by Liz Woods
FIVE
Over the coming weeks I flew more and more often with Tanya and her crew. Each time nobody mentioned what happened at the villa in Bali. Tanya’s influence over the faceless people in charge of scheduling was obvious. I never had two trips in a row without her, and she always had regular members of her clique at her side. Maria told me over coffee in an airport terminal that Tanya liked my ‘pretty face’ and that I gave an element of public trust to her crew dynamic. I could see what Maria meant and why Tanya needed faces with a sense of public diplomacy. People sometimes said I had a ‘kindness’ about my face, which was something that Tanya lacked. Tanya’s public image was fronted by a smooth forehead with straight brown hair pulled tightly into a bun. She was immaculate, but not pretty. Her strong jaw and bone structure gave her a seriousness that made her look harsh and unapproachable. It was a physical appearance that reflected her temperament. There was no warmth about her. In fact the room always felt as if it dropped a few degrees when she entered. She was thin and wore her uniform as tightly as her hair was pulled back on her head. She was eloquent, educated and spoke several languages. I heard her use Italian, Spanish and on occasion French, with such fluency and elegance that I dared not use my embarrassing fading knowledge of that language. Her polyglot abilities served her well in the demands of the job. By using other traffickers’ and dealers’ native tongues she created a sense of trust, building a huge network across the globe, with contacts in every port. When it came to men, she could not use charm and charisma. She had none. Instead, she presented herself as a hard to get conquest of sorts, and, if it served her own desires, would calculatingly allow herself to be won over.
With every trip, something new about her crew’s operations revealed itself. I observed that each member served a particular purpose and in exchange, took what it wanted. Maria loved to befriend men on board and have them buy her expensive gifts in exchange for them being able to say they ‘were dating a stewardess.’ Michael, nicknamed ‘Mile high Mike’ had a record that nobody could surpass. The job was just a game, allowing him to live out his fantasies and brag to friends back home. Simon had a taste for cash, and a need to feel important. Some helped out Tanya, simply to attend the wild parties and experience the thrill of criminal enterprise. My new life at the airline was not as I had foreseen. It was a whole new wild world behind the uniform and polished corporate image. I tasted wines that I could not even pronounce and could certainly never afford. I attended parties with bizarre and devious characters, leaving little time for sightseeing when hangovers needed to be nursed.
I also saw how Tanya’s crew members were able to cultivate the clique. They saw outsiders as a threat to their secrecy and lifestyle. They never tolerated ‘rule-following, in bed by 9’o’clock’ types questioning their layover activities and reporting what happened on board. They bullied newcomers who had the misfortune of being put on our trips. They were put in the galley, out of sight and out of earshot. It was the little things that alienated newcomers and broke them down. When handing back crew jackets, someone would give out everyone’s and leave the newbie’s on the floor. Conversations stopped awkwardly when the newbie arrived on scene. Squinting faces and eye rolls were a standard response to anything the newbie said. Toilet duties were always allocated to the threatening, usually, sweet mannered invader.
After a trip with Tanya’s crew I would relish returning to my shoebox apartment, and collapse onto the bed still wearing my uniform. The big nights and adaptation to work while battling oxygen deprivation caught up with me. I often awoke in the middle of the night, completely unaware of the time, where I was or how long I had been asleep. Every awakening in this job would be the same–confused, tired and lost. I was neither here nor there. Time zones were irrelevant. A good circadian rhythm was a luxury we did without. The small pharmacy I collected on my travels soon became handy. Uppers for getting away and putting on the bubbly persona, and downers for when I was desperate to induce sleep before a big day the next day. Random drug testing in the crew room was always a risk, but like every rule, there were ways around it. Some days were known to be high risk for drug testers–Monday to Friday mainly. The first day back after a public holiday was especially dangerous. The actual day of a public holiday was particularly safe. Government employees seemed to be averse to work on such days.
Flying began to take its toll on me. My skin dried up and my lips chapped. My hands would turn to crocodile skin without applying moisturiser nearly every hour. My cuticles would crack and bleed at the most inconvenient times. It was a battle to keep the skin alive when jumping from air-conditioned buildings, to desert, and then to the aircraft cabin. Some called the cabin the ‘death tube,’ because it sucks the life out of you, along with your hydration levels and your sanity. I noticed the occasional acne spot, which had been a rarity before working at Elhalia. I blamed the death tube and following a sleep regime more unnatural than that of the space shuttle crew. I was quick to conceal anything that detracted form my polished image with copious amounts of make up. I needed the job. No turning back. And I refused to be turned back by anyone else.
On board, between crew gossiping about their colonics and fad diets, was the interaction with the passengers. Certain celebrity passengers were as charming and charismatic as their publicists had hoped for. They pleasantly engaged in witty and sometimes cheeky conversation, and were appreciative of good service. Some were not so tolerable. One singer, if her pre-packaged persona really warranted her being called such, was determined to make everything more difficult than it had to be and was bent on being impossible to please. After being offered seven different juices, she insisted on a bizarre combination clearly not on the menu. Even after we had delayed the flight so that her entourage could bring twenty pizzas on board, making a mess and stinking out the cabin for the other passengers, we copped multiple rolled eyes from her whenever it was necessary to speak to her. At one point she refused to speak to the crew at all, relaying everything through her boyfriend, despite her speaking loudly enough for everyone to hear.
At the other end of the difficulty scale, were the passengers traveling under extreme personal stress, and not the invented type of my cosmetically enhanced wannabe gangster singer. On a flight to London, a couple aged in their early fifties sobbed relentlessly, unable to eat for the seven-hour ride. Their daughter had been missing after a night out with friends and they were heading to the UK to assist in the search. Just before they boarded, they were told that the body of their daughter–their smart, pretty, selfless angel– had been found in an East London park. There was no horseplay or smutty jokes from the crew on that flight. And none of the usual sporadic laughter that usually came from the galley. The wailing echoed in my head on the ride home and continued while I tossed about anxiously, trying to sleep in my hotel room. I suddenly had a guilty pang creep up on me, urging me to call my mother.
There was of course the occasional amusing incident, which never sounds as funny when retold. “Excuse me, there’s a man back there with no pants on.” The voice from the dark cabin alerted me. I was immediately alarmed. A man doesn’t take off his pants unless he is doing something that should be done behind closed doors. And I doubted he was going swimming. I pulled back the curtain to see the silhouette of the old man fumbling about trying to remove his pants from around his ankles in the standing position, swaying back and forth. Thankfully everyone appeared to be asleep.
“Excuse me sir, but do you know you’ve taken off your pants?” What else do you say to a man who decides to strip at 40,000 feet? There was no response from the man. It was every bit as awkward as it sounds. I looked at the seat opposite that I guessed was his, and spoke to the elderly lady next to it. She was wriggling around as if trying to get comfortable. She seemed to be awake. Perhaps she knew what was going on.
“Excuse me madam, is he okay? Does he do this often?” Again, there is no standard line for such an incident. Surely this was not the first time, I thought. She mumbled and
rubbed her eyes.
“We’ve taken sleeping pills.” She rolled over, as if she didn’t want to be disturbed.
Evidently, the pills were causing my elderly passenger to sleepwalk his way to an imaginary beach, and I had to deal with it.
“Okay sir, lets get your pants back on.” I said.
No response. I was worried that someone would surely wake up and notice the weird scene at any moment. And I was determined that this sensitive matter should be treated with discretion. I hoped he would come to his senses and pull the pants back up. Instead, he managed to kick free the pants around his ankles and pulled down his jocks to his ankles. Fortunately, his shirt was long enough to maintain his dignity and avoid complete catastrophe. Time for a new strategy. I took the man’s arm and grabbed his pants from the floor. The jocks would have to be sacrificed. I led him to the nearest galley, and closed the curtain. I put his pants in his hands, stepped out of the galley and closed the curtains, hoping he would see sense. Suddenly I was a retail assistant helping my customer at the fitting room. I almost felt the urge to call out and ask if he needed a different size. The job had many bizarre requirements that they don’t teach you in training.
So began my introduction to the weird world in the sky. I’d heard the quip that people don’t just check in their luggage when they arrive at the airport. They check in their brains too. Over the next few months, I could see why. The horror of the nine out of ten passengers who don’t use wash their hands after using the lavatory became apparent with the microsecond between flush and door opening, that I couldn’t help but notice. They would return to the cabin to eat, and spread their e-coli about. Passengers handing sick bags and dirty nappies in the middle of a meal service while the crew are handling food was another head scratching occurrence. Some showed no apprehension about clipping toenails and putting them into the seat pocket.
Every flight there was the great irony of passenger behaviour. Adults acting like children, complaining about the adjacent passenger stealing the arm rest, rolling their eyes when they cannot get a specific type of cola, developing sudden allergies to Coke, but not Pepsi and being generally ill mannered, and never offering so much as a thank you.
Some of the airline secrets I learnt from other crew who had flown for other airlines were amusing more than disturbing. A certain airline in South East Asia is so obsessed with the consistency in crew appearance uniformity in physical traits that the slinky dress that serves as the uniform is pre-fitted with a prosthetic derriere to ensure all its female flight attendants are sporting the same hourglass figure. I found it amusing when a ground crew member at Heathrow, told me that as they open the main aircraft door at the gate after a long flight, they quickly take a step back to avoid the assault of cabin stench, that all onboard have produced and become accustomed to in flight.
Then there were the sad human realities of air travel. I learned that aircraft toilets are the preferred place to die on board. The crew were eager to share their tales of finding dead bodies in flight. A flight attendant became suspicious when a lavatory had been occupied for some time. She knocked and didn’t receive a response from the occupant. She opened the door and a lifeless man rolled out onto the floor. He’d been dead a while. In the ensuing chaos, passengers stepped over the body so that they could use the lavatories, unfazed by the crisis. Passengers continued to press their call bells for service while it was made crystal clear through announcements for a doctor that there was a medical emergency on board. The six foot long roll-out table that served as a morgue on certain aircraft was used more often than I had thought. As soon as a doctor of medicine on board–usually there is at least one–pronounces the passenger dead, the corpse is placed into the drawer and stowed away for the remainder of the flight. Out of site, out of mind. After all any loose articles, even the odd corpse, must be secured for landing. Certain routes and times of year were particularly high risk for death on board. Flights to holy cities and those known for their mysterious healing qualities attracted the frail and ill. So did religious holidays, as the ill made one last ditch attempt to see relatives before going to the other side. Sometimes the stress of the journey finished them off before the descent. We often flew passengers who were already dead. In the cargo hold, just below our feet, our aircraft repatriated the bodies of holiday makers who didn’t check their scuba equipment properly, jumped on a moped without a helmet, or overdosed in a state of invincibility that travel brings about. Some just took their last holiday with undiagnosed health problems and dropped dead in their hotel rooms.
The airline was a workplace that was unofficially segregated along racial lines. The self-segregation was evident in the cliques that formed between speakers of a common language, or ethnic background. Although we all spoke English, either as a first or second language, the demarcation between groups made itself obvious. On any given trip, instant temporary friendships were struck between the whites, while the Asian crew members likewise made their own groups. We would work professionally and cohesively on the aircraft, but on layovers, the groups would go their separate ways. Meeting in the lobby for a return leg suddenly jolted the memory to the fact that there were other crew on the trip not seen since arriving.
Sometimes, rivalry between groups would arise and result in sheer animosity, especially when it came to holidays. With vacation time pre-assigned for the year, anyone lucky enough to have been given high value holidays off work could charge a fortune for a swap. If you wanted a particular holiday off from work to visit family and friends, there was a price. The Chinese wanted time over Chinese New Year, and Muslims wanted to avoid work over Ramadan as it was particularly exhausting due to the fasting requirements. Among the white, western crew, Christmas was the most popular holiday and anyone who wanted to get back home badly enough would have to pay. A friendly Canadian named Samantha revealed she paid a Kenyan crew member $US4000 to swap her vacation time, to have Christmas with her family. A slightly lesser price could be expected for Thanksgiving, and Easter. This trading scheme brought out the inner extortionist in all of us. It was better to get in as soon as possible and make alliances with people with a different religious background. If you didn’t get in early and get the trip swap, or vacation swap done in time, the price naturally went up. It brought out racist galley gossip tirades by white crew, cursing black or Arab crew members. White South African crew would unleash on black South African Crew, accusing them of conspiring to price fix and ‘ripping of us whites.’ Meanwhile, all the black African crew, it was rumoured, would refuse to sell anything to any white South Africans. Arabs made things hard for Americans, and Greeks refused to trade with Turks. The Chinese crew would charge exorbitant prices to the Japanese. The airline, it seemed, was not a place to make friends.