Further Under the Duvet (7 page)

Anyway… Arriving at Departures but already having lost the will to live, I look up at the telly monitors wondering where I should check in. But I needn’t bother overexerting my neck muscles by looking
up
. All I need to do is look
in
, at the rowdy, pushing, shoving mass of humanity spilling out
into the set-down area. It might look like a riot at a Red Cross feeding station but actually it’s a queue. A queue filled with shrieking babies all sporting ear infections, overexcited teenage boys playfully breaking each other’s limbs and greasy long-haired men wanting to check-in rocket-launchers and garden sheds.

Step right this way, Miss Keyes!

For many, many hours I shuffle, far too slowly for any movement to be visible to the naked eye, and because – through no fault of my own – I’m one of the last to check in, all the good seats are gone. I’m usually told it’s not possible for the left side and right side of my body to sit together, so one half of me is in 11B and the other in 23E.

Then I proceed to security in order to be groped and to display the contents of my brain on a little table. (Okay, security checks are a very good thing; I’m just sore because recently I was relieved of one of my finest tweezers in a handbag search. Very expensive they were too, something people don’t seem to realize about tweezers. They think they only cost a couple of euro, but mine cost
eighteen quid
. Sterling.)

The security check eventually comes to an end and when I’ve replaced my internal organs in something approximating to their correct configuration, I proceed to the gate – just in time for the delay!

Now the thing is, I expect delays, I don’t even mind them (apart from when I miss my connecting flight to Mauritius). I’ve learnt to embrace them in a Zen kind of way: why resent them? Resenting them would be as futile as resenting the sun rising in the morning. Delays
are
.

What I mind are the delay-related lies, the massive conspiracy that every airport employee is in on – the ‘Delay? What Delay?’ fiction. Sometimes I try to con the check-in person by asking, all super-innocent, ‘How long is the delay?’ And just before they yawn and say, ‘Oh, you know, the usual, about an hour and ten,’ they suddenly flick me a furtive, fearful glance and go, ‘
Delay?
What delay?’

We’re treated just like small children on a long car journey who ask their mammy, ‘Are we there yet?’ Instead of the mammy saying brusquely, ‘It’s another three hours, so just get fecking-well used to it,’ she fobs them off with, ‘Soon, love, soon.’

However, I would rather know the facts, unpalatable and all as they might be, because then I could quite happily go round the shops and try out lipsticks on the back of my hand, instead of sitting anxiously at the gate watching the greasy long-haired men polishing their rocket-launchers.

But when I’ve pleaded, ‘Just tell me the truth,’ the response has been, ‘The truth?’ Mad B-movie cackle. ‘You can’t HANDLE the truth.’

But no night is too long and, finally, on we get! Most planes smell a bit funny now because the airlines have ‘cut back on’ (euphemism for sacked) their cleaning staff, but who’s complaining? God Almighty, when did a bad smell ever kill anyone? We can spray perfume on hankies and keep them clamped to our faces; it worked fine in Elizabethan times, why not now?

Anyway, so I take my seat and calmly wait to be joined by the twenty-stone person with personal-hygiene issues, who is invariably seated next to me. But once in a blue moon
the unthinkable happens and the seat beside me remains empty. Other passengers flood in and sit down and still no one gets in beside me. I hardly dare let myself hope. Like, what are the chances?
No, I won’t let myself think it, I won’t even entertain the thought
. But then the trolley dollies start making their ‘cross-check’ and ‘cross-hatch’ noises and my hope can no longer be contained. It breaks free and goes on the rampage. Could it possibly be…? Have I really been given the luxury of space and privacy and fragrant-ish air for this flight? Thank you, God, oh thank you!

And then I hear it: the faint pounding noise, which gets nearer and louder. Please, God, no, I beg. I can actually feel it now, the plane is shaking slightly with each rumble – the unmistakable sound of a twenty-stone smelly person running down the metal walkway. With a sinking heart I hear the groan of metal straining as he steps onto the plane and he makes his way directly towards me, the floor buckling and creaking with each step. After ten minutes of banging and clattering, as he tries to fit his rocket-launcher into the overhead compartment, he fights his way into his seat, gives me a gap-toothed smile and unwraps his kebab.

If only that was all I had to endure, but as airlines have also cut back on (i.e. sacked) their maintenance staff, I usually spend the flight with my table tray crashing down onto my knees every time the person in the seat in front breathes.

Eventually we reach our destination, and after we have staved off the curse of Icarus and prevented the wings from falling off by completing the ritual thirty circles over the entire city, we’re allowed to land. Only to discover – why, why, why? – that we have to sit on the tarmac like a crowd
of goms because they can’t find a set of steps for us. This is the point when I start talking to myself, pretending to be the local air-traffic control people. ‘A plane, you say? Landed? What,
here
? And you all want to get off? Steps, is it? And a coach? And what magic wand do you expect us to wave? Look, we’ll do our best to accommodate you this once but bear in mind this is an
airport
, we’re not equipped for this sort of thing.’

A speedy couple of hours polishes off the passport control, the luggage carousel, the unattended luggage desk to report the unarrived luggage and the taxi queue ‘managed’ by some power-crazed weirdo who understands the laws of the universe in an entirely different way to the rest of us. Then, after a soupçon of heavy traffic – finally, I ARRIVE!

Come in, they say, sit down, no
lie
down, on a silken feather bed and have some nectar. Ambrosia, so? KitKat Chunky? Wide-screen TV? Jo Malone candles? Foot-rub? Spot of reiki? Sex with George Clooney? Just say it and you can have it.

See, TRAVEL = horrible and ARRIVE = nice.

Surely we’re all agreed on it? Apparently something like a hundred and twelve per cent of regular travellers say that the one thing that would transform their quality of life would be a ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ machine so that they could just arrive directly at their destination and cut out all that nasty pesky travelling.

But in the absence of that, ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce the unique Stack ’n’ Fly System (currently pending patent). The brainchild of seasoned traveller… er… me and my friend Malcolm – this is how it works. You check
your bags in as usual, go to your gate, lie down on a stretcher, get strapped in, then a nurse comes along and administers a knock-out shot. You’re totally out cold and until you arrive at your destination, you know nothing. Not delays, not kebab-man, nothing.

The seats would be removed from the planes so that several stretchers could be stacked on top of each other, not unlike the onboard catering trolleys (which, of course, there would no longer be any need for). That way there would be room for the airlines to get loads more passengers in, so everyone’s happy. Instead of air-hostesses on board, we’d have a nurse who’d patrol the aisle with a hypodermic syringe, just in case someone starts to come to, too early. Fantastic, eh?

And that’s just how it would work in economy. Business-class passengers would be guaranteed a deluxe service where an ambulance-style vehicle would come to their home and give them their injection right there, so they’d be spared
everything
– the drive, the check-in, the groping, the delays. Same at the other end: still unconscious, a whole stack of them and their clicky pens could be wheeled through passport control, baggage, etc., and they need know nothing until they’d ARRIVED and everyone’s running around being lovely to them.

I have seen the future and it’s sedated.

A version of this was first published in
Abroad,
March 2004
.

A few years ago I went on a book tour of South Africa. It was the beginning of my love affair with this magical continent. Before the work started, I had a day and a half in Johannesburg.

The thing is, Johannesburg has a terrible reputation for violence, and certainly on the drive from the airport all the houses looked like grim, blank-faced fortresses. So my publishers had installed Himself and myself in a cosy hotel in a safe suburb where we were less likely to get raped and shot. However, I’d been all geared up for African ‘otherness’ and almost cried at our red swirly carpet and pink, flowery room. It looked like Surrey.

Disconsolate, I switched on the telly looking for the South African
Who Wants to be a Millionaire
(I was keen to add to my collection – I’d seen it in Japanese, Czech and German) and instead I found the pan-African news and I was shot through with a deep thrill at being on this vast continent.

Because we’d come in on an overnight flight, we slept for a lot of the day, which was lucky because we were under the strictest instruction to go nowhere on our own.
Nowhere
.

Around seven that evening, just as the rose-covered walls were starting to close in, Karen, my publicity girl, sprang us and took us to an area full of bars, restaurants, music and
throngs of tall, thin Xhosa and Zulu. Not a bit like Surrey. I cheered up a little. But after Karen had parked her jeep, she foraged for a rand, to give to the guys minding the cars. She muttered something about how embarrassing all this need for security was, so I told her how we have the same situation in Ireland, how they’re called lock-hard men… then I noticed something and, abruptly, I shut up. Irish lock-hard men don’t carry AK-47s.

On Sunday morning I had a hair appointment. (And as the salon was actually
in
the hotel Karen was prepared to let me go without an escort.) Now, a quick word about my hair. It’s thick, frizzy and unruly and only a highly skilled professional can tame it. I had a week of publicity ahead of me, kicking off with South Africa’s version of
Ireland AM
very early the following morning – too early to get my hair done before it – so Karen had arranged for the hotel’s hairdresser to come in specially.

He was a prissy Swiss bloke and very narky about having to work on a Sunday. But he was one of those passive-aggressive types who told me he didn’t mind, it’s just that Sunday is his only day off, and that if he doesn’t get enough rest, he gets ill; he had a really bad throat infection there last month, he’s prone to throat infections when he doesn’t get enough rest; but don’t get him wrong, he doesn’t
mind
. So when he ‘showed’ me a phial of special expensive gear which mends split ends (as if!) and told me I was under no obligation to buy it, I felt obliged to buy it.

When I returned to the room, Himself leapt to his feet and, in ragged tones, told me the rose-covered walls were
moving in on him again. However Karen had told us that if we wanted to go out, to call her. But I didn’t want to bother her on a Sunday. (She might make me buy some stuff for my split ends.) A dilemma ensued. From our window we could see a shopping centre only fifty yards up the road; it didn’t look like the sort of place you’d get raped and shot. But then I thought of the men with the AK-47s – and they were the good guys.

In the end we decided to chance it but, on the short walk, I felt as if I was in Sarajevo, in danger of being picked off by sniper fire.

The gas thing was the place looked like Donaghmede shopping centre, all small and ordinary, but there was a market on, jammers with African carvings and metalwork, bizarre-looking vegetables and smells of exotic cooking. It was intense, exciting and crammed with Bantu, Indians, even one or two whites.
Nothing
like Donaghmede. Or Sarajevo.

Everyone was lovely, no one tried to kill us and I bought an embroidered tablecloth – what was to become the inaugural tablecloth in my Tablecloths-bought-on-book-tours collection. (Funny thing is, I’m not a tablecloth kind of person. Must have been the stress.) We even had our lunch before returning to the hotel.

Giddy and elated with having cheated death, we got through a good portion of the afternoon before the walls began to close in again. We had to get out. Earlier we’d noticed a small cinema in the shopping centre and after so successfully avoiding being murdered on our previous outing, we decided to give it a whirl. All that was on was
Chocolat
and under normal circumstances we might have made fun of
its tweeness, but in our fragile, dislocated states, it was exactly what we needed.

However, when we emerged from the cinema, it had started to rain. As an Irish woman, I thought I knew all there was to know about rain. But this African stuff took it to the next level: water tumbled from the sky and ricocheted off the pavements in great bucketloads.

Himself said, ‘We’ll be drenched.’

Drenched? We’d be concussed. And worse again, if I went out in that deluge, the narky Swiss man’s work would be entirely undone in two seconds and I’d have to go on telly the following morning looking like Jack Osbourne. We waited ten anxious minutes; it got noticeably worse. The roads had become fast-flowing torrents and not a car was about.

Back in, looking for something to protect my hair. The only shop still open was the pick ’n’ mix and I explained my situation to the lovely Xhosa woman. From a sheet of cellophane, she fashioned a cunning rain-hat, like a hanky knotted at four corners that English men used to wear on the beach. (The cleaning staff had got wind that a human drama was unfolding in the Sweet Factory and had gathered to snigger.) Once my head was watertight, I draped my denim jacket over it and tied the sleeves under my chin. I looked gorgeous. Not.

We could have white-water rafted home. So much rain was wrung out of our clothes, you’d swear they’d just been washed. But my hair? Well, my hair was perfect.