boo on Love Island before the first swingers arrive. With the terrible twins about, you could spend all that time picking hairpins out of your codpiece and never get around to checking a single bath plug. That is, if we ever get to the place.
“B.E.A. wish to announce the departure of flight 1147 to Gerona …”
I cross myself a couple of times and sneak out to join the others. I have never flown before but I know I am going to be terrified. I had intended to get pissed to the point of insensibility but Nan and Nat have put the kibosh on that.
Fortunately there is something to take my mind off the rigours to come. She is about five foot eight and wearing a uniform about two sizes too small for her so that the seam down the middle of her arse grins at you like sharks’ teeth. Her makeup looks as if it has been put on by a Chinese miniaturist and then lacquered and the expression of contempt with which she greets my gaze makes me feel like something that has crawled out from under one of her gardening shoes. As is my wont, in such circumstances, I immediately fall in love with her. Upper class disdain has always turned me on.
“This we-a, plis,” she says in a voice that sounds like Christmas Eve in Harrods. “Dee-ont fair-get your board-ink carts.” Oh, the sheer ecstasy of it. Listening to her I can understand why Mum keeps a photo of Winston Churchill in the kasi. Some are born great, and others should have been. I trip through the glass doors and she actually smiles at me. It is not so much a smile, more a flutter of the lip endings but it is all mine. Fear is temporarily abandoned and I skip down the long corridor following the image of my B.E.A.uty Queen until the boarding card is drawn gently from my unthinking fingers and I venture out into the cool evening air.
Then I become frightened. The minute I see the studded patchwork quilt of metal I wonder how many of those panels have had to be replaced. What are all those men in white overalls standing about for? They look like surgeons. Is the plane dying? Up the steps and inside and I think it is the final of the all Ireland Hurling Championships. In fact it is only everybody taking their coats off in a very limited amount of space and punching each other in the face at the same time.
“On the reeack, plis,” says my dream girl as I struggle to follow suit. “Nee-o, hee-and baggage on the flea-or.”
I manage to wedge my knees against the seat in front which is a bad move because the occupant presses the release button and nearly forces them through my chest. By the cringe, but they don’t lash out with the space in these things. I feel like I have been hung up in Shirley Bassey’s wardrobe.
I am sitting on the end of the row because that way I am nearer the exit doors and I have a quick flit through the reading matter provided. That doesn’t cheer me up much either. It is full of diagrams about how to protect your head when the plane crashes or what you have to do to inflate your life jacket. There is also a strong paper bag which I don’t reckon is there to hold your bullseyes. Miss Love at First Flight does not improve matters by popping up and explaining how to use the oxygen mask in “the unlikely event” of the cabin becoming depressurised. They don’t have to tell me about that. I saw the movie: Kersplat! – and the whole bloody lot of us sucked out through a hole in the fuselage. All this and we haven’t even taxied to the take-off point.
I look out of the window to see if the engines are on fire yet and turn my attention to my fellow passengers. Nan and Nat are five rows behind and sitting on either side of a big rugged bloke with a face like canned sunshine. He is looking pleased with himself as if he reckons he is no end of a fellow for having secured the attention of two such knock-out birds. Even in my agony I can summon up a smile. Ted is beside me, and most of the other passengers are “Fiesta Bunny” or “Sun Senor” fodder. “Men and women of the age we live in” as Sir Giles put it. I suspect that he could make two weeks in a concentration camp sound like it was good for waking up your liver.
“Fee-arson your sate belts,” says my sky angel. “Nee-o smoking until the see-ine stops flea-ashing.”
She flops down into an empty seat at the front of the plane and crosses her legs with a crackle of nylon that gets my old man airborne comfortably before the rest of the plane. I sit there looking at my white knuckles and listening to the engines’ roar getting louder and louder until the whole plane is shuddering like my Aunt’s collie when it sees the poodle from number 47.
“Made your will?” says Ted with that wry, gritty sense of humour that so characterises the British at moments of stress or adversity.
“Fuck off,” I tell him.
As if taking offence the plane suddenly leaps forward and begins to career down the runway. It soon becomes obvious to me that the pilot is gambling on picking up enough speed to get us airborne before we hit the barrier fence. On and on we go and I am pressing my nails through the palms of my hands and beginning to wonder whether we are supposed to motor the first ten miles when suddenly we are airborne. I can tell that because my stomach feels as if it is floating in formaldehyde and the ground starts disappearing at an angle of 45 degrees. This might be alright but I then hear unmistakeable sounds of the plane breaking up. A groaning, rumbling noise from directly beneath my feet. I knew this would happen. Most of them crash on takeoff.
“It’s the wheels,” says Ted who is watching my face.
“They’ve fallen off?”
“No, you berk, that’s the undercarriage being retracted.”
“Oh.”
Well that is alright, but the next thing I know we are in the middle of a great bank of cloud, where there is obviously a very good chance of bashing into another plane; and then the engines start to fail. I detect the change in tone immediately and the loss of power makes me feel that we must start plummeting towards the earth any second. “Just settling down to our cruising speed,” soothes Ted who is beginning to get on my nerves with all his well-informed chat. “They always cut back a bit after take-off.” He must be right because the “no smoking” sign goes off and the air hostess gets up and goes into the pilot’s cabin. I stop listening to every note of the engine and begin to relax. But not for long. When I look up, my genteel beauty is pushing an iron lung down the plane. I might have guessed. The pilot has had a heart attack. Oh well, it couldn’t last for ever.
“Good,” says Ted. “I feel a bit peckish.” To my surprise the air hostess then opens a door in the side of the iron lung and starts dishing out trays of grub.
“Don’t eat the knives and forks,” says Ted. I soon find out what he means. Everything is plastic, including the food. If you were both hungry and short sighted you could crunch up the whole lot.
“Tia coffee?” say the apple of my thigh, dangling her pots in front of me.
“Coffee,” I say, showing her what a smooth cosmopolitan man of the world I am. If she is impressed she goes to great pains to conceal it.
“I’d like a large brandy, please,” says Ted.
“Sartanly, Sar. I’ll sarve you as soon as I khan.”
I wish I had thought of that. Very impressive. Ted obviously knows the form.
“Same for me, please,” I chip in. I mean, it will help to soothe my nerves, won’t it?
In the course of the next hour quite a lot of nerve tonic goes down and I am beginning to feel very soothed indeed. Angela, as I discover she is called, zooms up and down like the weight on a try your strength machine and I am becoming hornier than a herd of Aberdeen Angus. You would think that after my last little encounter with the demon drink I would be on my mettle, but not a bit of it. Pausing only to down my fifth brandy and consider that the clouds outside the window look like downy pillows on a large and crumpled bed I stand up, bounce back, release my safety belt and pad down the aisle, Angela-bound. In such situations, I never know what I am going to say, or do. I just hope that something will turn up and that it won’t only be the end of my nose.
Around me my fellow passengers are beginning to lie back in their seats and nod off and the atmosphere is beginning to match the drowsy drone of the plane’s engines. I approach the toilet and glancing around observe