Don’t cry.
Too late.
‘Right, I’m ordering you not to cry,’ Hugh says. ‘It’s contagious.’
Gallows humour. Perfect.
He might be ordering me not to cry, but he’s also lifting the armrest against regulations – both the airline’s and his own. And my body involuntarily shifts into the space he opens up between us, with no resistance from him. Is he more alarmed by our situation than he seems? Because this is not what we do, inhabit each other’s personal spaces.
Hugh is no stranger to having me go to pieces in his company, but he always keeps me at a careful distance on the other side of his desk. He closes the door and plies me with tissues and tea, but he never hugs me or anything. Not even at Cam’s funeral, when I seemed to hug every other person I’d ever met.
‘I’d offer you a cup of tea,’ he says now, ‘but the service around here is atrocious.’
There’s another huge bang and a drop and a thud. People scream. I don’t care who he is on the organisational chart, I simply invite myself into his arms.
The side of my face is pressed against his chest. His hands float above my body, as if he’s unclear how to deal with this development. I try to block out all the chaos and listen for his heartbeat as a distraction. Of course, it’s so noisy I can’t hear anything, but if I press my ear hard enough against him, I can feel it thumping through his shirt. Unfortunately, it’s beating quite fast, betraying his cool-headed demeanour, and that scares the hell out of me.
‘You’re freaking me out with your heartbeat,’ I accuse him. ‘I thought you weren’t worried?’
‘I’m not.’
‘Why the racing heart then?’
‘Geez, Kate. Let me adjust that for you, shall I?’
Am I this demanding? I smooth his business shirt under my fingers, and the hard lines of his chest underneath it make me feel like I’m prying. I don’t get to touch people any more. I read something once about ‘skin hunger’. It’s an actual condition and, the more firmly I plaster myself to Hugh’s torso, the more certain I am that I’m riddled with it.
He braces against me in response. His muscles contract. He doesn’t share my skin starvation and nor does he want this level of proximity.
‘You miss your desk,’ I say cryptically.
‘What are you talking about?’ he asks, his hand finally coming to land on my arm when the plane lurches again.
‘Your desk. The barrier. You know, the wall. The blockade . . .’
He’s still puzzled.
‘I want to be friends with you again,’ I blurt out, the way a person would only do if they thought time was running out and wanted to hurriedly make amends and seek forgiveness and dot all the ‘i’s’ and cross the ‘t’s’ in an otherwise doomed relationship. ‘Proper friends, I mean. Without this giant obstacle between us.’
‘What are they piping through these air vents?’
I won’t let him evade this with humour. ‘What happened between you and Cam?’ I demand.
I lift my face to his, up close, in time to catch his expression progressing from consternation, through recognition, to pain, and settling on the usual resolute distance, whenever this topic is raised.
‘Please don’t ask me,’ he says finally. He means business and meets the desperation in my eyes with a hard ‘no’. If he won’t tell me now, when it feels like our minutes are numbered, he never will. This secret is doomed to stay wedged between us for the rest of our lives. It’s why, despite all the early bonding we were forced into when Cam’s life was impaled on the Alzheimer’s diagnosis, we operate at a slight distance now. It’s sad.
Maybe he’s right about the air vents, though. Something is obviously going to my head because for one, wild moment, despite my frustration with his relentless disengagement on this, perhaps because of the stark vulnerability in his expression, I imagine what it might be like to kiss Hugh Lancaster.
Is this a near-death thing? Maybe the libido is the last thing to go.
I’m instantly alarmed at the thought. Where men are concerned, I’ve had a one-track mind focused on Cameron Whittaker since that very first English lecture. Even more so, since he got sick. Certainly since he died. And yet, this morning, I’ve already envisaged kissing Justin and Hugh. Is this some mid-life widowed reawakening?
I push back from him. What if I lose all rational thought? It’s that same strange impulse I get walking over bridges, thinking, ‘What if I irrationally lose my mind and throw my phone over the guard rail?’ ‘What if I step out into traffic?’ ‘What if I break into song in this meeting?’
What if I kiss my boss . . .
‘I think the turbulence is settling,’ Hugh says, disentangling himself from me but holding eye contact while we pay attention to every tiny movement of the plane. Moments pass while we stare at each other, alert for that falling sensation.
It never comes. We’re through the storm. He moves back and pulls the armrest down between us again.
Nothing to see here, Anne with an ‘e’.
19
The Ballina–Byron Gateway Airport has nothing on the bustle of Brisbane, but after the nightmarish flight, I don’t care where we are, so long as we’re on firm soil.
My phone springs to life with eleven missed calls from Mum. We’re still sitting on the plane waiting for the doors to open and the queue to move when I click on voicemail and settle in for what I suspect will be a masterclass in escalating hysteria.
‘. . . and then I said, as if I don’t have enough on my plate already, Gwen, now I’m contending with a sulky camellia! Oh, hello? Hello? It’s gone to the voice message. Katherine! Kate?
‘. . . Are you there? Can you hear me? Hello? She can’t hear me, Gwen. Lordy, that girl and her tragic life, but as I’ve tried to tell her, it doesn’t mean she should neglect the washing—
‘KATE! Now listen to me! A “once-in-a-hundred-years storm” has hit the whole east coast! Didn’t we just have this? What is going on with the weather? Is it the coal? Those poor librarians in Lismore already threw all the books out the window that other time—
‘They’ve GROUNDED A FLEET OF PLANES at Brisbane airport due to a “freak hail event”. Good grief! It’s end times! I’m going to phone Hugh. I’ll get more sense out of him!’
Please don’t, Mum.
‘Mary!’ Hugh says calmly, answering his phone and winking at me. ‘Kate’s here. No, we just landed safely in Ballina. Unscheduled stop, but everything’s fine. How’s Charlie?’
If my new neighbour is the Minecraft Whisperer, Hugh must be the Mary Whisperer. He has the same anxiety-reducing effect on Mum as I get listening to one of those sleep stories on the meditation apps, read by Matthew McConaughey or Regé-Jean Page. It’s exactly the level of composure we need now that we seem to be unexpectedly stuck in subtropical paradise two thousand kilometres short of our final destination.