Russell Hoban - Come Dance With Me

25 January 2003. I was hoping to see Elias in the entertainment suite after the show but he didn’t turn up. I was stuck talking to D.O.A. executives, and when I got clear and rang his number I got the answering machine, so he must have already gone to sleep.

I’d especially wanted to talk to him because I’d be flying to Honolulu in the morning. The tenth anniversary of Django’s death would be the 30th January and I’d booked my flight a couple of weeks before this. I hadn’t told Elias about Django, we hadn’t yet got that far. I’d booked a return flight for the 2nd February, so I wasn’t going to be gone long, but I wanted to hear Elias’s voice before I left.

Every year as the 27th approached I thought of Django as I last saw him and tried to imagine how he’d look now. I’d seen Anthony Hopkins as King Lear at the National some years back, and at the end, when he holds the dead Cordelia in his arms and says:

… no, no, no life!

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat, have life,

And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never.

I wept as quietly as I could while everything spun around me and I tried not to faint. I bought a copy of the play and read those lines until they burned themselves into my brain and now I hear them when I’m brushing my teeth, crossing the road, all kinds of moments when I’m not even thinking of my lost boy. Consciously. Now, before my flight to Honolulu, I kept seeing him with the grey sky and the dark sea beyond as he went over the edge.

I put on my Django Reinhardt record and that brought back Django’s dead father, Adam Freund. I can’t control the pictures in my head, and when the music started I saw Adam shagging the stone sphinx to the tune of ‘Limehouse Blues’. ‘Nuages’ brought back naked Adam, the red lampshade and the spires of the Stephansdom. And ‘Herr Oluf’. And Elias. Can a person be a bad-luck carrier and am I one? Up to now, four men (counting Ron) and my son were dead. I’ve had my share of one-night stands and sport fucking and I don’t know if any of those men who didn’t mean anything to me ran into the Curse of Christabel. Should I break things off with Elias for his own good? Thinking tired me out and I fell asleep and dreamt that Django was with me. ‘Mum,’ he said, ‘I’m tired. Can we go home now?’

‘But we are home,’ I said, and my voice woke me up. My American Airlines flight was due to leave Heathrow at 11:05 but I was advised to arrive three hours early because of security checks. So I ordered a minicab for 07:15, got to Heathrow Terminal 4 at 07:45, wondered if I should phone Elias, decided it was unlucky, loaded my things on a trolley and joined a very slow-moving check-in queue. I eventually reached the counter, and after assuring the woman that I’d packed my own luggage and nobody had given me anything to take on the plane, asked for an aisle seat towards the rear, got a boarding pass, went through Passport Control and the metal detector, and found myself with about an hour and a half to get through before boarding time.

This is the time of year when I feel like a hermit crab without a shell, exposed and vulnerable. But airports have always been safe houses between what’s behind me and what’s in front of me. Except of course no place is safe now. In spite of that I like the smell of blankness and carpet shampoo and I like the stale recycled air and the lighting that’s neither day nor night. I’m comfortable with my book and my ticket and my boarding pass and all the strangers who are between me and the Erlking, the Cyclops, whatever.

I couldn’t help asking myself why, on this tenth anniversary of Django’s death, I was going to the place where he died. The answer will sound strange but I guess that’s how I am. Strange. My night in the Mini Hotel in Honolulu International Airport in 1993 had kept me from falling apart and I wanted to be kept from falling apart now. I’d phoned ahead so I knew that the Mini Hotel had been shut down after 9/11 but I thought that just being in the airport overnight might help me get my head straight about Elias. Did I want to drag him into my bad luck or should I turn him loose?

I had an Aroma coffee and went to WH Smith to get a book. I was thinking of Donna Leon’s latest but The Woman in Black by Susan Hill saw me first and jumped into my hand. I don’t have to buy this, I thought, I’ll just glance at the first couple of pages to see what it’s like. But after the opening lines of the first chapter, ‘Christmas Eve’, it refused to let go of me and I was afraid I’d finish the whole thing before we took off, so I’d need another book for the ten hours to Los Angeles and somehow I missed Donna Leon and was waylaid by Alice Munro’s Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage. Covering all that, it had to be value for money, so I bought it.

I found a seat with a good view of the monitor screens and noticed that there was a Middle-Eastern-looking man three seats away in the same row. Three seats on the other side of him were also vacant. He was reading an Arabic paper and I wondered if there was any way of spotting a suicide bomber just by looking at him. I probably look suicidal as often as not; lots of people with thoughtful faces might be about to do anything at all.

Boarding was at 10:40, and at 10:15 I rang Elias on my mobile. ‘Hello?’ he said.

‘Hi. It’s me. I was hoping to see you last night.’

‘I was hoping to see you too, but the debate on the international situation was too much for me so I left. I tried to reach you on your mobile but you weren’t available.’

‘I’m sorry, but I was surrounded by record company execs and by the time I got away you weren’t available either.’

‘So anyhow, can we meet tomorrow?’

‘That’s why I wanted to see you after the gig. I’m at Heathrow now. My flight’s leaving soon and I’ll be gone for a few days, back on the 2nd February’

‘What are you doing at Heathrow? Where are you going?’

‘Honolulu and Maui. It’s nothing that’s happening now, it’s to do with the past — a kind of remembrance day. I’ll tell you about it when I get back.’ I couldn’t quite say what I wanted to say next.

‘What?’ he said after a few seconds.

‘How do you feel about luck?’ I said.

‘Some days I feel lucky, some I don’t. How about you?’

‘Sometimes I feel unlucky. Sometimes I feel like a bad-luck carrier.’

‘You’re not. Finding you has been the luckiest thing that’s happened to me in a long time.’ Pause. ‘I miss you when you’re not here. When does your return flight get in? I’ll meet you at Heathrow.’

‘Don’t do that — with two long flights and a stopover at LA there are bound to be delays. I’ll come straight to you when I arrive, leave a key for me in case you’re out.’

‘Yes! I’ll leave a key under the right-hand box tree, under the pot so you can let yourself in any time of the day or night.’

‘Right. I’ll see you soon then.’

‘Yes. Please fly carefully’

‘I’ll try. See you soon, God willing.’ I did a phone kiss and rang off. I’d never said ‘God willing’ before. I hadn’t given him a phone kiss before either. Now I almost didn’t want to go.

25 January 2003. ‘A kind of remembrance day,’ she said. Whom was Christabel remembering? Sid Horstmann? A wave of unreasoning jealousy swept over me but then it subsided and left me with the blueness and the dark that had come to me last night at the Hammersmith Apollo. This Saturday was a working day for me: I had a neuropathy piece to finish for the Lancet as well as my aetiology notes to organise. I’m a very disciplined person but today the discipline wasn’t working — I put on a coat and a woollen hat and muffler and went out into the cold and the greyness.