The last time I flew into LAX was for a gig at the House of Blues in Hollywood. We had electrical problems with the light rig and the show wasn’t one of our best. As the plane tilted I saw Los Angeles all spread out and sprawling and it just had a flat noplace look. Places do that for me, they change sometimes from one hour to the next; maybe another time it would’ve looked like someplace.
After my arrival at Terminal 4 of the Tom Bradley International Terminal there was a three-hour stopover before I changed planes for the flight to Honolulu. As always in airports there were bodied voices and disembodied ones. The bodied ones accompanied the swarming footsteps and the disembodied ones tried to find people. Señor Manuel Losano was being paged in English and Spanish. No one’s looking for me, I thought. What if I just stayed here and didn’t make any more decisions. But of course doing that would require a decision.
I had a club sandwich and several coffees sitting outside a Daily Grill restaurant that had SATISFACTION SERVED DAILY over its front. I thought that was a pretty big claim and I noticed that satisfaction wasn’t on the menu. I wandered around a little, bought a pair of Gucci sunglasses at the Sunglass Hut, and did a quick browse at WH Smith, which I was surprised to see so far from home. In the window there was a big display of Dianetics by L. Ron Hubbard. L. Ron Hubbard! I’d thought he’d had his day and was long gone but here his book was, alive and well in LA. The Scientologists used to have a shop-front recruiting operation in Tottenham Court Road where they tried to get people inside for some kind of testing that involved tin cans as I remember. I guess the California climate favours Scientology and of course they’ve got Tom Cruise and John Travolta which can’t hurt sales. Nobody pulled me in for a tin-can test so I got away from there and walked about smelling stale fries and watching people coming from wherever they’d been and going to wherever they’d be next. There were monitors everywhere with flights that weren’t mine and announcements on the tannoy that had nothing to do with me.
I went halfway down the stairs to the Mezzanine to look at something I’d passed on my way up. At first glance it was like the large diagrams you see in the London Underground but it had moving parts. It was like a pinball machine stood on its side, up on easel legs like a lecturer’s blackboard, and you couldn’t do anything with it but watch it doing its own thing with balls dropping from one level to another in different ways and bells ringing as if it was demonstrating a pattern of meaningless events for no particular reason. ‘You talking to me?’ I said.
A woman with a small boy came along. Tight jeans, pink trainers, pink T-shirt that said LONG TIME GONE, big frizzy hair, unlit fag in her mouth, sunglasses. The boy was wearing a camouflage outfit. He might have been ten or eleven but looked old beyond his years. ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘it’s some kind of game.’
‘OK,’ said the woman, ‘so where’s the joysticks?’
‘Maybe it’s the kind you hold in your hand, only bigger,’ said the boy. They both studied it for a while and said, ‘Tsss.’ The woman had taken off her sunglasses and I saw that she had a black eye.
She put the glasses back on and turned to me. ‘Have you figured this thing out?’
‘Not yet,’ I said.
‘No buttons to push,’ she said. She and the boy tried pressing the glass in various places with no result.
‘Stupid thing,’ said the boy. ‘You can’t do anything with it.’
‘That’s life,’ said the woman, and they moved on.
I found myself humming one of the old Nectarine numbers I’d written, ‘A Long Way Down’.
I was high on the love we’d found,
and now it’s such a long way down …
It was raining the day Dick Turpin lost his footing on a roof and it was raining the day of his funeral. Dick’s mother was there, also his brother and Mrs Brother. Brother gave me a hard look and Mrs looked away. She was wearing a skirt as short as mine but she didn’t have the legs for it. Dick hadn’t ever made a will, so I got everything. I’d certainly earned it, and with his bank account plus the sale of the house and the business, I’d be able to set myself up comfortably in London and sleep in a bed that would never have anybody in it that I didn’t want.
‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord,’ said the vicar; ‘he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live …’ I didn’t recall that Dick had any belief in Jesus and I doubted that Jesus believed in Dick. When the vicar got to ‘We brought nothing into this world and it is certain we can carry nothing out’ I nodded my head yes and wondered what I’d ever have that I wouldn’t want to leave behind. Now I was humming ‘Nuages’ and I shook my head and went back to my book.
The Woman in Black is only 160 pages but it was slow reading because I kept stopping and thinking my thoughts before going back to the page I was on. Some of it I read again and again, like the part where the narrator hears the sound of a ghostly pony trap, then the neighing of the horse and the cry of a child as they get sucked into the marsh.
I got to the end eventually and it left me with a feeling of dread. So why had I carried on to the end? Good question.
The plane for Honolulu was a 757 but the drinks trolley was the same size as the one on the 777. I didn’t bother with the movies or the headphone music and I didn’t start the Alice Munro book. I closed my eyes and listened to the whale music in my head and watched Django go over the edge of the cliff. This time it was a woman next to me who said, ‘Are you all right?’ American.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘You’re crying.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it’s just that my eyes water a lot when I’ve had a few drinks.’
‘Oh,’ she said, nodding to show that she understood. She was young and pretty, with long dark hair and a serious face and just a little bit of that bulldog jaw some pretty young Americans have. ‘I don’t feel too happy myself. I was down in San Diego visiting my boyfriend. He’ll be shipping out for the Gulf soon.’
‘Army?’
‘Navy. He’s training dolphins to clear mines.’ She took out her wallet and showed me a photograph of a smiling man in a boat and a smiling dolphin leaping out of the water beside it.
‘Nice-looking guy,’ I said. ‘The dolphin looks happy. I’d have thought they were too smart to muck about with mines.’
‘Leroy — that’s my boyfriend’s name — he says they’re smart but they think it’s cool to hang out with humans. So they’ll do all kinds of things for a few fish, just to be buddies with their trainers.’
‘Does he just send them down to do the work or does he go down with them?’
‘He says he won’t have to get into the water with them once they’ve learnt what to do but I don’t believe him. I think about him over there, down in dark and muddy water with his dolphin. Either of them makes a mistake and Whammo! that’s all she wrote.’
‘Isn’t there still a chance that war won’t happen?’
‘It’ll happen. Bush thinks with his dick. He’s got all those planes and ships and tanks and bombs and he’s got a hard-on for Saddam Hussein. If it wasn’t Saddam it’d be somebody else. A while back it was Osama Bin Laden but you don’t hear much about him any more.’ She stopped talking but her lips were moving while we flew over banks of white clouds that looked as if you could walk on them if you were careful. Far down below was the sea.
‘I had a dream about Leroy’ she said. ‘I must have been underwater. The water was very clear and I could see him swimming toward me. But there were trees between us, thin trees not all that close together but he couldn’t get through.’
‘What happened then?’
‘I woke up with my heart beating fast. What do you think it meant?’