can’t help but wonder if Adam is behind it. Is he trying to make me feel guilty for leaving her? Or hoping I’ll worry enough to need his support? Is this, like the petrol, some warped way of him being my knight in shining armor?
It’s no one I’m working with, that’s for sure. It’s not like Adam and his mates, who have worked together for years and know each other’s limits; I work with new people every time I clock on. Who plays practical jokes on a stranger?
Back in the cabin, my gaze falls on the man in 3F. Jason Poke has the sort of fresh face and dimples that make teenage girls melt and mothers say watch out for that one. You’d have to have been living under a rock to have missed Poke’s Jokes, a cult YouTube channel that swiftly went mainstream when it moved to Channel 4. I remember an episode I watched with Adam, long before everything went wrong for us. Poke’s dressed as a vicar—all prosthetic nose and gray wig—stumbling over the marriage vows before an unsuspecting couple. “To have and to scold—I mean hold.” Cue muffled laughter from the congregation. Poke hiccups, slurs the next line. The camera zooms in on an elderly lady, her lips pursed, as Poke turns his back on the happy couple and swigs from a hip flask marked communion wine. The bride’s mouth falls open. Behind her, the best man roars with laughter as Poke peels off his prosthetics, and a cameraman walks out from the vestry. “Just another of Poke’s Jokes!” goes the voiceover.
“Classic!” Adam said, snorting with laughter.
“I’d go absolutely ballistic.”
“Only at first. You’d see the funny side eventually.”
“That poor girl.” On the television, we were being treated to the same “reaction shots” we’d seen a moment ago. The bride horrified, her mother in tears. “All those months of planning, and that wanker turns up and ruins it.”
“The best man organized it. Poke didn’t just rock up.”
“Even so.”
I walk past Poke’s seat, glancing at the screen to see what he’s watching. I’m surprised to see an Auschwitz documentary, and I flush when Poke looks up and sees me looking.
“Sobering stuff,” he says, his headphones making his voice too loud.
I must have brought the EpiPen on board myself. I remember transferring a magazine from my everyday bag to my work bag; maybe it got caught up in the pages. Or could Sophia have accidentally put it in the paper bag with my flapjack? That must be it.
I ignore the whisper in my head that says the pen would have been in Sophia’s schoolbag, not mine; that surely it’s a coincidence too far for it to fall from bag to bag not once but twice; that the pen was nowhere near the flapjack. I ignore the voice that reminds me of the petrol through the door, the dropped calls I’ve been getting recently, Adam’s strange behavior over the past few months. I ignore it all. It’s just an EpiPen. What would anyone have to gain from bringing it on board?
I wish I could text Becca, just to check everything’s okay, but ground control says there’s nothing they can do about the Wi-Fi. Dindar pulled out all the stops for this route—wider seats in economy, premium films, carbon offsetting, and free Wi-Fi for everyone, regardless of ticket class. In the in-flight magazine, a full-page ad urges passengers to live-tweet their journey using the hashtag #LondonSydney. He’s going to hit the roof.
I look around the cabin, trying to identify the journos. The first, a sharp-faced woman who writes a column for the Mail, is so much like her byline picture that I hardly need to check the passenger list for her name, although I do, to be sure. Alice Davanti is the name she writes under, Alice Smith on her travel documents. A married name, maybe, or perhaps Davanti is a pseudonym, chosen for its glamour.
It takes me longer to spot the second journalist. It’s no one I know by face or name, and without Google, I’m lost. I take a walk up and then down the aisles, glancing at laptop screens and into books. I notice that the man with the round glasses has slipped his wine list into a notebook, and as I pass him for the second time, he is using a proper camera, not a phone, to take the ubiquitous “feet up, watching a film” shot. Old-school. I check the passenger list: Derek Trespass. Despite his Wi-Fi