The Passenger

I remember taking a long-distance plane journey to Sydney. My memory tells me instantly that it was a considerable time ago because I had purposefully chosen a window seat. Nowadays, as an older woman, I always choose an aisle seat for easier access to the needs of a senior.

I was the first to claim my allocated seat in the three-seater row of the Korean aircraft. I admired the lovely uniforms of the staff, cheerfully noted the individual viewing screens on the seat backs, and soon stretched my feet out in front of me and wiggled my body further in my seat. Excitement stirred—Sydney, Australia. Slowly, the large plane began filling up, and my fellow travellers eventually came and claimed their seats.

From the word go, the man beside me was not my cup of tea. I assumed he was a Nigerian - (those years spent in Kaduna had not been wasted). He sat in the middle of the three-seater, fidgeting, and constantly flicked his rasta hairstyle from side to side, with at least one braid regularly slapping me across the face. I moved further towards the window, trying to put space between us. He constantly shifted and jiggled his too-slim body, finally leaving his middle seat and disappearing toward the toilet. I sniffed the air left behind and tried to figure out what I found so offensive. The scent clinging to the air was a sour musk of unwashed skin laced with something sweeter, almost syrupy but sharp, like burnt sugar left too long on the stove. It was the kind of sweetness that turned your stomach, an undercurrent of chemical smoke and decay that told its own story. I watched his return, a strange bouncing gait, and furtively looked for his seat as if he was not entitled to reclaim it. Something was not right about this man. I carefully moved my bag containing my essential documents away from him.  

As the plane took off and our long journey began, I determinedly tried to ignore him. His constant fidgeting eventually calmed down, and the intensity of his odour disappeared until his mere presence was no longer offensive to me. However, my trust in the man never improved, and I would have far preferred it if the woman sitting at the end of the row could have been placed next to me.

Eventually, the drinks and food trollies came round. I proudly refused an alcoholic drink. I was now in my fourth year of alcohol abstinence, but I always acknowledged that any form of international travel was slightly tricky for people with an addiction. As I toyed with the word ‘addict’ and how it related to me, I suddenly turned with a growing realisation to my fellow traveller. Over the hours, he had slowly calmed down, and looking briefly at his dark brown eyes, noted they had now adopted the dull, lifeless look of an addict deprived of its drug of choice.  

“Ah, that was the problem”, I thought knowledgeably.

Catching my eyes sweeping over him, he clumsily shifted in his seat and said “Hello” miserably.

I was not anxious to speak with him, but determined not to be rude, so I smiled and said, “Hello.”

We both munched our aircraft food silently, headphones strapped to our heads, and our fingers furiously searching for our chosen film.

After the trays had been cleared away and the blankets began appearing, I decided to go for a walk to stretch my legs. I kicked my travel bag further under the seat before me and stood up. The man in the middle and I clambered over the comatose woman in the aisle seat. Once free, I joined the bathroom queue with the other passengers.

On my return, settling back into my seat, the man attempting to converse asked:

“Where are you flying to?”

“Sydney. And you?”

“Tokyo”, he said. “I’m meeting my wife there. She’s coming from Paris. We live in Tokyo”

“Oh. So you’ll change planes in Seoul like me”

Now that he was awake, I detected that he seemed lonely, so I decided to spend some time chatting with him, feeling sure that he would soon become tired as he slowly came down from his drug indulgence, and he would fall into a deep, deep sleep. So we chit-chatted away until his eyes began to shut slowly. Checking he was in a deep sleep, after a while, I pulled my blanket around me and slowly drifted off whilst planning all the exciting things I would get up to in Sydney.

I awoke to an almost incoherent loudspeaker announcement about connecting with my transfer flight to Sydney. But as the plane descended, a dull pressure closed in around my ears, muting the world into a distant, underwater murmur and imprisoning me in a shut-off world. I couldn't understand almost anything being said.

When I disembarked at Seoul airport, I initially kept pace with my fellow passengers, walking determinedly to find their connections. However, my silent world disoriented me, and I frequently stopped at destination boards to figure out where to go next.

I looked left and right and immediately perked up when I saw a sign labelled “Transfers.” Arriving at my location, I was horrified to see how many people were standing in a seemingly static queue.  I joined the queue and began to anxiously estimate how long it would take to get to the actual desk and began to doubt whether I would make my connection to Sydney. I became aware of people ahead of me turning and looking, until finally someone ahead touched my arm and thundered, “A man is shouting to you - look!”

From the front of the queue, I heard a voice shouting, and it seemed to be saying:

“Hoy, hoy, lady, lady come here.”

Near the front was the guy who had flown from London with me. He stood waving at me and then beckoned to me.  

“Oh no,” I groaned inwardly. Then I looked at the ever-growing queue and found myself bounding up the length of the significant queue and greeting him like a long-lost friend.

We slowly shuffled forward, and eventually, waving and saying goodbye to each other, he turned left to Tokyo, and I turned the opposite way to Sydney.

After a two-hour layover in Seoul, I boarded the Sydney plane and sat in a two-seater seat for eleven hours, eating, watching movies, snoozing, and idly looking at my fellow passengers. 

Once the flight landed, I collected my belongings, struggled through immigration and baggage collection, and began praising myself on the successful journey I had just completed.

As I navigated another strange airport, the effects of jet lag began to hit me. I started looking for my nephew, who was meeting me. Suddenly, the phone I had allocated for business calls began to ring.

“Oh, go away,” I bad temperately thought, “I’m on holiday for God’s sake.” The phone continued to ring.

“Yes”, I growled, letting the caller know I wasn’t happy with the phone call.

“This is American Express fraud department. Can you tell us where you are?”

I hesitated. Why on earth would American Express be ringing me? I looked around the airport; everything was quiet, and there was no nephew yet.

“I’ve just arrived in Sydney. What’s the problem?”

“Can you look in your purse and verify that you still have your credit card?”

“For God’s sake,” I moaned, but I began to search my bag. 

“Oh my god, it’s gone,” noting how shocked I sounded. 

“Yes, your card is running from jewellery shop to jewellery shop in Tokyo. We’ve just stopped it, " said the agent, adopting a suitably conciliatory tone.

Interested, I asked, “How did you know it wasn’t his card?”

“It’s a Global corporate card for a huge accounting firm, presumably where you work?” I quickly acknowledged this was so.  

“Did you see anyone on your plane who couldn’t be mistaken for a corporate employee?”

“Yes, I did, and he was sitting close to me. His hair and clothes were not corporate.”

“That’s the man. The shop staff knew right away it wasn’t his card. He’s been arrested for theft. Be careful in future. He probably gained access to your purse when you were asleep or if you left your bag on your seat when you visited the bathroom.”

After finishing the call, I heard my name being called and looked up to see my smiling, excited nephew.

I smiled back and gratefully fell into my nephew’s outstretched arms.   

“Imagine if he’d taken anything else from my purse. What a dreadful start to a holiday it would have been. Instead, he seemed only to have time to take one corporate credit card”.

“That’s amazing,” said Pete the nephew.

As he guided me to his car, he leaned conspiratorially towards me and said, “How long do you think it will take before he realises what he is missing?”

“How do you know I got anything?”

“Because I would be shocked if you hadn’t. Fancy, two thieves sitting next to each other, but he wasn’t as expert as you.” We both laughed gleefully. “Just out of interest, who was the credit card’s owner? And that posh phone - whose was that?’

I shrugged my shoulders and laughed. Frankly, I didn’t know and didn’t care. “I think both may have been the girl comatose at the end of the row, but I had such a good haul at Heathrow Airport, who knows? So Pete, get your skates on, we need to go shopping.”