about my mother,’ she said, her breath smelling faintly of vomit. Then, after a while, ‘And I don’t know why she has that hairdresser – she can’t afford her.’
‘Well, it’s difficult for her to get out and about.’
The chains on the blinds started to rattle as the extractor fan in the en suite cut out, blowing a draught through the bedroom. Joe felt himself drifting off. ‘The soup you made tonight was good.’
‘Gazpacho, it was gazpacho,’ she said, ‘and before you say anything, it was meant to be cold.’
‘Why’s that, then?’
She didn’t answer, and Joe was almost asleep when Linda said, ‘She used to be in the army.’
‘You never said.’
‘Not my mother – the hairdresser. She was in the Falklands or something.’
He didn’t say anything, and after a while leant over to switch off the light on his side of the bed.
When he woke up it was still dark, and he didn’t know what time it was because the alarm clock was on the other side of the bed. Linda was lying on her back with her head turned away from him and her left hand curled into a fist.
He drifted off to sleep again.
The dark was still deep when Dominique left the house at five a.m. Mick’s flight from Florida – his last flight – was due to land in half an hour.
The road from Littlehaven to Gatwick was all new bypass, cutting across land with small strips of forest that deer used to graze in. She remembered pointing out the deer to Delta when she was small, but now there were no deer left to point out to Steph. They’d hit a deer once, in the red Renault, and Mick had wanted to stop and pull the animal off the road, but she hadn’t let him; she’d told him to keep driving. Then it started raining and they had to pull over anyway because the ton of running deer that had hit the windscreen had snapped both wipers clean off and they couldn’t see a thing. She’d tried to remind Mick about that deer a couple of years ago, but he couldn’t remember and this had shocked her. There was no way she could have forgotten a thing like that, but Mick told her, smiling, that he had no memory of it, no memory at all. As if he’d never been there in the car while they waited in the dark for the rain to stop, the dead deer and forest somewhere to their left, and Delta crying uncontrollably in the back. It was a shame the deer were gone, she thought, looking at the early-morning darkness and the way it hid the land’s details.
Leaving behind the patch of countryside the bypass intersected, she entered Gatwick’s network of roundabouts, Jacuzzi showrooms, electronics factories, out-of-town warehouses, hotels and – finally – the airport itself.
She had been a first-class air hostess working long-haul flights when she and Mick met. The first-class bit mattered, and ‘we got it together at fifty thousand feet’ was a conversation opener she still used. Most of the passengers in first class then were men, and she got on with men – even growing up without a father. It was women she didn’t like. Mick once called her a misogynist and it was true. She knew how to make men happy. How did you make a woman happy?
As soon as the plane wheels used to leave the tarmac – wherever she was in the world – she not only felt herself breathing again, but felt pleased to be breathing again. She never got claustrophobic in the pressurised cabin’s few cubic feet of reconditioned air and she never worried about dying. It was being on the ground she was afraid of: gravity. Anything that sucked you in or down or tried to anchor you in any way. She started taking as little time off between flights as regulation allowed and spending more and more time in hotel rooms in foreign cities with curtains shut and phials of sleeping pills, trying to defy gravity. As long as she had movement, as long as she had altitude, she was fine. It was her ground life that was going all autistic on her. Then Mick came along, and he changed all of that. Mick changed all of her.
When she told her mother, who was a scientist researching food dyes, that she was thinking of becoming an air hostess, Monica had just smiled at this new fatality in her life and said, ‘I suppose everybody’s got to do something.’
Then, two weeks later, Dominique got a phone call from her on a busy Friday night at the pub she was working in, and Monica told her she had an interview with someone running training sessions for Laker Air the next day. Which made Dominique feel, when she got accepted on the training programme, that the whole air-hostess thing had been her mother’s idea in the first place; that her whole life so far had been her mother’s idea. Even Mick; even Mick’s love for her; even her happiness – and Dominique being happy or not was the last thing on earth her mother cared about. It was just that happiness was part of the plan Monica had formulated for her daughter in the absence of academic success, because that’s what normal people were: happy. So she presumed.
Dominique stood for a while at the Arrivals barrier watching passengers from the Florida flight, jetlagged, walk through the automatic doors, thinking she should have done what Mick wanted and taken the girls on this last flight with him. Why hadn’t she just gone? She was about to leave her post by the barrier and get a coffee when she saw Laura, whom she used to fly with on Laker Air in the late Sixties.
Laura had always had long hair, but now it was cut short, close to the scalp. Her legs looked long and brittle and her knees too pronounced, but Laura was still flying. Dominique felt herself pause, trying to decide whether she wanted to talk to Laura, who was still flying, or not. Whether she’d ever liked Laura, who was still flying, or not.
‘Dominique. My God. Dominique.’
‘Hey, Laura.’ Up close, Laura felt taller than her, slimmer, and better smelling. The short haircut pronounced her cheekbones and shoulders. Dominique wondered how she was looking under airport strip lighting. ‘Just landed?’
Laura sighed. ‘Just landed.’ She parked the small suitcase on wheels by her side and kept hold of the two duty-free bags.
‘They’ve changed the uniform,’ Dominique said.
‘The uniform?’
She nodded at Laura’s navy suit and Laura looked down. ‘Oh – I’m with BA now.’
‘Since when?’
‘This was my first flight with them. To Delhi.’ She looked down at her suit again. ‘You don’t think it’s too dowdy?’
‘Dowdy? No.’
The two women looked at each other, trying to simultaneously absorb and keep at arm’s length their different lives.
‘God – isn’t it awful what’s happening to Laker?’
‘Well – you got out in time.’
‘Just. It’s the people with families I feel sorry for. God,’ Laura said again, suddenly exhaling. ‘It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?’
‘It has – can’t remember how long exactly, but – yes.’
‘Yeah,
