Gladys Reunited

by Sandi Toksvig

  I was not done with fame for the day. I drove on, a few miles south, to Venice Beach. I think I was being pursued for my talent for here Universal Trucks were out in force. I strolled past the Venice Beach sidewalk market — ‘A spliff a day keeps the doctor away’ — and on a piazza facing the beach I found more cameras whirring away. This was yet another piece of television and I knew instantly that it was something altogether grimmer. As I arrived, a monster with a double-headed executioner’s axe was about to chop off someone’s head. It was clearly going to be gruesome as there were many quarts of blood on stand-by. A small group of extras dressed in jeans and white robes appeared unconcerned, despite the fact that they were holding posters declaring that the end of the world was nigh. The monster kept practising his axe-swinging, for even a ghoul wants to look good for the cameras. It was hot and the monster was beginning to sweat. He lifted his rubber face up for some air and showed the actor underneath. He looked a cheerful enough fellow with a small moustache like an escaped caterpillar. Not natural casting, I thought. More the musical comedy type.

  ‘Could we have the zombie over here?’ called the assistant to the director’s assistant. How ignorant I was. A zombie. Not a monster at all. The people in charge of blood began to remove sheets of plastic from the dummy who was to be decapitated. Now I could see that it too was dressed in jeans and a white robe. No wonder the other extras looked so cheerful. At least they didn’t get that part.

  A man got out a small set of steps. Carefully he removed the dummy’s head, put a funnel in its neck and began to pour in blood. It looked very fake under the sky which was now a brilliant blue and held no threat of rain whatsoever. More blood poured from the funnel. It was all taking rather a long time. Two policemen on bicycles cycled past. There was a fluid mix of the real and the unreal on the beach and I couldn’t tell if they were actually policemen or men who yearned to do Hamlet. One of the extras had tired of his task and sat down on a low wall beside me.

  ‘What’s the show?’ I asked him.

  He couldn’t remember the name of the piece or, more importantly, why the end was nigh and had to ask around.

  ‘Providence, I think,’ was the final answer from a girl on her mobile. The extras sat in small knots discussing who had heard what about the possibilities of other work. My new friend was called Carrido. He was about thirty. He had a neat, trimmed beard and was fairly newly arrived from Mexico.

  ‘Aye chain chan chactor. Aye chwant to bay in dey moooovies,’ he explained and spat in my eye. I thought this seemed an unlikely career and that he was quite lucky anyone had understood he wanted a job at all.

  ‘Everything ready? Background people!’ came the urgent call as some of the extras started roller-blading, police looked busy about their persons and I wandered around trying to look concerned about the end being so nigh.

  ‘Action!’

  Now the adrenaline pumped into the zombie, he swiped the practised swipe and cut the dummy clean in half.

  Applause, laughter.

  ‘He’s dead for sure,’ called the extra with the mobile.

  ‘Good job!’ said props.

  Now the dummy needed surgery, redressing, more blood. The whole thing was turning into ER and I didn’t have the time to give any more. Still, enigmatic in the back of Angel and a glimpse of me looking concerned in Providence was enough Hollywood fame for one day. What a ridiculous business. What was I doing even on the fringes?

  One more port of call before I took the plane home — the Queen Mary ocean liner at Long Beach.

  It is better to travel than to arrive.

  Irritating Chinese proverb

  My family and I first arrived in the United States on one of the great ocean liners. Each summer we would take the slow boat back to Europe and return on another to our adopted home. Of all those journeys, my favourite had been on the old Queen Elizabeth. Not the QE2 with its steel door handles and high-tech lines. No, the old Queen. A stately ambassador for Cunard with gleaming wooden staircases and a history of glamour and excitement. The Queen Mary was her sister ship and sits as a permanent attraction and hotel at Long Beach, a few miles south of LA airport.

  I like the alleged story behind the Queen Mary. It seems Cunard went to see the king, George V, and said, ‘Sir, we’d like your permission to name our new ocean liner for the greatest queen England has ever known.’

  ‘Great,’ said the king. The wife’ll be thrilled.’

  And so the vessel became the Queen Mary. Cunard had to go back to the ship and take out all the things that said Queen Victoria on them.

  As I walked out on the gangway I had the boat to myself. Swing music was playing over the tannoy and I remembered how they had broadcast Anchors Aweigh and thrown coloured streamers, each time we left port. A poster of a 1930s couple encouraged me to visit America. I entered on the promenade deck where we had often taken a morning stroll. The wide wooden floor was protected from the ocean wind by large plate-glass windows. We had walked to make room for the three enormous meals a day plus morning bouillon soup and afternoon tea on the sports deck.

  I wanted lunch now but the only food option was provided by a hideous place called California Shakes. A Latino girl was alone behind the counter. She made me a chocolate malted milk and completed the entire transaction while talking on the phone. I remembered the caviar served in the back of a carved ice swan, the applause for flames of baked Alaska and I knew that Cunard was turning in his grave.

  I stood at the stern of the great old lady and felt overwhelmed with the loss of my father. How often we had stood in just such a spot, our hands beside each other on the gleaming wooden railings as the mighty engines chugged water out in a regular and rhythmic wake. We had travelled to America the right way in those days. As I stood there, a dirigible flew above Long Beach —the Goodyear Blimp — an image of a different kind of travel. Special clothes, special trunks. A journey which took a long time and you had cause to stop and think.

  It was on a ship, a smaller one but still at stern, watching the water rush beneath us, that my father had once and only once talked about me being gay.

  ‘Before I knew,’ he said, ‘I thought you were living your life without passion. I couldn’t bear it if you didn’t have passion.’ We never mentioned it again.

  Mixed with my grief was a knowledge that the sun felt good on my back and that only older people ever appreciate that. Then, on the farthest railing I saw a one-legged gull standing watching me. What could happen, I wondered, to a gull that might cause it to lose afoot? Did it affect take-offs and landings? What did the other gulls think? Was the one-legged fellow an object of gull ridicule? Did all gulls really come from California? And that was it. I suddenly felt better. I realised I did not want to retire from the world entirely.

  Standing on the deck of the Queen Mary I knew I had come full circle. I stood as an adult facing the child who had travelled on such similar decks. In the harbour a salvage tug had placed a large inflatable yellow ring in the water. They were trying to gather something in the middle and it was difficult. It seemed to me that it was precisely what I had been doing on this trip. In the distance, in Long Beach itself, I could see a barrage of cranes hard at work on some construction project.

  There was much discussion in the papers about what would happen to Ground Zero after the 9/11 tragedy has been cleared. Some people want a park, others want more office space on this prime piece of Manhattan real estate. Richard Anderson, President of the New York Building Congress, an amalgam of developers, contractors and realtors, said, ‘The people who died here weren’t sitting in a park on September 11. They were sitting at desks in an office building, and that has to be part of any final developments we approve.’

  This was a curious take on what happened. It suggested that if those poor people who were killed could have predicted and chosen their place of death then sitting earning the corporate dollar would have come first.

  At least I didn’t do that. I may be in a professio
n which now only admires youth, which does not want people ‘tainted with experience’, but there are other things to do. Going back had allowed me to close one chapter and look ahead to the next. I was not defined by a country. I think you can live in any country where you understand the nuances of daily life. I no longer have that in America. There is much I don’t understand. I could not live there now. I still love the mad, add-the-tax-at-the-till, bright-orange-cheese-melt country, but I do not belong.

  It is good to look back but it should not be a preoccupation in life. My mother refers to herself as ‘middle-aged’ which means she will live to be about 150.1 like that attitude. She believes she is only halfway. I hope the best is yet to come. Georgia O’Keefe horrified her family when at over ninety years old she took a lover in his twenties. Everyone said he was trying to steal her fortune, but in the photographs she’s just smiling.

  It was good to know that the Gladyses were all right. Eleven feisty women spread out over thousands of miles. No one had passed away. No one was really sick or destitute. Some had found their niche and others; like me, were still looking. The serious papers were full of international news. Everywhere young men filled and caused trouble spots with guns and grim determination. Yet another former congressman, senator, member of world politics, or whatever, was pictured turning up on the world stage to bring peace to some God-forsaken territory. Inevitably the peace broker was a man in a casual bomber jacket; it is always men in casual bomber jackets. They wear them to prove that they are good guys who plan to roll up their sleeves and get the job done. Personally, I’d like to send a task force of the Gladyses. Put the dozen of us in a trouble spot and I think we’d have it cleared up and fresh flowers out on the tables in a minute. But that would be my desire and not theirs. Among the women, with one or two exceptions, I found reflected an American preoccupation with the domestic. A worrying disregard for the big picture as the country plunges headlong into greater and greater isolationism.

  I still know that if any one of them came to my door I’d be there for them. For all the self-absorption that Americans display they do make good friends. Loyal and kind. I believe each and every one of them would help me if I asked. Would I seek them out? Not all of them. I have laid that part of my life to rest. It happened and I can’t go back.

  Next? I promised my younger daughter we would eat Chinese food in the shadow of the Great Wall, the elder one wants to go riding in the Grand Canyon and really I should take my boy camping on the San Juan islands. For myself? I don’t know. I am a grown-up now. Maybe I won’t show my knickers any more, except there is the offer of this play and …

  Conclusion on a Plane

  I don’t believe in survival of the fittest. I think it should be survival of the wittiest. That way at least those that die go laughing.

  Jane Wagner

  12 November 2001—John E Kennedy Airport, New York — 12.40 p.m. Almost exactly two months since the World Trade Center tragedy. It was Veterans Day, an American public holiday, and I was trying to go home. I had checked in early and suffered the new and often pointless security measures. I was made to walk through the metal detector with my boots off, an unhappy Englishwoman showing my socks in public. My boot laces proved to be harmless but the two Swiss army knives I had forgotten about in my bum bag went through unnoticed. I was exhausted. It had been many miles and many impressions and I no longer knew what I thought about anything. I pulled my laptop out of its bag to place it on the plastic tray as requested when a young woman behind me shoved her coat and bag in front and pushed past, her need clearly greater than mine, her reawakened humanity from 9/11 already forgotten. Everything went according to routine. I found my aisle seat and sat down. No child sat beside me. Finally I was getting the hang of this.

  We taxied out to the runway as the plane ahead took off and then there was silence. I looked past the vast American man sitting at the window and saw that the airport had become eerily still. Not so much as a baggage cart was moving. At last the tannoy cracked into life.

  ‘Uh, ladies and gentlemen …‘ The British pilot cleared his throat. ‘There has been an … incident at the end of the runway … we’re going to be … delayed … I will bring you further information when I have it.’

  I didn’t know then but the poor captain had seen the plane directly in front of us, an air bus heading for the Dominican Republic, rise up from the runway and plunge down vertically into the busy neighbourhood of Queens. Slowly, a kind of contained panic spread through the plane. People began calling on their mobile phones. You could hear the beep of text messages arriving throughout the cabin. Far from displaying the restrained calm I would have expected, the crew seemed to be running everywhere. A stewardess ran past me, yelling and pointing to someone on their phone, Turn that off now! Unless you want to end up like those people over there.’

  How a plane could have been brought down by a mobile phone was a mystery. It was not a comforting response in the face of a crisis. The young Asian girl across the aisle from me began to shake with barely controlled hysteria. Her boyfriend worked at La Guardia Airport in Queens. Maybe something had happened to him, maybe it was a bomb, maybe we were next. We sat there for an hour and a half with almost no information. Word spread row to row of the crash. We had been the next plane to take off. It could have been us. No one knew what had happened. Was it like the Twin Towers? Would we be next? Through the window, seemingly at the end of the runway, the sky was filling with strangely white smoke. It didn’t look horrible. It was rather pure — as though a cloud had landed and was now expanding and expanding to fill the sky and the earth in equal measure. Rumours began to circulate of something having been placed in the aviation fuel. The tiniest spark could bring a new meaning to the words ‘airline terminal’. Were we sitting on a bomb? The crew were now silent. Perhaps they knew nothing but even the nothing they knew would have been a comfort to share.

  At last we were returned to the departure lounge. Here, if possible, there was even less information. As we ‘de-planed’, an expression I had never heard before, the airport authority was making an announcement:

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen, Manhattan has been closed, Manhattan has been closed.’

  This was news I didn’t feel we needed. It caused more and unnecessary distress. The daughter of a journalist, I did what I thought my father would have done. I went straight to the duty free shop and bought a radio. The girl behind the counter was the calmest person in New York. Nothing swayed her from her undivided attention to her nails. She might be about to blow up but she would go with a fine manicure.

  The radio was not a great piece of technology and there was only one station which beamed in with any clarity. I don’t know what The Don and Mike Show deals with on a regular basis but I suspect it is not investigative journalism. Certainly, if I had hoped to find the American equivalent of Radio 4 this was not it. Either Don or Mike was explaining as I joined them that’… there’s not a lot of information around right now, so we thought why not do a show where people can call in and say what they know so we’re all in the same boat.’

  This opened the floodgates for every unbalanced person in the metropolitan area to call in with their two cents’ worth.

  Caller: ‘I heard they have dirty bombs.’

  Don or Mike: ‘So, more of a radiation threat than an annihilation threat?’

  Caller: That’s right.’

  Where did the person hear this? Who were ‘they’? Don and Mike moved on to the next nutter with phone access.

  Caller: ‘You know, this is almost the exact time those planes went into the towers.’

  Must be terrorism then. They do like to run everything by clockwork. Don and Mike argued with no one. It was an appalling piece of broadcasting. At no point was anything intelligent said by anybody.

  Caller: ‘All those people Bush is killing in Afghanistan I mean their kids are going to grow up and come get us. We need to get them too.’

  Don or Mike: ‘The way we live
right now — it … it … sucks.’

  Caller: ‘When people don’t speak English it freaks me out to travel. The security people seem to me to be inadequate individuals.’

  Caller: The Taliban hate everything we stand for — democracy, freedom of religion — so you can’t even talk to them. There’s no point.’

  Caller: ‘If you look at world problems they all come from the Middle East. I mean we just need to get rid of it.’

  I couldn’t listen anymore. I had managed to get through to my children who had already heard about the disaster on the news. The local English radio had merely reported that there had been a plane crash at JFK but had given no details of the type of plane, the airline and so on. It is the great danger of instant news that they had already suffered huge anxiety.

  In the departure lounge bar, the television had been turned up full and there was panic and mild hysteria on Channel 7 news.

  ‘They said there would be another incident before Ramadan which starts 17 November so this falls within that period.’

  This was followed by the comforting news that Terrorism will not stop Strip Pyramid being shown on Friday’. The hysteria went on and on. It continued even as news began to filter through that this had simply been a terrible accident. I spoke to my brother in London who works for Sky News. Everyone there was being much calmer.

  ‘Looks like a freaky coincidence,’ he said.

  The Channel 7 team were becoming more desperate. ‘I still think this is terrorism,’ a man in a suit went on, despite everything which now seemed to indicate the contrary.

  Beyond the windows of the departure lounge nothing moved. In the distance we could see the tremendous plumes of smoke continuing to pour into the sky from suburban Queens. The airport staff were becoming agitated as passengers tried to glean some information.