Homesickness

by Murray Bail

  Always there comes a let-down. It’s done casually, easily, suddenly a shock.

  Kaddok told them: ‘The Eiffel Tower was completed in 1888. And the same man did the Statue of Liberty too.’

  ‘We could get to see that…’

  Yes.

  ‘I’d prefer the Niagara Falls. I hear they’re fantastic.’

  ‘It was chiefly Leon.’ And they turned to Gwen. ‘He wanted to take his photographs. As you know. And we liked the idea of a group. We think we have a nice group here.’

  Garry put in, ‘Listen, don’t ever go to Singapore. I was sick as a dog.’

  ‘I’d heard it was spotless…’

  ‘Not in my book, it wasn’t.’

  ‘Yes, I must say a lot of the most unusual places are terribly filthy. Remember Africa on the nose?’

  ‘I think we could have skipped that. I didn’t feel at all at home there.’

  Garry belched.

  ‘Get your hand off me!’

  ‘One thing,’ Garry went on, overfilling another glass, ‘I didn’t come for their beer. Have you ever tasted such pissy muck? I’d heard about it but never believed it.’

  Violet pulled a face. ‘Ho-hum. You keep saying that.’

  ‘Piss off!’

  Louisa smiled widely, a ballerina’s mouth. ‘It’s one of my favourite things in the world, travel. I’m not conscious of time. You meet all sorts of people.’

  ‘Being away, especially in a large city like this,’ Borelli suggested, ‘don’t you feel you can do things you would otherwise not do? We feel anonymous or separate,’ he said aloud. ‘Sometimes I feel no harm could come; I could do anything.’

  Louisa watched him over her glass.

  ‘By that I mean—’

  ‘I’m myself wherever I am,’ said Mrs Cathcart, clearly and firmly. For she always suspected the worst.

  They were not conscious of time. They looked and felt separate from the main population, to one side. Their chairs formed a closed circle, regularly punctured by a darting waiter with a clubfoot who could lift six glasses with the blue fingers of one hand.

  ‘I haven’t been to good theatre for years,’ Violet was explaining.

  Beside her, Ken Hofmann gazed at the spot near the ceiling, fingers tapping his lips. Yet he readily answered.

  ‘The tax man pays for mine.’

  ‘Ken! You were keen to see the paintings and the museums.’

  ‘Yes, but there were other reasons, if you care to recall. Weren’t there?’ To the others he explained, ‘My wife has a poor memory or chooses not to remember. There are other reasons for coming all this way, tax being one, but I would not like to embarrass Louisa. Would I, wife?’

  ‘Here’s the Professor! Sit down. We were talking about you. We know all about you.’

  Ha, ha.

  ‘No we weren’t,’ Sasha quickly told him. ‘Where have you been? You can sit here.’

  As far as safety records go, the colourful South American airline, P—— N—— (‘no names, please!’), again topped the list on the casualties-per-kilometre scale. Their figures were really horrendous. It was the seventh year in a row. P—— N —— made attempts to suppress the data. Failing that they cited the peculiar weather conditions over the Andes, the beautiful afternoon light, the incidence of condors, and the low standard of mosquito netting in several stopover towns. These may have contributed but it was generally acknowledged that other factors, known in the trade as ‘invisibles’, distorted the picture.

  P—— N—— had begun as a jungle carrier—stones for metropolitan museums, tropical fish, a little cocaine—when nobody had ever seen a vapour trail, when the very idea of jet-propulsion and the ‘sound barrier’ made people burst out laughing. Indeed, around then P—— N—— achieved early and steady profitability with a charter service to find the lost explorer, Colonel Fawcett. Today its business connections are more obscure. Its major shareholders are difficult to trace. Astonishingly for a commercial airline its routes are pragmatic and can alter from hour to hour at the whim of the management or pilots. Those mid-air collisions which had boosted the year’s figures occurred when a P—— N—— Douglas had joined the flight path of another airline. And those who take an instinctive suspicious interest in the Central Intelligence Agency point to the inordinate number of mid-air explosions. A wild, still unsubstantiated rumour had it that last year’s wreckage near the Bolivian border showed the fuselage full of strapped-in soldiers, American soldiers.

  Flying for such an airline somehow made the pilots extremely attractive to women, and they could be seen wearing silk scarves and Polaroid sunglasses, and practised that careless swagger like the Battle of Britain pilots. This clique in the airline’s work force scorned passenger nervousness as ‘bourgeois’. But the crash figures were serious; of course they were. The subsequent fall in market share and the airline’s growing unprofitability prompted the Public Relations Department to act. The real lolly was in the Atlantic run.

  At breakfast, Gwen Kaddok said (in her steady, vegetarian’s voice, almost forgotten): ‘Before you go.’ She thought they might all be interested… ‘There’s an event here at the hotel this morning.’

  That was the thing about travel: you could decide on impulse to turn left instead of right, or stop dead, causing congestion and even bumping into the local inhabitants hurrying past to real destinations. Conscious of this their faces had settled, smoothed, flâneurs, travellers, dilettanti.

  ‘As well, the stars tell me to stay indoors today,’ Gwen mused, unsmiling. With her arms crossed she used her fingertips to lift the shawl on both shoulders.

  ‘You follow the stars too?’ Violet leaned forward. ‘What are you?’

  ‘I can see you’re a Scorpio,’ was Gwen’s answer. ‘Am I right?’

  Then she told them only what she had heard from the receptionist: the 150-year-old man had been flown in from a mountainous village in Ecuador. The idea here being the aura of his astonishing longevity would perhaps rub off onto P—— N—— Airlines, offsetting its sudden-death reputation, a bold and imaginative stroke on the part of the Public Relations Department. The press conference would begin at eleven sharp. Expected to attend were representatives from the British Medical Journal and other such organs, as well as radio and television.

  ‘It is my theory,’ said Gwen, who was never original, ‘preservation has us all interested. We’d all like to live long.’

  ‘Too right!’

  ‘“Preservation”?’ Sheila queried. She knitted her brow.

  Cut out meat and sugar. Eat roughage! Cold baths and secret exercises, oils and ointments: spend years to live another day.

  ‘A hundred and fifty? That’s incredible. Is that right?’

  ‘It’ll be an experience,’ Doug nodded. ‘I’d like to see him.’

  And when they returned to the dining room before eleven, they found twenty to thirty metal chairs facing a dais, as in a Fabian Society lecture or an anti-vivisectionists’ meeting. On the dais were two chairs, a card table and a cliche carafe of water. The group filled the first two rows on either side of Gwen Kaddok. She placed her hands on her lap.

  The others were not so patient.

  ‘It’s twenty past,’ Gerald whispered.

  Twisting in their seats they found the seats behind them empty.

  ‘I find her a bit spooky,’ Sasha nodded towards Gwen Kaddok. ‘Don’t you? She hardly says a word.’

  ‘What?’ North started. He had been…miles away.

  But then a very old man shuffled in from the left supported by the Public Relations Director, and they became quiet. To climb onto the dais he lifted his vibrating front leg twice as high. Realising his mistake, he stopped and tried again, better. They stared at his head. It was all dark holes and cracks, an old rock, with a few bursts of thin hair protruding. He wore a burlap shirt and rope sandals. Calm man: it had much to do with his slowness. He took no notice of them or the surroundings. When he sat down he emitted an ancient sig
h like life escaping a perished air cushion. ‘Wow!’ they all heard Gwen murmur.

  The airline’s representative remained standing. ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the press…’ and flashed them a smile.

  Excellent teeth! A pencil moustache, crumpled cream suit and floral tie.

  ‘We’re behind schedule…’

  He glanced at the old man and shook his head.

  ‘In the lift, José Ruiz Carpio believed he was back in our Douglas jet. I had to correct him. He’s never been out of his village before. Most of what he sees he cannot believe. But when one thinks about it, to be taken in a lift is an intercontinental flight on a reduced scale: acceleration, the smooth ride, gentle touchdown. I speak here only of our airline. What do you say?… To hell with the rest. But you want to hear from José Ruiz. Hey, señor! Did you have a pleasant flight?’

  The old man had his head on his chest.

  ‘The old man’s weary. Excuse me.’

  From his side pocket he took out a small syringe. Sheila turned her head as he lifted the old arm, and gave an injection.

  He spoke of José Ruiz’s ‘astronomical age’, of his village in the Province of Loja in Ecuador, its valleys of mists and steady temperatures. The average age up there is 114.6. And it’s rising. One theory was the complete absence of wristwatches and clocks. It was suggested the body becomes conscious of ticking, our metabolism embeds itself into that mechanical, artificial Time. In José Ruiz’s village the sound of time was replaced by the never-ending rattle of mountain water, which could very well drag the soul of a body along with it, as the heart pumps blood through the veins.

  All this was very interesting.

  They glanced at the figure beside him. He was sparking up.

  Dr North asked, ‘How do we know he is, in fact, 150 years old?’

  A good point. (For example, he could have been ninety or a hundred.)

  ‘Ah, an oversight! It is all here.’

  He handed around Xerox copies of the original birth certificate.

  ‘As you will notice, today is his birthday. We have a little party planned for tonight, to show what life is all about. He may have lived long, but he’s missed a lot. Then we’ll fly him home. Won’t we, José Ruiz?’

  The old man threw up his arms and let out a hoarse cry. Kaddok had crept up on all fours below the table and slowly raised his head fitted with camera.

  Calming him by hissing a sentence in Spanish and vibrating one hand, the PR man turned to them and shook his head. ‘He’s all right. He thought it was a machine gun. His experience of the media is zero.’

  He then held his smile for five or six seconds as Kaddok took another photograph. Excellent teeth!

  Beside him the figure sat mumbling.

  ‘Amigo! How old do you say you are!’ Garry Atlas called out, getting into the spirit.

  The PR man translated.

  The old man had a surprising deep voice: ‘One hundred and forty-nine and seven fortnights.’

  ‘What does modern science say about this?’ Gerald asked North. ‘Eh?’

  The PR man was explaining or apologising. ‘His village doesn’t have English or electricity…’

  He smiled to encourage further questions, and the witness helped himself to his cigarettes, putting one behind his ear and stuffing a handful into his shirt pocket.

  ‘Any ailments?’ Cathcart called out, a seasoned journo.

  This old man frowned—a deeper transformation—and cupped his ear.

  ‘Ailments! Le duele algo!’ shouted the Public Relations manager into the labyrinth of the ear.

  The other one shrugged and coughed something. He blew out shafts of smoke and studied the cigarette.

  ‘He says, none. He feels like a baby. That’s a lie. He’s hard of hearing and has weak legs. You should see his legs. Perhaps you would like to photograph them? He suffers from shortage of breath. He is as creaky as hell. In the air-cargo business he is the equivalent of a very fragile heirloom: an old oil portrait on a crumbling canvas held in a loose frame with broken glass.’

  Gwen writing in a small notebook looked up. ‘How have you lived so long?’

  But that’s an impossible quest—

  The deep voice: ‘When I wake up each morning I have to remember myself, and all that has happened, before I can continue. Otherwise, I am no longer sure who I am. Understand? I would be lost.’

  They nodded, respectful. For a while, no one spoke.

  It was Borelli who asked, ‘What have you learnt, overall?’

  ‘There is no such thing as truth,’ came the answer. ‘And things are not always as they appear. Catholics live longer than heathens. I can’t live without tobacco. The geese fly in winter. Dying is harder than you think.’

  A terrible coughing, deep down and fundamental, cut him short and an arm not seen before came out of his shirt and slapped his chest. The airline representative stared at him before allowing the next question. Obviously he was pleased at how things were progressing.

  ‘Sir?’

  Louisa had a question.

  ‘Please ask him what is there about Europe that interests him.’

  He caught the word ‘Europe’. Wiping his eyes he turned to his manager.

  ‘Where you are now,’ the PR man explained. ‘Eur-ope.’

  He looked around the room and nodded. He shrugged as he spoke.

  ‘Oh, he tells me the night sky is different here. There are fewer stars. He says the air is smaller. And here the moon is warmer than the sun.’ He questioned in Spanish and returned to them. ‘By that he means, the nights are warm.’

  They all smiled and nodded.

  The old man who took no notice of them lit up another cigarette and went on. ‘And the bath water here, Where I come from it falls straight down the hole.’

  Garry Atlas laughed.

  ‘He must live right on the Equator,’ North murmured.

  The PR man finished by asking a few questions about the flight: the food, the amount of leg-room, the quality of the hostesses. But José Ruiz had tired. As they watched a kind of vagueness drifted across his features. He became distracted. Smiling at them, the PR man kept talking. Suddenly, the old man leaned across the card table as if he had just noticed Gwen’s neatly crossed legs. A confused or surprised expression over-ran his face. It ran all over. He tried to speak—while the other one still produced statistics—and his big tongue protruded. Sasha cried out and others pointed. His arms conducted distant orchestras, knocking over the carafe and glasses. His head hit the table.

  The airlines representative bent down and lifted the 150-year-old eyelids. He then tested his pulse. ‘Damn!’ he frowned, stubbing out his cigarette.

  3

  Dozing, flipping magazines and whispering, they traversed the ocean as the albatross or the crow, held aloft by the Third Law, action/reaction, Boyle’s expansion of gases, Mach’s wind-tunnel tests of Hargrave’s surfaces, just the right degree of dihedral—the age of refinement!—radar noise, crackling wireless, screech and the known strengths of titanium and magnesium. Ancient navigators had creaked their way across here in wooden ships, across the expanse, their tracks erased by the next swell, or stopping dead. Ocean of plain great depth, of substance and extent, ruffled pewter, occasional crest and a tramp plowing on course, scratching the surface. Seated in comfort amid Latin pastels they could sense the despair of the enormity, became vague (so tiring), and turned to daydreaming. They looked away. Some took to drinks, cracking silly jokes. Visually their indicator of progress was the suprematist shadow below containing them, rollercoasting the troughs at 650mph (plus). Even so it offered little comparison. Those who woke after a doze and looked down found the same haliographic grey, scarcely any change; endless. They wondered and looked away.

  Deep canyons beneath and weed, currents and contranatent migrations of fish underneath, invisible whales; and lying deep, wrecks split on their sides and the slippery streets of Atlantis. They passed over the Cape Verde Basin, so called—fracture
zones, ridges. They crossed Cancer’s dotted line. The colours lightened: green by mid-afternoon; a few distant white islands to the north-east. Then they took to the windows and pointed. Editions of Time, of The Economist, and the single Stern (monopolised by Hofmann, noticed by Louisa), in the airline hardcovers were shoved to one side; closing the thriller, The Double Helix, Phillip North placed it on the seat beside him. All along Garry and Violet Hopper had two air hostesses in the seats facing them, Garry shouting drinks and more than once ordered out of the stainless-steel kitchen. Now they shared windows, touching heads. At the sight of land Violet produced an ostentatious wolf whistle normally used by strong males. She’d had one too many. Mrs Cathcart nudged Doug. Looking down to where she pointed he immediately began grinning. Almost everyone—Sheila, Gwen Kaddok—began grinning.

  A submarine from the navy of a small landlocked Latin American nation had surfaced after an exercise and lay long and lethal, matt-black in the water. White bodies dived off her conning tower and churned the surface. Others were draped over the bow, sunbaking. They were near the Equator. The water would have been warm.

  The plane banked and descended and those at the windows turned to each other laughing. ‘Hubba hubba, ding ding!’ Violet cried out. This was P——N——Airlines, Flight 2213. Alerted by Gwen, Kaddok switched to the starboard side and waited with his telephoto lens.

  Borelli whispered to Louisa, ‘I don’t think you should look. Quick, close your eyes.’

  And Garry gave a harsh laugh.

  Look at that! Down there!

  From the water men waved—one doing the backstroke. A large number there were mulattos. On the cigar deck they rolled over or stood up, shielding their eyes, and as the airliner passed low overhead, engulfing them in shade, one able seaman began dancing and pointing his cock up at the plane. The jet must have screeched: for then the crew all put their hands to their ears and the red-haired bosun poised on the conning tower dived off, belly-flopping. Bodies, heh heh, diving in all directions.

  ‘Christ, that was funny,’ Garry yelled, wiping his eyes. He turned to the others, ‘Jesus, we were close!’