Made With Love

Chapter 6

The last time I got on a plane was for Kate’s 29th birthday, a stand by roller coaster of a flight to Vegas. I’d started raving when the mondo drops kicked in.

‘Oh GOD! Did you hear that?! Was that something falling off? Oh my holy Jesus hell, I’m gonna die. I’m gonna... I’m...gonna be sick.’ I’d hammered away on the call button—‘I just want to ask if they can let me off’—and Kate had back handed me. I’d stared at her, shocked still, rubbing at my face, and then I’d spewed in her lap.

I am, Kate told the entire office when we got home, a ‘bad flyer’. What does that even mean? We’re not supposed to fly! How is flipping-out on a plane not the most logical thing you can do?

‘Two Dramamine, two glasses of wine,’ Kate advises when I call her from JFK. ‘You won’t wake up. Even if the plane crashes.’

That sounds like a plan.

I’m only three sips into my skunky Merlot when I conk and, before I know it, the plane punches through a low hanging cloud bank and jolts downward into a pocket of hollow air. I blink awake at a weak sun that hangs on the verge of the sea. The Clare coastline humps up beneath me, crisscrossed with irregular stone fences and clusters of houses, all of them bigger than I’d imagined. Their slate roofs glint dully in the damp morning air.

The plane banks hard over a curving motorway and touches down with a shuddering thwack into Shannon. I unclench my hands from the armrests and lean toward the window. I can just make out the narrow terminal in the lashing rain.

‘Brilliant,’ I grumble to myself, and the hairy handed old boy in the aisle seat chuckles.

‘First time in Ireland, is it?’ He eyes up the ‘weather resistant’ trench on my lap.

I nod yes and rub at my eyes. ‘Is it always like this?’

‘Only when it isn’t,’ he laughs. ‘It’s promised fine for the weekend. You’re lucky!’

I breeze through the near empty terminal, my overnight bag clacking on its little wheels behind me, and line up at Immigration.

‘Quinn,’ the officer says as he scans my passport. ‘My brother married a Quinn. Pure wagon of a woman.’

Is that a compliment?

‘You wouldn’t have relations up round Ennis, would ya?’

‘Inishmore.’

‘Now. Going to see them are you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Bit of a holiday?’

‘...Business.’

He cocks his head at me slightly. ‘Good woman you are,’ he says and smacks the clearance stamp down.

Now to catch my connecting flight. I scan the departures board. London, Heathrow at noon, Dublin at quarter after. Kilronan...there it is! Cancelled?! That can’t be right. I tromp over to the information desk. A pair of tubby lads stare into a portable television.

‘Go on, ya bitch ya!’ one of them spurts.

A fine-boned greyhound tears around the track in grizzled black and white.

‘Sorry,’ I say, and the man grunts. ‘I have a flight booked to Inishmore—the one o’clock?’

‘It’s cancelled,’ he says, waving to the departures board.

‘Yes, I saw that, but I need to get another flight.’

‘There’s only the one,’ the second coughs. ‘Aer Arann. And they’re not flying.’