‘Busy flight?’ I heard myself ask.
‘Pretty busy,’ he answered.
‘No chance of an upgrade, then?’ I said, and he grunted with laughter.
‘If I had a dollar for everybody who asked me that …’
‘Happens a lot, does it?’
‘All the time, mate. All the time.’
‘So how do you decide?’
‘What?’ he said, looking up.
‘How do you decide who gets an upgrade, and who doesn’t?’
‘I guess,’ he said, staring at me directly and appraisingly, before lowering his eyes again, ‘I have to like the look of whoever’s doing the asking.’
He said nothing more, and I felt crushed into silence. It wasn’t until I had finished checking in, watched my suitcase sway off into oblivion and walked a few yards away from the desk that I thought to check my two boarding cards (one for each leg of the journey) and realized that he had upgraded me – to something called Premium Economy class. I looked back at the man to show my gratitude. He was busy with the next passenger, but he still found time to glance across at me. His expression remained blank – even surly – and yet he winked at me before returning his gaze to the computer screen in front of him.
Two hours later, at about four-thirty in the afternoon, Sydney time, I was sipping my second glass of champagne, waiting for take-off, and contemplating the delights of the journey ahead.
I had a seat next to the aisle; there was one other seat next to mine, a window seat, currently empty. The seats were wide and well-padded, and I had plenty of leg room. I felt an almost sensual glow of pleasure at the thought of the pampering I could look forward to. Thirteen hours to Singapore, which would include dinner, a few more glasses of champagne to wash it down, a choice of more than 500 movies and TV shows on the entertainment console in the seat-back, and perhaps a light snooze somewhere along the way. Then a couple of hours’ stopover at Singapore airport, back on to a different plane, a large whisky, some sleeping pills, and I would be out like a light until we reached Heathrow the following morning. Couldn’t be better.
At least, that’s how it should have been. The trouble was, as I said, that seeing the Chinese woman and her daughter had unexpectedly reawakened my need for human contact. I wanted to talk. I was desperate to talk.
No surprise, then, that when a pale, overweight businessman in a light grey suit squeezed past me with the most cursory nod of apology, and settled into the adjacent window seat, I felt an overwhelming urge to engage him in conversation. It was a misguided urge, I have to say. If my experience in sales had taught me anything, over the years, it was how to read people’s faces, so it should really have been pretty obvious that this aloof and weary-looking stranger had little interest in talking to me, and would have much preferred to be left alone with his newspapers and his laptop. But I suppose the truth is that I did notice it, and purposely chose to ignore the fact.
The businessman took a minute or two to settle into his chair and get comfortable. Once settled, he realized that he had left his computer in a bag in the overhead locker, so then he had to get up again and there was some more slightly breathless tugging and manipulating to be done before we were both back in our places. Then he flipped open the laptop and almost at once started typing furiously. After about five minutes he stopped typing, glanced quickly over the words on the screen, pressed a final button with a firm, almost theatrical gesture, then sighed and sat back in his chair, panting a little bit as the computer shut itself down. He turned his head towards me, not really looking at me; but the gesture was enough. I took it as my doorway into conversation, even if he hadn’t meant it that way.
‘All done?’ I said.
He looked blankly at me, obviously not expecting to be addressed. For a moment I thought he wasn’t going to say anything, but then he managed: ‘Uh-huh.’
‘Last-minute emails?’ I ventured.
‘Yep.’
His accent seemed to be Australian, although it was pretty hard to tell just from the words ‘Uh-huh’ and ‘Yep’.
‘You know what I love about aeroplanes?’ I asked, undaunted. ‘They’re the last place left to us where we can be totally inaccessible. Totally free. No one can phone you or text you on an aeroplane. Once you’re in the air, nobody can send you an email. Just for a few hours, you’re away from all of that.’
‘True,’ said the man, ‘but not for much longer. There are already some airlines where you can send emails and use the net from your own laptop. And they’re talking about letting passengers use their mobiles soon. Personally, I can’t wait. What you like about flying is just what I hate about it. It’s dead time. Completely dead.’
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘It just means that if we want to communicate with someone during a flight, it has to be done directly. You know, like – talking. It’s a chance to get to know other people. New people.’
He glanced across at me as I said this. Something in his glance told me that the chance of getting to know me was one that he might have passed up without too many spasms of regret. But the rebuff that I was expecting didn’t come. Instead he held out his hand, and said gruffly: ‘The name’s Charles. Charles Hayward. Friends call me Charlie.’
‘Maxwell,’ I returned. ‘Max, for short. Maxwell Sim. Sim, like the actor.’ I always said this when introducing myself, but usually, unless I was talking to a British person of a certain age, the reference would go over their heads, and I would have to add: ‘Or like a SIM card.’
‘It’s good to know you, Max,’ said Charlie; then picked up his newspaper, turned away from me, and began reading it, starting at the financial pages.
Well, that wouldn’t do. You can’t sit right next to someone for thirteen hours and ignore them completely, can you? In fact, not just thirteen, but twenty-four hours – because I noticed from the boarding card lying on his table that Charlie and I had been seated together on the second leg of the flight as well. It simply wouldn’t be human to sit in silence for all that time. I was pretty sure, anyway, that, if I made a big enough effort, I would manage to draw him out. Now that we’d exchanged a few words, I realized that he didn’t look unfriendly, as such – just rather stressed out and overworked. He must have been somewhere in his mid-fifties: over dinner he told me that he’d grown up in Brisbane and now held a fairly high-powered position in the Sydney office of a multinational corporation which was starting to experience financial difficulties. (This, I suppose, was the reason he wasn’t flying Business Class.) He was on his way to London for crisis talks with some of the other senior figures: he didn’t specify what the financial difficulties were, of course (why would he, to someone like me?), but apparently it was all to do with leverage. His company had taken out loans which were over-leveraged, or under-leveraged, or something like that. At one point when he was trying to explain this to me he started to look quite animated, and I thought there was a chance he might become positively chatty, but when he realized that I knew nothing about leverage, and had no real understanding of any financial instrument more complicated than an overdraft or a deposit account, he seemed to lose interest in me, and from then on, it became increasingly difficult to get more than a few words out of him. It didn’t help that he’d drunk several glasses of champagne and a number of beers with his lunch, and was beginning to look even more tired than he did before. The other problem was that, as he grew more and more taciturn, I did the opposite, and – as if terrified by the possibility of silence between us – started to turn garrulous, over-talkative, and began pouring out confessions and confidences to this new acquaintance which I’m sure he must have found boring, if not a little embarrassing.