DEPARTURE

Downtown Manhattan and the early alarm call sounds like a road drill.

"Arrrgh" comes the groan from deep within as you turn in bed and fart with a vengeance. Indigestion’s calling card. There’s no one there to hear you so you let it rip. Actually even if there was someone next to you, you probably wouldn’t try and silence it too much. Although that would depend on how well you knew them, but if they were sharing a bed with you then you probably knew them pretty well, so it wouldn’t matter, would it? Let them see you as you are, that sort of thing. Thinking about it, maybe you would try and hold it in, clench the buttocks politely. No one likes sharing a bed with a farter. But men fart and are proud of it where as women don’t or don’t admit to it if they do. It’s probably one of those urban myths found in the "strange but true" column snippets you might read in the Daily Whatsit. You’ve never heard a woman drop a decent one, drunk or sober, and yet at boarding school Liversidge (or was it Kenning?) could fart God Save the Queen after lights out every night. Come to think of it, he (Liversidge or Kenning) never changed his repertoire. It was always God Save the Queen followed by a good night to each member of the dormitory, a fart after their name.

"Good night Cavanaugh." Fart!

" Good night Jones." Fart!

" Good night Russell." Fart!

You wonder what he’s doing now (Liversidge or Kenning)? Probably an investment banker, civil servant or, you smile, working at the Met office.

No, men fart, women can’t. That’s what you think and you do another just to prove the point and roll over to think about the day ahead.

It’s too bloody early. Ten more minutes wouldn’t hurt, so you get as comfortable as your body lets you, curl into the foetal position and close your eyes. Did you have a dream last night? Yes you did! Sometimes when you wake up you remember your dreams and sometimes you don’t. Sometimes it’s not until you’re in the bath or munching your Kellogg’s that you remember. But you remember last nights, or bits of it and you open your eyes to try and make it clearer. It was vague. Faces and places, undefined but not threatening, colourless somehow but not in a land of black and white. Surreal springs to mind but then so does Ulrika Johnson. What the hell was she doing there? Percy Thrower too, the last century’s Alan Titchmarsh. How strange the brain becomes when the body sleeps. Wasn’t Percy Thrower trying to force geraniums out of Ulrika’s arse or was it the other way round? You don’t remember. What you do remember was the last bit of the dream. You were falling. In the last minutes before the early alarm, you were falling and they do say that falling, to dream of falling, means something, but you’re not sure what. You can’t remember what they said it was supposed to mean. Never mind. Another night. Another dream.

You stretch the length of the bed and turn and turn again. Acid indigestion runs up and down. Sleep has had enough of you and even though you really don’t want to, you’ve got to get up. You’ve got to burst out from beneath your cover, fix bayonets, blow the whistle, go over the top and charge at the day ahead. Another day. Another dollar.

Your meeting with First Commercial isn’t until 8.30 and as you run the bath you sort of imagine your opening pitch. You see yourself, smart suited, word perfect, confident, proud and loud, not giving an inch just going in and getting the business. The bathroom fills with steam long before the bath itself is ready and you wipe your hand across the misted mirror to reveal your face. It’s all there, pretty much the same one you went to bed with and, like scores in bathrooms across the city, you do your early morning acting. When Michael Cain gets up and goes to the bathroom and examines his face in the mirror, who does he think he is? My name is Albert Stinkridge he might say in his Michael Cain voice, which wouldn’t be right at all. This morning, this September morning, you are Adolf Hitler. The bristles of the electric toothbrush, a mean Nazi moustache and your hair ordered to the front sweeping down to the right eyebrow threatening to invade it.

"Seek hile," you say softly to the mirror clicking your bare heels together on the bathroom floor.

"Seek hile," you say once more creating a bad impression.

Baths are so much more than showers. You get intimate with them. A bath is more like making love where as a shower is at best a quick shag. You sink in for your session, half man, half water and you sink and think.

The First Commercial meeting could go one of three ways. You could come out with the deal. Unlikely. They could say thanks but no thanks, but that was not on the cards as they had called for this other face to facer. What they were probably going to do is say go away and sharpen your pencil, redo your sums and come up with a better offer. If that were the case you’d have to really cut the cloth and look long and hard at cost savings. To work on a margin of less than three percent would not impress the board. You’d have to do some pretty smart talking to get around that one. Get your ducks in line, convincing Richard that it was a deal with a future worth having. Once Richard was on your side, the others, F.D. included, should all agree. Your rock bottom line was two point two five percent and if they wanted you to beat that, then you’d just have to turn and walk. You’d know one way or the other by ten. Fingers crossed and all that, it would be great to pull off another Afghan deal. Selling arms to the third world is a tedious business but it pays the bills. You pull the plug and the used bath water starts to disappear off out to the Hudson you suppose.

You wet shave in Hitler’s old mirror and as always, you marvel just for a brief moment at how the can, the Gillette shaving can, can hold so much foam. How do they get it in there? Why don’t you read about them blowing up with the pressure, covering bathrooms in crazy foam? Perhaps they do but you never hear about it. Crazy foam terrorists aren’t news worthy.

You dress in the uniform you chose last night. White Oxford cotton button down shirt, pale pink silk tie and the Gieves double-breasted pin stripe. Polished black Church’s for the feet, you remember your Mother’s words about how you can always tell the quality of a man by the quality of his foot ware.

By seven you’re ready to leave. The driver is in the lobby at 7.20 and you take the elevator down to meet him. The raucous roar of the Upper West Side hits you as you slip from the air-conditioned building into the back of the air-conditioned limo and off to the World Trade Centre.

Your driver is pleased to see you and yes, you are enjoying your visit to the Big Apple and yes, you will be going on up to New England and no, it isn’t as beautiful as it will be next month in the Fall. It’s small talk in a big car.

You never discover which way First Commercial really wants to play it or who their clients are. The deal is never done. Something atrocious happens. You leave without a word and you’re never seen alive again. They put your possessions in a jiffy bag the only sign that you were ever there, your things and the silver Cross fountain pen, the one I gave you last birthday with the initials on it, the one they took from your suit pocket when you arrived at the St James Infirmary, dead in the back of the limousine. Your heart must have known all along and kept you from the horror. They said that you had had a massive attack on your way to what they now call Ground Zero.

ARRIVAL

Helpless rivals. They both knew that Martine had been seeing another man. "Seeing" was far too nice a verb. Like "nice" itself "seeing" was just grammatical laziness, an unwillingness to describe the real act. Loving was somehow too grotesque, ones own intimacy defiled, with the image of another where your body should be, shaking and stirring that awful, awful chemical cocktail of jealousy somewhere in the gut. But Martine’s magnetism, her spell, her warmth, her passion, her way, had both men captivated, caged, bound and gagged.

Alan fell in love with her in Morocco. North Africa, tinged with exotic imagery. Kasbahs, Rick’s Bar, Berbers and Ali Ba Ba’s. Souks, Tajine and couscous, thuja wood and kellims, Mosques, Medinas, Mogador and Marrakesh. Sunshine and clean, clean air unpolluted on the Atlantic coast, windy so the palm trees clatter and the Hitchcock gulls surf the breeze above the fish gutters on Essaouira’s skala du port. Alan and Martine, unlike the rude and noisy sea birds, took their pick from the eager fish grills, moving crabs, white fish, lobsters and silver sardines by the boat load. Giggling, biting into the shark wondering if they’d the jaws for it, all served at the communal sunlit table with a plastic cover and cheap tin forks, illegal wine siphoned into green Fanta bottles and a simple salad of onions and red tomatoes oiled up to slip down with the barbecued fish. Martine flirting with the young fisherman come waiter and slipping him some extra Dirham as he led her to the stand pipe to wash her hands. She stooped smiling to splash the silver sunny water, a Kodak moment if Alan had had one.

The sandy beach to the south of the cannon lined old Mogador walls is where the locals play on Sunday. Dozens of unofficial football matches without referees or linesmen, no sponsor’s shirts nor baying crowds, a hundred barefooted Beckham's dribbling on the sand, not on one side nor the other but opposite the Sofitel, playing with the wind a distinct advantage. Playing too in the Sunday morning big French bed, Alan and Martine laughed and cried. After at café Ben Mosapha Leonard Cohen sang Suzanne and slipped them back to the sixties when Peace and Love Man roamed the old streets then pretty much as it does now. Hendrix ate at Chez Sam’s, or so the fading photo implies, and they did too on an exquisite sea bass boned with experience at the water’s edge, table’s edge with spoon and fork. They could almost hear the man himself, "Are you experienced, have you ever been experienced?"

Back in the hotel Alan stashed the wooden trinkets he had bartered for and the rug too. Martine had wanted the carpet and the street vendor had read the buying signals to his advantage and Alan's eventual cost.

Martine came out of the en-suite bathroom dust free and glistening damp without the Sofitel white towelling robe. Alan stopped what he was doing. He loved the look of Martine naked and the little shimmering beads of shower water gave her complexion a diamond dusting. He walked over to her and taking hold of her hands with both of his coaxed her gently to the bed. Her suntanned body followed his lead but as he tried to pull her down towards him as he sat on the edge of the king size, she pulled away and skipped out to the balcony that overlooked the long beach below. Alan followed kicking off his espadrilles and the loose dark blue linen chinos. He came up to Martine from behind and slipped his hands around her, gently cupping her white breasts, her nipples like cherry stones pressed against his palms.

"People will see you," he said softly in her ear as though he didn't care if they did.

"Let them," she replied and Alan felt his hands tighten automatically without warning. He kissed the nape of her neck at that part where the spine is closest to the brain and even though he couldn't see it, Martine closed her eyes. It seemed the most natural thing in the world taking her from behind and she loved every stunning moment of it on that balcony above the long beach. They made love in equal measure, neither being selfish but both being greedy in roughly the same proportion so that neither one felt the slightest bit let down by the other. No one saw a thing. Anyone in ear shot could have heard even though at the climax Alan had clamped his hand, precisely but nicely, over her mouth to muffle the expressions of her excited pleasure. He had just bitten his lip. The two giggled about their al fresco episode that evening in the restaurant as they drank and planned the rest of their lives together.

Martine had said to meet her at the Hotel du Palais in Biarritz. Alan was making his way. At thirty eight thousand feet over the Guggenheim, the newer one in Bilbao, Alan’s shredded carrot slipped down to thirty seven nine hundred and ninety eight thousand feet. As happens during meal times, the man in front declined to eat and reclined his seat just at the precise moment Alan’s shredded red carrot from the chicken and tarragon meal (CP0508 TQ04/05 use by 31 October 2004) was making its way to Alan’s mouth at thirty eight thousand feet. The impact of the jerk from the jerk caused the instant drop in altitude. What a pity, thought Alan, that we didn’t leave him like a Bogey on the runway’s tarmac in Casablanca.

Pierre-Jean had proposed to Martine in Nimes. Given her the ring in the ring. Down on one knee like a moonlit Matador. She had snorted like a bull, tossed her pretty head and kissed him hard in the white dust of the arena. Their hotel, just off the Roman amphitheatre was where the bullfighters stayed. Its small reception full of posters of men with looks like Pierre-Jean dressed to kill. The thin walls of their room could not hide their noise and the two had behaved without reserve, giving and receiving, so that at le petit dejeuner, they wore the blame when people spoke behind their hands or shook Le Monde even more than it deserved. They would have stayed in their room if the hotel had let them. But bullfighters don’t tend to take their breakfasts in bed.

They killed six that day in the arena and Martine leapt each time like the bull taking the coup de grace, jolted by the final lunge, the killer’s sword in the beast. She had squeezed Pierre-Jean’s hand so it went white with lack of blood as each horned warrior had succumbed and been dragged as dead meat through the sand and dirt leaving a red scar as the Corrida band struck up with their brassy notes. The arrogant victor strutted his stuff like a caped crusader with a dead bull’s ear held high in the air as a salute to the crowd. Same arena, different time, same desire.

That evening after all the crowds had gone home, they slipped back into the arena, past the inattentive attendants and right out into the dim ring. Martine shivered in the cooler night air surrounded by the Roman stone lit in part by the dappled street lights and the more distant moon. Pierre-John shuddered too and put his arm around the bare shoulders of his girl friend to keep them both from the ghosts, keep them both together.

"How many have died here?" She said it as though she knew the answer.

"And all in the name of love." Pierre-John replied quietly.

"Love?" Martine questioned.

"Love of the sport, of the spectacle."

They strode together as one joined at the shoulders kicking through the sand like a two headed beast. Suddenly he turned and kissed her and their two bodies swayed not certain which way to go. He fell down at her feet on one knee and produced the ring and she stooped and kissed him hard as they crumpled into a heap somewhere in the middle of the arena. Pierre-Jean's reluctant tongue found Martine's and his big hands, gentle as a giants, felt for her smooth skin and made her feel almost sick with wanting more. She lead him on, forced his touch beneath her skirts, those Spanish folds she had worn for the bulls, and up to where her thighs were taught, standing to attention on parade. Pierre-John had fingers the size of beeswax dinner candles but they were the nimble fingers of an artist, no hint of roughness. Big and bold but smooth and slow. Martine knew they were magnificent, felt their magic ; manipulative magic magnificence in that bull ring in Nimes.

Martine had said to meet her at the Hotel du Palais in Biarritz. Pierre-Jean was gunning his way along the trans Pyrenean payage, the Porsche purring without effort at 150 kilometres an hour. The snow capped peaks looked like a fairyland frontier away to the left. Jonnie Haliday sang out of tune, Dax and the Basque country danced by to it.

The Hotel du Palais on the front at Biarritz calls itself one of the leading hotels in the world. It’s setting is pretty impressive and the building itself is an over-the-top pile created from the ashes of the Villa Eugena built for his Empress by Emperor Napoleon the third. The hotel’s brochure is as lavish with its language as the interior is extravagant with its fittings. "Cradled for over a century by ocean waves playing court to its golden beauty, Le Palais is the embodiment and fulfilment of a long ago promise, an invitation to taste the sweetness and harmony of the land, where the gentle caress of Time gives way to a full appreciation of the magic of the moment… multilingual ballets of images and ideas move around intertwine, enlightened and enlivened by everything from gourmet refreshments to the preprandial tournaments in the Rotonde, the heart of the hotel"

Sod the preprandial tournaments, thought Alan. He was here to see Martine. His taxi had brought him from the airport not fifteen minutes away and he was excited. His heart raced in anticipation of being with her and he sat in the cocktail bar like an expectant Father, dry mouthed even with the drink.

Pierre-Jean’s Porsche pulled up to the hotel’s barrier and the gatehouse attendant pressed the switch after a glance, checking out the clientèle, letting them know just who was boss at these pearly gates. Pierre-Jean too arrived, nervous, weary, but pounding for the chase.

Through the windows of the bar just next to the Rotonde, the mean Atlantic surf played up onto the beach and the two men drank at separate tables oblivious of each other, one sense on the time and all six on the entrance. Same time, different arena, same desire.

Then across the polished lobby the bellboy strutted absurd in his button hat, brocade and tight green bum boy trousers. He held aloft like a Centurion’s standard his ornate crier’s pole with two words, hand written in felt tip pen upon the portable message board.

"Martine Insoumis".

They both saw it and each other in an instant. Recognised themselves without the secret handshake, wink and knowing nod. Bonded in that moment they came together uneasily, questioning, not like fighting cocks with sharpened spurs ready for the blood, but rather two lost schoolboys waiting for their nannies to collect them for an exeat. Waiting alone, all the rest had gone as the chilly wind bit between the long grey socks and the short trousers, and its just the two of them waiting in the courtyard, waiting for warm hands to hold, waiting for someone to arrive.

The two men sat like crows on stumps, perched next to each other.

"Do you think she’s not coming?"

"Perhaps" said Alan not sure himself but trying hard to show that he didn’t care one way or another.

"Hmm" said Pierre-Jean.

They had arrived for her. Helpless arrivals.