In-Flight Entertainment

by Helen Simpson

  When they put art on a hospital wall it was to do with the need not to be reduced to a lump of gristle and malfunctioning cells. Here was Catherine the Great’s ice-cream cooler with a ground of bleu céleste. But a garage doesn’t worry that it smells of oil and petrol; why shouldn’t a hospital smell of surgery? They had not all been sent to the guillotine as might have been expected; the Sèvres factory had carried on making porcelain, but with revolutionary symbols, Phrygian bonnets and tricolour flags instead of cherubs and roses.

  She walked into a large gallery room and here he was again, in this little painting at eye level, the greybeard with his grizzled wings. At his feet was an infant holding up an hourglass. Time was just another name for death, she got the point. He was sitting to one side playing a lyre, providing the music for four beautiful heavy-limbed dancers who moved hand in hand in a ring and faced outwards, fearless as children.

  There are the facts of life, she thought, the predictable traps and horrors. What struck her now though was the irrelevance and centrality of emotion in human life and how the facts happened anyway, whatever you chose to feel about them.

  Turning off into another room she was caught by tender greens and blues and glimpses of amorous outdoor parties. Le Petit Parc, she read, La Fête Galante. A girl in a loose lustring gown looked away, the nape of her neck exposed to outdoor kisses, while her companions lounged and whispered in each other’s ears, waiting for the lover who stood tuning his lute. In the mid-distance a man looked out to sea through a telescope.

  Homesickness for the recent past brought savage nausea. Garlands of fade-free flowers these paintings promised; musical fountains and trees in perpetual leaf. She wanted to climb up over the edges of their frames, and clawed at the air. Her legs dissolved.

  ‘Oh, I’m still here,’ she said, or tried to say, some minutes later. ‘I thought I was in a tunnel.’ Her view of things was from a different angle. Just then the scene above her whirled away as something else bulged inside her head and burst.

  I’m Sorry but I’ll Have to Let You Go

  HARD TO BELIEVE but at twenty-four he was already a Management Consultant, though of course Keats had lived life to the max by that age and Alexander the Great was leading an army against the world at fifteen. He had been living for the past year in a mansion flat in Battersea with his girlfriend, who was twenty-three and in Human Resources.

  Now it was time for promotion. He had flown out to New York twice in the last fortnight, for interviews. The job offer had arrived yesterday – two years in New York starting in three months’ time. It was just what should have happened, and he was satisfied. Yessss! He liked it when hard work paid off. Everything was going according to plan, like on a graph showing the ideal trajectory for a career in management consultancy.

  It was a pity about Sarah. They got on well, he really quite enjoyed living with her despite the aggro to do with picking up towels and so on; plus, she had a great bum. But she was in the end not by any means what you might call special – ‘The One’ – and anyway it was totally the wrong moment for all that, which would be in about ten to twelve years’ time. Commitment. (She couldn’t even spell it, he’d noticed, spotting the central double t on one of her press releases, even though she was so keen to talk about it.)

  But after all they had had a year together, slightly more if you counted the time before she’d moved into his flat – which he would rent out during his time in New York, it was sufficiently up to scratch to attract some sort of corporate tenant. He thought he would go for Paxman Utley rather than Shergood & Bentley, they seemed a bit sharper generally on the rental side of things, a shade more upmarket, and he’d haggle with them about that extra half per cent.

  So yesterday he had thought it through and decided it was only fair to give Sarah as much notice as he could about their relationship. That would give her time to adjust, also to find herself somewhere else to live. Nobody could say three months was unreasonable. There was no need to hurry things, they had plenty of time to wind it down. But it was only fair, he thought, returning to those words with satisfaction, congratulating himself on his fairness.

  And this morning he had told her about the job. She asked whether he intended to accept it, which slightly threw him. Of course he did. It was the next step, she knew that.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, hugging her in the hall and glancing at his watch. ‘There’s loads of time. Three months. But it’s very sad that we – our relationship – will, well, that it will, have to, change.’

  ‘How d’you mean?’

  ‘Well obviously,’ he said. ‘If I’m going to be living in New York. You’re not presumably imagining a transatlantic affair. It’s a killer, that flight, you get worse jet lag coming back from New York than you do from twice the distance in San Francisco.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Everybody knows that,’ he insisted manfully. ‘It would be totally impracticable. Unfair on both of us.’

  She stared at him, her made-up lips apart and her eyes wide.

  ‘I know it’s hard,’ he said, touching the tip of her nose with his forefinger. She had a cute nose, he’d always liked it. ‘It’s hard for both of us,’ he added, allowing himself a hint of reproach.

  She carried on staring at him, and a frown was gathering between her eyebrows. She was obviously having trouble taking it in.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be right away,’ he insisted. ‘I think we should carry on as normal until the week or so before I leave; there’s no need to break things up before then.’

  ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘You’ll need time. We’ll both need time. To adapt.’

  He took her shoulders and looked sorrowfully at her like a soldier in a film, off to the wars. He was going to be late for work. What came next? He lowered his face towards hers for a slow pitying notice-giving kiss.

  That was when she went mad and started screaming and shouting and slapping out and ranting. In fact, she’d lost it. He’d had to grab his laptop and slam the door on her harpy act in the end and set off down Prince of Wales Drive at a brisk canter. Not his idea of a great start to the day. No cabs to be seen of course, and he was late which didn’t look good at the meeting, sidling in after everyone else. Not his style. But then, they knew that. Totally one-off.

  It made for unease during the day, though. There was a lot on but even so his mind returned to the scene in the hall several times. He hadn’t for a moment thought she’d get so hysterical about it. Surely she should be pleased for him. His mother was. Perhaps he shouldn’t have told her until a couple of weeks before, but it had seemed only fair to give her as much notice as possible. Too fair, he thought wrathfully on his way to the sandwich bar. Too bloody fair, that was his trouble.

  ‘Well done,’ said his colleagues. ‘When do you start?’ And, ‘What about Sarah?’ asked one of them, Duncan Sharples, who’d come along for a glass of champagne at Windows on her birthday a few weeks ago.

  ‘She knows the score,’ he replied. ‘Very much so. Obviously she got a bit emotional but she’s got to be realistic like all of us have. It’s modern life.’

  ‘So there’ll be no prawns decomposing in the hollow curtain rail?’ laughed Duncan. ‘No mustard and cress sprouting on the bathroom carpet?’

  ‘Nothing like that,’ he said rather stiffly. ‘It’s not even happening for another three months.’

  When he got back that night she was waiting in the hall, white in the face and red-eyed, ranting on immediately about coldness and insensitivity, emotional autism and more of her therapy crap.

  ‘But there’s no need to get like this now,’ he said, genuinely baffled. ‘We don’t have to split up yet.’

  ‘Did you really think I’d carry on here eating with you and sleeping with you and doing all the girlfriend stuff, after, after …’ And she started screaming at him again. He found that a real turn-off.

  ‘I’m leaving tonight,’ she yelled at him. ‘I’ll
come and get the rest of my stuff later. When you’re at work.’

  ‘But it’s not for three months,’ he kept saying, flummoxed. She really didn’t seem to understand.

  ‘You are a total prat,’ she huffed. The doorbell rang. She went to the entryphone.

  ‘I’ll be right down.’ She turned to him. ‘That’s my cab.’

  ‘Sarah,’ he said, holding out his hands like a bad actor. ‘You don’t have to go. You know that.’

  ‘PRAT,’ she spat, and slammed the door behind her.

  He felt a bit shaken by all this, despite himself. He did some shrugging, followed by one of his stress-buster breathing techniques. Hoo-hoo-hoo, he went; hoo-hoo-hoo. He had a quick check round the flat to see she hadn’t caused any damage. It was still in excellent decorative order, he noticed, he was sure he could rent it out no trouble. There was her photograph, the one of her laughing in a bikini last Christmas in St Lucia. They’d had a really great time there, the hotel had been amazing. Had she forgotten all the good times?

  He wished he’d remembered to ask her that. He picked up the photograph and stared at her laughing face. It was a shock to think of its most recent expression, white-faced and venomous. Quite unlike her. She was being incredibly – totally – unreasonable.

  ‘Get off my case,’ he said, experimentally, at the photograph, and put it back face down on top of the music centre. He loaded a CD, turned up the volume for a blast of Arctic Monkeys.

  Then he went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. He would obviously have to get his own salmon-and-courgette bake tonight. She had gone completely over the top he thought, as he stood waiting by the microwave. It pinged. For a moment he thought he was outside the lift at work.

  He donned the oven-gloves and carefully removed the steaming box. The thing was, she was very young. He dug in with a fork. They both were really; but in the end she was immature with it. Whereas he wasn’t. Quite the opposite. Fuck, it was hot. Which was why it was probably just as well. Now he’d burnt his fucking tongue. He ran a glass of cold water and stood there over the sink, shifting from foot to foot, swishing and spitting, swishing and spitting and swearing.

  Sorry?

  ‘SORRY?’ SAID PATRICK. ‘I didn’t quite catch that.’

  ‘Soup of the day is wild mushroom,’ bellowed the waiter.

  ‘No need to shout,’ said Patrick, putting his hand to his troublesome ear.

  The new gadget shrieked in protest.

  ‘They take a bit of getting used to,’ grimaced Matthew Herring, the deaf chap he’d been fixed up with for a morale-boosting lunch.

  ‘You don’t say,’ he replied.

  Some weeks ago Patrick had woken up to find he had gone deaf in his right ear – not just a bit deaf but profoundly deaf. There was nothing to be done, it seemed. It had probably been caused by a tiny flake of matter dislodged by wear-and-tear change in the vertebrae, the doctor had said, shrugging. He had turned his head on his pillow, in all likelihood, sometimes that was all it took. This neck movement would have shifted a minuscule scrap of detritus into the river of blood running towards the brain, a fragment that must have finished by blocking the very narrowest bit of the entire arterial system, the ultra-fine pipe leading to the inner ear. Bad luck.

  ‘I don’t hear perfectly,’ said Matthew Herring now. ‘It’s not magic, a digital hearing aid, it doesn’t turn your hearing into perfect hearing.’

  ‘Mine’s not working properly yet,’ said Patrick. ‘I’ve got an appointment after lunch to get it seen to.’

  ‘Mind you, it’s better than the old one,’ continued Matthew comfortably. ‘You used to be able to hear me wherever I went with the analogue one, it used to go before me, screeching like a steam train.’

  He chuckled at the memory.

  Patrick did not smile at this cosy reference to engine whistles. He had been astonished at the storm of head noise that had arrived with deafness, the whistles and screeches over a powerful cloud of hissing just like the noise from Elizabeth’s old pressure cooker. His brain was generating sound to compensate for the loss of hearing, he had been told. Apparently that was part and parcel of the deafness, as well as dizzy episodes. Ha! Thanks to the vertigo which had sent him arse over tip several times since the start of all this, he was having to stay with his daughter Rachel for a while.

  ‘Two girls,’ he said tersely in answer to a question from his tedious lunch companion. He and Elizabeth had wished for boys, but there you were. Rachel was the only one so far to have provided him with grandchildren. The other daughter, Ruth, had decamped to Australia some time ago. Who knew what she was up to, but she was still out there so presumably she had managed to make a go of it, something that she had signally failed to do in England.

  ‘I used to love music,’ Matthew Herring was saying, nothing daunted. ‘But it’s not the same now I’m so deaf. Now it tires me out; in fact, I don’t listen any more. I deliberately avoid it. The loss of it is a grief, I must admit.’

  ‘Oh well, music means nothing to me,’ said Patrick. ‘Never has. So I shan’t miss that.’

  He wasn’t about to confide in Matthew Herring, but of all his symptoms it had been the auditory hallucinations produced by the hearing aid which had been the most disturbing for him. The low violent stream of nonsense issuing from the general direction of his firstborn had become insupportable in the last week, and he had had to turn the damned thing off.

  At his after-lunch appointment with the audiologist, he found himself curiously unable to describe the hallucinatory problem.

  ‘I seem to be picking up extra noise,’ he said eventually. ‘It’s difficult to describe.’

  ‘Sounds go into your hearing aid where they are processed electronically,’ she intoned, ‘then played back to you over a tiny loudspeaker.’

  ‘Yes, I know that,’ he snapped. ‘I am aware of that, thank you. What I’m asking is, might one of the various settings you programmed be capable of, er, amplifying sounds that would normally remain unheard?’

  ‘Let’s see, shall we,’ she said, still talking to him as though he were a child or a halfwit. ‘I wonder whether you’ve been picking up extra stuff on the Loop.’

  ‘The Loop?’

  ‘It works a bit like Wi-Fi,’ she said. ‘Electromagnetic fields. If you’re in an area that’s on the Loop, you can pick up on it with your hearing aid when you turn on the T-setting.’

  ‘The T-setting?’

  ‘That little extra bit of kit there,’ she said, pointing at it. ‘I didn’t mention it before, I didn’t want to confuse you while you were getting used to the basics. You must have turned it on by mistake from what you’re saying.’

  ‘But what sort of extra sounds does it pick up?’ he persisted.

  Rachel’s lips had not been moving during that initial weird diatribe a week ago, he was sure of it, nor during the battery of bitter little remarks he’d had to endure since then.

  ‘Well, it can be quite embarrassing,’ she said, laughing merrily. ‘Walls don’t block the magnetic waves from a Loop signal, so you might well be able to listen in to confidential conversations if neighbouring rooms are also on it.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said, ‘I’m not sure that quite explains this particular problem. But I suppose it might have something to do with it.’

  ‘Look, I’ve turned off the T-setting,’ she said. ‘If you want to test what it does, simply turn it on again and see what happens.’

  ‘Or hear,’ he said. ‘Hear what happens.’

  ‘You’re right!’ she declared, with more merry laughter.

  He really couldn’t see what was so amusing, and said so.

  Back at Rachel’s, he made his way to the armchair in the little bay window and whiled away the minutes until six o’clock by rereading the Telegraph. The trouble with this house was that it had been knocked through, so you were all in it hugger-mugger together. He could not himself see the advantage of being forced to witness every domestic detail. Frankly, it was bedlam, w
ith the spin cycle going and Rachel’s twins squawking and Rachel washing her hands at the kitchen sink yet again like Lady Macbeth. Now she was doing that thing she did with the brown paper bag, blowing into it and goggling her eyes, which seemed to amuse the twins at least.

  Small children were undoubtedly tiresome, but the way she indulged hers made them ten times worse. Like so many of her generation she seemed to be making a huge song and dance about the whole business. She was ridiculous with them, ludicrously over-indulgent and lacking in any sort of authority. It was when he had commented on this in passing that the auditory hallucinations had begun.

  ‘I don’t want to do to them what you did to me, you old beast,’ the voice had growled, guttural and shocking, although her lips had not been moving. ‘I don’t want to hand on the misery. I don’t want that horrible Larkin poem to be true.’ He had glared at her, amazed, and yet it had been quite obvious she was blissfully unaware of what he had heard. Or thought he had heard.

  He must have been hearing things.

  Now he held up his wrist and tapped his watch at her. She waved back at him, giving one last puff into the paper bag before scurrying to the fridge for the ice and lemon. As he watched her prepare his first drink of the evening, he decided to test out the audiologist’s theory.

  ‘Sit with me,’ he ordered, taking the clinking glass.

  ‘I’d love to, Dad, but the twins …’ she said.

  ‘Nonsense,’ he said. ‘Look at them, you can see them from here, they’re all right for now.’

  She perched on the arm of the chair opposite his and started twisting a strand of her lank brown hair.

  ‘Tell me about your day,’ he commanded.