There’s a beat where she looks at me as though I’ve completely lost my mind. Her mouth droops open, as if this unthinkable notion is clouding her ability to form the next sentence. A brief line from my final year dissertation pops into my brain.The average human will react in an adverse and regrettable manner to a situation at least twenty-seven times over the course of their lifespan. And even more so if they have an overbearing, out-of-touch mother.
She is simply making me more determined to see this hasty and impulsive decision of mine through.
‘Call us when you get there, love,’ my mild-mannered dad says gently while my mother resumes her wailing.
‘I’ll try.’ I shrug helplessly. ‘I suppose I can use the landline in the LoveIt head office for emergencies.’
My mother stops howling. ‘No phones? No…’ She pauses to put a hand to her chest as she takes an unusually loud, and unnecessarily deep, inhale through her nostrils before continuing. ‘Not even a phone box at the end of the street?’
‘I’m not sure. But I’ll write instead. I’ll send a postcard. Apparently there might be a postal service once a month.’
It’s like a red rag to a bull. My mother is recovering herself at an alarming pace. ‘Once a month?Once a month!Is it a third-world country? How are the letters getting here? By carrier pigeon?’
My father is quick to intervene. ‘A postcard every now and then would be lovely, Maddie. Just you go and have a great time.’ He pats my shoulder with one hand while clutching his unwanted purchase from Tie Rack with the other (a perfect melting pot of a pushy assistant, a pushy wife and a pushover father too polite to disagree that an orange tie with Dalmatians on will go with anything). We’ve already hugged so he understands there’s no need to drag this out.
‘You can ring the LoveIt head office and leave a message for me on the answering machine,’ I say to Mum gently, trying to calm her down. ‘I left the number in the phonebook in the hall, by the phone.’Under ‘L’ for Leave me to it.
‘But what if you hate it and want to come home and they won’t let you?’
‘I won’t want to come home.’
‘What if they want to kidnap you and sell your kidneys? Or… or worse? Then what will you do?’ She rests a finger on her cheek, waiting as though I should have already given thought to each of these scenarios.
‘I really have to go. I can’t miss my flight.’ I step towards her and cup her face in my hands. ‘Try not to worry so much. LoveIt Holidays are a reputable tour operator. I had to go throughthreeback-to-back, twenty-minute interviews to get the job. They wouldn’t let anything happen to me. Holiday reps are treated like royalty out there. And statistically Turkey has one of the lowest crime rates in Europe.’
‘They would say that, wouldn’t they?’ she huffs in a sulky tone, refusing to make eye contact.
‘Who? Who would say that?’ I’m beginning to lose patience with her as I step back and shift the weight of my backpack to the other shoulder.
‘The kidnappers!’ My mother throws her hands in the air and attracts the attention of the security guard standing nearby. She is becoming borderline hysterical.
I look beseechingly at my dad, but he’s way ahead of me. ‘Righto. Time to leave Maddie to get on with it. She’s a big girl, Pauline. Let her live her life the way she wants to. You said all this when she wanted to go to university and look, apart from the nose ring, she got through that okay, didn’t she?’
For context, my mother had leapt from happy-go-lucky, studious daughterwithouta nose piercing, to dropout daughter, shacked up with some deadbeat junkie, forced to work the streets to feed his habit… in less than a nanosecond. She was over the moon when it got infected and had to be surgically removed.
My dad continues to drive home his point. Bless him. ‘We were already married with a bun in the oven at her age. She’ll be fine, dear.’ He takes her arm and drags her gently away as I wave them off. My mother is twisting around and yelling across the terminal.
‘They don’t have toilets you know. Holes in the…’ My dad increases his speed, but my mother is still determined. ‘Holes in the…’ She points to the floor.
Breathe in… breathe out.This demented woman gave birth to me. It is only natural that she would worry and fear the worst for her precious only child.
* * *
Twenty-five minutes later, I’m walking up the stairs to board a Boeing 737 and on my way to start the ‘adventure of a lifetime’ as I’m now calling it, mostly to stave off a heart attack. If I wasn’t so embarrassed at the fuss I’d made about leading such a thrill-seeking life as far away from Dillon as is possible, I’d turn around and go back home. This gallivanting is wildly out of my comfort zone.
When I get to the top of the world’s ricketiest stairs, the flight attendant lowers his aviator shades and flicks his cigarette butt forcefully with a yellow-stained middle finger. It is propelled at speed outside the door of the aircraft onto the tarmac. He winks at me as though the burning missile hadn’t just whizzed past, an inch from my eye. ‘Lovely jubbly. Let’s see that boarding card of yours, sweetheart.’
I hand it to him as he leans in, his stale, smoky breath in my face. He reads my seat number out, as though I hadn’t thought to check it myself. Or maybe he thinks no one else can read, as he makes lingering eye contact before handing it back.
‘Need any help?’ he says in such a lascivious way I basically recoil.
And while I’ve hardly been a roaring success on the dating scene, I roll my big, sad-looking eyes (I’ve been told by men on numerous occasions tocheer up, love). ‘I’m sure I’ll find it, thank you. I mean, how difficult can counting to four be?’
He throws his head back and laughs, lighting another cigarette. ‘Good one. Playing hard to get. Shabba!’
Shabba Ranks topped the charts two years ago; why are people still yelling his name? The song wasn’t even that good.
The plane is jampacked, the aisles blocked with people pushing and shoving, swinging bags into overhead bins, bumping into each other in a chaotic, zombie-like fashion. Glassy-eyed passengers reeking of booze are moving against the tide because they can’t find their seat. I regard the tangle of limbs.
