1. Outdated
It was raining at the airport. Fat grey droplets pouring down from an invisible shower head. They had started as soon as the taxi had driven away, so my mother had insisted on accompanying me all the way to the Gate I was leaving from. Stupid rain. I remembered one of the playground myths that used to be part of my life, about how it was God pissing out of the sky. I almost laughed, but it wouldn’t come. The joke was tinged with regret at having to leave that innocent child behind me. I worried about how quickly she had accustomed herself to the “Real World”.
I was on a plane, headed for a place I didn’t care about. My mother had told me about it: things I should’ve known, like which flight I was to catch, and then things I didn’t need to know. Didn’t want to know. Like whom it was I was going to stay with. It scared me how little I could remember about the place I was leaving. I could visualise my bedroom, strewn with clothes and cups of moulding tea, but I couldn’t remember the view from the window. I could imagine the colour of my mother’s hair, but not her face, even though I had only left her half an hour ago.
I peeled my face away from the tiny plane window, my cheek sticky with the condensation. It was like a hundred people were breathing in a tin can. I wiped the smear my skin had made off of the reinforced plastic: it bothered me.
“Miss?” I looked up to see the stewardess assigned to look after me, perched in the aisle. She looked like a Barbie Doll™, all –plastic skin and bright nylon hair. She belonged in a plastic-fronted box on a shelf, twisted bits of wire confining her limbs to a single position. Or maybe in Butlins, if she was lucky.
When I had been introduced to her at the airport, I had noticed that her name tag read, “Shelley”. I had doubted that was her real name. My mother, who, in a real situation would have been quicker with the Barbie jokes than me, instead thanked Shelley in a bravado attempt at friendliness. She turned to hug me, brushing her face past mine quickly, as if she could hide the tears in her eyes. My sweater had got wet – I had had to take it off. That was why I was cold.
“Miss?” she asked again; her botoxed face didn’t show the same concern her voice did, “Are you enjoying your flight, so far?”
“Yes?” It was a question.
“Anything I can get you miss?”
“No.”
“Well we’re due to take off any moment, so if there’ s anything you need, don’t hesitate to ask.” She waited for a few more seconds, and when I didn’t reply, she left me alone.
We had been ‘due to take off any moment’ for the last fifteen minutes, and already I had started to face the prospect of having to wait until the morning for another flight. I wanted a clean break: I was on the plane and there was no going back. So I hoped that this time, ‘due to take off any moment’, meant ‘due to take off any moment’.
I pulled my sweater back on. It was better to be wet than cold, I thought, and I was shivering like crazy.
I picked up the safety guide in my seat and thumbed through it, pretending to take in the images, whilst really my mind was elsewhere. It was ahead of me, not bound by the need to travel physically, already at my destination. The only thing I was looking forward to about Texas was the heat. It rained too much in here.
I vaguely heard the plane rumble and the static pilots voice instruct me to put on my seatbelt. I already had it on. The plane started to leave the airport, rolling itself onto the runway. I was immune to the stress of taking off. I felt numb- and the shock of what I was doing hit me. I started to sit up and I unclipped my seatbelt. The light pinged on above my head, and down the aisle I could see Shelley hurrying towards me. But I wanted off the plane. I wanted to go back- I had made the wrong choice. ‘No- let me off!’ I wanted to shout, but I couldn’t, I was paralysed. The phrase, ‘to live or to die’ flashed through my head. And I knew that if I went to Texas I would surely be the one to die. What was I thinking? I was mad to go- crazy, suicidal!
“Miss, please sit down!”
I snapped out of my panic; and then I was thinking properly again. Shelley looked ruffled; she was probably worrying that it was her charge causing trouble. Not that it was me. I looked down at my black Mary-Jane’s and found something normal in them. So I sat down and did up my seatbelt.
“Sorry,” I spoke, “I…don’t know what I was thinking.” Shelley retreated.
That was odd. I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I shouldn’t be here. And though I had reclaimed my sweater, I still felt the occasional shiver down my back.
But I shook off the feeling, I’m a sceptic. I don’t believe in ghosts. Or superstitions. Or weird feelings that you just cant shake off. My life isn’t a storybook, I remembered. If it was- I’d be one of those characters the writer gives up on. I’m easy to write out- I have no colour, no spark. My mother is the most precious person in my life, and Sue is the least. I’m supposed to call her mom as well, but she’s not even that. She was just one of my dad’s ex girlfriends, just like mum, and we used to get along, until she married a jerk and had three jerk-babies. Dustin is sixteen, just like one of the jerks from my old school; Anna is twelve, like the annoying sister I never had, and Jacob is three and had lungs the size of the Grand Canyon. Man that kid can wail. That’s all I have to tell, in a nutshell. It might fill a dusty paperback, still in its plastic at the bottom of a storage unit in an unknown bookstore. Alone, peaceful and outdated.
