a finger toward me, and I jerk back despite the rows of seats between us.
It isn’t the first time I’ve been viewed with suspicion. I was flying back from Dubai, tensions high after a bomb scare in Qatar the previous week. We’d been delayed taking off, and a group of lads were already borderline pissed. Two hours later, they were well oiled. I heard them egging each other on, each taunt more outrageous each time I passed.
“Allahu akbar!”
“What’s the difference between a terrorist and a woman with PMS? You can negotiate with a terrorist.”
“Come over here, sweetheart. I’ve got something in my pants that’ll go off if you touch it.”
They arrested them at Heathrow for offenses under the Terrorism Act. I made myself look them in the eye as they were walked off the plane, even though my knees were trembling so much, I had to lean against the wall.
“It was a fucking joke!” one of them hissed as he passed.
There were enough indignant passengers, with enough mobile phone footage, for their solicitors to persuade them to enter a guilty plea, and I was spared the anxiety of giving evidence at court. I told the boss I was fine, but the incident rattled me for months afterward, and the hatred in the footballer’s eyes now sends me straight back to it.
“What about you?” Crawford turns on the Middle Eastern passenger from 6J, whose eyes instantly widen in fear. “Are you one of them too?”
“Jamie!” Caroline’s horrified tone is echoed in the gasps from several of the passengers around me. “Don’t be so racist.”
The man from 6J drops his head in his hands. I feel a stab of shame at having distrusted his claim to be a nervous flyer. Whatever disasters he anticipated can’t possibly have been as bad as the reality.
“You can hardly blame us.” Crawford is on a roll. He’s looking around for support, and I’m grateful to see that he finds little. Most people are avoiding his eyes, looking at the floor. “It’s always you lot, isn’t it?”
“‘You lot’?” says Derek Trespass. “You need to watch what you’re saying.”
“I don’t care whether you’re Muslim or Hindu or Jehovah’s bloody Witnesses,” says the woman on her way to spend Christmas with her dying friend. “But if she”—she points at me—“helped them, then she’s one of them, pure and simple.”
“They threatened my daughter,” I explain, trying to hold it together. “They said she’d be hurt if I didn’t do what they said.”
“And what about my child?” Leah Talbot screams across the cabin. Everyone turns to look at her. Tears course down her face as she carries on, the words broken by choking sobs. “Do you know how long I waited to be a mother? Eleven years. Eleven years of miscarriages, of fertility treatment, of being told we weren’t right for adoption.” She snatches Lachlan from Paul and brandishes him in front of her. “Doesn’t his life matter? What makes him less important than your daughter?”
Paul reaches for her, wrapping his son and his wife in his arms as Leah collapses into cries that rack her whole body. I’m trembling, remembering how desperately I wanted a child, how the pain in my womb each month was echoed in my heart.
“They are all important!” Lady Barrow is on her feet, and despite her diminutive stature, she is a commanding presence. “All our children. Whatever this young girl did, any number of you would have done too, if it had been your child at stake.” In any other situation, I might have laughed at being called a young girl, but I’m silent as Pat shouts down the self-righteous roar her statement has provoked. “Stop it! All of you, stop it! I for one don’t want to spend the remaining hours of”—she falters for a second, at the last moment changing my life to—“this journey fighting.”
The cabin falls silent. Throughout all this, Missouri has watched with a small smile on her face. She’s enjoying this, I realize with a wave of revulsion. Maybe she even planned it, wanted to see us turning on one another instead of on them.
“The man in there.” Alice Davanti points toward the flight deck as she addresses Missouri. “Is he a trained pilot?”
“Do you think we would jeopardize our own mission? He knows how to fly the plane.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
Fear crosses the cabin like fire, a murmuring that grows in volume, hysteria building into worst-case scenarios.
“Amazon is a skillful pilot; he will take us to our destination