101 Heavy was twenty degrees from the horizontal (it felt more like twenty degrees from the vertical), and at maximum power, when it hit the torn air of the slipstream.
At this point the locks securing the coffin of Royce Traynor snapped free from their bracket. Falling end over end for thirty-five feet, Royce powerdived into a mosaic of wall-bolted mountain bikes. Wedged at an acute angle against the cargo door, he remained more or less upright when the plane steadied and continued a shallow climb to its cruising altitude.
‘Isn’t it great to be above the weather?’ said the man in 2A. ‘I’d like to live above the weather.’
‘Yeah,’ said Reynolds. ‘But not today.’
‘Not today.’
He was staring at her legs, very critically, or so it seemed to Reynolds, who liked her legs. Now he was staring at her feet.
‘You shouldn’t have worn heels,’ he said. ‘You could puncture the inflatable emergency-slide. Which might also serve as a liferaft. You’re wearing tights.’
‘… That’s true.’
‘You shouldn’t have. They’re partly synthetic, you know,’ he said. ‘They melt and cling when they burn.’
In the hold the corpse of Royce Traynor seemed to square itself.
It was ready.
CHAPTER THREE
1. The publicity of knowledge
For her next encounter with the Intensivist, Russia Meo wore the most expensive clothes in her possession. A customised Italian suit of black cashmere, matching gloves and bag, court shoes. She wanted to send a clear message to Dr Gandhi: if anything went wrong, she would most certainly sue. It was also one of those days when she instinctively decided to let her figure have its head. A waisted white blouse, therefore, and her most dynamic white brassière. These luxurious expanses of silk were not aimed at Dr Gandhi (they were aimed at someone else); but perhaps the components of the olive cleavage would be making a core assertion — the assertion of life, life …
Dr Gandhi had taken due note of Russia’s appearance, and derived some doctorly stimulation from it (the relative size of the nipples was what chiefly intrigued him); but he wasn’t enjoying this second interview as much as he had enjoyed the first. The correlation of forces had already changed, as was now pretty well invariably the case. How much better it had been, how much more appreciated he had felt, when nobody knew anything — in the time before the publicity of knowledge. Now, instead of the sweating mutes of yesterday, you faced erratically wised-up mountebanks with half-assimilated case-histories, prognoses, quackeries. Dr Gandhi believed that it would be fractionally harder, henceforward, to get doctors to be doctors, such was the drain on the job-satisfaction. Russia Meo was of course an educated, indeed a distinguished woman, and he had never expected to be able to radiate downwards at her, like a Saturn. But nowadays (he reflected) every flop and waster in London had some four-eyed cousin or nephew prepared to scour the Web for all it knew … So Russia pressed from question to question; and, head injuries being head injuries, with their labyrinthine sequelae, Dr Gandhi was soon reduced to a drone of equivocation. He felt a familiar frowsiness come over him, alleviated, for a moment, when Russia turned to the white sheet of the window: the tautening of her bust allowed him to conclude that the nipples would be correspondingly large. This prompted a sexual thought, one unmoderated by the simultaneous reminder that large nipples would facilitate the business — if not the actual process — of lactation.
Russia, for her part, had not at all enjoyed her many hours in front of the computer, boning up on the head-injured. After reading one particular sentence (‘Approach your spouse as you would a completely new relationship’), she had even burst from the house and stridden to the Jeremy Bentham for cigarettes. She smoked seven of them while making herself mistress of subsections with titles like ‘Your New Domestic Life’ and ‘Your New Social Life’, and so on. What do they mean, new? she kept thinking. (And what do they mean, your?) It is better, we always assume, to be prepared than not to be prepared — but not much better; with some eventualities, being prepared isn’t any good either … Among other recent gains and accomplishments, women have naturally made considerable advances in the largely male preserve of self-centredness. And alongside the conviction that she would try her very best, there ran another — specifically, that there were some (no, many) possible outcomes, amply described on her screen, that she couldn’t and wouldn’t endure. She was not being ruthless, merely modern: come on. But then Russia confronted another sentence, one that made her hate herself, and weep, and valorously insufflate. The sentence went, ‘There is only one “miracle cure”, and that is love.’ And so now she said it a different way: come on. Come on …
* * *
As he stirred for the third or fourth time that morning, Xan Meo saw his wife, sitting, waiting, on the bedside chair. She said immediately,
‘I was just reading about you. Well, not you, but people in your condition. Now, Xan, I want to say this: don’t fall for the “two-year” myth. It’s an old wives’ tale that’s caused a lot of unnecessary pain. They say that “after two years” you’re not going to recover any further. It’s not true, Xan. You can go on recovering for much longer than that. It can take five years! It can take ten! Ask around in your support group and you’ll see that it’s so!’
Xan needed more time than he would have liked to realise that all this was in itself an old wives’ tale — or a first wife’s tale, to put it another way. This wasn’t Russia. This was Pearl. She went on:
‘You know, something like this, it can make you grateful for what you already have. I know I’m grateful for what I already have: a lump sum, and not alimony. Because you do know, don’t you, that only twenty-five per cent of head-injured patients are in full employment three months after their accidents?’
He straightened himself up and with both hands smoothed back his scattered hair; he supposed — and it was a supposition prompted or at least borne out by Pearl’s smile — that he had never looked balder. Rather more generally, his cheeks and forehead seemed to be dotted with excrescences, asperities — as if, while he’d slept, someone had sliced and daubed a loaf of bread above his face, leaving it covered with crumbs and seeds held in place by coagulating butter. He was glad that Pearl couldn’t see his knees: on the inner side of either patella, visible fluid waves, like fat worms.
‘Where are the boys?’ he said. ‘They’re here?’
‘They’re in the caff. They’ll be along … One of the things you’ll have to steel yourself for, my darling, is a net drop in your IQ. Studies show. Shouldn’t affect the acting but it won’t be too clever for the writing, will it? I don’t know about the rhythm guitar. You know what really worries me?’
Xan waited.
‘What really worries me is how it’ll affect your relationship with Russia. Sitting there at dinner, you won’t know what she’s on about. Because that was always very important to you, in the past — her mind. You used to say so. It wouldn’t matter that much if you were still with me. Not that I’d look at you now, in your state. We could just hang around staring at the wall. But with her …’