Lucky’s Reviews > The Driver's Seat > Status Update

‘Oh,’ she says, ‘the inconceivable sorrow of it, those chairs piled up at night when you’re sitting in a café, the last one left.’
…
‘It makes me sad,’ she says. ‘I want to go home, I think. I want to go back home and feel all that lonely grief again. I miss it so much already.’

She drops her hand and looks at her coat which is stained with a long black oily mark. ‘Look at my clothes,’ Lise says. ‘My new clothes. It’s best never to be born. I wish my mother and father had practised birth-control. I wish that pill had been invented at the time. I feel sick, I feel terrible.’

At the hotel desk she seems rather confused as if she is not quite sure where she is.

‘It is confusing,’ she says in English, handing over her passport.

‘Yes, you left part of yourself at home,’ the concierge says. ‘That other part, he is still en route to our country but he will catch up with you in a few hours’ time. It’s often the way with travel by air, the passenger arrives ahead of himself.‘

‘I hate rice,’ she says.

‘No, you only think you do. He who hath ears let him hear.’ He smiles widely towards her, he breathes into her face and touches her knee. She eats on with composure. ‘I’m an Enlightenment Leader in the movement,’ he says.

‘You know what Yin is?’ he says.

She says, ‘Well, sort of …’in a vaguely embarrassed way, ‘but it’s only a snack, isn’t it?’

‘Yin,’ says Bill, ‘is the opposite of Yang.’

“She will be found tomorrow morning dead…”

Then she had begun to laugh hysterically. She finished laughing and started crying all in a flood. As she ran to the lavatory she shouted to the whole office who somehow or other were trying to follow or help her. 'Leave me alone! It doesn't matter.' Half an hour later they said, 'You need a good holiday, Lise. You need your vacation. I'm going to have it, she said, 'I'm going to have the time of my life,'