Russell Hoban - Come Dance With Me

The flight attendants did their thing with pointing out the emergency exits and demonstrating the life jackets, we hung about for a while queueing for takeoff, then the 777 got serious, pulled itself together, started rolling, gathered speed and let go of the ground. London tilted away below us and the drinks trolley slowly, slowly arrived. I had two gin and tonics, the worrying man had orange juice and the fat man had two Diet Pepsis. The captain told us about the weather and how high we’d be flying and how long it would take, then we all settled back to breathe the low-oxygen air and wait for lunch. I like those little time-outs between what you’ve just left behind and what’s waiting up ahead; they never last long enough.

I opened The Woman in Black. This was a really classy ghost story of the old-fashioned kind. The Alice Munro book had a bright cover and seemed to have at least one story with a happy ending but the ghost story pulled me first. I was just settling into the atmosphere of it when lunch came and I had coq au vin and some white wine. After lunch I had a bit of a kip and then got well stuck in to Eel Marsh and Nine Lives Causeway and the tides and weathers of the story which took me up to the next drinks, followed by Dover sole and more white wine.

By then the overhead lights were switched off and it was movie time. The menu for the screen on the back of the seat in front gave me several choices including a remake of Solaris. I’ve never seen a good remake and I wasn’t going to watch this one but the title brought back something of the original film that I saw years ago. I remembered water and the sound of water, water in a stream, running over reeds, water in a pond, frozen in winter, water coming down in rain. And then there was the ocean on the planet Solaris. This ocean didn’t actually have water in it but a kind of plasma that reacted to what was in the minds of the men in the space station above it. It took their thoughts and memories and it made copies of people in their lives and sent them up to the station. These were flesh and blood just like the originals. The psychologist at the station was visited by what seemed to be his wife who’d killed herself ten years before. She was confused and frightened — she didn’t know what she was. She couldn’t bear to let him out of her sight, even broke through a steel door to be with him. At first he was so spooked by this that he put her in a rocket and shot her off, but the next day she was back. She loved him and he loved her too, even though he knew she wasn’t really real. ‘Love can only be experienced, it can’t be explained,’ he said. When the replica finally understood what she was she tried to commit suicide but failed. Poor thing — how real is anybody, really? I tried to recall the ending but I couldn’t. I know it was sad.

We were over the ocean while I was remembering Solaris. O God! I thought, if only the ocean beneath us could send up my dead son, alive and well, even if it was only a copy of him, but a warm and breathing Django I could hold in my arms and he would call me Mum.

The swarthy man touched my arm. ‘You all right?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why?’

‘You crying,’ he said.

I put a hand to my face. My cheeks were wet. ‘Eyestrain,’ I said. ‘Too much reading.’

‘Me too,’ he said.

‘Reading too much?’

He shook his head. ‘Too much sad.’

‘How come?’

‘Dead. Gone for ever.’

‘Who?’

He shook his head again and put his hand over his heart. ‘Name is like gravestone in little cemetery inside me,’ he said. ‘I take flowers, go alone.’

‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Little cemetery inside me.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Too much sad.’ He went back to his beads.

The last time I flew into LAX was for a gig at the House of Blues in Hollywood. We had electrical problems with the light rig and the show wasn’t one of our best. As the plane tilted I saw Los Angeles all spread out and sprawling and it just had a flat noplace look. Places do that for me, they change sometimes from one hour to the next; maybe another time it would’ve looked like someplace.

After my arrival at Terminal 4 of the Tom Bradley International Terminal there was a three-hour stopover before I changed planes for the flight to Honolulu. As always in airports there were bodied voices and disembodied ones. The bodied ones accompanied the swarming footsteps and the disembodied ones tried to find people. Señor Manuel Losano was being paged in English and Spanish. No one’s looking for me, I thought. What if I just stayed here and didn’t make any more decisions. But of course doing that would require a decision.

I had a club sandwich and several coffees sitting outside a Daily Grill restaurant that had SATISFACTION SERVED DAILY over its front. I thought that was a pretty big claim and I noticed that satisfaction wasn’t on the menu. I wandered around a little, bought a pair of Gucci sunglasses at the Sunglass Hut, and did a quick browse at WH Smith, which I was surprised to see so far from home. In the window there was a big display of Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard. L. Ron Hubbard! I’d thought he’d had his day and was long gone but here his book was, alive and well in LA. The Scientologists used to have a shop-front recruiting operation in Tottenham Court Road where they tried to get people inside for some kind of testing that involved tin cans as I remember. I guess the California climate favours Scientology and of course they’ve got Tom Cruise and John Travolta which can’t hurt sales. Nobody pulled me in for a tin-can test so I got away from there and walked about smelling stale fries and watching people coming from wherever they’d been and going to wherever they’d be next. There were monitors everywhere with flights that weren’t mine and announcements on the tannoy that had nothing to do with me.

I went halfway down the stairs to the Mezzanine to look at something I’d passed on my way up. At first glance it was like the large diagrams you see in the London Underground but it had moving parts. It was like a pinball machine stood on its side, up on easel legs like a lecturer’s blackboard, and you couldn’t do anything with it but watch it doing its own thing with balls dropping from one level to another in different ways and bells ringing as if it was demonstrating a pattern of meaningless events for no particular reason. ‘You talking to me?’ I said.

A woman with a small boy came along. Tight jeans, pink trainers, pink T-shirt that said LONG TIME GONE, big frizzy hair, unlit fag in her mouth, sunglasses. The boy was wearing a camouflage outfit. He might have been ten or eleven but looked old beyond his years. ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘it’s some kind of game.’

‘OK,’ said the woman, ‘so where’s the joysticks?’

‘Maybe it’s the kind you hold in your hand, only bigger,’ said the boy. They both studied it for a while and said, ‘Tsss.’ The woman had taken off her sunglasses and I saw that she had a black eye.

She put the glasses back on and turned to me. ‘Have you figured this thing out?’

‘Not yet,’ I said.

‘No buttons to push,’ she said. She and the boy tried pressing the glass in various places with no result.

‘Stupid thing,’ said the boy. ‘You can’t do anything with it.’

‘That’s life,’ said the woman, and they moved on.

I found myself humming one of the old Nectarine numbers I’d written, ‘A Long Way Down’.

I was high on the love we’d found,

and now it’s such a long way down …

It was raining the day Dick Turpin lost his footing on a roof and it was raining the day of his funeral. Dick’s mother was there, also his brother and Mrs Brother. Brother gave me a hard look and Mrs looked away. She was wearing a skirt as short as mine but she didn’t have the legs for it. Dick hadn’t ever made a will, so I got everything. I’d certainly earned it, and with his bank account plus the sale of the house and the business, I’d be able to set myself up comfortably in London and sleep in a bed that would never have anybody in it that I didn’t want.