— What for?
— Food and drink of course.
— You get that on board.
— And words. We must take words with us.
— No excess luggage.
— But Something, surely if we go supersonic –
— We must have a book of rules, if only for reference. Come on.
Something starts loading the iced shelves along the top of the trolley with tins and bottles and packets of frozen peas. The bottom shelf she stacks with books.
The huge plane drowns Basin Street with a huge noise as it comes in to land in total darkness on the tarmac behind the Travel Agent.
— You see, you couldn’t have photographed it, Someone.
— Don’t forget your route-map. You’ll need some latitudes, here, and some longitudes, here. And you too.
Mr Travelogue measures us up and down and sideways quickly, expertly. He embraces us up and down and diagonally with meridians, tropics, and elliptical orbits. We look almost spherical, except for our flattened poles and my individual flan-pudding which hurts under the ligatures.
— You don’t have to choke me. Help! Take them off.
— Good boy, you didn’t cry.
All round us the men and women spin about as flattened spheres, pushing their trolleys in the ultra-violet light towards and from the plane.
— I suppose they only pretend to come and go, like actors?
— Good boy. You have another point.
— Don’t mention it. I can’t move.
— You haven’t tried.
The meridians, tropics and equators stretch like elastic. We roll the trolley and ourselves, through the actors who pretend, to roll, and up the gangway of the plane into a hole in the end of the tail. Inside, a large cafeteria greets us.
— You see, we didn’t have to bring all that food.
— Stop quibbling. Look at the notice.
The notice on the wall says silence. The stewards and the air-hostess pretend to come and go with trays between the empty tables and don’t really exist. Framed in the small round window Jonas and his Jovials play inaudible Blues on the tarmac.
Something looks anxiously along the books at the bottom of our trolley next to the table. She picks one up, leafs through it quickly and opens it at the letter T. Not finding what she wants she turns to the letter P. Then D. Then G. At last with the sigh of a person losing a point she turns to R, and gives a little sideways nod with raised eyebrows to signify both recognition and surprise. Then she passes me the book, her fingers pointing at the sentence: Really will come back first.
Marital quarrels can occur above or below the verbal level as well as within it. In a pressurised hum of silence Something picks a tin from our private trolley and hands it to me for punching. In the same pressurised hum I shake my head, replace the tin on the trolley, beckon to the air-hostess and transmit my order with a gesture into the pressurised hum of silence. The air-hostess inclines her head with courtesy and a pleased look as if receiving a compliment. Something shakes her head and wags an index finger negatively. In my collection of silences this one takes the prize for sheer pressure. The atoms of our will-powers collide in the pressurised hum, and a long drawn battle ensues. Bombarded atoms whirl around each other, emitting particles of pain, withdraw, get reinforced with fresh electrons, re-enter, begin again. I win. Someone always wins. The air-hostess brings glasses and a long red drink and Something meekly sips at it. My silence says I have proved my point, her silence says don’t mention it, my silence says smile, Something, hers says you smile first, my victor’s silence does it easily, her vanquished silence ruefully but smiles. I put my meridians around hers and we merge into one almost perfect sphere, despite my excrescent scar, my individual flan-pudding in the middle of my belly.
A feeling of no movement wakes me, no vibration, no hum of silence even. Framed in the circular window, houses and hedges pass. We fly almost at ground level, along a road. The silence bounces with the sounds of people in the houses loving, quarrelling, calling their children in from the gardens where they throw their high-pitched voices like bright coins along the sunlight.
— Something, wake up. Look.
— I know.
— Our plane has changed into a private vehicle, sort of cigar-shaped.
— Yes. A cocoon.
— Nonsense. We move on wheels, I feel them. And look we have embryonic wings on either side. We must have fallen asleep.
— You drank more than I did.
— I see.
— Do you, Someone? What for instance?
— The sounds of people quarrelling, loving, calling their children in from where they throw their voices like shining coins along the sunlight.
— You read what you want into it, Someone.
— I can see the sounds but can’t hear what they say.
— I didn’t think you could. You don’t take much interest in things as such, do you, Someone, despite your five geometries? Only in the appearances you try to save.
— Oh, come, Something, I have a high regard for you. Surely I’ve made that plain by now.
— Have you?
— Well … Didn’t you like my meridians?
— You’ve made it plain to your own satisfaction.
— I don’t know any other way, Something.
— You will. Fasten your safety-belt.
— I can’t. It hurts my camera-eye.
— Put it away, Someone. You won’t see anything through that.
The vehicle lifts over a bank of yellow dustcloud, bumps down their steps immeasurably and with no undercarriage crashes to a stop. We emerge from our disintegrating cocoon, a man, a woman in the vast plain of a circular
crater. The ploughed fields in the hard baked earth offer no trees, except in the distance perhaps, near the slopes. The houses on the far edge of the crater curve a little like asses’ jaws as we start with crumbling steps towards them having to walk all that way in the hot sun without a drink.
— You chose the transit drink, Someone. The infra-red.
— But you said–
— No I didn’t –
— You did. You said we’d travel supersonic, on the top edge of ultra-violet.
— Until you shifted us into the red end of the spectrum. The light of the further regions that recede at the speed of light itself can never reach us now. You with your five geometries should know that.
— Oh, have it your own way.
— No, Someone. I played it your way.
— You do the knowing around here, as you never cease to remind me. You know everything, don’t you, girl-spy?
— Not everything. But I came prepared.
— Prepared for what, for God’s sake?
— Not necessarily.
— Oh, really –
— Not Really. Someone, please, please don’t let’s go on like this.
— No, don’t let’s.
— It makes me feel, so desolate.
— Me too. Have I — have I lost a point now, Something?
— Only a little one, a matter of timing. I think, perhaps, Really won’t come back first after all.
— Why not? The book said –
— Yes, before we, before the law got broken.
— Another law! How do you expect me to follow all these laws I’ve never heard about?
— But you know about the red shift, Someone. That, together with the degradation of intensity, as speed increases, means that less and less of the light actually emitted reaches us.
— Oh, don’t start proving your point again.
— I haven’t any points to prove, Someone, you have. I only follow my instructions.
— Whose instructions? Secret instructions, I suppose.
— If you like. I can’t tell you more because you wouldn’t hear. You chose opaqueness, Someone. You still have too much atmospheric density. I don’t mean that as an insult but as a statement of fact.