Chapter 2: The Flight
The principal actor in my story is Stuart. He’s the Englishman I met on the plane.
Stuart and I agree when the story began: May 1986.
We disagree about where.
I say that it began 30,000 feet above the earth. Stuart says that it began in the airport in Newark, New Jersey. (I prefer my version.)
Whichever version you choose to believe, there are those who would say that our versions reflect our personalities remarkably well. My head, they say, is above the clouds, and Stuart’s feet, on the ground. The truth, of course, is somewhere in between.
To be fair to Stuart, however, Newark airport is where I did start off on that stifling hot day in May - my point of departure back to England where I was living in a small rented flat in North Oxford. (I’ll tell you why later; that’s a story, too.) And at check-in, I was surprised when the man behind the counter asked where I (me?) would actually like to sit on the return flight - who knows but maybe even behind those sliding blue velour curtains that separate the men from the gods.
How very discerning of that man, I told myself, to offer me (yes, me!) an upgrade. ‘He felt his senses quicken, overwhelmed with wonder’, wrote Homer (I like Homer), ‘this was a god, he knew it well’.
Already tall, I suddenly felt even taller, tall as the atrium ceiling, with the topee1 I was wearing doing its quirky best to stand in for the lustrous helmet of Athena.
Such hubris! The gods get you for that, you know, sooner or later.
Me, I got it sooner, no waiting around - indeed, as soon as the very next person after me reached the counter. “And where would you like to sit?”, I heard the man ask. As he did the next person. And the next. Well, everyone.
Why?
The reason, as it turned out, was Gadafy.
Yes, him, Col. Gadafy, leader of Libya. He of the square jaw and the white teeth and the dark specs. And to whom, however improbably, I would owe my future. (Thank you, Muammar!)
To explain: back then, if you remember, Gadafy was our enemy. (I think he’s our friend now, I’m not sure.) And he was flexing his muscles. Which meant that Americans, as so often happens when times are tricky, weren’t travelling abroad. So the plane was only half full. Which meant that all of us back there in Economy, usually bunched up like so many bananas, were being allowed to spread out. Which is why I not only got my preferred seat in the side-aisle, I got the whole side-aisle. Not exactly Olympus, true enough, but not bad for a banana.
I thought that not just because it would mean not having to play contortionist the whole trip, letting people in my row in, and out, only a 2" passage between my knees and the seat in front. Or because I wouldn’t have to spend the entire trip sandwiched between the worst cold in the world on my left and a small drooling infant on my right. Or even because it meant there would be no chance of my becoming the captive audience of yet another middle-aged man whose marriage was falling apart (no fault of his own).
But most of all because it would mean whole hours alone and uninterrupted with one of the best and most loyal companions of my life: a book. This particular one finally chosen for this particular flight from among all the myriad and wondrous possibilities that the Strand (bookshop, fab, go there! 12th & Broadway) had to offer.
Bliss!
I settled in. Shut my eyes as the plane took off - the next day’s headlines careering through my head: ‘Newark plane overshoots runway, all lost’. Then opened them again in time to watch my country recede - that country I felt I had let down. From the land of opportunities, so many given to me, so many thrown away.
I took out my book and turned on the light. The light that was only half needed at the start of the flight but which, when my real story begins, was one of the few still turned on mid-journey. The light that was by then beaming down past my down-turned head and spilling onto the pages of my book while at the same time, laser-like, dividing the surrounding dark.
Sometime around then, a fellow passenger got up and started moving through that dark towards me.
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1. Topee, aka pith helmet. And I bet you think that was an odd thing for me to be wearing. Fortunately for me, Stuart didn't. But, then, he's English.