Paradise News

by David Lodge

  “You’ll have to put on a grass skirt yourself, then, love,” says Mr Everthorpe with a wink at Leslie and Trevor. “Tickle me fancy.”

  Mrs Everthorpe slaps him again, and Trevor leers sympathetically – it is his kind of humour.

  The Best family don’t seem to run to any kind of humour. Mr Best is greatly exercised about the discount vouchers for various diversions included in his Travelpak – the Paradise Cove Luau, the Pacific Whaling Museum, the Waimea Falls Park, etc. etc. It seems that there are only three sets of these vouchers in his wallet, and there are four Bests. They stand shoulder to shoulder in front of Leslie – father, mother, son and daughter, in perfectly graduated order of height, pale-eyed, sandy-haired, thin-lipped, while he tries to reassure them that the mistake will be rectified by the Travelwise rep in Honolulu.

  “Why can’t you give them to us now?” says Mr Best.

  Leslie explains that they don’t keep the vouchers in their office at Heathrow.

  “It’s not good enough,” says Mr Best, who is tall and bony and has a narrow ginger moustache.

  “You should complain, Harold,” says Mrs Best.

  “I am complaining,” says Mr Best. “That’s what I’m doing. What d’you think I’m doing?”

  “I mean, write.”

  “Oh, I’ll write,” says Mr Best darkly, buttoning up his navy-blue blazer. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll write.” He marches off, followed by his family in Indian file.

  “He’s a solicitor, you know!” Mrs Best throws this final dart over her shoulder.

  “Another satisfied customer,” says Trevor.

  “Some customers are never satisfied,” says Leslie. “I know the type. Tell ’em a mile off.”

  But Leslie doesn’t recognize the type their next clients belong to. They don’t look like holidaymakers at all. Father and son they appear to be, for they both have the same name, Walsh. The older man, with a lined, narrow, beaky face, and a shock of white hair like a cockatoo’s crest, looks at least seventy, and the younger one is probably in his mid-forties, though it’s hard to tell because of his beard, an untidy, piebald affair. They are both wearing dark and rather heavy clothes of unfashionable cut. The younger man has made one concession to the nature of their journey and destination: he wears an open-necked shirt with the collar neatly turned down outside his jacket lapels – a style Leslie hasn’t seen at large since the 1950s. The old man is wearing a brown striped worsted suit, with collar and tie. He sighs frequently to himself, looking round about him at the heaving, shuffling crowds with anxious watery eyes.

  “As you can see, there’s a bit of a bottleneck at Passport Control,” says Leslie, as he checks their documents. “But don’t worry – we’ll make sure you don’t miss your flight.”

  “Wouldn’t worry me if we did miss it,” says the old man.

  “My father hasn’t flown before,” says the younger man. “He’s a little nervous.”

  “Very understandable,” says Leslie. “But you’ll enjoy it, Mr Walsh, once you’re airborne – won’t he, Trevor?”

  “Eh? Oh, yeah,” says Trevor. “You don’t know you’re flying in them jumbos. Like being in a train, it is.”

  The old man sniffs sceptically. His son stows the Travelpak away carefully in the inside pocket of his tweed jacket and positions himself like a beast of burden between their two suitcases. “You take my briefcase, Daddy,” he says.

  “Trevor – give Mr Walsh a hand with the luggage,” says Leslie.

  “That’s very kind of you,” says the younger man. “I couldn’t find a spare trolley.”

  Trevor, eyeing the two cheap, scuffed and scarred suitcases with disfavour, obeys Leslie with ill grace. He returns a few minutes later, saying, “Queer couple to be going to Hawaii, aren’t they?”

  “I hope you’ll take your old Dad on holiday with you when you can afford it, Trevor.”

  “You must be joking,” says Trevor. “I wouldn’t take ’im to the end of the road, not unless I could lose ’im there.”

  “Do you know what a theologian is, Trevor?”

  “I dunno, somethink to do with religion, innit? Why?”

  “That’s what he is, the son, a theologian. It said so in his passport.”

  Later – some forty minutes later – the old man and his son were the centre of a commotion at the security barrier between Passport Control and the Departures Lounge. When the old man stepped through the metal-detecting door-frame, something on his person made the apparatus beep. He was asked to surrender his keys, and to pass through the door-frame again. Again the alarm was triggered. At the security man’s request, he emptied his pockets and took off his wristwatch – to no avail. The official frisked him with rapid, practised movements, running his hands over the old man’s torso, under his armpits and up and down the insides of his legs. The old man, his arms extended like a scarecrow’s, flinched and trembled under this examination. He glared accusingly at his son, who shrugged his shoulders helplessly. Passengers waiting in the same line, who had already sent their handbaggage through the X-ray machines, and were aware that it would be piling up in a log-jam somewhere on the other side of the barrier, stirred restively and pulled faces at each other in a mime of impatience.

  “You haven’t got a metal plate in your head, sir, by any chance?” said the security man.

  “No, I have not,” said the old man testily. “What d’you take me for, a robot?” He pronounced this word, in a perceptibly Irish accent, as “row-boat”.

  “We did have a gentleman, once, had one. Took us all morning to figure it out. He’d been blown up by a mine in the War. His legs were full of shrapnel, too. You haven’t got anything like that, then?” he concluded wistfully.

  “I said ‘No,’ didn’t I?”

  “If you would just take off your braces, sir, and just have another try.”

  Again the electronic beep sounded. The security man sighed. “I’m sorry, sir, but I must ask you to remove the rest of your clothing.”

  “Oh no you won’t!” said the old man, clutching the tops of his trousers.

  “Not here, sir. If you would just come this way –”

  “Daddy! Your holy medal!” exclaimed the younger man suddenly. He loosened his father’s tie, undid the collar button of his shirt, and fished out a pewter-coloured medal dangling from a fine-mesh stainless-steel chain.

  “That’s the culprit,” said the security man cheerfully.

  “That’s Our Lady of Lourdes, I’ll have you know,” said the old man.

  “Yes, well, if you wouldn’t mind taking her off a minute, and passing through the gate again –”

  “I’ve never taken this from off my neck since the day my dear wife gave it to me, God rest her soul. She brought it back from a pilgrimage in 1953.”

  “If you don’t take it off, you don’t fly,” said the security man, now losing patience.

  “That’s fine by me,” said the old man.

  “Come on, Daddy,” coaxed his son, and gently lifted the medal and chain over the old man’s white head. He poured the shining metal skein into his palm and handed it to the official. The old man seemed suddenly to lose the will to resist. His shoulders slumped, and he passed meekly enough through the door-frame, this time without triggering the alarm.

  In the crowded Departures Lounge, Bernard Walsh helped his father replace the holy medal round his neck, steering the chain over the old man’s ears, big, red, fleshy protuberances, with coarse white hairs sprouting from their recesses. He slid the medal under his father’s yellowish undervest, fastened the collar button of the shirt, and straightened the tie. He felt a sudden lurch of memory: himself, aged eleven, setting off for his first day at St Augustine’s Grammar School, his father gravely inspecting his new uniform, and tightening the knot of his school tie, a gaudy maroon and gold, not unlike the livery of Travelwise Tours.

  Their flight was not yet being called, so he bought two plastic beakers of coffee from a snack bar, settled down on a row o
f seats facing a monitor screen, and distributed the newspapers he had bought on the way from central London: a Guardian for himself and the Mail for his father. But while he was absorbed in an article about Nicaragua, his father must have slipped away. When Bernard looked up from the page, the seat next to his own was vacant, and Mr Walsh was nowhere to be seen. Bernard felt panic hollow his stomach. He scanned the Departures Lounge (and somehow found time to reflect on what a ludicrously inappropriate term it was, “lounge”, for this vast, congested hall, with its restless movement of bodies, its hum of conversation, its stale air and dazzle of glass) without catching sight of his father. To see better, he stood on the seat of his chair, under the gaze of eight pale, disapproving eyes belonging to a sandy-haired family sitting opposite with their flightbags at their feet. On the monitor screen the message, “BOARDING GATE 29” began to blink against the number of the flight to Los Angeles.

  “There we are,” said the head of the sandy-haired family, a tall, thin man, dressed in a neat blazer with chrome buttons. “Gate twenty-nine. On your feet.” His wife and children obeyed him in a single movement.

  A low moan of despair escaped Bernard’s lips. “Excuse me,” he said to the sandy-haired family – who, he now noticed, had purple and gold Travelwise labels on their handluggage – “did you happen to see where my father – the elderly man sitting there – where he went?”

  “He went that way,” said the younger child, a heavily-freckled girl who looked about twelve years old. She pointed in the direction of the Duty-Free Shop.

  “Thankyou,” said Bernard.

  Bernard found his father inspecting the various brands of whiskey in the Duty-Free, standing before the shelves with his hands clasped behind his back and his head inclined forward to read the labels, like a man in a museum.

  “Thank God I’ve found you,” he said. “Don’t go wandering off on your own like that again.”

  “A litre of Jameson’s for eight pounds,” said the old man. “That’s a bargain.”

  “You don’t want to drag a bottle of whiskey halfway round the world,” said Bernard. “Anyway, there isn’t time. Our flight’s been called.”

  “Will it be as cheap in Hawaii?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know,” said Bernard. He ended up buying him a bottle of Jameson’s, and a carton of cigarettes, as one might buy a child sweets to keep him quiet. He regretted it almost at once, for the boxed bottle in its plastic bag was heavy and awkward to carry, in addition to his briefcase and raincoat, along corridors broad as boulevards that seemed to stretch to infinity.

  “Are we having to walk all the way to Hawaii?” his father grumbled.

  There were moving walkways in places, like flattened escalators, but not all of them were working. It took them a good quarter of an hour to reach Gate 29, and then there was another crisis. When the uniformed girl at the desk asked to see their boarding cards, Mr Walsh was unable to produce his.

  “I think I left it back at the off-licence,” he said.

  “Oh my God,” said Bernard. “It will take us half an hour to get there and back again.” He turned to the ground hostess: “Can’t you issue him with another one?”

  “Not very easily,” she said. “Are you sure you haven’t got it, sir? Is it inside your passport, perhaps?”

  But Mr Walsh had left his passport at the Duty-Free too.

  “You’re doing this on purpose,” said Bernard, feeling himself going pink with anger.

  “No I’m not,” said Mr Walsh sulkily.

  “Where did you leave them – by the Jameson’s?”

  “Somewhere round there. I’d have to go back.”

  “Is there time?” Bernard asked the girl.

  “I’ll get you a buggy,” she said, reaching for a cordless phone.

  The buggy was an open electric car apparently intended for the use of infirm or handicapped passengers. They bowled back along the interminable walkways, the driver honking at intervals to clear their path through droves of oncoming pedestrians. Bernard had a queasy feeling that their journey had gone into reverse, not just temporarily but permanently – that they would spend hours searching vainly for the missing documents, while their plane departed, leaving them with their useless, non-transferable tickets, and no option but to take the Tube back to London. Perhaps Mr Walsh had the same intuition – it would explain why he looked suddenly cheerful, grinning and waving at the passengers footslogging their way towards the gates, like a child on a fairground ride. One of these passengers, a burly, side-whiskered man toting a video camera, stopped to film them, swivelling on his heel as they passed.

  They found the boarding pass, slipped inside the passport, where Mr Walsh had left them, on a shelf between the Scotch and Irish whiskies.

  “Why in God’s name did you put them there?” Bernard demanded.

  “I was looking for me money,” said Mr Walsh. “I was searching for me purse. That fuss at the machine back there, over the holy medal, got me all moithered. Everything was in the wrong pocket.”

  Bernard grunted. The explanation was plausible; but if losing the documents hadn’t been a conscious gambit to avoid boarding the plane, it had certainly been an unconscious one. He grasped his father’s arm and marched him back to the buggy like a prisoner. The driver, who was listening to crackling instructions from a walkie-talkie, greeted them cheerfully.

  “Everything OK? Hold on tight, then. I’ve got to pick up one or two passengers on the way.”

  They picked up a gigantic black lady, dressed in a striped cotton frock as big as a marquee, who wheezed and chuckled as she clambered aboard and spread her enormous hips over the back seat beside Mr Walsh, forcing Bernard to perch precariously on the handrail at the side, and a man with an amputated leg who sat next to the driver with his crutch levelled over the front of the buggy like a lance. This carnivalesque spectacle excited much attention and amusement among the footpassengers they passed, some of whom playfully thumbed for a lift.

  Bernard looked at his watch, which indicated five minutes to spare before their plane was due to leave. “I think we’ll just make it.”

  He needn’t have worried: there was a thirty-minute delay on the flight, and the passengers hadn’t even started boarding. Some of them looked accusingly at Bernard and his father as if suspecting them of being responsible. The waiting area was crowded – it seemed impossible so many people could get into the same aeroplane. As they looked for somewhere to sit down, they passed the sandy-haired family of four, sitting in a row, with their flightbags on their knees. “Found him,” said Bernard to the freckled girl, with a nod in the direction of his father, and received a tight little smile in acknowledgment.

  They discovered a couple of empty seats at the far end of the room and sat down.

  “I want to go to the lav,” said Mr Walsh.

  “No,” said Bernard brutally.

  “It’s that coffee. Coffee always goes straight through me.”

  “You can wait till we get on the plane,” said Bernard. But he had second thoughts: who knew how long it might be before they were airborne? “Oh, all right, then,” he said wearily, getting to his feet.

  “You don’t have to come with me.”

  “I’m not letting you out of my sight again.”

  As they were standing side by side at the urinal, his father said, “Did you see the size of that black woman’s bum? Begob, I thought I was going to be crushed to death.”

  Bernard wondered whether to make this the occasion for a little homily on respect for ethnic minorities, but decided to let it pass. It was fortunate that the word “black”, which Mr Walsh had always employed as a term of disparagement, had become accepted usage in society at large. Though whether Polynesians liked to be called black, he had no idea. Probably not.

  When they returned to the waiting area beside Gate 29, their seats had been taken, but a young woman in a pink and blue track suit, observing their plight, took her bag off the seat beside her and offered it to Mr Walsh.
Bernard perched on the edge of a low plastic table.

  “Which hotel are you going to, then?” said the young woman.

  “I beg your pardon?” said Bernard.

  “You’re with Travelwise, aren’t you? Like us.” She pointed to the purple and gold baggage label the courier had attached to his briefcase. “We’re going to the Waikiki Coconut Grove,” she said. He became aware that there was another young woman, similarly attired in mauve and green, sitting beside her.

  “Oh yes, that’s right. I’m not sure what hotel.”

  “Not sure?” The girl looked perplexed.

  “I did know, but I’ve forgotten. We arranged this trip at rather short notice.”

  “Oh, I see,” said the girl. “Last-minute bargain. You don’t get much choice, then, do you? But you save a lot. We did that one year in Crete, didn’t we, Dee?”

  “Don’t remind me,” said Dee. “Those toilets.”

  “I’m sure you needn’t worry about the toilets in Hawaii,” said the girl in pink and blue, with a reassuring smile. “Americans are very particular about things like that, aren’t they?”

  “I didn’t know we were going to a hotel,” said Mr Walsh querulously. “I thought we were staying at Ursula’s place.”

  “We probably will be, Daddy,” said Bernard. “I won’t know till we get there.” He was silent for a few moments, but felt the pressure of the two women’s intense curiosity. “We’re visiting my father’s sister,” he explained. “She lives in Honolulu. We probably won’t need the hotel room, but, absurdly enough, it was the cheapest way to travel – to take this package.”

  “What a place to live! Honolulu! It must be like being on holiday all year round,” said the young woman. She turned to Mr Walsh. “Is it a long time since you saw your sister?”

  “It is that,” Mr Walsh said.

  “You must be looking forward to it.”

  “I can’t say I’m straining at the leash,” he said dourly. “It’s her who wants to see me. Or so I’m told.” He shot a hostile glance at Bernard from under his bushy eyebrows.

  “My aunt is not well, I’m afraid,” said Bernard.