That would clear the travelator, for sure.
‘Excuse me,’ she says loudly, and the woman ahead looks back, startled, and finally hauls in the suitcase which has been blocking the way.
Dianne is not a laid-back traveller. She’s an enraged one.
People walk too slowly in front of her in airports, stop in the middle of busy walkways and just dawdle.
In Singapore airport, they lean lazily against the side of the travelator and let their huge suitcases block the other lane so that nobody can get past.
Inevitably, they huff loudly if Dianne mutters ‘Excuse me’ to make them move their ruddy bags.
Dianne barrels past traveller after traveller, notching up more steps on her Fitbit and burning off some of her inner fire.
She wonders why this anger was never available to her before. Or why women weren’t told about getting angry.
Because it turns out, anger is fabulous.
On the outside, Dianne looks like an ordinary sixty-something lady with curled frosted-blonde hair. She’s wearing a beige comfortable tee, an indigo padded gilet and actual mom jeans as well as a nice lippie. People probably can tell she plays tennis at a mildly competitive standard.
In short, she looks like a nice, cake-baking granny until anyone really looks into her eyes.
Her eyes tell the real story.
That she’s an enraged woman with dagger-sharp senses, screamingHurry the hell up!I will stab you with my blood donor gift pencil if you don’t get the hell out of my way!
On the fourth Singapore airport travelator, Dianne yet again refrains from doing this.
I deservesomething, possibly a medal for self-restraint, she thinks, but then, getting angry at inappropriate moments is why she’s doing this long-haul journey in the first place.
Since January, she’s been on a warning from her three kids after a road rage incident culminated in The Intervention.
The Intervention is why she’s just come off an eight-hour flight from Melbourne. She’s heading on to a connecting flight to Athens, before she gets another flight to Corfu. Three flights! Of course she’s angry.
She shouldbe home waiting for Ellie’s baby to be born, but no: she’s being held up by stupid tourists with huge bags dropped all over the place, and if she doesn’t control herself, someone’s going to die.
‘The coppers could have charged you with road rage!’ Toby, her youngest, said in shock when it all began to come out in the open.
He had a pal in the police who’d told him that it was sheer fluke that Dianne wasn’t being charged over the screaming row with the Tesla driver.
‘That moron took my parking spot,’ snarled Dianne. ‘I only kicked his tyres. I could have done worse.’
‘Mum?’ said Lauren, her eldest, holding out her hands in supplication like she was about to catch a beach ball or hold a church service. ‘The police called it a serious incident. You screamed at him for ten minutes andwouldn’t let him leave the car park. What’s wrong with you?’
‘Nothing’s wrong with me!’ Dianne had shrieked back, which had turned out to be a mistake too because Ellie, middle daughter, had weighed in.
‘You never used to shout?’ whispered Ellie, sounding heartbroken and then bursting into tears. ‘I love you but you haven’t been the same since Dad died.’
Lauren, who ran an architect’s practice with a chromium hand in a chromium glove, was less emotional. She listed Dianne’s transgressions briskly.
‘You’ve fought with all your neighbours. If a kid’s ball comes into your garden, you apparently puncture it and then throw it out, which is dreadful. Now the police are involved because of your road rage. You need help.
‘So,’ Lauren continues, ‘I can only find one anger-management live-in programme and it’s full, but there’s this place in Greece, run by that woman who was on American TV with her therapy show. She can fix anyone. Rose Talisman: remember her?The Talisman Effect.She’s been off TV for years because of some disaster on her show, but still. She was good.
‘It’s a week-long stay in Corfu. Late September. It’s expensive but frankly, it’s either this island retreat or we’ll have to get you put into a psych ward.’
‘Psych ward?’ hissed Dianne furiously. ‘I’m not mad,’ she’d added in a deliberately calmer tone.
‘Yet here you are, behaving as if you’re a complete psycho,’ Lauren snapped back.
