Story

“I am so wet.”

I looked up because there are sentences that do not belong comfortably at thirty-nine thousand feet.

She was standing near the lavatory, holding a plastic cup and looking furious. Tall, blonde, somewhere in her thirties, she had the unsteady confidence of somebody who had been drinking just enough to stop editing herself.

“I am wet,” she said again.

For one reckless second, my mind supplied an interpretation that had nothing to do with water.

Then I saw the dark patch across the back of her clothes.

“That fucking moron poured water on me,” she said, nodding towards the cabin. “Please come and stand with me.”

There are invitations a sensible man considers before accepting.

This was not one of them.

I stood.

The cabin was deep into the strange artificial night of a long-haul flight from Doha to Johannesburg. Window shades were down. Reading lights glowed over scattered seats. Nearly everybody around us had surrendered to sleep, necks bent at impossible angles, blankets pulled over shoulders, headphones still playing to unconscious ears.

Behind all of it was the endless engine noise. Not loud exactly. Constant. A mechanical ocean.

I followed her to the space near the galley.

“I'm Ayanda,” I said.

She told me her name was Valerie.

That was how it began.

Not with romance.

With spilled water.

For the next several hours we occupied the same narrow patch of aircraft carpet as though it had been reserved for us.

She asked what I did. I told her I worked around aviation, supporting ground equipment at Hamad International Airport. That was enough to unlock twenty questions.

How did they keep food hot on an aircraft?

How did catering get loaded?

Why did some aircraft sit higher than others?

What happened to all the equipment after a plane pushed back?

I explained what I knew and admitted what I did not. I was not an aircraft engineer, and I refused to become one simply because we were inside an aircraft and she was beautiful.

“So you don't fix the plane?” she asked.

“No.”

“But you said engineer.”

“Ground equipment support.”

She narrowed her eyes.

“You oversold yourself.”

“I gave you the trailer. Now you're watching the full film.”

She laughed.

There was something free about her laughter. It did not ask permission from the sleeping cabin.

Valerie told me she had been born in China to a family with German roots, and that they had relocated to Vietnam when s…