In-Flight Entertainment

by Helen Simpson

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Paul. ‘I don’t care. All I know is, it works.’

  ‘Because friendships need to be kept in repair like anything else. Like the house. Paul, d’you think we can leave the windows another year? Or are they at the point of no return? Paul?’

  A gentle snore alerts her to the fact that he has fallen asleep with his arms round her. She lies like this for a while until the light starts to fade, then gently detaches herself and creeps off to the bathroom for a shower. I say something, he says something back, she thinks as she stands under the stream of hot water. Sometimes that modifies my view and sometimes his; or we agree to disagree. She closes her eyes and lets the water pour onto her face. It’s like a long-running conversation. It’s gone on for decades and it doesn’t look like it’s about to stop now.

  She wraps herself in a towel and goes to lie down beside him on the bed again.

  ‘Hello,’ he says, opening his eyes and smiling. ‘You look different outside the house.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No fancy underwear I’m afraid,’ she says as he unwraps her.

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘Oh come here,’ she says.

  II

  In the next room along, a woman lounges on the small double divan, slightly slippery under her kimono from the rose-and-black-pepper hydrating oil she added to her bath an hour ago. She is reading a restaurant-review printout from the computer in the hotel lobby, looking up the tricky words in the French dictionary Donald sent her last week along with the Eurostar ticket. He should be here any minute now, if all goes according to plan.

  This one looks promising, a Michelin star in the Place Denfert-Rochereau. She loves the very sound of Paris, even the metro names: Ménilmontant; Mairie des Lilas; Bréguet-Sabin. Not that she intends to use the metro this weekend, absolutely not. The various heels she has packed to lift her towards Donald’s grey eminence are hardly pavement wear.

  ‘Les papilles,’ she says, wrinkling her brow and riffling through the dictionary: ‘Tastebuds. Oh. And la vie de patachon? A rollicking or wild life. Patachon! Very me.’ She pushes the dictionary aside and lights a cigarette, then picks up the remote and starts to channel-hop.

  He’s mad about her. She can make him groan just by looking at him. And it’s about time in her life for her to stand up and say, No, look here, for once I’m doing something for me. On the television screen on top of the wardrobe a semi-naked girl in Ray-Bans is easing a white stocking down her leg. How tacky, thinks the woman. How low-budget. Channel 17! She’s even got cellulite unless that’s a shadow. She stretches her own bare polished leg in the air, and gloats. ‘I just want to be adored,’ she whispers. Donald’s wife gave up years ago, she refuses point-blank. She only cares about the children now, it’s all sublimated. Which is fine for her, but not exactly very fair on Donald, who is an extremely physical man as well as highly successful.

  Aiming the remote again, she makes the girl disappear, white stockings and all. But hold-ups wouldn’t be a bad idea, she thinks, and roots through her suitcase until she finds a pair. She also extracts the lime-green balconette number with detachable turquoise straps and tries this on too, posing in front of the mirror, peering back over her shoulder at her rear view and narrowing her eyes with satisfaction.

  What she finds hard to take is the censorious line people assume when they know nothing about the facts at all. ‘Marriage may be a contract, but it’s not the same as buying a house,’ she thinks, growing hot with indignation at the memory of that talk with her so-called friend Clare. ‘Just because you marry someone when you’re twenty-three it doesn’t mean you’ve bagged them for good. It’s not like getting up early and putting your towel on a sunbed, for goodness sake!’

  When her own marriage stopped working she had refused to compromise. They were no longer in love, it was going nowhere, it was time to split. Her mother had had the nerve to tell her to ‘stick at it’, as though the smugness of a tight little nuclear family was worth selling your soul for. Alfie, who had been two at the time, had barely noticed what was happening. It was absolutely typical of her mother when last year at the age of seventy-three she announced she was leaving Daddy – ‘Better late than never’ was her excuse. Unbelievably selfish, with his second hip operation in the offing. Alfie was staying with her this weekend as it happened. Anyway, most of the children in his class were on the move at weekends between stepmothers and half-sisters and demi-grandparents. It was the new version of the extended family, and who was to say it was any worse than the old claustrophobic sort? So get over it.

  Donald had been great with Alfie, the time he’d met him. He adored his own three daughters, made no secret of the fact, to the point of tears in his eyes. Maybe we’ll have a baby, she’d soothed him last time he got upset; a little boy, a baby brother for your girls. And it wasn’t all one-sided. She’d have to give things up too: her beautiful flat, her transformation pad as she called it; having her own space.

  Sitting cross-legged on the bed she zaps the shooter at the television again, then slews herself slowly into a spinal twist; holding it, she watches the girl on the screen point her toes and reinsert them into the rolled-up white stocking. Sure, it’ll be messy. But she is prepared for that. She will see him through it, support him in every way she can. That might just be the price of passion, mightn’t it?

  The telephone rings. There is a gentleman in reception to see her.

  ‘I’m expecting him,’ she smiles, turning off the television, checking herself in the mirror. ‘Tell him to come up.’

  III

  A moment after this the third door along the corridor bursts open and a magnificently scowling young man strides off towards the lift. Peeping round the door frame appears a woman with a baby. ‘Where are you going?’ she calls after him. ‘Out,’ comes the reply.

  ‘He wants it to be like it was before,’ she murmurs to the baby, retreating back into the room. ‘He wants it to be as if nothing has happened. He wants me to agree to a babysitter I haven’t met, organised by the hotel, for tonight, and I won’t. “This was supposed to be a romantic weekend,” he says, “but you’re in love with him, not me.”’

  ‘And the thing is,’ she croons, lifting the baby and planting kisses in his delighted neck, ‘he’s right.’

  It hurts like a punch in the stomach that he has been so dramatic, so violent, walking out on them like that, and tears stand in her eyes; but at the same time she is almost too tired to care.

  ‘I’ve lost you,’ he’d shouted, just before storming off. ‘You’re lost to me.’

  ‘No you haven’t,’ she’d bleated, ‘no I’m not,’ wanting to add, Don’t be such a baby.

  She knows where he has gone. He’s gone to find Samuel Beckett’s grave in the Cimetière du Montparnasse. She knows this because earlier that afternoon they went for a walk in the Jardin du Luxembourg instead. They pushed the pram along the gravel paths of palm trees and pony rides, past the octagonal boating lake and the old men playing boules; and he had looked around restlessly and quoted from First Love.

  ‘Can’t you enjoy it here, now?’ she’d asked. What she didn’t say was, ‘I feel betrayed too.’

  ‘“Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards”,’ he’d intoned. ‘Listen, it was one of the places I promised myself I’d visit once I finished my thesis.’ He had wanted a literary pilgrimage rather than a walk in the park, and now she was paying for having insisted on the latter.

  She places the baby in the middle of the bed and barricades him with pillows. He waves his bare legs in the air, then begins to fuss and grumble. He wants to be fed. Has she got time to unpack her spongebag, wash her face even, before he starts to cry in earnest? Probably not. She rearranges the pillows into a mound for her back, and leans against them while he commences huffing and puffing to get at her. In the wall mirror above the desk she catches sight of her reflection, chalk-pale with dark half-moons beneath her eyes, h
is soft head bobbing away at a bosom hard and veined as marble.

  ‘Ah,’ she groans as he latches on. The broad-chested little boy gasps and gulps in his eagerness for the milk, and she murmurs, ‘Slowly, sweetheart, slowly.’

  After a while he goes at her less greedily. In a few minutes he will drift off, sated, and to make sure she doesn’t fall asleep before he does she flicks on the television with the remote control. Pressing the mute button, she surfs through noiseless images of washing machines, war zones, ice-cream gateaux and open-heart surgery until she reaches channel 17, where there is an altogether less agitating scene of someone getting undressed. How lovely, she thinks, watching the solitary girl take her time; how wonderful to have the bed to yourself.

  Much later the young man unlocks the door and finds his wife and baby sleeping deeply in the dark. He sees them in the starry light cast by the wardrobe-perched television set, curled round each other, oblivious to his change of mood. Up on the screen a girl is drawing a thin white stocking up her leg. He stands and gapes at her. The stocking covers her thigh at last and the girl pauses and dips her head; then she starts to ease it down all over again, very slowly, with infinite patience.

  Homework

  ‘I CAN’T DO it,’ groaned George, and brought his forehead to rest on the block of lined paper in front of him.

  ‘Can’t do what?’ I asked, looking up from peeling the carrots for the evening meal. I work from home, so I’m around when George gets in from school. He sits at the kitchen table and I bring some milk in his Manchester United mug and a plate with a tea-time snack. This might be a slice of toast and honey with a peeled satsuma from which I have removed any stray threads of pith, or perhaps an apple, cored and cut into fine slices, with a few cubes of Cheddar.

  Quite often I’m not able to stop what I’m doing, and then I have to stay put. I call out from my desk to say hello when I hear the front door. He calls hello back and makes his way to the television. I’d rather catch up in the evening but there’s not always a choice.

  ‘Can’t do what?’ I repeated. ‘I’m sure you can.’

  ‘You don’t know. Everybody says it’s really hard. And now I’ve got to give it in for tomorrow.’

  ‘Why do you do this? Why do you leave it to the last minute?’

  That’s another wonderful thing about George – you can tell him off and he won’t immediately go into orbit like some I could mention. He’s not a great one for flying off the handle.

  ‘It’s just so hard,’ he moaned.

  ‘Now come on,’ I said, drying my hands and patting his nice strong shoulder. ‘Sit up and tell me what it is. You never know, I might be able to help.’

  ‘It’s Mr Mottram,’ he said, heaving himself up from his slump. ‘It’s English, so it should be all right, but he still wants to make it hard. We’ve got to do three sides of A4 out of our own heads.’

  He is already taller than me and can lift me off the ground. One or two of his friends have had their growth spurt, so that I find myself deferring to the sudden height and booming voice of a boy whom last year I knew as a clear-skinned little pipsqueak.

  ‘What is it, this terrible task he’s set you?’

  ‘“Write about an Event that Changed Your Life”,’ said George with mournful sarcasm. ‘That’s what it is.’

  ‘Three pages is a lot.’ Then a thought occurred to me. ‘You’ve had all the Easter holidays to do this, haven’t you? And you just didn’t let on about it. Now it’s your first week back and the chickens have come home to roost.’

  ‘I know,’ he said, spreading his hands palms upward in front of him. ‘There’s no excuse.’

  ‘What have your friends done?’

  ‘Dylan’s written about when he went to a football match with his uncle, Crystal Palace v. Queen’s Park Rangers, and realised Crystal Palace was the team he wanted to follow for the rest of his life.’

  ‘I can’t see how he filled three sides of A4 with that.’

  ‘He said it only took up one page, even in big writing,’ said George. ‘Now he’s got to, you know, pad it out. He’s going to describe all the Crystal Palace matches he’s been to since then, one at a time.’

  Serves Mr Mottram right, I thought; I don’t know what he can be expecting from a class of thirteen-years-olds. They can’t know what a life-changing event is at their age. How can they know if what happened to them last year will have changed them in twenty years’ time? They won’t know till they get there.

  ‘I shouldn’t really help you,’ I said. ‘I should leave you to get on with it. But if I do …’

  ‘Yes?’ said George, propped up on his elbows, eyeing me with wary optimism.

  ‘If I help you you’ve got to understand it’s only this once.’

  ‘Course,’ he said with a beaming smile of relief. ‘You know I’m not like that, Mum.’

  ‘Yes,’ I smiled back. ‘I do know. I trust you.’

  ‘Cos you can,’ he shrugged.

  ‘All right then, let’s think.’

  I sat down at the kitchen table and watched him assume a thoughtful expression. He furrowed his brow and chewed at the end of his biro, then caught my eye and started to giggle.

  ‘I’d rather write about anything else in the world,’ he complained.

  ‘Just think,’ I said. ‘In fifty years’ time you might really want to write about the Event that Changed Your Life. In your old age you might find you’re desperate to set down your memories. Look at Grandma.’

  My mother had recently filled half a red Silvine exercise book with startlingly deadpan revelations. Her father had at the age of fourteen rejected a future as a farm labourer and walked down from Wakefield to London to find work, where at first he slept wrapped in old newspaper on benches along the Embankment. That was before he went to fight in France. His father had been among other things a prizefighter at country fairs, more or less on the wrong side of the law all his life.

  ‘No,’ said George, shaking his head firmly. ‘Boring.’

  ‘You might find it interesting when you get older,’ I persisted. ‘I never knew that her mother, your great-grandmother, was found as a newborn baby wrapped in a flour sack on the church steps early one Sunday morning. That accounts for a lot.’

  I’m glad I wasn’t born at a time when you had to stay with the father of your children even if he broke your jaw.

  ‘Where was I born?’ asked George, who knew perfectly well.

  ‘Willesden General,’ I said. ‘Then I kept you beside me in a basket all the time for months and months. You were a lovely mild baby, like a dewdrop.’

  George smiled a gratified smile. ‘But I did cry sometimes,’ he prompted.

  ‘Yes, but when you cried it just made me laugh,’ I said. ‘You didn’t wail in a high-pitched way; no, it was more like the roar of a lion, and then only when you wanted milk. When you were hungry, you just roared!’

  He smirked at this and gave an illustrative growl.

  Following his birth I’d had an urge to find out more about my family tree. After a while I gave up. It had branches and twigs and leaves in every corner of the British Isles. There were shipwrights and ropemakers in Northumberland, labourers in Lincolnshire, watchmen and pedlars and blacksmiths from Ipswich and Barnstaple and Carlisle. The further back I went, the further afield they spread out. It seemed pointless. George was from all over the place.

  ‘Life-changing events,’ I said, returning to the business in hand. ‘Let’s think of some examples.’

  ‘If you win the lottery,’ suggested George.

  ‘Or lose all your money,’ I said. ‘Go bankrupt like Dad’s dad. Skip the country like my uncle Colin.’

  ‘Yes,’ said George, pen poised, looking less hopeful.

  ‘What would change the life of a thirteen-year-old, though, that’s the question,’ I reminded myself. ‘The death of a parent, certainly, but I don’t want you writing about that because it might bring bad luck.’

  ‘Jacob’s mothe
r died,’ commented George. ‘He doesn’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Poor Jacob. What did she die of?’

  ‘He says cancer. But Ranjit told me it wasn’t that, it was a bottle of tablets,’ shrugged George. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘No,’ I said again. Jacob would get by till middle age, probably, when he would step onto this death as onto the tines of a garden fork, and the solid shaft of the handle would rear up and hit him in the face.

  ‘So, not death,’ I said. ‘Because that’s the obvious one. No, it’ll have to be your parents’ divorce.’

  ‘But you’re not divorced.’

  ‘Well, we are in this story.’

  ‘He’ll think it’s really true,’ said George, looking worried.

  ‘So?’ I said. ‘It’ll fill three sides of A4. Let’s have the mum leaving the dad for a change, rather than the other way around. And you have to move from your family house to a flat, and your new bedroom is tiny, and you have to share with your little brother who drives you mad.’

  ‘I haven’t got a little brother.’

  ‘Mr Mottram doesn’t know that.’

  My siblings are scattered far and wide. Sharon runs a bed-and-breakfast up by Hadrian’s Wall. Valerie has an alpha-male job in the City, just like her husband, and lives in a big house in Wimbledon. Keith has had various irons in the fire over the years, but now he’s teaching English as a foreign language in China. Very modern Britain, our family.

  George looked at me warily. I could see he was torn between natural fantasy-hating honesty and a desire to have someone else do his homework.

  ‘Is it allowed?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s English, isn’t it? Don’t they call this bit creative writing? Well, you’re just being creative.’

  ‘Ha,’ said George.

  ‘Inventive,’ I added. ‘It’s a good thing. Listen, you want to watch the match tonight, don’t you? Chelsea v. Liverpool, isn’t it?’