In-Flight Entertainment

by Helen Simpson

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In which case you’d better get this homework finished before dinner. Which I’m doing specially for seven o’clock, because I know you like all that warm-up chat beforehand.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  I couldn’t resist giving him a hug, the roaring dewdrop baby who had grown into this broad-shouldered boy. Last week I’d been making flapjacks while he stood by to lick the spoon, and I mentioned that I’d always liked the picture of the lion on the golden syrup tin. ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness,’ he read aloud, peering at the green-and-gold picture. ‘That’s what’s written underneath it.’ I never knew that before.

  ‘Have you got your pen ready? I’m not going to write this for you, you know, I’m only going to give you ideas.’

  ‘OK,’ he agreed. He was in no position to object.

  ‘Your parents had arguments for years. You remember the slammed doors and bitter words from when you were little,’ I began.

  George started to write.

  ‘You tried to blot it out, but you couldn’t help feeling upset inside. It got into your dreams. You could put a bad dream in, George, that would take up a few lines.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Oh, an earthquake perhaps,’ I said. ‘I was always dreaming about earthquakes and floods and fires when I was your age. Or you’re in a house and it falls down round you and you run but the ground opens up in front of you.’

  ‘To pad it out a bit?’ said George.

  ‘If you like. Then there’s the divorce, which is a relief after all the fighting.’

  ‘Why did Auntie Sharon get divorced?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I tutted. ‘They seemed quite happy to start with, but then Mike turned into a bear with a sore head when she had the twins. Some people find domestic life more of a trial than others.’

  ‘Dad loves domestic,’ commented George. ‘On Fridays when he gets back home he says, Ah domestic bliss.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ I said with a stunted smile.

  ‘Auntie Sharon lives in the nicest place and she’s got three dogs but Auntie Valerie’s got the best job,’ said George. ‘Her family goes on the best holidays and they’ve got an Audi and a BMW. I want a BMW when I get a job. That’s the first thing I’ll buy.’

  ‘Oh really,’ I sniffed. ‘The only time they all manage to get together as a family is when they go on some expensive safari thousands of miles away.’

  ‘Just because they’ve got good jobs,’ said George. ‘You shouldn’t be jealous.’

  ‘I’m not jealous!’ I declared. ‘How could I be jealous of anyone working those ridiculous hours? They’ve sold their souls.’

  ‘Oh Mum,’ said George reprovingly.

  ‘Anyway, after the divorce, you have to move house and change schools.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you do. Money. Jobs. And you go and live with your father and your little brother, and visit your mother at weekends. You might even ask if you can go and live with your grandma for a while.’

  ‘Why?’ said George again, large-eyed, even more down-in-the-mouth.

  ‘For a break,’ I said absently.

  Grow up in certain homes and it’s like being out on a cold choppy sea in an open dinghy with two angry fishermen in charge. Or sometimes just a single fisherman, who is, what’s more, drunk. Whereas with a grandparent, life for a child can be less dangerous, more like being afloat on a reservoir.

  ‘What happens next?’

  ‘The mum wants a new start. She wants to see the world! Everybody else has.’

  ‘But Mum, Mr Mottram will think it’s really you.’

  ‘When you think about it,’ I mused, ‘it’s none of Mr Mottram’s business. He should only be interested in it as a piece of writing. Is it a good piece of writing? Is it convincing?’

  ‘What if he asks me,’ muttered George.

  ‘He won’t. He’s an English teacher, isn’t he, not a psychotherapist. So if he did ask you, he’d just be being nosy.’

  George shrugged helplessly.

  When I went to live with my grandmother for a while, she had enough to eat, but not enough to keep warm. She was over seventy, but she had kept on one of her old cleaning jobs, Mrs Nibthwaite, mainly for the sake of being in a house with central heating. I went along to help with the floors; then, while she polished and dusted, I puzzled over the Latin homework that held my enfranchisement. She never considered this work demeaning, and in fact looked down on Mrs Nibthwaite as an unfeminine woman, a cold woman who made her husband lonely and who did not grieve when he died but said, ‘Now I’m free to do what I want to do,’ and went off round the world on various package holidays. The cheerful bearded sailor on her packet of Players was as close as she ever got to the sea. She cooked with a cigarette in her mouth; quite often ash would fall into the gravy, and she would stir it in as extra seasoning.

  ‘Listen, you’re doing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, aren’t you,’ I continued. ‘Do you think Shakespeare got asked whether he’d ever grown donkey’s ears?’

  George smiled briefly.

  ‘Right. So you see your mum at weekends and one weekend she tells you she wants to go to Peru and asks if she can borrow your Duke of Edinburgh rucksack. She promises she’ll send you postcards, it’s just something she’s got to do to move forward in her life.’

  George scribbled away, not happy with where the story-line was going but incapable of coming up with an alternative. I felt powerful, like a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat.

  ‘I still don’t think it’s allowed,’ he said.

  ‘Of course it’s allowed,’ I said. ‘You’ve got to have things happening, see, or it’s not a story. Think of the films you like. Car chases. Explosions. Sharks.’

  ‘Can the mum be swimming in the China Sea and then a shark comes up?’ asked George hopefully, trying to enter into the creative spirit.

  ‘Probably not,’ I said drily. ‘That might be a step too far for Mr Mottram, don’t you think?’

  ‘But you said …’

  ‘Yes, but we’ve got to make it believable. It’s like a game, isn’t it. He shouldn’t be able to tell what’s real and what’s made up.’

  ‘I’d like to go to Japan,’ said George. ‘They’ve got the new Nintendo Wii there and I could get it way ahead of everybody else. Plus you don’t have to have injections to go there.’

  ‘Next,’ I said. ‘I think the dad meets someone else, don’t you? At first he’s just been going into his work and coming back and cooking nasty teas. You’ve had to help – buying a loaf of bread on the way home from school, that sort of thing, and doing the washing up without being asked.’

  ‘Isn’t there a dishwasher in the new place?’

  ‘It’s broken. And nobody gets round to finding someone to mend it and anyway you’re all out all day. Maybe your little brother can be in because he’s ill, though. Chickenpox.’

  ‘My little brother can’t be left on his own,’ objected George. ‘If he’s seven or eight or something. That’s against the law.’

  ‘OK, you’ve got an older sister instead.’

  ‘She can cook,’ he said, with satisfaction. The meals were worrying him.

  ‘No she can’t,’ I said. ‘She just eats crisps and bananas. No, it’s the dad that has to do it after work, unless you start teaching yourself from a cookbook.’

  George looked up from his pad suspiciously. I was always trying to get him interested in cutting up broccoli florets or omelette-making.

  ‘The dad should do it,’ he protested. ‘I’m a kid. It’s not my job. Kids should be looked after by their parents.’

  ‘You’re thirteen, George!’ I said. I was about to bring up the walk from Wakefield, but then I stopped myself. ‘Oh well, it’s your story. The dad does the cooking, but it’s always pasta.’

  ‘Cool,’ grinned George.

  ‘And the pasta is always soggy,’ I scowled. ‘Feel free to carry on.’

  ‘No, no,
’ he said. ‘After you.’

  ‘He’s been trying to cook, but he’s no good at it. Then he meets, let’s see, Miranda. You know she’s not nasty or anything but she’s nothing to do with you. And he starts including her in everything.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She’s always there when he’s around, watching television with you, in between you on the sofa.’

  ‘What, even when football’s on?’

  ‘Yes. She pretends to like it. She says she’s a Chelsea supporter.’

  ‘Chelsea,’ said George, grimly.

  ‘One weekend your mum tells you she’s off backpacking in three days’ time, first stop Thailand,’ I continued. ‘We need to wind this up, George. She promises she’ll send postcards. You could have them arriving a bit later on with little messages, you know, ate fried tortoise, went bungee jumping, that sort of thing. You could stick them on the fridge so Miranda could see them.’

  ‘Maybe she can cook.’

  ‘Not likely,’ I said. ‘She’s not interested in food. She doesn’t see why she should anyway. Why should she? Then it’s the last straw. You’ve just had another of these postcards, the mum’s got as far as Australia. And your dad announces that your holiday this year is camping in Wales, there’s no money for anything else. He can stretch to walking boots for you and your sister but that’s it.’

  ‘Wales,’ said George, with leaden emphasis.

  ‘I think you can leave it somewhere there,’ I said airily. ‘It’s April now, just the sort of time people are planning their summer holidays. Mr Mottram will buy that.’

  ‘But how do I finish it off?’

  ‘You don’t have to really; you don’t have to solve everything. It’s not a police procedural. But you’re right, you do need something.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Pull in your love of football. All these months since the divorce you’ve turned to football to forget. This year you’ve been following the Champions League with a passion. Is your team doing all right in it? Manchester United?’

  ‘Last night’s game was amazing, Mum,’ said George earnestly. ‘Rooney scored this goal in the ninety-first minute, and I couldn’t believe it.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘It was unbelievable.’

  ‘Was he happy?’

  ‘He did this full body dive all the way along the grass, then he lay with his head on his arms and they all bundled in on top of him. We were playing at home, though, so it might not be so good in the return match.’

  ‘You can put all that in, just like you’ve told it to me.’ I’d been struck by a thought. ‘Now, what does the Man U crowd chant when it wants them to win? You know, like Tottenham is “Come on, you Spu-urs”.’

  ‘UNITED! UNITED!’ he chanted automatically.

  ‘There you are,’ I said. ‘That’s your last paragraph. You explain how football has got you through your parents’ divorce. You describe Rooney’s great goal in the ninety-first minute. How your team means so much to you. Then you write how you joined in with the TV crowd shouting, ‘UNITED! UNITED!’ And you round it off with the words, “Ironic, really.”’

  ‘Ha,’ said George, who wasn’t slow on the uptake even if the pilot light of his imagination had yet to flare into action. He smiled reluctantly, and started to write this down.

  I looked at his fair head bent over the pad of A4. The time for advice was almost gone. Beware heat without warmth. When a man loses his temper, people say, That’s the Irish in him, or the Scottish, or the Viking. Don’t listen to them. Dirty players or terriers are what they call footballers with that anger-stoked edge, but strength without sweetness is no use at all.

  ‘Ironic because …?’ I asked.

  ‘The mum and the dad. They’re not united.’

  ‘There you are.’

  I glanced at the kitchen clock.

  ‘I’ve got to get on,’ I said. ‘I’ve got my own work to do.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said, smiling up at me. ‘You go. I can do it now.’

  The Festival of the Immortals

  THE DANIEL DEFOE event had just been cancelled, and as a consequence of this the queue for the tea tent was stretching halfway round the meadow. Towards the back, shivering slightly this damp October morning, were two women who looked to be somewhere in the early November of their lives.

  ‘Excuse me, but are you going to the next talk?’ one of them asked the other, waving a festival brochure at a late lost wasp.

  ‘Who, me?’ replied the woman. ‘Yes. Yes, I am. It’s Charlotte Brontë reading from Villette, I believe.’

  ‘Hmm, I hope they keep the actual reading element to a minimum,’ said the first, wrinkling her nose. ‘Don’t you? I can read Villette any time.’

  ‘Good to hear it in her own voice, though,’ suggested the other.

  ‘Oh I don’t know,’ said the first. ‘I think that can be overdone. Some curiosity value, of course, but half the time an actor would read it better. No, I want to know what she’s like. That difficult father. Terribly short-sighted. Extremely short full stop. The life must shed light on the work, don’t you think. What’s the matter, have I got a smudge on my face or something?’

  ‘It’s not …?’ said the other, gazing at her wide-eyed. ‘It’s not Viv Armstrong, is it?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Viv Armstrong, for that was indeed her name. ‘But I’m afraid I don’t …’

  ‘Phyllis!’ beamed the other. ‘Phyllis Goodwin. The ATS, remember? Bryanston Square? Staining our legs brown with cold tea and drawing on the seams with an eyebrow pencil?’

  ‘Fuzzy!’ exclaimed Viv at last. ‘Fuzzy Goodwin!’

  ‘Nobody’s called me that for over fifty years,’ said Phyllis. ‘It was when you wrinkled your nose in that particular way, that’s when I knew it was you.’

  The rest of their time in the queue flew by. Before they knew it they were carrying tea and carrot cake over to a table beneath the rustling amber branches of an ancient beech tree.

  ‘I’m seventy-eight and I’m still walking up volcanoes,’ Viv continued, as they settled themselves. ‘I don’t get to the top any more but I still go up them. I’m off to Guatemala next week.’

  Eager, impulsive, slapdash, Phyllis remembered. Rule-breaking. Artless. Full of energy. In some ways, of course, she must have changed, but just now she appeared exactly, comically, as she always had been, in her essence if not in her flesh. Although even here, physically, her smile was the same, the set of her shoulders, the sharpness of nose and eyes.

  ‘The first time I saw you, we were in the canteen,’ said Phyllis. ‘You were reading The Waves and I thought, Ah, a kindred spirit. I was carrying a steamed treacle pudding and I sat down beside you.’

  That’s right, thought Viv, Fuzzy had had a sweet tooth – look at the size she was now. She’d had long yellow hair, too, just like Veronica Lake, but now it was short and white.

  ‘I still do dip into The Waves every so often,’ she said aloud. ‘It’s as good as having a house by the sea, don’t you think? Especially as you get older. Oh, I wonder if she’s on later, Virginia, I’d love to go to one of her readings.’

  Viv knew many writers intimately thanks to modern biographers, but she was only really on first-name terms with members of the Bloomsbury Group.

  ‘Unfortunately not,’ said Phyllis. ‘That’s a cast-iron rule of this festival, a writer can only appear if they’re out of copyright, and Virginia isn’t out of it for another five years.’

  ‘But she must be, surely,’ said Viv. ‘Isn’t copyright fifty years?’

  ‘Well, it was, until recently,’ said Phyllis. ‘And Virginia was out of it by the early Nineties, I happen to know because I was at one of her readings here. Oh, she was wonderful. What a talker! She kept the whole marquee in stitches – spellbound – rocking with laughter. But then they changed the copyright law, something to do with the EU, and now it’s life plus seventy years, and she went back in again. So she won’t be allowed to return until 2011 a
t the earliest. Very galling as we might not still be here by then.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Viv. ‘Aren’t you being rather gloomy? Seventy-eight isn’t that old.’

  ‘It is quite old, though,’ said Phyllis doubtfully.

  ‘Well, I suppose so. But it’s not old old,’ said Viv. ‘It’s not ninety. Come on, now, Fuzzy, we’ve got some catching up to do.’

  In the next few minutes they attempted to condense the last half-century into digestible morsels for each other. Viv had put in a year at teacher-training college, then found teaching posts through Gabbitas-Thring, while Phyllis had taken a secretarial course at Pitman’s College in Bloomsbury followed by a cost accounting job at the Kodak factory where she lived, totting up columns of figures in a large ledger at a slanting desk. At some point between the Olympics being held at Wembley and the year of the Festival of Britain, they had met their respective husbands.

  ‘All this is such outside stuff, though,’ said Phyllis obscurely. She was supposed to be writing her memoirs, spurred on by a local Life-writing course, but had been dismayed at her attempts so far, so matter-of-fact and chirpy and boring.

  They ploughed on. Viv had settled just inside the M25, before it was there, of course, while Phyllis lived just outside it. They’d had three children each, and now had seven grandchildren between them.

  ‘Two girls and a boy,’ said Viv. ‘One’s in computers, one’s a physiotherapist and one has yet to find his feet. He’s forty-eight.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Phyllis. ‘Well, I had the other combination, two boys and a girl. Ned’s an animal-feed operator but his real love is Heavy Metal, much good it’s done him. Peter’s an accountant – no, I keep forgetting, they don’t call them accountants any more. They’re financial consultants now.’

  ‘Like refuse collectors. “My old man’s a dustman.” Remember that?’ said Viv. ‘Then there was “My old man said ‘Follow the van, and don’t dilly dally on the way’.” My mother used to sing that. I divorced my old man, by the way, sometime back in the Seventies.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Phyllis.

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ said Viv. ‘I’ve realised I’m a natural chopper and changer. Or rather, I start off enthusiastic and then spot the feet of clay. It’s a regular pattern. I did eventually find the love of my life, when I was in my sixties, but he died. What about your daughter, though? Didn’t you mention a daughter?’