Landing (15 page)

Of course, the irony was that once Síle had started working as a flight attendant, she'd been too busy stacking, storing, serving, and chatting to look out the window.

A call from the flight deck; the first officer told her the smoke sensor in the premier toilets was lit up. She sent Jenny to knock on the door and threaten a fine. Síle bounced a carrot-stained baby up and down the plane for five minutes, and managed to make him stop crying by singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" in his ear. They passed an old woman hawking phlegm into a sick bag, and she thought of George L. Jackson, and stopped to offer a glass of water. These people were under Síle's protection: thousands and thousands of them over two decades. She did a quick sum, and discovered that over a million passengers had passed through her hands.

"More sugar? No decaf, I'm sorry. They should, I know, I've suggested it before." Nuala spattered coffee on a passenger's cuff and had to rush down the plane for a dry-cleaning claim form. "Don't fret about it," Síle said in her ear, squeezing by a few minutes later, "in my first year I spilled hot tea on a two-year-old and thought my career was over!"

"Oh thank you, sir, it is a striking uniform, isn't it; it's by Louise Kennedy."

Flashback to the ghastly eighties one: the long boxy green jacket with big pocket flaps, the blue sleeveless woolen number. Early nineties wasn't any better, with all those military buttons, shamrock buckles, and coy blouse collars. For someone who thought of herself as stylish, Síle had spent an alarming percentage of her life in ugly uniforms, it occurred to her now. She summoned up an image of her mother in the crisp lines of the Air India uniform, jaunty cap, pearls, gloves ... Her mind strayed to
Twilight Girls,
that 1959 pulp classic about an affair between two sultry stewardesses.

The first spare moment Síle got, she checked her messages. An e-mail from a cousin in Delhi announcing yet another new baby, and one from Jude.

I should be calling the Society of Canadian Archivists to thank them for the loan of their humidity measuring machine but instead I've been looking up your clan (online, you'll be glad to hear). Did you know you're a direct descendant of Heremon, fourth-century King of Ireland? There was also a Sir William Brooke O'Shaughnessy who introduced the telegraph to India, and cannabis to Western medicine...

Sometimes I say it out loud just to make it real: Síle Sunita Siobhán O'Shaughnessy. When I walked past the General Store an hour ago I saw you buying stamps, but I guess it was a hallucination.

Síle shot off a reply.

((((((((jude))))))))))

(If you were a visitor to chat rooms you'd know this means a big hug.)

A small boy in a psychedelic tracksuit is playing with his yo-yo and staring at me as if he knows I'm writing to a woman half my age (okay, 64% of my age) who somehow loves me back despite the fact that my sentences (if you can call them that) run on and on and on. At LAX the other day I saw an ad for "Apple a Day" Vitamins that advises "When you don't have the time or opportunity to eat an apple, take the equivalent nutrients in one easy-to-swallow tablet." I can literally
hear
you cracking up at that--telling me that if you ever don't have the time or opportunity to eat an apple you want to be put out of your misery with a shotgun.

Love Síle (that's an order)

Paperwork and gossip in the galley: When would management cough up the long-promised pay raise, and what good had last year's work-to-rule strike done at all? Lorraine, verging on the plump, had received an oh-so-subtle letter from personnel inviting her to join the airline's free Weight Watchers program. There were rumours about a bag of coke stashed in a cistern in the block-booked set of top-floor rooms the airline's crews used in New York. Apparently it was true about the Denver security screener who put himself through the X-ray machine to see what his brain looked like.

"Padraic, I'll hold it for you, the latch is bollocksed; Nuala's lost a nail to it already. Yeah, I've inputted it in the log twice. The bathroom's the other way, madam," Síle told a passenger, reverting to her professional voice. "Oh, you're doing your stretches, excellent. Mind your head on the locker."

And she was off on her rounds again like some peculiar nurse. "If it's in Spanish you're probably on Channel 3, try Channel 1. 400 Benson and Hedges, here you go, that's forty U.S. dollars." Peddling tobacco was the bit of her job Síle liked least. "Hang on, let's see ... miniature plane, ages three and older, no, not for a newborn. Six Waterford Crystal Tot Glasses, a Connemara Candle, and a pair of J Lo Shades, certainly."

In five hours they'd be on the tarmac. Arab airlines followed all pronouncements about time with "God willing," which seemed sensible. Unless that was another old aviation myth.

More paperwork, hot towels. "Euros or dollars? Sorry, new rules, only soft drinks are on the house in economy. On the plane, yeah, ha-ha. Yes, madam, dinner's on its way."

Considering how many passengers left their food uneaten, they were always in a hurry to get it. Since the airline had downgraded its meals, Síle brought her own: There was a Camembert and apple panino waiting for her in the rear galley. "Mind, the foil's hot. Did you ask for a non-dairy low-sodium vegetarian meal? Ah, I'm sorry, you have to order in advance. We've just run out of the chicken, I'm afraid; can I interest you in the beef? It's in ... some kind of gravy."

Síle's mother had served five-course dinners from a three-by-four-foot galley, Shay never tired of reminding his daughter.
Yeah, I know, Da,
Síle would throw back with a roll of the eyes,
waltzing and discussing Gandhi all the while.
Everything had been more chic in those days; Síle imagined that lost world in slo-mo black-and-white, violins surging on the soundtrack. Sunita Pillay offers that first clean smile to a young Dubliner flying to Bombay on his brewery's business.
My name's Shay O'Shaughnessy, and what might yours be?
Worlds touch, tremble, spin into a different orbit. The aisle of the narrow plane fades into the aisle of a church and "Here Comes the Bride."

Síle caught herself yawning, even though this was only leg two of her Friday-to-Tuesday rotation. The trick to long flights was to keep moving. What was it airlines used to say, in the bad old days when flight attendants were forced to retire upon marriage or the first crow's foot, the era of secret weddings and hidden pregnancies?
The job calls for young legs,
that was it. Ever since Marcus had taken a buyout package, he'd been nagging her about the health hazards: Cabin crew had three times the injuries of miners, apparently, and more radiation exposure than nuclear plant workers. At least schedules were better than in her mother's day, she reassured herself: Sunita had flown up to 120 hours a month, whereas Síle did an average of only seventy-three. Sometimes when she felt the energy draining out of her, in the middle of a flight, she closed her eyes, then opened them wide and became her mother, ever soignée, ever gracious, gliding down the aisle on ever-young legs.

It was at night that time went haywire, Síle thought in her hotel room, waking with a jerk from a miserable dream of playing tennis with Kathleen, the balls coming down on them both like hail. You could drop your head on the pillow and then, what felt like a moment later, struggle up to slap off the alarm: Where had those eight hours disappeared to? Or else you could lie in the dark in restless anxiety, dipping in and out of consciousness, with every hour feeling like forty days in the desert.

She conjured up Jude, or rather her absence, a hot ghost for Síle to wrap her body around. She reached for her gizmo and lit up the screen.

I used to be a great sleeper, but since meeting you I seem to have lost the knack. Sometimes I recite old pop lyrics; sometimes I work my way very slowly over your body, checking I remember every crease, every freckle. Does it count as consensual if my spirit ravishes you in your sleep? What if we're both asleep?

Last night you showed up in a sinister bonnet and a dress with a bustle--clearly this dream was inspired by your hilarious description of the school workshops. I'm insulted that I haven't infiltrated your dreams yet, Jude, but I'll just have to believe you that new people take about ten years to get processed by your subconscious. It's just that I resent being a "new person." I find myself wishing that (here comes a perverse one) I could have been present--as a fourteen-year-old towel-holder or water-boiler--at your birth. I miss all of you I know, Jude, and all of you I've never known too.

Dreams pulled so unpredictably on the fabric of time. Sometimes the night was one leisurely picture show, a cinema where you could wander from screen to screen. Identities blurred and swapped: It was your father, but he was a woman, or at least you thought so ... There were dreams that seemed to go on forever; Síle had once dreamed a whole life sentence in prison for murder, and woke up with her face clenched from years of weeping but found her cheeks quite dry. At other times you could conjure up a whole world in seconds, creating an elaborate backstory to explain the ringing of the phone that had woken you.

Why did people assume that daytime was the real life, it occurred to'Síle now? It would be hard to explain to a Martian that diurnal events counted and nocturnal ones—no matter how dramatic or memorable—didn't. In the night people journeyed far from the ones they slept beside, they lived out infinitudes of time, and in the morning they all behaved, like adulterers, as if nothing had happened.

At home on her purple sofa, lips to the receiver, she told Jude, "We never calculated your sexual density."

"Uh-oh," said Jude at the other end of the line.

Síle grinned. "Don't panic, I'm really not a jealous fiend. Full disclosure and burning love, that's all I demand."

"Okay. Chronological order?"

"Aren't you an archivist?"

"It's possible to classify in other ways; thematically, for instance—"

"Get on with the genital encounters," Síle told her.

"In high school: Sven, Pete, Dave—then Mike, oh and the other Dave..."

The rush of names startled Síle. "You had sex with all those monosyllabic boys?"

"Well, not always, uh, intercourse, but we necked. Made out in the backs of cars."

"
Necked
and
made out,
meaning, genitally?"

"Sure, we had to keep warm in the long winters. Mike was the abortion."

"That's a cruel way to describe any young man."

"You know what I mean," laughed Jude, "it was his condom that burst. And, give the guy credit, he drove me to the clinic in Toronto."

"The Dave I met, the bartender at the Dive, he wouldn't be one of the Daves you mentioned?"

She could hear Jude squirm. "He's the second, but really that was only one night at a drive-in."

"What was showing?"

"One of the
Aliens
movies."

"The first, I hope—or no, we must be talking nineties here, yeah?"

"Dunno. I think it was set on a prison planet."

Síle rolled her eyes. "The third,
not
Sigourney's finest hour. So what are we at, five? This sounds like an all-male lineup," she commented.

"Yeah, they always get that wrong in the movies, they make the girly-girl the one with all the guys in her past," remarked Jude. "Whereas in my experience it's the tomboys who hang round pool halls and cars with the guys, and fool around with them, too. But no, there were some girls too: Hannah, Sue ... some girl from Quaker Camp who used to cut her arms; this is awful but I'm blanking on her name."

"Did it feel any different with the girls?" Síle wanted to know.

No answer for a second. Then, "Sex is always different, depending on who you're with."

"Your generation's really ditched the old labels, haven't you?"

A pause. "Classic case of the limitations of phones," Jude told her. "I can't tell if you just sounded impressed or sad."

"A bit of both," said Síle, laughing a little.

"In my case—in a bunch of cases—the labels don't fit," Jude said gently. "I could sleep with just about anybody. In fact," getting there first, "I have! But I've never lost my heart till now."

"Shut your eyes, this is where I kiss you." After a minute, Síle said, "Go on with your list; you haven't even left school yet."

"'Reader, I married him,'" said Jude in a determinedly sprightly tone. "Rizla proposed the night I turned eighteen."

"What possessed you—"

"You know Gwen asks me that at least once a year?" Jude sighed. "I was furious with my parents for splitting up, but that's no excuse. Riz seemed kind of glamorous, as well as being my best bud. I guess I thought life with him would be a trip."

"Was your wedding the last time you wore a dress?"

"Actually we both wore jeans. Then when we got back from our trip to Detroit and moved into his trailer—"

"He took you to Detroit for your honeymoon?" said Síle. "The city where they can film post-apocalyptic disaster movies without building a set?"

Jude laughed. "We heard a couple of good bands. Rizla got into a stupid fight and broke his thumb. Anyway, that year we were mostly unemployed and often wasted, my mother thought I'd thrown my life away, and I was beginning to see her point. And then I realized I fancied the check-out girl at the Valumart in Mitchell much more than my husband. So I told Rizla it'd all been a big mistake."

"How did he take it?"

"Pretty well. Then I went off to plant trees in northern Ontario. It's what kids do, here, to make some cash," Jude explained.

Síle frowned. "Hang on, what about the check-out girl?"

"Oh yeah, she was Lina," said Jude.

"I'm running out of fingers," Síle commented, starting on her right thumb again.

"I had a thing with another tree-planter called Steve—though we sometimes fell asleep halfway through, we were so wiped out! Then I worked in a bar in Goderich, and I slept with..." She ransacked her memory. "Another Dave. Sorry! In Stratford there was Gwen, then Kay; Kay and I had a nice few months..."