Make or Break

‘Why would he lie? Why would he lie?’ I tightened my seat belt, but not so much that my stomach escaped over the top. ‘Pete?’

‘Yes?’

‘Why would he lie?’

Pete shrugged and looked helpless. He’d been looking helpless ever since I’d hung up from Dad, grabbed the ‘stick cricket’ game out of his hands and had a mini existential crisis about my reality being ever so skew-whiffed.

‘Why didn’t you tell him you were standing behind him?’ He moved his elbow away from a busy lady sorting her multitude of bags, magazines, iPads and Kindles into the cramped seating area.

Cabin crew were walking the aisles snapping shut the overhead lockers and making sure everyone had their seat belts fastened. I’d already tried to sidestep one of them and slip up the stairs to business when we’d boarded, but I’d been rumbled and was guided politely but firmly to my aisle seat. I searched through my carry-on bag looking for my elusive phone.

‘Why didn’t you call him straight back?’

‘I don’t know. He got off the phone pretty quickly. And I think I was too shocked. I don’t think my Dad’s lied to me ever.’

Pete looked sceptical. A female crewmember strode past us in thick-heeled pumps telling people to put their devices on flight mode and their bags on the floor under the seat in front of them.

‘You know when you have that day where you find out your parents have lied about why Aunt Pip really went away for all that time; or told you your pimples weren’t all that big and close together, therefore defining them as acne, but the doctor took one look and stuck you on medication at a strength that would mortify Armstrong; or that all the kids your age went to bed before Will and Grace and you found out it wasn’t true? And you took your parents down from that massive pedestal and gave them a much shorter one that was easy to move them on and off of as you adjusted your view of them?’

Pete frowned.

‘Handbag under the seat now please, ma’am,’ another passing cabin crew said, giving me a smile that didn’t reach her eyes.

I nodded and continued talking to Pete.

‘Well, I never had that with Dad. If I asked him a question, I knew, knew, he was telling the truth. He would look me in the eye and say “yes darling, one of your ears is a bit lower than the other but you’re still growing, and it’ll probably even itself out eventually. But I love you even more with the wonky ears.” And I believed him. And you know what? They did even out.’ I lifted my hair and showed off my evenly allocated ear locations.

‘Maybe it’s a huge international deal with someone famous?’ Pete said, shifting away from his busy lady-neighbour who was getting liberal with a facial spray. ‘And it needs to be a secret?’

‘Hmmm . . .’

Dad’s job did involve a lot of high-profile clients and last-minute trips. Often he couldn’t tell us who the client was, or any details about the acquisition, but I’d always believed we knew where he was. The plane gave a mini lurch and began reversing away from the terminal as another crewmember bore down on us.

Pete looked flustered. ‘Put your bag under the seat,’ he hissed.

‘I just want to try and call Dad quickly,’ I said, digging elbow-deep in my cavernous tote and finally coming out with my phone. ‘He might still have his phone on.’

I had only managed to do the thumbprint thing when the cabin lady arrived at my side and said in a tight voice that I was to put my phone on flight mode and my bag under the seat in front of me immediately. A few people in the surrounding seats swivelled to gawp at the disobedient passenger and Pete got busy behind a magazine. Once we were well and truly airborne a bell sounded. The cabin crew clicked themselves out of their seats and began bustling around the service areas, walking up and down the aisle, putting their formal jackets in miniature wardrobes and doing other important things.

I unclicked my seat belt.

‘What are you doing?’ Pete said in a panicked voice, looking up and down the plane.

‘I’m going to try and get up there.’ I pulled myself to standing by the headrest of the seat in front then said sorry when I got a disgruntled scowl from the lady in the seat whose hair I’d accidentally pulled.

‘You can’t!’ Pete said, flustered. ‘The seat belt light is still on.’

‘They’re all walking around,’ I pointed to the cabin crew. ‘It’s fine.’

Pete ducked in his chair, his cheeks flushed. The plane was still climbing, so the walk to the business class stairs was uphill. As I passed one of those kitchen/service areas a crewmember stepped into my path and her face registered polite outrage.

‘Ma’am, the seat belt light is still on. You have to return to your seat,’ she said through meticulously painted red lips. Her make-up was so thick that if she went in the sun it would harden and dry like a terracotta tile.

‘I just want to pop up and see my dad,’ I said, trying to sound rational and reasonable. ‘He doesn’t know I’m on this flight and—’

‘Ma’am, it’s aircraft security. You can’t be out of your seat.’

Another crewmember stepped out from the service area, his face young yet severe. Some of the surrounding passengers stopped what they were doing to watch us.

‘That’s hardly fair,’ I said, trying to smile my way through what was rapidly becoming an embarrassing situation. ‘You’re up and walking around. How come you’re allowed and we aren’t?’

‘We’re crew and we don’t need a reason,’ the lady said with an air of dislike.

‘We’re trained in the safety aspects of this aircraft and are required to be up to perform our related duties,’ the young, severe man added. ‘It’s for your own safety.’

‘What about your safety?’

‘I’m taking you back to your seat, ma’am,’ the severe man raised his voice slightly. ‘It is the aircraft security code and you must comply.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘But I think the aircraft law needs some revisions.’

‘OK,’ the man said, but the undertone was ‘fuck you’.

A little while later the seat belt signs were turned off but a drinks trolley blocked my exit.

‘Anything to drink, ma’am?’ said an entirely new female crewmember with a genuine smile.

The face-spraying lady next to Pete took off her earphones, asked for wine and set about rearranging her magazines and notebooks and iPads and pens. Pete flipped down his tray table and requested water and when my turn came I ingratiatingly asked for a gin and tonic. I thought I’d explain to this nice-faced air hostess my need to get up to business, but before I could open my mouth, Face Spray Lady had bumped Pete’s elbow who spilt his water over my tray table making me jerk my tonic can to the left just as I was opening it, and the nice-faced air hostess got drenched and became death-faced air hostess.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’ I said, looking at her sodden skirt.

‘Sure you are,’ she spat while dabbing pointlessly at her skirt with a miniature napkin.

I shot Pete a ‘whoops’ grimace. He gave my arm a brief squeeze of commiseration then fiddled with the entertainment remote. The face-spray lady sipped her wine, read her magazine and tapped at her iPad oblivious to the mess she’d gotten me into.

‘I won’t try going up there until the lights are off,’ I confessed to Pete a little while later, as the smell of airline food wafted down the aisle. ‘I think I’m on their radar as a nuisance.’

Pete looked up and caught wet skirt lady giving me a sideways glance of extreme distaste. ‘You think?’ he said with a cynical smile.

The food trolley parked next to us and Face Spray Lady made a fuss about chicken or beef as she wanted the sides that came with the beef but not the beef, Pete ordered the chicken and received it with a striking smile, twinkling eyes and a dash of flirting, and when I too requested the chicken I was icily told they’d run out and was thrust the sweaty beef casserole. Dinner service got cleared, another drinks trolley stopped by (I said no to a beverage hoping that by declining magnanimously I could get the crew back on side), and finally the lights were dimmed. I checked in with Pete, who wished me an unenthusiastic ‘good luck’ and donned his earphones, then unclicked my seat belt for my skulk up to business under the cover of darkness. Like a ninja. One with big boobs and no weaponry, lethality or co-ordination. I made it halfway up the aisle undetected and was approaching the galley, where the curtain had been pulled across to shield the snoozing passengers from the bright lights. I was close enough to hear the sound of cabin crew gossip when a woman one seat ahead got up, opened the curtain and asked for water, throwing a shaft of incriminating light on my passing form. The gathered cabin crew’s megawatt smiles dropped and I was greeted with narrowed eyes.

‘What happened?’ Pete said as I slid into my seat, a sourfaced escort loitering a few steps behind, making sure I stayed put.

‘I’m being victimised,’ I said. ‘Wet skirt lady has turned them all against me. Apparently I’m a “safety concern” and I’m to stay in my seat.’

Pete tried to suppress a smile as he laid a blanket over me.

‘I think my basic human rights are being violated in some way,’ I continued, allowing Pete to recline my seat. ‘I’m going to look it up when I get off this plane.’

‘But you’re not going to try going up there again, are you?’ Pete said, looking worried.

I thought about that for a minute. I tightened my seat belt further and flicked the inflight magazine with force. ‘No. No, I want to sit here and think.’

‘OK,’ Pete said with relief, his fingers hovering over the entertainment remote. ‘Do you . . . want me to think with you?’

‘Maybe he thought you said “How was Scotland” not “How is Scotland”,’ Pete said twenty minutes later in response to my ‘Maybe he’s buying a retirement apartment for him and Mum?’ His earphones were hanging round his neck and the opening credits for a documentary about a footballer were on pause on his entertainment screen.

‘Mmm . . . maybe . . .’ I said, running that possibility through my shit detectors. It was plausible. Dad was a vagueish sort of man so maybe he hadn’t really listened to me properly. Maybe I didn’t realise how vague, and he really had thought he was in Scotland? No, he’d definitely lied. Nobody could confuse Heathrow Tarmac with Scottish Highland. Not even my father, who once confused my sister’s face cream with white sauce and ate it with his vegetables. ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ I said, looking into his brown, concerned (or were they annoyed . . .?) eyes. ‘I’m just panicking.’

‘You are.’

‘Sorry for being a psycho.’

‘I’m used to it,’ he said with a grin.

I leant across and gave him a kiss. ‘You can watch your documentary now,’ I said, and Pete instantly did just that.

Within half an hour Pete was in a deep sleep. He was perpetually exhausted these days; the arduous trip from Streatham to Virginia Water was taking its toll. We’d had many discussions about moving closer to work, but I just didn’t think Annabelle was ready to be on her own and I loved Pete for being so understanding about it. Although recently his ‘understanding’ had been wavering. His boss had given him more responsibility; he had to be at school early three mornings a week to take the senior boarders on a six-mile run before breakfast, and Pete had been suffering with the additional hours. Lana had wanted to train me up to be a producer, which would have meant more money, and more money meant Pete and I might be able to afford to buy our own flat. Or at the very least, not have Dave the Body Confetti (dandruff) flatmate. But I had turned her down. The producer role came with more money but it also came with more hours. Hours I was not yet prepared to spend away from Annabelle and the kids. I liked knowing that twenty-five minutes after I clocked off at 5.30 p.m., I would be walking through Annabelle’s front door. Lana was supportive and had said the job was there when Annabelle and I were ready. Pete was less so. I rested my hand on Pete’s and even in his conked-out state his thumb gripped my pinky. I decided that if Annabelle coped on her own this trip, we could start to look at flats on the other side of London. And maybe I would talk to Lana about the producer role.

Unable to sleep, I flicked through Pete’s highlighted Lonely Planet and printed pages from TripAdvisor while coming up with all sorts of probabilities as to why Dad would have lied. The obvious ones, of course: affairs; drug deals; Dad had the sudden urge to tan; but none really fitted his MO. I kept coming back to how unlikely any of them were and that Pete must be right. Dad had thought I’d asked how was Scotland, he was talking in the past tense when he’d said ‘Lovely views’ and the only reason he was on his way to Cape Town was because the Russian had decided he didn’t want a cold Scottish isle as a gift for his five-year-old, he wanted a warm African one with nesting turtles and endangered lizards for little Saskia to collect and put in her giant terrarium.

At 11.03 a.m. we touched down and before the pilot had even uttered the whole spiel about welcoming us ‘to this land of sun and braais’, and the lie that is ‘we’ve loved having you on this flight and can’t wait to see you again’, I was out of my seat.

‘Come on,’ I urged Pete through the throng of bleary-eyed bodies un-creaking their limbs in the aisle and getting items out of overhead luggage.

‘OK.’ He yawned and allowed me to drag him forward by the sleeve.

Despite the lady next to him constantly fussing with face mists, flight socks, rehydration salts and various reading materials, Pete had managed to get about four hours’ kip. I hadn’t. Not a wink. I can function on little sleep during the week but will often crash at the weekends. Pete says the inability to stop myself falling into a coma-like slumber at 2 p.m. every Saturday is not ‘functioning’, but I know no other way. My family are nappers. We like to snooze. We must have been Mediterranean at one point in our ancestry, but no one’s bothered to find out. Probably too busy napping. We were at the very back of the plane so it took us an inordinate amount of time to disembark. Once off the aircraft we trudged along the terminal corridors following signs for Passport Control. I scanned the crowds looking for Dad while dialling his number. And then my phone died.

‘Can I have your phone?’ I held out my hand while keeping up the brisk pace.

‘What for?’ Pete said, pulling it from his jeans pocket.

‘I need to call Dad.’ I rolled my eyes like, hello, what alternative universe have you been visiting?

‘I don’t have his number.’ Pete rubbed at his eyes with a fist like a tired toddler. It made my heart melt.

‘You don’t?’

‘Why would I?’ he said, breaking into another yawn. ‘I never call him and if I did he’d most likely have lost his phone again. Or forgotten how to use it.’

That was fair. Dad often forgot how to use a mobile phone between calls. The only number I knew by heart was Annabelle’s. I dialled it.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Dad was on our plane!’

‘Cool,’ Annabelle said in her usual nothing-phases-me manner. ‘You guys going to hang out?’

‘What? No!’ I said. ‘Dad was supposed to be in Scotland. Don’t you think it’s odd he’s suddenly getting on a plane to Cape Town?’

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘No. The Air Hostess Gestapo wouldn’t let me up in business.’

‘I’d love to fly business,’ Annabelle said dreamily. ‘Just once. I wouldn’t even care where I was going. I just—’

‘Focus, Annabelle!’

‘On what?’ she said, amusement at the edge of her voice. ‘The fact that Dad, who works overseas, was spotted getting on a plane? Shall I alert MI5?’

‘Can you just call him?’ I huffed. ‘My phone died and Pete doesn’t have his number.’

‘No, you call him. I’ll send Dad’s number to Pete, OK? I’m taking the kids to the pools.’

‘By yourself?’ Mum usually helped Annabelle on Saturday mornings. She would stay with Hunter while he did his lesson and Annabelle would take Katie for a paddle in the toddler pool.

‘Yes. By myself.’ Annabelle said, and she’d gone from amused to annoyed.

Pete tapped my shoulder and pointed to his sports watch. According to Pete and Priya’s secretly organised schedule I was due at Priya’s bridesmaid brunch and we needed to get through Customs.

‘OK, I have to go. Don’t forget to send Pete Dad’s number.’

‘Doing it as soon as I hang up.’

We said our goodbyes as Pete and I arrived in the cavernous Passport Control. It was remarkably busy and Dad was nowhere to be seen. Pete’s phone pinged with the text from Annabelle.

‘Maybe Mum isn’t actually on a silent lentil retreat?’ I said as I dialled Dad’s number. ‘Maybe she and Dad have booked a dirty trip away and decided to keep it a secret?’

Pete wrinkled his nose.

‘Nah, you’re right.’ I shook my head. ‘It’s not very them.’

‘And too gross.’

‘Way too gross.’

Dad’s voicemail came on. I didn’t leave a message, knowing full well that Dad never checked them. We skirted around people looking up at signs or conferring in foreign tongues about how to complete the Customs arrival forms and joined the back of another long queue. I kept looking for Dad, even though I knew business class would’ve been first off the plane and would have sailed through Customs already. At Baggage Reclaim I did the same, even though his frequent-flyer priority baggage status meant he was one of the first to receive his luggage, and was often already exiting the airport while economy clientele were still hobbling to the carousel trying to reinstate normal blood flow to their kinked extremities. We stepped out into the arrival hall and, while doing a cursory scan for Dad, saw a man holding a tatty piece of cardboard with ‘JESS ROBERTS-SCHIELE’ written in almost-run-out black Sharpie.

I pointed to his sign. ‘Hi. That’s me.’

‘Hello, Jess!’ The man grinned and held out a hand for me to shake. ‘I’m Trust. Welcome to Cape Town!’

‘Trust?’ Pete said, shaking his hand also. ‘As in trust you”?’

‘Just like that,’ the grinning man said and he seemed very satisfied with our comprehension. ‘You Miss Priya’s friends? Come for the wedding? You staying at her apartment?’

I don’t know why he was asking, as he clearly knew everything but we said yes, yes and yes anyway.

‘Give to me,’ Trust said, taking my case and hoisting Pete’s backpack over his shoulder, despite Pete’s alpha male protestations. ‘Come,’ he said and made an authoritative track through the crowds.

The automatic doors to outside opened and we were hit by face-in-the-toaster-level heat. Not sticky and humid like I’d experienced in Majorca one summer but hot, dry and everywhere; back of the neck, behind the ears, behind the knees, nostrils. Everywhere. Africa was one big wood-fired pizza oven. We reached a parking ticket machine and as Trust fed in some ratty-looking notes he noticed me fanning myself with my open passport.

‘This hot for you?’ he asked with a smile.

I nodded. Trust, in jeans, closed shoes and a collared polo shirt in a fabric I deemed far too thick for this level of sun power, looked surprised.

‘You wait,’ he said and grinned. ‘It’s early now. Much hotter later.’

I decided I’d be wearing cheesecloth and netting for the duration.

‘Come,’ Trust said again, heading towards a covered car park.

We trotted behind him, weaving around people and trollies and luggage and vehicles and arrived at a white Transit van.

‘No, no,’ Trust said as Pete tried to help him with the bags. Everything he did was with a huge white grin. ‘You get in.’

I was about to climb in, hoping the van had arctic-like air conditioning, when I spotted Dad wheeling his suitcase at the far end of the car park. I knew my father’s unhurried gait anywhere.

‘There he is!’ I said, gripping Pete’s arm. ‘DAD!’ I yelled, but it got lost among the concrete pillars and the reunited people chattering on their way to their cars.

‘Where?’ Pete’s head swivelled left and right.

I gasped. ‘He’s with a woman!’ A slim lady with a flank of shiny caramel-blonde hair walked alongside Dad in a cream and gold jumpsuit, which sounds a little Mariah Carey but looked very Condé Nast – Italian Coast feature. ‘DAD!’ I yelled again, watching him place his suitcase into the boot of a gleaming white Range Rover Discovery.

They were too far for me to run over. By the time I got even halfway they’d be driving out of the car park. I grabbed Pete’s phone again and dialled Dad’s number. It went straight to his answer service again.

‘She’s probably a client,’ Pete said, finally spotting the pair, but as Dad’s arm moved to the small of the lady’s back his face creased with concern.

‘We have to follow him.’ I threw Alice (the camel bag) in the van’s middle row of seats, jumped in after her and looked back at Pete expectantly.