“Me neither! But the director’s inspired like that.”
A couple in the first-class dining room, I didn’t think I’d seen such beauty before. His radiance, rather than obscuring hers, seemed to set it off, and the whole room turned to look at their entrance. Waiters scurried to fulfil their wishes — which was for a bland vegetarian option and an obscure protein drink — and all the while she rested her chin on the back of her hand and laughed at his jokes with the high sound of silver tapping on a crystal glass, and didn’t look at his face, but scanned the room, like an animal wary of predators in the grass.
I approached them out of curiosity, told them I was a producer with the BBC, and forgive me intruding, but had I seen them on the TV?
“Not yet,” replied the man with a dazzling smile.
“Oh a producer, how wonderful!” exclaimed the woman, and a few short sentences later and a couple of references to my friend the director general and how exciting it was to meet new talent, I was at their table.
“I’d just love to be on the TV,” she exclaimed. “Not for the fame, you understand, but just because I think there’s so many important things I could say.”
Her partner joined in when I mentioned Top Gear, wondered if I’d met the boys, driven the cars.
“They’re darlings, such darlings — that chemistry you see on screen, it’s real, all of it, it’s just so real,” I lied. “Are you interested in cars…?”
Why yes, yes he was, he’d just bought his first Jaguar…
“He wanted a Ferrari,” exclaimed the missus, “but I won’t let him do anything so silly.”
I listened to them a while, dropping in occasional total lies and abject flatteries, until at last the woman leant over and said, “Have you got Perfection?”
“Why yes, of course. Though I haven’t used it for a while.”
“Changed. Our. Lives,” she intoned.
“Changed our lives,” he concurred.
“This trip — elite access, VIP upgrade to first class. It said ‘you need a break’ and you know, it was right, I mean, of course it was, it had GPS on me, knew I spent far too much time at work…”
“Far too much…” sang along the mister.
“…‘The perfect holiday for the perfect you,’ it said and, well, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t it just?”
“You don’t feel like you’ve just been sold a package?” I enquired.
“Of course we’ve been sold a package,” he replied, bristling at the notion that any thought might occur in this world which had not first occurred to him. “All these cruise companies and holiday companies, they all have tie-ins with Perfection, of course they do. But then, it is the perfect holiday…”
“… the perfect holiday!”
“… isn’t it?”
I smiled, and looked at this couple again, and imagined the hours they’d spent in dentists’ chairs, the wash of the general anaesthetic before plastic surgery, the days lost to shopping trips, the friends abandoned for lack of social graces.
“The perfect holiday, for the perfect couple,” I murmured, and stole their room key, and while they were finishing their dinner I used their shower, stole his watch, their currency and her make-up bag.
Chapter 19
Choices for the lonely: to seek human company in all its forms, or to be content with the fact that you have no company at all.
I switch between the two.
I made it fifteen days by myself in a cabin in the forests of Canada before breaking. In the end, paralysed and sobbing, I had to phone the police to come and rescue me.
A woman in a brown hat picked me up, and when she arrived I clung onto her arm, and said I was sorry, I was so sorry, I don’t know what came over me, but I couldn’t move, my legs couldn’t move, I tried walking and my legs wouldn’t lift me, I’d crawled on my belly to the phone and there were shadows in the windows, sounds in the dark, and I thought I’d be okay and I hadn’t been, I hadn’t been at all.
She held me tight, this perfect stranger, and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay, you’ll be okay. The forest gets to people sometimes. You’re not the first one to call, and won’t be the last I reckon. It’s okay.”
In any other place, she might have charged me with wasting police time, but here, where her beat was nine hundred square miles of forest, where she knew the name of every person that lived within, she wasn’t about to stand on ceremony. She drove me fifty kilometres into town, invited me into her home, made coffee, turned on the TV and said, “My kids will be home soon. You wanna stay and watch a film?”
We watched Bedknobs and Broomsticks, a lesser-known Disney romp involving con men, Nazis, soccer-obsessed lions, rabbits and magic.
“When I grow up,” said the youngest child, and I waited for her to proclaim her intention to be a witch, a knight, a soldier, “I want to own a museum.”
When the light was out and the kids asleep, I thanked the sheriff calmly, and said I didn’t know what had come over me.
“Some folk just ain’t built for living solo, I guess,” she replied. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of, if that way ain’t for you.”
In the months that followed, I travelled across North America. I met psychologists and attended conferences, studied journals and newspapers. I talked with scholars and monks, men and women who’d been held in solitary confinement for years on end.
You find the happiness you can, one said. Sometimes it’s hard, sometimes you gotta dig deep, but it’s there, the thing inside that you can be content.
I asked what happened when he’d been freed from his prison cell after seven years in isolation.
I went to the hotel and met my wife. She was crying, holding me, but I didn’t say anything. All my feelings were cold. It had been seven years since I’d last had to speak, I didn’t think I knew how.
A prisoner from a supermax in Florida, sat on the end of the hospital bed.
I’m lucid now, he said, but I been in the hospital for eleven days. They had me in administrative segregation before. That’s where they segregate you from the population, so as you can’t do no harm to another.
“Did you do harm?” I asked.
I killed a man, he replied with a shrug. He was gonna kill me.
“You sure of that?”
Sure I’m sure. I seen the way he were looking at me, like he knew I were gonna die. I had to get there first, is all.
“And why are you in the hospital now?”
Tried to strangle myself with my own bedding. This is the third time I try to kill myself, and I feel okay now, now that the doctor seen me, but I guess when they send me back I’ll try again until I get it right.
Calmly, so calmly, sat with his chin in his hands, three-time killer by twenty-two, segregated for life.
I used to dream when I were in solitary, he explains, staring through his hands. Now I don’t dream so much. I’m just waiting.
“Waiting for what?”
Dunno. Just waiting.
I do not fear loneliness — not any more.
Discipline.
I am the queen of internet dating; I am a one-click wonder. People forget me, but my digital profile remains, enshrined in binary code, remembered by the internet, so much more reliable than the human mind. The web is designed for the short-term; see something you like? Bookmark it. Like what you see, right now? Call me. I’m right here; I’m waiting.
“You don’t look anything like your profile picture!” people exclaim when I introduce myself to them at our pre-arranged meeting.