‘I look for a gay time,’ Lise is saying.
‘You got a young man?’
‘Yes, I have my boy-friend!’
‘He’s not with you, then?’
‘No. I’m going to find him. He’s waiting for me. Maybe I should get him a gift at the duty-free shop.’
They are walking towards the departures chart. ‘I’m going to Stockholm. I have three-quarters of an hour wait,’ says the woman.
Lise looks at the chart as the amplified voice of the announcer hacks its way through the general din. Lise says, ‘That’s my flight. Boarding at Gate 14.’ She moves off, her eyes in the distance as if the woman from Johannesburg had never been there. On her way to Gate 14 Lise stops to glance at a gift-stall. She looks at the dolls in folk-costume and at the corkscrews. Then she lifts up a paper-knife shaped like a scimitar, of brass-coloured metal with inset coloured stones. She removes it from its curved sheath and tests the blade and the point with deep interest. ‘How much?’ she asks the assistant who is at that moment serving someone else. The girl says impatiently aside to Lise, ‘The price is on the ticket.’
‘Too much. I can get it cheaper at the other end,’ Lise says, putting it down.
‘They’re all fixed prices at the duty-free,’ the girl calls after Lise as she walks away towards Gate 14.
A small crowd has gathered waiting for embarkation. More and more people straggle or palpitate, according to temperament, towards the group. Lise surveys her fellow-passengers, one by one, very carefully but not in a manner to provoke their attention. She moves and mingles as if with dreamy feet and legs, but quite plainly, from her eyes, her mind is not dreamy as she absorbs each face, each dress, each suit of clothes, all blouses, blue-jeans, each piece of hand-luggage, each voice which will accompany her on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.
THREE
She will be found tomorrow morning dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie, in the grounds of an empty villa, in a park of the foreign city to which she is travelling on the flight now boarding at Gate 14.
Crossing the tarmac to the plane Lise follows, with her quite long stride, closely on the heels of the fellow-passenger whom she appears finally to have chosen to adhere to. This is a rosy-faced, sturdy young man of about thirty; he is dressed in a dark business suit and carries a black briefcase. She follows him purposefully, careful to block the path of any other traveller whose aimless hurry might intervene between Lise and this man. Meanwhile, closely behind Lise, almost at her side, walks a man who in turn seems anxious to be close to her. He tries unsuccessfully to catch her attention. He is bespectacled, half-smiling, young, dark, long-nosed and stooping. He wears a check shirt and beige corduroy trousers. A camera is slung over his shoulders and a coat over his arm.
Up the steps they go, the pink and shiny business man, Lise at his heels, and at hers the hungrier-looking man. Up the steps and into the plane. The air-hostess says good morning at the door while a steward farther up the aisle of the economy class blocks the progress of the staggering file and helps a young woman with two young children to bundle their coats up on the rack. The way is clear at last. Lise’s business man finds a seat next to the right-hand window in a three-seat row. Lise takes the middle seat next to him, on his left, while the lean hawk swiftly throws his coat and places his camera up on the rack and sits down next to Lise in the end seat.
Lise begins to fumble for her seat-belt. First she reaches down the right-hand side of her seat which adjoins that of the dark-suited man. At the same time she takes the left-hand section. But the right-hand buckle she gets hold of is that of her neighbour. It does not fit in the left-hand buckle as she tries to make it do. The dark-suited neighbour, fumbling also for his seat-belt, frowns as he seems to realize that she has the wrong part, and makes an unintelligible sound. Lise says, ‘I think I’ve got yours.
He fishes up the buckle that properly belongs to Lise’s seat-belt.
She says, ‘Oh yes. I’m so sorry.’ She giggles and he formally smiles and brings his smile to an end, now fastening his seat-belt intently and then looking out of the window at the wing of the plane, silvery with its rectangular patches.
Lise’s left-hand neighbour smiles. The loudspeaker tells the passengers to fasten their seat-belts and refrain from smoking. Her admirer’s brown eyes are warm, his smile, as wide as his forehead, seems to take up most of his lean face. Lise says, audibly above the other voices on the plane, ‘You look like Red Riding-Hood’s grandmother. Do you want to eat me up?’
The engines rev up. Her ardent neighbour’s widened lips give out deep, satisfied laughter, while he slaps her knee in applause. Suddenly her other neighbour looks at Lise in alarm. He stares, as if recognizing her, with his brief-case on his lap, and his hand in the position of pulling out a batch of papers. Something about Lise, about her exchange with the man on her left, has caused a kind of paralysis in his act of fetching out some papers from his brief-case. He opens his mouth, gasping and startled, staring at her as if she is someone he has known and forgotten and now sees again. She smiles at him; it is a smile of relief and delight. His hand moves again, hurriedly putting back the papers that he had half drawn out of his brief-case. He trembles as he unfastens his seat-belt and makes as if to leave his seat, grabbing his brief-case.
On the evening of the following day he will tell the police, quite truthfully, ‘The first time I saw her was at the airport. Then on the plane. She sat beside me.
‘You never saw her before at any time? You didn’t know her?’
‘No, never.’
‘What was your conversation on the plane?’
‘Nothing. I moved my seat. I was afraid.’
‘Afraid?’
‘Yes, frightened. I moved to another seat, away from her.’
‘What frightened you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why did you move your seat at that time?’
‘I don’t know. I must have sensed something.’
‘What did she say to you?’
‘Nothing much. She got her seat-belt mixed with mine. Then she was carrying on a bit with the man at the end seat.’
Now, as the plane taxis along the runway, he gets up. Lise and the man in the aisle seat look up at him, taken by surprise at the abruptness of his movements. Their seat-belts fasten them to their seats and they are unable immediately to make way for him, as he indicates that he wants to pass. Lise looks, for an instant, slightly senile, as if she felt, in addition to bewilderment, a sense of defeat or physical incapacity. She might be about to cry or protest against a pitiless frustration of her will. But an air-hostess, seeing the standing man, has left her post by the exit—door and briskly comes up the aisle to their seat. She says. ‘The aircraft is taking off. Will you kindly remain seated and fasten your seat-belt?’
The man says, in a foreign accent, ‘Excuse me, please. I wish to change.’ He starts to squeeze past Lise and her companion.
The air-hostess, evidently thinking that the man has an urgent need to go to the lavatory, asks the two if they would mind getting up to let him pass and return to their seats as quickly as possible. They unfasten their belts, stand aside in the aisle, and he hurries up the plane with the air-hostess leading the way. But he does not get as far as the toilet cubicles. He stops at an empty middle seat upon which the people on either side, a white-haired fat man and a young girl, have dumped hand-luggage and magazines. He pushes himself past the woman who is seated on the outside seat and asks her to remove the luggage. He himself lifts it, shakily, his solid strength all gone. The air-hostess turns to remonstrate, but the two people have obediently made the seat vacant for him. He sits, fastens his seat-belt, ignoring the air-hostess, her reproving, questioning protests, and heaves a deep breath as if he had escaped from death by a small margin.