Chapter 15
Chapter 15
N alitha had shown Gertie everything she could, and was now taking a much-needed day off to drive down south to the nearest John Lewis and start looking at blankies. She and Morag had reassured Gertie she was going to be absolutely fine, although neither of them were totally sure; she could be so shy.
Gertie did not sleep well, and left the flat early, before Morag was awake, although smoke was already skirling from the chimneys. The town was not quiet, because the tides were in, which meant the boats would have returned; not the little skiffs from her grandfather’s time, but up-to-the-minute trawlers. They looked a little battered and bashed from the outside, but inside had the latest technology that told them where to find shoals, and also where the fish were low and needed to be left alone, to spawn and regroup.
At least it was a little airport, Gertie told herself, none of the scary lines to go through she’d seen on TV with queues that went on for miles and agitated, sad people sitting on their luggage, their children weeping, complaining about being stranded miles from home.
By contrast Carso airport, such as it was, was very much just a large tin shed at the end of the industrial estate. It had some cheeky flags and three flights a day: two by Calum Frost’s large Norwegian line, which went to Aberdeen and Glasgow respectively, carrying oil people and tourists and local shoppers, plus MacIntyre Air, technically owned by Calum too, but fiercely clinging on to its own branding and show of independence.
Many of the people coming up via Glasgow were making the long trip north from around the world to visit their ancestral homes, or simply the beautiful chain of the archipelago: tiny Inchborn, with its preserved abbey and world war defensive zones and pillboxes; Cairn, the largest, its population, bird life and wonderful grazing; then Larbh, the remotest island, with a few tumbledown cottages, a very few remaining inhabitants; and uninhabited Archland, with its famously vertical mountain, the Mermaid’s Spyglass, that drew climbers from round the world; the last island before the great expanse of sea before you hit Mure, Shetland, the Faroes, and on to the fjords.
It was a magical part of the world; so far north that in the summer it was rarely dark with an extraordinary quality of light in the bright yellow rays of high sun. Sunshine streaked across the blue-green water faster than the herons swooped from bay to bay, or the capercaillies circled the hilltops.
The airport itself had some pretty nifty branding along the lines of “Gateway to the North” and saltires and so forth, but inside simply tended toward the very drafty and so it was known by all as the tin shed.
The airport building, apart from the airlines, was run by a husband and wife team, Pete and Linda, who handled air traffic control for the three flights plus freight, helicopters and the teams that went out to maintain the wind farms and oil rigs, who had their only private transfers. Linda ran the office and the kiosk, with varying results.
The little kiosk sold absolutely terrible coffee from a horrible machine that really only qualified to be called “coffee” on a technicality, and was good at bringing together all nationalities, whatever their coffee heritage, from fastidious Swedes who expected a small biscuit, to Kiwis used to sensational patterns in their im maculate flat whites, to Americans who liked theirs tasting of burnt electrical wire, to Italians who liked tiny defibrillator cups you could only drink standing up in case your legs started twitching involuntarily, to Turks who liked to fill theirs with sugar until the spoon could stand up in it independently. There was not a nationality that passed through that airport that didn’t take a sip from the million-degrees-Celsius super-thin plastic cup full of watery brownish liquid who didn’t immediately make a face and agree amongst themselves that Scotland was brilliant at many many things, but coffee was not one of them.
On the plus side, there was also a small supply of baking on sale too; Linda made shortbread, fresh, and scones, warm if you were up for the morning Inchborn flight or Edinburgh, and you could sit by the big glass windows and look out at the little runway on a sunny morning and frankly many locals came and did just that, but they brought their own coffee in a flask.
There were two check-in desks: one for Nalitha, and one for Calum’s other business concerns, staffed by a rotating crew of unbelievably beautiful Scandinavians on Calum’s flights, which had real stewardesses on board, who also staffed check-in with formidable efficiency despite the fact that many of the male passengers immediately went slack-jawed in the queue.
“That’s what happens when you spend too much time with sheep,” Nalitha would point out, when even people trying to check in to their airline kept craning round to look at the six-foot girls.
The other flight attendants were friendly enough but there were just so many of them; it was such a huge company, plus they were coming from incredibly well-insulated airports in Oslo and Bergen and Aalborg, so it was understandable they would complain about how cold it was in Carso, where the wind could rattle the old aluminium sidings, for sure. Okay so the toilets were Baltic, but that was good: Who wanted to encourage people to linger in toilets for heaven’s sake? You could also tell the ones who’d been through Carso before by the inevitable coffee flasks.
T HE FIRST THING Gertie had had to do was submit for clearance. Morag had tried to look completely unconcerned upon learning that she didn’t have a passport and politely suggested she consider getting one of those. Then Pete made her up a laminated photo card that allowed her through the security gate, run by their son, Mackintosh. He was large and dozy, possibly as a result of having completely unrestricted access to shortbread and fresh scones every day, and Nalitha occasionally joked that she was going to walk through with a huge ticking ACME bomb, just to see what he would do. Gregor thought they should be searching people coming off the Inchborn flights, in case anyone had stolen rare or valuable eggs, but that hadn’t gained much traction, particularly with the punitive consequences Gregor also proposed for anyone doing such a thing, which involved rather a lot of hot poker work, and some hanging.
G ERTIE, HANGING AT the entrance of the tin shed, inhaled. When she’d arrived the first time she’d wondered what that smell was: kind of like if someone had heard of coffee and had tried to make it in a bin. She braced herself to be brave.
In the tin shed Gertie glanced, again, nervously, at the checklist and swallowed hard. Her first day without Nalitha there to help. It had been so many years since she had started a new job, and even then it was mostly just someone giving her a duster and telling her to unpack a box of shampoo.
“You’ll be fine!” Jean had said, as convincingly as she could. “Just try not to daydream too much!”
Gertie had made an “of course not” face, as if she hadn’t half-taken the job in the first place because of its terribly sexy owner.
She pulled anxiously on her uniform, with its tartan skirt—Gertie never wore skirts—and tartan piped shirt with the heather-colored waistcoat. Nalitha absolutely hated it, but Peigi made them by hand and refused to change anything about the ensemble. It was impractical—the shirt had short sleeves, which made it cold and uncomfortable, and was made of polycotton, which meant if you lifted too much and got hot, you would sweat in it—and the waistcoat was not remotely flattering to girls who had boobs, as Nalitha certainly did, nor girls who had flat chests, like Gertie, who looked—according to Jean—like a lad going to his first communion when she had modeled it for the KCs. Tara had told Jean to shush, she looked lovely, and also could she give her a lift down to Glasgow as she wanted to do some shopping and Gertie explained that it didn’t work like that. In the same way that she couldn’t give them free biscuits in the ScotNorth no matter how many times they suggested that there were already lots broken in the box, and Cara had said, “See!” to Tara very meanly and: “I told you that would be a stupid idea,” and Tara had got a bit upset so Gertie had just got changed again and tried not to mention it.
But here she stood, finally, tapping carefully in her mid-heels, which were also new, and already giving her grief, and prepared to check in the 9:40 to Cairn, calling at Larbh.
There was a small queue of people already waiting at the desk, and she suddenly felt a bit panicked with having to log in and remember the correct sequence of events, but she breathed deeply and told herself not to worry about it. Nalitha had told her to call her anytime, but the thought of doing that was daunting, particularly as Nalitha had loudly made her pre-John-Lewis plans clear, vis-à-vis: lying down and watching YouTube videos of dogs falling over and eating jammy doughnuts, and Gertie thought she probably didn’t want to be disturbed.
She could do this. She went up and keyed in the code that turned on the computer, which fired into life, then turned to the queue with a smile.
The first two customers were nice old ladies heading to Cairn, the largest of the islands, on a walking tour. They held on to their sticks and smiled widely, talking only about the weather forecast. This was going to be fine, thought Gertie. To her surprise, they hadn’t even thought she was new or noticed anything amiss about how she served them, so she couldn’t have stood out too dramatically.
Then it was a young family who traveled regularly, who greeted her cheerfully and recognized her from the supermarket, asking after Nalitha. Gertie swallowed. Maybe this was all going to be all right. A large group of hikers, no problem. Some Americans who wanted to ask her all about herself and told her they were Scottish and looking for old gravestones, in an extremely jolly tone of voice, as if traveling across the world to look for the gravestones of their ancestors was very jolly. She barely needed to check their IDs as they were all wearing matching sweatshirts that announced: IT’S HARD TO BE HUMBLE WHEN YOU’RE A WILSON, and sure enough there it was on the screen: Wilson x 8. She stopped feeling quite so panicky. That flight went fine. The number of passengers tallied with the manifest numbers; the luggage was the right weight. She’d been warned a million times that they had to be careful: the plane was so small that there was not a lot of margin of error with the weight limits. It was going to be fine. She was going to be okay.
She felt a lot more confident checking in the second flight, that afternoon—the return circle, picking people up. The little plane essentially flew in a circle. After two couples celebrating a birthday, the next customer was quite different: a large, heavyset man, with an equally large, heavy-looking bag.
“Finally,” he said, looking huffy.
“Hello!” said Gertie. “Welcome. Do you want to put your bag on the scale?”
The man looked irritated. “Not really, it’s fine. Here.”
And he brandished his phone, with the online ticket on it in tiny font, which Gertie couldn’t see; and when she picked it up to try and scan it she must have pressed something wrong as it immediately started emitting a loud heavy metal song.
“Oh for Christ’s...” The irritated man snatched it back from her. “It’s there,” he said, shoving it back in her face.
She checked the booking, wondering why on earth he was being so aggressive. Was this how some people behaved in airports? Constantly ratty and glancing at their watches and sighing and tapping their feet and touching their luggage? In training Nalitha had said that people got anxious, and also airline staff had quite a lot of power to throw passengers off planes. If you missed one it would cost an absolute fortune to get the next one and if you were here in Carso, the next one wasn’t until tomorrow anyway, so that was a problem. Hence people getting shirty with you.
Now she felt her face pinkening as the man stood there, looking cross as she checked him in, laboriously, desperate not to get anything wrong.
“I do need to weigh your bag... could you put it on the belt please?”
The bag came up as 27 kilograms. Gertie was not happy. Nalitha had been absolutely adamant.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s too heavy to go on.”
The man snorted. “Fine. I’ll pay even more.”
“I’m sorry. You can’t pay for extra baggage. It’s...”
She hated having to do it.
“... it’s policy. We have to weigh our...”
She suddenly couldn’t remember the name for the bit of the plane the luggage went into. She nearly said “boot.”
“Uhm, hold.”
“But I can take stuff out of my bag and walk on with it.”
“Uh, yes.”
The man shook his head.
“This is ridiculous, you realize that? Completely and utterly stupid!”
Gertie wanted the ground to swallow her. She didn’t know what to do. If there was anyone really aggressive in the ScotNorth you just got Mr. Wainwright and he would come out and give them a hard stare until they put the cheese back on the shelf. John Paul was local and she’d known him all her life; she had no idea what this guy was capable of.
“You’re bloody useless. Look at you! Computer says ‘No!’ Fuck’s sake.”
Everyone around was staring at their shoes suddenly, as if their shoes were very very fascinating things. Gertie swallowed hard and told herself she wasn’t going to cry.
“Now you’re going to make me open my fucking bag? Seriously, love, haven’t you got anything better to do? Just let it go, fuck’s sake.”
Gertie breathed through her nostrils and tried to smile. “I’m sorry, sir. But I just can’t...”
He mimicked her. “I’m sorry I can’t... I’m sorry... I am a robot... controlled by computers.”
Suddenly there was a stir in the queue.
“Excuse me?” came a booming voice. A man stepped forward. He had blonde, slightly bouffant hair, Oakley sunglasses, and was wearing a ridiculously over-patched flying jacket, which, given the preponderance of weird slogans and odd bits of leather all over it, must have been extremely expensive. Gertie’s heart leaped.
The man standing at the desk turned round, looking aggressive.
“Wait your turn, mate,” he said.
“I’m not your mate,” said the man, smiling nicely at him. “And I’m here to tell you, you can’t board this aircraft.”
“What?” said the man. “Piss off.”
“I’m afraid so. I’m going to have to ask you to leave the airport.”
“Get screwed,” said the man. “Me and this girl were just checking in my bag, that’s all. Weren’t you, love?”
“I’m afraid she can’t do that. As you are leaving,” said a new voice.
“Who the fuck are you?” said the man.
“I’m the fuck who owns this airline,” said Calum Frost stepping into view.
And just like that, the latest great crush of Gertrude Mooney’s life jumped up a whole new gear.