they were well behind schedule and Eva, who had never flown in such a big plane
before, was beginning to become genuinely alarmed. Of course she couldn’t show it in
front of the girls who were thoroughly enjoying themselves pressing buttons so that the
seats tilted backwards and trying on the earphones and letting down the tables from the
seat in front and generally occupying themselves to the discomfort of other
passengers.
Then Penelope had insisted in a loud voice that she had to go to the loo and Eva had had
to squeeze past the man at the end of the row to go with her. When they got back and Eva had
squeezed back to her seat, Josephine said she had to go too. Eva took her and Emmeline and
Samantha just to be on the safe side. By this time–and they had taken their time trying out
various buttons and the toilet water–Eva needed to go herself and just at that moment it
was announced that passengers had to return to their seats for take-off. Eva once more
made the difficult passage past the man at the end of the row who said something in a
foreign language which she didn’t understand but which she suspected wasn’t very nice.
Then when they had reached cruising height and she could go again and in something of a
hurry too, what he had to say didn’t require any knowledge of a foreign language to tell
her that it wasn’t nice at all. Eva got her own back by treading on his foot when she resumed
her seat. This time there could be no mistaking his feelings. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Mind where
you’re treading, lady. I ain’t no doormat.’
Eva pressed the button for the stewardess and reported the matter.
‘This man–I won’t call him a gentleman–said…’ She paused and remembered the quads.
‘Well, he used a rude word.’
‘He said ‘Fuck’,’ Josephine explained.
‘He said ‘Fuck you’,’ Penelope added.
The stewardess looked from Eva to the girls and knew it was going to be a bad trip.
‘Yes, well, some men do,’ she said pacifically.
‘No, they don’t,’ said Samantha. ‘Not impotent ones. They can’t.’
‘Shut your mouth,’ Eva snapped and tried to smile apologetically at the stewardess who
wasn’t smiling at all.
‘It’s true,’ Emmeline joined in from across the aisle. ‘They can’t get erections.’
‘Emmeline, if I hear another word out of you,’ Eva bawled. ‘I’ll…’ She was getting to
her feet when the man beside her got there first.
‘Listen, lady, I don’t give a goddam fuck what she said. You ain’t corn-crushing my
feet again.’
Eva looked triumphantly at the stewardess.
‘There you are, what did I tell you?’
But the man was also appealing to the stewardess.
‘You got another seat? I’m not spending seven hours sitting next to this
hippopotamus, I’m telling you I’m not.’
It was a thoroughly unpleasant scene and when it had been cooled down and the man had
been found another seat as far away from Eva and the quads as possible, the stewardess
went back to the galley.
‘Row 31 is trouble. Keep your eyes open. Four girls and a mother who is built like a
power lifter. Sperm bank her with Tyson and there’s no one would go a single round with the
baby.’
The steward looked down the rows.
‘Thirty-one is suspect,’ he said.
‘Don’t I know it.’
But the steward was looking at the man in the window seat. So were two men in grey suits
five seats behind him.
That was the beginning of the flight. It didn’t get much better. Samantha spilt her
Coke, all of it, on the trousers of the man by the window, who said, ‘Forget it, these things
happen,’ though he didn’t say it very nicely and then went off to the toilet. On the way
there he noticed something that caused him to spend a far longer time locked inside than was
needed for cleaning his trousers or even relieving himself. Still in the end he came out
looking fairly calm and went back to his seat. But before
Elizabeth Amelia Barrington