‘Where are you from,’ Folake asked suddenly, ‘in Holland?’ Her eyebrows had rushed to the centre of her forehead. She crushed her lower lip. She was livid and I had not noticed.
‘Ah,’ Mr Ooststroom laughed. He looked at her, then at me. ‘A small place – you maybe haven’t heard of it – Zandberg, it’s called.’
Folake nodded, which could have meant ‘yes’ or that she did not know, but she did not say anything. Mr Ooststroom frowned.
‘Why aren’t you married?’ She stared defiantly at him.
He looked back at her. His large slate-grey eyes wavered, then fell. His face was so open you could see the puzzlement pacing beneath the skin. There was a stillness in the group. Everyone had stopped talking. They were watching these two.
‘Folake!’ our mother shouted.
Then Mr Braverman burst out – a sporadic kind of snorting at first, like a man trying to suppress a sneeze. In a moment the laughter tore out of him. It’s human nature, I suppose, to revel in someone else’s predicament: a child on its back, on a hardwood floor, kicking its legs in glee. They were identical, the pair of them, father and son. In a way Jonathan could not help himself – he had no choice but to follow his father’s ways.
Mr Ooststroom looked uncertain then. He was not sure what was happening, why there was this laughter, this hostility. ‘I am,’ he replied quietly. ‘Married.’
Folake made her mouth like a fish’s – a little ‘o’ from which no sound issued. She had not been prepared for that. She would not dare question him any further. There were limits to her, surly as she was. I knew that. But I wanted to know where his wife was – in Hong Kong, The Netherlands, where exactly? Was she sick? Did he love her? Were there children involved?
The English bathers had walked far enough along the beach for their words to be smothered by the distance. I wished they would disappear, that they had not arrived in the first place. I would never have asked my questions then.
‘Such heat!’ Mrs Tripathi fanned herself with Jonathan’s frisbee in a slow wide arc, making hardly any breeze. ‘Makes me wish, almost, that I was in Delhi, sipping mango lassi with plenty of crushed ice.’
‘Delhi – such an interesting city,’ Mrs Tonet said. ‘That was our third posting, I think. Or was it Rome?’
‘Rome,’ her husband grunted.
‘Ah, now Rome,’ Mrs Braverman sighed. ‘Now there’s a city. When were you there?’ And then they were off, reminiscing about Italy and its idiosyncrasies. They had moved swiftly away from the embarrassment of Mr Ooststroom. He seemed tired and deflated in his linen suit now, his polished brogues. He probably wanted to leave, but there was no way off the island until the late afternoon ferry, which we were all catching.
Bunmi and Folake sprinted into the sea with Sarah, Jonathan and Rafael. The rest of us strolled along the stretch of beach until it was time to return to the bus. Mrs Tripathi even approached the shoreline, but refused to allow the water near her feet. I lagged behind while Mr Ooststroom talked with my mother and Mrs Braverman. He seemed to have perked up a bit by now.
Later on, a few weeks into the new term at school, I noticed my geography teacher wearing a crisp linen suit, a navy shirt, but no tie, and I remembered him, Mr Ooststroom. I had not thought about him since that day at the beach. And I felt sorry then, for the way we had behaved: my sisters and I, Jonathan and his father, Mrs Tonet, Mrs Tripathi. He was only a man who might have been lonely. We did not really know all that much about him. Bunmi and Folake had both left for England and I was alone now in the large apartment with my mother and father. Sometimes I would wander into my sisters’ rooms and peer out of the windows into the bay as if they were out there somewhere and all I had to do was look hard among the bathers and picnickers and people on yachts. And I thought then that a boat trip with a group of people I could get to know would be a way to make a strange place feel more like home.
THE HUSBAND OF YOUR WIFE’S BEST FRIEND
ITHINK TWICE ABOUT going to work today – that lingering flu, fatigue, ennui. I cling to the edge of the bed. My heart buffets my ribcage. Rain sluices the winter chill.
My son wakes early. He is nearly four. For him, the day begins at five. He has no concept of work; everything is play. His older sister is so fast asleep no ordinary sounds can rouse her.
In a moment I am standing, creaking into life. There is a shirt to iron, a bath to take. Shaving. Breakfast is either a two-minute rush or a feast I wake especially early to prepare. This may be the only time throughout the day we are all together: my wife, my daughter, my son. The moment arrives when I am fully awake. I have pushed away the drug of sleep and I smile in the embrace of my family. This may be a moment I replay in my mind throughout the day, or it may vanish the instant I leave home.
I secure a seat on the Tube. This involves a tussle with a woman who appears from nowhere, but I am fast and burly, and have misplaced any sense of decorum. I am enthroned in my seat in the carriage, the victor. The competition huddles about, hanging onto handrails, being flung back and forth by the lurch of the train. I have a seat for the next twenty-five minutes. This is an important start to the day. Conquest. Sometimes I shudder when I think of my behaviour, how I used to be when I first arrived in the city. I look at my earlier self as if examining another person. A good person. Courteous. Perhaps kind. Now I stretch in my tiny space, I preen, I turn a page of the newspaper. I scrutinize others. There may be a woman sitting opposite, legs crossed at the knee, or a flash of inner thigh. Relax. Get comfortable. My seat. Such a little thing.
At work there is a frisson of excitement. One of my colleagues, Levinson, is to marry a woman named Alice Betteridge who used to work in the department.
‘Two years at most,’ I whisper to Geoff.
‘I give it two weeks,’ Geoff smirks. ‘Including the honeymoon.’
Geoff once had a brief affair with Alice before the birth of his second child. I believe he is bitter. She cast him aside before he could get a real taste for adultery. She didn’t even give him one week.
Geoff sits beside me in the office. All day we stare at radar and computer screens. He has been an area controller one year longer than I have. He earns more, but he seems to have less disposable income. Also, he weighs seventeen stone. His voice belongs to a small child, even though he is thirty-seven. He is tired of labouring day and night for inadequate pay. He plays the Lottery every Saturday morning. It makes him anxious, truly anxious, to skip a week. He will swear that the missed play could have meant the difference between the desk job and the apartment on the Costa del Sol. That is as far as his imagination will stretch – Torremolinos. But I like Geoff. He can make me laugh at any time of the day, in any circumstance.
I buy coffee and a croissant before the work begins. Geoff joins me in the canteen for his breakfast.
‘I was on the Tube this morning,’ he says. ‘And this woman gets her leg trapped in the doors. So I prise them apart – the doors I’m talking about!’ He chooses a muffin and a Milky Way.
‘Oh yeah?’
‘She says it didn’t hurt a bit, but I’m thinking – what if that happened to me, to Elaine? What if my foot was crushed? My toes? I could sue, couldn’t I? How much d’you think I’d get? A hundred K?’ This has obviously preoccupied him for much of the morning. Geoff is constantly thinking of get-rich-quick schemes, the most frequent of which involve injury and bloodshed. He is a man who is terrified of pain, the sight of blood, but he is keen to make immediate millions.
‘I’d have to go barefoot,’ he thinks out loud.
‘On the Underground?’ I have to drag him back to reality sometimes because, in his mind, he has already moved into the apartment in Spain.
I am speaking to the pilot of a Cathay Pacific 747 flying in from Hong Kong. I ask him to reduce his approach speed – he is too close to the plane ahead – and to alter his altitude. I watch the aircraft on the radar, a tiny light representing hundreds of lives: students, businessmen, children, holiday-ma
kers, men and women trying their luck at another way of life in a new country. I wonder what each person is thinking now, where each one will branch off in an hour’s time. This still fascinates me after all these years, the individual stories of people’s lives.
During the morning break I call my wife at home. My son picks up the phone, says ‘hello’, drops the receiver. I decide to try again later after my wife discovers the discarded phone on the floor.
In the canteen Martin is talking to Levinson. Every so often, someone approaches their table to congratulate the groom-to-be. I decide to wait until it is quieter or until I can get Levinson on his own. Our boss, Arnold Christiansen, chats to Rebecca, one of several new recruits. She is a woman who arrived with her mouth moving, her head spinning, too much enthusiasm. Geoff predicts she will burn out before the end of the year. We are eagerly awaiting her demise.
I avoid eye contact with Arnold. He has been stalking me, preparing for something. It cannot be welcome, though I have no idea what it is. Geoff hovers by the sandwich counter.
‘What d’you reckon. Tuna fish and sweetcorn, or coronation chicken?’ He has a face like an uncooked doughnut. A chocolate bar lounges on his tray, a coffee, a bottle of fizzy orange. This is a pre-lunch snack.
Geoff has recently failed a medical. It has been suggested that he switch to a healthier diet in order to lose weight, to take care of himself. We both realise he is becoming a liability, but Geoff does not seem concerned. He has been given free membership of a nearby gym for three months, but he has yet to put in an appearance. I promised to accompany him, but that was over a month ago. There is a feeling of guilt at the back of my mind, but not that much.
‘Take the tuna,’ I whisper. The woman from Admin is leaving the room with two of her colleagues. She glances at me, or at least in my direction. I smile. This could be a sign; if she had not looked, she would not be interested. Her slightest gesture is likely to set me off.
‘Not too sure about the sweetcorn,’ Geoff is saying.
I give him a look and he chooses something else.
When I return to my desk Arnold Christiansen gives me a look. Everyone is looking. I clamp on the headphones. I am flying in from Dubai this time. The plane contains pockets of trapped sunshine. A mosquito sings beside a passenger’s ankle. The insects will all perish once the plane lands at Heathrow. None of the passengers will greet the winter with open arms. I hand over to the aerodrome controller and move on to the aircraft behind – Quantas, flying in from Melbourne. I am a sky whore, advancing from one aeroplane to the next. I cannot get enough of them and each meeting is so brief. They fly up to me, whisper their requests in my ear. I give them what they ask for in a voice that is calm, reassuring. Slow down baby, I want to croon. What’s the hurry? Easy now. Sit back and relax. Then it’s on to the next one – Air France this time – from Abidjan. I freshen up, clear my throat, work the sultry magic one more time.
Geoff too is moving his mouth, though I cannot hear his words. Around the room colleagues are comforting clients, guiding them safely through the sky, mopping damp brows. It is all a choreography of sorts, a kind of aerial ballet – hunks of metal hurtling through the sky, but perfectly coordinated throughout the day. This is when it makes sense, the work I do. When the job, the family, the friends, the life become a perfect symmetry, one feeding the other, taking a little away.
This is when she appears, when I am most content. This can happen in the early hours, or last thing at night when my wife is asleep, or on a train, or at work when I let the mind drift. She is here now – Fantasma. Can anyone else see her? She comes to me when I am half asleep in bed. She is all legs and chest, and lips and hips. She floats over, takes my hand, leads me to the couch in the quiet-room. Or she sits directly in front of me, blocking the screens. She flicks the microphone in front of my mouth with her index finger. She unbuttons the top of her blouse as if she is too warm. Her eyes salsa. She moves like hot oil in a lava lamp. She is all curves and undulations and quiet mystery.
At lunch, Geoff, Levinson, Salma, Martin, me and the energetic Rebecca, are enjoying the break when Arnold Christiansen saunters over to congratulate Levinson. As he leaves, Arnold turns to me, says, ‘By the way, good work with the Alitalia. Couldn’t have handled it better myself.’
There was a predicament with an Airbus A320. The pilot climbed through an already assigned flight level, spoiling my tactical plan. There was a conflicting situation with other aircraft. I reacted quickly enough to avert any mishap – no worse than anything I have had to deal with before, but here’s Arnold blowing hot air in my direction. It makes me tense. Arnold Christiansen who can praise and damn in the same breath. He pauses and I sense the censure approaching, but he just winks and walks away. He is using tactics, I think. For months he has been complimenting me. But there will come a time when he suggests I make a slight change to that or why not do this another way? Perhaps he will want a quiet word.
All afternoon I sense something. Across my temple there is a pain that moves – a child drumming my skull with a rubber hammer. I feel Arnold Christiansen watching, waiting for an error of judgement. No laughing, no smiling. Only work. He does not approve of me sitting next to Geoff.
I phone home mid-afternoon and my wife answers. ‘Lem’s party was frantic!’ She cries. ‘The boys, they were throwing food all over each other. They were hysterical.’
Lemma is my son’s best friend, but I cannot imagine my child engaged in such behaviour.
‘Can I talk to him?’ I ask.
‘No, he’s fast asleep. I gave him a bath; there was cake all over him. Then he conked right out. It’s probably that juice Mrs Zeinaba buys. All those chemicals.’
‘The woman’s a hazard. You shouldn’t let him play over there.’
‘I can’t do that,’ she says. ‘Trust you to suggest something like that. She’d be offended. And he loves playing with Lem.’
‘Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.’
‘Yes, well, don’t forget to buy the dessert on your way back.’
On the Tube home a man sitting opposite me is reading the Evening Standard. The headline is about a politician who has bounced back after yet another scandal. I hardly notice the person sitting down next to me, forcing me to shift a little. What catastrophe could have befallen the politician now, how could he possibly have mismanaged affairs this time? I turn to scowl at the passenger jammed up against me and it catches me by surprise – Fantasma. Is she following me? She is wearing a long fur coat, a blue bikini, glass stilettos. ‘Please cover yourself,’ I whisper. ‘I mean … you might catch cold.’
Fantasma throws back her head and laughs. Her body chortles, her breasts threatening to tumble out of their azure cups. Her frame gurgles against mine. I stare at her guffawing features and realise she bears a slight resemblance to the woman in Admin. Every day I make a special effort to greet this woman. Usually she returns a polite ‘hello’. Sometimes she frowns and I don’t know why.
‘I am so, so hot in this dead old thing,’ Fantasma purrs. She winks and the fur slips to the floor of the carriage. I feel moisture rising to the surface of my face. I imagine steam whistling out of my collar. All eyes in the carriage are on me now, me and Fantasma, but I dare not look back at them. She places a hand on my knee and squeezes. I lean back and sigh. The newspaper man glances at me, then out the window. I follow his gaze to the station platform. Manor House. I have missed my stop.
The supermarket is less crowded than usual. I make up lost time by purchasing only what I have been told to buy: butterscotch ice cream and a bottle of red wine. I am almost skipping and I cannot say why. The air is sharp and fresh and, for some reason, this pleases me. An aeroplane flies overhead. I look up, but cannot see it. All day I guide them, but I do not see them. I wonder whether Valerie or Eliot or Seamus is guiding this one, whether I have guided this particular aircraft before, coaxed it down like a big child afraid to descend a tall tree.
When it hits it is like nothi
ng I have ever felt before. Light. Then pain. I do not know where it is coming from. I cannot focus. I do not know where I am. Am I standing, am I lying down? I feel the blow, the punch, and in a peculiar way it seems to make sense. I always thought I was invincible, but there is no time for reaction now. There are hands on me, grabbing, tearing pieces of me apart. There are no voices, but I believe I am surrounded.
There is the sound of footsteps sprinting away. One person. Could it be only one person? I cannot see. My face is beginning to numb, my body is shaking. Somehow it seems wiser to remain still. I worry about the ice cream melting, whether the bottle of wine is still intact. I open my eyes, but it hurts to look around. I can only stare up. The reality of what has happened is slow to arrive, perhaps because it is not something I want to admit. I realise I am shivering. The pavement drains warmth from my body. The world, the black sky, spins. I imagine clouds chasing each other across the night, but I do not see them.
When I was a child I liked to bake bread, my father and I. This was something he did to help him relax. I would sink my brown hands deep into the bowl of white flour, wait until he had measured the ingredients. Then we would both fold the mixture together. I loved the feel of the warm dough, my father’s large hands. This became a ritual for us on Sunday mornings. My mother loved to see this, to encourage us. Sometimes my brother would join in. I miss my mother now.
In the hospital I am treated for cuts and bruises. I cannot see out of my right eye. I avoid mirrors and reflective surfaces; my face, on one side, resembles a rotten pumpkin. I cannot walk unaided because I smashed my knee falling to the ground. But ‘Nothing is broken,’ my wife repeats again and again. ‘Thank God nothing is broken,’ she sighs. ‘You have your life.’ Every so often, when she looks at me, she begins to cry quietly, her eyes like tiny taps. This amazes and disturbs me both, this concern. I presumed we were beyond tenderness. I would like her to stop this, but it is too painful even to open my mouth. I shake my head instead. I long for sleep, to wake up my old self. I worry about appearing for work tomorrow, but I am not sure whether it is tomorrow today, how much time has elapsed. Soon enough sleep takes me away.
A Life Elsewhere Page 10