the yellow-tailed one, he said, adding that he hoped the poor panic-stricken souls on board wouldn’t have too much longer in there. We were informed that there would be a tail wind so our flight time to Cork would be just fifty minutes.
I had been panic-stricken myself when I’d turned on the early news and heard that Stansted happened to be the airport designated to receive hijacked planes for London. The report had said that the place was closed off but in the end I’d had no trouble getting there despite the busy late-summer roads, driving in through the TV cameras and tight groups of uniformed men with guns on their hips.
I was glad now that I hadn’t rung my father, alarming him with fears of a long delay. I thought of how thrilled he and my mother would be that I’d actually seen the hostage jet with its canary yellow markings. They had always relished random misfortune, a good disaster; a motorway pile-up, a plane crash, a sinking ferry. Pulling their chairs around the television they would tut and invoke the blessings of God on the poor victims of chance, crossing themselves when a body-bag appeared. Extra interest would be provided for my father if there was any suggestion of sabotage or treachery. Then he would follow the story for weeks, poring over newspapers and cursing the bifocals he had never mastered. The grassy knoll in Dallas had provided him with years of satisfying theory and counter theory; sometimes he would favour the CIA conspiracy then after reading another book he’d switch to KGB and/or Cubans as the assassins of JFK. My mother’s attention span was shorter; such reports confirmed her view that life was a series of catastrophes waiting to pounce and so she would mark time until the next, uninterested in fine details. After a solemn prayer for the dead and wounded, uttered in a devout voice while fingering her St Christopher medal, she was ready to turn to a quiz show.
It seemed to me that St Christopher was a disappointment as a patron saint. Travellers who were supposedly under his protection regularly met death and injury. Unlike St Anthony, who in my experience always helped to find lost articles, he wasn’t up to the job. Either he’d been given an appointment beyond his reach or he was a slacker. I once mentioned this facetiously during my late teens, when I was home from university. I used to enjoy baiting my mother and seeing her colour rise. I had secretly abandoned the stranglehold of Catholicism by then and thought myself a bit of a sophisticate. I viewed my mother’s fervent, superstitious belief with distaste bordering on loathing.
There had been a horrific train crash near Bombay. My mother had been expressing pious sentiments about the lost souls over steak and chips. I felt the food sticking in my throat and wanted to be cruel in the way that young people do who see their parents as stuffy obstacles to progress. I commented coolly on St Christopher’s apparent shortcomings, suggesting that maybe they could do with a good management consultant in Heaven, someone who would look at personal specifications and psychological profiles. It must be hard being stuck with a job for eternity; you’d get stale, bored, itchy to try something else. Maybe there should be a big shake-up, with roles reorganized; St Christopher might have a talent for music while St Cecilia could prove skilful at protecting travellers. My mother, unsure of my point but understanding the intended mockery, returned her usual riposte; it was a lot of good my ejicayshun had done me if it had turned me into a jeering Judas. She didn’t know now why they’d ever sent me to the Jesuits because all they’d done was made me smart. She’d waved a chip at me before dipping it into ketchup. ‘Smartness won’t cut the mustard with St Peter,’ she’d stated, satisfied that I’d get my comeuppance at a later date.
As we were lifted into the air I saw a jeep crawl towards the hijacked plane and I could hear myself describing the scene to my parents, beefing it up; the waiting ambulances and fire engines, a glimpse of a famous reporter who was always sent to disasters standing by the verge and smoothing her hair back between takes. They referred to all the major reporters as if they were old friends. ‘There’s Bill,’ my father would say, swishing the teapot and pointing the spout at the screen. ‘Hasn’t he put on a bit of weight?’ my mother would comment, adding that he’d been in Paris last week, probably living it up at the Moolan Rooge and the Folly Berger. ‘Ye’d better watch the waistline,’ she’d admonish Bill, wagging her finger at him.
Tiny cups of coffee and bite-sized biscuits were delivered by a stewardess. I sipped and crunched at this miniature doll’s house fare, listening to the two women in front of me.
‘Of course Ireland’s the place to be right now,’ the blonde was saying.
‘Is that so?’ Her brown-haired companion’s scalp was showing through thin hair.
‘Oh yes; very much a thriving scene. Films being made, celebrities buying homes; Mick Jagger, Liz Hurley. I think Madonna showed an interest. There’s been lots of articles in the English papers about the quality of life and lack of pollution.’
‘Not a second-rate land of bogs and mists any more then.’
‘Oh, not at all. The economy’s growing. Youngsters who emigrated are returning. Even the North isn’t putting people off now. And of course there are generous payments to the old, you’re getting retired English people crossing the water.’
I nodded my agreement. That had been one of the lures that had drawn my parents back to the homeland they’d emigrated from after the war. Letters from my father’s brother crowing about free telephones, fuel and subsidized electricity had been dissected and wondered over. Sums were done and a decision was made, when my father turned sixty-five, to return to ‘God’s own country’. They had sold their modest terraced house in Tottenham for an eighties-inflated profit beyond their dreams, bought a cottage twenty miles from Cork and banked the difference.
I’d visited as often as I could during the ten years they’d lived there, every spring and autumn and usually at Christmas. They wrote regularly; that is my mother wrote and my father added a line or two at the bottom. My mother’s writing was large, her As formed in Celtic style. Her letters were a challenging stream of consciousness because of her scatter-gun punctuation. She strewed full stops with abandon, confusing the meaning; a question mark or even several question marks lined up together were likely to appear in the middle of a sentence where there was no enquiry and odd thoughts were scribbled in the margins, such as ‘price of butter gone mad altogether’ or ‘didn’t Mother Teresa look terrible sick last week’. My father’s cramped hand always said the same thing; ‘Your mother’s given you the full works. Hope all is well as it is with us here, T.G.’
The letters spoke of a woman who missed the bustle of London, a woman who’d forgotten that rural silences can freeze you as effectively as any ice. She complained about the price of food, the scarcity of good-quality vegetables, the rain, the lack of a Sainsburys in Fermoy, the battle against the damp along the back wall of the kitchen, the ratty dog from the farm up the road who terrorized their rabbits. There was always a long section dwelling on her major preoccupation, her health; sciatica, rheumatism, water retention, nervous headaches, hot and cold tingles, acid stomach, palpitations and sluggish bowels were listed with the types of agonies they caused. Pain was stabbing, rippling, smarting, shooting, twingeing, griping or throbbing. An exhaustive list of the most recent medicines she had been prescribed was given, with queries about the side effects of the little yellow tablets or the black and red capsules; could they be causing the dizziness or the morning nausea? I could never make my mother understand that as a physiotherapist, I did not have a doctor’s medical knowledge. She knew that I had been to university and sometimes wore a white coat; therefore I should be clued up. The last part of the letter would feed me news of my brother in Hong Kong and I assumed that they did the same to him about me. He and I exchanged birthday and Christmas cards.
And then, just four days ago, an envelope arrived addressed in my father’s hand. I picked it up, knowing that something must be wrong for long-standing routine to be broken. My mother had had a touch of women’s trouble, the brief note inside said, and she was in the hospital for a couple of days while they did tests. Women’s trouble; what on earth could he mean? My mother was well past the page where that euphemism was usually applied, alluding to gynaecological problems.
I rang him, always a difficult manoeuvre as he was partially deaf, and he sounded relieved to hear me. Too relieved, I thought, a small bell of alarm sounding. I’d get a locum in and fly over, I told