Homesickness (18 page)

Fair enough.

Gerald turned to Borelli, ‘To have the feeling you could never get away when you wanted would be unbearable. I think I'd go mad. I always feel I want to go away. And yet lately I've had nightmares about dying and being buried under a stone in a foreign country. I don't understand it.'

‘What we've seen,' said Doug putting down his glass, ‘makes you realise how ruddy lucky we are.'

‘By now I have been to most countries at some stage, except Tibet. But I find there is always something fresh to see, something I've missed.'

Yes, that's true.

‘Perpetual Motion, eh Sheila?'

The disloyalty of some; of men.

Always there comes a let-down. It's done casually, easily, suddenly a shock.

Kaddok told them: ‘The Eiffel Tower was completed in 1888. And the same man did the Statue of Liberty too.'

‘We could get to see that…'

Yes.

‘I'd prefer the Niagara Falls. I hear they're fantastic.'

‘It was chiefly Leon.' And they turned to Gwen. ‘He wanted to take his photographs. As you know. And we liked the idea of a group. We think we have a nice group here.'

Garry put in, ‘Listen, don't ever go to Singapore. I was sick as a dog.'

‘I'd heard it was spotless…'

‘Not in my book, it wasn't.'

‘Yes, I must say a lot of the most unusual places are terribly filthy. Remember Africa on the nose?'

‘I think we could have skipped that. I didn't feel at all at home there.'

Garry belched.

‘Get your hand off me!'

‘One thing,' Garry went on, overfilling another glass, ‘I didn't come for their beer. Have you ever tasted such pissy muck? I'd heard about it but never believed it.'

Violet pulled a face. ‘Ho-hum. You keep saying that.'

‘Piss off!'

Louisa smiled widely, a ballerina's mouth. ‘It's one of my favourite things in the world, travel. I'm not conscious of time. You meet all sorts of people.'

‘Being away, especially in a large city like this,' Borelli suggested, ‘don't you feel you can do things you would otherwise not do? We feel anonymous or separate,' he said aloud. ‘Sometimes I feel no harm could come; I could do anything.'

Louisa watched him over her glass.

‘By that I mean—'

‘I'm myself wherever I am,' said Mrs Cathcart, clearly and firmly. For she always suspected the worst.

They were not conscious of time. They looked and felt separate from the main population, to one side. Their chairs formed a closed circle, regularly punctured by a darting waiter with a clubfoot who could lift six glasses with the blue fingers of one hand.

‘I haven't been to good theatre for years,' Violet was explaining.

Beside her, Ken Hofmann gazed at the spot near the ceiling, fingers tapping his lips. Yet he readily answered.

‘The tax man pays for mine.'

‘Ken! You were keen to see the paintings and the museums.'

‘Yes, but there were other reasons, if you care to recall. Weren't there?' To the others he explained, ‘My wife has a poor memory or chooses not to remember. There are other reasons for coming all this way, tax being one, but I would not like to embarrass Louisa. Would I, wife?'

‘Here's the Professor! Sit down. We were talking about you. We know all about you.'

Ha, ha.

‘No we weren't,' Sasha quickly told him. ‘Where have you been? You can sit here.'

As far as safety records go, the colourful South American airline, P—— N—— (‘no names, please!'), again topped the list on the casualties-per-kilometre scale. Their figures were really horrendous. It was the seventh year in a row. P—— N —— made attempts to suppress the data. Failing that they cited the peculiar weather conditions over the Andes, the beautiful afternoon light, the incidence of condors, and the low standard of mosquito netting in several stopover towns. These may have contributed but it was generally acknowledged that other factors, known in the trade as ‘invisibles', distorted the picture.

P—— N—— had begun as a jungle carrier—stones for metropolitan museums, tropical fish, a little cocaine—when nobody had ever seen a vapour trail, when the very idea of jet-propulsion and the ‘sound barrier' made people burst out laughing. Indeed, around then P—— N—— achieved early and steady profitability with a charter service to find the lost explorer, Colonel Fawcett. Today its business connections are more obscure. Its major shareholders are difficult to trace. Astonishingly for a commercial airline its routes are pragmatic and can alter from hour to hour at the whim of the management or pilots. Those mid-air collisions which had boosted the year's figures occurred when a P—— N—— Douglas had joined the flight path of another airline. And those who take an instinctive suspicious interest in the Central Intelligence Agency point to the inordinate number of mid-air explosions. A wild, still unsubstantiated rumour had it that last year's wreckage near the Bolivian border showed the fuselage full of strapped-in soldiers,
American soldiers
.

Flying for such an airline somehow made the pilots extremely attractive to women, and they could be seen wearing silk scarves and Polaroid sunglasses, and practised that careless swagger like the Battle of Britain pilots. This clique in the airline's work force scorned passenger nervousness as ‘bourgeois'. But the crash figures were serious; of course they were. The subsequent fall in market share and the airline's growing unprofitability prompted the Public Relations Department to act. The real lolly was in the Atlantic run.

At breakfast, Gwen Kaddok said (in her steady, vegetarian's voice, almost forgotten): ‘Before you go.' She thought they might all be interested… ‘There's an event here at the hotel this morning.'

That was the thing about travel: you could decide on impulse to turn left instead of right, or stop dead, causing congestion and even bumping into the local inhabitants hurrying past to real destinations. Conscious of this their faces had settled, smoothed, flâneurs, travellers, dilettanti.

‘As well, the stars tell me to stay indoors today,' Gwen mused, unsmiling. With her arms crossed she used her fingertips to lift the shawl on both shoulders.

‘You follow the stars too?' Violet leaned forward. ‘What are you?'

‘I can see you're a Scorpio,' was Gwen's answer. ‘Am I right?'

Then she told them only what she had heard from the receptionist: the 150-year-old man had been flown in from a mountainous village in Ecuador. The idea here being the aura of his astonishing longevity would perhaps rub off onto P—— N—— Airlines, offsetting its sudden-death reputation, a bold and imaginative stroke on the part of the Public Relations Department. The press conference would begin at eleven sharp. Expected to attend were representatives from the
British Medical Journal
and other such organs, as well as radio and television.

‘It is my theory,' said Gwen, who was never original, ‘preservation has us all interested. We'd all like to live long.'

‘Too right!'

‘“Preservation”?' Sheila queried. She knitted her brow.

Cut out meat and sugar. Eat roughage! Cold baths and secret exercises, oils and ointments: spend years to live another day.

‘A hundred and fifty? That's incredible. Is that right?'

‘It'll be an experience,' Doug nodded. ‘I'd like to see him.'

And when they returned to the dining room before eleven, they found twenty to thirty metal chairs facing a dais, as in a Fabian Society lecture or an anti-vivisectionists' meeting. On the dais were two chairs, a card table and a cliche carafe of water. The group filled the first two rows on either side of Gwen Kaddok. She placed her hands on her lap.

The others were not so patient.

‘It's twenty past,' Gerald whispered.

Twisting in their seats they found the seats behind them empty.

‘I find her a bit spooky,' Sasha nodded towards Gwen Kaddok. ‘Don't you? She hardly says a word.'

‘What?' North started. He had been…miles away.

But then a very old man shuffled in from the left supported by the Public Relations Director, and they became quiet. To climb onto the dais he lifted his vibrating front leg twice as high. Realising his mistake, he stopped and tried again, better. They stared at his head. It was all dark holes and cracks, an old rock, with a few bursts of thin hair protruding. He wore a burlap shirt and rope sandals. Calm man: it had much to do with his slowness. He took no notice of them or the surroundings. When he sat down he emitted an ancient sigh like life escaping a perished air cushion. ‘Wow!' they all heard Gwen murmur.

The airline's representative remained standing. ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the press…' and flashed them a smile.

Excellent teeth! A pencil moustache, crumpled cream suit and floral tie.

‘We're behind schedule…'

He glanced at the old man and shook his head.

‘In the lift, José Ruiz Carpio believed he was back in our Douglas jet. I had to correct him. He's never been out of his village before. Most of what he sees he cannot believe. But when one thinks about it, to be taken in a lift is an intercontinental flight on a reduced scale: acceleration, the smooth ride, gentle touchdown. I speak here only of our airline. What do you say?… To hell with the rest. But you want to hear from José Ruiz. Hey, señor! Did you have a pleasant flight?'

The old man had his head on his chest.

‘The old man's weary. Excuse me.'

From his side pocket he took out a small syringe. Sheila turned her head as he lifted the old arm, and gave an injection.

He spoke of José Ruiz's ‘astronomical age', of his village in the Province of Loja in Ecuador, its valleys of mists and steady temperatures. The average age up there is 114.6. And it's rising. One theory was the complete absence of wristwatches and clocks. It was suggested the body becomes conscious of ticking, our metabolism embeds itself into that mechanical, artificial Time. In José Ruiz's village the sound of time was replaced by the never-ending rattle of mountain water, which could very well drag the soul of a body along with it, as the heart pumps blood through the veins.

All this was very interesting.

They glanced at the figure beside him. He was sparking up.

Dr North asked, ‘How do we know he is, in fact, 150 years old?'

A good point. (For example, he could have been ninety or a hundred.)

‘Ah, an oversight! It is all here.'

He handed around Xerox copies of the original birth certificate.

‘As you will notice, today is his birthday. We have a little party planned for tonight, to show what life is all about. He may have lived long, but he's missed a lot. Then we'll fly him home. Won't we, José Ruiz?'

The old man threw up his arms and let out a hoarse cry. Kaddok had crept up on all fours below the table and slowly raised his head fitted with camera.

Calming him by hissing a sentence in Spanish and vibrating one hand, the PR man turned to them and shook his head. ‘He's all right. He thought it was a machine gun. His experience of the media is zero.'

He then held his smile for five or six seconds as Kaddok took another photograph. Excellent teeth!

Beside him the figure sat mumbling.

‘Amigo! How old do you say you are!' Garry Atlas called out, getting into the spirit.

The PR man translated.

The old man had a surprising deep voice: ‘One hundred and forty-nine and seven fortnights.'

‘What does modern science say about this?' Gerald asked North. ‘Eh?'

The PR man was explaining or apologising. ‘His village doesn't have English or electricity…'

He smiled to encourage further questions, and the witness helped himself to his cigarettes, putting one behind his ear and stuffing a handful into his shirt pocket.

‘Any ailments?' Cathcart called out, a seasoned journo.

This old man frowned—a deeper transformation—and cupped his ear.

‘Ailments!
Le duele algo
!' shouted the Public Relations manager into the labyrinth of the ear.

The other one shrugged and coughed something. He blew out shafts of smoke and studied the cigarette.

‘He says, none. He feels like a baby. That's a lie. He's hard of hearing and has weak legs. You should see his legs. Perhaps you would like to photograph them? He suffers from shortage of breath. He is as creaky as hell. In the air-cargo business he is the equivalent of a very fragile heirloom: an old oil portrait on a crumbling canvas held in a loose frame with broken glass.'

Gwen writing in a small notebook looked up. ‘How have you lived so long?'

But that's an impossible quest—