OF COURSE, THE MANNER of my going’s typical of those two wankers. They only get me on a package in and out, because that way it’s cheaper even though it includes the bill for the hotel I’m not going to use. So I have to join the un-legislative club of package creeps all the way from Euston to Luton to Palma, including, as the song says, all the stops along the way: hanging around with them at the air terminal, hanging around with them at Luton, hanging around with them at forty thousand feet, hanging around with them at Palma Airport waiting for the luggage to come spewing out onto the bit of fun-fair.
But it’s in the air they get on my tits most, and the group that gets on them more than any other is a family I haven’t been able to get away from since the air terminal. There are nine of the bastards: a couple of kids, fathered by two mid-thirty Dagenham workers, real-life brothers; they are swaggering would-be hardcases using the fashionable manufactured folk-dialogue of the East End, hairstyles courtesy whichever North London footballer’s salon happens to be nearest, decked out in expensive machine-made holiday clobber but wear their eiderdown-like windcheaters with the Ford emblem on the breast-zip pockets and the ceremonial racing stripes rippling down each of the arms. They look for all the world like T.U.C. 1975 equivalents of the Few, the major difference being the swift skinniness of their eyes, darting this way and that with the tense paranoia of those that observe others, eyeballs with a view to discover who’s for and who’s against. Their wives are anonymous but noisy late beneficiaries of their husbands’ collective hundred-pound-a-week wills, all crimplene, hairstyles ten years behind those of their husbands. Enlarging the group are the brothers’ parents, the woman past the age of caring, desperately rowdy, her husband trying to stretch himself back to be a brother to his sons by wearing the same kind of clobber and all that does for him is to accentuate the impression he gives of regretting that the present difference hadn’t started to spiral about 1935. And topping off this familial layer-cake is the inevitable and definitive Old Dad. Hogarth and Leonardo couldn’t have cross-hatched a better model. From the nose back everything about his face recedes and sinks into the depression of his hand-stitched mouth only to sweep out again to the bone of a Punch-like chin. But the support his mouth lacks tooth-wise doesn’t stop his endless jaw-bone solo. Not that any of the other generations of his family are paying much attention, they’re too busy leading off in their own directions. And it’s just my bleeding luck to get surrounded by the whole lot of them. My seat number places me next to a porthole and in the middle seat there’s one of the brats and the aisle seat is taken by one of the sons of Daghenam. Across the aisle is number two son, number two brat, and the middle-aged father. Behind me is mum and the two wives, and in front of me old dad has been sent to Coventry by the numbering of the seats. One of the three is empty but the wall seat’s been taken by a young girl of around fourteen, airline logic having placed her parents about ten rows down. The old dad starts by saying to the young girl:
“Do you mind if I sit down next to you, young lady?” The dirty old bugger’s question is quite irrelevant because she’s got no choice. She shakes her head and number one son’s who’s stacking the old dad’s coat while the old dad creaks down next to the girl, his eyes venal and his tongue peeping through the recession in his lips. “Watch his left hand, darling,” the number one Dagenham son says to the young girl, who takes no notice of him or the old dad. He looks at me and gives me a swift deadpan wink and I give him a slow deadpan turning away of the head and I hear him sniff as I look out onto the wet tarmac and as he sits down there is an echo of his disdain in the crackle of his windcheater as he settles himself in.
The old dad starts up a routine with the young girl. “You ever been to Majorca before, young lady?” he asks her.
“No.”
“Ah,” he says. “We been coming five years now. Five years ago it was when I first come. ’Course, took me seventy-five years to actually get round to having a continental holiday. Not like you youngsters nowadays. We had it different in my day. I was brought up down Wapping Steps. But you can say what you like, there was a strong sense of community feeling down there, them days.”
Behind, number one son cracks a laugh. “And he should know, the old sod. Did all the feeling, he did.”
“My Uncle Ernie used to live down there,” the girl says flatly. “He said it was dead nasty.”
The old dad changes tack, his attitude and voice betraying a lifetime of compromise.
“Oh, yes,” he says. “Of course we moved out in the end, that’s why we moved out. Went to live in Vauxhall, we did. Very nice, it is.”
The way he says Vauxhall, it sounds like a bronchitic’s expiring breath.
“I wouldn’t know,” the young girl says. “I’ve never been to Vauxhall.”
So the young girl successfully ends the conversation and then Dagenham son number one smacks his hands together and says towards the stewardess who in no way can hear him:
“Come on then, darlings. Let’s be having you. The above have arrived. Get cracking. Start wheeling out the duty frees.”
He turns round in his seat and looks towards the back of the plane.
“They’re not a patch on last year’s, Benny,” he says to his brother across the way. “Remember that little spade? What a little cracker that was. Remember? I always fancied a bit of black for that.”
“I’ll give you a bit of black if you don’t leave off,” his wife says from behind.
“The day you give me anything’ll be a day to remember. Here, Benny, last year she gave it up for Lent and you know how she never could count, I never had the heart to tell her Lent’s over and done with. I never looked back since.”
Benny bellows his appreciation. Number one son’s wife says: “You just bleeding watch it or I’ll tell them stewardesses all about your operation. That’ll slow you down a bit.” There’s a trio of screeches from behind. Number one son puts his hands on the back of his seat and raises himself up slightly and gives his old lady a freezer. “You’re asking for one in the mouth, you are,” he says.
“Ooh, yes please,” his wife says. “Only not yours, eh?” Three more shrieks.
“Here, Barry, can you arrange one for me?” the other wife says.
Three more shrieks.
A stewardess pauses in sweeping by and says to Barry: “Would you mind fastening your seat belt, sir?”
Barry swivels round in his seat and says: “I was hoping you’d fasten it for me, darlin’.”
The hostess smiles and keeps going so as to prevent herself spitting at him. Then she goes into pantomiming the oxygen drill, every action exaggerated, eyes fixed on a point somewhere slightly above the heads of her audience, like a bored stripper waiting for her disc to end, the voice of the unseen stewardess like a send-up of a fashion house commentary. When the visible stewardess has finished her act the Dagenham sons give a round of applause. The stewardess walks back and is very good at totally ignoring the sons while seeming to smile very sweetly at everybody before her. Barry gives a crooked arm and a clenched fist as she deports herself by. The old dad turns to his left but the aisle seat is still vacant and it strikes me how none of his family’s bothered about sitting next to him, nor do I fucking well blame them. Of course part of the thought occurs to him too. “ ’Ere, ain’t none of you lot going to keep me company, then?” he asks.
“Can’t be done, can it, my old son?” Barry says. “It’s down to the numbering of the seats, innit?”
“Yers, well, how come I’m the one as is on me own? Why can’t one of the nippers change places?”
“I was afraid he’d think of that,” Barry says under his breath. He speaks to the old dad: “Look, you’re all right where you are. Besides, we don’t want to put the mockers on a budding romance, do we?”
“I’ll change places with Grandad,” the brat next to me says.
Oh Christ, I think to myself. Vauxhall here we come.
“You stay where you bleeding well are,” Barry says. The kid does as it’s told and I breathe at least one small sigh of relief.
But the relief is only temporary. Because ever since we left the terminal, I’ve been as tense as a minder who’s having to wait a minute longer than he ought to. Not that I ever felt that kind of tenseness myself. But I’ve seen it in others. And that is what I’m feeling now. Those clever sods up in the Penthouse had sussed it. I’d never flown before.
Of course, I’ve often thought about it. And after having thought about, I’ve always sworn nothing would ever get me in the inside of an aeroplane. I mean, the things you read. Those reports in the papers. (Reports I always read, not missing a detail; I’m drawn to them; if there’s one on the front page I always lap it up, even before I’ve turned to see how Spurs have gone on.) Bodies strewn over a ten mile radius. Tape recordings of the last minutes in the flight deck. Pictures of the stewardesses, smiling. And on T.V., it’s even more favourite with my stomach muscles. The smoking wreckage. The anonymous sheets on moving stretchers. Zooming in on a chiffon scarf hanging from a tree branch, a briefcase, a kid’s spouted drinking cup lying on its side in the drizzle. I mean, it’s not that I’m frightened of going. If it was that, I’d have taken up flower arranging years ago. When you’re gone, you’re gone, no argument, seeing as how that’s the one thing there’s no answer to. No, it’s just that I like the idea of having some say in the matter of my going. Not to mention the matter of when.
I’m all for self-determination. I like having odds. Somebody’s coming at you with a knife, you’ve got chances. Somebody’s got a pump action massaging your vertebrae, you can always make a decision. A motor coming at you down the wrong side of the M.6, you can still take evasive action. There’s a chance. And, besides, experience is a great teacher. You know what happens with a knife, a pump-action, a steering column. If you’re going to go they all have one thing in common: the swiftness of progression from cause to effect. Whereas it’s always struck me that in a plane, there’s fuck all the individual can do about anything. No room for any determinism there; no chance for the individual with the quickest reactions to take evasive action. You just go with the rest, and never having been a lover of crowds, the close proximity of other people—that descent of a minute or a minute and a half, surrounded by the wailing and the screaming of the assembled throng—would seem as long as the eternity we were all about to enter. Another thing: when I used to organise tickles, there were never any wankers on a team of mine. If I asked a specialist his opinion of a particular facet of his part in the job, I’d expect a straight answer; no flannel just so he could row himself on something for the sake of possible readies. Whereas a mate of mine, Jimmy Fish—he once told me he was in this plane coming in to land one time. It was mucky weather, the plane was circling, and the loudspeaker came on when it shouldn’t and the whole fucking planeload heard the captain saying to his copilot: “Well we can’t stay up here all night going round and round; let’s go down and have a crack at it.”
Unbelievable. That kind of thing gives me the fucking creeps.
So eventually the plane begins to trundle out onto the runway, and out of my porthole I can see the wing shuddering, the unsettling crudity of the bolts holding the individual metallic sheets together, the simplicity of the wing flaps. I turn away and re-read the William Hickey column, concentrating on the given reasons for the display of today’s ear to ear smile. Then when the plane is (presumably) pointing in the right direction for takeoff, there is a small pause. The jets reach screaming pitch, the plane begins to move, accelerating along the runway like an arrow from a bow, only I hope this particular arrow isn’t going to emulate the one in the nursery rhyme. Then the runway slants away and we’re up and streaming through the clouds and, although I’m still concentrating on the words in that boxed caption, the statistics going through my mind are of a different variety, the statistics for the incidence of major disasters during the first few minutes of takeoff. Of course, the Dagenham Boys have their own method of passing the time by joking loudly about all the various forms disaster could take, just to prove they’d been through it all before.
“Hope the rubber bands are new,” the one called Barry says.
“I bet the corner garage gave them a price on a job lot of tires,” Benny says. “Should make for happy landings.” They both bellow with laughter and it’s a toss-up whether the nearest one gets a knuckle or I keep my clenched fist clutching the newsprint.
The plane veers and suddenly we’re above the clouds and the quilted whiteness that stretches to the horizon is reassuring enough to counter-act the Mike and Bernie Winter cross talk on my left. Then the illuminated lettering goes opaque and I shuffle my Players and my lighter out of the mohair and light up and inhale gratefully, and after I’ve done that I try and get myself into a position that will cause as little stress and strain on the mohair as possible; I don’t want to be seen getting off the plane looking like Gerald.
Then, at last, they wheel out the trolleys, and after the Dagenham lot have performed I order a handful of vodkas and some cans of tonic and settle down to get quietly and methodically pissed.