In my dream conversations at work I might have spoken. But you wouldn’t have, either, if you’d seen the tight expression on her face. Anyway, could I really bear to tell her the truth? She wouldn’t hear anything, if she didn’t want to. They both closed me out; there was this loyalty between them. A month or so earlier I’d said to my father,
‘Why did Mum never make me a proper birthday party? Couldn’t she be bothered?’
Eyes vague, he’d replied, ‘Won’t hear nothing against your Mum . . . greatest little Mum in the world.’ He went on, even vaguer, ‘By Jesus, she’s a grand little woman.’
Years ago I would have been stunned by this. But nowadays I realized that he believed everything as he said it, and his brain was as weak as water. Our mutual betrayal had silenced us, once. But now it was just the poverty of our words.
I hadn’t continued the conversation. Dad, who’d never loved me enough to listen to a word I said.
Soon I’ll be an air hostess. That’s what I told myself; I clung to those words. The sound gained weight each time I spoke them. Soon I’ll be an air hostess, I said, and none of this will matter . . .
And that autumn, just a year ago, Am-Air recruited me as a flight attendant.
They call them flight attendants because they’re American. I tried Am-Air first because I’d met this trainee pilot in the Sheraton Tropic Room. It’s in the Sheraton near me, right by the airport; if you’ve been there you’ll remember it. There’s grown trees in there, and humid vegetation. There’s parrots singing and a lovely thatched bar. It’s the sort of place they film rum ads, to save the air fares. You expect to see bronzed bodies in bikinis, but of course it’s all businessmen just arrived off the planes . . . Japs and Germans, wearing plastic name-tags. That reminds you where you are.
This pilot, though, he had a gorgeous tan, and he said that Am-Air were the guys to fly with. He wanted my phone number, but you know I didn’t have one; afterwards I pretended I had a car outside, and walked home. He’d just been laying-over one night and killing time with a cocktail. He said it was a people job, and he could tell I was a people person. He said I should give them a buzz, so I did.
They sent me a form saying I should have experience in public contact. JT seemed like that to me; I never saw the eaters, of course, it was more like posting nourishing letters into the sky, but I’d been there more than a year and that seemed like experience. Besides I’d read the order forms and I knew about the special diets, things like that. The timetables danced around my head, the dancing codes of my daydreams. And I knew French, from my bedroom monologues.
So they took me on. They had a building at the airport and I did a training course. I learnt first aid and how to mix a cocktail. I learnt about currency tables and how the air crew always put the passengers first. I can’t remember those weeks, not now. We had a lot of tests; if you failed one you had to start all over again. I was so tense that I noticed nothing, just blurred edges around my central, hard concentration.
It’s the unexpected moment that it hits you, isn’t it? I felt blank, the day I passed, and blank for some days afterwards. My parents didn’t help; neither of them could cope with big events. Dad said, ‘Blimey . . . Fancy that.’ Mum looked warily pleased, as if planes were slightly wicked, but awesome too.
I stood on the bed, wearing my uniform. I turned this way and that; I felt different, but not heart-stoppingly so. It was later that it hit me, in the queue at Boots the next Saturday.
Two women stood in front of me.
‘He’s a sly one.’
‘Thought you said he’d gone to Saudi Arabia.’
‘That’s what I mean.’
Suddenly I realized: soon I’d be gone. I looked down at my wire basket. A bottle of cleanser lay there, and some lipstick in an embossed tube. Me, Heather Irene Mercer, soon I’d be reddening my lips under a foreign sky. My lips, this lipstick. People would be speaking a strange language around me. And I was being paid good money for going there; somebody thought I was worth paying.
Before I began my job, how did I imagine it? I can’t remember. Vaguely, I suppose . . . The golden skies of my Bible stories . . . up into oblivion, the clouds closing behind me like a mouth, closing away the grubby present. I hadn’t ever flown, remember, even as a passenger. I’d just seen those big planes waiting, every day of my life.
I told myself it was just nerves, that first flight. All the girls must feel the same way, mustn’t they? I sat through the briefing; in my uniform I felt like a dressed-up doll, it wasn’t myself sitting there, though underneath the cloth my blouse stuck to me because I was so nervous. The captain was from Texas and he talked real slow. It seemed to take hours, him drawling about the hot shot from Shell, in First Class, and how many vegetarian meals in Economy. I wanted to get to the toilet. A girl called Mary Lou was looking after me. When I emerged she smiled:
‘I guess I felt that way too, my first flight. In and out of the john like a goddam jack-in-the-box.’
We tap-tapped across the tarmac, holding on to our hats, it was so windy. I told myself: I’m one of a team now. They took me on, didn’t they?
If they hadn’t, you see, I’d know that they knew. This might seem stupid – it was stupid – but it was buried in me, deeper than superstition. I’d felt it at the JT interview, which I’d passed. I’d felt it at my driving test, which I’d failed. JT hadn’t found me out, but the driving people had. It was mad, of course, but it blocked my throat like asthma. Standing in the lobby of the test centre, the paper in my hand, I simply couldn’t breathe. Then it passed and I was just a normal, disappointed person who happened to have failed her test.
I followed Mary Lou down the cabin, checking the headsets, pillows and baby-kits, like I’d learned in our mock-up. It was a 747, with a spacious, hushed interior that smelt of perfume. Someone switched on the lights and the music. It seemed like a stage-set, waiting; all those empty seats, and those vacuumed aisles.
I clung to Mary Lou, getting in the way as the passengers embarked. I nodded and smiled too. Mary Lou glistened as she greeted them; she was a big, radiant blonde. You’d probably think her bland, but you wouldn’t have heard her raucous laugh at the briefing.
‘Hi,’ I said, nodding and smiling too. ‘Welcome on board.’
They glanced at me, smiling; I tried to concentrate but I kept hearing Dad’s parting words. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do, he’d said, patting my bottom. You be a good girl, see? I remembered the medical officer tapping my chest, as I lay there in my bra and pants. You’ve been on the pill how long, Heather? Gazing down at me.
Some of the passengers stopped, and caught my eye. Some ignored me, pushing their way down the aisle, lifting their briefcases as they went. I made my mind go blank.
The seats were occupied now. Faces turned as we walked past, bending across to check they’d fastened their seat belts. As we taxied out I told myself: they don’t know the first thing about me. And Am-Air are paying me . . . Am-Air think I’m worth paying.
I still felt transparent, though. Kimberley, the purser, was speaking over the PA. In our section, I was doing the demo because it was supposed to be good practice, so I positioned myself in front of all those eyes. I pointed one arm, and then the other, to indicate the masks.
‘. . . the oxygen masks will drop automatically . . .’
Avoiding looking at those faces I moved my foolish, clockwork arms. Have you ever dreamed you were standing on a stage, naked?
I clamped the mask to my mouth.
‘. . . and inhale deeply . . .’
I mimed inhaling, gripping the mask as if I were dying. The old feeling swept over me. They knew . . . They could see right through this uniform to the worthless me inside. They knew about Cliff the chef and how I’d treated him so badly he’d lost his job. They knew about the Heathrow Hotel man pushing me out of his bedroom. And the man at the Holiday Inn.
Actually most of them were reading their newspapers. But only because they could see
me for what I was, and they were disgusted, just as my mother would be, if she ever learnt the truth.
My legs felt saggy and boneless with guilt. It caught me unprepared, this guilt, it seeped out like a gas. Where did it come from; what hidden cracks? I was being punished for thinking I could actually do this job, and push Dad right behind me . . . for thinking I’d be changed just because I was being lifted out of England.
Replacing the mask, I smiled at the rows of heads. The smile stretched my skin. We’d been taught to smile, to instil confidence in our passengers. ‘Your job, honey, is to reassure them,’ the teacher said, ‘however lousy you’re feeling yourself.’
We were carried along, faster and faster, and then the cabin tilted and we were up, climbing into the sky. A ping released us and I made my escape towards the toilet. Through the porthole, I saw the fields down there. We tilted. A glassy eye stared up at me, flashing in the sun. That was my reservoir.
I’m always cowering in toilets. Remember at school, when I didn’t dare come out? All those girls . . . they knew. Now, crouched on the flimsy plastic rim I told myself: don’t be stupid. This is just first-day nerves. You’ll lose your job if you don’t pull yourself together.
Nobody noticed a thing, of course. But I knew then that I couldn’t escape, even though I could see the crinkled woollen clouds below me, and the blue void above. It was still the same, heavy old me, pausing there, sticky with fright. He was still beside me, curdling the air.
I felt sinkingly superstitious, that first flight. Five hours later the plane tilted. Below us, buildings lifted into the sky, like fingers pointing. New York literally took away my breath . . . those blocks bathed in rosy light, with shadowed canyons between them.
Dad wasn’t down there, in those streets. But it didn’t make any difference. It didn’t make any difference that he hadn’t really touched me for the past year. He was within me, he was in my breathing and the thumping of my heart, and I took him everywhere. I’d take him to the ends of the earth.
I lived in limbo – in a sort of dazzled numbness. Apparently they all did. Korky, another flight attendant, tried to explain it to me over breakfast. We were in Los Angeles three weeks later.
‘Boy, does it louse up your relationships,’ she said, cracking open the jam sachet. ‘Like, you lose the continuity. Love’s never having to say you’re sorry. But I’ll correct that: love’s being there to never have to say you’re sorry.’ She flicked the sachet into the bin. ‘I never am.’
‘Aren’t you?’
‘Like, you lose your sense of caring. You lose that responsibility, because the next day you’ll be gone . . . Kinda weird.’
I thought of the roads at home, and people throwing the litter out of their cars . . . all that untidiness they wouldn’t see again. Oonagh’s sister, Marie, was a chambermaid at the Heathrow Hotel; she told such stories about the débris people left behind, the intimate débris of their personal lives. What did they care, half-way to Singapore?
After breakfast with Korky I went up to my room to sleep. Outside, the sky was solid blue, as if it had been built around the landscape. The freeway below was lined with dusty palms; it was a wide road sliding with traffic. It wasn’t that different from home . . . Just the road wider and the sky bluer, and everything silent because the air-conditioner sealed me in. But just the same . . . Opposite, down there, was the long glass frontage of a Ford showroom, and then a burger joint with lights chasing each other round, ‘Fries 50c, Fries 50c’. Nobody walked in Los Angeles either, just like home . . . Farther along stood the Holiday Inn, with blinding white fretwork. Outside it stood a sign saying, ‘Holiday Inn Welcomes IBM Convention’. Even the IBM was the same.
This was my first lay-over in LA. Korky said it stretched for hundreds of miles, just like this. There was no centre. You never arrived anywhere, you just drove.
‘Back home,’ I said, ‘there’s nowhere to arrive at either.’
‘Honey, I’ve been to Oxford, to your Stratford-on-Avon –’
‘Not where I come from, there isn’t.’
Upstairs, I showered and hung up my dress in the steam to shed the creases. Remember the shower-cap Mum gave me, long ago? Nowadays I threw them away like everyone else. I drew the curtains and climbed into bed. These hotel rooms were all alike. The décor was either blue, with a nubbly turquoise bedspread and curtains, or orange. Today, aching with fatigue, I gazed at daylight glowing through amber weave. I could be anywhere in the world, except that here they called the curtains ‘drapes’.
The weeks passed in a jolting daze of airport coaches and hotel lobbies, of lifting and carrying and pouring and clearing away, the smile plumbed into my face like a bathroom fixture . . . Of foreign coins in my handbag and daylight through the curtains, of midnight arrivals and the sudden blast of foreign heat before I stepped into the bus, of long delays in some brightly lit departure lounge, with the taste of sleep still in my mouth. I felt as blank as my parents looked, watching show after show on the TV . . . I jolted along, busy and passive.
Korky was right. I forgot home, not through simple absence – after all I was only away a few days at a time – but through dislocation . . . hazed disorientation. I didn’t feel, I didn’t think. I slept heavily, with violent dreams.
The only time I felt properly myself was when I bought Teddy a present. I always bought him something; he’d make a fuss if I didn’t. I dawdled around the airport boutiques. I was most often at Frankfurt. It’s like a futuristic Oxford Street in there, with all the shops. I came to know the Matchbox cars, and costumed dolls like the ones Gwen had, and the spotlit mounds of fluffy bears. Teddy wanted instruments of destruction. He was seven, now, so he demanded more than sticks.
It was in Dallas, one night, that I was standing at the hotel gift shop, looking through the window.
‘Hi. Who’s the lucky guy?’
‘What?’
‘Puts a smile on your face like that? You’re standing there with this big, beautiful grin.’
I’d been looking at the Atom-Death Bleep Gun. I turned round.
‘Remember me?’ he grinned. ‘I’m the guy you put into an erect position.’
Lots of them say that. I remembered him now; I’d reminded him to adjust his seat for landing. He was muscular, with a square, shadowed jaw. I didn’t want to buy Teddy’s gift with him there.
‘I’m all on my ownsome tonight,’ he said. ‘You have a date?’
I still can’t meet people’s eye, however reckless I feel. I gazed at the carpet and agreed to meet him in the Rib Room. I only looked up when he walked away: a loping walk; an utter stranger.
I bought the gun. It was mounted on a card, with a detachable blast-nozzle. I pictured Teddy’s face when he saw it.
I persuaded myself that I wanted to have dinner with that man, and the old, tingling excitement and disgust rose up in me. A shutter clunked down in my brain. I shut off Teddy, because I didn’t want him to see me now.
It’s all so much easier in the dark, isn’t it? This man’s name was Rod, and he’d turned off the lights. I’d drunk some wine, so the undressing wasn’t that embarrassing, and I was half-smothered by him when the crying began.
It was a child crying in the next room. On and on it cried, while Rod grunted and the bed rocked. He kept talking. ‘Honey,’ he murmured, ‘I love you . . .’ I hate it when somebody says that. What do they mean? What on earth can you reply?
The cries went on, dry and monotonous, like a wood-saw. Was nobody coming to comfort it? Perhaps the child lay in darkness . . . The cries grew louder. Rod was grunting into my ear but I didn’t hear him. I couldn’t bear the sound of that child . . . it was crying urgently now. Didn’t this man hear it?
Teddy lay in darkness too . . . Teddy in his damp nightie, bellowing with loneliness. And all the other children . . . me . . . all of them. All of them now, at this moment . . . How many of them were yelling now for comfort? Shut up, the lot of you . . .
I tried to shut it out . .
. I gripped him, the warmth beating up me, and then the blackness exploded.
When it exploded, shuddering, I forgot everything. I forgot the cries, I blasted all the sadness, all the children crying and the human breakage, I blasted them to pieces . . . Just for those shuddering seconds.
Too swift . . . Always too swift.
Soon afterwards I escaped from this stranger, with his smug recollections and his invitation to a ‘togetherness shower’ . . . these Americans spend the whole time washing. They must be ashamed too. When I left his room the child had stopped.
Back in bed, I fell into a heavy sleep. I dreamed of searching for Teddy in a huge warehouse full of children. I’d never seen it before but I knew it was in our yard, like my other dreams . . . I struggled to get there through the thick mist . . . All the children wore clothes; they twisted and mewled, a turning mixture of pink cotton and denim . . . The more I searched, the larger the warehouse grew, swelling up . . . I knew he was calling me but I couldn’t even hear his voice, there were so many cries. I wanted to touch the children, but I couldn’t because somebody had jointed them like meat . . . Inside their clothes their limbs were loose.
You see, my dreams were violent.
Back home, I slept. The banging doors, and the grinding noise as Dad tried to start his lorry . . . As I lay there, drowsily, they seemed to come from the far side of a valley. Dad would tiptoe past my room as if I were an invalid, then bump into the table and swear, loudly. As you know, there wasn’t a lot of conversation at our home, and neither Mum nor Dad asked me much about my job, except did I meet anybody famous. They distrusted anywhere abroad, because they’d never been, yet they were awestruck, too. Dad bragged about me to his mates, I heard him, and Mum never told me to do the chores when I was wearing my uniform; she seemed to think I was serving my country, and should keep my strength. Once she asked me what I did, and when I told her she looked shocked.
‘They make you do that – just like a skivvy?’ She started. ‘There’s nobody to do that for you?’
Porky Page 17