Well, you know what they say: Don’t get mad, get Ethan.
25
‘Would your son like a bar of chocolate?’ a flight attendant asks Ethan.
‘He certainly would,’ Ethan replies. ‘Thank you.’
Ethan takes the bar of chocolate from her and hands it to Jake, who is sitting in the window seat next to me.
‘We’re sharing, right?’ Ethan checks.
‘I guess,’ Jake says with a sigh as he takes the chocolate.
Ethan doesn’t let go of it quite yet though.
‘Wait, do your real parents let you have chocolate?’ Ethan checks.
‘Yeah,’ Jake replies – but then his conscience catches up with him. ‘Well, my mum doesn’t, but my dad does.’
‘Which one lives in Australia?’ Ethan asks.
‘My dad,’ Jake replies.
Ethan lets go of the chocolate bar.
‘You’re a pushover plane dad,’ I tell him with a smile.
‘Well, we’re over international waters,’ he reminds me. ‘And we’re closer to Australia than we are the UK, so I think this falls under his dad’s jurisdiction.’
I laugh.
I was grateful, when it came time to board, and the lady at the desk said she would allocate us seats together on the plane. I didn’t really think about the fact that we might have a third person with us.
Jake, it turns out, is flying the same route to Sydney as us. He’s ten years old and currently splits his time between his divorced parents who live on the opposite side of the world to one another – I suppose that’s one way to avoid your ex.
So poor Jake is flying alone – except not all members of the flight crew seem to know that, so most of them keep assuming that Jake is our child, so we’ve taken on the role of honorary plane parents, and believe me when I say we are not strict.
After sleeping for the first stretch of the flight, it’s sort of like our daytime now. The in-flight entertainment system looks decent but it seems like the number-one way they keep you happy and distracted through long-haul flights is by feeding you and feeding you and feeding you – oh, and plying you with drinks, of course.
‘We should really make a plan, for how we’re going to handle this,’ I say to Ethan.
‘Isn’t the idea of a plan counterproductive to what we’re turning up to do?’ he points out. ‘I thought you wanted to turn up and just kind of piss around.’
‘Bad word,’ Jake ticks us off.
‘Don’t swear in front of our plane son,’ I playfully remind Ethan.
‘Sorry, Jake,’ Ethan tells him before leaning in closer to me, lowering his voice to make it more difficult for little ears. ‘So, I figured we were just going to turn up and be ourselves. That’s usually chaotic enough.’
‘That’s too chaotic,’ I remind him. ‘I need a more manageable chaos.’
‘Ooh, I’m not sure I can help you there,’ he jokes. ‘You see, with me, what you get is fires, floods, explosions.’
‘Explosions?’ Jake repeats a little too loudly.
A woman sitting in the seats over the aisle from Ethan coughs loudly. We glance over at her to see a concerned look on her face. She narrows her eyes at us, trying to work out if we might actually be plotting something. I can’t help but notice that she’s reading a copy of what looks like it would be a murder mystery (well, you don’t have to be a detective to figure out thatThe Mysterious Murder of Mr Blackis probably not a romcom) so I’ll bet she’s the type to fantasise about suddenly becoming a lead character in her own life when she happens upon something story-worthy. I can see her imagination going into overdrive.
‘No, no, no, don’t say that word on an aeroplane,’ I tell him quickly and quietly. ‘You’ll freak people out. He just means explosions like… fireworks.’
