“The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, in so far as it stands ready against the accidental and the unforeseen, and is not apt to fall”
Marcus Aurelius Antoninus (121 – 180)
“Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash”
Louis Aragon (1897 – 1982)
You’ve been in an airport of course. I was in one myself recently, crouching on the edge of a padded seat in the main lounge, sipping their overpriced coffee as I tinkered on my laptop and watched my fellow travellers surge past.
Airports are interesting, futuristic places, with a bright touch of other world glamour to them. I still find them so, even after many a boring flight. With their high ceilings and thronging devotees, the endless halls and concourses form almost temples to the polished glory of the modern age, greater and harder than the amiable, soft-fleshed creatures that arrive to worship within them.
A forest of concrete and tarmac usually guards these palaces, bewildering the pilgrims who arrive by coach and car to struggle with the maze of roads, ramps and walkways, through, over, around and under the tangle until they reach their numbered terminals. As before they navigate with one anxious eye to the vigilant traffic police, and another to their burden of luggage and kids that must be shepherded safely through the outer melee of cars and people, and into the great spacious halls. There a rank of waiting desks displays their carrier’s name, and at that point their tension begins to ease, as now it is only a matter of time to kill and directions to obey, for they have seized the great rope of commerce that will haul them surely to their destination.
For them this is not an everyday event, but neither is it new, and they know that all paths have long been prepared for them, and that a thousand unseen little precautions will ensure their safety and comfort. As their mildly anxious eyes scan the cold emptiness of space and concrete they see that all is ordered and arranged, as last time and the time before that, and they proceed through the layers of security, cheerful now, and unafraid, guided by polite barriers of rope and chrome to the final departure lounge. There they can with much confidence await that last direction to pass down one of those ingenious tubes, and encouraged by the practiced smiles of those pretty and oh so competent air hostesses, board some massive jumbo for Rome, or Manila, New York or Tokyo. Whilst they await that final call they may visit the many chapels within this temple: the burger stands, the bars, the newsagents and souvenir shops, and most essential, the off duty store with its bright display of perfumes and spirits, wines and tobacco. Like the rest of the eager horde, I sometimes worship there, but cautiously, for too much enthusiasm with the plastic can run up an unholy bill.
The types recur: doubtless they are all individuals, all with their own lives, yet all are cut from one of the range of patterns. In one queue an energetic Chinese man in a suit still pursues his affairs over his mobile ‘phone, even within minutes of a five-thousand mile journey, and in another a denim clad men of thirty something exchanges a few pleasantries with a fellow-traveller, who he will never meet again, whilst his bottle-blonde wife at his side clutches the hand of a small child, who stares about him with infant curiosity; his older sister is lost in the tiny world of a hand-held game, oblivious to the ponderous details of the journey, and about their knees, like the circled wagons of Indian fearing pioneers, their armoury of suitcases, stuffed with ammunition to attack the promised delights of Spain or Greece.
As they shuffle inwards, others surge out, laughing, noisy, and re-energised: a tanned discharge of northerners returning from The Dominican Republic. Rum is cheap in that hot country, and the bleary expressions of that group of young men shows that they have taken full advantage: the tall one, with his hair braided for a few pounds on that far country’s beaches: he looks self conscious already; he will whip those beads out before he resumes his place at the bank counter.
Yet these airports have another, grimmer side, which sometimes they show to me in my dreams. They are touched by a fearful air of final mystery, which they share with graveyards and funeral parlours, for an airport is both a doorway and a fearful barrier. If he passes through it, the traveller will be swiftly snatched to a different place, but this place will die to him, the very thread by which he could find his way back snapped by the shock of the swift departure. On an aircraft journey, as with death, there is no time for the traveller to give a backward glance, and for the ones who remain, no slowly diminishing figure, to which extra, distant farewells can be waved. It is abrupt and final: a goodbye, a promise to ‘phone, and the traveller passes through a narrow door; we catch a brief glimpse of sober looking men in dark uniforms inspecting him keenly, then he is gone. We see him no more, neither does he see us again, nor the bustling life we shared, but from a soaring height we can guess him to watch the mottled world fall away beneath him.
But to return to this last trip, and my expensive coffee… there was a girl at the airport. Many girls of course, but this one stuck in my mind. I glanced up as she sashayed past my table, twenty-two perhaps, tall, slender, a smooth, flat midriff bared above tight pants whose dark chocolate colour enriched the ripeness of her figure. Her face was strong and confident, her dark brown hair long and straight. I gave a glance, I had a second for brief appreciation, then she was passing into the distance, wending her way between the tables with an easy sway of her hips, leaving a trail of final satisfaction in the sight of her rounded bottom. But there was one thing, one final note adding intrigue to the girl’s charms beyond the physical. The pants that she wore, close at the hip and thigh, were flared below the knee to the ankle. There was nothing new in this, for the fashion for flares had crept back tentatively some years before, but it was the “back” that was the point. Wasn’t it somewhere in the seventies that flares went out of favour, never to return till the sun should grow cold? And here this young woman could wear them with no apprehensions, for this was nineteen-ninety nine, and my fashion conscious youth ended far before her birth.
Another girl sat a few tables away, of much the same age, but pale and angular, talking in a quiet, mousy way to an older traveller, probably her mother. There was no hint of fire in her timid glance, no eyes that challenged the world, and I pondered the difference. That passing girl: her face, her stride, her air of assurance; from what source could they spring? Possibly merely the sure knowledge of her beauty, taught to her by her mirror over the years, but perhaps also some inborn desire to be, and be of consequence. Such women are not for the timid, for if the face is to glow with presence – that near arrogance that magnifies beauty – so that a man’s head turns as the dimness of a weary day is brightened, is there not a threatened price? Can one think that such outer glow does not spring from inner fire? And will such fire always flow cool and harmless like a placid stream, and shape itself calmly to the glass to be sipped at leisure, and never scald? No. They can be dangerous, these real women. But then, so is life.
Gary Wilson, Manchester, 1999
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To clear up some confusion that people are asking me about -
The speaker is called Gary Wilson, and he is a minor character in a story which he will soon decide to tell. He is a bit serious and cynical, and he is a bit wordy, but his job is to act as a mood setter, and the mood is a bit gloomy. He is in Manchester airport, shortly before the end of 1999. The rest of the novel is told by him in the third person, and in a brisker style, and is set over the period 1951 to 1999. the characters in it are born between 1901 and 1990. Zorn, the main character of another novel that I am now working on, was born between 2020 and 2035
Gary is my narrator, and is a fictional character. He is not me.
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