Paradise News

by David Lodge

  “I hope your father’ll be OK.”

  “Thanks. I hope so too.”

  The driver closed the doors and took his place behind the wheel. The woman remained standing at the kerb, almost to attention, her arms at her sides, frowning thoughtfully at the back of the ambulance as it pulled smoothly away. They had exchanged names and addresses on the advice of the police. He took the piece of paper out from his breast pocket and read her name: Yolande Miller. The address meant nothing to him: something Heights. The ambulance, its siren wailing, turned a corner and she passed from view.

  “Has your father got any allergies?” the paramedic asked Bernard. He was filling in a form as they drove.

  “Not that I know of. How much does this ambulance cost, as a matter of interest?”

  “There’s a standard charge of a hundred and thirty dollars.”

  “I don’t have that much money on me.”

  “Don’t worry, you’ll be billed.”

  The tinted windows of the ambulance turned the whole world blue, as if the vehicle were a submarine, and Waikiki built on the seabed. The palm trees waved to and fro like seaweed in the tide and shoals of tourists swam by, goggling and gaping. Traffic was heavy, and the ambulance was frequently forced to a halt, in spite of its wailing siren and flashing lights. At one such stop, Bernard found himself looking into the eyes of the sandy-haired adolescent girl from the Travelwise party, standing on the sidewalk just a few yards away, looking straight at him. He mustered a smile of greeting and a kind of shrugging wave, meant to communicate something like, Look-what-a-pickle-I’m-in-now, but she stared blankly back at him. He realized that, to her, the windows of the ambulance would be opaque, and felt slightly foolish. Then, to his astonishment, she suddenly pulled a gargoyle-like face of derision and contempt, crossing her eyes to an alarming degree and poking out her tongue. Then, as quickly as it had appeared – so quickly that he wondered if he had imagined it – the demonic expression was replaced by the child’s usual impassive mask. The ambulance moved on and the girl passed out of his sight.

  “Amanda! Don’t dawdle!” The clipped, high-pitched male English voice causes several heads to turn on the busy pavement – though not, immediately, Amanda’s own. To relieve her feelings, she scowls ferociously at the noisy ambulance, then, adjusting her features, turns and trots after her father.

  “You’ll get separated, if you’re not careful,” her mother scolds, as Amanda catches up with them. “Then we’d have to spend the rest of the day looking for you.”

  “I could find my way back to the hotel.”

  “Oh, could you, miss, I’m glad to hear it,” says her mother sarcastically. “I’m not sure I could, we seem to have been walking for hours.”

  “Eleven minutes, actually,” says Amanda’s brother, Robert, consulting his digital watch.

  “Well, it feels like hours, in this heat. I’d no idea we were going to be so far from the beach. To call that hotel the Hawaiian Beachcomber is downright deceitful.”

  “I’m going to complain,” says Mr Best over his shoulder. “I’m going to write.”

  The sound of the ambulance siren recedes. “Cross my fingers, cross my toes, Hope I don’t go in one of those,” Amanda chants under her breath, crossing her toes inside her sandals, as she lopes along, taking care at the same time not to tread on the cracks between the paving stones – anything to block out the all-too-familiar noise of adult whingeing. Are all grown-ups like this? She doesn’t think so. It is not her impression that other girls spend their entire lives creased with embarrassment at the spectacle, or imminent threat, of their parents making themselves publicly disagreeable.

  Russell Harvey, or “Russ”, as he is known to his friends, and to colleagues on the trading floor of the investment bank where he works in the City of London, hears the distant sound of the ambulance siren from the balcony of his room on the 27th floor of the Waikiki Sheriden, where he is breakfasting alone. It looks as if he is going to be doing most things on his own this honeymoon, including sex. Cecily is still asleep, or pretending to be asleep, in one of the two double beds. Russ has just risen from the other one. Apparently every room in the hotel has two double beds, which is one too many from Russ’s point of view. Cecily retired first last night, having prepared herself for sleep in the locked bathroom, and when he joined her between the sheets, she simply and silently moved across to the other bed. Russ did not pursue her, having formed the impression that she was quite prepared to play musical beds as long as it was necessary. He feels hard done by. It isn’t, of course, a matter of consummating the marriage, or slaking a long-repressed desire – he and Cess have, after all, been living with each other for nearly two years – but a man on his honeymoon is surely entitled to nookie on demand.

  Russ stands up, leans on the balustrade and gazes gloomily along the curving palm-fringed shoreline towards a flat-topped mountain sticking out into the sea that the waiter who brought his breakfast told him was Diamond Head. He recognizes that the view is picturesque, but it does nothing to lift his spirits. The noise of the siren grows louder. He looks down at the street intersection below, where a huge five-petalled yellow flower has been painted on the road. They seem to be barmy about flowers round here. There were flower heads on their pillows last night, and another one floating in the toilet bowl, and there was even one on top of his cornflakes this morning, which he might easily have swallowed by accident.

  The ambulance appears, crosses the five-petalled flower, and immediately becomes locked in traffic. Its siren noise changes from a wail into a kind of frantic yelping. Then the snagged traffic loosens, the ambulance wriggles through a gap, and away it goes. Russ wonders idly who is inside. Some aged tourist who has pegged out from heatstroke, perhaps (it is already hot as hell on this balcony); some randy second-honeymooner who slipped a disc in mid-fuck; some desperate, spurned lover who –

  Russ suddenly has an idea. He stands on a chair at the open patio-style window, with arms extended, the morning sun throwing his crucified shadow into the room, gives a strangled cry, and jumps softly down sideways into the well of the balcony, crouching low beside the wall, out of sight from the bedroom. He squats there for a long minute or so, curled up into a ball, and feeling increasingly foolish. Then he peeps into the room. Cecily has not moved. Either she is really asleep or she saw through his ruse. Or she is an even colder-hearted bitch than he has reckoned with.

  Sidney Brooks, standing on a balcony of the Hawaii Palace in his pyjamas, hears the sound of the ambulance, but only faintly, since the hotel is on the oceanfront and their room overlooks the beach (nothing but the best for Terry). Terry and Tony have a room just one level down and three along at a right-angle to their own, and last night they all waved goodnight to each other, but there is no sign of life from the other balcony yet this morning. The ambulance siren stops and then starts again. Sidney feels a faint cold qualm of fear, in spite of the hot sunshine beating on the balcony, remembering recent ambulance rides of his own. He draws some deep breaths, in and out, clasping his paunch before him like a medicine ball. “Lovely view, Lilian,” he says over his shoulder. “You should come and take a look. Like a picture postcard. Palm trees, sand, sea. The lot.”

  “You know I can’t take heights,” she says. “You should be careful yourself. You’ll have one of your dizzy spells.”

  “No I won’t,” he says, but comes back into the bedroom. Lilian is sitting up in bed, sipping the cup of tea he has made for her. There is an ingenious little water-heating gadget fixed to the wall of the bathroom, with teabags and sachets of instant coffee thoughtfully provided. Sidney spent quite a few minutes this morning inspecting the bathroom fittings with a professional eye, and was impressed.

  “You never went out there like that?” says Lilian. “With all your belongings on show?”

  Sidney feels below the overhang of his paunch and pulls the gaping fly of his pyjama trousers together. “Doesn’t matter, there’s nobody who could see. Terry and To
ny don’t seem to be up yet.”

  Lilian frowns into her cup. “What d’you make of it, then?”

  “Make of what?”

  “This Tony.”

  “Seems a nice chap. I didn’t get much chance to talk to him.”

  “You don’t think there’s something funny? Two men on holiday together. At their age? Sharing a room?”

  Sidney stares at her. He feels another cold qualm, and shivers. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says, and turns back to the balcony.

  “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” he says.

  When the ambulance passes Brian and Beryl Everthorpe’s hotel they are in the middle of shooting “Waking Up In Waikiki – Day One”. Beryl has in fact been awake for over an hour, has washed and dressed and had her breakfast in the buffet restaurant on the ground floor, leaving Brian still asleep, but when she returned to their room he made her undress again, put on her nightie, and get back into bed. Now Brian is standing on the balcony with his camera focused on the pillow. On his cue Beryl is to sit up, open her eyes, yawn and stretch, get out of the bed, shrug on her negligée, and walk slowly out onto their balcony, where she is to gaze ecstatically at the view. The view is in fact of another hotel across the road, but Brian is confident that by leaning out over the balustrade as far as possible (with Beryl hanging onto his trouser-belt for safety) he can get a long shot of a bit of beach and a palm tree that can be spliced into the sequence at the appropriate point. “Action!” he shouts. Beryl wakes up, gets out of bed, walks towards the open sliding glass door, yawning convincingly, but just as she reaches the balcony the strident bleating of the ambulance’s siren rises from the street below. “Cut! Cut!” cries Brian Everthorpe.

  “What?” says Beryl, coming to a stop.

  “This camera has a built-in mike,” says Brian Everthorpe. “We don’t want the sound of an ambulance on the sound-track, it would spoil the mood.”

  “Oh,” says Beryl. “You mean I’ve got to do it all again?”

  “Yes,” says Brian. “Let’s have more cleavage this time. And don’t overdo the yawns.”

  Roger Sheldrake hears but is not distracted by the noise of the ambulance. He has been up for hours, out on the balcony of his room high up in the Wyatt Regency, with his notebook and binoculars and zoom-lens camera, hard at work, observing and recording and documenting ritual behaviour around the swimming-pool in the big hotel across the street. First, in the cool of the early morning, the preparation of the pool by the hotel staff: the hosing down of the poolside area, and the skimming of the water with a long-handled net to remove any debris; then the laying out of the moulded plastic loungers and the moulded plastic tables in neat rows; then the distribution of waterproof mattresses; then the stacking of clean towels at the poolside kiosk. At eight-thirty the first patrons arrived, and claimed their favourite spots. By now, eleven o’clock, nearly all the loungers are occupied, and waiters move between them, bearing drinks and snacks on trays.

  The pool, as Roger Sheldrake knows from his researches, is not really designed for swimming. It is small, and irregularly shaped, discouraging the swimming of orderly lengths; in fact it is impossible to swim more than a few strokes without bumping into the sides of the pool or into another bather. The pool is really designed for sitting or lying round, and ordering drinks at. Since the patrons are deterred from swimming for long, they get extremely hot and thirsty, and order a lot of drinks, which come with complimentary salted nuts designed to make them even thirstier and therefore order more drinks. But the pool, however minimal, is a sine qua non, the heart of the ritual. Most of the sunbathers take at least a perfunctory dip. It is not so much swimming as immersion. A kind of baptism.

  Roger Sheldrake makes a note. The noise of the ambulance fades away.

  Sue Butterworth and Dee Ripley do not hear the noise of the ambulance or watch its progress. They are both still asleep, having woken in the middle of the night because of the time change, and drugged themselves with sleeping tablets, and in any case their twin-bedded room in the Waikiki Coconut Grove doesn’t have a balcony from which they could have watched, being at the lower end of the Travelwise accommodation scale. A few minutes after the ambulance has passed, however, the telephone beside Dee’s bed rings. Sleepily she gropes for the receiver, picks it up and croaks, “Hallo?”

  “Aloha,” says a lilting female voice. “This is your wake-up call. Have a nice day.”

  “What?” says Dee.

  “Aloha. This is your wake-up call. Have a nice day.”

  “I didn’t ask for a wake-up call,” says Dee icily.

  “Aloha. This is your wake-up call. Have a nice day.”

  “Don’t you understand, you stupid cow!” Dee screams down the telephone. “I didn’t ask for a bloody wake-up call!”

  “Whatisit, Dee?” Sue murmurs from the other bed.

  Dee holds the receiver away from her ear and stares at it with dawning understanding and impotent rage. The lilting voice carries faintly: “Aloha. This is your wake-up call. Have a nice day.”

  6

  ST JOSEPH’S HOSPITAL WAS a modestly-proportioned building, constructed of beige-coloured concrete and tinted glass, just off a leafy suburban road in the hills above Honolulu harbour. Silver oil storage tanks winked in the sun among warehouses and cranes on the flat industrial landscape far below. The Emergency Department had an air of calm, unostentatious efficiency that Bernard found reassuring. Mr Walsh was wheeled straight into what the staff referred to as the Trauma Room for examination and X-rays, and he himself was taken aside by an administrator, an oriental lady whose name, Sonia Mee, was pinned to her crisp white blouse. She sat him down at the desk, offered him coffee in a plastic beaker, and began to fill in (or, as she said, fill out) yet another form. When the question of insurance came up, Bernard confessed his uncertainty about their cover, but Sonia Mee told him not to worry, they would wait and see if his father needed to be admitted.

  A few minutes later a young doctor in pale blue hospital overalls came into the office and reported that Mr Walsh would indeed have to be admitted to the hospital. He had a fractured pelvis. Apparently it could have been worse, and in a worse position. The treatment would probably be just bed-rest for two or three weeks, but a physician would have to be assigned to take responsibility for him. The hospital could contact an orthopaedic specialist on their list, unless Bernard had some other preference. He hadn’t, but enquired anxiously about payment. “It would be a great help,” said Sonia Mee, “if you could let us have the name of the insurance company at your earliest convenience.” Bernard said he would fetch the policy immediately. “That’s not necessary,” she said. “Just call us with the details. And don’t worry about your father in the meantime. At this hospital we believe in treating patients first.” Bernard could have kissed her.

  He went to the Trauma Room, where his father was still lying stretched out on the gurney, and gave him an account, as brief and reassuring as he could make it, of what was happening. The old man kept his eyes closed, and his mouth shut in a grim, downturned line, but he nodded once or twice and appeared to take in the information. A nurse informed Bernard that a bed was being prepared for him in the main hospital. Bernard said he would return later in the day, and left.

  As he stood on the hospital steps, wondering how to get back to Waikiki, a cab drove up to deliver an out-patient, and Bernard hired it. Traffic was heavy on the freeway, and the driver threw up his hands in despair as the stream of vehicles slowed to a halt. “Gets worse all the time,” he said. The phrase seemed applicable to Bernard’s own situation. He had come to Hawaii to help his sick aunt, and so far all he had achieved was to get his father run over. He hadn’t even seen Ursula yet – and by now she must be wondering what had happened to him. But paying off the cab in Kaolo Street with almost his last dollar reminded him that he had to go to the bank before he could see Ursula.

  As he stepped out of the elevat
or on the third floor of the apartment building, Mrs Knoepflmacher was waiting to step in. She cast an inquisitive eye on his flustered, fatherless state, and hovered expectantly, but he did not stop to enlighten her, merely tossing a greeting over his shoulder as he hurried off. Inside the apartment, he went straight to his briefcase and took out the insurance policy, He felt his heartbeat quicken as he scanned the small print – but it was all right: it seemed that his father was covered for medical expenses up to a limit of a million pounds. Presumably not even an American hospital could charge more than that to cure a fractured pelvis. Bernard sank into a chair and blessed the young man in the Rummidge travel agency. He phoned Sonia Mee to give her the details of the policy, and promised to bring the document in with him later. Then he phoned Ursula’s nursing home to leave a message that he had been delayed. Then he went out to the bank.

  It was mid-afternoon before he finally came face to face with Ursula. The “nursing home” turned out to be smallish private house, or rather bungalow, in a rather down-at-heel neighbour-hood on the outskirts of Honolulu, not very far from St Joseph’s, but closer to the the freeway. The street seemed deserted. The distant hum of traffic was the only audible sound in the sultry afternoon, as he parked his rented car and stood for a moment beside it, plucking at the fabric of his shirt and trousers where they had stuck to his shoulders and thighs with perspiration. The car was a biscuit-coloured Honda with 93,000 miles on the clock, plastic-covered seats and no air-conditioning – the cheapest he could get. There was no nameplate outside the house, just a street number hand-painted on a lop-sided mailbox nailed to a rotten post. The house was embedded in a tangle of trees and unkempt shrubbery, built up on brick piers, with three worn wooden steps leading up to the front porch. The front door was open, apart from a wire-mesh insect screen. Somewhere within, an infant was grizzling: the noise stopped abruptly as Bernard pushed the doorbell button and heard it peal at the back of the house. A thin, brown-skinned woman in a brightly coloured housecoat came to the door, and smiled obsequiously as she let him in.