“Thank you, but I don’t drink.” I haven’t for years. I prefer the buzz of caffeine to the thick head of alcohol.
“Well, I’m here if you need anything.”
I breathe out. Funny to still feel like an impostor, so many years afterward. “Thank you.”
Everything is under control. I have a business-class ticket. I have money in my pocket. Life is finally going the way I wanted it to go.
NINE
12 HOURS FROM SYDNEY | MINA
The rest area is more crawl space than room, the walls curving inward till they become roof, the shape of the plane as clear here as in the cockpit. The floor is made up of tessellated mattresses, reminiscent of school gym mats, separated by curtains that hang from the ceiling like in a hospital ward, each bunk the size of a coffin.
We were all too wired to sleep. Only Erik pulled the curtain around his bunk, leaving the rest of us to talk in whispers.
The remaining crew—seven of us—sprawled on the floor, exchanging the sort of passenger gossip that can’t safely be had in the galley.
“There’s a guy about halfway down—no word of a lie—must be thirty stone,” said one of the crew from economy.
Carmel made a face. “Poor guy. He must be so uncomfortable.”
“Poor guy next to him, you mean! He’s got the aisle seat, and I keep getting the trolley stuck. I’m like: Um, would you mind moving your…um…stomach?”
They all roared with laughter, cutting off abruptly when Erik harrumphed from within his curtains. We all knew what it was like, trying to sleep when no one else wanted to, but there was a childish atmosphere in the air—a midnight-feast-at-a-sleepover vibe—that made us all giggle, pressing our hands over our faces. The passengers wouldn’t be disturbed at least: no sound travels between the rest area and the cabin. When we’re up there, we’re completely sealed off.
I was only half there. Half joining in with the snog-marry-avoid game and Carmel’s interior design decisions, half trying to work out when I’d last seen Sophia’s EpiPen.
It had been in the rucksack yesterday morning, I was sure of that. I always check it when I take out her lunch box and flask, and there’s no reason for me not to have done so yesterday. Could I have taken it out when I emptied her lunch box after school? I never had before, and even if I did, that still didn’t explain how I’d brought it on to the plane.
Could someone be playing a practical joke on me?
I remember Adam, years ago, creasing with laughter as he told me how he’d been “initiated” as a new police recruit. “My sergeant said we were going to freak out the new mortuary assistant by making him think one of the bodies was alive,” he’d told me, barely able to get out the words for laughing. “So I get on the trolley, and they cover me with a sheet and slide me into the fridge. And I’m lying there, chuckling to myself about how I’m going to do the whole wooooo! ghost thing when they pull me out, only…only…” Another burst of laughter bent him double, and I couldn’t help but laugh too, even though the idea of being surrounded by dead bodies made me shiver. “Only next thing I know,” Adam went on, “I hear this voice from the corpse on top of me, saying, ‘Bloody freezing in here, isn’t it?’” He creased up, apoplectic with mirth at the memory of discovering he’d been the intended recipient of the joke all along.
Adam’s world is one of stark contrasts. On the one hand, critical decisions and violent altercations. On the other, cling-filmed loos and mobile phones Sellotaped to desks, fake loudspeaker announcements summoning nervous officers to a humorless superintendent.
“Comic relief,” Adam always says. A lightness—however childish—to counterbalance the darkness of a road death, a rape, a missing child.
Adam was already a police officer when I met him, and I’ve often wondered what he was like before, whether he’s always had the sort of mood swings that pull him down into a place I can’t reach. When we got married, these moods would last a few hours—a day at most—but as time went by, the black dog snapped for longer at his heels. The last year has been unbearable.
“Who are you texting?” We were watching TV—it must have been around this time last year—but Adam had barely looked up from his phone. Katya was in her room, Sophia asleep.