Caught between arrivals and departures

Tuesday 15 January 2013

Over the years I have arrived at Jan Smuts Airport and Johannesburg International Airport, today it's OR Tambo International. It's not just the name - and the concept of South Africa - which changes each time I fly into Joburg, it's the airport. They have been improving it for a long time and it's like being a dream, really: I know exactly where I am and yet not at all.
When I first came to South Africa I was seven and my mother's sister picked us up from the airport. Since then someone has always picked me up at this airport: my aunt, my sister, a BBC employees when I flew in a couple of days after Kate died, but not today. Today I am here alone and it should be a pleasure, for me, to be between an international flight and an internal one: a place of no responsibility or ability to do much about anything, like being on a plane only you can walk around. But this airport is full of the ghosts of the people who are not meeting me or not flying with me. It's not even that fabulous When Harry Met Sally situation where a lover no longer picks you up at the airport, your relationship having move onto that point... there is simply no one to pick me up because I am flying on to Durban for the first show tomorrow night.
At the same time it's lovely to be here - I can feel the beautiful heat through the air con, can see the sunshine on the tarmac outside and I am diverted by spending some time trying to find the right check-in desk for my flight to Durban. Wandering around, looking the tourist, I get approached by two guys who point in the other direction, telling me check in is there. I thank them and do not break my stride. They are pretty snarly at my not accepting their offer of help. Ah, being at an airport, looking like a tourist....
Of course the tension ratchets right up again as I see my check in desk and stand in the queue. I am overweight. Well, I am overweight, but that's not important right now. The problem is that my luggage is overweight to the tune of about 7kg. I try to arrange some stuff under my jacket on the trolley. Then it's my turn. My strategy, as with every other nanosecond of my life, is to talk. I mean, as if there is any way I could really distract someone from their job by yakking at them, but I am nervous and maybe we might get on and he'll feel sorry for me. As it turns out he doesn't even bother with my weight and I engage him in conversation anyway, telling him G's story. He really feels for G and we agree that addiction is a terrible thing.
I approach a group of workers having a sit down and ask whether there is a coffee shop in domestic departures and it is only as I am about to go through security (just past the gun check-in point) that I realise they were giving me a funny look because my enormous trolley is all but empty. I see me as they see me: rather deranged.
Standing in the queue for security and passing through it suddenly I recognise it all quite clearly: nothing's changed here, I think, since I got on a flight from Johannesburg to Cape Town with my sister and my brother. It feels like yesterday but it is not yesterday, it is another lifetime. Suddenly I'm back with Charlie and Kate, staying in her best friend's spare room in Cape Town, the three of us  spending the night beset by one mosquito after another, finding ourselves unable to sleep because of their noisy assault and then because of the hysteria the situation induces. I miss my sister, and I miss my brother, and I pretend for as long as I can that I am back there and then, not caught in this inadequate here and now.
Ah, it's the fear getting to me again. Flightside I have my first South African juice, get online and comfort myself with a bit of work. There are emails from Anna, our producer, and I don't feel so alone. Come on Rebecca, you're about to get on the plane to Durban where the tour begins: the actual tour of the actual show which Martin and you wrote... and you're bringing it back to one of its homes. It's all a bit surreal and at the same time too marvellous.

You're sitting in my seat

Monday 14 January 2013

I do not have a window seat. I have not been happy about this since I found I could not check in online 24 hours ago. I knew this would culminate in my not having a window seat. With a window seat I stood a chance of sleeping the whole way or at least a bit, but as it is I will need to tune into the in flight entertainment.

The person who has got my window seat, G, a chap in his 20s, greets me in such a friendly way that I wonder whether I can ask him straight away to swap. G has been away from South Africa for ten months, during which time his second daughter has been born. He left his pregnant wife and elder child to travel to England in a last-ditch attempt to get himself off drugs. And it's worked: he has not touched them for the whole time he has been here. He tells me he used to disappear off for weeks at a time, taking drugs or moving in with other women or, I suspect, both. He tells me he will not sleep on this flight... and I wonder whether it would be very rude at this point to ask  him if we can, in that case, swap seats.

I am nervous about this trip to RSA, very nervous, but I do not have that much riding on it. If I believed in such things I'd think I'd been sent G to remind me of how lucky I am. As the journey progresses he tells me about his father leaving when he was 13 and about his alcoholic stepfather who killed himself last last year. I say that maybe he should not be so hard on himself, with events such as these during his formative years it's not very surprising he has an addiction problem. He, however, is adamant: he's done with self-pity. He has two brothers, neither of whom have managed to derail themselves as he has. Everything he had done was his responsibility.

We both have a pretty sleepless nights, he flails around quite a lot. It's an odd thing sleeping - or not - right next to a stranger on a plane. Every time I flip up my eye muff to see how many nano seconds have passed since I last did so he's there, making lots of effort to get some shuteye. As we make the approach to Johannesburg I can feel his tension rising so that by the time we have landed he is one of those people who leaps up to stand in the aisle while we don't get off the plane yet. He tells me he cannot sit down any longer: he is terrified that he has lost everything and it may be there there is nothing he can do to save himself. If she won't have him back he will be free to return to the UK, which he loves, but that will be because he is no longer wanted at home.

I've been stopped at passport control in South Africa before now - when I was travelling there from Rio years ago, so long ago that the fact that I did not have my outward ticket from South Africa was enough for them not to want to let me in (I'd been mugged in Peru, but that's a whole other story). These days I have no paper evidence of anything on me whatsoever, apart from my passport. It all goes smoothly, though, and what with the swanky, shiny arrival side at Oliver Thambo International in Joburg and the fact that for the first time in my life no one is meeting me from my plane at this airport , I can almost forget that I am back in the same place, my sister's home from home.

G and I bump into one another again, pushing our trolleys along. He has somehow found a few more stress notches above max and, as we head for the arrivals area he tells me that he has had to bribe a police officer to get back into the country - he would have gone to prison if he'd not done so. I ask who's meeting him. One of his brothers, he says. When I say that's nice, he looks at me wryly and says that his brother doesn't want him to come back at all that he'd rather he stayed, with all the trouble he's caused, in the UK. We step into South Africa and he sees his brother, points him out to me. He hugs me, I feel his terror, he wishes me luck and as he heads off towards this unwelcoming brother I feel my own terror rise again.

I'm getting there...

Monday 14 January 2013

I am just over weight, only a few kilos, but enough to cause me trouble if someone wants to cause me trouble, say, the person on the check-in desk. Long gone are the halcyon days when I used to put all my dirty underwear at the top of my rucksack, turn up at the airport and, when they objected to my overweightedness, start unpacking it all over the floor by the desk amongst the feet of my co-passengers. I never got very much of the stuff out of my bag, it was just too horrible and degrading for the humane staff and they would stop it and let me on the flight. But air travel is not the frivolous pursuit it used to be and I am, by nature, rather rule-abiding and cautious... so I'm worried.
The departures lounge at Heathrow Terminal 3 is bustling... no... heaving, and lots of folk seem very excited about the swanky outlets selling all kinds of brands that even I, who have had no TV since the analogue signal was turned off nearly a year ago, recognise. However, I am to be found in Boots The Chemist buying painkillers, throat sweets, cold remedy. It would seem the stress of preparing for this trip has finally got to my immune system.
And yet I am agonising in the shampoo section. Mark - one of our hosts on this trip, the man who is planning the gala opening night of the show in Cape Town, he who was my sister's best friend - has asked me to bring a particular shampoo and conditioner from the UK. He has also asked for tea bags, tea bags with actual tea in them as opposed to the neutered ones he finds in his local Cape Town shops - I have three quarters of a kilo of those on board already. The tea bags are not the problem: I am agonising about risking the weight of the hair condiments when I try to get onto my flight.
Of course I'm already through check-in, but that's just for the long haul journey, I have to make a domestic flight from Johannesburg to Durban tomorrow, where the tour begins, and I'm at least seven kilos over for that. Mark says he will not actually expire if I don't bring his hair products... but would it make that much difference?.... In the end, fearing what might befall me in Joburg, I leave with only my selection of drugs. Looking back I should have simply grown a pair, but I'm proving, yet again, what a wuss I am. I'm such a wuss.
I am such a wuss I've been in a state of high-anxiety about bringing the show to South Africa for about two months. It came upon me all of  sudden and has stayed with me, migrating from one problem to another in my fevered 4am brain, night after night, waking me early, reaching its peak over the Christmas period, making me snappy and even less reliable than usual.
So why am I doing it?
Like so many things in my life, the opportunity presented itself and I said yes... and then thought about it. If I think about anything I become very unlikely to risk, which is why I should've bought the hair ablutives and worried about the consequences in queue for the domestic flight. As it was I was worrying the whole restless long haul night about being overweight anyway, I knew I would be, and it would have only been a few more grammes. Stop and think and you will sink:  that should be my motto. More thoughtlessness required.