On the Thursday night, my grandson had another asthma attack. Because my boy had had a few drinks before going to bed, granddad had to get up and drive everybody to the hospital. That night I had an hour’s sleep.
On the Friday night I had no sleep at all. Check-in time for my flight to Lisbon was 4.30 in the morning, and it wasn’t worth renting a hotel room at Heathrow, so I sat in the Costa coffee lounge from 10.30 p.m. and read a biography of the American short-story writer Raymond Carver. At around 3 a.m., just as Carver’s lung cancer was diagnosed, the genial barista made his way over to my table and with practised politeness asked me to please take my feet off the seats.
At 4.30 I went downstairs to the check-in desk and found myself at the back of a long, stationary queue. Everybody checking in seemed to have a problem. When I eventually presented my passport to the check-in woman, Carver was dead and buried and the plane was due to take off.
Far from being upgraded to business class and offered a bed, as I’d hoped, I was not even in economy class. My ticket, they told me at the departure gate, was a stand-by ticket. I would be fortunate indeed to get on as the plane was full, and would I please stand aside, sir, to let these other passengers with valid tickets pass through. Just before the gate closed, however, a spare seat showed on the monitor and I was allowed to go forward.
I was so wired by anxiety and artificial airport lighting and coffee, I couldn’t sleep on the Lisbon flight. I promised myself I would gorge on sleep during the next one, from Lisbon to Salvador in Brazil, if I got on, which I did.
An economy seat was free next to what must have been one of the fattest women in Brazil. It took two hostesses to strap her to the chair with a seat-belt extension strap. When I pointed out to them the folds of flesh overflowing the armrest and colonising my own pitifully small economy space allowance, they shrugged. She had a radiant smile, this big woman, and hated to be a nuisance, and I regretted my cavil. After dinner she slept peacefully, sometimes with her head resting on my shoulder. I slept not at all.
In Salvador, Brazil, on Saturday afternoon, I got off the plane feeling as stiff and misshapen as last year’s artificial Christmas tree brought out of its crushed box. During the taxi ride into town the vivid tropical scenery had the flavour of a hallucination. The overnight hotel was a pleasant enough place with a fascinating view of the port, docks and warehouses. I ate in the restaurant then went upstairs and lay on my back on the bed and was asleep in an instant. When I woke, it was dark. I looked at my phone: 2 a.m. After that I had the odd experience of being both tired and wide awake at the same time, and I lay awake till dawn, then I got up.
The taxi arrived punctually at 8 to return me to the airport to catch the internal flight down along the coast to my final destination. Unfortunately I missed it, owing to having been given the wrong flight time. Negotiations for a later flight on the same airline were fruitless. Finally I bought another ticket on a budget airline called Trip. Trip’s credit-card reader was playing up that morning and I couldn’t persuade an ATM to let me have any cash.
When eventually I arrived at the destination airport, I was met and driven to the hotel. I was shown to my room then driven straight to the beach, where I was introduced to the hotel owner, former creative director of Diesel, Wilbert Das. He was standing at his beach bar in his swimming trunks. We shook hands. I asked him if it was Sunday still. He said it was. Since last Wednesday, I told him, I’d had about six hours sleep, so he must excuse my gonk impression.
Mr Das led me over to a double mattress lounger and we lay down together on it. Iced drinks arrived five seconds later. I looked around. It was a Brazilian tropical beach on a Sunday afternoon as you’d imagine it — swaying palms, golden sands, thundering surf, bare bottoms as far as the eye can see.
A wonderful one, owned by an 18-year-old woman, name of Ananda, came and knelt beside Wilbert and she chatted to him in Portuguese while she idly ran her fingertips up and down his thigh. Her husky voice and long, tanned fingers mesmerised me as they dragged to and fro along the hairy thigh. Then I lost consciousness and went to a place very far away, even from that remote beach, for what was left of the afternoon.
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