Chapter 37
When Maya finished school, she soon became restless. She had part-time jobs but nothing that engaged her fully. She lacked focus, she was lost. All she knew was that she still wanted to fly helicopters as much as she had as a little girl and without much of a relationship with her father, she was going to fund her training herself. But getting all that money together took time, patience.
The summer Maya turned twenty-one, she was bored and desperate for change. Temporary work had dried up and she spent more time out with old school friends. One evening, she got left in the pub with a girl she barely knew, a girl called Liz who seemed a whole lot of fun. Liz seemed dangerous. Like nobody Maya had ever been friends with before, like someone her father would totally disapprove of. Perhaps that was part of the appeal. The pair of them carried on drinking, they had a ball, a real laugh. They played the slot machines, they danced in a park, laughed their way down the slide, swung high on the swings, used the seesaw until it turned them both green.
They left the park, stopped at one more bar and then kept on walking until they ended up in Whistlestop River. Maya had never been to the town before; she’d always headed further afield in search of more excitement than her home county.
That night, Maya was ready to jump in a taxi home by the time they reached Whistlestop River. She wanted her bed badly but her father’s house wasn’t really home any more. It was a place with walls, somewhere to lay her head but with very little warmth apart from her sister’s love.
‘We need to amp this night up,’ Liz declared as they lay on a grass bank not far from the town’s main street, before Maya had a chance to mention the taxi.
Maya groaned. ‘I need to go home.’ She was beginning to feel the aftereffects of the alcohol rather than the buzzy high that came initially.
Liz leapt up from the bank and pulled Maya’s hand to haul her to her feet. ‘We need more booze.’
Maya thought about disagreeing but perhaps another drink enjoyed beside the river might send her to sleep right here in the fresh air, with nature and its sounds all around them. She’d never been scared of the dark, or of creepy crawlies; she wouldn’t mind one bit sleeping outside for the night.
And so she agreed and they headed off – so she thought – to the shops to find one that was open for them to buy a bottle of whatever took their fancy.
When Liz stopped at the back of the Whistlestop River pub and bent down, Maya assumed she was tying her shoelace but it didn’t take long to realise she wasn’t when Liz stood up clutching a handful of gravel.
‘What are you doing?’
Liz threw some to the upper windows of the pub. ‘Let’s make the owners think they’ve got a ghost.’
Maya had a bad feeling about this. ‘We should go.’
But Liz already had another handful and she’d scooped some up for Maya too.
Maya didn’t throw hers but Liz did. And then Liz began making animal noises – Maya had no idea what they were meant to be; she assumed owls. All she knew was that she didn’t like this, particularly when Liz got frustrated that her plan wasn’t working. She wanted to scare the owners and grew impatient when it seemed she couldn’t.
‘All we’ll do is give them a fright,’ Liz told Maya, who by now was begging her to leave it alone. ‘We’ll leg it as soon as we see the upstairs lights go on.’
After another ten minutes of getting no reaction at all, Liz went in for the kill. She picked up a much bigger stone and lobbed it at the window. And not just any window. Her aim was at the fancy stained-glass picture window. It was ornate, most likely it had been there since the pub was established hundreds of years ago.
In that instance, Maya felt sober enough to see the seriousness of what they were doing here, or what Liz was doing as the stone left her hand and hit her target head on. The window was smashed to smithereens.
A light went on, Liz grabbed Maya’s hand and before Maya could take in the enormity of what had just happened, they were running away. Liz’s laughter echoed in the moonlight. Maya’s fear pumped through her veins. And when they reached the little wooden boat moored beside the sign that indicated it belonged to the pub, both girls leapt in and set off down the river.
Maya rowed for her life; Liz was too weak to help, she was laughing so hard. Maya stopped about a hundred metres away when she could no longer hear voices, when she was so spent, she couldn’t carry on rowing, no matter how much she wanted to.
They tied the boat up and Maya thought that was it, but the drama was far from over.
Liz ran off towards a shed and Maya wondered whether she wanted to take shelter inside. But she quickly came back and had in her hand a can of something.
Before Maya could even question it, Liz poured whatever was in the can into the boat, pulled a lighter out from her pocket and threw the flame onto the boat.
The whole thing went up.
Maya had never been so scared in her life. ‘What did you just do!’ she roared.
But she moved quick enough when she heard a male voice yell that he was police, that they should stop right there.
They didn’t. They ran. Like cowards. Away from the scene.
Two days later, Maya had the biggest row she’d ever had with her dad. She hadn’t left the house since the night outside the pub, petrified the police would come to arrest her. She’d caught a glimpse of the local paper reporting the incident when she went to get a drink from the kitchen and she felt so much guilt, it almost swallowed her up.
‘Did you fill in another UCAS form?’ her father asked her as she tried to escape back up to her room and leave the newspaper article behind.
She turned halfway to the top of the stairs to face her father. ‘What?’
‘Don’t what me, Maya. You heard what I said.’
‘I did, but I’ve told you, university right now isn’t in my plan.’
‘This again…’ He turned to go.
Maya could’ve easily headed upstairs and closed her door on her father but something made her chase after him into his study.
‘You know what I want to do, Dad. I want to be a helicopter pilot.’
His jaw twinged. ‘So you say.’
‘You don’t think I can do it?’
‘It’s a lot of study, a lot of money, and you might not even like it after all that so?—’
‘Said every single person at university! Who knows that they’ll love their field of study?’ She was yelling at him now, something he wasn’t impressed with but seemed too shocked to address. ‘Helicopters will be my life, Dad. Get that into your thick head!’
She’d gone too far.
She knew she had.
And she couldn’t retreat fast enough to escape the bellow that followed.
‘I am still your father; you do not talk to me like this in my house. Under my roof. If your mother was here?—’
‘Yeah, well she’s not, is she! Neither are my grandparents; you took them from me too!’
When she ran up to the top of the stairs, his voice followed, something about showing respect, she didn’t much care. All she knew was that she had to get out of here. And this time, for good.
She pulled a big rucksack from the wardrobe, the suitcase from under the bed and threw as many of her things in as she could.
‘Maya…’ Her door had opened so quietly she hadn’t heard her sister Julie come in. ‘What are you doing?’ But Julie knew what this was; that’s why her eyes filled with tears.
Maya sat down on the bed and held out her arms to her sister and they sat there together, sobbing, hugging, Maya doing her best to explain that she wasn’t walking away from Julie, only the man they called their dad, the man who hadn’t understood her in a very long time.
Maya left that night. She had no idea where she was going, she just knew she had to go. It was pouring with rain, she got on the bus that went from 100 metres past the driveway to the family home and sat on it until the driver announced it was the last stop.
Whistlestop River. The town she’d been in before. She stepped off that bus, saw the sign and almost tried to clamber back on again and beg the driver to take her anywhere but here. The place where she’d behaved so abominably.
But the driver had already driven away and she was stranded at the side of the road in the town that didn’t deserve her.
She walked away from the sign, around the back streets until properties spread out, landscapes came into view in the fading light. She found a bus shelter and decided to wait to see if another bus came at this time of night. The skies grew dark, the temperature fell enough that she dug out the blanket she’d put in her suitcase.
She huddled beneath it, clutched it tighter and tighter as the darkness surrounded her. Nobody else came to the bus stop, nobody bothered her; it was deserted. Maybe it wasn’t even an operational bus stop at all.
Whatever it was, she fell asleep in it.
Maya woke up to the sound of a distant car horn and realised it was gone midnight. Her body was stiff, she was hungry, she shivered. She knew she had to move. She hadn’t brought much money with her, she had no food, but how could she go home?
Maya wasn’t sure how long she kept walking. Going around another bend, her rucksack on her back, dragging the suitcase behind her, she saw a sign: The Whistlestop River airfield.
She drew closer to the airfield and when she reached a metal barrier, she threw her suitcase over, then her rucksack, and then climbed over herself. She hoped they didn’t have guard dogs here and almost turned back but as her heart thumped and no beast came barrelling towards her, she put one foot in front of the other to head for the building a couple of hundred metres away.
She reached the ground adjacent to the airbase building. It was the middle of the night now and she watched as someone dragged the helicopter from its helipad back into the hangar. She felt a sense of calm, a sense of peace. She didn’t care about being cold and hungry in this moment; she was watching something she envied and longed to be a part of.
She stayed in the shadows. She thought the air ambulances operated 24/7 but she must have got that wrong because the hangar door was closed by whoever was in there.
She left her suitcase and rucksack in the bush at the very edge of the field and ran closer to the airbase building, hid behind a car. Crew members emerged one by one.
She heard a couple of them yell goodnight and as soon as another car left and she couldn’t see anyone else, but the lights were still on inside the building, she ran to the door. It was open. She crept inside as quietly as she could. A few weeks earlier, she’d read in the newspaper that the airbase was fundraising for a new hi-tech CCTV system, which hopefully meant their security wasn’t great now. She’d worn a hoodie tonight for warmth and pulled up the hood just in case, making her harder to recognise if someone did catch her at it.
She slinked up the stairs at the side, into a room that had a couple of really small beds. She heard nobody and after ten minutes had passed, gradually all blocks of lights around her disappeared, one by one, until she was in total darkness. She heard the big door at the front close and the sound of it being locked but she waited another twenty minutes, until she knew the coast was clear.
She wasn’t going to do anything bad. She didn’t want to damage anything or steal, but she needed warmth, shelter, food. That was it, then she’d leave.
She went down the stairs on her bottom in the dark but there was enough moonlight filtering in that she could find her way through reception and to the kitchen. She found cheese in the fridge, some bread in one cupboard, chocolate in another. It had taken the edge off. She could go now, no harm done.
Maya made her way from the kitchen and into reception but with the door locked from the outside, it was hopeless. She was stuck. She looked around for a spare key but couldn’t find one and the drawers in the desk section were locked.
She went back up the stairs, searched in the kitchen but found no sign of a key there either. She was trapped.
She took a big knife and a smaller one back down to the reception. She managed to force the top drawer, then the second, where she found a cash box.
She looked at it. Was she a thief?
She wasn’t, but she had to survive.
Before her conscience could talk her out of it, she forced open the box, took all the cash from inside, the notes, the coins, every last bit. She swore she’d pay it all back when she could: when she got herself sorted.
She forced open the third drawer and it was in there she found a keyring with two keys on it. One of them had to be the right one, surely.
But neither of them were.
She tried one of the keys in a door at the far end of the reception, a side entrance, but no luck there either.
And then her head went to the hangar and its huge doors to let the aircraft be brought in and pulled outside.
One of the keys fitted the internal door. She let herself in, the smell of engine oil letting her know how close she was to the helicopter. She tried the other key in the padlock used to secure the hangar doors and it worked. She had it off in seconds but froze – was it alarmed? The main building obviously wasn’t, she’d been walking around inside and there hadn’t been a sound, but perhaps they’d saved it for the external doors.
Only one way to find out.
She yanked open the door at one side, putting all her weight behind it. She’d planned to make enough of a gap to squeeze through, but no alarm sounded.
Relief washed through her.
All she had to do was run, grab her bag and suitcase and disappear. Nobody had to know she’d been here.
But as she turned to close the hangar door again, she caught sight of the helicopter.
There it was in all its glory. The lights weren’t on but she could still make out the bright yellow of its body and tail in the moonlight that filtered inside, its main rotor blade, all the parts she’d been able to name since she was a little girl.
She was drawn back over to it as if it was a magnet. She ran her fingers along the pilot’s door, imagined what it would be like to open it and get inside, to take off. She looked out at the night sky, stars not visible with the rain tonight, but she could imagine being up there, being free from everything else, being herself, Maya the pilot, not Maya the girl who’d lost her mum, her grandparents, her dad, pretty much.
She tried the door to the helicopter and unsurprisingly it was locked. She circled the aircraft, tried the other door, in awe of this beast she dreamed of flying one day. She couldn’t ignore the passion; it was like a fire inside of her, it would never be extinguished.
It was a split-second decision. She didn’t process it; one minute, she saw the crowbar on the tool bench in the corner and the next thing she knew, she was using it to try to get inside. She had to sit in that pilot’s seat, even if it was only once. She wanted to feel the helicopter beneath her, view the control panels and equipment in the cockpit.
She tried over and over again, the paint coming off, the damage plain to see, but she couldn’t stop until she got in.
She felt a surge of adrenaline, excitement, when finally the door gave in and opened.
She climbed into the pilot seat and put the crowbar down on the other seat next to her. Being inside a helicopter, right here up front where the action took place, was something she dreamed about.
But she wanted more. She leapt out, went over to the hangar doors and pulled them both all the way open so that she could feel as though this were real.
She didn’t know how long she sat there pretending she was a pilot, that she could leave her troubles behind and take to the skies, but it was warm, comforting, the rain hammering the hangar and helipad beyond. In here, inside this aircraft, she was someone else.
When she grew tired of pretending, she leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. She’d take a minute, only a minute.
But she shouldn’t have done that.
The next thing she knew, she was waking to a rapping on the pilot side window.
Shit.
And now someone was opening the door, exposing her.
‘Well, well, well, what have we here?’ The man locked her in his gaze.
She froze, she daren’t say a word. How could she?
It was fight or flight. She leapt to the other seat, lifting the crowbar out of her way, expecting to open the door from inside, jump down and run off into the night. But the man had climbed in himself and she turned to defend herself, the crowbar in her hand.
Smash.
The crowbar didn’t defend her but it did smash into the flight instruments on the dashboard and she didn’t need to look closely to know her split-second reaction had caused damage.
He took the crowbar from her and when he backed out of the aircraft, she followed after him. She couldn’t do much else. He’d be too quick for her if she tried to get out the other side, she should’ve known that.
The rain continued to pour beyond the open hangar doors, a rumble of thunder sounded, a flash of lightning reminded her that a storm had closed in.
Her legs went weak; she slumped to the floor.
‘Let me help you,’ said the man and she looked up at him with red-rimmed eyes. ‘Come with me.’ He took something from his pocket and showed it to her. A warrant card. ‘I’m a police officer. You can trust me. I’ll make sure you don’t get in trouble.’
And in that moment, she’d really believed him.