Turbulence

“It’s not pleasant, but it’s not dangerous” said the most attractive of the cabin crew to Harris Blakely, who was sitting in seat 7G, on flight FR1977 from Riga to Dublin.  Harris was not a natural flyer, nor was he enjoying this particular batch of turbulence, but he wanted to let her know that he disliked his fellow passengers in seats 7D and E far more than his fear of flying.  Instead, he returned the smile and said “can I have another white wine please?” and the steward nodded.

The couple in seats 7D and E were obscenely annoying.

They were young, beautiful, confident and well-dressed and were very much in love with one another.  Harris disliked them both, but in particular the young woman due to her incessant chewing of gum.  He could hear the sound of the chewing, like boots walking through squelshy melted snow, and he could smell each tiny spearmint droplet.  He felt as if he were inhaling her, and it disgusted him.

The couple had been staring out of the window all through take-off, out over the Baltic sea and towards Finland.  But now they were staring at one another, stroking the others hands and smiling far-away smiles.  Harris took the opportunity to close the plastic shutter on the window.  He opened the bottle of wine and poured half of it into the plastic cup.

Harris looked behind him to his wife, who was sitting four rows back in seat 15B, and there she was smiling at him immediately, which made him feel as though he were being watched.  There had been a mix up at check in, but Harris didn’t mind the separation of rows on the way home, after the disastrous holiday.  It gave him time to sit alone and think.  He smiled back at his wife and she blinked in return.  When they first met Harris loved the way she blinked, he found it sweet and endearing and amusing, but nowadays he just hated it.  There were times when he just wanted to shout at her to just stop blinking all the time, but he used his powers of restraint and kept his irritations to himself.

Harris and his wife, the blinker in seat 15B had been in love at the beginning, because Rachel remembered it.

Rachel remembered hearing about him before they met, and even when they did meet, she heard his voice in the garden before she saw his face.  When they did finally speak, at the end of the sunny barbeque in a garden yard in Rathmines, it took seven seconds before she fell in love with him.  She loved everything about him without a delay.

He was a little drunk from the wine, and soon he said to her, “I’m going to kiss you now” and she liked it.

“Now?” she asked.

“Well either now or not now” he shrugged, so she leaned in close next to him and kissed him.

But 19 years later and they were nearly middle aged anyway.

The holiday had been a failure.  While Rachel had enjoyed the walking tours of Riga’s old town and took plenty of photographs of the Gothic and Nouveau Riche architecture, Harris just stayed in small bars and cafés, read his books and ignored her.  She tried local sausage and fish, he ate from McDonalds, she went to folk music and dancing evenings, he stayed in the hotel and watched satellite TV.

Rachel didn’t mind that they weren’t like the newly in love couple sitting next to Harris on this flight, but she missed the barest of intimacy.  She wanted to see him laugh again, to feel him close again, to hear him say again that he wanted to kiss her, either now or not now.  She missed the physical feeling of love, the sensation of falling, feeling like floating, or like a feeling of turbulence, and she missed the sense of not being alone.

She just didn’t know what to do to change it.