Doctor Who_ Warchild - Andrew Cartmel [5]
‘That’s them.’
‘Hmm. Yes, a bit odd perhaps.’ Fee got her computer out of her pocket and punched up the passenger list. ‘Bernice Summerfield and Roslyn Forrester,’ she said, reading the names off the tiny folding screen.
‘I think they’re lesbians,’ confided Jessica.
‘Fine, if that’s what turns them on,’ said the Scots girl.
‘Good lick to them.’ Then she realized what she’d said and instantly began to blush furiously. ‘I mean, good luck to them.’
Jessica managed not to laugh until Fee had blundered hastily out of the cubicle to answer a drink request from club class, her face still a scorching bright pink under her freckles.
The Belgian came out of the toilet to find Jessica gasping and biting a knuckle, howling silently into her closed fist. He frowned and headed back to his seat, rattling his newspaper.
Jessica managed to calm herself down. If she got the giggles she was lost. She wiped her eyes. Steady now. A fit of giggles in first class just wouldn’t do. Deep breaths. There.
That’s better.
Half of this job was maintaining the proper façade, the unflappable smiling public face. You had to be calm and helpful even when you wanted to kill the passengers.
Roy had told her that, in later life, airline stewardesses developed terrible etched lines on their faces from all that fake smiling. ‘That’s nice to hear,’ she said, lying in bed beside him. Will you still love me if I have a face like a corrugated roof?’
‘No,’ said Roy. ‘But I’ll pay for a face-lift.’
Now Jessica felt herself becoming lost in thoughts of Roy. She remembered the fight. They had never had one like that before. Oh, they’d argued. But never anything like this.
Scooter, their huge cowardly Alsatian, had lived up to his name and scooted at the first sound of their angry voices. He hid under the sofa in the front room, making helpless, small, lost-doggy pleas for peace as the argument between his beloved owners escalated towards violence.
They say that the kitchen is the scene of more domestic killings than any other location. Jessica wasn’t surprised.
She’d been standing there on the tiled floor, facing Roy, and they’d both run out of vicious things to say to each other.
That was when Jessica saw something gleaming out of the corner of her eye and she’d lunged for it and just let her rage explode.
Thank God, it hadn’t been a knife. Just that row of glass bottles that she and Roy had filled with pasta and pulses. It had been the final thing they’d bought for their kitchen, which was the final room in the house that they’d decorated. She had remembered their shared excitement when they’d found the handsome old bottles lurking under a layer of dust in an antiques shop. Old blue Victorian medicine bottles. They had got them so cheap it was like stealing. They cleaned them up and gave them pride of place in the kitchen. It was the finishing touch. It seemed to set the seal on their moving in together.
While Roy watched, Jessica swept the glass jars on to the tiled floor. They exploded in a dancing jagged tangle of blue glass, lentils, dried peas, noodles. It sounded like a bomb going off and next door Scooter howled and fled with his tail between his legs.
Roy had just looked at her with level hatred in his eyes and said, ‘I wish I’d thought of doing that.’
Then he turned and walked out.
She stared at the wreckage on the floor and wondered what she’d done. She began to cry. None of this would have happened if Roy hadn’t been so vicious, so unrelenting in the course of their argument.
Of course, knowing what she did about Roy now, she understood why it had happened. Knowing what had been running through his mind at the time, it was no wonder.
It had all been revealed at the airport that morning before she left for Budapest. Jessica sat there in the cabin crew’s cubicle and thought about that morning.
She had forgotten about getting the giggles, and about Fee blushing, and about