Girl on a Plane (24 page)

“It's amazing,” David says. “Like a giant living map.” But it means nothing to me. These people mean nothing. I'm tired of them. I just want Marni and my dad. I want to get away from everyone else now: the strange captain and navigator, the stewardesses, the doctor and nurses. This plane.

Especially this plane.

After we return to our seats, the steward continues reading out his lists. They are much shorter now, just one or two names each time.

“Are your parents waiting?” David asks.

“Haven't heard yet,” I say, trying, and failing, to sound unconcerned.

Over the next half hour, my name still doesn't come up, and the knot in my stomach grows and tightens, until it feels like a great, twisted root.

This is all wrong. I should be celebrating, like everyone else.

I'm
wrong.

More than anything else in the world, I want them to be there, waiting. I get up, go down to the toilet, lock myself in, and sob.

The seat belt sign in the toilet lights up.

“Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, please fasten your seat belts. We will shortly be beginning our final descent into London,”
booms the intercom.

I turn the PFLP badge over and over in my pocket.
Please,
I say,
make them be there.

I wash my face, dry it, and scrunch up the paper towel and shove it in the trash. I'll see them all greeting each other, being emotional, reunited. Like watching everyone else's parents coming to take them out from school on a Sunday when your parents aren't.

I take a deep breath and open the door.

The atmosphere in the cabin is electric.

I wander listlessly back to my seat, struggle past David, sit down, and fasten my seat belt one more time.

David hands me a blank piece of paper torn from a notebook. He's asking for my school address. I write it down automatically. I'll be there in a few hours.

“Thanks,” he says, taking it from me. Then he raises his eyebrows. “Er . . . hello?” I look at him blankly. “Don't you want mine?”

“Oh. Sorry. Yes, of course.” I tear the bottom off the piece of paper. He writes his address and hands it to me.

“Where are you going after this?” he says.

“School, I suppose.”

“God, I'm definitely refusing to go straight back. Going to stall for as long as I can.”

“Me too.” Tim has Fred back on his knee. “Me and the twins are going to say that we need time to recover from our
nightmares.
” Then, seeing my worried expression, his cheeks dimple. “Ha, just pretending.”

“Last night I dreamed Lady Mac blew herself up with the plane,” David says.

When I don't respond, he stares at me, and then it dawns on him. “Have I missed hearing who's meeting you?”

“No.”

“Oh.” He looks awkward. “Someone's bound to be there by the time we arrive, Anna.”

“Course they will,” says Tim.

Easy for you both to say,
I think.
You just feel sorry for me.

I stare at the ice particles forming on the outside of the window. Above the tiny clouds, another plane draws its thin white line across the sky.

We begin the descent into London, the engine noise changing from a high whine to a gruffer kind of acceptance. The wing dips as we change direction, curving westward, and I'm blinded for a second by the sun. For a moment I glimpse the edge of the world, where pale sunlight pools like moonlight on water.

“There's just one more message,” the steward's voice says. “Anna Milton—​your parents may be a bit late.”

My parents! My mother and father! Marni and Dad. They
will
be there!

Tim grins. “See?”

Down, down we go, slicing through a blanket of cloud resembling newly laid concrete, and the tiny ice crystals on the outside of the window melt away.

I put the badge back in my bag with the other souvenirs of my hijack: the turquoise ticket wallet, the BOAC fan, David's school address,
Wuthering Heights,
and even the empty Nivea tin. If I show them when I get back, who will understand how much they mean to me, these treasures?

I open the BOAC fan, with its bright turquoise paper folded in flutes. On one side, between borders of roses, is a Canadian Mountie in breeches, a beefeater from the Tower of London, an African man with a giraffe, a Japanese woman by a pagoda, an Australian with a kangaroo. And there, written in small white capitals across the top of the fan, it says:

ALL OVER THE WORLD BOAC TAKES GOOD CARE OF YOU

I push my feet into my maroon shoes and tie my hair back into a ponytail with my scarf.

I'm going to see my parents.

I follow David and Tim down the plane steps, into a quiet English drizzle, and then across the tarmac toward the tall, gray airport building. A truck reverses on its way to offload the luggage. Another brings the refueling line.

It's cold. A familiar cold, a sharpness that penetrates the thin cotton of my shirt. Up on the balcony of the building, I can see lots of small figures, too high to make out any faces. I imagine there'll be hundreds of photographers to battle through and am glad that this bit, this first bit, seems so calm.

We file slowly into the building and up some linoleum stairs. Our shoes clomp on the steps. No one speaks.

“This way, please.” Pale-faced ground crew in navy uniforms lead us into another room. Someone ticks my name off a list. We wait, in limbo. I still feel as though I've been unhitched from the real world.

A man speaks to us in a singsong Welsh voice. “Now we have you all here, and before you meet your families and collect your luggage, we'd like to say how very happy we are to have you all back safe in England.” There's a smattering of applause. “You are all invited to stay here in the hotel tonight, to relax and recover. There will be supper and free accommodation for everyone. Later a few members of the press will be allowed in. This will be carefully monitored. We hope some of you will agree to a short interview and a photo for both the national press and your local papers.”

We're called up individually. David is the first in our group.

“Here goes,” he says, grinning. “Bye, you guys.” He kisses me on the cheek and gives me a big hug, and then he hugs Tim. I watch him disappear through the door with a spring in his step.

I wait with Tim. When I hear my name next, I'm surprised that my parents aren't late. I bend down to kiss him quickly on the cheek. He hugs me tightly and then looks up at me. “Anna”—​he's scrabbling in his pocket—​“I saved this for you.” He hands me his last Polo mint. “To eat when you get to school.”

“Oh, Tim.” I well up. “That is
so
kind. You are the loveliest boy—​remember that.” I turn away tearfully and walk in a daze toward the door.

The room beyond is ugly; fluorescent strip lighting glares overhead. In front of me shapes fall away, shadows lift, shift, and in the crowd I see her hair, her eyes. I see Marni! And then Dad too! I run toward them.

She folds me in her arms, and the weight of the last few days falls away. Marni's soft hands, Marni, smelling of Je Reviens. Marni.

She strokes my hair, my forehead, my face. “My precious girl, my treasure,” she says. “You're safe. You're safe now.”

I'm finally released to my father, who gives a wry smile before I'm crushed against his newly laundered shirt, just where I want to be.

“That was a close one, Annie,” he says into my hair. I try to answer but can't.

As we walk out of the terminal building, neither lets go of me. I feel the soft warmth of Marni's hand and my father's strong arm around my shoulders, and I can't stop smiling, and crying.

Marni keeps stopping to gaze at me, to hug me again and again. “I can't take my eyes off you,” she whispers. “Can't believe you're really here.”

“They're putting us up in the airport hotel for the night,” Dad says as he collects my luggage from the pile that has somehow arrived at the far end of the next room.

“I tried to let you know I was OK,” I say at last.

“You did so well, darling,” Marni says. “When we got here, we bought all the newspapers we could lay our hands on, and there you were! It was wonderful to see you! What hope it gave us!”

“Where are the boys?”

“They're with Auntie Di. We've been staying with her since we got to London. But we had no idea how long you'd be today. Or what might happen. We thought it better to leave them there with her. We've called to update them.”

“Are they OK?”

“Yes, they know you're safe. We'll call them later. You can speak to both of them yourself.”

We go through to the hotel reception. “Anything happen?” Dad asks suddenly.

“What do you mean?” I'm confused.

“Anyone hurt you?” he says. “Touch you?”

And I'm back there. Back where I don't want to be. Horrified at Maria's muffled cries, her frantic footsteps, the sobbing.

What can I say? What does Dad want to know?

“Um . . . No. Most of the hijackers were nice,” I say. “But one girl got a bit hysterical at the back of the plane one night . . . Someone—” I stop, disoriented. “Someone . . . one of the hijackers . . . touched her.”

“My God!” It bursts out of him.

Marni lays a hand on his arm, as if to remind him of something. He nods, calms himself. “Well, you're safe now, Annie,” he says. And he takes my face in his hands and kisses the top of my head.

Yes, I'm safe. I hear the words, but I don't feel safe. Not yet.

It's like I have a lot of
unsafe
to get out of my system first. I am happy, though—​yes, happy—​but my head feels as if it will burst with it all, with everything that's going on inside it. I'm with Marni and Dad. They're talking. I'm answering. But I still feel separate somehow, as if I'm looking out from behind a kind of gauze.

We check in to the hotel and go up in the elevator to the modern family room they've given us on the fourth floor. It has a double bed, a single one in an adjoining room, and a bathroom. I look at my little bed, with my suitcase already on it, and listen to my parents' low voices in the next room. Then my father comes in. “Look what I've just found, pushed under our door,” he says, smiling. “It's addressed to you.” He hands me a little brown envelope. It has
Post office telegram: no charge for delivery
written across it. Typed below that, it says:
Anna Milton—​Arriving from Amman, hijack plane passenger, Heathrow airport.

I tear it open. Inside are two strips of paper pasted across the page and a purple ink stamp from earlier today.

= WELCOME BACK BABY HOPE YOU HAD FUN WITH THE GORILLAS

LOVE = ALI FI SPUD AND JAFFA + SENDER REQUESTS GORILLAS SPELT LIKE IT

I smile and pass it to Dad and Marni.

“What friends—” Marni says, but is interrupted by a knock on the door.

Dad opens it to a tall young man in jeans with shaggy hair and a camera around his neck. “I'm an authorized photographer, sir,” he says, showing a piece of paper. “Would you consider a picture?”

“Of course, certainly.” Dad stands aside to let the man into the room and introduces Marni and me.

“Been a tough few days for you all,” the man says, smiling.

“Slight understatement.” Dad laughs. “It really was touch-and-go at times, so we're absolutely delighted to have Anna back.”

Touch-and-go.
Is that how it was?

“Are you glad to be home, then, Anna?” the man asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“And how would you sum up your experience?”

Sum up?
I hesitate. I don't want to sum it up. “I can't,” I say. “Not yet.”

A look passes between Marni and Dad.

“I'm sorry,” I say, feeling useless, my hand feeling instinctively for the Polo mint and the badge in my pocket.

Marni stands. “If you want to take the picture now, then I think after that we'd like to give Anna a little space to recover.”

“Of course.” The man looks disappointed.

It's probably his first assignment,
I think vaguely, but I don't want to answer questions. I can't make sense of it myself, so how am I supposed to “sum it up” to a stranger?

The man arranges two chairs with their backs to the TV, in the corner. Marni and I sit on them, and Dad stands behind. Marni holds my hand. Dad has a hand on each of our shoulders.

The flash explodes. Wherever I look, I see blinding bars of white light. They lock in the man's face, his camera, his body, the patterned carpet, the window. And I'm back there—​in the desert with the guerrillas, hemmed in, lying under the seats.

I blink. I am not in the desert.

“Just one more,” says the man. “Smile, please, everyone. Say cheese.”
Oh my God,
cheese, I think, as the bars explode again.

Dad ushers the photographer to the door and stands chatting with him. Marni and I wander away to sit on the sofa.
She's right here beside me.

“I've rung school, by the way,” she says, “to say you'll be back in a few days. Think you probably need what the army would call a bit of R and R—​rest and recuperation. That's exactly what the school secretary thought too.” Suddenly Marni seems distracted, as if she's forgotten something, and I see how tired she is too.

“And . . . ?” I say, smiling.

“Yes, sorry.” Marni comes to. “And so I thought the best place to do that might be down with Birdie on the farm in Cornwall. What do you think?”