by Joan Barfoot
There are arrows and signs for people moving to this country, temporary visitors, people with items to declare and those sailing right through. A woman about Lila’s age, in uniform and perched on a stool in one of the sailing-through booths, looks up startled from a book. “Who are you? What are you doing here? You from that plane?” It’s obvious what plane she means. “They letting you people through already?” She has grooves at the sides of her mouth, and tiny, withery lines running along her upper lip; surely she looks much older than Lila. Or more weathered. How arduous is her life, when she isn’t sitting here?
Lila remembers intending to look up “arduous” and “ardour.” Why was that? “They’re starting to,” she tells the woman.
“There’s supposed to be somebody with you. I thought it was going to be ages yet.”
“It may be for most people, but I checked out fine and I have everything with me, all my documents, so it was a lot quicker for me. Here’s my passport,” handing it over. “My ticket.”
The woman still looks uneasy. “There’s supposed to be staff back there doing identification and claims.”
“There are. A lot of people are helping. I’m lucky, getting through so fast. Well”—Lila smiles disarmingly, gratefully—“I feel incredibly lucky all around. Such a day.”
The woman nods sympathetically, reminded of what Lila has been through, although, Lila thinks, she has no way whatever of knowing. “Awful thing. I expect you’re exhausted.”
“I just want to get away, that’s for sure. Collect myself. Recover.”
“All you have is your handbag?”
“That’s all. Others don’t even have that much.”
“I know. It’s going to be a nightmare. You’ve done the luggage claim?”
“All taken care of.” If, tomorrow or the next day, Lila wants to add up and claim her losses, it will irritate and inconvenience the airline people, but that’s a small concern. Anyway, a few lost possessions are the least of the matter. Lila catches a flicker of her original holiday vision, then it’s gone.
“At least all you lost was luggage.” The woman is typing Lila’s information into her computer. “Must have been horrid.”
Yes, and much more.
Once Tom sorts himself out, he’ll probably go to his conference. That will be good for him, in a concerned, angry, grieving sort of way. At least it’ll be reasonably easy for him to find out Lila’s alive and uninjured. Thanks to this computer, he won’t have to fret about something as basic as that.
There is something about the size and texture of a small rock in Lila’s heart when she considers him. She regrets his worry and sorrow, that’s all.
“Ma’am?” The woman is looking at her sharply—she must have missed something. “Are you sure you’re all right? Were you checked by a doctor?”
“Oh yes, a very thorough and attentive young man.” If that white-coated medical person was a doctor, he was certainly attentive, at least. “I just got a few scrapes. And my clothes are pretty much wrecked, as you see. But we heard three people were killed. Do you know if that’s right? Do you know who?”
She has succeeded in both flustering and diverting the woman. “Oh. Yes. I believe that’s the case, unfortunately. But we’re not giving out names until families are notified.”
Families. Always families. As if they’re necessarily nearest and dearest.
That bitter flash is just an old, bad, irrelevant habit. Bound to happen now and again.
“Only, I heard one was an old woman, and I wondered if it might be someone I had a long chat with on the plane. I didn’t see her afterwards, and I’ve been wondering. Adele Simpson?” Lila also wonders why she’s risking her own capture to find out about someone she didn’t much like in the first place.
Capture?
Well, she is becoming a fugitive of sorts, that’s all she meant.
The woman looks alarmed. “Oh dear. I shouldn’t. Don’t tell anyone. But that is one of the names. I’m terribly sorry. This is all dreadful, just dreadful.” She even reaches out to touch Lila’s arm. Another kind person beneath the uniform, after all, another good sign.
Poor Adele, in her prim, print housedress—was she in any doubt, or was she praying joyfully at the end, however it came? Was she very scared, or in pain? Is she already happy in heaven, her reward for an unforgiving life?
“That’s too bad,” Lila says. “A shame.” Because you can’t assume people will be happier, or better, elsewhere. Or if they get what they claim to want most passionately.
They may have merely fallen into a habit of passionately wanting, forgetting the roots and origins of their desire.
“I’d better get going.” Lila retrieves her passport and ticket. “When the rush starts, you’ll be busy.”
“Do you know where to go? There’s a room where people meeting the passengers are waiting.”
“Thanks, but I wasn’t being met.” The woman looks pitying; Lila may have sounded pathetic. “I was getting together with someone at a hotel in the city.” There, that sounds more interesting. And it’s true, also. That is what she had been going to do.
“You’re sure you’re all right?”
“Absolutely. And very glad to be alive.” Which is entirely and gloriously true. “Thank you.”
After his conference, Tom will go home.
She’ll probably go home as well, although she can’t imagine the flight, getting back on a plane. Will she be able to?
But two weeks from now—that’s infinitely distant, and unpredictable. A past doesn’t vanish, but Lila knows how it sorts itself in the memory in swift, unforeseeable ways.
A future takes surprising turns in an instant, as today has made implacably clear.
Boarding a plane may be a very small matter when the time comes.
These steps she is taking on these wonderfully solid floors, these decisions she is making without deciding them—how strange all this is. She feels in the grip of necessity, inexorability. She is moving in the direction of longings she cannot identify yet, but is quite certain of, nevertheless.
I want, she thinks. I want more.
She wants brilliance. An electric existence. She wants to make her own hair stand on end.
If she goes on without love of a certain kind, she will still sustain a full heart. She will absorb colours and lights and impressions, and will not put words to them, necessarily. Not every experience will have to make sense; not every action will need to be scrutinized. This seems to her an outcome that is, so far, both acute and calming.
She will ride a motorcycle, and have a rosebud tattooed on her butt.
Tom, less readily amused, will have reached his own conclusions.
She will miss their conversations.
She can’t speak for him, he may well feel differently, but she has no desire to uproot love from the organs and veins and small spaces it has twined itself into. This isn’t like anger or anguish demolishing love itself. She imagines that what remains of the two of them will be like cleaning up after a party: the event is over, the spirit is fatigued but cheerful, and there are plates and glasses to be washed, some spillages to be mopped and some festive pictures to be appreciated and put away.
That would strike Tom, no doubt, as chilly, and he would be wounded. He prefers warmer visions, rosier words, softer, more pliant conclusions. He thinks they are easier. She thinks that, in the end, they are not.
She was a child who went fearlessly high on a swing, and flung herself free without thought. She feels exceptionally blessed by the chance to do it again.
It’s quite simple, walking through the terminal without the burden of luggage. She is brisk and invisible, a middle-aged woman no one would notice even if they weren’t absorbed by concerns of their own. It doesn’t matter that she’s dented and bruised, and that her clothing is marked and torn—she has acqui
red the gift not only of being imposing, but also of being unobtrusive, when she desires.
She, on the other hand, notices sounds, movements and most particularly the sweet smell of humans who are merely anxious, not terrified, as if they are knife-pricks in her skin.
So many people at airports embrace for one reason and another, either casually or with passion. That’s pleasing to see.
Passing through the final set of doors, she pauses outside on the sidewalk.
Astonishing: there is the huge dark sky she so recently inhabited, tinged with city brightness. From here it’s a vast blanket overhead, protective and comforting, giving no hint of its perils, or of the transformations it makes necessary.
A slight, blissful breeze carries genuine, cool, city-stink air. The light rain is no longer chilling, and standing here is a miracle.
“Hey, love,” a cabbie calls. “Lift?”
Well yes, she supposes. She can’t stand here forever with her feet planted and her face turned up to the sky. “Please,” she says, and heads towards him.
“Where you going?”
There’s a question, isn’t it, and only momentarily a minor, disappointing one. New lives, like old ones, will be mainly made up of small decisions and details.
Certainly Tom’s quaint little vacation hotel is out of the question. Somewhere, in fact, quite the opposite.
“I don’t have a reservation, but one of the big airport hotels around here, I think. Do you know one that’ll likely have vacancies?”
“Hop in, we’ll find you one. Bags?”
“No luggage.”
Oh dear, it’s tempting to make something symbolic of that, but she resists. It’s the first of what she imagines will be many little, sometimes amusing resistances, and some large ones, too.
She feels slightly drunk, heady, out of her skin.
She also looks like hell, and can expect strange glances at the hotel. Even the cabbie looks so wary as she shifts into the back seat that she laughs. Gosh, that makes people nervous. Funny world, when joy and delight are either annoying or scary.
A whole life ended today, she thinks, but that’s so pompous, she snorts, earning herself another nervous glance. She’s been snorting a lot today, not a very appealing habit.
What on earth is she going to do?
At least she’s happy enough with her first decision: a large, anonymous hotel where tonight she can have a drink and a shower and stare out into darkness, and where in the morning she can call for breakfast and coffee, and sit at the window watching airplanes landing and lifting off. In daylight, that should be stirring, even beautiful; a view that could hold her attention for quite some time.
She will become lonely, and can expect to miss Tom.
Eventually, she’ll have to get out and buy clothes, everything from underwear to coat and sturdy shoes. She pictures doing a good deal of walking, although not exactly where. She’ll also call Patsy and Nell, just as soon as she has enough words.
They’ve each done mad things in their time, and will no doubt have ideas. Perhaps they’ll want to fly over to join her. That would be fun. She’d like to have fun. Would they enjoy motorcycles, would they agree to rosebuds of their own? To going exploring in long, graceful duster coats?
Has she done a mad thing? Like Aunt June, is she stepping from one side of an invisible line to the other, exchanging a difficult, pleasing, quite ordinary life for one of increasingly vast eccentricity? She shrugs, alone in the back seat.
Farewells and irrevocable decisions are always unnerving. Leaping off cliffs, diving with eyes closed, things like that. Fearsome and exhilarating. She may have trouble sleeping. She is ravenously hungry.
Eating incautiously, perhaps she’ll get fat. Something large, in some respect, seems called for. All her restraints and silences, what were they for?
She can’t quite recall.
What she recalls is that, in those hours in the air, she felt most painfully, besides the terror, sorrow at having given in; reconciled herself; forgotten too much. Regret, she supposes. It was a surprise to discover regret.
Also a surprise to discover a capacity for radiance.
“You all right?” the cabbie asks.
Why, was she doing something peculiar?
“I’m fine. I just came in on a plane that was on fire for a while and almost crashed, so I’m still a bit shaky. But fine.”
“My god, did you?” His expression alters instantly from wariness to concern and sympathy. “I’ve got tea if you’d care for a hot drink. Or a blanket, if you’d like that.”
What a kind, human desire it is, to warm other humans—it’s by no means always a matter of anarchy, is it? “Thank you, but I’ll be okay. I feel quite lucky, really.”
She wonders if he’d care to join her for a drink. She wonders what events and circumstances made him into a compassionate cabbie offering warmth at the drop of a hat. There are so many stories, some of them about generosity, kindness and virtue. Along, of course, with tales of massacres and cold-hearted rivers of blood, and ill will, and evil.
She imagines the rough and smooth textures of clothes she will buy, and the cool comfort of boots, and stretching her legs. She sees herself taking long strides, covering miles and miles over the earth. The whoosh of the tires on the dark, rainy road is soothing but also very exciting. She feels as she has sometimes done with Tom: as if she could drive through the night forever.
This is hardly how she expected her day to be ending, when she opened the door to him not so many hours ago.
Even so, here she is, going off on her holiday at last.
Since she is headed for something, she observes the details of her progress with keen and superstitious interest. The cabbie is helpful. The seat is wide, and the upholstery is soft, gentle on her bruises. The night is velvet and her spirit is high. These are all very good signs.
It’s also true that she’s weeping, rather the way Tom did on the plane, without particular movement or sound.
She feels born again, as Adele might have said, meaning something else entirely. She snorts, one last time, as the cab swings towards a hotel lighted wall to wall, floor to skyline. She hopes that at some point Tom will also find something funny, as well as new, about the way today has gone.
When she gets out of the taxi, she finds herself standing under the portico of the high, bright hotel, looking into its busy, anonymous lobby. Where she feels she is standing is at the centre of emptiness, with no sign of horizon. She also sees herself standing far from the centre, balanced on the very edge of invisible, irresistible extremes.
