Love + Hate: Stories and Essays

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The stewardess brought Daniel a glass of champagne and some roasted nuts. The champagne wasn’t good, but it would lighten his heavy head and reduce his irritability. Standing, he drank it back at once and was relieved to hand his jacket to the smiling stewardess and remove his shoes, settling into his seat not long before the plane was due to leave the gate. He was aware that people with real money went private. Still, you didn’t get this service on a bus. He would enjoy a temporary, restful passivity. It had taken him years to reach this condition of ease; he’d make the most of it — particularly after what he’d just endured.

He had been late getting to the airport from his hotel. He travelled often, and it had become his habit, on the flight home, to loiter with several drinks, food and the newspapers in the aimless area of the First Class Lounge. But he’d been stuck in a terrible meeting, his driver was delayed and the road to the airport was blocked. Airport security — or ‘insecurity’, as his teenage children called it — had been obtrusive and slow. Although he always checked the news at least twice an hour, he wondered if there’d been an incident he hadn’t heard about. In the security hall — a sweaty shed of crawling conveyor belts carrying luggage, clothes and shoes past monitors — he’d had to watch strangers undress, before removing his own clothes, apart from trousers and T-shirt. He was made to stand inside an X-ray machine so security personnel could inspect his organs, for fear he was concealing toxic material in his heart or kidneys.

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