Episode 08 - Turning Left

I told you last time where I write these. A moulded plastic chair, a watched board, a man in a room he has spent a frightening proportion of his life in. What I did not tell you is how he is able to sit there at all.

There is an answer. It is not courage.

Go back a long way, to the first time I left Europe. I had done the short hops by then, the two-hour indignities, the flights a man can be quietly terrified on and still be home for supper. Then came the first long one. South Asia, a night in the air, a number of consecutive hours aloft that I could not imagine surviving in sequence.

I had spent the whole of that morning constructing reasons not to go, and they were good reasons. There was another way to do it. Someone else could go. The thing could be done from London (or Sarajevo where I was then). The first flight was bearable. One hour to Munich.  Then came the long flight.  I got as far as the gate with the reasons still assembled and ready to deploy, and I want to record honestly that there was a version of that day in which I turned round and went home, and I was close enough to it to taste it.

I boarded anyway. That is the only brave act in this story and it lasted about eleven seconds.

Because I came through the door and turned right, as I had turned right my entire life, and set off down the aisle towards the part of the airplane where I belonged. And a stewardess took my boarding pass, and looked at it, and then looked at me with the particular charity reserved for the obviously out of their depth, and said, “No, sir. You’re turning left.”

I have thought about that sentence for the whole of my adult life.

What happened next was not dignified. I was shown to a seat roughly the size of my first flat. Champagne arrived before the doors were shut, which struck me then, and strikes me now, as an act of extraordinary optimism about the evening ahead. A menu was delivered. A printed menu, as though dinner were a decision I was being invited to make rather than a sentence being passed on me. And somewhere between the champagne and the menu, the thing that had owned me since breakfast simply left. Not managed. Not endured. Gone, at speed, like water out of a bath.

I would like to tell you that I discovered something about myself that night. What I discovered was something about upholstery.

Let us be clear about what had and had not changed. It was the same airplane. The same weather waited for it, the same physics governed it, the same engines were bolted to the same, although slightly longer, wings. Had it gone into the sea it would have taken the left with the right, and the champagne with it. Nothing about my actual position had improved by so much as a foot. The only intervening variable was a curtain. Three feet of fabric, drawn across an aisle, and behind it a man who ninety seconds earlier had been rehearsing his own death was now studying a wine list.

There is a story, told about the old liners running out to India, that the seasoned passenger booked port side out and starboard side home to keep his cabin out of the worst of the sun, and that the initials of the arrangement gave us the word posh. Every etymologist of any standing says this is nonsense. There is no ticket, no manifest, no scrap of evidence for it anywhere. It is a folk tale that attached itself to a word because people liked the shape of it. I have known perfectly well that it is false for the better part of thirty years and I have never once stopped telling it, and I have finally worked out why. It says the thing I want said. On the old routes east, which way you faced was who you were.

I have made a living out of taking other people’s comfortable stories apart. I can spot an unevidenced assertion at forty paces and I have built a career on declining to let one pass. And I have carried this one around like a lucky coin, because it flatters the only cure I have ever found.

I know what I bought that night, and it was not safety. Safety was never on sale. What I bought was a story good enough to think about instead. That is all the front of an airplane is. It is a room designed so completely for your comfort that it never occurs to you to look out of the window, and the great secret of it is not the champagne or the flat bed or the warm nuts. It is that nobody in it is thinking about the sky.

My wife, who has observed this entire apparatus at close range for twenty-seven years, puts it more economically. Somewhere over the Gulf, without opening her eyes, she said, “You’re not less frightened. You’re just more comfortable.” She then went back to sleep, having done in eleven words what four therapists have failed to do at length.

She is right, of course, and I am not going to pretend the arrangement is admirable. But I will tell you what it did. It made a traveller out of a man who was, on the evidence of that morning, about ninety seconds from never leaving the continent. Everything since has run through that door. The hundred flights a year. The cities I could not place on a map. The whole shape of a working life that only functions if the man at the centre of it can be relied upon to get on the airplane. All of it rests on a stewardess, a partition, and a glass of something cold.

I have never looked back. I should be honest and say I have never really gone back either. I turn left now, most of the time, and on the handful of occasions when circumstances have obliged me to turn right, I have found the old thing sitting patiently in the seat, exactly as I left it, not aged a day, delighted to see me. It was never cured. It was only outbid.

So that is the confession that completes the set. You have had the heights and the bridges and the sound of a stranger eating. Here, finally, is the remedy, and it is not a virtue, or a technique, or a hard-won peace. It is a curtain, and a man on the expensive side of it, telling himself a story that isn’t true about a direction that doesn’t matter, at thirty-eight thousand feet, entirely calm.

They’re boarding. You know by now which way I go. More from the next one.