Free Ghosting by Jennie Erdal Page A

Frankfurt I always like to dress casual,” he explained.
    Like fine wine, and cats in baskets, he did not travel well. Every stage of the journey—driving to Heathrow, queuing up at the check-in desk, boarding the plane—was attended by a high degree of angst. Would the traffic make us late? Would the plane leave on time? Would there be a screaming infant in the row behind? On the way to the airport he made countless calls from his car phone, announcing his imminent departure and giving out contact details, apparently to anyone he could think of. In the 1980s the advertisers of the first generation of mobile phones targeted the business traveller, promising that effective use could be made oftime spent travelling—“dead time,” they called it. Working his way through the list of numbers in his Filofax, Tiger made this dead time zing. “I shall be in the air for just over one hour. My plane lands in Frankfurt at 14:45 local time, but you can reach me …,” he boomed down the phone again and again. I doubted whether any of this was strictly necessary, but it had the desired effect of aggrandising the trip and creating a sense of urgency.
    In the business of communication Tiger was ahead of his time. He acquired one of the earliest versions of the mobile phone, upgrading it as soon as a new model came on the market, and he seemed to understand before anyone else that it was an index of the future. “Look at it!” he would say, cradling it fondly in his hands. “Isn't it amazing? Isn't it beautiful? Can you believe how neat it is?” He drooled over the design and knew instinctively that the size, the fascia, the foldability—all these things would come to be very important. In fact, he was also one of the earliest examples of the useless but self-validating
I'm on the train
culture. As we trundled down the motorway, he yelled into the mouthpiece a running commentary on weather conditions, traffic congestion, exact location, proximity to Terminal One, and so on. And in the back seat I experienced the first stirrings of those feelings now common among travellers whose basic entitlement to peace and quiet is being violated. I had no idea then that within twenty years a billion people would be jabbering into mobiles.
    Once we were on the aeroplane Tiger's anxiety levels increased, though it was striking that he didn't have the concerns people traditionally have before take-off: will the plane actually get off the ground? Does the captain know what he's doing? Should I have written a letter to my children? Instead he fretted about whether there was enough bread on board so that he could have extra withhis lunch, and whether his state-of-the-art mobile phone would work in Germany. In between he kept checking his three watches, certain that we were going to be late in leaving, all the while scowling at his fellow passengers as if they had no right to be there. He worried dreadfully about the possibility of contagion, and he listed the ghastly diseases he could catch, fearing it might already be too late. He hated it when people coughed or blew their noses into handkerchiefs. He was also acutely sensitive to smell, and the moment everyone was seated he puckered his nostrils and probed the air for anything malodorous. “Oh, my God, the smell!” he said to me, screwing up his face and glaring at the man across the aisle. “It's appalling! Can't you smell him?” He pushed the call-button to summon the stewardess. I felt sure he was going to complain about body odours, but instead he asked for a glass of water. “I have to keep drinking,” he explained. “My wee-wee is yellow.” Moments later, he pressed the call-button again and said to the same stewardess: “Excuse me, I am a London publisher. I need to see the
Financial Times
for reasons of business. Would you be so kind as to bring it to me?”—a sentence that seemed to have been plucked from a phrase book for travellers abroad:
“Can you help me, please? I am