is the unit of magnetic-flux density. The becquerel is the unit for measuring radioactivity. Death is a camel that lies down at every door. Watch it, it mustn’t catch.

  Surely it must be nearly over now. The noise was getting louder. Don’t be tempted to rush it. The noise changed, the motorised bed started to move backwards, and she opened her eyes. She thought, My luck has run out.

  ‘All right there, are you?’ said the nurse as she came out of the tunnel.

  ‘Fine,’ she smiled, breathing again, yawning, rubbing her face with her hands to revive the blood flow. She couldn’t wait to get away from the machinery and the credit-card swipe, the stale swagged grandeur of the reception area.

  Walking columns of water, she thought as she hurried down Weymouth Street. Even thought could be photographed now, the synaptic spark in a rat’s brain like a jag of lightning. What happens to thought, though, when the meat goes off?

  She didn’t have to go into work until after lunch and it was still only eleven-fifty. A sub at work who had needed chemotherapy last year had described how she’d followed each session with a blast of retail therapy. Cheer herself up with a new lipgloss? Hardly. She bared her teeth then dialled his number on her mobile and waited, grimacing; heard the start of his voice message and cut the call straight off.

  Behind the railings of the central garden in Manchester Square stood several large soot-eating plane trees just in leaf, bluebells brightening their roots. Where had her health gone? She went up to the railing spikes and took in some deep breaths, smelling the wet hawthorn on the other side. There she had been, taking it for granted, its good behaviour and innocence; next thing she knew it was all over the place, it was in hysterics, threatening to leave her. Then it had packed its bags and walked out, slamming the door behind it.

  Somewhere round here was an art collection, tucked away above the scrum of Oxford Street. ‘I’m sick of thinking about myself,�
� she muttered. ‘I don’t want to think about me.’ Here it was, at the top of the square, this red-brick mansion – the Wallace Collection. She walked up to the swing doors. It was free.

  Along the centre of the entrance hall reared a marble staircase, winged snake-necked griffins biting its banisters. She went and stood over by the fireplace to one side of it. The clock on the mantelpiece was ticking in her ear. She checked the time it told against her watch, and it was right: twelve o’clock.

  There came a silvery chiming from the room opposite, and distant carillons from other rooms too, the sound of midday chimes and striking mechanisms. I don’t want to obey these rules, she thought, that everything’s always going to be over and everyone must die.

  She crossed into a room dominated by a massive freestanding chronometer on top of which lounged old Father Time, winged and bearded, and a baby holding a scythe. The clock itself, not content with mean time alone, also showed solar time, the passage of the sun through the Zodiac, the age and phases of the moon, the date, the day of the week and the time at any place in the northern hemisphere. It was a skeleton clock: through the glass side panels you could see its elaborate working parts, the spring that must be wound once a month and the pendulum maintaining the regular beat.

  This room was full of china in glass cabinets, soft-paste Sèvres porcelain bulb pots and tea services in sea-green, salmon-pink and lapis-blue. She took a laminated information sheet from the box by the door and started to read about cailloute and vermicule gilding, relishing the terminology of an unfamiliar technique where none of it remotely involved medical procedures. Cailloute meant pebble-like and vermicule was worm-tunnel. After the initial biscuit firing came the glazing process; then the paste was fired again and painted with cherubs or marine scenes or triple wreaths of foliage and flowers tied with ribbon. Last of all came the gilding. Honey and powdered gold had been brushed onto these vase brims and teacup handles three centuries ago, then fired, then burnished with a dog’s tooth to increase the shine. A dog’s tooth!