‘How are you feeling?’ I asked Selby.
‘Overloaded,’ he said.
‘I know the IV is a bother and clearing this up is a slow business but the antibiotics will do the job.’
He nodded in a resigned way. ‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘Do you believe in God?’
‘Why do you ask?’
He showed me a photograph in The Times, a close-up of a bat with long ears and a thoughtful face. I’d noticed the picture in my own Times when I was having breakfast and I’d been thinking about it. Selby said, ‘I’m wondering if His eye is on the bat.’
‘I’ll have to get back to you on that,’ I said.
‘Sure you will. I’ll be here.’
After the round I surprised him by appearing at his bedside again. He handed me the paper and I reread the caption under the bat portrait which identified the animal as a European free-tailed bat. It had come down, ‘exhausted, starving, and injured’, in a Cornwall graveyard. ‘It is believed it had been blown off course from its migration route to the Iberian peninsula’, wrote the reporter, Simon de Bruxelles. He went on to say that ‘European free-tailed bats are high fliers and have been spotted by airline pilots several miles up’.
‘“Nineteen-inch wingspan,’” I read. ‘That’s a pretty big bat.’
‘That’s what you could call a batline,’ said Selby. ‘Bat Air, last of the independents. Pilot sitting in his 747 looks out of his window and there’s Bat Air flapping along beside him. What’s Bat Air doing up there with the big guys?’
‘Migrating, it says here.’
‘But why so high?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s picking up a favourable air stream.’
‘I think there’s more to it than that. What if those are souls flying up there?’
‘Why would souls take the form of bats?’
‘Maybe when you die you stop being separate from every other animal. Maybe you take on a bat shape or a wolf shape or an elephant shape or a whale shape. Maybe the world is full of souls walking or swimming or flying around, and when some of those animals get extinct, those souls die. What if that, eh? Think about it.’
I did.
17 Abraham Selby
25 January 2003. What I like about Dr Newman is that he makes me feel a little less horizontal. He might be working too hard though, and not getting enough sleep. On his way out of the ward he walked into a bucket one of the cleaners was using and he almost fell over.
18 Anneliese Newman
25 January 2003. Sometimes now I dream of music. Not opera music, what it is I don’t know. Over me, under me, all around me. I can hear it, I can feel it. When I wake up it is gone. Lost, nothing remembered.
19 Christabel Alderton
25 January 2003. ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ treacled down the aisles as if a big can of bossa nova in the galley had sprung a leak. I know that the international airport in Rio was named after Antonio Carlos Jobim after his death but I don’t think he acquired posthumous performance rights in public conveyances worldwide. The 777 was no more than half full but people still managed to get in each other’s way as they found their seats and put things in the overhead compartments.
I was in 28C and I wasn’t surprised to find that the swarthy man between the empty seats in the departure lounge was next to me. We were on the left-hand side, about halfway back in Economy. I was aisle, he was middle, and window was a very fat man who smelled like Burger King and breathed heavily. Because Mr Window overflowed his space Mr Middle’s right arm sometimes pressed against my left arm. He smiled apologetically and made himself small. Then he took out a string of worry beads and began to worry them.
The flight attendants did their thing with pointing out the emergency exits and demonstrating the life jackets, we hung about for a while queueing for takeoff, then the 777 got serious, pulled itself together, started rolling, gathered speed and let go of the ground. London tilted away below us and the drinks trolley slowly, slowly arrived. I had two gin and tonics, the worrying man had orange juice and the fat man had two Diet Pepsis. The captain told us about the weather and how high we’d be flying and how long it would take, then we all settled back to breathe the low-oxygen air and wait for lunch. I like those little time-outs between what you’ve just left behind and what’s waiting up ahead; they never last long enough.
I opened The Woman in Black. This was a really classy ghost story of the old-fashioned kind. The Alice Munro book had a bright cover and seemed to have at least one story with a happy ending but the ghost story pulled me first. I was just settling into the atmosphere of it when lunch came and I had coq au vin and some white wine. After lunch I had a bit of a kip and then got well stuck in to Eel Marsh and Nine Lives Causeway and the tides and weathers of the story which took me up to the next drinks, followed by Dover sole and more white wine.
By then the overhead lights were switched off and it was movie time. The menu for the screen on the back of the seat in front gave me several choices including a remake of Solaris. I’ve never seen a good remake and I wasn’t going to watch this one but the title brought back something of the original film that I saw years ago. I remembered water and the sound of water, water in a stream, running over reeds, water in a pond, frozen in winter, water coming down in rain. And then there was the ocean on the planet Solaris. This ocean didn’t actually have water in it but a kind of plasma that reacted to what was in the minds of the men in the space station above it. It took their thoughts and memories and it made copies of people in their lives and sent them up to the station. These were flesh and blood just like the originals. The psychologist at the station was visited by what seemed to be his wife who’d killed herself ten years before. She was confused and frightened — she didn’t know what she was. She couldn’t bear to let him out of her sight, even broke through a steel door to be with him. At first he was so spooked by this that he put her in a rocket and shot her off, but the next day she was back. She loved him and he loved her too, even though he knew she wasn’t really real. ‘Love can only be experienced, it can’t be explained,’ he said. When the replica finally understood what she was she tried to commit suicide but failed. Poor thing — how real is anybody, really? I tried to recall the ending but I couldn’t. I know it was sad.
We were over the ocean while I was remembering Solaris. O God! I thought, if only the ocean beneath us could send up my dead son, alive and well, even if it was only a copy of him, but a warm and breathing Django I could hold in my arms and he would call me Mum.
The swarthy man touched my arm. ‘You all right?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Why?’
‘You crying,’ he said.
I put a hand to my face. My cheeks were wet. ‘Eyestrain,’ I said. ‘Too much reading.’
‘Me too,’ he said.
‘Reading too much?’
He shook his head. ‘Too much sad.’
‘How come?’
‘Dead. Gone for ever.’
‘Who?’
He shook his head again and put his hand over his heart. ‘Name is like gravestone in little cemetery inside me,’ he said. ‘I take flowers, go alone.’
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘Little cemetery inside me.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Too much sad.’ He went back to his beads.