Eventually, the Airbags dented themselves into their seats. Robert had never seen such vague faces, mere sketches on the immensity of their bodies. Even the father’s relatively protuberant features looked like the remnants of a melted candle. As she squeezed into her aisle seat, Mrs Airbag turned to the long queue of obstructed passengers, a brown smudge of tiredness radiating from her faded hazel eyes.
‘Thank you for your patience,’ she groaned.
‘It’s sweet of her to thank us for something we haven’t given her,’ said Robert’s father. ‘Perhaps I should thank her for her agility.’
Robert’s mother gave him a warning look. It turned out they were in the row behind the Airbags.
‘You’re going to have to put the armrests down for takeoff,’ Linda’s father warned her.
‘Mom and me are sharing these seats,’ giggled Linda. ‘Our tushes are expanding!’
Robert peeped through the gap in the seats. He didn’t see how they were going to get the armrests down.
After meeting the Airbags, Robert’s sense of softness spread everywhere. Even the hardness of some of the faces he saw on that warm and waxy arrival afternoon, in the flag-strewn mineral crevasses of mid-town Manhattan, looked to him like the embittered softness of betrayed children who had been told to expect everything. For those who were prepared to be consoled there was always something to eat; a pretzel stall, an ice-cream cart, a food-delivery service, a bowl of nuts on the counter, a snack machine down the corridor. He felt the pressure to drift into the mentality of grazing cattle, not just ordinary cattle but industrialized cattle, neither made to wait nor allowed to.
In the Oak Bar, Robert saw a row of men as pale and spongy as mushrooms, all standing on the broad stalks of their khaki trousers in front of the cigar cabinet. They seemed to be playing at being men. They sniggered and whispered, like schoolboys who were expecting to be caught out, to be made to remove the cushions they had stuffed under their pastel button-down shirts, and unpeel the plastic caps which made them look as if they were already bald. Watching them made Robert feel so grown up. He saw the old lady on the next table drape her powdered lips over the edge of her cocktail glass and suck the pink liquid expertly into her mouth. She looked like a camel trying to hide its braces. In the convex reflection of the black ceramic bowl in the window he saw people come and go, yellow cabs surge and slip, the spinning wheels of the park carriages approaching until they grew as small as the wheels of a wristwatch, and disappeared.
The park was bright and warm, crowded with sleeveless dresses and jackets hooked over shoulders. Robert felt the heightened alertness of arrival being eroded by exhaustion, and the novelty of New York overlaid by the sense that he had seen this new place a thousand times before. Whereas the London parks he knew seemed to insist on nature, Central Park insisted on recreation. Every inch was organized for pleasure. Cinder paths looped among the little hills and plains, past a zoo and a skating rink, quiet zones, sports fields and a plethora of playgrounds. Headphoned rollerbladers pursued a private music. Teenagers scaled small mounds of bronze-grey rocks. A flute player’s serpentine music echoed damply under the arch of a bridge. As it faded behind them, it was replaced by the shrill mechanical tooting of a carousel.
‘Look, Mama, a carousel!’ said Thomas. ‘I want to go on it. I can’t resist doing that, actually.’
‘OK,’ said Robert’s father with a tantrum-avoiding sigh.
Robert was delegated to take Thomas for a ride, sitting on the same horse as him and fastening a leather belt around his waist.
‘Is this a real horse?’ said Thomas.
‘Yes,’ said Robert. ‘It’s a huge wild American horse.’
‘You be Alabala and say it’s a wild American horse,’ said Thomas.
Robert obeyed his brother.
‘No, Alabala!’ said Thomas sharply, waving his index finger. ‘It’s a carousel horse.’
‘Whoops, sorry,’ said Robert as the carousel set in motion.
Soon it was going fast, almost too fast. Nothing about the carousel in Lacoste had prepared him for these rearing snorting horses, their nostrils painted red and their thick necks twisted out ambitiously towards the park. He was on a different continent now. The frighteningly loud music seemed to have driven all the clowns on the central barrel mad, and he could see that instead of being disguised by a painted sky studded with lights, heavily greased rods were revolving overhead. Along with the violence of the ride, this exposed machinery struck him as typically American. He didn’t really know why. Perhaps everything in America would show this genius for being instantly typical. Just as his body was being tricked by a second afternoon, every surprise was haunted by this sense of being exemplary.
Soon after they left the carousel, they came across a vibrant middle-aged woman bent over her lapdog.
‘Do you want a cappuccino?’ she asked, as if it must be a tremendous temptation. ‘Are you ready for a cappuccino? Come on! Come on!’ She clapped her hands together ecstatically.
But the dog strained backwards on his leash, as if to say, ‘I’m a Dandie Dinmont, I don’t drink cappuccino.’
‘I think that’s a clear “no”,’ said Robert’s father.
‘Shh…’ said Robert.
‘I mean,’ said Thomas, removing his thumb from his mouth as he reclined in his stroller, ‘I think that’s a clear no.’ He chuckled. ‘I mean, it’s incredible. The little doggie doesn’t want a cappuccino!’ He put his thumb back in his mouth and played with the smooth label of his raggie.
After another five minutes his parents were ready to head back to the hotel, but Robert caught a glimpse of some water and ran forward a little further.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘a lake.’
The landscaping created the impression that the far shore of the lake lapped against the base of a double-towered West Side skyscraper. Under the gaze of this perforated cliff, T-shirted men hauled metal boats past reedy islands, girlfriends photographed each other laughing among the oars, immobile children bulged in blue life jackets.
‘Look,’ said Robert, not quite able to express how astonishingly typical it all seemed.
‘I want to go on the lake,’ said Thomas.
‘Not today,’ said Robert’s father.
‘But I want to,’ he screamed, tears instantly beading his eyelids.
‘Let’s go for a run,’ said Robert’s father, grabbing the stroller and sprinting down an avenue of bronze statues, Thomas’s protests gradually replaced by cries of ‘Faster!’
By the time they caught up with him, Robert’s father was bent double over the handles of the stroller, getting his breath back.
‘The selection committee must have been based in Edinburgh,’ he gasped, nodding at the giant statues of Robert Burns and Walter Scott, stooped beneath the weight of their genius. A little further on a much smaller sprightly Shakespeare sported a period costume.
The Churchill Hotel where they were staying had no room service, and so Robert’s father went out to buy a kettle and some ‘basic provisions’. When he got back, Robert could smell the fresh whiskey on his breath.
‘Jesus,’ said his father, fishing a box out of his shopping bag, ‘you go out to buy a kettle and you come back with nothing less than a Travel Smart Hot Beverage Maker.’
Like Linda’s and Mom’s unconstrained tushes, phrases seemed to feel entitled to take up as much room as they could. Robert watched his father unloading tea and coffee and a bottle of whiskey from a brown-paper bag. The bottle had already been drunk from.
‘Look at these filthy curtains,’ said his father, seeing Robert calculating the proportion of the bottle that was already empty. ‘The reason why the rest of New York is breathing lovely clean air is that we’ve got these special pollution filters in our room sucking all the dirt out of the atmosphere. Sally said that the decoration in this place “grows on you” – that’s exactly what I’m worried about. Try not to touch any of the surfaces.’
Robert, who had
been excited to be staying in any hotel at all, started to look sceptically at his surroundings. A Chinese carpet in mouse’s-underbelly pink, with a medal-lioned pictogram at the centre, gave way to the greasy French provincial upholstery of the sofa and armchair. Above the sofa, against the buttercup walls, an Indian tapestry of women dancing rigidly by a well, with some cows in the foreground, stood opposite a big painting of two ballerinas, one in a lemon-yellow and the other in a rose-pink tutu. The bath was as cratered as the moon. The chrome had greyed on the taps and the enamel was stained. If you didn’t really need a bath before getting in it, you certainly would afterwards. The view from his parents’ room, where Thomas was bouncing up and down on the bed shouting, ‘Look at me! I’m an astronaut!’, gave onto a rusty air-conditioning system that throbbed a few feet beneath the ill-fitting window. From the drawing room, where he was going to sleep on the sofa bed with Thomas (or, knowing Thomas, where his father was going to sleep after Thomas had taken over his mother’s bed), there was a perfect view of the sheet rock that covered the neighbouring skyscraper.
‘It’s like living in a quarry,’ said his father, splashing a couple of inches of whiskey into a glass. He strode over to the window and pulled down the grey plastic blind. The pole holding the blind crashed down onto the drawing room’s air-conditioning unit with a hollow clang.
‘Bloody hell,’ he said.
Robert’s mother burst out laughing. ‘It’s only for a few nights,’ she said. ‘Let’s go out to dinner. Thomas isn’t going to get back to sleep for ages. He had three hours on the plane. What about you, darling?’ she asked Robert.
‘I want to motor on. Can I have a Coca-Cola?’
‘No,’ said his mother, ‘you’re quite excited enough already.’
‘Apple and cinnamon flavour,’ muttered Robert’s father, as he continued to unpack the shopping. ‘I couldn’t find any oats that taste of oats or apples that taste of apples, only oats that taste of apples. And cinnamon, of course, to blend with the toothpaste. A less sober man might end up brushing his teeth with oats, or having a bowl of toothpaste for breakfast – without noticing. It’s enough to drive you mad. If there aren’t any additives they boast about that too. I saw a packet of camomile tea that said “Caffeine Free”. Why would camomile have any caffeine in it?’ He took out the last package.
‘Morning Thunder,’ said Robert’s mother. ‘Isn’t Thomas enough morning thunder already?’
‘That’s your trouble, darling, you think Thomas can substitute for everything: tea, coffee, work, social life…’ He let the list hurtle on in silence, and then quickly buried the remark in more general commentary. ‘Morning Thunder is very literary, it just has added quotations.’ He cleared his throat and read out loud, ‘“Born often under another sky, placed in the middle of an always moving scene, himself driven by an irresistible torrent which draws all about him, the American has no time to tie himself to anything, he grows accustomed only to change, and ends by regarding it as the natural state of man. He feels the need of it, more he loves it; for the instability, instead of meaning disaster to him, seems to give birth only to miracles all about him.” – Alexis de Tocqueville.
‘So you see,’ he said, ruffling Robert’s hair, ‘wanting to “motor on” is in perfect keeping with the mood of this country, at least in 1840, or whatever.’
Thomas clambered onto a table whose protective circle of glass was about a foot less wide than the table itself, leaving the mulberry polyester tablecloth exposed at the edges.
‘Let’s go out to a restaurant,’ said Robert’s mother, lifting him gently into her arms.
Robert felt the sense of almost violent silence in the lift, made up of the things that his parents were not saying to each other, but also caused by the aroma of mental illness surrounding the knobbly headed lift operator who informed them with pride, rather than the apologies Robert felt they deserved, that the lift had been installed in 1926. Robert liked some things to be old – dinosaurs, for instance, or planets – but he liked his lifts brand new. The family’s longing to escape the red velveteen cage was explosive. While the madman jerked a brass lever back and forth, the lift lurched around in the vicinity of the ground floor and finally came to rest only an inch or two below the lobby.
In the fading light, they walked over glittering pavements, steam surging from corner drains and giant grilles replacing the paving stones for feverishly long stretches. Robert refused to give in to the cowardice of avoiding them altogether, but he walked on them reluctantly, trying to make himself lighter. Gravity had never seemed so grave.
‘Why do the pavements glitter?’ he asked.
‘God knows,’ said his father. ‘It’s probably the added iron, or the crushed quotations. Or maybe they’ve just had the caffeine sucked right out of them.’
Apart from a few yellowing newspaper articles displayed in the window, and a handwritten sign saying GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS, Venus Pizza gave no hint of the disgusting food that was being prepared indoors. The ingredients of the salads and pizzas seemed to fit in with the unreflecting expansion which Robert had been noticing since Heathrow. A list would start out reasonably enough with feta and tomato and then roll over the border into pineapple and Swiss cheese. Smoked chicken burst in on what had seemed to be a seafood party, and ‘all the above’ were served with French fries and onion rings.
‘Everything is “mouthwatering”,’ said Robert; ‘What does that mean? That you need a huge glass of water to wash away the taste?’
His mother burst out laughing.
‘It’s more like a police report on what they found in someone’s dustbin than a dish,’ his father complained. ‘The suspect was obviously a tropical-fruit freak with a hearty love of Brie and shellfish,’ he muttered in an American accent.
‘I thought French fries were called Freedom fries now,’ said Robert.
‘It’s cheaper to write GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS than reprint a hundred menus,’ said his father. ‘Thank goodness Spain joined the coalition of the willing, otherwise we’d be saying things like, “Mine’s a Supreme Court omelette with some Freedom fries on the side.” English muffins will probably survive the purge, but I wouldn’t go round asking for Turkish coffee after the way they behaved. I’m sorry.’ Robert’s father sank back into the booth. ‘I had such a love affair with America, I suppose I feel jilted by its current incarnation. Of course it’s a vast and complex society, and I have great faith in its powers of self-correction. But where are they? What happened to rioting? Satire? Scepticism?’
‘Hi!’ The waitress wore a badge saying KAREN. ‘Have you guys made a menu selection? Oh,’ she sighed, looking at Thomas, ‘you are gorgeous.’
Robert was mesmerized by the strange hollow friendliness of her manner. He wanted to set her free from the obligation to be cheerful. He could tell she really wanted to go home.
His mother smiled at her and said, ‘Could we have a Vesuvio without the pineapple chunks or the smoked turkey or…’ She started laughing helplessly. ‘I’m sorry…’
‘Mummy!’ said Robert, starting to laugh as well.
Thomas scrunched up his eyes and rocked back and forth, not wanting to be left out. ‘I mean,’ he said, ‘it’s incredible.’
‘Maybe we should approach this from the other direction,’ said Robert’s father. ‘Could we have a pizza with tomato, anchovy and black olives.’
‘Like the pizzas in Les Lecques,’ said Robert.
‘We’ll see,’ said his father.
Karen tried to master her bewilderment at the poverty of the ingredients.
‘You want mozzarella, right?’
‘No thanks.’
‘How about a drizzle of basil oil?’
‘No drizzle, thank you.’
‘OK,’ she said, hardened by their stubbornness.
Robert slid across the Formica table and rested his head sideways on the pillow of his folded arms. He felt he had been trapped all day in an argument with his body: confined on the plane wh
en he was ready to run around, and running around now when he should have been in bed. In the corner a television with the sound turned down enough to be inaudible, but too little to be silent, radiated diagonally into the room. Robert had never seen a baseball game before, but he had seen films in which the human spirit triumphed over adversity on a baseball field. He thought he could remember one in which some gangsters tried to make a sincere baseball star deliberately lose a game, but at the last moment, just when he was about to throw the whole thing away and the groans of disappointment from the crowd seemed to express the whole unsatisfactoriness of a world in which there was nothing left to believe in, he went into a trance and remembered when he had first hit a ball a long way, into the middle of a wheat field in the middle of America. He couldn’t betray that amazing slow-motion sky-bound feeling from his childhood, and he couldn’t betray his mother who always wore an apron and told him not to lie, and so he hit the ball right out of the stadium, and the gangsters looked a bit like Karen when she took the pizza order, only much angrier, but his girlfriend looked proud of him, even though the gangsters were standing either side of her, because she was basically like his mother with much more expensive peach-coloured clothes, and the crowd went crazy because there was something to believe in again. And then there was a car chase and the gangsters, whose reflexes were not honed by a lifetime in sports and whose bad character turned into bad driving on a crucial bend, crashed their car and exploded.
In the game on television the gangsters seemed to be having much more success and the ball hardly got hit at all. Every few minutes advertisements interrupted the play and then the words WORLD SERIES in huge gold letters spun out of nowhere and glinted on the screen.
‘Where’s our wine?’ said his father.
‘Your wine,’ Robert’s mother corrected him.
He saw his father clench his jaw and swallow a remark. When Karen arrived with the bottle of red wine, his father started drinking decisively, as if the remark he had not made was stuck in his throat. Karen gave Robert and Thomas huge glasses of ice stained with cranberry juice. Robert sipped his drink listlessly. The day had been unbearably long. Not just the pressurized biscuit-coloured staleness of the flight, but the Immigration formalities as well. His father, who had joked that he was going to describe himself as an ‘international tourist’ on the grounds that that was how President Bush pronounced ‘international terrorist’, managed to resist the temptation. He was nevertheless taken into a side room by a black female Immigration officer after having his passport stamped.
The Patrick Melrose Novels Page 56
