I feel a quick stab of disappointment, I was looking forward to seeing Cassie’s friends, but if it means she’ll be calmer, safer without people like her wild-eyed neighbour about, then so be it.
I spend most of my day staring at the foot of Cassie’s bed, wondering where she is in her coma, if she’s travelling in her subconscious, wondering if she, like me, is ever visited by the dead. Most of my visits happened on a plane. It was supposed to be my first flight, and I’m in my twenties again, on the flight I should have taken to America to start my new job, to start my new life. In the dream, the seat next to mine is always empty and I’m restless with fear unable to sit still, tapping the laminated emergency instructions I hold in my lap against a feverish leg that won’t stop shaking. The smiling, pretty, flight attendants – packaged in their uniforms like plastic dolls, shiny hair and red lips – aren’t even enough to distract me. The noise of 30,000 feet is not what I expected. It’s a sort of white noise, a great long moan wrapped around the world; it stretches on at the same note, and my ears are full of it.
‘C’mon, lad, shove over.’ I hadn’t heard that gruff voice out of our tiny, paisley-printed sitting room – that smelled of airless hours in front of television mixed with something a little sweet, white bread maybe – since I was a teenager, but I’m hardwired to obey that voice so, without turning, I move into the unoccupied middle seat next to me as my dad, who died when I was nineteen, eases himself with a wheeze and a wince into the aisle seat. I can’t remember ever sitting so close to him when he was alive, his brown polyester slacks almost touch my stonewashed jeans.
‘Your mother and me –’ always his preferred opening line ‘– want you to get off this flight.’ I look at him then. He’s looking forward, down the aisle towards a slim, blonde air stewardess who’s bending down in front of her trolley to get someone a lemonade. His jowls spill over the top of his shirt collar, like extra pastry on a pie. There’s a shock of white hair in his ears and I’m close enough to see hundreds of tiny blackheads on his nose that open out into larger pockmarks over the rest of his wide face. His deep-set eyes fix onto the blonde woman’s bottom and his grey eyebrows move as much as his mouth as he says again, ‘Yes, your mother and me … we want you to get off this flight.’
‘Dad.’ My voice far older, deeper than it was at twenty-seven. ‘What are you talking about? There’s no way we can get off.’
He pulls himself away from the blonde then, and nodding, turns his wide face towards mine. His breath smells, as it always did, of well-stewed tea. ‘It’s not safe, son, it’s not safe. This is no way to go. You could be stuck on this thing for ever. It’s not right, so it’s best you come with me.’
‘Dad, this is crazy. We’re somewhere over the Atlantic, it’s not safe.’
His eyes narrow at me.
‘Don’t argue with me, son. I know a way, you just follow me.’ He starts to heave himself up, but either he’s too fat or the seat in front of him is too close because it takes him a few tries, and the whole bank of seats shudder with the effort. I look around at the other passengers – businessmen on laptops, cuddling couples, kids giggling at a film – but none of them seem to have noticed my dead dad.
He’s waiting for me in the aisle now.
‘Come on, good lad,’ he says.
I stand and start to follow him, bending my knees to move out of the row of seats and then I notice the blonde stewardess has turned around. She’s pulling her steel trolley straight towards me, hips swinging in her high heels and she’s looking straight at me. Underneath the make-up I can see it’s June Withers from school. She dated my older brother Paul for a few months, which made me the coolest boy in my class for a brief moment, before June dumped Paul for a heroin addict. She was found a few months later face down in her own vomit at her mum’s house. Now I think that story about the heroin and the puke must have been bullshit; she must have been training to be an air stewardess all along.
Her red lips curl like a seashell into a smile, her teeth like pearls as she narrows her eyes in disbelief. ‘Frankie?’
‘June?’
‘Oh my god, it is you! How funny!’ Her smile crests over me.
‘Frank!’ My dad barks like a pissed-off terrier further down the aisle. I don’t turn away from June, but she must see him over my shoulder because she says, ‘Is that your dad?’
‘Oh, yeah. I think the altitude’s got to him. He keeps saying we’re not safe.’
Her smile disappears immediately, and her face knots. ‘No, Frank, listen to him. We’re safe, but you’re not. You have to go with him or you’ll be stuck on this plane for god knows how long.’
She starts shoo-ing me along with her manicured hands, saying, ‘Go on, follow him, Frankie, go on’, and forcing me forward, pulling the trolley after her.
Dad’s moved on down the aisle; he’s waiting for me. When I reach him, he starts walking again; his brown cardigan and the way his stout neck has receded between his broad shoulders makes him look like a retreating mole. I’m pressed now, between my dad and June who still flicks me on, as if I’m an annoying fly.
We pass the toilets and rows and rows of people. I’m escorted by Dad and June to the tail of the plane, where there are more toilets and a little beige cupboard area. Two more trolleys like the one June is pulling are parked up and there’s another air stewardess sitting on a case eating some noodles. She glances up at us with bored, black-rimmed eyes and then looks away again. Out of the corner of my eye I see movement and, to my horror, my dad is braced, tense and puffing out through his cheeks. He’s pulling the red handle of the emergency exit door.
I lunge towards him, but June’s sharp hand on my arm pulls me back and she says with a little laugh, ‘Don’t worry, Frankie; he’s doing the right thing.’
Then we hear a loud sucking sound and the light for the toilet flashes from red to green and the door concertinas as it opens and, after a second, my Luce walks out.
She claps her hands together when she sees me; she’s about twelve years old, her face round and flawless with youth. She reaches out to me and takes my hand.