“Can’t get this in Florida,” she says, selecting a packet of vacuum-sealed smoked salmon.
“You can’t get fish in Florida?” Positioned behind Gran’s chair, Aideen freely eye-rolls.
“Not Irish fish, Duckie.”
“Gran,” says Aideen, “where are we going to eat that? Is there a kitchen even?”
When Aideen sees Gran’s face, she wants to take it back. She doesn’t really mean to be mean; she just has no idea how to envision their near future. A motel? A high-rise? A tent pitched on the beach? To Aideen, Florida is a jumbled fantasy grounded in a steady diet of Hollywood and the internet. It could just as well be Los Angeles or San Diego or Atlanta. It’s Kentucky Fried Chicken, stubble-faced surfers in wetsuits unzipped enough to expose just that bit of chest, Disney World, blubbery men in gold chains parked beside coolers of Budweiser, blubbery women in tennis visors and neon fanny packs. What exactly will Aideen and Gran do once they land? Get laughed out of a police station? Steal a wheelchair and play detective in Clearwater? Book a room and subsist on smoked fish until they deplete their woeful cash reserves?
“Go on then,” says Aideen. “We can eat it in a hotel, right?”
“Ah, you’re a petal.”
“What about sausages? Might as well get some of those as well.”
“Oh, no bother, I’ve already got some.”
“You packed a string of sausages in your carry-on?”
“No! You can’t take sausages in your handbag, I don’t think, love.”
“I know that, Gran. But you can’t put them in your luggage either. I mean, first of all, that’s just gross. You can’t—”
“I’m more worried about the rashers, if I’m being honest.”
“Did you bring eggs as well? We can do a fry-up at the gate.”
Gran cranes her neck right round and grins. “You’re just like your dad there.” In the unflattering glare of the institutional overheads, her grandmother’s eyes flash with feeling, but they’re lost in the deep trenches that have always been, to Aideen, her most striking facial feature. The woman is ancient.
There once was a saucy old dame
Who her family tried hard to make tame…
“Listen to me, Aideen, are you listening?”
“Our flight’s boarding soon, Gran. We’d better hurry.”
“We will. But listen: You can’t speak to Mum or Dad yet. We’ve got to stall them until we’re settled and then we’ll let them know we’re safe. Right? We can’t tip them off now, you see, so no text messaging, no phoning. Your father will get his knickers in a twist and he’ll be on the first airplane to Florida and that, as they say, will be that.”
“No he won’t.”
“Yes he will, love. You know what he’s like. He’ll come and bring us right back home, you can believe that.”
“No he won’t,” says Aideen. “He can’t.”
“Of course he can.”
“I’ve done something really wicked.”
“You put fish eyeballs in his coffee?”
Aideen gawps at her grandmother. She could eat the head off her; she could poke out Gran’s own eyeballs.
“That is not funny.”
“Sorry, love. You’re right. I’m sorry. Lost the head.”
“That is the opposite of funny.”
Gran sheepishly casts her face toward the floor and Aideen takes up her position behind the wheelchair and they roll in silence to the till. But almost as fast as it arrives, Aideen finds, for some reason, that fury with Gran is difficult to sustain. It was a cheap shot, yes, but Aideen gets that Gran’s off-color joke is rooted in a truth and so maybe it’s fair game. She put a woman in hospital for no good reason, after all; she’s been the cause of great pain.
“She’s going to be alright,” Gran says, counting out a mess of euro coins. “She’s in the clear, remember? Stable.” Back at Margate, Aideen would only agree to America after Gran had impersonated the headmistress of Millburn School over the phone and got word that Bleekland’s condition was improving. “Stable is good.”
“That’s the word they used?”
“The very one.”
They pay for the fish and wheel their way to their gate. Just before boarding, though there’s no one near them, and no one cares, Aideen drops her voice and leans forward and whispers in Gran’s ear the whereabouts of Dad’s passport.
46
The bit of river that trickles through Millburn is not visible from the road. Kevin walks down a bank of weeds, the odd condom wrapper and a crushed can of Smithwick’s peeping through the ragged scrub. He follows a long, hidden walkway and soon enough discovers what is surely the girls’ spot on the far side of an underpass. They’ve left a rude mound of evidence behind: cigarette butts, an empty box of matches, crushed Sprite cans. He calls Aideen’s name halfheartedly but knows she’s not here—the whole place feels forgotten. He plunks to the ground, his back against rock. Back at Fair House, Rose Byrd had threatened to ruin him—not only unkind but also preposterous. He’s literally lost his daughter. He’s figuratively lost his wife. His profession is nearly obsolete. He is currently contributing zero income to his household. And what about the long-ago notion of himself as a writer? What was the last word he’s written that didn’t concern celebrity fitness regimes or a peek into some ingénue’s couture handbag?
How much more ruined could he be?
Kevin’s phone buzzes. For the countless time today, he rejects a call from Rossdale. A small, wishful part of him feels sure Aideen’s grand; she’s just gone off for a bit of a cry or turned up at home. But a more primal part, the one that reigns parents from infancy, is all terror, and makes him vulnerable to the wildest of scenarios—she’s wounded, unconscious, kidnapped, raped, dying, dead.
Opposite him is a thick bank of forest, a copse of silver birches and wild brush. Across the river, a man emerges. At first, Kevin assumes he’s just a drunk stumbling along in his raincoat, disheveled, weaving through the woods, poor bastard. But a stretch of pale skin between the hem of his trench and the top of his shoes—and then the fact of his belt—tells Kevin all he needs to know. Across the road from an all-girls school. He scrambles to his feet in a huff, chest out, breath heavy.
“Oy!” Kevin yells.
It’s almost comical, the effect of this. The man recoils as if a blow has landed on him, and then he turns and takes off so quickly and expertly, Kevin is left with all this teeming energy and adrenaline and nowhere to channel it. The fear rears its head again, all the possibilities of evil in the world, and his own twin demons—regret and failure—and having no control over any of it, he lifts his face to the sky and, with great frustration, screams.
47
Millie is studying the laminated emergency landing card with its disingenuous diagrams. A family in life jackets bounces its way, not unhappily, down a giant yellow inflatable mattress into the ocean. As in, whee! She tucks it back into the seatback pouch and listens to the deluge of announcements overhead, learns that federal law prohibits tampering with, disabling, or destroying smoke detectors on this aircraft. Which brings to mind the twenty Dunhills in her handbag, which she’d found in Margate still sealed in their swank maroon-and-gold packaging. She’d taken the discovery as a sign that the universe was cutting her some slack. Do as you like, it was telling her, you need no permission. Had that really been just a few hours ago? She marvels that one day can be so brimming, others so bereft.
Since blastoff, the ride’s been particularly bumpy, and with each cough and swoop of turbulence, Millie suppresses a Tourettian urge to say “shit shit shit shit shit.” She ought to hide this fear from her granddaughter, of course, but Aideen doesn’t notice a bloody thing anyway. Blissfully impervious to mortality, she’s sitting with her purple cushioned headphones watching some violent drivel that features incomprehensible numbers of explosions, bodies flying, guns drawn, planets and cities wiped out in milliseconds. Millie quietly takes up her handbag and is soon clicking the ben
dable bathroom door into its locked position and lighting up a Dunhill. Ah. She feels with pleasure the sharp intake of smoke to her lungs. She luxuriates in it. As she calms, the tiny cabin fills with smoke. Yet no alarm sounds; no undercover federal agent swoops in. Millie cannot even detect a detector. As she’d half suspected, it’s all a bit of bollocks. She’s just a little old lady having a fag.
For all her airport bravado, she’d realized moments after regrettably glimpsing into the space station of a cockpit, that in the many years since she was aboard a plane, she’s become a nervous flyer. Even if the statistical likelihood of a plane crash is roughly equivalent to having your limbs gnawed off by a great white on an innocent dawn swim, she can’t help thinking how plausible it would be for this Boeing to just drop out of the sky—and seven hours is an impossibly wide window of opportunity for such a calamity, a yawning chasm of potential doom. Like most of her fellow travelers, Millie has no sense of the science behind what keeps a steel goliath airborne. She had simply boarded the thing, willfully ignorant, or just stupid, and hopeful. Wait now, she thinks, doesn’t flight have something to do with how the wind glides under (or is it over) the wings?
When she first hears it, Millie ignores the knocking. As it becomes persistent, she calls out, “Might be a bit. Upset stomach!”
Who would want to be rushing in after gleaning that particular tidbit? When she’s finished with her Dunhill, Millie sizzles the butt into the disinfected puddle of toilet water and watches as it whirls and vanishes down the steel vortex. She scrubs her hands carefully, something she seldom does, finding the modern obsession with hygiene and bacteria, like most modern obsessions, absurd.
Upon exiting, an unsubtle cloud of smoke wafts out along with Millie Gogarty. Directly opposite her stands a dismayed-looking female flight attendant with a taut ombre bun, dark outer rim orbiting an unnatural orange nucleus. Millie nods and moves past the woman.
“Hey, wait a minute. What were you doing in there?” The attendant—her nametag reads KAREN—sniffs. The face on her! “Did you just…” Incredulous! “Smoke a cigarette?”
Something in Karen’s voice calls to mind Sylvia Phenning. It’s not just that the woman’s American; it’s also a wonky, foreign emphasis on the wrong words, a conversational clanger to her Dublin ears. Millie freezes. What will she say? And then it comes to her: She’ll say nothing. She’ll play dumb though she worries, immediately, how to transmit muteness. Deaf would be easier, if only she knew how to sign.
“Ma’am?” Karen reaches across to take hold of Millie’s wrist. “Were you just smoking in there?”
Across the way, another loo door pops open and out steps a young fella in stocking feet (on a public airplane!), an unsightly slab of translucent belly leaking from beneath his grubby gray T-shirt. He sniffs the air, registers a look of mild curiosity, and mutters, “Right on,” before walking off.
Millie barricades her mouth with crossed fingers. Karen ignores this, steps into the bathroom, and is greeted with lingering licks of smoke.
“Holy shit,” says the flight attendant. “Don’t move.”
Karen’s reaction now strikes real horror in Millie’s heart and her mind is deluged with nasty possibilities: visions of being hauled off the airplane, dragged down the gangplank. Handcuffed, arrested, interrogated, frisked, fined, incarcerated, deported. She can’t be stopped now—Millie’s unlikely to be on many more trips like this. Another item on her ever-swelling never-again list: never go abroad, never join a team, never mind an infant, never share a bed. And then what about Aideen? Would they deport her as well? Millie can hardly bear the thought, not now that they’re on their way.
Karen scans the galley kitchen behind them until her eyes seize upon a red telephone attached to the wall.
“Gran?”
From the aisle, Aideen steps forward and completes this little tableau, the headphones now clinging to her neck like twin baby mammals, some pop tune blaring from each.
“This is my gran,” says Aideen. “Is everything OK?”
“This is your grandmother?”
Aideen looks quizzically at Millie. “She’s been gone awhile, I got worried.”
“Can she speak?”
“Yes, of course she can speak! Gran?”
Millie tries to beam her a message along the lines of: Let’s pretend I can’t speak, but Aideen just looks baffled.
“Well I caught her smoking in that bathroom right there. Which is basically, like, breaking three different laws.” Karen’s face is reddening. “Stay here,” she commands, stepping again toward the phone.
When Aideen first appeared, Millie was surprisingly relieved: she had backup. But sure, look at her. The shoulders of a girl, not a woman (shoulders, Millie realizes with a pang, to which she herself is adding an even heavier burden); a thick cuff of rubber bands clamped onto a delicate wrist; a T-shirt—SAVE THE DRAMA FO YO LLAMA printed below a sketch of the animal—that screams youthful heedlessness.
“Wait, hang on,” cries Aideen. “You don’t understand. My gran is—” Aideen stares at Millie. “Say something!”
Millie does the only thing she can think of, which is: She winks. It’s the tiniest yet riskiest of gestures, and, luckily, Karen’s gaze is still fixed on her granddaughter.
“My gran’s, like…” says Aideen and makes a cuckoo face, rolling her eyes and circling a finger at her temple: the international gesture for loony tunes. “Demented.”
“You mean, like, she has Alzheimer’s or something?”
“Yes.”
Impressive, thinks Millie, but Aideen’s lying is wobbly. Her eye contact is shady to nil; her cheeks are ablaze—that flaming ruddy Irish tainting impossible to hide.
“She gets confused and, like, wanders off a lot and does stuff like this sometimes. She probably forgot where she was.” Aideen gently places her hands on Millie’s shoulders. “It’s me, Gran. You know who I am, right? I’m Kevin’s daughter, Aideen. You’re on an airplane, but you can’t smoke on an airplane, remember, we talked about that?”
Millie squints at Aideen.
“Oh my God,” says Karen.
Millie is so tickled with Aideen’s performance, she might as well be struck dumb. “Are you the person responsible for her?”
Aideen nods. “Sometimes she doesn’t know who I am, and I’m the closest one to her.” Both statements, Millie realizes, contain truth.
“How old are you?”
“Eighteen.” Aideen blushes again. “I’m really sorry about all this. Come on, Gran, let’s go back to our seats.”
Millie hangs her head, a cowed dog, like one of the poor souls from Rossdale.
“Wait a sec.” Karen drops her voice. “I’m gonna need all your information. I have to report this.”
“Oh no!” Aideen says. “Please don’t. It was a mistake. It was my mistake. I nodded off. It won’t happen again. I promise you. I’m going to drink coffee the rest of the plane journey, I swear. I’ll be with her every minute. We’ll take away her cigarettes—Gran, hand over those smokes.”
“Oh, honey.” Karen shakes her head sadly, the bun a slick immobile boulder. “I know it won’t happen again. But I have no choice. I have to report this; there’s a whole protocol. Don’t look so worried. I’ll let the captain know the circumstances. Captain Tyler is the best.”
“But what’ll happen to us?”
“I’m not—to tell you the truth, this is a new one for me. But I can assure you he’s a very cool guy and I’ll explain the situation. They might have to talk to her when you deplane at Orlando.”
“What? No,” says Aideen. “Oh my God. No, please.”
“But since she’s elderly and, you know, not well…”
“No! You can’t! Everything will be ruined,” Aideen says. “Please, it was a mistake. I beg you. This trip is—all her life my Gran’s wanted to go to America, it was her dream but she waited too long and now she’s in this state, this Alzheimer’s, which has been horrible.” Millie is astonished
to see something like real tears. “And so the idea was, like, for her to finally have her trip, a last trip, to America. It was her dream.”
With that, Millie takes her cue. “We’re going to America?”
* * *
Not twenty minutes later, Millie’s choking down a whiskey and trying without success to get Aideen to look at her. Her granddaughter hasn’t spoken since Karen let the Gogartys off after a moving speech that began with the revelation that her own father-in-law suffered from Alzheimer’s and ended with, “This is probably against my better judgment.” She’d brought Aideen and Millie each to the brink of pain with a lengthy and fierce embrace, blocking two passengers and a fellow flight attendant from passing by. It was a moment. Millie had felt so touched and grateful, so appreciative of American compassion and openheartedness, she’d had to reject her immediate impulse to confess their chicanery to Karen.
Aideen had made a great show, hambone nearly, of lending an arm to her poor old dotard of a granny and guiding her down the aisle back to their row. But when Millie clicked her seat belt and whispered, “That was an absolute showstopper, Duckie,” Duckie had glowered.
“Don’t,” she’d hissed, “say a single word to me. Not a word.” With that, she’d shut her eyes and leaned away.
With no warning, the plane begins to jolt, sporadically at first and then it’s full-on jackhammering. Through the window, it looks as if they’re trapped in an infinite wispy white mess of clouds. The minibottle of Jameson and Millie’s plastic tumbler and Aideen’s can of Sprite and cup tremble and hop across their tray tables. Another wrenching drop of the plane, Millie’s stomach dipping with it, is followed by a collective gasp. Somewhere a baby begins to wail. Millie feels a hot hand snatch her own and she meets her granddaughter’s wide and terrified eyes. Millie’s never seen her look so hyperalert. Have they boldly booked passage to America only to perish in the frigid Atlantic? Will they, too, end up bouncing down their own yellow rafts?
Good Eggs Page 24