fork. ‘Not very sharp,’ she says.
‘Who needs them, anyway?’ says Bill. ‘This is awful food.’
‘Oh, it looks all right. I’m hungry. I only had a cup of coffee for my breakfast. There wasn’t time.’
‘You can eat mine too,’ says Bill. ‘I stick as far as possible to a very sensible diet. This stuff is poison, full of toxics and chemicals. It’s far too Yin.’
‘I know,’ said Lise. ‘But considering it’s a snack on a plane —’
‘You know what Yin is?’ he says.
She says, ‘Well, sort of …’in a vaguely embarrassed way, ‘but it’s only a snack, isn’t it?’
‘You understand what Yin is?’
‘Well, something sort of like this — all bitty.’
‘No, Lise,’ he says.
‘Well it’s a kind of slang, isn’t it? You say a thing’s a bit too yin …’; plainly she is groping.
‘Yin,’ says Bill, ‘is the opposite of Yang.’
She giggles and, half-rising, starts searching with her eyes for the man who is still on her mind.
‘This is serious,’ Bill says, pulling her roughly back into her seat. She laughs and begins to eat.
‘Yin and Yang are philosophies,’ he says. ‘Yin represents space. Its colour is purple. Its element is water. It is external. That salami is Yin and those olives are Yin. They are full of toxics. Have you ever heard of macrobiotic food?’
‘No, what is it?’ she says cutting into the open salami sandwich.
‘You’ve got a lot to learn. Rice, unpolished rice is the basis of macrobiotics. I’m going to start a centre in Naples next week. It is a cleansing diet. Physically, mentally and spiritually.’
‘I hate rice,’ she says.
‘No, you only think you do. He who hath ears let him hear.’ He smiles widely towards her, he breathes into her face and touches her knee. She eats on with composure. ‘I’m an Enlightenment Leader in the movement,’ he says.
The stewardess comes with two long metal pots. ‘Tea or coffee?’ ‘Coffee,’ says Lise, holding out her plastic cup, her arm stretched in front of Bill. When this is done, ‘For you, sir?’ says the stewardess.
Bill places his hand over his cup and benignly shakes his head.
‘Don’t you want anything to eat, sir?’ says the stewardess, regarding Bill’s untouched tray.
‘No, thank you,’ says Bill.
Lise says, ‘I’ll eat it. Or at least, some of it.’
The stewardess passes on to the next row, unconcerned.
‘Coffee is Yin,’ says Bill.
Lise looks towards his tray. ‘Are you sure you don’t want that open sandwich? It’s delicious. I’ll eat it if you don’t want it. After all, it’s paid for, isn’t it?’
‘Help yourself,’ he says. ‘You’ll soon change your eating habits, though, now that we’ve got to know each other.’
‘Whatever do you eat when you travel abroad?’ Lise says, exchanging his tray for hers, retaining only her coffee.
‘I carry my diet with me. I never eat in restaurants and hotels unless I have to. And if I do, I choose very carefully. I go where I can get a little fish, maybe, and rice, and perhaps a bit of goat’s cheese. Which are Yang. Cream cheese — in fact butter, milk, anything that comes from the cow — is too Yin. You become what you eat. Eat cow and you become cow.
A hand, fluttering a sheet of white paper, intervenes from behind them.
They turn to see what is being offered. Bill grasps the paper. It is the log of the plane’s flight, informing the passengers as to the altitude, speed and present geographical position, and requesting them to read it and pass it on.
Lise continues to look back, having caught sight of the face behind her. In the window seat, next to a comfortably plump woman and a young girl in her teens, is a sick-looking man, his eyes yellow-brown and watery, deep-set in their sockets, his face pale green. It was he who had handed forward the chart. Lise stares, her lips parted slightly, and she frowns as if speculating on the man’s identity. He looks away, first out of the window, then down towards the floor, embarrassed. The woman does not change her expression, but the young girl, understanding Lise to be questioning by her stare the man behind, says, ‘It’s only the flight chart.’ But Lise stares on. The sick-looking man looks at his companions and then down at his knees, and Lise’s stare does not appear to be helping his sickness.
A nudge from Bill composes her so far that she turns and faces forward again. He says, ‘It’s only the flight chart. Do you want to see it?’ And since she does not reply he thrusts it forward to bother it about the ears of the people in front until they receive it from his hand.
Lise starts to eat her second snack. ‘You know, Bill,’ she says, ‘I think you were right about that crazy man who moved his seat. He wasn’t my type at all and I wasn’t his type. Just as a matter of interest, I mean, because I didn’t take the slightest notice of him and I’m not looking to pick up strangers. But you mentioned that he wasn’t my type and, of course, let me tell you, if he thought I was going to make up to him he made a mistake.’
‘I’m your type,’ Bill says.
