A Fool's Alphabet (27 page)

From that moment on he had lost any connection with the wider, autonomous world and had become an item in transit. The process began in the terminal with the checking-in of the bag with all the personal connections it contained: clothes given as presents at various times that would fit no one else, a framed photograph, a sponge bag with prescribed ointments and pills. Feeling the marble floor of the building beneath his shoes, he walked over to the gate marked
Departures and showed his ticket. He had half an hour before the flight was called, but once through the passport control he was already stateless. The only way he could re-establish his identity then was by surrendering to the prescribed journey, and emerging, some hours later, a foreigner.

He drank beer beneath an indoor parasol and looked at the people who worked in this place that was nowhere. At first he felt sorry for them, as he might have felt for people who lived in towns that had become famous to the world for some tragedy, like Aberfan, or Chernobyl. He had to admit, however, that the fat Spanish-looking barman and the cleaner with her turbaned hair and red lips seemed quite happy in their work. Day after day they caught the bus or train from a real street, a proper house, to come and work here. For them it was a particular location, it was work, the office. Presumably this suspended world of clattering departure boards and scarf shops was not an unmapped plain of hell but a place they knew, whose corridors and back entrances they could refind, and pass, and name.

Business, always business, as Paul Coleman had sighed with fake ennui to hide his excitement when they had met three years earlier. On his own now, without Coleman, Pietro echoed the words with genuine remorse.

He crossed the final no man's land of the check-in gate. At Logan airport in Boston you could buy live lobsters at this stage, their claws held together with a rubber band for safer transit. Just the thing you might need. As he set foot on the plane and met the unblinking smile of the stewardess, he noticed the simple construction of the doorway. These plates and rivets would shortly be under unimaginable pressure in a freezing empty world high above this one, he thought, as he trailed his finger over the metal. He folded, then shoved his overcoat into the locker above the seats, squeezing the two parts of the catch together to spring the door open. His was the aisle seat, as far as possible from the sights of the window. He leaned over the empty seat and
pulled down the hard floral blind. Then he reached for the plastic switch in the armrest.

Take-off was not frightening. The increased engine noise was reassuring. It was only after ten minutes or so, when all trace of earth was gone and there was no doubt that the aircraft was unsupported in the air that his palms began to slip on the metal ends of the armrests where he had unconsciously clamped them. There were a number of different kinds of crash. The nose might shear off as the plane ran into a mountain. He imagined the sight of the rock, quite clear for a fraction of a second, that would appear to him from the other side of the cinema screen, behind the curtains of the business class section. It would be the last thing he would ever see: perpendicular granite. Or the wings could drop off. This was unlikely, but his fear was not a reasonable thing. The engines raged and died as the plane banked. It had once been explained to him that one engine had to turn faster than the other during this manoeuvre, but it surprised him that no one else seemed to notice. They continued with their crosswords, they talked calmly, they even slept. The most likely way to crash, it always seemed to him, was as a result of turbulence. No man-made structure could survive the buffeting an aircraft took when it unaccountably dropped in the sky. It would disintegrate eventually and it would spiral down into the sea, though he would be dead from decompression before it completed its fall. The calm of his fellow passengers when the plane plummeted was the most miraculous thing of all. Reason and experience might eventually persuade anyone that such turbulence was seldom dangerous, but surely any sentient being, any creature with the meanest instinct of survival, should be alarmed when the machine in which he was travelling at hundreds of miles an hour lurched into sudden freefall. But apparently it was his own reflexive grasp of the armrests that was morbid or misplaced; the normal human response was to fill in another crossword clue.

‘Among those who died in the crash, the largest civilian disaster of its kind, was Pietro Russell, the famous . . .' There was always some problem at this point in the obituary. What he really hoped was that people would feel sorry for the dreadful way he had died and that their sympathy might in some way save him or bring him back to life.

He looked down the aisle where the drinks trolley was making irksomely slow progress towards him. The stewardesses wore royal-blue uniforms and tan tights of a peculiarly dense weave. He ordered a whisky and ginger ale, something he never normally drank, which came with a thin plastic stick and a small packet of dry-roasted peanuts which emitted a sharp little stench when he pulled the packet apart. He took the headset from the pocket of the seat in front, then from its plastic bag, and stuck the ends into his ears. He found himself listening to a rasping, singsong comic with storms of interference, possibly from audience laughter, which the flight guide identified as ‘Nutter on the Bus by Jasper Carrott'. It conjured distant worlds. The television in the front room, London, a theatre, a Birmingham bus queue, terra firma. What a way to go down to your death, with so many references, with this thing playing in your ears.

After five weeks in Los Angeles he had forgotten the flight, the fear, pretty much everything. The man came round to shampoo the dog in a white truck with the words ‘Critter Cleaner' on the side, but he had no shame about this. It was a good job, it beat pumping gas, and he liked the weather though one day he'd go back to New York, he reckoned, he figured.

Inside, the movie on Channel 13 was
Big
with Tom Hanks. He played a child in a man's body, going wild in a toy store, which seemed like a good enough metaphor for the city and even the country. The kitchen had M & M chocolate beans in a glass jar and a can of spray-on butter, guaranteed dairy-free, and a giant pack of Twiglets and some herbal tea, but no bread. So breakfast was tea and peanuts and a drink from
some Mexican bottle in the cupboard that said ‘Mezcal con gusano Monte Alban Regional de Oaxaca' and that last word seemed to spell trouble. The label also said, ‘with agave worm' – and there it was, a dead worm at the bottom of the bottle. Out in the garden, with the orange tree hanging over the wall from next door, the critter cleaner gave a squeeze to the avocados in the sunshine to see if they were ripe. By the french doors were tall plants that wilted only for a day before reblooming in the permanent spring.

And in five weeks things began to slide. He had lunch in Santa Monica. A Greek or perhaps Armenian café with tabouleh and hummus but also chicken sandwiches and Coke. The girl had even teeth and her legs were tan, though he couldn't see that much because the pants were mid-calf. She was going to play tennis with Gail because her boyfriend was out of town, then maybe she'd go to a movie. But she'd definitely call if she was free. She looked so healthy, her hair was shiny and her eyes were bright. She was drinking diet coke, eating diet burger.

Later he drove up Mulholland and wondered if he needed to buy a hummingbird feeder he had seen advertised. The creatures had been hovering that morning, minute things more like insects than birds, hanging between the orange tree and the oleander. In the end he was heading for the new cinema complex in Century City. He had all night ahead of him and all the next day and all of the day after that, and there was no impediment in view and no end to the even sunshine. He discovered there was an art to pleasure, that gratification requires hard work; and in that art and hard work, the absence of guilt became at first negligible, then imperceptible.

They sat over dinner one day at some new French place in Hollywood, West Hollywood, whatever. The valet parking had taken the car and parked it in back. ‘What did you get for dinner?' she asked him. No longer confused by this question, he said, ‘The endive salad and the grilled lamb.' The waiter had curly hair cut short up the sides and back, glistening
with gel. He dealt deftly with questions about the regional Alsace cuisine, the
choucroute garnie
, the Strasbourg sausage and the Gewürztraminer by Hügel or Hartmann. Afterwards they drove down freeways, boulevards, underpasses, strips and highways, out towards Malibu, the hot wind in the palm trees by the road. The music for some reason was wrong, a Beethoven sonata on the cassette and rap on the radio, but she whistled the right song anyway through her teeth: ‘Then she looks in my eyes / It makes me come alive / When she says / “Don't worry, baby, / Everything will turn out all right . . .”' Nothing would happen between them.

Idling one morning in the kitchen, where the sunlight flagged the floor, he read an article about the Ligurian coast of Italy. The sights and only barely evoked atmosphere in the rudimentary travelogue, all olive oil and gnarled enchantment, seemed overpowering. Through the picture window the Pacific Ocean lay like a boundary that marked how far he was from England; yet being so absent made him also want to be elsewhere.

At other times his body quickened with a sense of loss and possibility. It was still feasible for him to change his life. He was being shown an existence that might have been his if he had made other choices. It was too late, but not quite too late. Without practice or testing, however, what could either choice mean? Where was the value in a blind decision with no appeal permitted?

Sitting in Los Angeles airport, Pietro ordered a gin and tonic at the cocktail bar.

It was over. LAX to LHR, the baggage label changed.

He thought of Hannah, and so powerful was his desire to see her that he could sense the cool touch of her skin, he could almost taste the peculiar fragrance of her neck and hair. He pictured her waiting at the barrier in London and how her body would feel when he wrapped his arms about it: the firm, flat waist, the soft tissue of the upper arm; the long slender legs said by Harry to be the most beautiful in
the world. She would be holding James, their third child, now five months old, and he would take him from her. His arms could feel the boy's compact bulk, the weight of the buttocks resting on his own right forearm; he envisaged the toothless, twisted smile; he could smell the sweetness of the baby's hair over the unclosed fontanelle.

Tears stung his eyes as he raised his glass. His body was raging with a sense of mortal urgency. He could not be sure if this was caused by expectation of seeing those he loved, or by the abandonment of America and of the lives he had not led.

At some strange time of night they crossed the Pole. He saw the VACANT sign on the cabin ahead and struggled from his seat. The light in the cubicle didn't come on until he slid the bolt in the door. There was a smell of liquid soap or perhaps the blue disinfectant that swirled in the metal bowl of the lavatory. He splashed water on his face. Since he could never sleep on planes he thought he might as well be as wakeful as possible. Soon they showed a film in which Michael Caine played an American with an English accent unremarked by the other characters. His daughter was sleeping with a man old enough to be her father. There was a thriller subplot with tropical locations, slow wisecracks and a glimpse of nudity.

When he lifted the plastic blind there was a sense of light outside. They had flown from day to premature night, and through the other side. The sky below was bleached and foaming with fatigue. Someone else's dawn was coming up.

A stewardess presented him with a tray, which was breakfast. His mouth furred by red wine and sleeplessness, he drank the orange juice and held out the thin plastic cup for coffee. His stomach churned with acid tiredness. Under a foil cover was a dense, overdone but still warm omelette, cooked light years ago by some hapless immigrant in San Diego. It would lie in his stomach on the back seat of the taxi on the M4 as it went past Hounslow.

IT WAS DARK
when Pietro heard the theatrical whispering at his door. ‘Wake up.' Harry's voice was urgent. ‘It's half past five.'

This was a terrible way to begin a morning on holiday. Harry was standing fully dressed in the corridor outside. ‘Come on,' he said. ‘We're supposed to be in this village by six.'

They tumbled down the steps of the old hotel and out into the first signs of dawn. Harry switched on the headlights of the car. The top of the dashboard was crammed with suncream, dark glasses, postcards and other hot-weather holiday clutter that seemed out of place in the chill morning. They shivered in their shorts and sweaters as the engine started. Pietro stowed their picnic in the back. There was a smell of garlic from the terrine, though the soft cheese was as yet unnoticeable. Harry drove out of the square and found the road east towards Mont Ventoux.

They travelled in silence, each doing his best just to survive the unnatural earliness of the hour and the sense of injustice at having to spoil one of the valued few days of vacation.

In the main square at Bédoin there were signs of reluctant life. At the far end of the sandy expanse was an empty bandstand and a couple of locked pizza lorries. At the near end, where the road bent round to the left, were some small cars, Renaults and Fiats, and a short Provençal man emerging from an alleyway with his arms full of baguettes which he began to distribute.

‘Is this where we're supposed to be meeting them?' said Harry.

‘I think so. Yes, look, there's Patrick.'

A man of about forty, bandy-legged, with black curly hair and a red face, came over and shook their hands. He slapped them on the back and said, ‘Fait froid, hein?' several times, then took them over to a car where he introduced them to half a dozen other men, mostly in their twenties. ‘Philippe, Jean-Pierre, Martin . . .' Hands were shaken, and one of the men handed Pietro a baguette.