‘That’s just a sprinkling!’ I shout, seeing the harassed, open-mouthed woman shouting back at me in the dark glass. ‘Lapland air traffic control would laugh this off!’
But, as I Google and scroll ticket sites and then wait in a queue listening to nerve-twanging jaunty hold music as I try to get through to an EasyJet operator, and then a rip-off last minute ticket broker, it starts to sink in. They all keep giving me the same answer: No flights for at least twenty-four hours.
I’m not going anywhere.
Chapter Thirty-Two
They’ve all done their best to cheer me up. All the Channel 4 and BBC presenters trying to cajole me into a Happy New Year. And this bottle of red and the selection box have done their darnedest to get me into the party spirit. But its eleven o’clock at night, an hour until the bells ring out the old year, and I’m on the sofa in a morbid slump. Mum and Dad are at Auntie Brenda and Uncle Alan’s for Twister and nibbles but I, with some relief, declined the invitation, saying I was having an early night.
What’s so happy about a new year anyway? Another twelve months of lonely slog ahead: work, cook, tidy-up, sleep, repeat. I’m not even listening to the sweet-little-Sylvie voice at the back of my brain reminding me not to be ungrateful and that I’ve got Sunday lunches at my folks’ place to look forward to, and I’ll have Nari, if she ever comes back, and there are two hundred and thirty-eight teenagers who won’t get their rocks off about Oliver chuffing Cromwell or the Bletchley Park codebreakers without me, but right now, there’s not much comfort in any of that.
The telly’s a bit blurry, I notice, as I empty the dregs of the bottle into the red-stained and finger-printed tumbler, and the light from my phone’s giving me a headache. I’ve been refreshing my notifications since four o’clock this morning when I finally gave up my impulsive search for non-existent flights, hoping for some word from Nari. Did she get there? Did her flight turn back? Did it ever take off?
‘This is the time of year we think about our loved ones and wish them well, wherever they may be,’ says a grinning, bobble-hatted Fearne Cotton from the Thames Embankment surrounded by crowds of singing, shivering drunks waiting for fireworks.
It couldn’t hurt to wish Stellan well. A little New Year message. He’ll be back at the resort after the trail by now, surely? I’ll send him something friendly and final, something nice to find as he gets back to his cabin after five hardworking days under canvas, as he peels away his layers, takes his aching body to the sauna… his aching, muscled, fit, smooth-skinned body…
I look at my phone screen. I’ve texted and sent something.
I peer with seesawing, telescoping eyesight at the kaleidoscope of dancing letters. Three texts? I’ve sent three increasingly boozy texts!
Book your flight to England and then get into my bed.
Excellent. That doesn’t sound desperate and leery at all.
Come and see me sometime. Soon. Please. X
Oh God!
Hope you have a Happy New Year. I Love You.
Right. Well, if he hasn’t fully retreated into his crazy-lady-shy man cave before, he will now.
Starting the New Year as you intend to go on, Sylvie Magnusson: a sad, pathetic, loser, all alone.
I cry, for what feels like a long time, am overwhelmed with tiredness, and then nothing.
I miss the notification at first, sleeping through the soft pinging sound. But then I sit bolt upright on the sofa, staring at my phone, just as the Embankment countdown comes to an end and fireworks pop and bang on the TV screen and all over snowy Castlewych.
