Russell Hoban - Come Dance With Me

‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord,’ said the vicar; ‘he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live …’ I didn’t recall that Dick had any belief in Jesus and I doubted that Jesus believed in Dick. When the vicar got to ‘We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out’ I nodded my head yes and wondered what I’d ever have that I wouldn’t want to leave behind. Now I was humming ‘Nuages’ and I shook my head and went back to my book.

The Woman in Black is only 160 pages but it was slow reading because I kept stopping and thinking my thoughts before going back to the page I was on. Some of it I read again and again, like the part where the narrator hears the sound of a ghostly pony trap, then the neighing of the horse and the cry of a child as they get sucked into the marsh.

I got to the end eventually and it left me with a feeling of dread. So why had I carried on to the end? Good question.

The plane for Honolulu was a 757 but the drinks trolley was the same size as the one on the 777. I didn’t bother with the movies or the headphone music and I didn’t start the Alice Munro book. I closed my eyes and listened to the whale music in my head and watched Django go over the edge of the cliff. This time it was a woman next to me who said, ‘Are you all right?’ American.

‘Why?’ I said.

‘You’re crying.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s just that my eyes water a lot when I’ve had a few drinks.’

‘Oh,’ she said, nodding to show that she understood. She was young and pretty, with long dark hair and a serious face and just a little bit of that bulldog jaw some pretty young Americans have. ‘I don’t feel too happy myself. I was down in San Diego visiting my boyfriend. He’ll be shipping out for the Gulf soon.’

‘Army?’

‘Navy. He’s training dolphins to clear mines.’ She took out her wallet and showed me a photograph of a smiling man in a boat and a smiling dolphin leaping out of the water beside it.

‘Nice-looking guy,’ I said. ‘The dolphin looks happy. I’d have thought they were too smart to muck about with mines.’

‘Leroy — that’s my boyfriend’s name — he says they’re smart but they think it’s cool to hang out with humans. So they’ll do all kinds of things for a few fish, just to be buddies with their trainers.’

‘Does he just send them down to do the work or does he go down with them?’

‘He says he won’t have to get into the water with them once they’ve learnt what to do but I don’t believe him. I think about him over there, down in dark and muddy water with his dolphin. Either of them makes a mistake and Whammo! that’s all she wrote.’

‘Isn’t there still a chance that war won’t happen?’

‘It’ll happen. Bush thinks with his dick. He’s got all those planes and ships and tanks and bombs and he’s got a hard-on for Saddam Hussein. If it wasn’t Saddam it’d be somebody else. A while back it was Osama Bin Laden but you don’t hear much about him any more.’ She stopped talking but her lips were moving while we flew over banks of white clouds that looked as if you could walk on them if you were careful. Far down below was the sea.

‘I had a dream about Leroy’ she said. ‘I must have been underwater. The water was very clear and I could see him swimming toward me. But there were trees between us, thin trees not all that close together but he couldn’t get through.’

‘What happened then?’

‘I woke up with my heart beating fast. What do you think it meant?’

‘Well, there’s the thing with Iraq standing between you. And you could say you won’t be out of the woods until it’s cleared up.’

Her right hand was rubbing the third finger of her left hand, like a close-up in a movie. ‘I want us to get married before he ships out,’ she said, ‘but Leroy isn’t sure. He’s very superstitious and he says it’s like asking for something to happen and I’ll be the widow who gets the folded-up flag at the funeral. But if we don’t get married and it happens, then I’ll always think, at least we could have had that, at least I’d be his widow instead of just a grieving girlfriend.’

‘I’m superstitious too,’ I said. ‘I think if you get married it might keep him safe.’

Her face lit up. ‘I’ll tell him that,’ she said. ‘Thank you. My name’s Elizabeth.’

‘I’m Christabel.’ We shook hands. The captain announced that we were about to begin our descent. The sound of the engines changed and my ears popped. The sky was grey and so was the ocean.

Honolulu tilted into view with white buildings and soon the wheels touched the ground and we kept our seat belts fastened and the backs of our seats upright and so on until finally the captain thanked us for flying American and the time was now ten hours earlier than it was in London. ‘Are you here for business or pleasure?’ Elizabeth said to me as we left the plane.

‘Visiting a friend,’ I said. ‘You?’

‘Delivering ashes,’ she said, ‘to my grandparents. My mom and dad died on 9/11. They were born here and this is the first chance I’ve had to bring them home.’

‘Sorry,’ I said.

She nodded a couple of times. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘You have to move on.’

25 January 2003. That woman who sat next to me on the plane, Christabel, she was crying all right. I had a feeling about her, like that shudder you get when somebody walks over your grave. What she said about keeping Leroy safe by getting married, I wasn’t so sure about that. I didn’t think she knew anything about keeping anybody safe. When we were over the water I did ‘Eternal Father, Strong To Save’ like I always do, singing it in my head:

Eternal Father, strong to save,

Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,

Who biddest the mighty ocean deep

Its own appointed limits keep;

Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,

For those in peril on the sea!

I just do the first verse. I don’t think God needs the whole thing every time.

28 January 2003. I dreamt about a dog we had when I was a boy. Bo, we called him, short for Boris. He was a cross between a German shepherd and a collie, and my father used to walk him twice a day. He was about as old as I was, very quiet and well-mannered except that when he was off the leash he chased cars. One finally hit him the year after my father died. My sisters nursed him devotedly; they didn’t want to lose my father’s dog but his injuries were too severe and he had to be put down. I hadn’t thought about him for the last fifty years or so but here he was in a dream. He was very old and stiff but he took the leash in his mouth and went to the door and looked back at me. ‘Bo!’ I said, ‘Poor old Bo!’ and woke up to a grey day with a cold wind blowing.

For a moment I didn’t know where I was but I felt that something was missing. Then it came back to me — Christabel was on her way to Hawaii for her remembrance day. Yet another mystery. There were always new unknowns with her. In an effort to get my mind off her I phoned Peter Diggs and arranged to meet him for lunch.

I did a morning clinic, then I went to meet Peter at The Daniel Mendoza off Long Acre. I’d first heard about it from a patient who was a betting man with a keen interest in all sporting events. He strongly regretted that boxing had become what he called a namby-pamby sport and claimed that he had several times seen the real (and illicit) bare-knuckle thing. Being Jewish he longed for a new Daniel Mendoza to rise like the golem and show the gentiles how it was done. The restaurant is a dark brown place with prints of Mendoza and other bare-knuckle boxers: Tom Cribb, Jem Belcher, Deaf Burke, Ben Caunt, Bendigo and so on. Also Pierce Egan and various of the Fancy. ‘Patronised by HRH the Prince of Wales 1792,’ said the wooden banner over the bar. A framed poster showed Mendoza coming up to scratch under the words, in large capitals, MENDOZA THE JEW, HEAVYWEIGHT CHAMPION OF ENGLAND. There were several pen-and-ink portraits in which he looked more a poet than a bruiser. Although only five foot seven and a middleweight, he defeated much bigger men to become heavyweight champion and is credited with being the father of scientific boxing. He wore his hair long and curly, possibly with Samson in mind, but this proved his downfall in a bout with ‘Gentleman’ John Jackson who grabbed him by his hair and gave him a beating from which his status never recovered.