‘Y’know Faulkner had a screen credit on Land of the Pharaohs,’ I remarked, apropos of everything, but Sherman only hissed:
‘Will you shut the fuck up,’ and went about his task with a will, snapping combination locks with his clippers, then unzipping the bags so that their contents spilled on to the aluminium deck.
‘Look at this drek,’ he said, snatching up a handful of stuff. I recognized the seat covers we had had in my childhood home, the print of a historic map of Worcestershire that had hung above the phone table, a paperback edition of C. E. M. Joad’s Guide to Modern Wickedness and my mother’s dentures.
‘Can you believe people cross the Atlantic with such tat,’ he spat, ‘and pay for it too!’
‘Dentures are pretty much essential,’ I said, ‘if you don’t have any teeth.’
Sherman slid down the baffler of bags until he was sitting. The cyclopean eye of his torch dazzled me, and his voice — nasal, insistent — soared above the jeremiad of the jets. ‘You and your dumb books!’ he prated. ‘Micro-satire, dirty doodlings in the margins of history!’
‘I say, that’s a bit harsh.’
‘Is it? When Gutenberg invented the printing press there were at most a hundred titles produced annually; by 1950 this had swollen to a quarter of a million; now a book is published somewhere in this dumb world every twenty seconds, and you have the nerve — no, the gall, to contribute to this flood of verbiage that is inexorably inundating the land with ill-contrived metaphors!’
‘I–I…’ I wanted to rebut him forcefully; instead I only spread my hands and said, ‘I don’t know how to do anything else.’
Add a dream, lose a reader — isn’t that Uncle Vladimir’s line? Well, the lover of little girls has aught to teach me. I awoke as the British Airways flight settled down over Toronto and shat its undercarriage, sending said reader end over end, down to where the survivors had retreated, a network of tunnels deep under Chaillot. The victors stood guard over a kingdom of rats. In the half-light before full consciousness I took in the drear panorama of the razed city, the stalk of the CN Tower wilting among the charred stumps of the skyscrapers, the grid pattern of blackened rubble — all of it irradiated by the sickly green glow from Lake Ontario.
I remembered my first visit to Canada in 1977, with my father. We stayed out in Dundas with his friend, the philosopher George Grant. While they debated Red Toryism, I lay upstairs on an iron bedstead smoking. I loved the Players pack, the way one side read ‘Players Filter’ and the other ‘Players Filtre’ — all of Canadian happenstance seemed bound up in the reversal of e and r.
I took a bus into town and wandered the Hagia Sophia of the Eaton Center in a consumerist ecstasy — it was big enough to swallow whole five of London’s poxy malls. I bought a disposable lighter for a few bucks — the first I’d ever seen — and when I got back to Dundas I lay back down on the iron bedstead, then held the translucent green canister to my eye so as to look through the liquid gas.
I left the frummer behind where we had been sitting. He appeared stricken, making none of the phone calls that other passengers had begun the instant the plane had landed; nor did he rise to retrieve his flight bag from the overhead locker. But I couldn’t concern myself with that — the flight had arrived almost two hours late — and so I strode off through the dun corridors, hopping on to travelators with whistling insouciance. The two men crammed into dun uniforms at Immigration only glanced at my passport. I was kicking about in the dun arrivals hall, pondering my transport options, when I became aware of snuffling behind me and turning discovered the frummer looking very down-in-the-beard and accompanied by a member of the airline’s ground staff, who was pushing a wheelchair in which sat the obese flight bag, its front zip creased in a complacent smile.
‘What’s the problem?’ I asked brightly.
‘It’s dusk… so, it’s Shabbat,’ he muttered. ‘You must’ve noticed me, on the flight… as soon as I realized we were gonna be delayed I began trying to get through to someone by phone.’
‘And?’
‘Yes’ — he stared shamefaced at his black dress shoes — ‘I guess you’re right — it wouldn’t’ve made any difference, I can’t go in any car on Shabbat.’
I was merciless. ‘Or bus, or train.’
‘Or bus, or train.’
‘You’ll have to stay out here at the airport.’
‘No, no, I can’t do that, it’s a really important Shabbat, the last before my youngest son’s bar mitzvah, I must get home.’
‘Well, you should’ve thought about that before you booked a flight with an insufficient margin of safety.’
‘I know, I know,’ he moaned.
‘Of course’ — I looked towards the main doors where gentile-mobiles were pulling away from the kerb with unholy despatch — ‘you could always walk.’
‘Walk…’ He savoured the word in a prayerful way.
‘Yup’ — plunged my hands into the pockets of the Barbour — ‘walk — I think I’ll walk into town, the weather’s OK and I could do with stretching my legs. You’re welcome to come with, but I’d advise you to check that into left luggage — it’s a good seventeen miles.’
‘Walk…’ I hadn’t noticed the flattened vowels of his Canadian accent before, the a cowering as if an umlaut had been fired over its head. ‘Yes, I guess I could walk, but I’ll have to bring my bag, it’s got valuable, uh, stuff in it.’
‘Stuff, or a valuable person?’
‘I’m sorry, I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’
One of his fish-belly-white hands flipped towards me. ‘My name’s Reichman, Howard Reichman, and… well, it’s an awfully big favour to ask but would you consider helping me with the bag — unless, that is, you keep Shabbat yourself?’
I shook my head.
‘And I could pay you—’
I shook it again. I felt guilty — but then I always do. In this instance it was guilt over my snide thoughts. However, it wasn’t this that motivated me, but the sheer challenge. ‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Reichman,’ I said. ‘Now let’s get going.’
As I took the flight bag’s handle and trundled away, I wondered: was this one of the Reichmann brothers who ran Olympia & York, at one time the largest property developer in the world? If so, it was a curious coincidence; after all, before they went bust in the recession of ’92 they had built the biggest skyscraper London had ever seen, Canary Wharf; not only the biggest — the most banal. I looked back; he was struggling along in my wake. His coat looked hot — his hat hotter; he was as ill-equipped for exodus as anyone I’d ever seen.
On we went along Airport Road, then Silver Dart, before crossing beneath the 427 expressway. To begin with I waited for Reichman to come puffing up in his woefully constricting cummerbund, but soon enough I was struggling with the dumb bag, which lurched from one tiny wheel to the other, yanking my arm in its socket as if it were a drunkenly dependent toddler. I had to lift it over the cobbled ravelins under freeway bridges and hump it up grassy embankments. He was tirelessly grateful. ‘Thank you, oh, thank you, most kind,’ he kept saying as we rumbled between the down-at-heel warehouses and unbusinesslike premises that lined International Boulevard. When I looked back, the sun was setting behind the airport and the jets coming into land incandesced in its last gleaming.