Metro Winds (22 page)

He kept travelling, looking not for the door to summer, but for a gateway to somewhere or something that would stop him feeling like a stranger in his own life.

He pictured the scene: a cat stalking from door to door, tail in the air as its master turns one doorknob and then another. It would be a nice opening device for a movie without a linear structure. He imagined trying to pitch his airport movie to the money men and grimaced. Why were they always money men? Was it that women did not invest in movies? Maybe that was why the movie world was so full of men as boys. Was he a man or a boy, he wondered? Sometimes he felt as if he was some other category altogether.

Certainly he had not been man enough for his ex-wife, Stephanie. He sighed and looked at his watch without taking in the numbers. Then, as he habitually did, he thought about that as directions in a script.

Man checks time.

I am losing the plot, he thought.

What plot is that? he enquired of himself drily.

Man mutters to self, then smiles.

If life were a movie, his would be one of those European movies where everything took too long and even the smallest event was invested with a mysterious meaning that never divulged itself. Most people in the New World did not ‘get' European movies because they saw them as metaphor. They could not imagine a level of alienation from other people so profound that almost no words or interaction were necessary or indeed possible. The first time he travelled to Europe, he had discovered that a lot of the things he regarded as metaphor were no more than simple descriptions of an unfamiliar reality. Like the way people in Russian novels lived, several different generations crammed into a two-room apartment with bookshelves and thin dividers set up to create an illusion of privacy. He had thought that a metaphor for emotional oppression, only to find that it was just how it had been behind the Iron Curtain during communism, or communism disguised as socialism, or state capitalism disguised as socialism. Privacy and space had been as unreachable as freedom.

His Czech friend Ivana had said languidly that in those times, entire sagas evolved around the attempt to get an apartment. People schemed and planned and paid bribes so they could leave home, where their grandparents, parents and siblings still lived together, sometimes even their in-laws. She herself had slept with the brother of a dead woman in order to get him to sublet his sister's squalid bedsit. It had been illegal, of course, in a place where, for a long time, almost everything anyone could want had been illegal. Her occupation of the apartment had lasted a year before the man had evicted her for fear of being reported. And that had been in the aftermath of the fall of communism. After the aftermath.

The thing was that people like Ivana had a reason for feeling disconnected from the people around them. But he had never been poor, or politically oppressed, or even in much physical discomfort. He had never experienced the extremes of fear or anger or sorrow. His childhood had been pleasant, and when his parents died he had felt sad rather than grief-stricken, before burying them and going on to live a pleasant, even rather lucky life. He had no excuse for feeling alienated.

He glanced around the airport, feeling weary and slightly dehydrated. But not suicidal. Not over an apartment or an airport or because of being left by his wife. Not even because he was living a life in which he had taken hundreds of trips without ever feeling he had arrived. Once, years ago, he had told a guy at a party that he had never contemplated committing suicide. The guy had looked at him incredulously. How could anyone see the state of the world and not feel like killing themselves? he asked. Obviously the man thought him shallow, and Case had felt disturbed in some way he could not articulate, but when he told the story to Ivana, she laughed uproariously.

‘Petr is Hungarian! What can you expect? Hungarian is not a language in which to conduct normal conversations. It is a language only for suicide and poetry.'

Case had been fascinated by the idea of a language so tortured it could express only suicidal or poetic thoughts. He saw it as a poetic notion, until he overheard someone at a rap party say that the suicide rate among Hungarians was the fifth-highest in the world. That was the thing he liked about parties. The way you heard or misheard intriguing scraps. The way certain words got stuck in your head; this piquant phrase or that evocative awkwardness. He loved conversation – not taking part in it but witnessing it. Parties were perfect for that, because everyone wanted to talk and no one listened. He could be a stranger among them, listening and taking mental notes, and no one cared. He saw himself as a natural and instinctive witness of the world, which was perhaps why he'd been so troubled by the comment that a person who truly saw the world would be suicidal. Because Case felt like he saw far more than people who were deeply engaged in life. It was only that he did not feel suicide to be the natural or necessary consequence of his observations.

He thought of his ex-wife's disgust at his passivity, and found himself looking at his watch. He did not want to know the time; it was a pose he often struck in an airport. It's like I am performing for an unseen audience, he thought. He often had the feeling his life was some sort of performance. It even worked as a metaphor. You came out of the darkness of the womb into the limelight, and so began the performance that was life, which invariably ended with the curtain falling. Curtains. The only bit that really bothered him was the idea of coming to the end of the performance, without ever knowing what it was for. Maybe that was why he had so much trouble with endings in scripts. They felt contrived, because life did not come with full stops. Everything bled into everything else.

His problem with endings was why he had never made it to the big time, despite all the young playwright prizes and grants and the preliminary excitement of studios. He was known for being a very good scriptwriter who had trouble ending his scripts, to the frustration of his agent. Studios that took him on these days knew they would have to wait and wait and maybe call in another writer to finish his script or rewrite the end. The fact that he did not object to someone putting the tail on his script was why he was still working. The truth was that he was content for someone else to finish his stories.

‘So what do you want, Case?' one of his tutors at the Binger had asked irritably a few months before in a coffee shop in Amsterdam, halfway through a three-month grant stay where he had been trying yet again to resolve the end of a script. ‘You want to just go on and on and what? Bore the audience to death?' One woman in a session had said outright that maybe his inability to finish – to close – was tied up with his unresolved sexuality. He grimaced at the obvious circumlocution for ‘his repressed homosexuality'. Well, it was Amsterdam where window-peeping was a tourist industry and you ordered grass off a menu after discussing it with the waiter. There had been a lot of talk about performance as exhibitionism and audience voyeurism. He had kept silent because, for him, any audience that would see the movie arising from his script was irrelevant. He did not think about other people when he wrote. For him writing was an articulation of his observations, and an attempt to lay them out in a way that would make some sense of the world. The reason he had never produced a play that satisfied him, despite the credits to his name, might be the same reason he had never found an ending that felt right.

There was an announcement and he freeze-framed to listen, but could not tell whether the disembodied announcement was in English or Greek or Esperanto, much less whether the speaker was male or female. Fortunately, he could see the departure boards from where he was sitting, and make out the destinations and gate numbers if he squinted. He was searching for the Aegean Airlines flight when a tall woman stopped in front of him, blocking his view.

She was wearing a perfectly fitted, perfectly pressed, parchment-coloured sleeveless suit and a panama hat of the sort that he associated with
Casablanca
, tilted very slightly over one eye. Her long, thin, bare arms hung loosely by her side, the slender fingers slightly furled. She wore no varnish on her short, square-cut nails, and she was carrying nothing. That struck him as unusual, because you never saw a woman without a bag of some kind, especially now bags were as big a status symbol as cars, some of them costing almost as much. The fabric of the woman's suit was so fine and smooth you could tell she did not have so much as a coin in a pocket. Was it possible she was carrying no more than her boarding pass and passport? She didn't even have a book. Could anyone travel that light?

He was interested in how, by simply standing so long with her back to him, she was building dramatic tension in him. It was not so much that he felt curiosity about her face, but the relaxed fluidity of her waiting roused his interest, for she would not stand so long merely to read something that was already there. Like him, she must be waiting for her gate number to be announced. But people did not normally wait without any sign of impatience. She did not fidget or adjust her clothes or shift her weight from one slender, booted foot to the other, nor did she look away from the board. Case had never seen anyone wait so compellingly. How could anyone surrender with such grace to the necessity of waiting?

Woman in perfectly white silk suit and panama hat stands relaxed
with her back to the camera as she studies departure boards. Camera watches her from point of view of man seated. She stands
unmoving.

Adequate lines, but how to recast them so that they would express the profound patience evoked by her stillness? Directions should evoke mood without wasting a word in explaining it. No adjectives. A film script like
Taxi Driver
was the perfect example of dynamic poetry – how a violent, dark, gritty movie could be expressed so lyrically as a script! He had no desire to write that sort of film, but he would have liked his scripts to have the spare beauty that arose from real precision.

Of course, most film moguls and agents would not even notice beauty in a script. Spectacular action and an accelerated plot were the qualities that sold a movie into the cinema chains. It was all about formula and box-office take during the first week. That's why the films being churned out were so bad. They were made to make money and that was the whole reason for their existence. No one making the movie pretended anything else. The incredible thing was that people kept going to see them.

He sighed, realising he was on the verge of an irritable inner diatribe of the sort that had irked him in his father when he was young. He had seen that edgy, impatient crabbiness settle into the lines in the faces of older people. It seemed to him that intolerance, rigidity and irritability were all signs of decay, and when he noticed the tendency in himself, first with wry amusement and then with distaste, he had vowed to guard against such rants because, aside from being a surrender to ageing, they formed a metaphorical cataract that clouded your vision. He had the feeling that ageing was not a matter of getting old physically, so much as accepting the habits of ageing.

‘Maybe if we could be distracted from going through the motions of ageing we'd be immortal,' he muttered aloud.

The woman in the pale silk turned and looked at him.

Her eyes were pale blue diamonds and her hair was black and blunt-cut to jaw length with sharp wings that brushed her cheeks. Were there such things as blue diamonds, he wondered dazedly, unable to turn his eyes politely away. Common sense told him that she was too far away to have heard his soft words. But why would she look at him like that if she had not heard him? And even if she had heard, what had he said that had so caught her attention? Or was it merely that he had spoken in English or with an Australian accent? She was looking at him with an expression that might, in a face that lacked the strange blandness of extreme beauty, have been surprise. Her stare had the same quality of intensity as her waiting. That polar gaze was so compellingly focused that it was as if she reached across the distance separating them and touched one finger to his lips. Yet there was no intimacy in her look. She might have been studying a fascinating bug under a microscope.

She turned and walked away without haste, but she was gone from his sight in an instant. It was as if several frames had been cut from a reel of film. One minute she was walking away from him – gliding away, his mind insisted – then she was gone.

People do not vanish, he told himself, groping for balance, for her glance had been so heavy that its withdrawal had made him feel less substantial. He licked his lips and found them dry. You are half out of your head from lack of sleep, he told himself sternly. He was. He had flown non-stop from Australia to Athens, and right now it was about two in the afternoon in his head, even though it was only five in the morning in Greece. He would have got a later flight except there were only two airlines that went to Santorini, and the Olympic Airlines flight was in the evening, which would have meant hanging around all day. So he had opted for the Aegean flight, which had meant waiting four hours in transit.

He got up, slung his bag over his shoulder and strolled across to the duty-free shop, letting his eyes run over the displays: gleaming bottles of Chanel, of Glenfiddich whisky with black and gold labels, of dark red French wines, and then the stuffed children's toys, chocolates, books and more books – three for the price of two, two for the price of one. There were long lines of bestsellers from number ten to number one, with a disproportionate number about vampires. Ostensibly he was passing time but in fact he was looking for the woman. He wanted to see her again. Or, to be more exact, he wanted to feel the weight of her gaze. There was something about how it had made him feel that he needed to experience once more, in order to understand it. It was absurd, but the desire to find her kept pulsing though his mind so that even when his legs were tired he could not bring himself to sit down.