‘Sir?’ she said. ‘Sir, we need to have a word with you, about your friend.’
‘My friend?’
I didn’t know who they meant at first. Then I realized that she must be talking about Charlie Hayward. There was another stewardess standing beside her, and a male flight attendant. They didn’t look happy. I remembered that there’d been a bit of fuss a few minutes earlier, when one of them had come to take his tray away, but I’d been busy talking, and hadn’t taken much notice. Anyway, as they now informed me, it was impossible to be sure of the exact timing – not until they’d found out if there was a doctor on the plane – but apparently he’d been dead for at least five or ten minutes.
It was a heart attack, of course. It usually is.
The airline handled it all very delicately, I must say. A week after I’d got home, they sent me a letter, letting me know a few extra details which I have to say were comforting, very comforting. They told me that Charlie Hayward had suffered from heart problems for some time – this was his third attack, they said, in the last ten years – so the news hadn’t come as a complete shock to his wife, although of course she was devastated. He had two daughters, both in their twenties. The body was flown back home from Singapore and he was cremated in Sydney. On the way out to Singapore, though, they’d had no choice but to keep him in the same seat, right next to me. They put a blanket over him and said that I could come and sit with them if I liked, on one of the staff seats near to the galley, but I said no thanks, it was OK. Somehow I thought that would have been rude, disrespectful. Call me fanciful, if you like, but I felt he would have appreciated the company.
Poor old Charlie Hayward. He was the first person I’d really managed to speak to, after taking my decision to reconnect with the world. Not a very auspicious start.
However, things were about to get better.
3
I was the last person to leave the plane after it landed at Singapore. While they lifted Charlie’s body and carried it off, I moved over to another seat, and sat there for a while after the other passengers had gone. Depression came over me. I could feel it. I was used to it by now, and knew how to recognize it. It reminded me of a horror film I had seen once on TV when I was a little boy. This man was trapped in a secret chamber in a big old castle, and the villain of the story pulled a lever which made the roof of the chamber start coming slowly down on top of him. Closer and closer, until it threatened to crush him. That’s what it felt like. It never quite crushed me, of course, but it got close enough that I could feel it, weighing down on my spine, cutting off my freedom of movement, paralysing me. Whenever this happened, I would for some time be physically unable to raise myself, will myself into motion. You could never really tell what was going to bring it on, either. It could be anything. In this case I suppose it was a sort of relapse: having said so much to Charlie, having unburdened myself so shamelessly of so many words, a tidal wave of words finally breaking through the floodgates, after months and months of withdrawal from the world, months made long by silence, by lack of human contact (contact, that is, unmediated by technology) – after all that, and the disaster it had just led to (indirectly or otherwise), I was already suffering something like a nervous reaction. I lapsed into immovable stillness and had no awareness, none at all, of what was going on around me. Finally, I noticed that a stewardess, once again (it was even the same stewardess, I believe) was shaking me gently by the shoulder. ‘Sir?’ she was saying, in a kindly undertone. ‘Sir, we must ask you to leave the plane now. The cleaning staff are waiting to come on board.’
Sleepily I tilted my head towards her and, without a word, rose to my feet in a slow and I suppose trance-like movement. I made my way down the aisle, through Business Class and then out along the walkway towards the arrivals lounge. For some of the time I think the stewardess must have been walking alongside me. She said something like: ‘Are you OK, sir? Would you like someone to come with you?’, but the reply I gave must have been reassuring enough for her to trust me to my own devices.
A few minutes passed. I can’t say for certain where I would have spent them, but after a while I became aware that I was sitting at a cafe table, conscious of an oppressive, sticky heat and surrounded by shops bearing the names of familiar global brands, through which crowds of jetlagged passengers wandered in their own kind of daze, their eyes glazed and sightless, each one threading between the racks and stands and revolving displays with the thoughtless tread of a sleepwalker. I looked down at the liquid in my coffee cup and saw that it appeared to be some sort of cappuccino. Presumably I had ordered it and paid for it. I inserted a finger between my neck and the collar of my shirt in order to wipe away a ring of sweat that had gathered there. As I did so my eyes were drawn to one figure in particular amidst the crowd of somnambulant shoppers. She was a young woman of about twenty-five and my first impression of her was curious. I am not a particularly spiritual person but the first thing I noticed about this woman – or thought that I noticed – was that she was wearing a very colourful blouse. In fact it was probably this burst of colour, making her stand out like a fiercely burning beacon, that had first caught my attention and startled me out of my latest trough of depression. But actually, when I looked at her more closely, her clothes were of quite an ordinary colour and what I must have sensed, instead, was something else about her that was colourful, something internal, some kind of bright and luminous aura. Does that make any sense? As I continued to watch her this aura slowly flickered out and faded away but still there was something compelling and irresistible about her. For one thing, while the surrounding crowds seemed to be drifting ever more slowly, as if in a state of deep hypnosis, this woman had a sense of purpose. A rather furtive sense of purpose, admittedly. She wandered from shop doorway to shop doorway, trying to appear nonchalant but unable to stop herself from looking around her so frequently and so warily that at first I thought that she might be a shoplifter. Since she never actually went into any of the shops, however, I had to discount this theory. She was dressed in a rather masculine way, with a blue denim jacket which seemed quite unnecessary in this kind of heat, and had the sort of short hair and boyish looks which I’ve always found particularly sexy. (Alison used to have the same looks, for instance – Chris’s sister, Alison Byrne – although the last time I saw her, about fifteen years ago, she had started to wear her hair long.) I suppose you would call this woman’s hair reddish, or perhaps strawberry blonde. It looked as though she might have used henna on it. Anyway, the jacket is the important thing, because after a while I began to suspect that she might only be wearing this jacket in order to conceal something underneath it. I came to this conclusion after watching her, I suppose, quite brazenly, for a minute or more, during which time she noticed me and flashed me one or two anxious and irritated glances. Embarrassed, I averted my gaze, turned it towards my now empty coffee cup, and tried to concentrate on something else – in this case, an announcement over the PA system: ‘
‘Are you a policeman or something?’ she asked.
She had an English accent. Quite posh, but with that hint of Mockney that posh young people these days seem compelled to affect.
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, I’m not a policeman.’ She said nothing in response to that, just continued to stand over me, glaring down suspiciously, so I added: ‘Why would you think I was a policeman?’
‘You were staring at me.’
