Further Under the Duvet (6 page)

Many years ago I was living in London and about to visit New York for the first time. My sister had moved there four months previously, and I was going to spend Christmas with her. Three nights before the off I began to pack and when I looked in my ‘official things’ drawer for my passport, there it was – gone! Except it couldn’t be. It had sat in that drawer since I’d last needed it, on a trip to Greece the previous summer. I rummaged through bills and stuff expecting it to appear and when it didn’t I took the entire contents out and systematically went through each item one by one – nada. My mouth went a little dry, my heart-rate increased, but I told myself that it
was
here, I just couldn’t see it – hadn’t my mother always told me that I couldn’t find the water in the river?

But unless it had gone invisible, it simply Was Not There and with sweaty hands I began to tear my room apart, going through every pocket of every item of clothing in my wardrobe, looking in old rucksacks and handbags, pulling books out of my bookcase, and although I stumbled across a handful of sandy drachmas and half a bag of inexplicably abandoned Maltesers (still edible, quite nice, actually), there was no passport. Then I launched an attack on the rest of the flat and late into the night I finally had to admit the inadmissible: my
passport wasn’t here. At this stage I was almost whimpering with terror; although my ticket to New York had put a huge dent in my meagre finances, it was non-changeable and non-refundable. If I hadn’t a passport in two days’ time I wouldn’t be going.

I rang my mother in Ireland. There was nothing she could do but, selfish brat that I was, a trouble shared is a trouble doubled, and at least she promised to pray to St Anthony – for those not familiar with the superstitions of Catholicism, the idea is that you pray to St Anthony when you lose stuff and if it turns up you make a donation to the poor box. Under normal circumstances I poured scathing scorn on the notion but right now I was so desperate that I nearly considered doing it myself.

I went to bed in my bomb-site bedroom but I barely slept and got up again at about 5 a.m., dervishing through the silent flat, looking behind boxes of breakfast cereals, inside video cases and when I arrived at work I was a hollow-eyed manic wreck, with the taste of panic in my mouth.

I spilt the terrible story to my boss, Charlotte, and she calmly advised me to apply for a new passport.

‘But it takes weeks to get a passport and I leave in two days’ time!’ I had to try hard not to screech.

‘Ring the Irish Embassy, tell them it’s an emergency and send a courier for an application form.’

Within an hour, the application form was on my desk and Charlotte helped me read through the requirements because I was so frenzied the letters kept dancing in front of my eyes. First I needed a photo so she combed my hair, dispatched me to a nearby photobooth and reminded me to smile. (The
photo is still in my passport; I’m a pretty pistachio-green shade.)

Next, I needed a professional to endorse my photo and my bank manager seemed the obvious choice. However, despite the lively, almost daily correspondence that zipped from her to me, despite the audacious way she addressed me and the intimacy of her advice, she elected not to know me.

So Charlotte got on the phone and tried a magistrate she knew, but he turned out to be on holiday. Undaunted she found a nearby barrister who owed her a favour and was prepared to bend the rules and pretend that he knew me. I nipped round to him, then back to the office where Charlotte told me I could catch up on work later and pushed me out through the door, shouting, ‘Go, go, go!’ like I was an SAS man parachuting into enemy territory.

Then, gasping for breath, I was running through the streets of Belgravia, counting the numbers on the wedding-cake rococo mansions, looking for the Irish Embassy. I found it and panted up the steps to the fancy front door, then back down again with a flea in my ear: the passport office was round the side and in the basement. Down the rickety spiral staircase I went, burst in – and suddenly I was no longer in toney Belgravia but in a sub-post office in Athlone. It was a tiny little place, with four rows of plastic chairs cowering beneath merciless strip lighting and a serving counter with three glass hatches. I grabbed a ticket: number 792. When was my turn? I looked around for the number display and there in hellish red digital was the next number in line. It said 23. My heart almost leapt out of my chest with panic. I’d be here for ever! But no one was in sight, either in the waiting area or behind the counter…

Then from some hidden back room, a plumpish young man appeared, came up to one of the hatches, looked at me and declared, ‘Next!’

I looked in confusion at my ticket.

‘Next,’ he repeated.

‘But…’ I flapped my little piece of paper.

‘Oh we don’t bother with that yoke.’

Fair enough. Up I stepped and blurted out the tragic tale of the missing passport, the cheap, non-refundable, non-changeable ticket, the lonely sister sitting out her first Christmas in New York, and he listened, leaning easily on his elbow, nodding in sympathy. ‘I see, I see, I see. Do you have a couch?’

Nonplussed, I stopped in my tracks. What was going on? Was he trying to sell me furniture?

‘See, you wouldn’t credit the things that get lost down the back of a couch.’

‘I looked down the back of the couch.’

‘But did you
really
look?’ he persisted. ‘Did you put your hand in?’ He undulated his hand in front of my face. ‘Like this?’

Yes, I said. Yes, I did. And he muttered to himself, ‘Looked down back of couch,’ and appeared to tick something on a piece of paper but it was to the side of the glass and I couldn’t really see it properly.

‘Okay. Have you drawers?’

Excuse me?

‘Desk drawers?’ he elaborated. ‘Some of them have a spring mechanism and you’d be amazed what gets caught in them. You really need to give them a good shake.’

I insisted that I had, although none of the drawers in my melamine chest of drawers had any kind of mechanism, but the panic was building again and threatening to choke me.

‘Shook out desk drawer,’ he told himself and seemed to make another tick on the piece of paper.

‘Finally, have you prayed to St Anthony?’ (As God is my witness, I’m not making any of this up.)

I admitted that I personally hadn’t and he looked as though he was gearing up to tell me to go away and come back after I’d had a good pray, then I played my ace. My mother was praying round the clock!

‘She is, is she?’ He studied me carefully.

‘Round the clock,’ I gasped. ‘I swear.’

‘Right,’ he sighed. ‘If St Anthony has been prayed to and it hasn’t turned up, then it really is lost.’ An arm movement that could have been the final tick on his checklist. ‘We’d better organize you a new passport, so.’

Under the glass hatch I slid in my thick bundle of documentation – the application form, photos, birth certificate (which bizarrely I had a copy of at my office) and photocopies of my plane tickets which Charlotte had suggested I bring in case they needed to be convinced of the urgency of my case. Your man picked up my photo. ‘Not the most flattering of pictures,’ he remarked. ‘Mind you, they never are. Right, all of this is in order. All you have to do now is pay.’

‘Here, here.’ I thrust thirty quid at him (which Charlotte had lent me because all my spare cash was in traveller’s cheques awaiting unloading in the Zara on 59th and Lexington).

‘You pay at the Cashiers. That’s the next hatch.’ He slid the bundle of papers under the glass hatch and back to me,
and I stepped three feet to my left to the next hatch, the one that said Cashier. At the same time he stepped three feet to his right. For a moment we eyed each other through the new glass and he said (and I’d say he was joking, I
hope
he was joking), ‘Can I help you?’

Once again I slid the bundle of paper under the glass to him and this time he took the money.

‘Come back tomorrow,’ he said, ‘and we’ll have a new passport for you.’

The following day Charlotte once again gave me time off work to go to the Irish Embassy. When they gave me my pristine new passport I couldn’t let go of it – I kept opening it and closing it and reading my name, just to make sure it was mine – and the following day I was on a plane to New York.

Previously unpublished
.

I know a man who denies that jet lag exists. He regularly flies halfway across the world, marches off the plane after a twenty-seven-hour flight, goes straight into the Auckland office, pausing only to brush his teeth, and immediately starts barking orders and making people redundant. (Or whatever super-macho, no-human-weakness job it is he does.) I want to sue this man. As far as I’m concerned denying jet lag is like denying that the earth is round. I am so prone to jet lag that I even get it when I haven’t been on a plane: I get jet lag when the clocks go back.

(It’s because I’m so in thrall to sleep. I’m grand if I get my habitual sixteen hours a night, but if anything happens to interfere with that, I’m all over the place. I am a
martyr
to my circadian rhythms.)

Naturally, I’ve investigated all the jet-lag ‘cures’: stay away from the jar on the plane; drink plenty of water; eat lightly; do a little exercise; get on to local time patterns immediately; and, most importantly, walk around in the sunlight as soon as you arrive at your faraway destination.

All nonsense, of course: as effective as giving someone a Barbie plaster for a shattered femur. I must admit I don’t trust ‘natural’ solutions to conditions, I like chemicals. I am probably the last person in the Western world who doesn’t
have a homeopath and who still swears by antibiotics. I would
love
it if someone invented an anti-jet-lag drug and I couldn’t care less about side effects, in fact I’d embrace them – dry mouth? Trembling? Blurred vision? Better than being fecking jet-lagged and falling asleep face downwards in my dinner at six in the evening.

But unfortunately, for some things there is no cure but time. Like a hangover or a broken heart, you just have to wait your jet lag out and try to live through it as best you can.

Of all the suggested ‘cures’ I think that trying to get on to local time as quickly as possible is probably the best, but doing it is so phenomenally unpleasant. Walking around on feet I can no longer feel, swimming through air that seems lit with little silvery tadpoles, the pavement lurching towards me… everything takes on a strange, hallucinogenic quality. (Mind you, if you’re that way inclined, it’ll save you a fortune in recreational drugs.)

In Australia, I had the worst ever example of this. In a pitiful attempt to recover from a twenty-four-hour flight and an eleven-hour time difference, Himself and myself thought we’d ‘do a little exercise’ and ‘walk around in the sunlight’ as soon as we arrived.

It was early evening and clutching our bottles of water (‘drink plenty of water’), we staggered about on an area of greenness so verdant that we gradually realized it must be a golf course. Bumping into each other and grumpily apologizing, like we were scuttered, I suddenly saw something that stopped me so abruptly in my tracks it was as if I’d run into an invisible wall. Through the gathering gloom, about twenty
feet away, I saw two kangaroos kicking the CRAP out of each other. They were balancing on their tail and laying into their sparring partner with such powerful
whump
s that I could actually
feel
the impacts. They were kicking each other so hard and fast it was as though they were doing kung-fu.

It was then that I got a bad dose of The Fear. ‘Please tell me,’ I clutched Himself’s arm, ‘please tell me that you see them too.’ (He said, ‘See what?’ but he was only messing, thank Christ.)

However, jet lag isn’t all bad. It’s a great excuse to go out and get pure stotious, on the principle that if you’re sick and psychotic with a hangover you won’t notice the jet lag. Or if you were planning a nervous breakdown, now’s your chance. You’ll be feeling alienated and fearful anyway, so you might as well double up. And my own personal favourite: jet lag affords the perfect opportunity to eat guilt-free Toblerones at two in the morning. Picture it – it’s pitch-black outside, a deep blanket of sleep has settled on whatever strange city you’re in, and suddenly, as if you’ve just been plugged into the mains, you’re AWAKE. You’re super-awake, you’ve never before been this alert in your
life
. You’re so firing on all cylinders that you could go on
Who Wants to be a Millionaire
and win it in fifteen minutes. And you’re also hungry. Savagely so. Your poor stomach is still on home time; it had to miss its breakfast and it’s not best pleased that someone wants to deprive it of its lunch as well. But deep in the bowels of the silent, sleeping hotel, the room-service lads have shut up shop and gone home and it’s a long, long wait until morning.

What choice have you but to shine the luminous light of the
mini-bar into the darkened room and select an overpriced, supersized bag of M&Ms and clamber back into bed to eat yourself back to sleep.

See? Not all bad.

A version of this was first published in
Abroad,
July 2004
.

‘It is better to travel than to arrive.’

Whoever said that should get his head examined. It is NOT better to travel. To travel is AWFUL and to arrive is LOVELY.

The only time it’s not entirely unbearable to travel is when you’re on the Orient Express, and your daily champagne allowance would fell an elephant. Or on a cruise liner the size of a small country, and you’re sailing from place to place but it doesn’t feel like it, the same way you don’t feel the earth turning at four million miles a day (or whatever it is).

Let’s look at how awful it is to TRAVEL, will we? I won’t even mention the car-clogged crawl to the airport, the dog-eat-dog scramble for parking and the overland trek from the long-stay car park to the departures hall. (All I’ll say is that I’ve heard frequent travellers discussing the feasibility of paying homeless people to sleep in a space in the short-stay A car park, so that it’ll be reserved for them for when they need it.)