The Driver's Seat Read online

  ‘Look, Miss,’ the clerk says, pulling himself straight and stamping her ticket, ‘you’re holding up the people behind you. We’re busy.’

  Lise turns away from the bewildered-looking couple to face the clerk as he pushes her ticket and boarding card towards her. ‘Boarding card,’ says the clerk. ‘Your flight will be called in twenty-five minutes’ time. Next please.’

  Lise grabs the papers and moves away as if thinking only of the next formality of travel. She puts the ticket in her bag, takes out her passport, slips the boarding card inside it, and makes straight towards the passport boxes. And it is almost as if, satisfied that she has successfully registered the fact of her presence at the airport among the July thousands there, she has fulfilled a small item of a greater purpose. She goes to the emigration official and joins the queue and submits her passport. And now, having received her passport back in her hand, she is pushing through the gate into the departure lounge. She walks to the far end, then turns and walks back. She is neither good-looking nor bad-looking. Her lips are slightly parted. She stops to look at the departures chart, then walks on. The people around her are mostly too occupied with their purchases and their flight-numbers to notice her, but some of those who sit beside their hand-luggage and children on the leather seats waiting for their flights to be called look at her as she walks past, noting without comment the lurid colours of her coat, red and white stripes, hanging loose over her dress, yellow-topped, with its skirt of orange, purple and blue. They look, as she passes, as they look also at those girls whose skirts are specially short, or those men whose tight-fitting shirts are patterned with flowers or are transparent. Lise is conspicuous among them only in the particular mixture of her colours, contrasting with the fact that her hem-line has been for some years an old-fashioned length, reaching just below her knees, as do the mild dresses of many other, but dingy, women travellers who teem in the departure lounge. Lise puts her passport into her hand-bag, and holds her boarding card.

  She stops at the bookstall, looks at her watch and starts looking at the paperback stands. A white-haired, tall woman who has been looking through the hardback books piled up on a table, turns from them and, pointing to the paperbacks, says to Lise in English, ‘Is there anything there predominantly pink or green or beige?’

  ‘Excuse me?’ says Lise politely, in a foreignly accented English, ‘what is that you’re looking for?’

  ‘Oh,’ the woman says, ‘I thought you were American.’

  ‘No, but I can speak four languages enough to make myself understood.’

  ‘I’m from Johannesburg,’ says the woman, ‘and I have this house in Jo’burg and another at Sea Point on the Cape. Then my son, he’s a lawyer, he has a flat in Jo’burg. In all our places we have spare bedrooms, that makes two green, two pink, three beige, and I’m trying to pick up books to match. I don’t see any with just those pastel tints.’

  ‘You want English books,’ Lise says. ‘I think you find English books on the front of the shop over there.’

  ‘Well, I looked there and I don’t find my shades. Aren’t these English books here?’

  Lise says ‘No. In any case they’re all very bright-coloured.’ She smiles then, and with her lips apart starts to look swiftly through the paperbacks. She picks out one with bright green lettering on a white background with the author’s name printed to look like blue lightning streaks. In the middle of the cover are depicted a brown boy and girl wearing only garlands of sunflowers. Lise pays for it, while the white-haired woman says, ‘Those colours are too bright for me. I don’t see anything.’

  Lise is holding the book up against her coat, giggling merrily, and looking up to the woman as if to see if her purchase is admired.

  ‘You going on holiday?’ the woman says.

  ‘Yes. My first after three years.

  ‘You travel much?’

  ‘No. There is so little money. But I’m going to the South now. I went before, three years ago.

  ‘Well, I hope you have a good time. A very good time. You look very gay.

  The woman has large breasts, she is clothed in a pink summer coat and dress. She smiles and is amiable in this transient intimacy with Lise, and not even sensing in the least that very soon, after a day and a half of hesitancy, and after a long midnight call to her son, the lawyer in Johannesburg, who advises her against the action, she nevertheless will come forward and repeat all she remembers and all she does not remember, and all the details she imagines to be true and those that are true, in her conversation with Lise when she sees in the papers that the police are trying to trace who Lise is, and whom, if anyone, she met on her trip and what she had said. ‘Very gay,’ says this woman to Lise, indulgently, smiling all over Lise’s vivid clothes.

  ‘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 th
e 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.

  Lise and her companion have watched the performance. Lise smiles bitterly.

  The dark man by her side says, ‘What’s wrong with him?’

  ‘He didn’t like us,’ Lise says.

  ‘What did we do to him?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. He must be crazy. He must be nutty.’

  The plane now comes to its brief halt before revving up for the takeoff run. The engines roar and the plane is off, is rising and away. Lise says to her neighbour, ‘I wonder who he is?’

  ‘Some kind of a nut,’ says the man. ‘But it’s all the better for us, we can get acquainted.’ His stringy hand takes hers; he holds it tightly. ‘I’m Bill,’ he says. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Lise.’ She lets him grip her hand as if she hardly knows that he is holding it. She stretches her neck to see above the heads of the people in front, and says, ‘He’s sitting there reading the paper as if nothing had happened.’

  The stewardess is handing out copies of newspapers. A steward who has followed her up the aisle stops at the seat where the dark-suited man has settled and is now tranquilly scanning the front page of his newspaper. The steward inquires if he is all right now, sir?

  The man looks up with an embarrassed smile and shyly apologizes.

  ‘Yes, fine. I’m sorry …’

  ‘Was there anything the matter, sir?’

  ‘No, really. Please. I’m fine here, thanks. Sorry … it was nothing, nothing.’

  The steward goes away with his eyebrows mildly raised in resignation at the chance eccentricity of a passenger. The plane purrs forward. The no-smoking lights go out and the loudspeaker confirms that the passengers may now unfasten their seat-belts and smoke.

  Lise unfastens hers and moves to the vacated window seat.

  ‘I knew,’ she says. ‘In a way I knew there was something wrong with him.’

  Bill moves to sit next to her in the middle seat and says, ‘Nothing wrong with him at all. Just a fit of puritanism. He was unconsciously jealous when he saw we’d hit it off together, and he made out he was outraged as if we’d been doing something indecent. Forget him; he’s probably a clerk in an insurance brokers’ from the looks of him. Nasty little bureaucrat. Limited. He wasn’t your type.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Lise says immediately as if responding only to Bill’s use of the past tense, and, as if defying it by a counter-demonstration to the effect that the man continues to exist in the present, she half-stands to catch sight of the stranger’s head, eight rows forward in a middle seat, at the other side of the aisle, now bent quietly over his reading.

  ‘Sit down,’ Bill says. ‘You don’t want anything to do with that type. He was frightened of your psychedelic clothes. Terrified.’

  ‘Do you think so?’

  ‘Yes. But I’m not.’

  The stewardesses advance up the aisle bearing trays of food which they start to place before the passengers. Lise and Bill pull down the table in front of their seats to receive their portions. It is a midmorning compromise snack composed of salami on lettuce, two green olives, a rolled-up piece of boiled ham containing a filling of potato salad and a small pickled something, all laid upon a slice of bread. There is also a round cake, swirled with white and chocolate cream, and a corner of silver-wrapped processed cheese with biscuits wrapped in cellophane. An empty plastic coffee cup
stands by on each of their trays.

  Lise takes from her tray the transparent plastic envelope which contains the sterilized knife, fork and spoon necessary for the meal. She feels the blade of the knife. She presses two of her fingers against the prongs of her fork. ‘Not very sharp,’ she says.

  ‘Who needs them, anyway?’ says Bill. ‘This is awful food.’

  ‘Oh, it looks all right. I’m hungry. I only had a cup of coffee for my breakfast. There wasn’t time.’

  ‘You can eat mine too,’ says Bill. ‘I stick as far as possible to a very sensible diet. This stuff is poison, full of toxics and chemicals. It’s far too Yin.’

  ‘I know,’ said Lise. ‘But considering it’s a snack on a plane —’

  ‘You know what Yin is?’ he says.

  She says, ‘Well, sort of …’in a vaguely embarrassed way, ‘but it’s only a snack, isn’t it?’

  ‘You understand what Yin is?’

  ‘Well, something sort of like this — all bitty.’

  ‘No, Lise,’ he says.

  ‘Well it’s a kind of slang, isn’t it? You say a thing’s a bit too yin …’; plainly she is groping.

  ‘Yin,’ says Bill, ‘is the opposite of Yang.’

  She giggles and, half-rising, starts searching with her eyes for the man who is still on her mind.

  ‘This is serious,’ Bill says, pulling her roughly back into her seat. She laughs and begins to eat.