OK, so I was letting my imagination run away with me. I was surrendering to fantasies. But maybe that in itself was a good sign. For six months now I had barely spoken to anybody. I had been off work for nearly all of that time, and had spent most of it alone at home, mainly in bed, occasionally in front of the television or the computer. As for human contact, I’d lost all appetite for it. Mankind has, as you may have noticed, become very inventive about devising new ways for people to avoid talking to each other, and I’d been taking full advantage of the most recent ones. I would always send a text message rather than speak to someone on the phone. Rather than meeting with any of my friends, I would post cheerful, ironically worded status updates on Facebook, to show them all what a busy life I was leading. And presumably people had been enjoying them, because I’d got more than seventy friends on Facebook now, most of them complete strangers. But actual, face-to-face, let’s-meet-for-a-coffee-and-catch-up sort of contact? I seemed to have forgotten what that was all about. Forgotten, at least, until the Chinese woman and her daughter had reminded me. It may sound like a strange thing to say, but their closeness, their intimacy had been the first thing I’d seen in six months which had given me hope. Had made me feel, even, that my luck might be about to turn.
And then, that very next day at the airport, something else happened that gave me exactly the same feeling. I was standing in the queue, waiting to check in, and hoping that I would be checked in at a particular desk, which was being staffed by a friendly-looking woman, a brunette with hazel eyes and an unforced smile. I wanted it to be her because she looked like the kind of person who might – just might – offer you an upgrade if you asked nicely enough. Anyway, I didn’t get her. Instead I found myself dealing with a grey-haired, overtanned guy of about my own age, or perhaps even older, who had no interest in making small talk and rarely looked up from his work to make eye-contact. It seemed pretty clear that I was on a hiding to nothing here. But I couldn’t stop myself from trying, all the same.
‘Busy flight?’ I heard myself ask.
‘Pretty busy,’ he answered.
‘No chance of an upgrade, then?’ I said, and he grunted with laughter.
‘If I had a dollar for everybody who asked me that …’
‘Happens a lot, does it?’
‘All the time, mate. All the time.’
‘So how do you decide?’
‘What?’ he said, looking up.
‘How do you decide who gets an upgrade, and who doesn’t?’
‘I guess,’ he said, staring at me directly and appraisingly, before lowering his eyes again, ‘I have to like the look of whoever’s doing the asking.’
He said nothing more, and I felt crushed into silence. It wasn’t until I had finished checking in, watched my suitcase sway off into oblivion and walked a few yards away from the desk that I thought to check my two boarding cards (one for each leg of the journey) and realized that he had upgraded me – to something called Premium Economy class. I looked back at the man to show my gratitude. He was busy with the next passenger, but he still found time to glance across at me. His expression remained blank – even surly – and yet he winked at me before returning his gaze to the computer screen in front of him.
Two hours later, at about four-thirty in the afternoon, Sydney time, I was sipping my second glass of champagne, waiting for take-off, and contemplating the delights of the journey ahead.
I had a seat next to the aisle; there was one other seat next to mine, a window seat, currently empty. The seats were wide and well-padded, and I had plenty of leg room. I felt an almost sensual glow of pleasure at the thought of the pampering I could look forward to. Thirteen hours to Singapore, which would include dinner, a few more glasses of champagne to wash it down, a choice of more than 500 movies and TV shows on the entertainment console in the seat-back, and perhaps a light snooze somewhere along the way. Then a couple of hours’ stopover at Singapore airport, back on to a different plane, a large whisky, some sleeping pills, and I would be out like a light until we reached Heathrow the following morning. Couldn’t be better.
At least, that’s how it should have been. The trouble was, as I said, that seeing the Chinese woman and her daughter had unexpectedly reawakened my need for human contact. I wanted to talk. I was desperate to talk.
No surprise, then, that when a pale, overweight businessman in a light grey suit squeezed past me with the most cursory nod of apology, and settled into the adjacent window seat, I felt an overwhelming urge to engage him in conversation. It was a misguided urge, I have to say. If my experience in sales had taught me anything, over the years, it was how to read people’s faces, so it should really have been pretty obvious that this aloof and weary-looking stranger had little interest in talking to me, and would have much preferred to be left alone with his newspapers and his laptop. But I suppose the truth is that I did notice it, and purposely chose to ignore the fact.
The businessman took a minute or two to settle into his chair and get comfortable. Once settled, he realized that he had left his computer in a bag in the overhead locker, so then he had to get up again and there was some more slightly breathless tugging and manipulating to be done before we were both back in our places. Then he flipped open the laptop and almost at once started typing furiously. After about five minutes he stopped typing, glanced quickly over the words on the screen, pressed a final button with a firm, almost theatrical gesture, then sighed and sat back in his chair, panting a little bit as the computer shut itself down. He turned his head towards me, not really looking at me; but the gesture was enough. I took it as my doorway into conversation, even if he hadn’t meant it that way.
‘All done?’ I said.
He looked blankly at me, obviously not expecting to be addressed. For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to say anything, but then he managed: ‘Uh-huh.’
‘Last-minute emails?’ I ventured.
‘Yep.’
His accent seemed to be Australian, although it was pretty hard to tell just from the words ‘Uh-huh’ and ‘Yep’.
‘You know what I love about aeroplanes?’ I asked, undaunted. ‘They’re the last place left to us where we can be totally inaccessible. Totally free. No one can phone you or text you on an aeroplane. Once you’re in the air, nobody can send you an email. Just for a few hours, you’re away from all of that.’
‘True,’ said the man, ‘but not for much longer. There are already some airlines where you can send emails and use the net from your own laptop. And they’re talking about letting passengers use their mobiles soon. Personally, I can’t wait. What you like about flying is just what I hate about it. It’s dead time. Completely dead.’
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘It just means that if we want to communicate with someone during a flight, it has to be done directly. You know, like – talking. It’s a chance to get to know other people. New people.’
He glanced across at me as I said this. Something in his glance told me that the chance of getting to know me was one that he might have passed up without too many spasms of regret. But the rebuff that I was expecting didn’t come. Instead he held out his hand, and said gruffly: ‘The name’s Charles. Charles Hayward. Friends call me Charlie.’
‘Maxwell,’ I returned. ‘Max, for short. Maxwell Sim. Sim, like the actor.’ I always said this when introducing myself, but usually, unless I was talking to a British person of a certain age, the reference would go over their heads, and I would have to add: ‘Or like a SIM card.’
‘It’s good to know you, Max,’ said Charlie; then picked up his newspaper, turned away from me, and began reading it, starting at the financial pages.
Well, that wouldn’t do. You can’t sit right next to someone for thirteen hours and ignore them completely, can you? In fact, not just thirteen, but twenty-four hours – because I noticed from the boarding card lying on his table that Charlie and I had been seated together on the second leg of the flight as well. It simply wouldn’t be human to sit in s
ilence for all that time. I was pretty sure, anyway, that, if I made a big enough effort, I would manage to draw him out. Now that we’d exchanged a few words, I realized that he didn’t look unfriendly, as such – just rather stressed out and overworked. He must have been somewhere in his mid-fifties: over dinner he told me that he’d grown up in Brisbane and now held a fairly high-powered position in the Sydney office of a multinational corporation which was starting to experience financial difficulties. (This, I suppose, was the reason he wasn’t flying Business Class.) He was on his way to London for crisis talks with some of the other senior figures: he didn’t specify what the financial difficulties were, of course (why would he, to someone like me?), but apparently it was all to do with leverage. His company had taken out loans which were over-leveraged, or under-leveraged, or something like that. At one point when he was trying to explain this to me he started to look quite animated, and I thought there was a chance he might become positively chatty, but when he realized that I knew nothing about leverage, and had no real understanding of any financial instrument more complicated than an overdraft or a deposit account, he seemed to lose interest in me, and from then on, it became increasingly difficult to get more than a few words out of him. It didn’t help that he’d drunk several glasses of champagne and a number of beers with his lunch, and was beginning to look even more tired than he did before. The other problem was that, as he grew more and more taciturn, I did the opposite, and – as if terrified by the possibility of silence between us – started to turn garrulous, over-talkative, and began pouring out confessions and confidences to this new acquaintance which I’m sure he must have found boring, if not a little embarrassing.
It all began when I told him: ‘You’re so lucky, you know – living in Sydney. What an amazing city. So different to where I live … ’
I left a short silence, which he finally broke with the dutiful question: ‘Don’t you live in London, then?’
‘No, not London exactly. Watford.’
‘Ah, Watford,’ he repeated. It was hard to tell whether he was investing the word with curiosity, disdain, sympathy or anything else.
‘Have you been to Watford?’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t believe I have. I’ve been to some great cities. Paris. New York. Buenos Aires. Rome. Moscow. Never Watford, for some reason.’
‘There’s a lot to be said for Watford,’ I insisted, with a defensive edge to my voice. ‘Not many people know that it’s twinned with Pesaro, an extremely attractive Italian town, on the Adriatic coast.’
‘I’m sure it’s a marriage made in heaven.’
‘Sometimes,’ I continued, ‘I do ask myself why I ended up living in Watford. I’m from Birmingham, originally, you see. I suppose it came about because I got this job a few years ago with a toy company, based in St Albans, and Watford’s pretty close to there, as you probably know. Or perhaps you don’t. Anyway, they’re right next to each other. Couldn’t be handier, really, if for any reason you wanted to go from one to the other. Mind you, I stopped working for that company pretty soon after moving to Watford, which is ironic, when you think about it, because after that I started working at a department store in Ealing, which is actually further from Watford than St Albans is. Not much further, you understand, just another .… well, ten or fifteen minutes, if you’re driving. Which I usually was, because it’s quite hard to get from Watford to Ealing by public transport. Surprisingly hard, as a matter of fact. But I certainly don’t regret taking that job – the job in Ealing, I mean – because that was how I met my wife, Caroline. Well, my ex-wife Caroline, I suppose she will soon be, because we separated a few months ago. I say separated, but what happened, really, was that she told me she didn’t want to be with me any more. Which is fine, you know, that’s her prerogative, you’ve got to respect that kind of decision, haven’t you, and she’s … you know, she’s very happy now, she’s with our daughter Lucy, they’ve moved back up north, and that seems to suit them, because for some reason, I don’t know why, Caroline never really seemed to take to Watford, she never seemed entirely happy there, which I think is a shame, because, you know, there’s something good to be found everywhere, isn’t there?, which isn’t to say that, living in Watford, you wake up every morning and think to yourself, Well, life may be a bit shit, but look on the bright side, at least I’m in Watford, I mean it’s not as if Watford is the sort of place where the very fact that you’re living there gives you a reason to go on living, that would be overegging the pudding a bit, Watford just isn’t that sort of place, but it does have an excellent public library, for instance, and it does have The Harlequin, which is a big new shopping centre with some … terrific retail outlets, actually, really terrific, and it does also – now I come to think of it, and this will amuse you actually – well …’ (noticing his frozen expression, I wasn’t so sure) ‘… it might amuse you, anyway, it does also have Walkabout, which is a big, sort of themed bar, which has a big sign outside it offering to give you “The Awesome Spirit of Australia”, although, thinking about it, when you’re in there, it never really feels as though you’re in Australia, you never really forget that you’re in Watford, to be perfectly honest, but then if you’re like me, and you like living in Watford anyway, what’s wrong with that?, I mean, some people are just happy with what they’re given, aren’t they, and I don’t see anything wrong with that, I mean, I wouldn’t say it had ever been my ambition to live in Watford, I don’t ever recall my father sitting me down on his knee and asking me, Son, have you ever thought about what you want to do when you grow up, and me saying back to him, Well, Dad, I don’t really mind, just as long as I end up living in Watford – I don’t remember any occasions like that, it’s true, but then, for one thing, my father just wasn’t that sort of person, he never did sit me down on his knee, as far as I can remember, he was never very tactile, or affectionate, or very … present really, in my life, in any meaningful way, from the age of about – well, for about as long as I can remember, I suppose – but anyway, my point is that just because Watford isn’t the sort of place you dream of moving to all your life, that doesn’t make it the sort of place you can’t wait to move out of, in fact I had a conversation along these lines a few years ago with my friend Trevor, Trevor Paige, who is one of my oldest friends actually, we go right back to the 1990s, right back to when I used to be a sales rep for this toy company that I was telling you about, he used to cover Essex and the East Coast, and I was doing London and the Home Counties, but I left that job after a year or two, as I said, to go to this department store in Ealing, but Trevor stayed on, you see, and we carried on being friends, mainly because he only lived a couple of streets from me in Watford, until about two years ago that is, because about two years ago we were having a drink together in Yates’s Wine Lodge in the precinct, and suddenly, he said, You know what, Max, I’m fed up, I am, I’m really pissed off, and I said, Pissed off?, what are you pissed off with, and he said, Watford, and I said, Watford?, and he said, Yes, I am, I am well and truly pissed off with Watford, I’ve had it up to here with Watford, I’ve lived in Watford for eighteen years now and to be perfectly frank I really think I’ve seen everything that Watford has to offer and it can truly be said that Watford holds no further delights or surprises in store, and I’ll go further than that and say that if I don’t get out of Watford soon I shall probably kill myself or die of boredom or frustration or something, which was a huge surprise to me I must say, because I’d always thought that Watford suited Trevor and Janice – that’s his wife’s name, Janice – down to the ground, and in fact that was one of the things that Trevor and I had always had in common, really, the fact that we were both quite partial to Watford and more than partial, actually, we were both quite fond of Watford, you know, a lot of our best memories and the most treasured … shared moments in our friendship were associated with Watford, like for instance the fact that we’d got married in Watford and our children had been born in Watford, and to be honest I thought that Tre
vor had really just lost it that night and it was the alcohol talking, and I can remember thinking to myself, No, Trevor will never leave Watford, he can talk the walk but he can’t walk the … talk, or take the walk or something, anyway, I thought he’d never go through with it, but credit where it’s due, there was more to Trevor than I thought, and it hadn’t all been bluster, he wanted a clean break with Watford and a clean break with Watford was what he got, and six months later he and Janice moved to Reading, where he got this new job – a very good new job, by the sound of it – with a company that makes toothbrushes, or imports them anyway, I think they import them from overseas, but they distribute them all over the UK, and not just regular toothbrushes but specialist toothbrushes with quite, you know, innovative designs, and also dental floss and mouthwash and a number of other oral hygiene products, which is actually quite a fast-growing … Erm, excuse me?’
I’d become aware that somebody was tapping me on the shoulder. I turned round and saw that it was one of the stewardesses.
‘Sir?’ she said. ‘Sir, we need to have a word with you, about your friend.’
‘My friend?’
I didn’t know who they meant at first. Then I realized that she must be talking about Charlie Hayward. There was another stewardess standing beside her, and a male flight attendant. They didn’t look happy. I remembered that there’d been a bit of fuss a few minutes earlier, when one of them had come to take his tray away, but I’d been busy talking, and hadn’t taken much notice. Anyway, as they now informed me, it was impossible to be sure of the exact timing – not until they’d found out if there was a doctor on the plane – but apparently he’d been dead for at least five or ten minutes.