The World and Other Places (8 page)

O’Brien was confused. She hadn’t had time to brush her hair. Was it standing on end? She went into the Ladies and peered into the mirror. She was blonde.

‘It really suits you,’ said Kathleen, from Fabrics and Furnishings. ‘You should do more with your make-up now.’

‘Do more?’ thought O’Brien, who did nothing. She decided to go back home, but in the lift on the way out, she met the actor who had come to play Santa …

‘It’s awful in the Grotto. It’s made of polystyrene and everyone knows that’s bad for the lungs.’ O’Brien sympathised.

‘Listen,’ said Santa, ‘there’s two dozen inflatable gnomes in the basement. I’ve got to blow them up. If you’ll help me, I’ll buy you lunch.’

For the first time in her life O’Brien abandoned herself to chaos and decided it didn’t matter. What surprises could remain for a woman who had been visited in the night by a Non-Singing Telegram and subsequently turned blonde? Blowing up gnomes was a breath of fresh air.

‘I like your hair,’ said the actor Santa.

‘Thanks,’ said O’Brien, ‘I’ve only just had it done.’

At the vegetarian cafe where every lentil bake came with its own sprig of holly, Santa asked O’Brien if she would like to come for Christmas dinner.

‘There won’t be any roast corpse though.’

‘That’s all right,’ said O’Brien, ‘I’m not a vegetarian but I don’t eat meat.’

‘Then you are a vegetarian.’

‘Aren’t you supposed to join something?’

‘No,’ said Santa. ‘Just be yourself.’

In the mirror on the wall O’Brien smiled. She was starting to like being herself. She didn’t go back to work that afternoon. She went shopping like everybody else. She bought new clothes, lots of food, and a set of fairy lights. When the man at the stall offered her a cut price Christmas tree, she shouldered it home. Her landlady saw her arriving.

‘You are early today,’ she said very slowly. ‘I see you are going to get pine needles on my carpet.’

‘Thanks for the sardines,’ said O’Brien. ‘Have a bag of satsumas.’

‘Your hair is not what it was last night. Did something happen to you?’

‘Yes,’ said O’Brien, ‘but it’s a secret.’

‘I hope it was not a man.’

‘No it was a woman.’

Her landlady paused, and said, ‘I am going now to listen to the Gospel according to St Luke on my wireless.’

O’Brien put the potatoes in the oven and strung her window with fairy lights. Outside the sky was strung with stars.

At eight o’clock, when Santa arrived, wet and cold and still in uniform, O’Brien lit the candles beneath the tree. She said,

‘If you could make a wish what would it be?’

‘I’d wish to be here with you.’

‘Even if I wasn’t blonde?’

‘Even if you were bald.’

‘Merry Christmas,’ said O’Brien.

When I was a boy I made model aeroplanes.

We never had the money to go anywhere, sometimes we didn’t have the money to go to the shop. There were six of us at night in the living room, six people and six carpet tiles. Usually the tiles were laid two by three in a dismal rectangle, but on Saturday night, aeroplane night, we took one each and sat cross legged with the expectation of an Arabian prince. We were going to fly away, and we held on to the greasy underside of our mats, waiting for the magic word to lift us.

Bombay, Cairo, Paris, New York. We took it in turns to say the word, and the one whose word it was, took my model aeroplane and spun it where it hung from the ceiling, round and round our blow-up globe. We had saved cereal tokens for the globe and it had been punctured twice. Iceland was held together by Sellotape and Great Britain was only a rubber bicycle patch on the panoply of the world.

I had memorised the flight times from London Heathrow to anywhere you could guess at in the world. It was my job to announce our flying time, the aircraft data, and to wish the passengers a comfortable trip. I pointed out landmarks
on the way and we would lean over the fireplace to take a look at Mont Blanc or crane our necks round the back of the settee to get a glimpse of the Rockies.

Half way through our trip, Mother, who was Chief Steward, swayed down the aisle with cups of tea and toast and Marmite. After that, Dad came forward with next week’s jobs around the house scribbled on little bits of paper. We dipped into the pouch, and somebody, the lucky one, would get Duty Free on theirs, and they didn’t have to do a thing.

When we reached our destination, we were glad to stand up and stretch our legs. Then my sister gave us each a blindfold. We put it on, and sat quietly, dreaming, imagining, while one of us started talking about the strange place we were visiting.

How hot it is getting off the plane. Hot and stale like opening the door of a tumble drier. There are no lights to show us where to go. Death will be this way; a rough passage with people we have never met and a hasty run across the tarmac to the terminal building.

Inside, in the day-for-night illumination, a group of Indians were playing cellos. Who are these orchestral refugees? Can it be part of the service? Beyond them, urchins with bare feet are leaping up and down with ragged cardboard signs, each bearing the name of someone more important
than ourselves. These are the people who will be whisked away in closed cars to comfortable beds. The rest of us will search for the bus.

Luggage. Heaven or Hell in the hereafter will be luggage or the lack of it. The ones who recognised that love is enough and that possessions are borrowed pastimes, will float free through the exit sign, their arms ready to hug their friends, their toothbrush in their pocket. The ones who stayed up late, gathering and gathering like demented bees, will find that you can take it with you. The joke is that you have to carry it yourself.

Here comes the bus. It has three wheels, maybe four, and the only part noisier than the engine is the horn. All human life is here. I am travelling between a chicken coop and a fortune teller. The chickens peck at my legs and suddenly the fortune teller grabs my palm. She laughs in my face.

‘When you grow up you will learn to fly.’

For the rest of the journey I am bitten by mosquitoes.

At last we have reached the Hotel Cockroach. Dusty mats cover the mud floor and the Reception Clerk has an open wound in his cheek. He tells me he was stabbed but not to worry. Then he serves me lukewarm tea and shows me my room. It has a view over the incinerator and is farthest from
the bathroom. At least I will not learn to think highly of myself.

In the darkness and the silence I can hear, far below, the matter of life continuing without me. The night-shift. What are they doing, these people who come and go, cleaning, bringing food, wanting money, wanting to fight. What will they eat? Where will they sleep? Do they love someone? How many of them will see morning? Will I?

Dreams. The smell of incense and frangipani. The moon sailing on her back makes white passages on the dun floor. The moon and the white clouds at the window. How many times have I seen it? How many times do I stop and look as if I had never seen it before? Perhaps it is true that the world is made new again every day but our minds are not. The clamp that holds me will not let me go.

During the night a mouse gave birth behind the skirting board.

At the end of my story, my family and I swopped anecdotes and exchanged souvenirs. Later, we retired to bed with the weariness of a traveller’s reunion. We had done what the astronauts do, travelled in space that did not belong to us, uncoupled ourselves from time.

That night, I knew I would get away, better myself. Not because I despised who I was, but because I did not know who I was. I was waiting to be invented. I was waiting to invent myself.

The pilot and I went up in the aeroplane. It was a Cessna, modern and beautiful, off white with a blue stripe right round it and a nose as finely balanced as a pedigree muzzle. I wanted to cup it in both hands and say, ‘Well done boy.’

In spite of the air conditioned cockpit, overwarm and muzzy in an unexpected economy class way, the pilot had a battered flying jacket stuffed behind his seat. It was authentic, grubby sheepskin and a steel zip. I asked him why he needed it.

‘Romance,’ he said, grinning. ‘Flying is romantic, even now, even so.’

We were under a 747 at the time, and I thought of the orange seats crammed three abreast on either side, and all the odds and ends of families struggling with their plastic trays and beach gear.

‘Is that romantic?’ I said, pointing upwards.

He glanced out of the reinforced glass.

‘That’s not flying. That’s following the road.’

For a while we travelled in silence. I watched him; strong jaw with necessary stubble. Brown eyes that never left the sky. He was pretending to be the only man in the air. His dream was the first dream, when men in plus fours and motorcycle goggles pedalled with the single mindedness of a circus chimp to get their wooden frames and canvas wings upwards and upwards and upwards. It was a solo experience even when there were two of you.

What did Amy Johnson say? ‘If the whole world were flying beside me I would still be flying alone.’ Rhetoric, you think, frontier talk. Then you reach your own frontier and it’s not rhetoric anymore.

My parents were so proud of me when I joined the Air Force. I stood in our cluttered living room in my new uniform and I felt like an angel on a visit. I felt like Gabriel come to tell the shepherds the Good News.

‘Soon you’ll have your own wings,’ said my mother.

My father had bought a bottle of Scotch.

In my bedroom, the model aeroplanes had been carefully dusted. Sopwith Camel. Spitfire. Tiger Moth. I picked them up one by one and turned over their balsa wood frames and rice paper wings. I never used a kit. What hopes they carried. More than the altar at church. More than a good school report. In the secret places, under the fuselage, stuck to the tail-fin, I had hidden my hopes.

My mother came in. ‘Will you take them with you?’ I shook my head. I’d be laughed at, made fun of. Yet each of us in our bunks at lights-out would be thinking of model aeroplanes and the things from home we couldn’t talk about anymore.

She said, ‘I gave them a wipe anyway.’