After the End(69)

“Thank you, have a nice day.” Jada’s smile doesn’t move as she adds to me, “Skinny jeans, strapless top, killer heels. You?”

I try to remember what I threw in my case. “Black wrap dress, shoes I can dance in. Thank you, enjoy your stay.” The man with the amber eyes winks a goodbye, and despite myself, I blush as he walks away.

“You’re in there,” Jada says. “You’re welcome, goodbye, sir.”

“Not my style.”

“He’s lush.”

“Cheating, I mean. I wouldn’t. Goodbye, safe travels home.”

“He’s a catch is he, your Max? You’re welcome, have a nice day.”

I smile. “I think so.” Everyone has gone, and I’m about to tell Jada how generous Max is, and how thoughtful, and how he makes me laugh all the time, when I realise I’m reading from an old script. Max and I haven’t laughed together for a long, long time.



* * *





The Ice Bar is busy, and Jada and I squeeze through to where the other cabin crew already have their second round of shots lined up. Ethan and Zoe count to three before knocking theirs back; Marilyn, a woman in her late forties with just as much stamina but far more decorum, drinks hers in several small sips. Like Jada and me, they’re all wearing the oversized fur coats handed out in reception, looking like they’ve just discovered Narnia.

I’m surprised to see our pilot, Lars. I’ve flown with him a few times since joining the airline a year ago, but this is the first time I’ve seen him socialising.

“Have you been here before?” he asks me, when I’ve shuffled into the small space between him and the others.

“Years ago, when I was with BA. It hasn’t changed.” On the wall beside us is a small square hatch cut into the ice, which serves as the bar. A glamorous couple order vodka and clink their glasses together with a toast that could be Russian.

“I didn’t realise you’d come from enemy lines.” Lars’s tone is teasing. “Why the change?”

I shrug. “I switched to short-haul for a bit, but . . .” I hold a sip of vodka in my mouth, then let it warm my throat. Stalling. “I missed the travel. And business class.” In fact, it was less about missing business class, and more about avoiding economy.

“All the families,” I told my HR manager, “I just don’t think I could . . .”

“I understand.” She’d lost a baby herself, I knew—arrived for her second scan to find silence in place of a heartbeat. She’d told me the story after Dylan died—not to compare, but to emphasise her assertion that I should take the time I needed. And even when I repaid her kindness by handing in my notice, she was unfailingly on my side.

“A new start,” she said, and it felt like an order, so instead of going back to BA I launched into Virgin Atlantic’s own special brand of customer service, doing a year in economy before my CV and some good timing put me into what they unashamedly call upper class. Here there are fewer families, fewer young children. It’s easier.

Lars eyes me thoughtfully and I think he’s going to ask more, but he smiles instead. “You get a different class of reprobate in upper class.” He’s tall—even taller than Jada—with thick blond hair and a square jaw, and eyebrows so fair they’re almost invisible. His accent is flawless, but his surname—Van der Werf—makes my guess a confident one.

“Are you Dutch?”

“Guilty as charged.” Around us there is a stirring of movement, and Jada yells across the noise.

“It’s bloody freezing in here—you coming?”

“They should turn the heating up,” Lars says seriously.

“They should!” Jada hugs her fur coat around her and I catch Lars’s eye and grin as we follow the others out of the Ice Bar.

There’s a band playing at Dusk Till Dawn, and by three a.m., when we call it a night, my feet are aching and my voice hoarse from singing. We take taxis back to the Park Lane hotel and peel from the elevators onto our respective floors. Jada throws her arms around me as she says goodbye.

“I bloody love you, Pipi-Pip. Shit, I’ve lost my key card.”

“In your hand. I love you too. Drink some water.”

She wobbles down the corridor and I hold the lift door until I see she’s safely in her room.

“Kids, eh?” Lars says, with an exaggerated eye-roll. I laugh and press the button for the eighteenth floor. “Do you have any?”

“Sorry?” I stare at the lift buttons, watching them light up at each floor we pass. Fourteen, fifteen.

“Do you have children?”

Sixteen.

Just one. A boy. Running in the park, playing football with his dad, standing on a chair at the sink so he could help me wash dishes. Mad about diggers—his first word was “truck.” Pudgy warm hands around my neck at night. Sleep tight, Dylan, sweet dreams.

Seventeen.

Silence stretches into rudeness. I should turn around, look at him, at least, but instead I stare at the buttons, and . . .

Eighteen. There’s a ping and an imperceptible jolt, and the doors slide open.

“No,” I say, as I step out. “I don’t have any children.”