—
I am sorry. Profoundly sorry.
I could not, in fact, be sorrier.
Chapter 8
The cabin manager, Allegra Patel, is in the lavatory when the call buttons first commence their peevish melody. So that’s Murphy’s Law. Or Allegra’s Law, more like it. Her period has turned up a week early, and she is rummaging through her bag for a tampon and each time she thinks she has found one it turns out to be the same tube of lip balm, which is making her laugh softly and kind of demonically.
Today is her twenty-eighth birthday and she hadn’t been expecting champagne and rainbows, but she had assumed it would be a pleasantly neutral Friday, not one of those days where everything consistently goes just a tiny bit wrong, where that scratchy sandpapery feeling starts to build up behind your eyes.
“Give me a break,” she mutters as she feels the first cruel clench of a cramp. Her cramps are always worse when she flies.
She digs farther into the corner crevices of her bag.
Euphoric relief: one solitary, beautiful tampon. Thank you, universe.
She’d been pleased when she got the roster for her birthday: Sydney-Hobart, Hobart-Sydney. Home in time for dinner with her parents and brother. She likes this leg. The flight length is not too long but also not so short that you’re rushed off your feet trying to get everything done. It had been a bonus when her friend Anders, who she’s known since they trained together, was rostered on the same crew. He arrived at the preflight briefing with doughnuts and a metallic heart-shaped helium balloon.
Sadly, it was all downhill from there.
“Not these two tossers together,” moaned Anders, when their two pilots swaggered into the crew room like movie stars. “There won’t be enough room for their inflated egos in the cockpit.”
Captain Victor “Vic” Levine addressed them with his usual brusque brevity. Unremarkable weather. Full flights. He’s not rude. He just doesn’t fully register anyone’s existence unless they’re a fellow pilot. To him, all cabin crew members are interchangeable. They’re not quite real to him. They’re like holograms.
“Birthday, eh?” said First Officer Jonathan “Jonny” Summers, instead of saying, “Happy birthday, Allegra,” like an actual human. He accepted a doughnut, took a minuscule bite, scrunched up his offensively handsome face as if he’d eaten a lemon, and then dropped it in the garbage can in full view of everyone.
“I’ll never love anyone as much as I hate that guy,” Anders had whispered in Allegra’s ear. He was especially distressed by the disrespectful treatment of the doughnut because he’s currently undergoing an aggressive intermittent fasting regimen. He has a wedding next weekend where he’ll come face-to-face with an ex he hasn’t seen in five years. Allegra will be glad when this wedding is finally done.
The other two members of Allegra’s crew today are fine: just mildly exasperating.
Kim is a placid, padded woman who has been with the airline since the eighties and ambles about the cabin as if she’s hosting a backyard barbecue, leaning one elbow on the back of seats for long chummy chats with passengers. A quick service is a good service, but it’s never going to be a quick service if you’ve got Kim on the other side of your cart. Ellie is at the opposite end of the spectrum, young and fizzy. She’s only just got her wings, so is brimming with new knowledge, eager to impress and do every PA announcement.
On the first leg Ellie informed Allegra that Anders had taken a bag of pretzels from the food cart, which Ellie understood was “technically stealing.” Why are new flight attendants always such snitches?
“I was feeling faint!” said Anders, who was more ashamed that he’d broken his fast with half a pretzel than that he’d broken the rules.
“Eat the rest of them, you look like a corpse!” Allegra hissed, wondering if his stupid diet was turning into an actual safety issue she needed to address.
And then: the delay.
It would have been polite for the flight deck to keep her in the loop, seeing as she was the one responsible for keeping control of an increasingly agitated cabin, but she heard nothing for ages, while the baby screamed like a broken car alarm and tempers simmered, bubbled, and boiled over.
The reason was finally revealed to be a broken seat belt in the cockpit. They had to wait for someone to fly in from Sydney because Hobart has no engineer on-site. If the passengers had learned that, they would have been offering to fix it themselves. No doubt the square-jawed guy Anders dubbed “Superhero” could have fixed it with his eyes closed.
“He’ll trek through the mountains to save us before we turn to cannibalism,” he’d whispered as they both watched the guy march down the aisle. Allegra elbowed Anders. He didn’t actually use the words “plane crash,” but he sure did imply them.
Allegra could have fixed the belt. She’s handy. Sadly, that’s not the way safety protocols work. She was once on a flight where they had to wait an hour for an engineer to fix a broken overhead bin, which he did with a strip of masking tape. Took him three seconds, tearing it off with his teeth while asking her out for a drink.
She washes her hands and studies her face in the mirror, then gets that disconcerting but not unpleasant out-of-body feeling she’s been experiencing since she was seven. She would look at herself in the bathroom mirror and float free of her body for a few seconds. “I left my body!” she told her mother. “Did you, beta?” said her mother. “That’s nice.”
“Do you know how insanely beautiful you are?” said the most recent man with whom she’d had sex (two weeks ago now, and never again, absolutely not, done with that) as he ran a fingertip back and forth across her collarbone.
“You’re done with him, Allegra,” she whispers to her reflection. “Done.”
He’s like a junk food addiction: delicious at first, then regrettable.
Insanely beautiful.
I mean, that’s a nice compliment.
Nope. Stop it.
People comment on her beauty often enough that it would be disingenuous not to believe she’s attractive, but high school burns forever. Only tall, skinny blond girls were considered beautiful back then, the girls who, ironically, came back from summer holidays with tans that were exclaimed over and complimented, tans that made their skin nearly as dark as Allegra’s, but her brown was not the right brown. Even Allegra’s own mother would say, “Don’t go out in the sun, Allegra, you’ll get too dark.” Her mum wouldn’t say that now. She’s evolved, like everyone.
She thinks of Sara Perkins in Year 8, saying, “Imagine how beautiful Allegra would be if she wasn’t, you know…” Meaningful jerk of her head. She said this in front of Allegra. She thought it was a compliment, or at least not an insult. Allegra wonders if Sara Perkins ever wakes up in a cold sweat thinking, “Oh, God, did I really say that?” You really did, Sara Perkins, you really did.
Allegra finds Panadol in her bag, palms two tablets into her mouth, swallows them without water (life skill), and reapplies her lipstick. She only wears makeup at work. She is “required” to wear a “minimum” of foundation, eye shadow, and lipstick. Male flight attendants like Anders must only be clean-shaven with their hair cut above the collar, which is ironic because Anders taught Allegra everything she knows about makeup. He gave tutorials when they trained together in Melbourne. Allegra laughs each time she remembers him, makeup brush poised, shaking his head sorrowfully and saying, “I can’t believe you girls don’t know how to contour.”
She will never forget the pure exhilaration she felt the day she got her wings. Her dream job. Not her mother’s dream job for her. She’d always wanted Allegra to be a dentist, a strangely specific career choice, seemingly based only on Allegra’s excellent toothbrushing as a child. Allegra’s dad is happy for her—he loves the perk of free standby flights for family members. Thankfully, her brother got the medical degree, so they can show off about Taj to the grandparents, while Allegra makes them seem “interesting.” She was flying the day after she completed Ground School. Walking through the airport that first morning she’d felt glamorous and alive. All these years later she still feels lucky and secretly sorry for her friends in nine-to-five office jobs. No one expects them to have interesting anecdotes about their work (and they sure don’t), but people love to hear about Allegra’s work as a flight attendant.
People always want to know if she’s had the oxygen masks drop, and Allegra enjoys telling them about the one time she was working when they lost cabin pressure and the masks dropped, and she saw the horrified realization hit her passengers that maybe they should have listened during all the safety demonstrations they’d been ignoring. She also once had a pregnant woman’s water break. Who knew there was that much amniotic fluid sloshing around in every “baby bump”?! Allegra had carefully studied the obstetrician’s letter that today’s hugely pregnant passenger handed over as she boarded. “I’m only twenty-five weeks,” the woman sighed, “I just look gigantic.”
Kim once had two passengers get into a brawl over the reclining of a seat—fists flying, yelling, police, viral video—but Anders trumps them all because he had a passenger die last year. It might even have been on this same leg. The man’s poor wife was sitting right next to him. Thought he was napping. Anders said the man was old, but not, you know, Dumbledore old. Allegra has been keeping a careful eye on the ancient couple on this flight. They’re retired doctors, don’t require wheelchairs, their only walking aids are walking sticks, and they’re both wearing fancy Apple Watches, which is endearing. She wants them delivered to Sydney alive and well.
She straightens her back, smacks her lipsticked lips together, and watches her face in the mirror go into work mode: professional, polite, do not fuck with me.
Please, universe, don’t let these pinging call buttons mean a death or a brawl or a baby. I’m too crampy. Also, it’s fun telling horror work stories after the fact, not so much when they’re actually happening.
