And two hours later, since England is further from the equator, the same sun is sliding down over London, roosting in the blackening skyscrapers. Early September: summer is over.
The airport. Heathrow, Terminal 4. In here, there is no weather, no rain, no sunlight.
A giant ant-hill poked with a stick. The ants run everywhere, surely without purpose. Tiny limbs hurrying, dragging great parcels of earth or food almost bigger than they are. Great white birds swoop down on them, one after another – but then more ants stream out of their bellies.
No trees, no grass, nothing. Come down closer and the ants become people, but still nothing grows. Everything here was made by machines. Metal and plastic, silicon and paper.
The humans, though, are very alive, giving off waves of sweat and terror, adrenalin, joy and sorrow, as they say goodbye, or greet other humans.
Here’s Vanessa Henman. Ah, Vanessa ... Vanessa, accompanied by her driver, long-suffering Justin, who has driven all wrong, so Vanessa has told him.
How small she looks, how agitated. Like grass in the wind; dry grass; straw. A chemical yellow, half a lifetime too late for the blonde of childhood, and her teeth are too white. Her little pale face is tense with excitement, her red lips pursed to say goodbye to her son, who has wheeled her luggage trolley through to Fast Bag Drop, offloading her enormous blue case, a sort of wardrobe on wheels that feels freighted with stones.
She might be in her forties, or fifties, or sixties. Nights of not sleeping, getting ready for her journey, have left her older. She clutches at Justin. The point of her life, but has she been a bad mother? He’s a big handsome animal, lazily clever, with lips that curve in a deep cupid’s bow and natural blond curls Vanessa envies. ‘Justin,’ she says, ‘kiss Abdul Trevor for me.’ She’s a good grandmother, if rather anxious, and her little grandson is not quite well. She cries for a moment, then lets Justin go, and begins to heft her over-large flight bag into the lonely maze of roped-off gangways, endlessly doubling back on themselves, down which all travellers must go. Like a determined snail, with her house on her back. Surely it won’t fit in the overhead lockers?
Be obedient, Vanessa: follow the path. If you go off the path, who knows what may happen?
Vanessa’s on her way to Kampala, Uganda. She’s going to a British Council Conference, where everything is organised. She has several memos with all her arrangements. There are Conference Programmes of enormous size, in multiple versions, clogging up her computer, as speakers drop in, or venues drop out. The unifying theme is ‘The Outsider’. Some of the titles are long or repellent, but she’s used to the longwindedness of academics. ‘Dis-covering the Outsider in Heart of Darkness: Marlow or the Cannibals?’ ‘Orature: Can it be Spoken?’ ‘Exile and the Dis-grace of Coetzee: Solitude, Slow Man and the Lonely Modernist.’ On the other hand, some events are very, well, up tempo. There are dub poets, beat boxers, a rap poet. She has printed all the versions, indiscriminately, and stuffed all the paper in the lid of her suitcase. (Vanessa has a small problem with objects: paper, photographs, books, bills. She loses them, or accidentally stockpiles them. She brings the wrong ones, and they make her anxious. She strains to be organised, and fails. Then every few months, she goes on the war-path, desperate to re-impose order on life. Woe betide anyone who gets in the way.)
But later, she’s off to see the gorillas. The rare mountain gorillas of western Uganda. Near DRC, the Democratic Republic of Congo, where few tourists go. She’s not entirely sure it’s such a good idea, now the reality is coming closer. Yet she had boasted to Justin and his wife, Zakira, ‘Real gorillas. In the jungle. Not a zoo. I’m going to – actually – spend time with them.’
They hadn’t looked as impressed as she’d expected. (Of course they were young and ignorant, especially Zakira, who could be snooty. ‘Upper-class Moroccans,’ as she said to her friend Fifi. ‘No-one is as haughty as upper-class Moroccans, and my son has to go and marry one.’ In fact, she is immensely proud of Zakira. Justin, having been useless for years, has suddenly married a rather remarkable woman, a Moroccan with an MBA, and they’ve got a baby, poor little Abdul Trevor, a sweet child despite his ridiculous name. And Justin’s doing an evening course in journalism. How clever of him to find a wife with prospects, a wife who will certainly be rich one day, for an MBA is the royal road to money.)
‘I’m going to spend time with them on equal terms,’ Vanessa had insisted, getting pink in the face.
‘She’s going to wear a gorilla suit,’ said Justin to Zakira, and they both burst out laughing.
Vanessa remembers this with pain. In fact Justin had got extremely silly and doubled up, breathless, crying with laughter and repeating, every so often, through his tears, ‘Mum in a gorilla suit! Mum in a gorilla suit!’
Little Abdul Trevor had been more sensitive, although he was only three. Disturbed by laughter he did not understand, he had crept up beside his grandma and put his arm around her, staring at her earnestly. ‘Is it funny, Ganma?’ he asked.
‘Not very, darling,’ she had said, with dignity.
‘Not be a grilla, Ganma,’ he urged her.
‘Er – no, I won’t be a gorilla, I promise.’
As she hauls herself along, out of the comfort zone, growing smaller, now, in the enormous ant-hill, crawling deeper into the nervous land of checking and re-checking money, passport, ticket, glasses, she remembers the kindness of Abdul Trevor. The little boy loves her, and she is grateful. She knows she isn’t an easy person.
But as soon as she thinks that, she justifies it; she has high standards, she cares about things.
Justin watches his mother toiling away, with her hump of possessions, photographs, documents. He has brought her this far and can go no further. How slight she looks. Almost fragile, though people don’t tend to see her as fragile. She turns and waves a gallant, abortive little wave and then pushes on determinedly towards the checkpoint. By now she has traversed a hundred metres of gangway, though she’s only six metres away from him. To go as the crow flies is forbidden. Just before Justin turns and leaves, he sees Vanessa talking to the passport official. Oh dear, what is his mother doing? Screwing up his eyes, he lip-reads, incredulous.
She’s saying, ‘An upgrade ... if you could do anything ... well-known writer ... British Council ...’ A flood of words. The man looks puzzled. Oh God, now she’s showing him her latest book, and he is scratching his head and looking at her closely. Probably wondering if she’s sane enough to travel. She’s asking an immigration officer for an upgrade. Now, tiring of her, the man waves her on. His mother disappears into Departures, forgetting to look round at him. Justin fears she will try for an upgrade again.
He picks his way back through the halls of displaced people, dodging the trail of enormous possessions to which fretting owners are paying obeisance, labelling, locking and unlocking, worrying. Now he thinks of his mother with sorrow and affection. It’s always such a relief when she goes, which is sad for her, he does see that. Even for a moment, even after lunch, when she goes for a rest to quell acid indigestion. Rooms are calmer and easier without his mother in them, tidying, improving, asking questions. She is always buzzing with ideas and plans, most of them involving work for other people. She lives other lives as well as her own. In the end the only way he could escape her was by giving up completely: work, social life, getting up in the morning. Justin had gone to bed for six months. Perhaps she’d got the message. Only Mary Tendo could cheer him up. And then he had got back together with Zakira.
Good-looking young women glance up as Justin passes, the harsh light of the airport halo-ing his curls, but there’s something a little unfinished about him, as if he doesn’t quite know where he’s going, and long before he’s out of sight, they lose interest.
Justin is focused on his mother. Why is she always searching for something? As if life itself owes her an upgrade. To be fair, how far she has climbed already, through her own efforts, from the dump where she grew up, in a tiny Sussex village, with a farm labourer and a depressive! Grandma was in and out of loony bins, she’d recently told him. Poor Mum! And like him, she was an only child, so all the loony-ness hit her undiluted. Yet she’s become a published novelist and a lecturer in creative writing. And she can’t be as bad at writing novels as Justin fears (he can’t bring himself to read them, in case he’s in them), if the British Council’s chosen her as a delegate to an international conference. He supposes his grandparents must have been proud. Vanessa was her mad mother’s wunderkind. (‘I was fearsomely bright. I was two years ahead!’) And she’d tried to impose the same role on him.
So I was always at classes, Justin reflects, Junior Einstein Fun with Numbers!!, Dolphin Swim League, Teen Trapeze ... No wonder I got tired. Whereas Mum is fucking tireless.
How would he have survived without Mary Tendo? Mary had never tried to improve him. Just played with him, cuddled him, and fed him normal food, things like chips and baked beans which his mother had forbidden. Mary. Where is she? He misses her. He knows she would adore Abdul Trevor.
He has come to an unfamiliar part of the short-stay car-park. Harassed people are unloading, with sharp cries of effort, their rucksacks and cases and cellos from car-boots, trying not to quarrel when they’re just about to part. He peers short-sightedly around for his jeep, which he’s thinking of swapping for a second-hand Smart Car. There’s a certain social pressure, now, against jeeps. And Justin is certainly as green as the next man. Ah yes, he’s spotted it. He switches off his phone, so his mother cannot ring him, and revs up his engine, which needs a service: clouds of grey smoke. He loves driving, now, though he isn’t wholly confident. When he was depressed, he had to give up driving, and was driven everywhere, like a baby. Mary Tendo helped him to grow up again.
Hunched in Departures with a skinny decaff latte, stopping every so often to pat the rucksack pocket from which her passport and boarding card might be stolen, Vanessa is already texting her son. Goodbye Justin, lots of love, goodbye. Thanks for driving me, good boy. Hide a key for my cleaner pls under the dustbin? Take care darling, you are always my baby, kiss Abdul T for me, Mum.
An hour later, the passengers for Entebbe are in a queue for boarding. Vanessa, hardly able to stand upright with the weight of her flight bag dragging back her shoulders, is pleading with the British Airways steward, who is smiling automatically, consulting his list. ‘I am representing the British Council, and I will be writing about Uganda. I will definitely mention British Airways in my article, if you could offer me an upgrade.’ His face becomes frankly puzzled as she adds, pink-faced with the foretaste of failure, ‘I asked the gentleman in Departures. This is my novel. I’m Vanessa Henman.’ It’s hard to hold the book, her flight bag, her boarding-card and her litre of water. Why can’t they make things easy for her?
‘I’ve checked the list. You’re in World Traveller.’
‘Thank you.’ She smiles, ecstatic: she’s pulled it off. She’s been upgraded to World Traveller. And then she’s suspicious. A sinking of the heart.
‘Is that an upgrade?’
‘I’m afraid not.’
People are listening. She trudges forward.
Vanessa, oh, Vanessa. Travel safely.