by Adam Foulds
“I wanna try.”
“Come to momma. Let’s feed yer up.”
The tissue had a neutral, pharmaceutical flavour. He folded it into his mouth, sipped water from the tap. Virginia encouraged him. With some strain, he manoeuvred it around and swallowed. He felt it travelling down. “See, it’s not so hard?” she said. A communion of nothingness. “Delicious,” he said. “Tissues are going to be my number one food group. Now how about that sugar?”
“Oh that. You still want that.”
He came while somebody was knocking on the door. They emerged as one of the signifiers of a good party—the couple who leave the bathroom together after a suspiciously long time.
“Drink? Drugs?” he said. “Another line? Let’s do another line.”
Henry developed a theory that he explained to Virginia. It was about acting and film and how a film was a finished thing, sealed, the time inside it over. You’re watching the past happening in the present. It’s another dimension. Like where dead people are. That’s where he wanted to be, where the dead people are.
“This is the most cokey coke talk I’ve heard for a long time. You should write this down. You’ll enjoy it in the morning.”
“There are like Thai women arriving. Are you seeing this?”
“I am. Well, my sisters must not be putting out. They’ve called the professionals.”
“That is what it is, isn’t it? That is kind of gnarly. We’re in the gnarly stage of the party. Shall we go somewhere?”
“Where can we go?”
“Into the desert. I want to go into the desert. I’ll ask that guy, Littlehampton or whatever he was called. We’ll go out for a drive. This is a very good idea.”
Henry climbed over the back of the sofa. “There he is. Hey, you, sir!”
Ilham agreed. “If you haven’t been out there, you’ve got to see it.”
*
Henry wound down his window to let the air stream in. He turned to Virginia, holding her hair flat against her head to stop it whipping around. “I have to go tomorrow,” he said.
“I know.”
“I like you.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.”
“Don’t worry that you’re tearing me apart here. I know what’s going on. A three-day vacation.”
“That kiss on the cheek? I didn’t mean that.”
“Just enjoy yourself.”
“I will miss you,” he said, and, though he was pretty sure he didn’t mean it, he did feel it. For the moment he was sad, although another thought started to twist and change that emotion: in a few days he would be meeting Sofie Hadermann.
Ilham turned off the road. The car moved over desert surface, launching and sinking, launching and sinking.
“Woooh!” Henry gripped the handle in his door. Virginia hung on to his arm.
“Okay,” Ilham shouted. “This is far enough.” He switched the car off. They smiled at each other as they plunged into silence. “Go out and have a look,” Ilham said.
They climbed out of the car into the dark moonscape. “What planet are we on?” Henry said.
“A fucked-up old bit of earth,” Virginia said.
“Look up,” Ilham said. “That’s why you come out here.”
“Oh my God,” Henry said. “Virginia, are you seeing this?”
“Lots of stars,” she said.
“Like so many. I’ve never seen them like this,” Henry said.
“Grew up with them,” she said. “Haven’t seen ’em for a while.”
“I need to … I’m sorry …” He wandered off on his own, looking upwards, stumbling softly until he felt he was alone. He fell down backwards onto the cold grip of the ground and looked up at the packed lights in the sky. He could see the long luminous cloud of the Milky Way, the whole entire galaxy he lived in, stars so many and so far that they were a veil of light. He could see stars behind stars. He’d never seen the night sky look three-dimensional before. There all the time. All the time. There all the time behind everything. Lying still, intoxicated, he felt the earth sway, the surface of the earth moving. The stars slid in his vision. He had to keep looking back at a certain point to reset them. The brilliant white fires. The endless space. It was awesome. His mind quailed. He was tired and sad and exhilarated. He felt a kind of exaltation in which happiness and despair were indistinguishable. Clichéd thoughts arrived—how big the universe is, how tiny he was, how alone—were unavoidable. Tiny and struggling. How nice it would be not to have to try, not to be a person, not to be himself at all.
Virginia called for him. “Hey, you! Where’d you go? We’re waiting for you.”
2
Flight
It was time to go. The number of her boarding gate had appeared when the screen refreshed. There it was. Kristin started walking, following the signs. It was easy to do, clear and flowing. She fell in with others walking, a movement of people so patterned that with a little swiftness, a little joy, it would be dancing. An electric vehicle beeped and carried past an infirm person wearing huge glasses and a baseball cap. Kristin hadn’t been in an airport for a long time but many of her dreams were set in airports—in this very one—and part of her lived always here with the miracle happening, or about to happen, or failing to happen, while travellers blurred around her and she could somehow feel with heightened senses the heavy machinery of flight arched overhead.
The miracle had happened in this very airport and now she was back inside it, back inside the central magic of her life, on her way to see Henry again. She had visited the spot where it had happened earlier, where the watches glittered behind glass. The watches appeared in some of the dreams, too: she would hear them, chirruping, intelligent, their bright faces attentive to the moment, eternity come to see.
Moving walkways bore her forwards. They bounced underfoot. She held her coffee cup, her backpack on her shoulders. Soon she was at the gate, one of the first there, and she found a good seat facing the desk. She took out her phone and texted Suzanne. In the airport. All good. Waiting to fly! xx.
Through the enormous window, Kristin could see what must be the plane she would be getting on, tethered to its tunnel. Above, there were golden clouds. Kristin became engrossed in one, the silence of its slow, pouring transformations, stretching and gathering, flaring at the top into wisps that vanished. So much beauty if you only looked. Around her the few people in their chairs, dressed in soft leisurewear for the long-haul flight, didn’t see. They looked instead at their phones, at books, at the floor.
Two years ago, after Ron had initiated the divorce and they were no longer living together, Kristin had come to this airport to fly down to the islands with Suzanne and Linda. The plan was for the vacation to be defiantly celebratory, drunk and outrageous. Kristin had been the first to arrive. She went to the check-in desk. She opened her bag for her passport and printed booking confirmation and had also found Spiderman. This had all come back to her entire when she went to the restroom in the airport earlier. Everything that had been broken into unconvincing pieces with strenuous recollection and partial reappearances in dreams had come together again. They still had the same brand of soap in the airport bathroom, a soft-serve of scented foam deposited automatically in your palm when you triggered the sensor. When Kristin had smelled it again earlier she had remembered standing there in tears, cooling her face with water, washing her hands. The ordinary, anonymous, chemical pleasantness of the soap’s fragrance, mass-produced, made her yearn to be like that, to be as okay as everybody else in the crowds of passengers. It was the sight of Spiderman that had broken her. When she saw him in her bag, the tensed posture, the painted featureless face and white diamond eyes, she had known immediately that Lionel had put it in there because he wanted her to have it, his precious favourite toy, because he felt sorry for her and worried that she might be lonely.
/> And then with her eye makeup reapplied, her breath once more slow and regular, looking more or less normal, she had emerged from the restroom and met the actor Henry Banks and ordinary had been forbidden her forever.
Dazed, not quite able to identify the familiar face, she said, “Don’t I know you?”
Henry smiled at her. He said, “You tell me. It seems like you do.”
They had a brief conversation standing there in front of the display window of expensive watches and everything became very clear, overwhelmingly clear. When she met Suzanne and Linda later on, they were worried about her because she was so quiet and strange, flexing the fingers of her right hand and unable to tell them what had happened. There weren’t words for it. A pure white circle of truth, a pure heat, now sat in the centre of her heart and flowed out, containing everything. A total sympathy. An end to questions. The nature of love. How could she speak about that?
Henry had shaken her hand. For a long time after it seemed singled out from the rest of her body. She would look at it, move it, as though it could if it wanted to share its special knowledge of him and tell her what would happen next.
And this was all because little Lionel had put his Spiderman toy in her bag. This was how you knew it was fate: the smallest thing different in either of their lives up to that instant and it wouldn’t have happened. A traffic light’s delay of half a minute and they would have used the airport independently, without ever seeing one another. If Lion hadn’t put Spiderman in her bag she wouldn’t have cried, she wouldn’t have run to the restroom. If she hadn’t opened her bag in that way she wouldn’t have seen it. Fate. Seemingly so fragile but it rules like iron because it is meant to be.
The seats around Kristin were full now, all the people bound for London. She heard English voices behind her, a couple talking with the flat tang of one of those accents. Opposite, a young man in square glasses, wearing cargo pants and a mountaineering sweater, was reading the Bible. He had one of those beards trimmed to a line along his jawbone to mark the boundary between fat cheeks and a fat neck. A gate of goatee around his mouth. He turned a page. That was nice to see: a serious, spiritual person. He looked up and she smiled at him. He turned away, pensive, as though she were a question he now had to consider. Maybe she’d scared him. She hadn’t meant to. Looking around, Kristin felt affection for all of the people travelling on this adventure together, forming into a group as the sky darkened outside—now an awesome vista of bronze and purple, a resonant and auspicious sky affirming the significance of the journey.
The journey had to be made. Kristin had known this for some time. She had long ago accepted that her letters to Henry would go unanswered and that she would have to go to him in person. When Hamlet first appeared in her Google alerts, she knew when it would be. And then, months later, when an alert pinged through a tiny article that said Henry’s father had written a play (what a family!) and had him boasting that his famous son would be at the premiere, just after Hamlet, the invitation couldn’t have been more obvious if it had begun, Kristin, come quickly. She cancelled her ticket for Hamlet and at serious expense bought one for the last night from someone else. The first ticket she’d bought from the theatre, waking at three a.m. to be online and ready for four when the London box office would switch on. So prepared and yet the frantic inaccuracy of her typing when the moment came. The sense of victory at securing a ticket. Afterwards, she couldn’t get back to sleep until after ten in the morning.
Two tones on the PA system like a doorbell, then a nasal British woman’s voice. Kristin looked at the desk. The woman wore the airline’s uniform’s red neck scarf and had blond hair that spiralled into a bun high at the back of her head. She called the first category of passengers to board.
Kristin belted herself into her seat. She didn’t have her coffee cup anymore. She must have left it on the floor outside. She had her book and her iPad now tucked into the seat pocket with the airline magazine and other things they gave you. Her backpack she’d pushed under the seat in front. Beside her, a small boy played with the straps of his belt while his mother, in the next seat along, told him to buckle it. Dressed in pyjamas and socks, he already had the pale, dignified, quietly observant look that children sometimes have after their bedtime. Lion did it, too, holding himself very erect and decent until he crumpled. The boy’s soft flannel collar looked appealingly comfy against his delicate neck. The mother said, “No, do it now. The flight attendant will come and check that you’ve buckled in.” The boy did now as he was told, his little striped feet kicking. Kristin said to him, “Hey, neighbour. Do you want to see what I’ve got in my bag?” She bent over to retrieve her backpack and smiled past the boy at the mother as she produced Spiderman.
“You always have that in your bag?” the mother asked.
“Oh, I guess I do. My stepson gave it to me.” The boy was handling Spiderman now, checking the range of movement in his tensed limbs.
“I see. They’re not travelling with you, your family?”
Kristin shook her head. No. They’re … Well, to get into it, we got divorced a while back there. You know. Life.”
“I see.”
“It happens.”
“So, your stepson? You see him? Is that what you call him, after a divorce, I mean?”
The boy bounced Spiderman’s pointed red feet along his armrest.
“I don’t know. I haven’t really thought about that, to be honest. It’s how I think of him.”
What she thought of in that moment for no particular reason was Lion standing on the deck by the pond at Ron’s house, chewing the edge of the towel he’d wrapped around himself, staring over the water.
“You see him ever?”
“Gosh. This is a lot of questions. Actually, there are three boys. The youngest gave me this. Why are you going to London?”
“My husband is there for a work thing. Thought we’d add on a vacation. You?”
“Similar. Same.” Kristin said. “My life didn’t stop with the divorce.”
Flight attendants walked down the aisles banging shut the overhead lockers. On the small screens in front of them, a video of safety instructions played showing correct postures and procedures should the aircraft crash into the ocean. Kristin said, “In the past I’ve been a bit scared of flying but not today. Let’s get up there.”
The plane taxied, turned. Squares of orange light, the setting sun coming in through the windows, flowed over people’s faces and slid along the walls. A loose roar like a big gas flame being lit, then a shuddering went through the seats and plastic fittings and the plane punched forwards, rumbling, picking up speed, lifting at the front, floating up from the ground. Small domestic lights could be seen in the countryside below.
After a meal, eaten while watching a postcard-sized movie with headphones on, most of Kristin’s fellow passengers went to sleep, reclining under blankets. The little boy next to her passed out completely, limp as a doll. When the mother went off to the toilet, Kristin retrieved Spiderman from beside the boy’s thigh and put him back in her backpack.
Even when the lights were dimmed to a soothing, nocturnal blue, even with her eyes closed and the blanket up to her chin, Kristin could not lose consciousness. She drifted in the swirl of her thoughts. The future was so close at hand its light was breaking through, too bright for sleep. Soon she would be seeing Henry live in the theatre. Soon she would be meeting him again at his father’s play. Soon all that had been so long delayed would arrive. She smiled, her eyes still closed, images of smiles in her mind: Henry smiling, she herself smiling. From time to time she thought, I’m falling asleep now, and with that woke up. Maybe she did drop off at one point because an hour or so seemed to go missing. Also, the way an isolated memory returned to her suggested she was unconscious either side. The boy had kicked Kristin and she looked across at him being soothed and rearranged by his mother. He moaned at her with his eyes closed,
at the mother who was always there outside his sleep.
They were flying east into the sunrise and the coming day and perhaps that had something to do with her wakefulness. When the flight attendant walked along the aisles opening all the window blinds, the daylight was shocking and brilliant. As the plane tilted, Kristin could see below a blazing platform of cloud. The plane sank into it slowly, whiteness whipping past the windows. Beneath, the earth was in view with quietened colours. Vegetable greens and browns of small fields. Britain, just as everyone said it would be. After rapid miles, London was below them for a long time. And then more fields and finally the lowered wheels banged onto the runway.
“We’re here,” Kristin said. “We’re here.”
People turned their phones back on. Kristin did too and texted Suzanne. Landed in London. It’s happening! Around her, people sprang upright to retrieve their hand luggage then stood grimacing while they waited for the doors to open.
What a boring effort it was getting through the airport. The corridors at Heathrow were so long and passport control was an age of slowly advancing, waiting again, slowly advancing.
At the baggage carousel, Kristin watched the other passengers waiting for their possessions to reappear, eager to disperse. The forced passivity of the flight over, their faces hardened again into individuality, a sense of the importance of their own lives. When their suitcases appeared, they took them and left at speed. When hers came bumping around, Kristin did the same.
Kristin had decided to take the London Underground to the hotel. The tube was a famous sight in itself so her tour of the city would begin immediately. She bought a ticket, made her way through the snapping jaws of the barrier and descended. Tiles. Posters. A tang in the air of singed electrical metal and dirt. A few people, also with suitcases, were already waiting on the platform. The train banged out of the tunnel and rushed to a stop in front of her. The doors opened. Inside, there was no obvious place for a suitcase. Kristin sat down and held hers in front of her knees. A warning sound and the doors closed. The train moved on to the next station and opened its doors to different, non-airport passengers. They were dressed for work, faces soft with fatigue, unfocused, but ready to endure, almost all of Indian ethnicity. Kristin saw in them the effort of mornings, getting up, showering, dressing, eating, digesting, moving, beginning. Life was so hard for people. After a few more stops, the train rattled up from underground into daylight, a sudden sideways morning light that pushed against Kristin’s tired brain. Kristin saw the brick backs of houses, their toothy TV aerials and satellite dishes, bits of roads and traffic, an ordinary, altered world with different street signs, smaller cars. Again the train sank into darkness.
