Being For The Benefit Of Mr Kite! (25 page)

'Go on,' she said, 'out with it.'

'It's fine.'

'I'll go and sit in economy.'

'No, you won't.'

'What were you going to say?'

I stared at the seat in front, silent for a moment, but inevitably I was going to do her bidding.

'I was thinking that firstly it was odd for some bloke to ask you to join him so that you can continue having an affair, but then you take someone along with you.'

'Reasonable,' she said. 'And second?'

'That... maybe this is just me, but it seems beneath you. That's all. You're this beautiful, funny, sexy woman. You could have anything, do anything. Yet you're running after some married guy who's probably not half the actor you are. What are you doing?'

'Well, for a kick-off I'm sitting next to another married guy who's not half the actor that I am.'

I glanced at her, waiting for the smile. This time there was no smile.

'I'm not the girl you think I am,' she said. 'Or, you know, no one else sees me the way you do. You're still hanging on to some old infatuation, and two wonderful days a long time ago.'

'You were acting like it was just last week,' I said defensively.

'Because I was embarrassed. It was seventeen years ago. I walked out on you and never called, and you, like an old obedient hound, can't even bring yourself to be annoyed at me for it. And what have I done in those seventeen years?
Spooks
?
Casualty
? I look like this and I still can't make a decent career out of it.'

She paused, but she wasn't finished. It was a letting-the-words-sink-in pause.

'To be honest, I don't have something else in two weeks. I have no other definite work, just a series of possibles and let's meet over coffees and a couple of auditions where I'll be up against three hundred other women, most of whom will be younger than me and considered to be on their way up. So what's my latest offer? A few weeks staying in a nice hotel, free to explore the coffee houses of the city and anything else I can find, and all I have to do is be available to be fucked every now and again. Really, if I was better than that I wouldn't be on the damned plane.'

She gave me another glance then lowered her eyes. A cabin steward appeared with the bottle of white. Jones accepted another glass; I refused. Once again she had demonstrated the dominion she held over me. I looked at her for a moment, then stared at the rear of the seat in front. Her voice had been quiet, almost conversational in tone, but her words so forceful that there was no argument to be had. And what would I have sounded like, how pathetic, had I tried telling her how talented she was?

Had I really thought she was great in
Spooks
, or had it just been wonderful to see her on television? It had been a small, uninspiring part, could have been played by anyone.

'So, I'm here as your bit on the side?' I said, my tone and intention nothing like as small and petty and bitter as the words might have implied. 'Am I staying in your room?'

She held my gaze for a while, and eventually she smiled ruefully, sympathetically, and once again she squeezed my hand.

'You need to find your own way,' she said. 'You're looking for the Jigsaw Man, and I can't help you. But I don't think he was in Warsaw, so there was no point in you being there. Maybe you can get your own room in the same hotel, and we'll see each other. Who knows? I thought perhaps we'd have some fun and hang out in chic bars, and maybe you'd get carried away and get over your guilt and we could fuck. But, you know, maybe those two days seventeen years ago was it for us. Maybe you were right to turn me down. Hey, we'll always have Glasgow.'

Her words cut right through me. I had myself to blame, of course. I was the idiot who had forced the conversation. What had I been expecting her to say? That she was taking me to Seattle because she loved me? That this was us running away together, the start of a long, beautiful relationship?

All I wanted was five minutes. To turn back the clock five minutes. I'd been given six months before, why not five minutes? How would I do that? Go to the bathroom, emerge some time later, and we'd be back where we started, not having said anything since the plane took off?

Time doesn't work like that. But how does it work? No one knows. Even physicists don't know. Even if they think they know, how was anyone going to explain me turning up on Nairn beach the previous summer?

But I wasn't thinking about Nairn beach, or Brin or Baggins, or my quest for the Jigsaw Man. All I had was an empty feeling in my guts, like some part of me had been sucked out. There was a reason for all those airhead, flighty conversations with Jones. It was truth avoidance, because the truth was so insignificant. We weren't some great and tragic romantic couple. There was no Cathy and Heathcliffe, Romeo and Juliet story to be written. God, we weren't even Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan in some '90s romcom.

I wanted to retrieve the conversation, I wanted to force the mood back in time, back to the frivolous air of inconsequentiality with which we had departed Warsaw in the early morning. Nothing had mattered. If there had been a reason to think, well, we hadn't been thinking about it.

But there was nothing to say. Words came and went in my head, a hundred conversations. They all sounded so sad. I had been crushed so many times by Jones, but never before because of anything she'd said. This time the weight came from her words and was so much greater as a result.

The plane continued its smooth passage across the Atlantic and down across Canada. Neither of us spoke for the remainder of the journey.

*

W
e sat in a taxi together. Piotr was booked in to the Hilton for two weeks. The bulk of the crew were staying at a small hotel out of town, close to the shoot. Piotr, however, being the star had managed to get himself detached. Presumably it meant he'd have to get up a little earlier in the morning, but also one could presume that he had a car and driver waiting to whisk him away as soon as he appeared each day.

If I'd thought about it, it would have seemed peculiar that they were using American woods to double for Russian woods, especially as they'd already been filming in Poland. One would have thought that Russian woods would have been cheaper. As it was, I didn't think about it.

I had no idea whether Piotr would be keeping Jones in his room with him. I presumed not. He was more likely to be personally paying for another room, where he would keep his mistress. Sunk in my depression, I wanted to walk away from her the second we got through immigration, but we stuck together through the ninety-minute queue at passport control, and then we walked to the taxi rank and I automatically got into the same taxi to take me to the same hotel.

Without really thinking about it, my intention was to pitch up at the hotel, wave my agency card around and book myself into the best room available. And what then? Sit around the hotel bars and restaurants and lobby hoping that Jones would walk by?

Sitting in the taxi, for the first time since leaving Warsaw, I thought of Agent Crosskill and his female buddy. Were they following me to Seattle? Perhaps they were behind me, in economy, resentful of my bottomless pit of a credit card. Presumably they wouldn't leave me to sit around the hotel for too long. They had found me in Warsaw easily enough, they would find me in Seattle.

The taxi stopped outside the hotel, early afternoon. Defying all convention of the Pacific north-west, the sun was shining, the sky a picture-perfect blue. As we pulled up, Jones glanced at me, a look that said,
you're the one living the government gravy train dream, you can pay for the taxi
, and hopped out, her bag slung over her shoulder.

Even then I imagined that she'd wait for me, or at least we would stand next to each other at reception, and finally the ice would be re-broken.

I paid the driver, took some small pleasure in tipping him twice the original taxi fare at the agency's expense, then followed Jones in through the grey-edged glass doors, my backpack hanging off one shoulder, and stood in the lobby of the hotel.

And there she was, already having met her beau. Piotr, the famous actor, the Pole about to make it big in Hollywood. There was no one else around from the film crew, and I wondered if he'd managed to swing the afternoon off so that he could be waiting for her. They'd been filming in Warsaw just two days previously, so perhaps they were still setting up.

They were not obviously flirting with each other or even just hugging each other. He was wearing a shirt and tie, an expensive suit, and although I wouldn't have thought from the way she'd travelled that Jones was dressed for a business meeting, seeing her next to him, suddenly she looked as though she had come for some executive consultation, and that they were standing there discussing their strategy for the forthcoming board meeting being held in a conference room on the top floor.

He touched her lightly, almost formally on the arm, and then headed towards the elevator, Jones a pace behind. I watched them, waiting to catch her eye as she looked, apologetically, over her shoulder.

She never looked. They waited briefly for the elevator. They got in. She did not turn. The doors closed.

Jones was gone.

The lobby was busy, a real bustle. Tourists, businessmen, people meeting for lunch. Any reason you can think for people to be in a hotel lobby or to meet in a hotel, they were there. I did not stand out, as I stood in utter dejection, my insides having been drawn out and sprayed around for all to walk upon.

The plane had been bad. The conversation devastating. Yet still I had imagined that there would be some salvation at the other end. That we would arrive in Seattle in early afternoon, Piotr would be working, and that Jones and I would have some time together. The conversation and the crippling feeling of loss and hurt could be assuaged.

And then she'd gone, whisked off without a word, without a glance. Not even
Goodbye, Jones
, because she hadn't been interested enough to hear the words.

No one noticed. The hotel lobby bustled around me. Perhaps I was so empty, so distraught and strung out, that I was invisible. They were looking through me. Walking through me.

I don't know how long I stood there. No one bumped into me, no one spoke to me. Perhaps I wasn't there. I looked at reception the entire time. Was that where I was headed? Reception? 'Can I have a room, please? I'm going to sleep there, but actually what I'm intending to do is sit around the lobby like some wretched lost puppy.'

Waiting for Jones. Was that to be the next stage of my life? Two weeks, she'd said. Two weeks waiting for Jones.

Eventually I walked back outside through the revolving doors. My right hand gripped my bag. The sky was still the most incredible blue.

––––––––

I
walked for a while, but my heart wasn't in walking. I passed a lot of coffee shops, and eventually it began to sink in. I was in Seattle, the place where the great western coffee boom had begun. Starbucks. Others might dispute it – there's no denying, of course, that Peet's Coffee & Tea came first – but the great explosion that had spread around the western world, turning us all into coffee junkies, had really kicked off from here.

I went into a Starbucks, paused to take in my surroundings, then looked up at the menu board.

Much of it looked familiar, but there were some products that we didn't sell in our branch. Maybe we did now. It'd been a while since I'd been there. There were always new products coming and going; I was bound to have missed something.

I ordered a caramel ribbon crunch Frappuccino. Iced coffee made with caramel syrup, drizzled with caramel sauce, topped with whipped cream, caramel and crunchy caramel sugar. When it was placed on the counter I could feel my heart bleeding just looking at it, and I thought that I ought just to have asked for as plain a white coffee as they could bring themselves to serve me.

On the plus side, at least for a moment I hadn't been thinking about Jones, and although the thoughts quickly returned, it was a start. After seventeen years, there was a tiny voice in the wilderness inside my faraway head telling me it was time to move on, move on from Jones, currently in bed with Piotr, the Polish movie star.

I also ordered an apple and a cinnamon muffin, sat in a seat near the window and looked out at the beautiful day. I began to notice that everyone was dressed for spring. I tentatively drank some of the Frappuccino, took a small spoonful of the cream from the top. No wonder people are fat, I thought, then guiltily looked around the café to see if anyone had read my thoughts. But I was no Jigsaw Man, I was just a normal guy, and no one was paying me any attention.

I finished the muffin and then the apple. Customers came and went. This Starbucks followed exactly the same model as the coffee shop I ran at home. I could have been in Bristol. Of course, that's the point, the same with Hilton Hotels and Hertz Car Rental. Wherever you go in this homogenised world, you'll feel at home.

The sky turned a slightly darker shade of blue. My iced coffee began to heat up, and with that the sweetness became more and more evident. I went to the counter and ordered some Pike Place Roast, got a glass of water and returned to my seat.

Surely Jones and Piotr would be finished by now. Could I go back there? I had to spend the night somewhere. But going back risked the possibility of seeing them walk together through the lobby, or sitting at dinner holding hands, or worse, talking intimately. Or laughing. Laughing would be worst of all. What if Piotr made her laugh? How tragic. I didn't make her laugh. Never had done. Yes, she smiled all the time, but she always smiled at me, humouring me. I didn't know how to make her laugh. Perhaps Piotr did.

Perhaps Piotr thought the same things I did.

'Is everything all right for you today?'

I looked up at the waitress who was standing over my table. I glanced quickly round the café and realised that it had quietened down a lot since I'd entered. She must have had time to spare, time to spread a benevolent, helpful word around the joint.