Landing (2 page)

TRAVEL (originally the same word
as TRAVAIL), to go on a journey.

TRAVAIL (from Medieval Latin,
trepalium,
a three-staked instrument
of torture), to work, tire, suffer.

Jude was ten thousand metres above the earth, with her eyes jammed shut. She was trying to ignore the tang of puke from the waxed paper bag the old man on her left had just squashed into the seat pocket. He must have been too embarrassed to ask one of the cabin crew to take it away; maybe he was hungover from starting New Year early.

After the long, screeching takeoff—
it's all right, it's all right,
Jude had mouthed to herself, hunched against the tug of gravity—she'd thought the worst must be over. But the sensation of imprisonment only tightened as the hours dragged by. Every overhead locker was crammed, every inch of floor was littered with baggage, and three rows ahead, a woman's tote had spilled into the aisle: What quantities of garbage people hauled around the world with them! Jude prayed for the night to be over and herself safe at London Heathrow, where—according to the screen over her head—it was 4:29 on January first. Back home it was still last year; that was kind of funny, or would have been if she could have found anything funny right now. Did time zones only work on the ground, or above it as well? What time was it up here in the black void, where the plane seemed to be hanging quite motionless?

Last May, Jude had spent a day and a night looking after a baby, and the experience had taught her that time was a human invention. Of course the planet had a pulse—light and dark, winter and summer—but humans, in their elaborate arrangements, had long left earth time behind. At two months, Lia slept and woke according to her miniature body's dictates, and as Jude yawned over the aromatic little head at four in the morning she'd come to the conclusion that night and day, hours and weeks were all fictions. ( Hadn't the French revolutionaries tried to implement a ten-day week, she remembered now? That couldn't have been popular.) And what a hoo-ha people made at New Year's Eve parties, shrieking "Don't go out for a smoke now, it's three minutes to, you'll miss it!" As if there were any real
it
to miss.

Jude arched in her seat to stretch her back. In the movies, airplanes looked so spacious, but this had to be how pigs were brought to the abattoir. She was only five foot six, but there was barely room for her knees; how did tall guys cope? To her right, across the aisle, sat a nun whose body spilled over the armrest, engrossed in something called
The Poisonwood Bible.
To Jude's left was the puker, his head tilted back, pale eyelids down. His briefcase was digging into her ankle; overdue for retirement, a minor executive for a multinational? Poor guy, but Jude wished him anywhere in the world but limp and acrid in the seat beside her.

Compassionless, worn out, rigid as a crowbar: What a way to see in the New Year! Jude was trying to remember the last time she'd gone this long without a cigarette, except in her sleep. On her fifteenth birthday she'd bummed her first off some girl with braids whose name escaped her now. She could feel the slim packet in her shirt pocket now, tantalizing the skin below her collarbone. Jude's palms were damp. She tried crossing her legs but there wasn't room, so she crossed her ankles instead.

Not herself
—what could Louise have meant by that? Rachel Turner was always herself, sick or well. She scorned a fuss, and she was generally easy to live with. (Jude's friend Anneka thought the very idea of sharing a house with one's mother was peculiar; she claimed she got on much better with her own back in Stockholm now that their communication was limited to Web cam.) Jude started a list of all the illnesses Rachel could possibly have developed in the six days since she'd left Ontario, crossing off the ones that would prevent her from walking around making tea. Then she told herself to stop it. She couldn't stand people who worked themselves into frenzies.

Jude wrenched the in-flight magazine out of its plastic sheath:
Irish Eyes,
it was called. (Back home, she was halfway through
The Scarlet Letter,
but in her state of dislocation she'd left it by her bed, she remembered now.) The editorial was all about "rebranding as a low-cost, low-fares airline to meet the challenges of today's competitive climate." She scanned articles on body language, "Survival Strategies for Road Warriors," Cajun cookery. She was briefly distracted by the advertisements; she speculated about the kind of person who'd buy a CD of the sound of surf on pebbles, or a Personal Inflatable Oxygen Bubble for escaping from a burning hotel.

Fatigue swam in Jude's eyes. She shut them and took some slow, deep breaths. She pretended she was in the old Meetinghouse at Coldstream that she drove to every Sunday.
Wait. Center down. Way will open.
Or, as she used to paraphrase it when she was eleven and restless,
Shut up and listen!
But listen to whom or what, exactly? Quakers were better at questions than answers. Damn, she should have called the Petersons; who'd drive them to Meeting?

The window was a small egg of darkness. Really, there was nothing to worry about, Jude told herself, this was only a big steel coach in the sky. Just a vast, humming, groaning Greyhound bus with nothing but air under its wheels. Infinite black air outside the windows and very little inside. Jude heaved a long breath. "The bums in steerage only get about a fifth the oxygen the pilots do, I saw it on MTV," Rizla had told her on the highway. "That's what causes migraines and clots and Sudden Infant Syndromes and shit."

Jude's skin was crawling, her head hammering. She'd had a whiskey instead of the stuffed chicken breast, but it hadn't helped. She would have bartered a finger for a cigarette. Stiff-necked, she stared around her in the dim cabin. Passengers slept propped up like puppets, thin green blankets tucked under their chins; how did they manage it? Jude began letting down her seat back, but as soon as she felt it make contact with a knee, she released the button and was jerked upright again. Now it felt as if she were being folded forward. She thought of the bed in that Edgar Allan Poe story she'd read Rizla one insomniac night: the bed that waited till you were asleep before it closed up like a mouth.

That sick bag was really beginning to stink. Her seatmate was sleeping open-mouthed, helpless as a baby. Jude thought of pulling the bag out of his seat pocket, to dispose of it herself, but she feared it might be soggy; she didn't have her friend Gwen's ease with bodily functions. (Gwen liked to horrify new acquaintances with a story about having to remove, by hand, a ninety-five-year-old Sunset resident's impacted stool.)

A flight attendant went by like a gazelle, a South Asian woman in a green tailored suit of startling brightness, but Jude failed to catch her eye. The man in front let down his seat back, and the plastic tray slipped off its latch and smashed onto Jude's knee. She bit into the soft inside of her lips.

The plane heaved slightly, and Jude decided that one of its engines had fallen out; they were about to plummet, spin, and smash into the icy Atlantic. A weight landed on her shoulder. Jude blinked into thinning white hair. The old guy's head was on her shoulder, heavy as a bowling ball. She couldn't think how to get rid of it, short of a violent shake. Across the aisle, the nun got up, stretching, and gave her a little smile. Jude felt absurdly embarrassed. The nun walked off, as if there were somewhere to go.

Five minutes on, Jude decided that was it; the guy's time was up. Canadian politeness only went so far. She wriggled her shoulder. She tried tilting her body into the aisle, but the man slid with her; his head nestled into the crook of her arm like a lover's. At which point she took hold of the cuff of his gray suit with her free hand and gave it a shake. His hand shifted limply.

"Excuse me?" Jude's words were almost soundless; she hadn't spoken in hours. She cleared her throat. He didn't stir. "Sir? Could you please wake up?"

And then she knew something was wrong, because her heart was banging like a gong. He had to be ill. Because no adult, not even a worn-out
road warrior,
could snooze in that position, face slithering into a stranger's lap.

Bile rose in her throat. She searched the arm of her seat for that little icon you could press to call for help. A light sparked on overhead, the beam hitting her in the eye. The nun came back but put on her headphones before Jude could speak to her; the sound of merry violins leaked from her ears.

At last a flight attendant hurried up the aisle with a basket; she was the South Asian one Jude had noticed before. "Excuse me?" said Jude, putting her free hand out; it brushed the woman's hip.

She turned with a smile. "Here you go." With tongs, she dropped a white scalding thing into Jude's hand. Jude yelped and shook it off.

The woman was staring at her now. "Sorry, didn't you want a hot towel?" Angry? No, more like amused. Her eyes were an odd, tawny shade; her accent seemed British.

"No, I'm sorry, I just—" Jude looked with helpless revulsion at the man slumped against her. "I think this gentleman may possibly not be feeling well," she said, absurdly formal.

The woman's face changed. She set her basket of towels on her hip, bent, and leaned in. Her snaky black braid was long enough to sit on. Six inches from Jude's eyes, the shiny rectangle on the green lapel said SíLE O'SHAUGHNESSY, PURSER. That didn't seem like an Indian name. And wasn't a purser some kind of manager on a cruise ship? She wore expensive perfume; a gold choker swayed away from her throat. Her stockinged knee was touching Jude's, now. "Sir?" she said. "Sir?"

"He seemed okay at dinner," said Jude stupidly.

The woman held the man's wrist for a few seconds, her face unreadable. Then she straightened up, pressing her fingers into the arch of her back, as if tired.

"Miss! Towels, over here, please!" a passenger called.

"On my way," she said mildly. Then, to Jude, "Sit tight, I'll be back."

Jude's eyes locked onto hers.
Sit tight?

But Síle O'Shaughnessy appeared again a minute later, leading a graying woman whose glasses hung on her blouse. They consulted in murmurs. Then she bent into Jude's row again, her jade skirt stretched at the thigh; she took the old guy by the shoulders, gently pushing him upright. Freed of his weight, Jude squeezed out. Not wanting to be in the way, she stumbled down the aisle to stand outside the washroom.

When she came back a few minutes later the old guy was lying the other way, a small white pillow between his head and the little porthole. What, no oxygen tanks, no CPR in the aisle, no infibrillator or whatever that machine was called? So it had to be that he was all right, just in a really deep sleep.

Feeling relieved but foolish for having made a fuss, Jude strapped herself back into her seat. Beyond the old man's flat profile was a gaudy sunrise; where had that come from? The skies of southwestern Ontario had nothing on this: malachite, and raspberry, and flame.

Then all at once she got it. She laid one surreptitious fingertip on the back of the man's hand. It was as cold as an apple. Now that was something else Jude had never done before in her life. Seen a dead person. Sat beside a dead man, in fact, ten thousand metres up in the air.

Her hand was shaking. She tucked it under her other arm. It just couldn't be that someone had died in the seat beside her and she hadn't noticed.

How could she not have noticed? Jude searched her memory for any words she'd exchanged with him when they'd boarded, back in Detroit. A minimal "Hi," at most. She should have introduced herself, at least. She'd been too wound up in her own petty anxieties. Had that been the guy's last conversation? Or maybe he'd spoken to one of the crew. He'd had the chicken, she suddenly recalled; it had looked so pallid and humid, she'd left the foil on hers and just nibbled the roll. "Chicken, please," had that been his last line? People were always claiming they wanted to pop off in their sleep, but they didn't know what they were asking. To have not a moment's preparation, to drop as mutely as a suitcase from this world into the next ...
You know not the day nor the hour,
wasn't that the Gospel line?

"All right there?" The purser had come back to stand beside Jude, fiddling with the catch of her gold watch. Her arched eyebrows went up. "There's a seat at the back, if you'd like..."

"That's okay." Jude kept her eyes on her lap, embarrassed by the secret they shared: death, slumped in the next seat.

"Sure we'll be landing soon enough." Síle O'Shaughnessy dipped down till her head was beside Jude's. "At the gate there'll be an official with a couple of questions, if you wouldn't mind."

Why should Jude mind? Oh, questions for
her.
She nodded, speechless.

She could hear the woman's brisk voice all the way down the plane. "Any newspapers, headsets, plastic cups?"

In another quarter of an hour the cabin was full of yellow light. At they started their descent, Jude felt the pressure build up in her ears again; it was like being underwater. Where her fear had been there was only a numbness.

Landing, landing, coming back to earth with a bang. She'd thought it would be smooth, but the engines roared and the wheels clawed at the tarmac, and if it weren't for her belt she'd have been thrown out of her seat.

The nun pulled off her headphones and rubbed her papery lids. "I didn't get a wink," she remarked to Jude, "did you?"

Jude shook her head.

"Well, that's the price of taking the red-eye. Somebody's got a quiet conscience."

"Excuse me?"

"Your friend," said the nun, nodding over Jude's shoulder at the stranger who seemed to be sleeping like a newborn, his face soaked in light.

On earth we are like travelers staying at a hotel.

—ST. JEAN-BAPTISTE-MARIE VIANNEY

Síle watched an enormous brown case bound with a pink scarf make its jerky progress around the carousel. Then a globe-shaped parcel in snowflake wrapping paper went past again. Her mind was a yo-yo. She shivered, and buttoned her uniform coat to the throat. Smelling a cigarette, she whipped around, jabbing her finger at the sign on the wall: "Can you not read?"

The girl took a long suck of smoke before dropping it on the floor and extinguishing it with her boot. "Cut me some slack, could you?" she muttered.

Síle gave her a second glance. "Oh, sorry, pet, I didn't know you with your hood up."

The Canadian had clean blue eyes in an angular face. Soft brown hair that couldn't be more than two inches long. Very worn blue jeans, and not the kind sold expensively pre-aged. "Who was he?" the girl asked in a low voice.

Síle hesitated, then told her, "The manifest gives the name, that's all: George L. Jackson. He's in the mortuary; his next of kin should be getting the phone call about now. He wasn't wearing a wedding ring," she added, "but then his generation of men often don't."

A silence. "I can't decide which would be worse," said the Canadian, "for him to turn out to have this big devoted family, or—"

"—to have been a bachelor with only a couple of indifferent nephews?"

She nodded.

Jude Turner,
Síle dredged up the name from the line on the form that said
Witness.
"I've just been put through the wringer by the manager of cabin services," she confided, on impulse.

"What could you have done?" Jude Turner asked huskily. "He was stone cold by the time I called you over."

Síle nodded. "The doctor confirmed it. But the airline's policy is
always defibrillate.
It was a judgment call: I decided that hauling the poor bastard into the aisle to shock him would do nothing but start a general panic."

"What about me," the girl asked, after a second, "didn't you worry I'd panic?"

"You didn't look the type."

Jude Turner flushed slightly, and turned her gaze to the carousel, where bags were beginning to form precarious piles.

"Nineteen years flying the friendly skies," Síle explained, "you get the knack of sizing people up. Canadian, yeah?"

A small grin. "Most Brits can't hear the difference between our accent and an American one."

"The huge maple leaf on the back of your jacket was a bit of a giveaway."

The flush reached the girl's cheekbones this time.

Síle only felt slightly bad about teasing her. "And I'm Irish, actually, not a Brit."

"Right. I meant, you know, from these islands," her hand making an apologetic circle. She stared at the flattened cigarette by her toe—probably wishing she'd had a few more puffs, Síle thought.

The crowd parted like water as three of her colleagues walked through smartly, wheeling their green carry-ons; one of them gave her a little wave.

"How come you have to stand round here with the herd?" asked the girl.

"Oh, it's entirely my own fault: I bought a trampoline."

Jude Turner ducked through a gap between two carts, and came back with a small black backpack. "A trampoline?"

"Mm, one of those cute little ones; you just get up on it and bounce, and the calories drip off you." The girl started to laugh, and Síle joined in through a sudden wave of fatigue. "I know, it sounds like an utter nonsense now I describe it. I spent $179 on the fucker in Detroit, and I still have to haul it through UK customs before I fly on to Dublin."

"Is that it?"

Síle's eyes narrowed. "Was it that big? Christ, the thing's five feet wide! I'll need a trolley—"

But Jude had already headed toward the line of gleaming carts.

"You're a star," Síle said when the girl got back. Between them they heaved the huge parcel upright on the trolley. Now was the moment to nod good-bye. "Listen," she asked instead, "are you in one piece? I couldn't be sorrier about all this," flicking her eyes upward to indicate the sky, the flight, the night.

"Actually, it was my first time."

As the virgin said to the bishop,
Síle thought automatically. "Your first time seeing..."

The narrow head shook furiously. "I didn't see him die; I must have been reading the magazine or longing for a smoke. No, I just mean it was my first time flying."

"Ah, you creature! What a thing to happen to you."

Tears were striping Jude's jaw, dropping onto her jacket, onto the streaky floor of the baggage hall. She averted her face.

"Well, I made a right hames of that," said Síle lightly, taking hold of her arm above the elbow. "You'll have to let me buy you a coffee on the other side. How many more bags are you waiting for?"

Another speechless shake of the head.

In the Rive Gauche Airport Brasserie—after the Canadian had shot outside for a cigarette—Síle rattled on. "Síle's pronounced like
Sheila,
yeah. And is it Jude as in
Jude the Obscure
?"

"Good guess! Most people assume it's from the Beatles song," said the girl, her voice still a little ragged, "but actually my mom was reading Hardy's novel during labour."

"I like androgynous names, they disconcert people." Under the table, Síle slid her feet out of her new navy heels and stretched them.

"Listen, you're really kind, but you're probably in a rush to get on your plane to Dublin—" Knuckles against the damp eyelids, like a child.

"Ah, I've got three-quarters of an hour." Síle was about to add something flippant about breakfast being her sole priority. Instead she leaned forward and said, "Don't bother your head being embarrassed. You'd be surprised how many people have burst into tears on me, over the years."

An attempt at a smile.

"They've also patted my arse, told me they had cancer, tried to punch me, and thrown up a lot of peanuts—back in the days when we were let serve peanuts. Though I never mind the kids throwing up; it's in their nature, and it doesn't smell as bad."

"Really?"

"Less brandy," Síle explained.

"Have you got any yourself? Kids, I mean."

"No. The real perk of this job is, I get to play with other people's and then hand them back."
Hmm,
she thought belatedly,
was that a way of finding out whether I'm straight?

Jude ate a very small piece of
pain au raisin.
"Thanks for the coffee, it's great."

"Well, that's a classic bit of Canadian politeness."

A blink.

"It's absolute dishwater," said'Síle. "I only come here for the pastries."

Jude rallied. "Well, first of all, I really needed some coffee; I don't think I've been up all night since a slumber party when I was nine."

"Fair point. And second of all?"

"It's better than the kind I brew in an old pot with a strainer that lets grit through."

Síle grimaced. "I've become a shocking coffee snob," she explained. "At home in Dublin, there's this one Italian café on the docks I have to trek to whenever I have a day off."

"So you were happier before, when you didn't know any better?"

"Well—I suppose," she conceded. "You don't reheat yours in the microwave, at least?"

"I haven't got a microwave."

Síle stared. "You must be the last holdout in the Western world."

When Jude grinned, the curve of her cheek was as chaste as a white tulip.
She didn't have a second bag,
Síle registered belatedly,
she was only hanging round the baggage carousel to talk to me.
She looked down at her pastry, swallowed a buttery mouthful.

"I don't even have a cell phone," said Jude, nodding at the pewter-tinted device sticking out of'Síle's handbag.

"Oh, this is far more than a mobile; I call it my gizmo." She picked it up fondly. It was a sample from a friend in the business; it gave her a shallow thrill that this model wasn't on the market yet.
You have 7 messages,
but she snapped the little screen shut. "It says the temperature out there is minus two."

"Nice."

"Are you being sarcastic?"

"No, that's mild for January, by my standards," Jude assured her.

"Jaysus."

"What else does it do?"

"You name it. It's my little bottled genie: takes pictures, plays music, surfs, voice recognition, ten languages..."

"Bet it won't know what
poutine
is."

"Spell it," said'Síle. "Sounds a bit like
putain;
doesn't that mean whore?"

Jude spelled it out.

NOT KNOWN,
said the tiny screen. She frowned. "What language is it?"

"Canadian. It means fries with cheese curds and gravy."

"Ugh!"

A brief Síle nce. Jude wiped away the ring her coffee glass had left on the table. "If I'd noticed, a bit earlier—"

"Don't torture yourself." Síle put her hand over the girl's very white one, lightly, like a butterfly landing. With the three gold rings, the Keralan bangles, the watch, hers suddenly looked like the hand of a sinister older woman.
You're taking advantage,
she told herself, and moved it away.

"The only funerals I've been to have been closed-casket," Jude told her.

"I've seen lots of dead people ... of course, I'm twice your age," said Síle with deliberate exaggeration, to punish herself for the moment with the hand. "Three uncles and an aunt, my grandparents—just on my dad's side, not the Indian ones—my art teacher ... not my mother, I was only three at the time."

The girl's chiseled eyebrows shot up.

"Diabetes," Síle told her.

"I'm sorry."

Síle smiled.

"Do you remember her?"

"Well, I do and I don't. I get images, but I know some of them must be based on photos."

"How weird!"

"These women I know in New York," said Síle, "they play a dinner party game called dead exes, and the winner is the one who's slept with the most dead people."

"That sounds like necrophilia."

"It does a bit." She slugged her cooling coffee, then wished she hadn't. "When Da visits his old village, in Roscommon, so many of his relations are dead, it's like Oisín come home."

"It's like what?"

"Oisín," Síle repeated. "Son of Fionn Mac Cumhaill, leader of a band of heroes called the Fianna?"

"Ah, Finn McCool, the guy the pubs are named after."

Síle nodded. "So Niamh of the Golden Hair trots by on her magic white horse, lures Oisín west across the sea to Tir-na-nOg—that's the Land of Youth," she supplied.

"Like Never-Never Land?"

She made a face. "They're not children—but they never grow old, so yeah, sort of. Well, life there is fantastic; every day they hunt and every night they sing. But after three weeks our lad happens to see a shamrock and gets homesick. He tells the lovely Niamh, 'I have to go back to Ireland, just for a day.' She's not happy; she says, 'Go if you must, but stay on the white horse and don't let your foot so much as touch the ground.'"

"Ah," said Jude, nodding, "the magical pull of the native soil."

The girl was quick; Síle grinned at her. "Well, Oisín passes some puny fellas in the road trying to roll a big boulder out of the way. He asks them where the Fianna are hunting, and they squint up at him and say the Fianna have all been dead for three hundred years. Now Oisín doesn't believe this mad story. But he thinks he'll help them with the stone, so he leans out of the saddle and gives it one great shove."

"He falls off?"

Síle nodded. "Finds himself in the mud, a shriveled husk, more than three centuries old, and he knows he'll never see Niamh of the Golden Hair again."

Jude shook her head. After a few seconds, she said, "Bet she regretted lending him the horse."

Síle burst out laughing. "That's right. Keep 'em tied to the bedpost, I say!" This came out far too sexily, so she turned back to her
pain au chocolat.
Another of those odd Silences. She knew she should check her watch, but she didn't want to end the conversation.

"So ... what do you reckon happened to him?"

The girl didn't mean Oisín. Síle shrugged. "In-flight deaths are surprisingly common, though that was my first; they think it's the stress of travel." One long-haul airline had recently added a corpse cupboard to its Airbuses, though she didn't mention that. "A friend of mine from college, he went climbing in the Macgillycuddy Reeks with his son, dropped dead over his egg sandwich. Apparently the altitude can hit the fittest people the hardest."

"You mean ... last night, it could have been the
altitude?
"

"No, no," said Síle, exasperated, "that was just an example of going quick and quiet. The cabins are pressurized, you know; it's just like being on the ground."

"It doesn't feel like it."

"Ah, you'll get used to flying, now you've taken the plunge. Suddenly shedding gravity—" Síle's hand mimed a sharp ascent—"it's better than a roller coaster."

"I throw up on roller coasters."

"Now
that's
a revolting image."

"I mean, afterwards," Jude corrected herself. "This one time Rizla—my ex—dragged me onto a huge one in Sudbury, I was nauseous for days."

"So is she a Luddite like you?"

The girl blinked. "Actually, it's a he. I mean, he's a guy, Richard. The nickname's from the cigarette papers."

Síle's face heated up. Haircuts could be so misleading. "Oh, I'm sorry."

"No, it's—"

"Rizla, right, cigarette papers, I thought the word was familiar," cried Síle. So much for her ability to read people.

"That's okay." Grinning.

Ah,
thought Síle.
So I wasn't wrong?

"What was your question?"

"Did I have a question?"

"Luddites," Jude remembered. "No, Rizla's all about machines; he's an auto mechanic. And I love motorbikes, so I'm not a total Luddite."

"Aren't you going to finish your
pain au raisin?
"