Page 12 of I’m Dreaming of a New York Christmas

‘Oh, we haven’t paid for hold luggage,’ Mum said casually.

‘What?! But look how much we have! Your ginormous holdalls don’t even have wheels!’

‘Aha, but they have handles,’ Anneka replied, tugging at one of the small straps as if I’d never seen one before.

‘I’m not sure the presence of canvas loops will be enough to deceive the system, Anneka.’

‘It’ll be fine, Flo. Don’t stress. I’ve watched some YouTube videos – we just need to style it out.’

Given that I’d never styled anything out in my entire life, how did they expect me to be able to suddenly switch on airport stealth mode as if I was some kind of sleeper agent?

Sleepy agent, more like.

I smiled at my private joke and considered saying it out loud to Mum and Anneka, but they were focused on paperwork and passports as we made our way to the security queue.

Shit! Passport!

‘Umm, I’m sorry to say that I don’t have my passport.’

A flicker of hope ignited in my belly. Maybe this would scupper the entire—

‘You mean this passport?’ Mum replied coolly, interrupting my JOMO fantasy and shaking my precious ID in front of my face like a Polaroid picture.

Fuck.

‘Wait. Where did you find that?’ I looked at Mum, unsure whether to narrow my eyes accusatorily or widen them in fear.

‘Why are you squinting? Anyway, it was in your bedside drawer.’

Just as I’d feared. ‘You… you looked in my bedside drawer?’

Mum shrugged. ‘There was nothing in there that concerned me, Flo. To be quite honest with you, I was kind of relieved.’

‘Mum!’

Passing through security was as stressful as I’d known it would be. I, of course, had to empty out my backpack under the watchful eye of security when a ‘sharp, metal object’ showed up on the X-ray machine. It turned out Anneka had packed my tweezers (‘What?! All I’m saying is that your eyebrows could do with a little tidy-up!’), and insisted on plucking seven of my ‘stragglers’ there and then before the tweezers were binned.

‘How much time do we have before the flight?’ I asked, eyeing up the departure lounge’s bookshop while rubbing my sore, freshly attacked browbone.

‘No time at all!’ Anneka said, as she cast her eyes upwards at the information screen, before swivelling on her heels and making a beeline for a corridor of departure gates. ‘Our gate’s already been announced!’

It shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did that we’d arrived at the airport in the nick of time. For a moment, I almost felt grateful that I hadn’t been privy to any logistical information, since it’d prevented me from feeling any anxiety about the prospect of being late. But then I realised that all the anxiety I was feeling about this trip far outweighed all theoretical worries anyway.

For the seventy-eight-millionth time in my life, I wished I had been born as carefree as Anneka – or as stubbornly resilient as Mum. Anneka had always been one of those unflappable people who never seemed to be concerned about what the future might or might not hold. It was as if she was rooted in the here and now, yet also able to bend and flex with the wind, whichever way it happened to blow – like the time she got made redundant from her ‘soul-sucking office job’ but had ended up running a doggy daycare business for all her ex-colleagues – and making way more money that way. Mum, on the other hand, wasn’t flexible per se, just totally unwilling to confront anything that might end up challenging her way of life. And her way of life had always been dominated by cheeky grifting and obsessive thrifting.

In short, if Anneka was a ‘fight’, Mum was a ‘flight’ – running away from anything that might threaten her status quo. I, on the other hand, was undoubtedly a ‘freeze’, my instincts forcing me to shut down whenever something unscheduled reared its head. And this trip was as unscheduled – and unexpected – as it came.

It took about ten minutes to walk to the gate in question. And then it all became clear. Not only because of the destination airport listed at our gate, but by the sudden sound of Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York blaring from Anneka’s phone next to my ear, accompanied by their delighted squeals.

New York. New. Bloody. York.

Yes, I’d always dreamed of going there. In fact, the plan had been for me and Will to go to NYC next December for our honeymoon once we’d saved up some money after the wedding. Had I told Mum and Anneka about this plan? Maybe in passing, at most. That said, they’d always known how much I loved the many on-screen depictions of the city we’d watched together over the years. Come to think of it, our nights in watching re-runs of nineties New York-set shows like Friends and Sex and the City were probably the only times all three of us had felt relatively comfortable in each other’s company back when we’d lived under the same roof. And watching Home Alone 2: Lost in New York every Christmas Eve was the closest thing we’d ever come to establishing a festive family tradition.

But did any of that mean I wanted to go to New York with them? Hell, no. And yet here I was, at the departure gate for JFK. With, somehow, zero choice in the matter.

I tried to imagine what Will would say to me in this situation to reassure me. He’d probably try and game-ify the circumstances, suggesting I should pretend to be part of a Race Across the World team or something, with a giant prize waiting for me at the other end. At this moment in time, the only prize I wanted was a bed.

Just aim for that bed, then, Flora.