Britical

When I got home I must have looked like some distraught victim of sexual assault. I tore off all the clothes I was wearing and put them into a plastic bag. I then stood in a hot shower resisting the impulse to scrub myself raw with disinfectant. I washed my hair, though I had washed it that morning – and getting out at last, downed a big handful of Vitamin C tablets. This is not my usual routine on coming home. But I had been at the hospital, you see.

It is assumed that everyone hates hospitals. The bleak, institutional hallways, the putrid school dinner smell, the sheer sadness and stink of the place. Not that I was even in there for long. Most of the time was spent showing I.D. and standing in little lines behind frantic people who didn’t speak English. When it was my turn, I was handed a huge, letter size fluorescent pink pass – the pink indicating, they told me, that you’re visiting someone who’s in critical condition. Going up to the 10th floor then, I fancied that everyone in the lift might be staring at me in some sort of awed pity. Presumably all of them there to see people with broken ankles and other would-be ailments since they were carrying “lesser” coloured blue passes. And presumably they were merely appalled at my large, furry hat - but I ignored this pesky thought and looked valiantly straight ahead trying to appear to be nobly suffering, a Brave Little Woman in the vein of a black & white WWII movie. How hateful I am.

Speaking of which, and FYI, none of the nurses was like the snappy yet teary-eyed, earnest ones in ‘Atonement’. Lost in the vast, shiny corridors I asked a whole disobliging, sullen, series of them for directions. Lolling, like postal service workers, at their little white melamine desks, most of them shrugged and directed me to someone else. Apparently they lack even the courtesy to try and pretend to be harried and overworked.

I am at last in this overheated, white room. I am shocked by how many machines there are surrounding the bed. Certainly more than in any TV or movie hospital I have ever seen. They are both worrying and reassuring, I suppose. But their constant beeping, burping, whoosh-whooshing sounds, the forced breath of the ventilator, cannot disguise how unacceptably silent the room feels. But they give me something to look at that’s not my friend. I am conscious of the glass walls of the room, and wonder what the staff think of this person examining the machines so intently and barely glancing at the woman in the bed.

She is lying as if dropped from a great height – head twisted to one side, mouth hanging open, lips white, breathing but not breathing. Barely visible amid her tangle of inexplicable wires and blinking lights and tubes and tape, she looks for the first time I can remember supremely unapproachable. And so I do not dare, and then notice I am holding my breath. At that moment a nurse comes in to tell me I cannot leave the tulips in the room. I had always thought this no flowers business was a legend. Not so. However, the suddenly immense and pressing issue of where to leave the tulip plant is my opportunity to leave the room and I take it.

 The nurse has no interest in my placing the thing on her empty desk so that my friend might see it if she wakes up. So I apologize for the trouble and ask her name – blatantly trying to establish some sort of connection. “How is “the patient” doing?” I say. She’s immune. Perhaps she has compassion fatigue. Perhaps they all do. She gazes at me dully, trying, I realize, to figure out who I am to this patient who has had almost no visitors.

I leave the tuilps on her desk anyway, knowing they might go straight into the trash the moment I leave, and go back into the room to leave the card I brought. But there is literally nowhere to put it. It then dawns on me that there are no cards or silly plush toys or balloons or anything you might usually find in someone’s room. The surfaces swarm with wires and machines. It’s a brand new wing of this hospital and yet, while they clearly thought of everything, I notice there is nowhere for a person to put anything that belongs to them. I place the card on the edge of the sink – glad that before I left the house I had, for some typically bizarre reason, put it in a Ziplock bag.

There is nothing for me to do here. I hover by the bed a little longer – and, taking the doctors at their word that she is completely unconscious and cannot hear or feel anything, I leave. On the way out, and crossing First Avenue, an unfamiliar unease clings to me. In the shower, I do my best to scrub off whatever it is.

 

 

Copyright Britical 2008. All rights reserved. 

 

NYC

 

"Now Madam, how about another glass of champagne?” And perhaps also, I thought, a cigarette, since I was now no longer an Upper Class virgin.

I took a nice big swig and asked the flight attendant (one of a whole, hovering flock of them on soft little cat feet) who the uniformed older man was. He was perched in a overly casual way (it seemed to me) on the arm of a seat a few rows up, chortling away with a thrilled-looking passenger. “That’s the captain, Madam”. Oh, I see. I felt instantly, ludicrously jealous - then vaguely worried for obvious reasons: do Evildoers not think to travel Upper Class, where there is plenty real silverware and the captain is allowed to leave the flight deck and wander about unsupervised? After all, I now recalled, on the way over they had let me hang about on the flight deck for twenty minutes badgering the pilot and co-pilot about flight paths and wind shear. They had even pulled out their maps…. and managed to look quite sorry when I went back to my seat.

 

But these thoughts soon evaporated. It’s hard to think about anything dismaying when you’re being plied with all sorts of luxurious un-necessities. I wondered then if I, too, could request a visit.

So it goes here at 35,000 feet above the Atlantic ocean, where you’re shocked to discover you’re sorry – for once! - that the flight isn’t longer. Even at the airport - at festering, unlovely Heathrow - you arrive at a serene, almost empty check-in area, separated, natch, from the economy class riff-raff by velvet ropes and pink neon lighting. You instantly acquire a soft, pretty glow. From there you’re whisked up in the lift to Virgin Atlantic’s own, private security point. Yep. They purchased for some vast, unimaginable sum their very own security machine for Upper Class passengers so that you, a lone and presumably delicate upper class flower, may tiptoe quietly past the scanner where the security folks are only minimally less mollycoddling than the rest of the Virgin staff.

No, it doesn’t get much better than this. Though it has been pointed out that of course you are paying a lot of money for the privilege, I say you pay a lot of money for a lot of things (my apartment comes to mind) yet often don’t feel you’re getting what you pay for. 

But here, witness the recently revamped Virgin Lounge where you can book a free spa treatment…..and look, over there, where you can stuff your face with a frustrating array of food items…lounge in one of the giant sofas with a big, glossy magazine….shoot pool…browse in the library….make phone calls and surf the internet…..or just sit at the huge bar and drink yourself stupid. Option paralysis abounds, and like the Vatican or the Hermitage, you really need several days to fully appreciate it.

Once on board it gets worse. There is more champagne, and your very own fully flat private bed with duvet and pillows and pajamas. There are gourmet chocolates and shiny silverware, thick napkins and marvellous soup, and onboard shoulder, neck and scalp massages. (However, there is no Ambien, and that seems a shame.)

If you really can’t sleep on your private, fully flat bed with duvet and pillows, you can wander in your pyjamas and socks up to the bar to chitchat with other wealthy insomniacs. Who can bear to slumber unconscious through all this luxury? But the lights are dimmed when they should be, and there is no startling “BING-BONG!” noise. Ever. Except something feint – a discreet “ding!” perhaps - when the seatbelt light goes on or off. There are no pesky seatmates – no having to pull out a book, your I-Pod, or feign alarming coughing fits to avoid talking to some large, chatty stranger.

Waking up from a little nap, I felt peckish, as you do. A flight attendant appeared (for you Brits reading this, it is not unlike like the magically apparating shopkeeper in “Mr.Ben”) as did, a little later, a pair of charming, fat, miniature plane-shaped salt & pepper shakers. “How do you stop people from stealing these??” I asked. “We don’t”, he said. “Go ahead and take them - it’s Christmas!!”

The staff here seem to have mastered the exacting and subtle art of walking the line between deferential and chummy. How do they do it? I suspect they are hired partly based on their perceptiveness and ability to read each person and to act accordingly. This stuff is usually hardwired quite early in life and makes me worry – for a couple of seconds anyway - that they learned this from having difficult or abusive parents who’s every move they had to predict and manoeuvre around. I resolve to be the model passenger and to not pester them. Still, it’s obvious they already love me – why else encourage me to steal their salt and pepper shakers?

A day or so later, back in New York, I find the perfectly darling objects carefully hidden in paranoid fashion at the bottom of my hand luggage. Weighing them in my hand, I notice they aren’t actually metal but metal-coloured plastic. I feel a bit guilty stealing them, but remember the flight attendant’s wink-wink suggestion to go ahead and do so. I must admit, it had made me feel awfully special. But then for some reason I turn them over in my hand, and see, neatly printed on the bottom of each: 

 

“Pinched from Virgin Atlantic”.

 

 

Oh. Oh dear. Have I been had? Maybe. But it was fun while it lasted.

 

 

 

Copyright Britical 2008. All rights reserved.