Wish You Were Here (6 page)

By the time I made my way over to the check-in desk there were only five minutes left until it closed but the queue was still some twenty to thirty people deep. Tom overheard something from the people in front of us about airport staff apologising over the late opening of the check-in desk that afternoon. We could finally relax. We'd been handed a reprieve.

The queue in front of us was made up of every sort of person. Old folk with luggage trolleys packed right up to the rafters; families over three generations who all seemed to be talking at once; well-groomed young couples clearly taking their first joint holidays abroad; preening young men with salon tans and highlighted hair pouting and posing to their hearts' content; scruffy-looking student types flirting with each other in a prelude to holiday foreplay; gangs of girls who looked as though they'd just stepped out of a nightclub; worried parents assisting their over-excited offspring with their luggage for their first holiday alone; rough-looking lads in baseball caps laughing and joking with each other; and then finally there was us: three relatively well-dressed but hardly stunning thirtysomething men suffering from varying degrees of hair loss. I'm sure we stood out a mile in our queue because we looked so incomplete – like stray dogs abandoned by their owners: grown men without their other halves.

Gradually the queue whittled down to us and a bunch of lads in their late teens who had attempted to push in ahead of us only to be set straight by Andy. The woman at the check-in handed the return tickets, boarding cards and passports to Andy, assuming in the way that everybody did that he was our leader.

‘I'm going to get a paper,' said Andy. ‘Anybody else want anything?'

‘I'll come with you,' said Tom. ‘I want to see if I can get a guide book to Crete.'

‘What for?' asked Andy. ‘All we're going to do is eat, drink, and lie on a beach. You don't need a guide book for that, do you?'

‘If you think I'm going to spend all week staring at the sun you've got another think coming, mate,' said Tom flatly. He turned to me and winked. ‘You'll come with me on a few trips won't you, mate?'

‘I'm easy,' I replied in a bid to keep the peace. ‘I'll go anywhere with anyone.'

As Andy and Tom made their way to the newsagent's, I stood and watched a group of people who had obviously just returned from their holidays and had lost their way from the arrivals lounge. Some were wearing their market-stall-purchased straw hats as though they were still basking in the glow of the sun that they had long left behind. They looked relaxed and carefree, in stark contrast to the guys in the reflective yellow tops collecting the abandoned trolleys who looked miserable and hassled. Seeing these fresh-from-holiday people made me smile because what they had – their sunshine state of mind – was exactly what I wanted for myself. Maybe in seven days' time I too wouldn't feel quite so at odds with the world. Maybe I would return to Gatwick wearing clothing inappropriate for the non-existent British summer. Maybe I would come back changed somehow. Different.

In the pub the night before Andy had promised me that this holiday would turn my life around. He promised laughter and new experiences. New stories to tell and new women to tell them to. Though at the time I'd found myself thinking instinctively, ‘Andy mate, that's asking a lot of a cheap last-minute package holiday,' but afterwards, as we walked home through the chilled Brighton night air I'd thought to myself, ‘Maybe he's got a point after all. Everybody has expectations of holidays. We want them to restore us, entertain us and even find us new loves. So why should this holiday be any different?'

On Andy and Tom's return from the newsagent's we made our way through to passport control, now with only a security check between us and the departure lounge. When Andy stepped through the metal detector he set off the alarm, as did Tom – they had both neglected to empty out money from their pockets – so as I took my turn to walk through the detector I convinced myself that I too would somehow set it off even though my pockets were empty. It was with no small relief that I made it through without a single electronic beep or flash to the other side. I was through. I was safe. There could be no going back without a great deal of difficulty. Now I was standing in the kingdom of discounted perfume and aftershave; of multiple packs of fags and litre bottles of booze. This wasn't England any more. It was a shopper's paradise.

‘Does anyone fancy a stroll around the shops?' I asked as Andy located a row of seats in the lounge to use as a base while we waited for our flight number to be called.

‘No thanks,' replied Andy. ‘I'm going to read my paper.'

I looked over at Tom. ‘I'll give it a miss, mate. There are a few things I'm quite keen to check out in my guide book.'

Undeterred by my friends' lack of consumerist urges, I did the rounds of the various high street names inside the departure lounge alone. And although I didn't actually need anything at all I still managed to return from my sojourn with several packs of fruit pastilles, two bottles of mineral water and three books from Waterstone's.

‘How long is the flight?' asked Andy looking up from his newspaper as I sat down next to him.

‘Four and a half hours,' I replied. ‘You're trying to work out if we'll have time to get to our hotel and then go and get slaughtered aren't you?'

‘A wise man always knows how much drinking time is available to him.'

‘Have you never heard of pacing yourself? I'm still feeling a bit rough from last night.'

‘I would've been better off going on holiday with that lot,' chided Andy pointing to a group of girls featuring more peroxide highlights, spandex, gold rings, tattoos and naked flesh than any group of people had any right to. ‘Do you think they're planning to go to bed as soon they reach Crete?'

‘They're young,' I replied. ‘They'll learn.'

‘I doubt it,' said Andy. ‘They might be young but I guarantee you they won't learn anything at all. Look, at me, I'm thirty-six next birthday and I'm proud to say that I haven't learned a single thing in my entire life.'

We'd been discussing the phenomenon of how, when you've been away on holiday, someone famous always dies, when Andy was cut short by the announcement over the Tannoy of the departure gate for the flight to Heraklion. There was an instant flurry of activity in our corner of the departure lounge as people began to troop towards the gate.

‘This is it then,' said Tom folding up his newspaper. ‘Better give Anne a quick ring.'

‘I suppose I'd better try Lisa too,' said Andy, pulling out his phone.

‘Okay,' I said standing up. ‘I'll see you guys at the gate.'

Tom and Andy both had people to say goodbye to but I had nobody and for a brief moment I felt as if the one thing I wanted most in the world was to have someone who wanted to hear from me. Someone who would miss the fact that I was no longer there. I considered calling Sarah and as I reached the queue for the gate I even pulled out my phone and scrolled through the address book for her number. But then I imagined her answering the call. And I imagined hearing the disappointment in her voice. And I imagined my reaction. And I knew I didn't want that feeling to be the last thing in my head as I got on the plane. So I turned off the phone before I could do any damage and slipped it into the carrier bag in my hand, next to my books and bottled water.

Even with the phone off, Sarah remained in my thoughts. She was there as we handed in our boarding cards and as we trooped aboard the shuttle-bus. She was there as we crossed the tarmac and climbed the stairs to the plane. She was there as we listened to instructions to turn off all mobile phones and electrical devices. And she was there as the emergency manoeuvres were drilled into us and the nearest emergency exits pointed out. She was even there as we prepared for take-off and taxied along the runway. But as the cabin began to shake and the roar of the jets filled our ears, her presence finally began to fade, so that by the time we had lifted up into the air and broken through the clouds above she was gone altogether.

According to our pilot we would land at Heraklion airport at a quarter past eleven in the evening, local time. The flight had been fairly uneventful. With an initial burst of energy after take-off the three of us became quite talkative, taking great pleasure in unearthing a flurry of embarrassing anecdotes and memories from our student years, but as the journey progressed an oddly uniform lull spread across the plane and, with the exception of the odd screaming child, few passengers did anything other than eat, sleep, read or watch the in-flight entertainment:
Miss Congeniality 2
, an ancient episode of
Only Fools and Horses
and a documentary about clocks. I had entertained myself with the first of my three books:
Touching The Void
by Joe Simpson. A completely absorbing account of two friends who climbed the 21,000 ft Siula Grande Peake in the Andes only to get themselves in trouble on the way down. I'd seen the documentary they had made of the book a few years earlier at the cinema with Sarah. After the film Sarah had said to me that if it had been me and Andy on that mountain, Andy wouldn't have thought twice about cutting the rope and seemingly sending me to my doom. I'd told her she was wrong. Andy would never have cut the rope in a million years. It wasn't his style at all. But as I read the first few chapters of the book it dawned on me that I'd never really considered the situation the other way round. With Andy's life in my hand would I have cut the rope? I couldn't come to any kind of conclusion even after hours of internal debate. In the end I abandoned the book and distracted myself by watching
Miss Congeniality 2
without the aid of headphones.

With the sound of the electronic ‘ding' the seat-belt safety sign switched off, plunging the entire plane into a flurry of frenzied activity. Passengers were frantically unbuckling, unloading the overhead storage lockers and squeezing into the aisles in a bid to be the first off the plane.

‘What's the big rush?' said Andy a little too loudly. ‘It's not like they're going to get to their hotels any quicker. They're still going to have to wait for everyone else.'

‘I suppose,' I replied but the truth was, I was as eager to get off the plane as they were; like them I wanted to get my holiday started right away. Now I was on holiday my time was my own. I could go wherever I wanted to go and, more importantly, I could be whoever I wanted to be. I couldn't wait. And as our turn arrived to file into the narrow aisle and head towards the exit, it was all I could do not to run. As the cabin crew said goodbye I was too excited to reply, distracted by the exotic thrill of walking out of the air-conditioned cool of the plane straight into a thick fug of Mediterranean night air. The warmth was real. Almost palpable. Good things were going to happen to me in this country. I could feel it in my blood.

As soon as we passed through passport control Andy, Tom and I turned on our mobile phones and stared at them expectantly. But while Tom and Andy, despite their lack of messages, took great delight in comparing names and logos of the Greek mobile phone operators they had been assigned, I simply stared at my phone in disbelief. Unbeknownst to me, while we'd been in the air I'd received a text message from Sarah:

Message Sarah:
Charlie, I need to talk to you about something important. Please ring me when you've got a moment. S x

‘What's up mate?' asked Tom, obviously reading the concern on my face.

‘Nothing.' I shook my head as if waking from a dream. I quickly switched off. ‘I'm fine. Just a missed call.'

Andy walked over to me and ruffled my hair as if I was a five-year-old. ‘We're on holiday now, mate. Cheer up. Once we reach baggage claims me and Tom will get the luggage and you can go and get a trolley.'

Though I was already pretty sick of being organised by Andy, I didn't have the energy to protest. There were at least two flights that needed to be unloaded ahead of us and so it took quite a while for our luggage carousel to get started. And when it finally did get going, much to Andy's annoyance a good few of the passengers on our flight managed to get their luggage without a single sighting of our own. I however had my own problems to contend with. Sarah's text had sent my world into a spin. While I was curious about her message I was fearful of it too. I stared at my phone and silently cursed the progress of technology. A decade ago she wouldn't have been able to send me a guided missile via the airwaves. A decade ago I would have been blissfully ignorant of her desire to make contact. But it was now, not then. And despite my best intentions the message had been received. Loud and clear.

As I reached across with my thumb to switch off my phone I felt a tap on my arm. Standing in front of me was a girl wearing a straw cowboy hat. She had curly black hair, flawless mahogany skin and looked altogether amazing.

‘You were on the flight from Gatwick weren't you?' said the girl-in-the-cowboy-hat in a bold south-London accent.

‘Yeah,' I replied cautiously as I looked over her shoulder at a gang of girls in their mid-twenties who were trying their best to give the impression that they weren't watching us.

‘I thought so,' said the girl-in-the-cowboy-hat. ‘Which resort are you staying at?'

‘Malia.'

‘I knew it!' she exclaimed. ‘Me and my friends are too. Have you been before?'

‘Once, a while ago. How about yourself?'

‘This is the third year in a row for me and the girls,' she replied.