flight

Sandy, Liz and I are reprising last year’s Sydney gig: training northern suburbs school guidance officers to present the SKIPS program. It’s about supporting primary school kids who live with a parent with mental illness.

Will we fail Tourist 202? Last year we bombed Tourist 101 and should, by rights, be repeating. But we don’t want that: unable to find a way out of the airport; lost at Central Station; staring at each other in a motionless lift we can’t get to leave the ground floor; sweating it out in our apartment, powerless to turn on the air-conditioning.

Sandy’s an insanity consultant and mad theorist. When the media want a quotable quote about schizophrenia, Sandy is their go-to. No matter how brilliantly Liz and I engage our trainees over the next two days, Sandy’s hour of powerful testament about living with mental illness will lodge most firmly in their minds.

Getting from Croydon to gate lounge 25 at Tullamarine is more than half the journey. Flying is the most unedifying travel experience. Every airport is the same pretentious antiseptic glassed-in people hangar as every other.

Airport conceit—flights go through to instead of to some destination—irritates me. It’s only a preposition—through. But airlines and airports expropriate it to serve the conceit that air travel is more important than other travel. What do airplanes go through? Nothing. Trains go through things—tunnels, towns, countryside.

We shuffle along the air bridge onto Flight DJ849 and waddle down the aisles. I plonk my arse in seat 20E, an aisle seat, then happily relinquish it to Sandy who has particular likes and dislikes. She settles in and opens her attaché bag.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck—pause—fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!” Her MP3 player is missing. “My iPod is my lifeline. Oh, no, no, no,” she moans. Explanation not needed. Her voices persecute her every night: ear buds and Beethoven are her front-line defence, temazepam her reserve.

She rummages in that bag for minutes, livid at her plight, her stupidity. “I’m a fuckwit, Liz, a fuckwit. What am I? A fuckwit, a fuckwit.” More rummaging, more profanity. Could it be on the floor at the check-in, stuck in the baggage x-ray, in the departure lounge where we shuffled books—her memoir—from her overweight bag to ours?

There’s time to go look for it, but no, the flight attendants can’t let her off the plane. Here’s a phone number to ring when you reach Sydney.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”

The plane remains on the Tulla tarmac long enough for someone to invent the iPod5.

Rock on.