In-Flight Entertainment Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Up at a Villa

  In-Flight Entertainment

  Squirrel

  Ahead of the Pack

  Scan

  I’m Sorry but I’ll Have to Let You Go

  Sorry?

  In the Driver’s Seat

  The Tipping Point

  Geography Boy

  Channel 17

  Homework

  The Festival of the Immortals

  Diary of an Interesting Year

  Charm for a Friend with a Lump

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Poignant, perceptive and dazzling, in this, her long awaited new collection, Helen Simpson offers acute portraits of lives in transition: of changes for the better, lives stalled and in freefall; of love, loss, and sudden revelations. Warm and funny, the stories are also threaded with a sense of anxiety and fear: of growing old, of commitment, and, most worryingly, of the growing threat to the environment.

  In the title story, Alan, on a transatlantic flight, is delighted by an unusual upgrade to a first class seat, but is to find his journey disturbed by portents of doom; a family discussion over the fate of a trapped squirrel unexpectedly veers to nearly reveal a shocking truth; and a boy contemplates a parallel life after asking his mother for help with his creative writing homework.

  Elsewhere Patrick, newly deaf and belligerent, is forced to re-examine his life with the help of a supernatural hearing aid; a profound, heartfelt and distracted prayer is offered for a friend’s health and safety; and in ‘The Festival of the Immortals’, two old friends look back on their lives with joy and regret, as they wait to heckle Charlotte Brontë. Moving deftly between the domestic and the fantastical, from tragedy to comedy, this is a remarkable collection from a master of the genre; each story brilliantly realised, beautifully captured and utterly engrossing.

  About the Author

  Helen Simpson is the author of Four Bare Legs in a Bed, Dear George, Hey Yeah Right Get a Life, and Constitutional. In 1991 she was chosen as the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year and won the Somerset Maugham Award. In 1993 she was chosen as one of Granta’s twenty Best of Young British Novelists. She lives in London.

  Up at a Villa

  THEY WERE WOKEN by the deep-chested bawling of an angry baby. Wrenched from wine-dark slumber, the four of them sat up, flustered, hair stuck with pine needles, gulping awake with little light breaths of concentration. They weren’t supposed to be here, they remembered that.

  They could see the baby by the side of the pool, not twenty yards away, a furious geranium in its parasol-shaded buggy, and the large pale woman sagging above it in her bikini. Half an hour ago they had been masters of that pool, racing topless and tipsy round its borders, lithe Nick chasing sinewy Tina and wrestling her, an equal match, grunting, snaky, toppling, crashing down into the turquoise depths together. Neither of them would let go underwater. They came up fighting in a chlorinated spume of diamonds. Joe, envious, had tried a timid imitation grapple, but Charlotte was having none of it.

  ‘Get off!’ she snorted, kind, mocking, and slipped neatly into the pool via a dive that barely broke the water’s skin. Joe, seeing he was last as usual, gave a foolish bellow and launched his heavy self into the air, his aimless belly slapping down disastrously like an explosion.

  After that, the sun had dried them off in about a minute, they had devoured their picnic of pissaladière and peaches, downed the bottles of pink wine and gone to doze in the shade behind the ornamental changing screen.

  Now they were stuck. Their clothes and money were heaped under a bush of lavender at the other end of the pool.

  ‘Look,’ whispered Tina as a man came walking towards the baby and its mother. ‘Look, they’re English. He’s wearing socks.’

  ‘What’s the matter with her now,’ said the man, glaring at the baby.

  ‘How should I know,’ said the woman. ‘I mean, she’s been fed. She’s got a new nappy.’

  ‘Oh, plug her on again,’ said the man crossly, and wandered off towards a cushioned sun-lounger. ‘That noise goes straight through my skull.’

  The woman muttered something they couldn’t hear, and shrugged herself out of her bikini top. They gasped and gaped in fascination as she uncovered huge brown nipples on breasts like wheels of Camembert.

  ‘Oh gross!’ whispered Tina, drawing her lips back from her teeth in a horrified smirk.

  ‘Be quiet,’ hissed Nick as they all of them heaved with giggles and snorts and their light eyes popped, over-emphatic in faces baked to the colour of flowerpots.

  They had crept into the grounds of this holiday villa, one of a dozen or more on this hillside, at slippery Nick’s suggestion, since everything was fermé le lundi down in the town and they had no money left for entrance to hotel pools or even to beaches. Anyway they had fallen out of love over the last week with the warm soup of the Mediterranean, its filmy surface bobbing with polystyrene shards and other unsavoury orts.

  ‘Harvey,’ called the woman, sagging on the stone bench with the baby at her breast. ‘Harvey, I wish you’d …’

  ‘Now what is it,’ said Harvey testily, making a great noise with his two-day-old copy of The Times.

  ‘Some company,’ she said with wounded pathos. ‘That’s all.’

  ‘Company,’ he sighed. ‘I thought the idea was to get away from it all.’

  ‘I thought we’d have a chance to talk on holiday,’ said the woman.

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Harvey, scrumpling up The Times and exchanging his sun-lounger for a place on the stone bench beside her. ‘All right. So what do you want to talk about?’

  ‘Us,’ said the woman.

  ‘Right,’ said Harvey. ‘Can I have a swim first?’ And he was off, diving clumsily into the pool, losing his poise at the last moment so that he met the water like a flung cat.

  ‘She’s hideous,’ whispered Tina. ‘Look at that gross stomach, it’s all in folds.’ She glanced down superstitiously at her own body, the high breasts like halved apples, the handspan waist.

  ‘He’s quite fat too,’ said Charlotte. ‘Love handles, anyroad.’

  ‘I’m never going to have children,’ breathed Tina. ‘Not in a million years.’

  ‘Shush,’ said Joe, straining forward for the next instalment. The husband was back from his swim, shaking himself like a Labrador in front of the nursing mother.

  ‘“Us”,’ he said humorously, wiggling a finger inside each ear, then drubbing his hair with the flats of his hands. ‘Fire away then.’

  She started immediately, as if she knew she only had two or three minutes of his attention, and soon the air was thick with phrases like Once she’s on solids, and You’d rather be reading the paper, and Is it because you wanted a boy? He looked dull but resigned, silent except for once protesting, What’s so special about bathtime. She talked on, but like a loser, for she was failing to find the appropriate register, flailing around, pulling clichés from the branches. At some subliminal level each of the eavesdropping quartet recognised their own mother’s voice in hers, and glazed over.

  ‘You’ve never moaned on like this before,’ marvelled Harvey at last. ‘You were always so independent. Organised.’

  ‘You think I’m a mess,’ she said. ‘A failure as a mother.’

  ‘Well, you’re obviously not coping,’ he said. ‘At home all day and you can’t even keep the waste bins down.’

  Nick and Tina were laughing with silent violence behind the screen, staggering against each other, tears running down their faces. Joe was mesmerised by the spectacle of lactation. As for Charlott
e, she was remembering another unwitting act of voyeurism, a framed picture from a childhood camping holiday.

  It had been early morning, she’d gone off on her own to the village for their breakfast baguettes, and the village had been on a hill like in a fairy-tale, full of steep little flights of steps which she was climbing for fun. The light was sweet and glittering and as she looked down over the rooftops she saw very clearly one particular open window, so near that she could have lobbed in a ten-franc piece, and through the window she could see a woman dropping kisses onto a man’s face and neck and chest. He was lying naked in bed and she was kissing him lovingly and gracefully, her breasts dipping down over him like silvery peonies. Charlotte had never mentioned this to anyone, keeping the picture to herself, a secret snapshot protected from outside sniggerings.

  ‘The loss of romance,’ bleated the woman, starting afresh.

  ‘We haven’t changed,’ said Harvey stoutly.

  ‘Yes, we have! Of course we have!’

  ‘Rubbish.’

  ‘But we’re supposed to change, it’s all different now, the baby’s got to come first.’

  ‘I don’t see why,’ said Harvey. ‘Mustn’t let them rule your life.’

  The baby had finished at last, and was asleep; the woman gingerly detached her from her body and placed her in the buggy.

  ‘Cheer up,’ said Harvey, preparing for another dip. ‘Once you’ve lost a bit of weight, it’ll all be back to normal. Romance et cetera. Get yourself in shape.’

  ‘You don’t fancy me any more,’ she wailed in a last-ditch attempt to hold him.

  ‘No, no, of course I do,’ he said, eyeing the water. ‘It’s just a bit … different from before. Now that you’ve gone all, you know, sort of floppy.’

  That did it. At the same moment as the woman unloosed a howl of grief, Nick and Tina released a semi-hysterical screech of laughter. Then – ‘Run!’ said Joe – and they all shot off round the opposite side of the pool, snatching up their clothes and shoes and purses at the other end. Harvey was meanwhile shouting, ‘Hoi! Hoi! What the hell d’you think you’re playing at!’ while his wife stopped crying and his daughter started.

  The four of them ran like wild deer, leaping low bushes of lavender and thyme, whooping with panicky delight, lean and light and half-naked – or, more accurately, nine-tenths naked – through the pine trees and après-midi dappling. They ran on winged feet, and their laughter looped the air behind them like chains of bubbles in translucent water.

  High up on the swimming-pool terrace the little family, frozen together for a photographic instant, watched their flight open-mouthed, like the ghosts of summers past; or, indeed, of summers yet to come.

  In-Flight Entertainment

  AFTER ALL THAT nonsense at Heathrow, it came as particularly welcome to find himself upgraded to First Class. This hadn’t happened to Alan before and he looked around him with beady pleasure. Business Class he was used to, Club Class and Premium Economy and what have you, the extra eight inches were a lifesaver when you were six foot plus; but not First, until now.

  His champagne was in a real glass rather than a plastic facsimile. It made a difference. He had way more room to stretch his legs, and on a nine-hour trip to Chicago that counted for something, especially after a four-hour delay. The big armchairs were ranged in curved couples, like Victorian loveseats; his own faced forward, while the old guy opposite had the window seat of this pair, its back to the cockpit. They were near enough to converse if they chose, but so far hadn’t done so, which suited Alan just fine.

  The other First Class passengers were mainly business types like himself, or much older men. No women, unless you counted the air stewardesses. His own stopped and smiled at him fondly, so he took another sparkle-filled glass from her tray. He could get used to this. Yes, really quite old; the passenger just across the aisle from him, for example, he must be eighty if he was a day, and not looking too good on it either. Cabin crew had already had to help him totter down the aisle to the toilet, first one in after the seatbelt signs went off, and even now he couldn’t seem to settle; he’d just pressed the button for more attention Alan couldn’t help but notice.

  Yes, he was going to enjoy this flight, he decided, inspecting the menu and the list of films on offer. He was a bit of a film buff. Something retro to start with, something easy to eat by; here it was, just the thing, North by Northwest with Cary Grant and Eve Marie Saint. King prawns on a bed of wild rice with star anise. Already he was aware of his tightening facial skin and sore red eyes but this could hardly be called an ordeal. It’s being up in the clouds, he thought, as the champagne kicked in; it’s being in transit. I’m where it’s at.

  All you needed for the modern world was to know how to work a remote control – when to fast-forward, when to double-click – which was something these older guys simply couldn’t get the hang of. The screen on the swivel-arm in front of him showed a shrunken globe with a jewel of an aeroplane – the one he was on – just clear of the tiny triangle that represented the UK, at the start of its journey across the pond. He felt unaccountably moved. The end of the world was nigh, that’s what the Heathrow nutters had been shouting, basically. Global warming, he was sick of the sound of it, he only had to see those words and a massive wave of boredom engulfed him.

  Even his parents had jumped on the bandwagon, wittering on about their carbon footprints the last time he went to see them, complaining about how the lawn needed mowing right through winter now, showing off their new wiggly lightbulbs. His mother had sneaked a sticker onto the windscreen of his new Merc SUV – ‘Costing the Earth’. He hadn’t noticed, but Penny had been furious when she saw it.

  ‘Your mother,’ she’d hissed. ‘She’d like us all to go back to saving little bits of string just like her mother did in the war. That does it, I’m not having her over here being holier-than-thou about the patio heaters.’

  The old guy across the aisle was making quite a fuss now; Alan watched his freckled baldy head jerking around and his hands fluttering spasmodically as the air stewardess leant down to ask him what he wanted. She was nice, that girl, a nice smile and nice teeth; though she wasn’t smiling now, right enough. What a job! You had to hand it to them.

  The thing was, as he’d tried to explain to his parents, the science behind these new reports could be quite shaky. There were two sides to every coin, and anyway Planet Earth has a self-regulating mechanism, rather like the economy, and we should leave it to right itself. Mother Nature knows a thing or two, he’d told them, tapping his nose; don’t you worry. And if it does get too hot, America’s going to send giant mirrors into space to deflect some of the sun’s rays back off into the darkness. ‘What about the polar bears,’ his mother had persisted. She’d always preferred animals to humans, as she proudly announced from time to time. ‘Yes, it’s a shame about the polar bears,’ Alan had said, growing exasperated, ‘and the three-toed Amazonian tree frogs. But there you go. It’s the survival of the fittest out there, Mum.’

  ‘Last time we came to meet you at the airport,’ his father had butted in, apropos of nothing in particular that Alan could see, ‘there was this American family and the kids were all in T-shirts saying “Darwin Was Wrong”.’

  Where was the food? He was going to go for the boeuf en croute rather than the Indonesian fish curry. More of the cabin crew seemed to have converged now on the old man with his fluttering hands. The nice stewardess flashed Alan a smile when he caught her eye, then went back to looking worried. An announcement came out over the sound system for any doctor on board to please come forward. Now, for the first time, Alan’s opposite number in the curving double seat leant across and spoke to him.

  ‘I can’t see what’s going on from here,’ he rasped.

  ‘It’s the old guy in the next seat along,’ hissed Alan. ‘He seems to be in some sort of trouble. Oh look, here’s someone. Must be a doctor. He’s obviously not best pleased. Now they’re making the seat recline. They’ve got him lyin
g down flat.’

  Other heads too were craning to get a look at the drama. The cabin crew stuck determined smiles on their faces and started to do the rounds, taking orders for dinner.

  ‘Four hours’ delay,’ volunteered Alan. ‘Thanks to those jokers at Heathrow. Alan Barr, by the way.’

  ‘And I’m Jeremy Lees. Yes, those anti-flying protesters. A waste of time.’

  ‘Complete time-wasters.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Jeremy. ‘What I meant, though, was, it was a waste of their time. They’re not going to change anything.’

  ‘Exactly. It’s nonsense, isn’t it, this global warming stuff. Trying to turn the wheel back. Half the scientists don’t agree with it anyway.’

  ‘Actually I think you’ll find they do. Ah, red please,’ said Jeremy as the air stewardess offered him wine. ‘What have you got? Merlot or Zinfandel? I’ll try the Zinfandel. Thank you. No, they do agree now, they’ve reached a consensus; I ought to know, I was one of them. No, it’s not nonsense, I’m afraid. The world really is warming up.’

  ‘Merlot,’ said Alan, rather annoyed. These finger-wagging types were getting everywhere. Even his own firm had been pressured into signing up for some carbon-offsetting scheme recently. £19.50 extra it had cost for this trip to Chicago. Plant a bloody tree. All a big con-trick. ‘So how long have we got?’ he demanded with a tinge of belligerence. ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Your health,’ replied Jeremy, raising his glass in a courtly manner. ‘Well. They were saying thirty years, but now it’s looking more like twenty, or even fifteen. Still, that should see me out.’

  Old bugger, thought Alan; how self-centred can you get. The children’ll be in their twenties.

  ‘The thing is, the nearer you get to a mountain, the less of it you see,’ said Jeremy obscurely. ‘Like old people and death.’

  Enough of you, thought Alan, nodding at him and donning his headphones. Cary Grant was waiting at a bus stop in the Midwest and in the distance was the little crop-spraying plane buzzing towards him. He hadn’t really noticed it yet. This was the best bit of the film; Alan couldn’t help losing concentration though when he noticed from the corner of his eye that his favourite air stewardess was holding a plastic bag of liquid aloft. She was standing just ahead of him in the aisle, while a man who was presumably the passenger-doctor had started to fit a drip. A second stewardess held a torch. Wow, thought Alan; it must be serious. He looked around him again, uneasy. He could see a man playing sudoku, and another forking food into his mouth like there was no tomorrow.