‘All right there, Cathy?’ I say.
‘Ouch,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘I’ve felt better.’
‘Right,’ I say, my smile slightly stiff.
‘I never knew Bacardi Breezers could make you feel so shit. Mint?’
‘What?’
‘Want one?’ She proffers a tube of extra strong mints. ‘Stop me breathing alcohol all over the punters.’
‘Good idea. And no thanks. Any idea where the others are?’
‘Debbie’s here,’ she says, pointing to her friend, who looks sheet white, as if she is about to throw up.
‘Afternoon, Debbie,’ I say.
She can only nod, and even that motion seems to cause her pain. There is hungover and toxic, and this girl is clearly toxic. If I had more staff I would send her home without any pay as she is clearly not fit to work.
‘What about the other two?’ I ask.
‘Oh,’ says Cathy. ‘Last time I saw them both they were getting up close and personal with some blokes who work in Baggage at Luton.’
‘OK.’
‘We left them there,’ she adds.
‘Any idea if they are planning on coming in?’ My patience is beginning to reach its limits.
‘Oh, they’ll be here.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I’ve got Chanel’s flat keys.’
‘How?’
‘It’s a long story.’
‘Good night?’ asks Andy, who is standing behind a check-in desk putting up a branding board.
‘Great,’ says Cathy, flicking her long, ironed-straight, burgundy-coloured hair. ‘It was a mate of mine’s leaving thing from Luton and all her male colleagues did the Full Monty striptease in her honour. They were ever so good.’ She smiles. ‘They did it right down to these gold pouches and a couple of them went totally naked. Wasn’t that funny, Debbie, when those two blokes went totally starkers?’
‘Mmm,’ says Debbie as she turns her computer on.
‘Sounds like a top night,’ says Andy.
‘You’d have loved it,’ says Cathy. ‘You must come down with us next time.’
‘Possibly.’ Andy sounds uncharacteristically unforthcoming.
‘No, you should,’ I say, sensing it is not his thing at all.
‘Absolutely,’ says Andy, flicking me the Vs behind Cathy’s back. ‘And you should go too.’
‘Yeah, go on,’ says Cathy, her eyes brightening. ‘You’d love it.’
‘Oh look,’ I say quickly, changing the subject. ‘What visions of loveliness do I see before me?’
‘Oh shit,’ says Andy.
‘Twenty quid.’
‘All right. Keep your bloody toupee on.’
Chanel and Trisha are weaving through the crowds towards our check-in desks. Bearing in mind that neither of them has probably been home, they look amazingly showered and shiny and ready for work. Chanel’s very yellow hair is scraped back into a tight pony tail, while Trisha’s brown and blonde striped hair swings as if she has just stepped out of a salon. I have to admit I am impressed. They are both dressed in their navy blue ground-handling uniforms but have remembered to accessorize with our red and white scarves.
‘You two are dirty stop-outs,’ says Cathy, wagging a white square-tipped fingernail in their general direction. ‘What did you get up to last night?’
‘Never you mind,’ says Chanel, raising an eyebrow that has been plucked completely away and then drawn back on again. ‘Sorry we’re late,’ she says to me, with an insincere smile.
‘You’re not.’
‘Did you cop off with that big bloke?’ Cathy persists.
‘My lips are sealed,’ says Chanel, zipping up a pair of pink glossed lips. ‘A lady never tells.’
‘How about you, Trish?’ asks Cathy, bored by Chanel’s refusal to play gossip.
‘Ditto,’ says Trisha.
‘You two are no bloody fun,’ moans Cathy. ‘I’m not taking you again.’
‘We don’t need you to go next time,’ says Chanel.
‘Ooh, hark at her!’ says Cathy. ‘Well, you can get someone else to look after your keys next time you want to shag some baggage handler.’ She throws over the set of keys.
‘Customs and Excise, actually,’ corrects Chanel, catching her keys.
‘Whatever,’ says Cathy, making a W shape with her thumbs and fingers and pointing it in Chanel’s direction.
‘Can you two stop bickering?’ I say as I look at all four of them standing in a row behind their desks. ‘We’ve got a full plane to check in and we’re a bloke down.’
‘It’s always a full plane,’ mutters Cathy.
She’s not wrong. Our planes are normally overbooked by about 20 per cent. We do it as a matter of course, mainly because there are about 20 per cent no-shows on any one flight and the airline doesn’t want to be out of pocket. These days there are so many ways to book tickets and so many people who don’t pay until the last minute that it’s hard for the industry to keep up. The days of everyone booking months in advance and paying their fare in full to their travel agent are long gone. People’s plans are always changing. Most of the time, because this is a long-haul flight to Sydney via Bangkok, we can successfully juggle passenger numbers. It’s the short-haul flights, where passengers’ plans are more likely to change and the flights are overbooked by as much as 35 per cent, where the real problems are.
But there are some passengers who make money out of not flying. It happens more in the States, but it does go on over here as well. Known as ‘compensation flyers’, they book the cheapest non-refundable tickets on very over-subscribed flights then turn up late in the hope that there is no room on the aircraft, and we have to compensate them. Denied Boarding Compensation can be quite substantial, between £300 and £600 a flight, so you can see the appeal. There are some people who spend whole days booking themselves onto flights out of JFK and never going anywhere at all. It is quite a lucrative way of earning a living, just so long as you time your arrival correctly and are always the first people in the queue to accept the invitation not to fly.
Unfortunately, some people also think this is the best way to get an upgrade. If you arrive late enough for the plane, there will be no economy seating left and we will have no choice but to upgrade you. In the days of yore, before frequent flyer cards and loyalty schemes, this may well have worked. But now these card-holders are marked ‘Vol Up’ (suitable for voluntary upgrade) before the puffed-out passenger who arrives late for the flight. In fact, being late and stressed will only mark you out for special treatment. Check-in staff often take sadistic pleasure in handing you the worst seat on the plane, in the middle of the back row, right by the toilets, if you arrive late and give them any sort of grief. The more you huff and puff and complain about how difficult your journey has been, the worse your seat. Well, they get paid £11,000 a year for an eight-hour shift on the service frontline; you can understand they have to keep themselves amused somehow.
And it’s not as if we haven’t heard the upgrade excuses before. ‘My wife’s pregnant.’ ‘My wife’s got her period.’ ‘My wife had flu.’ ‘We’re honeymooners.’ ‘I have a headache.’ ‘My back is bad.’ ‘I’ve got unfeasibly long legs.’ ‘But I always fly first/business – my secretary must have made a mistake.’ It’s enough to make you put them next to the fattest, most flatulent person on the flight.
And it’s always bollocks. In the years that I have been doing this, never has anyone produced a medical certificate if they’ve been asked. And as soon as we call Derek and Terry over, if they’re really pleading and insistent they normally undergo a miraculous recovery worthy of Lazarus.
Then, of course, there are the bribes. Usually the preserve of the Nigerians and the guys from the Gulf, the slickest way of securing an upgrade is to slip a couple of fifty-pound notes into your passport as you check in. We used to have a terrible problem with cash for upgrades. Last year I found seven passengers on our Sydney flight who had paid at the check-in
for the privilege. I got the purser on the flight to explain that they could sit in their seats, but the cabin staff wouldn’t be able to serve them on the flight. They all sat still and ate nothing all the way to Sydney.
But there are plenty of other ways to be on the take. We used to get a lot of Premiership football business on our short-haul flights and one of our check-in staff was only too keen to upgrade them in return for tickets and season passes. But it was one of our check-in staff in South Africa who proved to be truly problematic. He was in the pay of people smugglers and was getting illegal immigrants onto our flights despite them all having forged passports. It was a nightmare for us at this end because we were being charged £2,000 per repatriation. It took UK immigration a while to work out what was going on, but eventually our check-in bloke was arrested. It caused no end of problems for our duty manager over there. The smuggling gang didn’t like the fact that their business had been compromised and they started to threaten the duty manager’s family. He was quickly moved out of South Africa and sent to New York. But it all got quite hairy. So you can understand why it’s a good idea for me to keep an eye on proceedings.
‘Right,’ I say. ‘Dave is obviously not showing up, so Andy and I will take it in turns to do first and club, and the rest of you are on economy.’
‘OK,’ says Cathy. The others nod in agreement.
‘Do you all know how this system works?’ I ask. ‘Business is rows eleven to twenty-seven.’
‘Yeah,’ says Chanel, glancing over at a pale, grey-looking Debbie. ‘Not sixty to seventy like in BA.’
‘Can you chat on these computers?’ asks Trisha with a small grin on her face.
‘Oh yes,’ replies Andy. ‘We’ve still got the old system here.’
‘Not too much,’ I warn them, trying to keep control. ‘We’ve got a lot of people to check in in a very small amount of time.’
‘Spoilsport,’ mutters Andy.
‘I know what you’re like,’ I say, tapping the side of my nose.
Depending on what computer system the airline uses, check-in staff can talk to one another via simultaneous email. So when check-in staff seem to be taking an age to type your rather short name into the computer, they are probably sending one of their mates a message – usually about you or occasionally about someone else in the queue behind you. These messages range from the basic – ‘Have you seen the nose/tits/arse/gut on her?’ – to the more malicious – ‘I’ve got a right old cunt here; can anyone suggest a screaming child for him to sit next to?’ They can also add comments or messages to your ticket that flash up as you arrive at the gate. So the cabin crew are warned in advance that a ‘twat’ is approaching or a ‘difficult bastard’ is on his way and that you should be treated accordingly – i.e. given your dinner/drinks last, asked to move at the last minute to a seat next to an enormously fat man. You see, it really does pay to be pleasant at check-in.
There are a few passengers already forming queues by the time we are ready to open. Fortunately, we don’t have a uni-queue policy (or one queue for all flights) as favoured by some airlines. I don’t know why they bother to do them. They’re a bloody nightmare. Every time anyone finally gets to the front of the queue, they are always pissed off at having to wait that long and feeling panicked about missing their flights. It’s not that democratic either: most of the time staff are trawling up and down the queue pulling people to the front who are late for their flights; meanwhile, the ones who turned up with plenty of time to spare get penalized.
I walk up and down behind the desks. The check-in seems to be going fine. There is no sign of the gang the police are looking for. However, I do notice that every time Debbie bends over to slip a luggage tag on a bag she retches. I swear, if I don’t let her go and get a glass of water she is going to puke any second.
‘Debbie?’ I say.
‘Mmm?’ she says, her dry lips held tightly together.
‘Why don’t you have a quick break and get yourself a glass of water?’
‘Oh,’ she says, looking a bit surprised. ‘Um, thanks.’
Debbie walks into the back office for a sit down and I take over her desk.
‘Good afternoon, madam,’ I say to a rather efficient-looking woman with hard blonde hair, accompanied by three young boys whose ages, I’m guessing, range from about six to twelve.
‘Is it?’ she says as she heaves her luggage onto the scales and slaps down four passports.
‘All the way to Sydney?’ I ask.
‘That’s right,’ she replies, not bothering to look me in the eye. I start to type in her name. ‘Could you upgrade my children to business?’ she asks in a manner that implies we hand out almost £21K worth of tickets for free every day of the week.
‘Oh,’ I say. Here we go. ‘I’m afraid we don’t usually upgrade children into the cabin. If you would like to fly with your children I suggest that you downgrade to economy. I could sit you all together next to an emergency exit for extra leg room if you’d like?’
‘Right,’ she says, having clearly ignored everything I’ve said about her downgrading. ‘Are you sure you can’t put them in business? You see, I’ve done it before.’
‘Not with this airline you haven’t, madam,’ I say, sort of trying to laugh.
‘I have,’ she insists. ‘Every time I’ve flown, in fact.’
‘Well, it isn’t our policy to upgrade children. We have customers who have paid a lot of money for some peace in the cabin and I’m afraid they don’t really expect children to be there.’
‘I don’t care what the other customers do or do not expect,’ she continues. ‘I fly your airline all the time and my children always get upgraded.’
‘Do you have a frequent flyer card?’ I ask.
‘Of course not!’ she barks. ‘I don’t have a Sainsbury’s Nectar card either. Dreadful things.’
‘They aren’t quite the same,’ I point out.
‘You’ve got a right old slag there.’ A message from Andy pops up onto my screen.
‘Do some work,’ I type back.
‘Look at her hair. She looks like a right old harridan.’ I ignore him.
‘I want to speak to the man in charge,’ she says.
‘I am the man in charge,’ I reply.
‘You!’ she says.
‘Yes, me.’ I smile.
‘Oh.’ She looks only marginally wrong-footed.
‘It’s the children I feel sorry for,’ Andy types. ‘Look at their miserable little faces.’
‘Um,’ she says, ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’
‘Madam!’ I say as she walks away. ‘You can’t leave your children, luggage and passports here.’
She ignores me, and flounces off down the long queue to make a phone call. The three small boys sit on their suitcases like little lost souls and wait for their mother to return. I move her bags off the scales and carry on checking in.
‘What?’ comes a shriek from the next-door queue. ‘It can’t be.’
‘I’m afraid it is,’ says Chanel, her face impassive. ‘By two months.’
‘Can’t you make an exception?’ asks the harassed-looking woman.
‘No,’ says Chanel. ‘Your passport is out of date, you are not allowed to fly.’
‘But it’s only just,’ tries the woman.
‘Two months is two months,’ says Chanel.
‘I can’t believe you won’t make an exception. I’m English, and Australia is an English colony.’
‘It’s a country in its own right,’ explains Chanel. ‘And I’m afraid we can’t let you leave the UK with an out-of-date passport.’
‘Well, fuck you!’ says the woman, suddenly giving up and giving Chanel the finger. ‘Fuck all of you!’ She marches off into the terminal in tears.
‘You all right?’ I ask, leaning over to Chanel.
‘What?’ she asks, looking at me as if I’m insane. ‘Course I am.’
‘Good. It’s just that some people get a bit upset being sworn at.’
‘Nah,’ she says. ‘Water off a duck’s back.’
‘Right!’ says the hard-haired woman, who has returned to the front of my desk and slapped the passports down again. ‘I’ve come to a solution.’
‘OK,’ I say.
‘The children will fly tomorrow as unaccompanied minors and I shall travel today in business.’ She smiles. ‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of it earlier. So much easier for everyone all round.’
‘Right,’ I say. Much easier for you, I think. ‘You’ll have to go to the ticket desk to change the children’s tickets. And if you give me yours, I’ll check you in all the way through to Sydney.’
‘Isn’t that a good idea?’ She smiles again, looking down at her children. ‘Nanny Stewart is on her way to collect you. And I shall see you in a couple of days.’
With hard-hair checked in to Sydney and her children waiting for the lift back to London, Debbie makes a return appearance.
‘Better?’ I ask.
‘Yes, thanks,’ she replies, looking only marginally less grey.
I vacate her desk and walk up towards Andy and the club/first class check-in. As I walk past Cathy she turns round and takes hold of my arm.
‘Can I have a quick word?’ she asks.
‘Course,’ I say.
‘See the man behind me?’ she whispers, pointing over her shoulder towards a small weasel of a man in a thin grey suit.
‘Yes.’
‘Well, he’s got such bad BO. I don’t think he should fly.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Can’t you smell it?’
I lean forward and inhale slightly. Jesus Christ! The smell is overpowering. It’s so acrid it makes my eyes water. ‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘He stinks.’
In the airline regulations manual there is a passenger acceptance list which gives a whole load of reasons for refusing admission to a plane. Drunk passengers, rowdy passengers, barefoot passengers, infants less than a week old (unless its parents have a doctor’s note allowing it to fly), passengers with communicable diseases such as chickenpox, passengers who look like they might be on drugs – and passengers with body odour. And this man really does have body odour. Offensive body odour. Revolting enough to make anyone sitting close to or around him on a long flight to Sydney want to complain.
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