The Last Resort

“You’re going to have to tell me what’s going on.”

That was Sharon I was ignoring. Sharon’s my best friend. (I’m Ava, by the way.)

Or at least, I was trying
to ignore her, mostly by pretending to fiddle with the in-flight entertainment console. Then staring blankly at the emergency procedures manual as if it were written in Urdu. You know—that sort of thing.

“Look at me, you dozy cow. Tell me what’s going on! And don’t give me that wounded look. I agreed to go to—to—where is it we’re going again?”

Sharon is formidable. You wouldn’t think it to look at her, or at least not at first glance; she’s honey blonde, fake-tanned, fake-nailed, and as fabulous-looking as a footballer’s wife. She also has these Bambi eyes, which she widens charmingly whenever she swears—i.e., often.
Personal action point: stop hanging around with people more attractive than self.

“Cape Town,” I said, tiredly. “We’re going to Cape Town.”

She threw her beautifully-manicured hands in the air. “Cape Town! Well, I agreed to go to Cape Town with you. The least you could do,
madam,
is deign to tell me
why
.”

The absolute last thing I felt like doing was talking about the mess I was in. I wanted to kick back, have a few free airline drinks, pretend I wasn’t being eaten alive by self-doubt, self-hatred, and a whole lot of other things that start with ‘self’. “Oh, Shaz,” I said weakly, “can’t we just—”

“It’s that bastard you went to work for, isn’t it? I can’t
believe
you haven’t even rung me since you resigned
.
Since
May!” (
More on that later.)
“Did you embezzle money? Are we smuggling drugs for him? There’s a condom of coke in my luggage right now, isn’t there?” She started to clamber out of her seat, looking frantically around for an air hostess to snitch to.

It was my turn to grab her by the arm. “Alright! I’ll tell you what happened.”

She looked at me pointedly. “Will you, now?”

“
Yes,
if you’d just quiet down and be calm for a moment.”

“So it’s drugs then, is it?”

“No!”

She threw her hands in the air. “You know they’re going to arrest us at the airport. And throw us into some jungle prison where we’ll get dysentery and be flogged for laughing after lights-out.”

“No drugs. You know I’d never do something like that.”

She rolled her eyes, folded her arms, sat back in the seat, and whispered something that sounded like
sanctimonious cow
. She has a special talent for derision, does Shaz. “Go on then. Let’s hear the melodrama. I’m riveted.”

I filled my lungs with a deep breath of recycled airplane-cabin air and shut my eyes tightly for a moment. The horror was rising in my chest. You see, the reason we were on the first plane out of the northern hemisphere was that I’d made a mistake. In fact, I’d made a series of very,
very
big mistakes. And in such quick succession, with such lightning-fast, devastating accuracy, that I feared I’d topple over from panic if I had to think too carefully about them.

But Sharon deserved an explanation, and I was the only one to give it. I had been the World’s Worst Best Friend, after all. A few breaths in and out, slowly, to soothe myself. “You’re sort of right. It is—it was about my new job.”

She snorted. “I knew it. What did you do? Sleep with someone?”

“Well—”

“You slut!” she squealed, thrilled, barely able to contain her interest.

“It’s not what you think.”

“What—his wife really doesn’t understand him, does she? And the marriage’s over anyway, they’re just staying together for the children?” She was getting excited now, the thrill of new gossip helping her forget how she’d been mistreated.

“It’s
really
not what you think.”

Her face fell into a frustrated pout. We sat in silence, me staring miserably at my hands, her staring miserably out of the cabin window.

After a little while, when the tension became unbearable, she said quietly: “Why did you just disappear like that? Didn’t you think I’d be worried?” When I looked up, I saw the hurt in her eyes; they gleamed, ripe with tears. Sadness slid like a knife into my chest.

“Shaz,” I replied wearily, “it’s complicated.”

She was off again. “All you had to do was text! Or just send off a little email, a status update, anything!” She looked at me with a mixture of exasperation and resignation: when I opened my mouth to defend myself, nothing came out. She was right. I could have done any number of those things.

Mercifully, the stewardess came by just then, and we paused to politely bend out of her way as she craned over to serve us double gin-and-tonics. I hadn’t counted on Sharon being so combative. Silly of me, really. I should have guessed that the only way she’d forgive me was if I got her drunk.

I fiddled with my little plastic cup. Where should I start? Perhaps with how I met him? No—she knew that already. I’d told her all about it.

With the job itself? No. It would be hard to make her care. She was too pissed off.

Well. Only one thing for it, then.

“I got married,” I blurted, flushing dark red as my hand automatically went to my chest. Against my skin, hidden from prying eyes, was the enormous diamond solitaire he’d given me in Paris—on a crappy silver Accessorize chain around my neck. I couldn’t face parting from it just yet. Not even after all that had happened.

I hated saying it.
Married.
I hadn’t always, but now it was something shameful, a lapse in judgement. I felt a spasm of resentment: other girls remembered their weddings (and usually their marriages) with fondness, as the joyful culmination of their treasured childhood plans. Why couldn’t it be the same for me? You know—froofy meringue dresses, keepsake envelopes of confetti, cringey best-man speeches? Why did everything I touch turn to crap?

Sharon gave me a long, blank stare. The only sound was the soft whoosh of the plane as it cut through the air, onward to the tip of Africa, and the dull tinkle of ice in my plastic cup as I nervously slurped down my drink. We were over Europe now. Still another 10 hours or so to go. Why couldn’t the first plane have been to Mallorca or something?

Then she sprang to life, shook her head as if to clear the cobwebs out. “I’m sorry. I thought I just heard you say you’re married.”

“I did,” I whispered painfully.

She stared open-mouthed at me. “
You
got married? What did you do? Give some poor fella roofies and take him to Las Vegas? You, Ava, Miss Knickers-On-And-No-Funny-Business?”

Sharon always said I was unnaturally modest in my sexual habits. “It’s a fundamental prudishness that really distinguishes the bourgeoisie from all other classes,” she said to me once, absently, as she filed her nails. She couldn’t understand why I hardly ever took boys home from the pub or tried to pull people on the night bus on our way home.

“Don’t be such a bitch,” I said sulkily. “It’s not that unbelievable, is it?”

But when our eyes met, something gave way. Her face cracked into a smile. Nervous, I started to giggle, and then she laughed, and a crashing tide of relief washed over me. Thank goodness she didn’t hate me anymore; I couldn’t bear another moment of it.

“Honestly, Ava,” she said, through tears of mirth, “I thought you were going to tell me you broke out of the looney bin or something. But all you did was get married!”

We laughed. One of us would stop, then catch the other one’s eye, which set us both off again. It was a wonderful feeling.

“I-I-I suppose I should congratulate you,” she wheezed.

In light of the situation, I couldn’t help but collapse into another round of helpless laughter. Congratulate me! Ha.

But then, just like that, the laughter started to take on a life of its own; first morphing into gasps, then straight into sobs and heaves. Now I was crying. Crying, crying, crying. Crying from the bottom of me, fathomless oceans of sadness pouring out.

Sharon, alarmed, pulled me towards her as if compelled by a reflex—but the sudden, bodily comfort of being held set me off all the more. I realized that it had been weeks since anyone had touched me with so much as a hint of love. Maybe Sharon was the only person in the world who still loved me.

“What is it?” she was saying, urgently, at my ear. “What’s happened?”

I felt as if I were wading through open water, struggling against an icy tide, trying to find the shore. I had to pull myself together. There was a brief lurch as the plane hit turbulence; we were on our way to another universe, a place where I might be able to make sense of what had happened.

I willed the sobs away. They died in my chest, but my eyes still throbbed and burned. “I think I made a terrible mistake,” I said.

She almost looked scared, but attempted a bit of humour anyway. “Yes, you did, you silly cow. Not even making me your maid of honour.”

I laughed bitterly.

She shook my gently by the shoulders. “You’re starting to frighten me now. Just tell me, get it out in the open.”

I pulled away from her, found a tissue in my bag, and blew my nose. For a long time, I stared at the grey tweed of the seat in front of me. The stewardesses brought peanuts and fuzzy little blankets; toddlers squalled and mothers shushed. Life was carrying on.

“I’ve left him,” I said, eventually, my voice not my own. Once the words were out in the atmosphere, they seemed harmless. The monstrousness of it seemed mundane, almost. Girls split up with boys all the time. Wives split up with husbands.

“And you think that’s a mistake?” I could tell she was being careful to sound neutral.

I thought about it. “I’m not sure. I don’t know what I think.”

“Ava,” she said.

I looked at her. She studied my face as if looking for a clue of some kind. “You’re not yourself at all, are you?” she said.

Tears filled my eyes. I shook my head. “No,” I said, voice wobbling dangerously. “Not at all.”

“Oh dear,” she sighed, and took my hand in hers. We looked out of the porthole: now we were far above the clouds, sailing over a bright white wonderland.

Soon, I would be ready to begin making sense of things; for now, I just needed to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
This is so embarrassing,
I thought.
All I wanted in the first place was to get away from everything.

“I’m glad you asked me to come with you,” she said after a while.

“I’m glad you came. And I’m so sorry about how I—how I dropped you. It was so stupid of me.”

“Doesn’t matter. Water under the bridge.”

We looked out of the porthole some more.

“What’s Cape Town like, then?” she said. “Hope you’ve booked us our tent.”

“I haven’t, actually,” I said dubiously. My head filled with images of us sleeping in thorn trees, trying to beat away the marauding leopards. “Surely there’ll be a few spots open?”

“I suppose there will,” she said.

There was a short silence. I sensed a change in topic coming on.

“Was the job nice, then?”

My stomach lurched. “It—it was alright. It was good, I suppose.”

She rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “Details?”

“I’m trying to recall where we left off.”