Landing (5 page)

"I forgot to ask about the inquiry," wailed Marcus. "So you didn't get the heave, I presume?"

"An official reprimand," said Síle with a sigh.

"Bastards."

"Management accepted not only that Mr. Jackson was dead when I was alerted to the situation, but that the doctor on board then advised me that he was hours past the point of resuscitation. However, they insisted that in line with airline policy I should still have run for the defibrillator and hauled him into the aisle, rigor mortis and all!"

"Now that would be just too
Fawlty Towers,
" murmured Jael.

Síle was hot-cheeked remembering it; for all her seniority, her impeccable record, she'd been scolded like a child. Her mind slid sideways to Jude Turner's fine-boned face. (
I did offer the passenger another seat,
she'd said at the inquiry.
But as it was only half an hour till landing, she declined. The doctor did not consider that Mr. Jacksons body posed any health hazard.)
She'd mentioned the girl to Kathleen, of course; she'd said something about the Canadian in the seat next to the dead man being a bit rattled, and how Síle'd had to buy her a coffee.

"Oh, it's just typical of the industry these days," Marcus was saying, "all petty regulations and fear of legal repercussions."

"The latest is that we're meant to stop passengers from queuing for the loo, in case they're conspiring to rush the flight deck," Síle told them. "Oh, and we have to watch out for anyone reading the Koran or an almanac! Sometimes nineteen years on the job feels like nineteen years too many."

"Ah, but it must be worth staying for the, whatcha call it, the non-rev travel," said Anton.

"Yeah, you're the only person I know who can wake up on a rainy day off and wonder,
Where will I fly to?,
" growled Jael.

"Though that was a bigger deal in the days before cheap flights," Marcus pointed out.

"You needn't gripe," Anton told his wife, "you were in Trieste last weekend."

"That was business. We got that EuroJoyce Festival gig, by the way, Síle; it's a two-month campaign, megabudget."

"Good on you!"

"Business, meaning champagne breakfasts," said Anton, "while Ys and Daddy were choking down stale Bran Buds at home."

Síle wriggled her way to the bar for the next round. She looked back at the animated faces of her friends. Jael was reapplying her brown lipstick in a tiny mirror and jabbing at Anton with her elbow at the same time. He was going a little silvery around the temples. Jael, she happened to know, would be entirely gray by now if it weren't for expensive monthly applications of Malaysian Cherry. In her charcoal pinstriped jacket she looked so ... worldly, was that the word? Her friend had dressed so much more wildly in the days when Síle had first known her, as a perpetual student living off cheques from her parents' stud farm. Of course, Jael had been a lesbian back then, all battered leather and ties from Oxfam.

That was the early nineties, before the boom turned everything speedy and pricey, before Jael blagged her way into the business and set up Primadonna Publicity. And before Anton. Síle thought back to the phone call in the middle of the night:
I've said I'll marry him, the fat-bottomed guy in middle management. Do you think I'm out of my tree?
For as long as Síle had known them, Anton and Jael had yapped at each other like dogs. Especially when Yseult was born: Motherhood had sent Jael reeling.
(The creature pisses through everything I put on her!
) But their marriage seemed as solid as any other.

Then again, who could tell from the outside whether something was built on quicksand or rock? You could know a friend all your life and still find it a complete mystery why he or she loved this particular individual, out of all the people in the world. What did the two of them whisper to each other under the duvet? Was one of them in charge, or was there a secret power-sharing agreement? And as to whether a partnership would last, well, you might as well toss a coin. Síle had seen gorgeous, tender romances founder on the smallest rocks, and septic yokings linger on till death did them part. Couples she'd thought were perfectly content had broken up and confessed to years of complicated misery; there was an awful privacy about relationships, even in these days of tell-all phone-ins.

Her gizmo beeped.
Out of fluoride-free toothpaste. Night-night.

Síle made a mental note to try the late-night pharmacy on the way home.

In the first couple of years, she'd often caught herself boasting about the fact that she and Kathleen didn't cohabitate:
We don't fancy domesticity.
But they'd been kidding themselves, she thought now. After five years, all couples were domestic, even if they kept two addresses. The pleasant banalities crept up on you; the comforts and irritations became equally habitual.

"Three sour apple martinis and a Murphy's," she roared in the barman's direction, waving her 荤50 note, but his nod was so minimal, she couldn't tell if it was meant for her.

Yes you did, so you did,
So did she and so did I.
And the more I think about it
Sure the nearer I'm to cry.
Oh, wasn't it the happy days
When troubles we had not,
And our mothers made
Colcannon in the little skillet pot?

—ANON
The Skillet Pot

An icy February night; Jude's first drink since the funeral.

She and Gwen were beside the fire in Ireland's bar, the Diving Duck, known to its regulars as the Dive. Gwen was staring at a poster above the rack of ill-assorted antique pistols. She shoved her sandy hair out of her face. "Jazz ballet classes. Who ever heard of a jazz ballerina?"

Jude kept on saying nothing.

Gwen pushed the basket of fries an inch in her friend's direction. "At least over here I don't run into relatives of the residents like I do in St. Mary's. I swear, I was having a quiet beer across the road from my apartment the other night and this lady came up to ask if I'd ever found her dad's cashmere cardigan, and how were his, uh, B.M.s these days?"

Jude was replaying not the cremation, not the hospital, even, but that moment in her aunt's front room in Luton:
Unless Bill
drives us.
It was important to establish the beginning of the end. That way, everything before Luton counted as normal life.
I used to live with my mother,
Jude practiced;
I lived with my mother till last month when she passed on.
No, the euphemism was creepy.
When she died. Yeah, of a brain tumor. Oh, it was very quick; better that way.
Or so everyone said. For Jude, those few weeks of January—from the first hints of Rachel's disorientation in her sister's house, through the episodes of confusion back home, the morning she woke howling with pain, the CAT scan, MRI, and biopsy, the first seizure felling her in the snowdrift outside the general store, those terrible new words to learn
{high-grade, infiltrating, frontal lobe),
the radiation, vomiting, drunken slur, blindness in one eye, and so on, and so on—those weeks hadn't felt quick, but more like a sojourn in hell. She couldn't imagine how they'd felt to her mother.

When Jude hadn't been sitting in various London, Ontario, waiting rooms, she'd continued going to work, in a zombielike way. She'd presided over a board meeting in which Jim McVaddy (untiring, at eighty-two) mentioned that he might have thought twice about donating the collection that three generations of hard bargainers had built up in the McVaddy barn if he'd known that local businesses wouldn't appreciate it enough to chip in, and Glad Soontiens had countered that in her view the Ireland Museum's overhead should be covered by tax dollars handed back by those robbers in Ottawa. Jude had also overhauled the database of all known pre-1900 residents of Perth and Huron townships, and was halfway through putting up an exhibition called "Blood on the Ice: A Hundred Years of Local Hockey," when Rizla had dropped by and said, "Get the fuck out of here."

The one thing she was grateful for, in retrospect, was that the final horrors had stormed in so quickly, there'd been no need for her to pretend to get on with things anymore. For what had turned out to be the last four days of her mother's life, Jude had camped out in the hospital room. (The specialists in London had sent Rachel back to Stratford, Ontario, for what they called "palliative care," which translated as dope.) Gwen drove over from St. Mary's every day, sometimes with a box of doughnut holes. She sat there holding Rachel's hand, making conversation: "Nice day out there, Mrs. Turner. Fifteen below, but they say it'll get up to minus three or four." She gave Jude occasional bits of advice out of the side of her mouth: "She might like a bit of Bach." "Remind them to roll her over, or she'll get sores." "You know that light has a dimmer?"

"Jude? Another?"

She jerked, and covered her beer glass. She wasn't in the hospital, she was in the Dive; it was mid-February now, and her mother's ashes were a gritty mulch on the roots of the lilacs in the backyard, under a fresh fall of snow.

"Okay. Call it a night," said Gwen, heading for the washroom.

Jude took the last few fries from the basket—feeding herself had become dully automatic—and followed her old friend with her eyes. Gwen had a broad face, attractive if you liked her, plain if you didn't. She wore fleece from October to April, then switched to cotton; she claimed to be too busy practically running the Sunset Residence to bother with "all that frilly shit." In their high school it was Gwen who'd gotten called a "lez," mostly for lack of boyfriends, whereas Jude had almost never been without one. Gwen could see the joke in that; as she'd once told Jude, "My market value might be higher if I batted for the other team." But these things were in the hands of the gods, and Gwen's preference was for tall, lithe guys. ( Her one grand passion had been for a giant of a hockey player who'd repeatedly trampled on her heart before turning pro.)

"How you
doing,
Jude?" Dave, the barman, set down their check weighted with two cinnamon mints. Considering Jude had gone to school with the guy, his manner was avuncular, it struck her now; maybe it came with the job.

What was the appropriate answer?
Just dandy? Frigging awful?
"Not too bad."

In her wallet she found the little card with the swallow on it, and she let herself trace the slightly raised image with her thumb.
Síle O'Shaughnessy.
Jude had thought she'd lost the card until she came across it two thirds of the way through
Dombey and Son,
the book she'd been reading to her semiconscious mother at the hospital, out of some vestigial memory that this was what you did when someone was dying. Jude never used to mislay things, but now it was happening all the time; yesterday she'd stomped around the house in search of her glasses for half an hour before discovering that they'd slipped off the hall table into her boot. She used to have a sort of quiet about her that some found enviable, others irksome; "the butch gravitas thing," a girlfriend had called it. Jude had never taken any credit for it, any more than for the smooth curve of her jaw. But now she couldn't remember how to be "solid" or "grounded" or any of those words: Loss had tipped her whole life on its side.

She rubbed the letters again.
Síle O'Shaughnessy:
She practiced saying the name in her head, though she'd never spoken it aloud. In all the dread and chaos of the last six weeks there'd been no occasion to tell anyone about the flight attendant with the Irish accent and the Indian face. But this was the peculiar thing: Jude thought about'Síle O'Shaughnessy all the time. The rapid, tilting sentences; the slightly tired, ripe mouth. The memory was like a teasel stuck to Jude's heel. Every time she remembered Luton, the thought led sideways to'Síle O'Shaughnessy, whose name opened like a door into another, sun-drenched world. Jude liked to imagine the woman in L.A. or Bangkok, Web-surfing on her gizmo over a cocktail, or in her lizard-green uniform bouncing high above her trampoline, her plait dancing like a cobra.

She knew this was absurd, bordering on obsessive, but she wasn't willing to give up anything that took her mind off the horror show of images of her mother, from capable retired receptionist, to frightened patient, to old lady dead in a bed. (They'd had an absurd argument about cremation a week from the end; Jude had argued for a grave and headstone—just name and dates, in the Quaker way—but Rachel had refused to waste the money. Jude had accused her mother of being a
cheapskate;
it was that word she couldn't forgive herself for now.)

"Thank
you.
" Dave again, swooping down for the saucer.

Gwen intercepted Dave and snatched the $20, tossing it back in front of Jude and replacing it with her own.

"Is this one of the stages of bereavement, getting all my drinks bought for me?" Whenever Jude tried to exercise her sense of humour these days, it came out creaky.

Gwen pulled on her beige down jacket. Jude got up, stiff-kneed; all her joints ached. Dave held the heavy door for them: "Goodnight, ladies."

"Night, Dave." Snow whirled into their faces.

"You okay going home?" Gwen asked her.

"It's where I live."

"Anytime you want to crash on my couch..."

Jude almost smiled. "Never again. I've been telling you for years, it's like being char-grilled."

"Buy me a new sofa bed for my birthday, now you're an heiress," Gwen threw over her shoulder as she headed to her car. This was a sardonic reference to the $1,391.61 that Rachel Turner had left, along with the yellow brick house, to her only child.

The wind was biting; Jude pulled her scarf up to her eyes as she turned down the deserted Main Street. It was funny that after what she'd been through, she still cared about such tiny sensations. Still preferred a warm nose to a frozen one, cold beer to lukewarm, any dinner to none. The body insisted on doing its old selfish thing, and the mind was no different.
Site O'Shaughnessy,
she said in her head,
Site O'Shaughnessy,
the sibilance like a tilted rain stick.

When she got to the house, Jude stared up. (Last April she'd seen Bub's porch roof crash to the ground under its burden of snow.) The flaking sash windows were dark. Long before environmentalism, Rachel had ingrained in her daughter thrifty habits such as turning off the light as you left the room.
Next time I go out,
thought Jude,
I'm leaving one on.

No, she couldn't bear it; despite what she'd told Gwen, she wasn't willing to sleep alone tonight.

A few streets away, Rizla's windows glowed with the uneven light of the TV. There were bylaws against parking a winterized trailer on a vacant lot and living in it year round—she'd looked them up for him years ago—but the cops never gave Rizla any grief; he claimed he'd smoked up with half of them in high school.

There was no answer when she tapped, but she let herself in anyway. Siouxsie stirred and whined, but put her head back down on her paws when she recognized Jude. Rizla was supine on the couch, a half-smoked cigarette in his hand. Jude snatched it out of his fingers. He woke with a long snort and sat up. "What the fuck?"

"What the fuck is this?" she asked, brandishing the cigarette.

His eyes veered to the door. "Did I ask you over?"

Jude knew he was just confused, but she treated it as sarcasm. "No, but just as well I happened by, dumb-ass. You could have gone up in flames."

Rizla blinked, shoving a curtain of black hair out of his face with the heel of his hand. "I was watching
CSI
something or other."

She stepped over Siouxsie to the television, which was showing something about penguins, and punched the power switch. "How often do I have to tell you, put the fag out before you lie down."

"Okay."

"You say okay, but you don't do it, Riz." Her voice was unsteady. "I mean, you might as well play Russian roulette. This whole place's going to go up like paper and there'll be nothing left of you but cinders in the couch springs."

He got to his feet and wrapped her up in his arms. A sob jumped out of Jude's throat. There was a density, an amazing inertia to this man. Rizla lifted his head and she thought he was going to say something, maybe something wise that would restore her to herself, but he only yawned like a hippo. He'd had far more practice at losing people than Jude, it struck her now; his father, mother, and two of his brothers had all gone young.

She wiped her eyes on his shirt. She tried twice before her voice came out. "By the way, I never got around to saying ... That time you came to the hospital? I'm sorry she didn't know you."

"Oh, just paying my respects," he said. Then, satiric, "Ma Turner never did much like the trailer-trash that led her darling daughter astray."

Provoking Jude was an old game. "That's bullshit," she couldn't help saying.

Rizla shrugged his massive shoulders, grinning through a yawn. "Gotta hit the sack."

Jude stayed, and only partly because she felt ashamed of having roared at him.

Sometimes on nights like these nothing happened, and sometimes something did; it wasn't a big deal either way. This was how it had been between them for years now, ever since they'd broken up. It wasn't an event if Jude said yes, without words, nor a problem if she said no, equally Silently. Rizla was always open to the possibility—
just how guys are,
he'd once told her ruefully—but never pressed any claim.

Tonight turned out to be something rather than nothing. But it didn't comfort Jude the way she'd thought it might. Afterward she couldn't get to sleep; she threw the condom away, then turned the TV on low and watched someone wallpaper a room.

At six she walked home through icy fog for a bath before work. There was a message on the machine from her father. He called her "honey"; that must be a new Florida habit. Jude supposed one parent was better than none, but the fact was that Ben Turner was the wrong one, and about sixteen hundred kilometres too far south, besides.

She called him back, still standing in the hall beside her dripping boots, to get it over with. "I didn't wake you?"

"Lord no, I don't need more than five hours a night these days," Ben told her.

She thought of her father's sun-ripened face, in the Coldstream Meetinghouse; various Friends had stood up to give their spare, kind testimonies to Rachel Turner, but he hadn't said a word. The irony was that Ben was the birthright Quaker, and Rachel a desultory Anglican who'd become a "convinced Friend" (as they put it) after marrying him, but he'd left it behind long ago, with so much else. He'd flown in on the day of the cremation and departed the day after, although—it struck Jude now—he might never see his hometown again. Anger flew past her like a garish bird. "So you got back all right?" she said, aware it was a meaningless question.

"Yep, your uncle Frank picked me up at the airport; he says how are you looking after his beautiful motorcycle? Rochelle was so sorry she wasn't able to come for the funeral, by the way."