Lifting Off: A Life in Freefall

iiiiiiv

LIFTING OFF

Karen McLeod

For my sister Dawn,

and my love, Minnie

vii‘We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.’

— Kurt Vonnegutviii

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

CHAPTER 1: Acceptable Reasons For Late Arrival

CHAPTER 2: Lift Off

CHAPTER 3: The Pretend Christmas

CHAPTER 4: Autopilot

CHAPTER 5: The True Film

CHAPTER 6: Happy Hour

CHAPTER 7: The Summer, Before The Dark

CHAPTER 8: The Absence of Battery Life

CHAPTER 9: In The Wings

CHAPTER 10 What Was Over There, Was Now Over Here

CHAPTER 11 Ghost Writer

Acknowledgements

By Karen McLeod

Copyright

1

Prologue

With the unsettling dark ocean below, I could’ve been anywhere, my body set to any clock. The only constant was the drumming hangover in my head. I had to disguise this to the passengers and the act of doing so, of presenting normality, felt familiar and safe. Soon the alcohol would wear off, somewhere between the meal service and the duty free, and the trick was not to speak loudly in case they caught the whiff on my breath.

It had become a uniform in itself, this unintended life, and it was now well-tailored and seamless. We were halfway to New York, the plane a Boeing 767 which didn’t exactly rattle, but belonged to the era of Cinzano ads and a meal trolley with a roasted joint of ham served by a stewardess. We were called cabin crew these days, and I was handing out drinks in the aisle, all eyes on what I might have in my drawers (I had to pretend to enjoy innuendo) when the captain announced over the Tannoy, Will the Senior Cabin Crew member report to the flight desk immediately?

‘Red wine? Of course sir.’ I handed over two miniature bottles, clicked the brake, lowered my eyes as I retreated from the cabin. It was exhilarating to break the routine, to 2be allowed to leave rows of passengers high and dry without a drink or a paper menu.

The purser appeared, then told us to prepare for an emergency briefing. We gathered round and she reported the captain had informed her there was a crack in the wing. We were to divert to the nearest land mass. Greenland.

It took a while to sink in. Could we land safely with a damaged wing? I guessed we probably couldn’t. As I stowed the cannisters and the trolleys, making sure none would shoot out and whack my head, I went through the emergency evacuation drill, then thought how stupid I’d been to give up smoking. If I was going to die in the next few hours why had I bothered trying to be healthy, slimmer, less outrageous? I wondered how many complementary peanuts I had handed out, how many hot towels, how many exits I’d encouraged the familiarisation thereof. I wondered what they would say at my funeral and how people who really knew me would lament I had so much more life to come, how I hadn’t yet arrived fully at what I was good at. What a fool I was to believe I could prolong my life when my imminent demise must’ve been written in the stars. I thought of Mum, back home, with her firm belief in fate, but not this kind of fate, blind to the fact her daughter would soon perish. I wished I’d told her I loved her, but she didn’t like these words. She believed it was shown through action, all the many packed lunches she’d made, the cups of tea, the endless cakes and tucking into bed. I wanted words from her mouth, soap opera style, as if it would underscore it and set it in stone. I should have said them anyway, forced them at her in a text via satellite.

Everything was silent apart from the low murmur of the engines. The passengers had been warned there was a 3technical fault with the plane. From where I was sitting, I couldn’t see any faces, but I could sense the collective stillness, quiet, like a praying congregation. I expected panic, screaming, clambering over one another like the scene with the singing nun in the film Airplane.

It was then that the purser’s interphone rang. She took the call, stood, then came over close.

‘It’s all okay,’ she said, ‘we can carry on with the service. It’s not serious. You can go up to the flight deck and see the window if you like?’

‘The window?’

‘Yes, the splintered window on the flight deck. In front of the first officer. There’s eight layers to the glass, so it’s quite safe to carry on to JFK.’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I thought you’d said win … ’

The purser waited for me to finish, but I kept the ‘g’ in my mouth. To admit it would mean I would have to say so much more about how things were getting out of control.

‘Of course, the window,’ I said.

I had misheard. It was not the first time, but the consultant had confirmed my hearing was fine. Afterwards, he’d asked whether I was happy, which was a strange question for an ear doctor. He said we don’t hear sometimes if we’re disengaged, and this can present as hearing loss.

By the flight deck door, I rubbed the goosebumps on my arm. In the middle of the night, the flight always turned cold. Then I knocked three times and faced the spy-hole so they would know I was crew. Beneath this uniform was my body, the body I was born with which had housed me for all these years. Thumping conduits of blood and electricity were keeping me alive. Somewhere within all this skin was something called ‘me’, but I wasn’t sure what this was.

4

When the captain opened the door, I softened my eyes into a hello. There it was, the right-hand window, shattered yet held in a crash of crisscrossing lines; the universe outside might not exist.

CHAPTER 1

Acceptable Reasons For Late Arrival

​London

There was a specific moment I can chart as to when things started to go awry. My cheek was pressed to the lounge carpet at number forty-seven and Mum was bent over, her heels popping out of her slippers, consumed in what I thought was a narrow mesh of living: obsessing over small domestic problems, like dust or wiping skirting boards, or defrosting freezer compartments. Yet I worried how I still needed her in a way I couldn’t specify. Now at twenty-five I was not allowed to be a child, I was an adult living back at home, and the scales no longer tipped in my favour.

‘There,’ she said, shifting the coffee table over an inch. ‘Meet the new lounge.’

Lifting my head, I saw the latest configuration had 6given the room a lift. But the bay window above, once so cinematic, now began at my head and ended at my toes. My sister’s freedom car, ready to whisk us off from Dad at any point, was no longer parked outside. This street was too small, too familiar. Back here in Penge I was a failure, cleaning my old secondary school toilets for cash. The girls stuck their used sanitary towels, face out, on the cubicle walls. Maybe this was modern witchcraft, or a fingers up to authority, whatever, it was certainly dismissive of the person cleaning up.

‘Help me move the sofa. See if there’s any grain of rice type things,’ Mum said, like I would join in. ‘That’s evidence they’re back.’

‘Don’t moths have stomachs and nervous systems?’ I said. ‘You shouldn’t be killing … ’

‘Isn’t there enough going on, without you …?’ Mum said.

‘You’ve hoovered once, so … ’ I said, splaying my fingers at the room.

‘God, you sound like your father. I’m double-checking.’ Mum’s cheeks had gone red.

‘I’m not Dad,’ I said, like I was thirteen. Her likening me to him was the last thing I wanted. I didn’t have a drink problem. Plus, I had friends. Lots. My brain fired up after a pint or three, I danced and flashed and never got nasty.

While I was in Australia trying to make it as a performance artist, a horde of gold moths had been spotted here in the carpets, their larval pupas stuck behind the curtains. This was the big news she’d written in her letter, nothing more personal. If it’d been a metaphor for her dissatisfaction with Dad, I would’ve understood – how moths were drawn to fake light, believing it was the radiance of the moon – but we weren’t a family who used metaphors.7

After a long inspection she put the hoover attachment down. She rubbed her forehead, and from her sigh, I knew the pressure of me living back home was difficult. And Dad, she still chose him after all he’d done to us. Before I’d left for art college, I’d painted him naked and blue, strung up by a noose. Then I’d propped the picture above my bedroom door, trying to force the evil pull of the booze away. When he’d brought me a cup of tea the next morning, he’d walked in under the painting, not seeing it balanced on the doorframe. I’d realised the man I carried in my head from the night times was not the soft man sat on my bed in the morning. Because I loved him when he wasn’t drunk, I destroyed the painting as fast as possible.

‘Now, why don’t you give the airline a call?’ Mum said. ‘I think it would do you good, see more of this world while getting paid for it.’ She held out her hand to pull me up. ‘You never know … I could even join you. Be a cling-on,’ she said, twitching her head in a weird way.

Motioning me over, together we slid the table in front of the drinks cupboard under the record player. This was the latest attempt at curbing Dad’s drinking; the other week he’d stumbled over an open water works hole and ripped his best work trousers.

‘It’s not me, cabin crew. Tea, coffee, tea, coffee,’ I said, moving my hands like a robot.

‘Why shouldn’t it be you? There are worse ways to make a living. You are always saving to go off travelling. And the art … well, it’s not too late to retrain. I would think it would be good for you.’

My eyes darted down at the coffee table, feeling the shame. The first person in my family to study at university and I couldn’t hack it now I’d left. All those years 8finding my wings: film-making, photography, nudity, wig-wearing, impersonations of Julie Andrews, following my gut, feeling my glow; I’d believed I was on the brink of becoming something big. Dad had suggested I study graphic design, so I would be sure to land a job, but that was selling out. When I left Cardiff Art School, I had a show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and thought this was the beginning. Then I’d entered The World’s First Miss Lesbian Beauty Contest held at the Café de Paris, thinking this was my way into my extraordinary future. When nothing happened, I couldn’t work out how or why I should make art. So my sister got me a job at Barclays bank in Streatham, processing cheques with nothing but a portable radio to keep me human. Cellulite formed on the backs of my thighs, reminding me of cauliflower and rot. I’d read somewhere how you shouldn’t let a job define who you were, but I couldn’t work out how not to.

‘You see, love,’ Mum said, picking up the furniture polish, then performing a wipe round the television screen. ‘Life is all about having to do things you don’t want to.’

Her philosophy was threadbare, so poor it made me want to scream. I was not going to turn out like this, caught in a room, searching for moths. Only last week, after a particularly silent standoff with Dad, she’d disappeared. Later, when she returned, she confided she’d left home only to go on the 227 to Bromley and back. Twice, she said, and the driver hadn’t charged her for the second journey which became the golden lining to the story. She’d have stayed out longer, she said, if it’d been Thursday late-night shopping.

‘So, anyhow, I got you the airline phone number from Juan up the road.’ She pronounced ‘Ju-an’ carefully, enjoying the foreign quality dance over her tongue. ‘He loves it. 9Do you know he was in a hot tub in Miami last week? Took his mum to Kenya. She sat on an elephant.’

‘Why are you telling me this?’ I blurted. Too sharp.

She turned, flushed-face. ‘You should focus on being like my side of the family. The light side.’

‘Can I go now?’ She nodded, and I noticed there was a roll of dust on her sleeve. As I went to pick it off, she stepped back. To the outside eye no one would notice this flinching, but to me it was everything. Since I’d told her I didn’t like men, how I had never liked them in that way, there had been no more touching. I hoped I was imagining it, but whatever the reason, she was uncomfortable. I feared she believed if I held her too intensely, it was because I wanted her in a lesbian way.

The telephone number for the airline was in the hall. I grabbed it then took the stairs to Mum and Dad’s bedroom, sinking onto Dad’s side where I studied the marbled blood stains on his pillow. Last year’s book on cricket scores sat closed on the table next to the telephone. I opened the pot where he stored his false teeth. He’d worn them since he was forty, losing his real ones early because he was too scared to visit the dentist. The container was empty; he was down the pub. It was a Saturday, and Mum allowed him to have lunchtime drinks on Saturdays. Along with Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays after dinner, she kept him on a tight schedule. The official line was his diabetes. Still, I found the pot intriguing, as if it were a way to get closer to him. I examined the dull shine in the plastic bowl. It smelt of unchanged pedal bins.

Picking up the phone, I smoothed the crumpled paper over my knee. Baulking at Mum’s peach curtains, I pictured how many women were rearranging rooms right now across 10London, then multiplied this. I would not become another one. I would be strident. Taking in a deep breath, I dialled the number. It rang immediately, then clicked to a plucky operatic harp. I recognised the tune from the TV ad where people of different nationalities were reunited for a wedding in Japan. I wanted to be the kind of person who had friends in Tokyo and drank Martinis on rooftops in Manhattan.

When the call reached a human voice, I jumped, spurting out, ‘hello?’

The gap which followed made me realise it was a recording. The office was now closed and would reopen on Monday morning.

Replacing the receiver, I felt relief. Mum had got it wrong about me being right for the job, of course. An air hostess was never going to make me into me. Everyone knew parents had the worst ideas for their offspring. So far I’d made it to my mid-twenties without having one hairstyle Mum liked. I certainly would not call back on Monday because I would’ve figured things out by then. That afternoon I would go to the library and read through the back copies of National Geographic. There would be broadsheets with job pages hanging off wooden poles and recent copies of Lonely Planet. Then I would go out with the L Gang to a gay bar in Brixton. My true purpose would find me if only I got out and into the breadth of life. I would just have to save up by working in rubbish jobs a bit longer, then I could get to Mexico. There the cost of living was cheap; artists had settled in the south since the sixties. Avocados grew on trees. I would drink quality tequila, and dress all in white, and if I got there by December, arrive in time to celebrate the Night of the Radishes.

*

11Dressed in a pink satin blouse tucked into a charcoalgrey pencil skirt, I listened to the foreign tube names announcing themselves west out of London: Barons Court, Hammersmith, Osterley, Hounslow. Between each stop I made sure there were no smudges to my black eye-pencil, opening and closing the information pack, examining the sides of my shoes. Borrowed from Mum, the little court heel was repulsive: the uniform of church-goers, or shoes you might be fitted in for your own funeral, if no one knew you.

Arriving at Hatton Cross I clutched the airline folder and took the stairs to the ticket hall. The air outside smelt of car fumes and my tights had slipped down between my legs. I would only get to yank them up once I found a toilet. Being nearly six foot tall I’d spent years hitching up one thing or another, pulling waistbands lower, trying to fit in. I was not comfortable in these clothes. I used to be confident, a spontaneous woman who wore hobnail boots and flowing maternity dresses to thwart the male gaze, a kind of anti-uniform of my own.

I found the stop for the transfer bus. The sky was crossed with contrails. Soon enough a minibus arrived with a sign on the dashboard, ‘Meadowbank’. On board were women in smart office attire reading the information pack. As I boarded, practising psychic Morse code, I tried to connect with the rigid mousse-haired woman at the front. I feel as nervous as you, this is risky, I sent over to her. But she did not pick up.

The bus took a series of winding roads circumnavigating the airport until we pulled up outside an ugly brown building with reflective windows. Through a set of automatic doors, I followed the sign for ‘INTERVIEW CANDIDATES: Stage One’ and entered a room full of 12dipped heads and already-breathed air. The majority were women in dresses and short matching jackets. A couple wore trouser suits with wheelie suitcases parked by their knees. One woman stood out because of her tight stone-washed jeans and low-cut top, her cleavage pressed into a vertical line. Was this what the airline wanted? This out-dated barmaid look?

I chastised myself for putting the woman down, then searched about the room for clues. That morning I’d brushed my blonde bob into a side parting and tucked it behind my ears, feminine but to the informed eye, an edge of otherness. Most of the women around me had their hair held back in tight shiny buns, like ringed doughnuts. A high percentage were stick thin, with bony knees jutting from the hem of their skirts. One of the questions on the form was about your weight, and I’d got on the scales then subtracted ten pounds. For days I’d eaten cream cheese triangles, diet crackers, grapes. I’d switched lager for white wine, but still hadn’t dropped more than a couple of pounds.

I spotted an empty seat next to an older woman dressed in a navy trouser suit and a white lace-collared blouse. Her hair was cropped in a pixie cut which gave me a flutter of hope. As I sat down, I nodded, careful not to be too over-enthusiastic.

‘Here we are then. The big interview,’ the woman said, moving her wheelie bag.

‘Yep,’ I said.

‘Brenda, hi.’ The woman put out her hand. She had an Australian accent.

‘Karen,’ I said, cringing at my name, how unlike me it still felt. I shook her fingers loosely.

‘How far have you come?’ she said. 13

‘What year do you want me to start?’ I said, noticing her accent had already slipped into mine.

‘No, I meant travelled in from.’

‘Oh, South London,’ I said. ‘You?’

‘Flew in from Brisbane yesterday.’

‘For this?’

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘It’s my dream to fly again. Years ago, I worked for Qantas, but I left when I got married. Then I got divorced from the prick, usual story. I made it through round one for Air New Zealand, never went any further though. You tried other airlines?’

‘No, this is my first,’ I said, feeling ashamed for applying when I didn’t really want it, when the job clearly mattered so much to her.

‘You don’t sound like a Londoner.’

‘I lived abroad for a while,’ I said. ‘I accidentally pick up people’s accents. I can’t help it. My mum does it too. I guess you could say we’re a family of impersonators.’

‘You’ll get on fine in this job then,’ Brenda laughed. ‘Theatrical. You got a boyfriend?’

‘No … I’ve, I’m …’ I breathed in, weighing up whether to say or not. I decided against it.

‘Sure,’ Brenda said, eyeing me. I noticed my thumb pressing into my arm fat, so released it.

‘Doesn’t make us less of a woman,’ I said, brightly. ‘Single-dom.’

I heard my voice do that annoying thing, the one where I made a ditzy-light impression of myself to make someone else feel more comfortable. As I shifted in my seat I could tell Brenda’s familiarity had dropped. So we sat in silence, me sifting through my notes, re-reading my CV, checking the exaggerated parts, while Brenda wound her ring round 14her smallest finger. Then in the corner, over Brenda’s shoulder, a cheese plant caught my eye. I studied the brown earth in the pot, the wide leaves. The plant was perfect for bugs, the listening kind. Perhaps the airline recorded us in the interview room, perhaps they were watching me right now examining the hyperreal shine of those leaves?

Soon a woman in the airline uniform invited us into the adjoining room. I queued a few people away from Brenda, just so she didn’t think I was obsessed with her. Through the folded-back partition were chairs fitted with flap-tables. WELCOME! was projected on a white screen. I found a seat three along from Brenda and tried to get my table to lie flat over my knees. The woman next to me gave me a sympathetic smile as I uncrossed my legs.

The training staff introduced themselves: Jenny, chignon, had flown for twenty-six years before moving to training. She missed the shopping ‘down route’ but loved being home to tuck her children into bed at night. Brian, softly spoken, attractive though boss-eyed, expanded on the expression ‘down route’, explaining that it was a phrase for where crew stayed in ‘super, five-star hotels’. The mention of hotels made me lean forward. Both Jenny and Brian sounded suspiciously chirpy. Most people I’d met in the world of work carried an air of just about getting through it. Brian told us how he had flown long-haul from Heathrow for eight years, but now had a serious injury so he was grounded. He looked fit enough and I suspected there was a different story beneath the acceptable one.

Brian pressed play on a video where a radiant, cheerful crew walked across an airport