The Last Love Note(15)

Hugh watches my struggle, until he can stand it no longer. He reaches over my head and gives it – and by extension, me – a hearty shove. We’re put in our place, my bag and I, and he shuts the locker door, stands back and offers me the window seat, which I slide into.

‘How long is this flight?’ I ask. I can’t get out of here fast enough.

‘An hour and forty minutes to Brisbane and about two and a half hours to Cairns after that,’ he replies as he shuffles in next to me. He might as well be describing his life sentence.

‘I got to the airport as fast as I could,’ I explain. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t get a minute’s sleep last night.’

He glances at the whole helmet-hair-meets-bed-hair situation, swallows, and says, ‘Really?’

‘Oh, God,’ I say, so loudly the white-haired woman in front of me turns to her husband and tut-tuts. I grab Hugh’s arm with both hands and he flinches. ‘Forgot the valium!’

This is dire.

I’ve tried counselling and hypnosis and the Fear of Flying course the airport runs and nothing works. Valium takes the edge off, though, so I don’t spend the entire time floundering in an anxiety attack.

I can’t help that this is how I was raised. Of course, my parents didn’t intentionally give me a phobia, but I’m from a family of pioneer aviators. Two of my great uncles died in plane crashes. One of their planes simply broke apart mid-flight in the 1930s. It’s the stuff of family legend.

‘Planes don’t break in half in mid-air these days, Kate,’ Hugh says, demonstrating how many times he’s been the audience of one for my ‘unresourceful runway self-talk script’, as the psychologist calls it. Normally I’m way less freaked out about this than I am right now, because normally I’m way more medicated. I couldn’t grip Hugh’s arm any tighter if I was having a transition-stage contraction and it was too late for the epidural.

Don’t picture Charlie’s birth! Delivery suite memories lead to emotionally perilous memories of Cam. I can picture his face so clearly now that it’s like he is right here, up close, forehead pressed to mine, our tiny baby in his arms, whispering, ‘Thank you, sweetheart. You’re amazing.’

Stop it.

‘It’ll be okay,’ Hugh says quietly, extracting each of my fingers from the sleeve of his now creased white shirt and bringing the armrest down gently between us. He’s probably wishing it was something more substantial. Cone of silence. Force field.

I turn away from him and stare out the window, desperately seeking composure. The captain announces that the doors are armed and instructs the crew to cross-check and be seated for take-off. I need a happy place. Stat.

Wish I was back on that bike.





7





As the plane lifts into the air, my body starts to shake. The sight of the tarmac falling away makes the anxiety even worse. So, as Lake Burley Griffin and Mount Majura shrink out of sight in our wake, I go to Plan B: staring at the headrest in front of me and doing the breathing exercises the psych taught me, which always work so well in her office when I’m not technically anxious at all.

Staring at the headrest, however, only draws my attention to the card in the seat pocket containing safety instructions in the event of a crash. I shove it behind the in-flight magazine and the sick bag, which I’m going to need in a minute because I’m close to hyperventilating.

I look at Hugh. He’s Plan C, and a picture of ease, leaning back against his headrest, eyes closed, unflappable. How does he do it? He’s habitually in command.

This is so different from when I used to travel with Cam. I was never anxious then. If anything, I was the risk-taker. The one missing the last bus at some remote beach just for the perfect sunset photo, even if we had to walk miles back to the hotel in the dark. I was always angling for mystery flights and spontaneous mini breaks and off-grid adventures.

We had Christmas Day in Paris once as students. It was right at the end of our trip and we’d drained our budget and couldn’t afford a proper Christmas lunch in a cafe. So we spent the entire day walking the streets with nothing but a baguette and a wheel of brie between us. We sat on the Pont des Arts, freezing our butts off while we invented stories about the couples who locked padlocks on the bridge.

‘We didn’t have to come all this way, you know,’ Cam had said. ‘You make a trip to the local supermarket fun. But Katie, I’m seriously cold. Do you want to go to church?’

‘Pardon?’ I’d replied in a bad French accent. Had he found religion?

‘Voudriez-vous aller à l’église?’ he’d stumbled through, using an English–French translation book, pre-smartphones. ‘C’est gratuity.’

‘Free?’

‘And warm,’ he argued.

We spent the next three hours sitting on a wooden pew, huddled over an electric bar heater in some understated, crumbling little chapel, losing track of time, just talking, until we were finally thrown out by the nuns, who apparently had more of a social life than we could afford. It was never flashy with Cam. It never needed to be. Once he swept me into his orbit, I’d barely notice we were in the sky.

But it’s not Cam beside me now. It’s Hugh. And he’s shut down, so I’m completely lost. Not for the first time, I wish things with Hugh were more like they used to be. Something big went down between Cam and Hugh, near the end. Neither would ever speak about it, no matter how much I begged them to let me in. All I know is, after it happened, the landscape of our friendship shifted. I watched the walls go up between the two of them and felt the tremor of a new fault line beneath Hugh and I. It never stopped him being supportive, but it’s hard to be totally at ease with a person who holds a secret my husband took to the grave.