Reasons to Fly

Istanbul. The airport a hub – a conduit, funneling people of every creed and colour to all four corners of the world. Mixed tongues are white noise here; I can recognize some languages by the lilt, the odd word, but many are too alien. A fellow passenger wonders at the tighter security; ‘I don’t remember having to go through security between connections last time’, he observes, ‘are you sure you’re right’. I point to the sign which clearly indicates, ‘international transfers’ and I remind him that Turkey has been placed upon the map and dragged into the news for reasons that might well put a noose around the security in this huge airport. I must pull off every single one of the dozen silver bangles on my wrist before I walk through the machine; at home I always make a show of trying to tug them off and explain that they are tighter in the heat and please can’t they let me off and – depending on their mood – the airport staff either laugh and wave me through or snort and roll their eyes and let me through anyway. I daren’t try that here. I wonder, as I always wonder when I travel, what presses people to move such vast distances. I thought nobody had any money anymore? Is long distance travel a luxury. Or a necessity? A bit of both for me this time. Is it necessary that I see my children? Or am I just lucky enough to luxuriate in their presence for a few precious days? Where are all these people going? Why? Business? Pleasure? Love? Life? Death? I have flown expectant with child, heavy and round, and nervous to drag a suitcase from a carousel in case my waters broke.  I have flown thin and haggard with a daughter that needed urgent medical attention in London. I have flown home brimming with tears and sadness – on the news of my dad’s death. I fell into deep slumber on the flight, exhausted by days of too little sleep, too much crying, and woke over Africa as the early light stole into the cabin. For the briefest moment I was elated at homecoming. Until I remembered why. I have flown as a new bride. On the cusp of adventure as I feigned grownupness and confidence. I’m in ubiquitous Costas as I write. Harshly lit so that the fluorescent light washes complexions of the tans we may have collected as souvenirs. Not me, of course, tans are old hat when you’ve always lived in the sun. SPF 50 for me. A slightly laughable case of closing the stable door long, long after the horse has bolted. When I was eighteen and travelling between home and college, I flew back to januarynipped London the colour of toast and my skin crumbed on the way so that even as I arrived I was miserably paler than when I left home. I am in toohot, washed of colour Costas for tea. Because I’m English. Or masquerading as English for the purposes of travel. That’s what it says in my passport; it’s what I must be. Despite what my taxi driver in Dar es Salaam said as I transited through a city breathing heavily and hotly close to rain. The parking attendant in the domestic terminal – for I had bounced through the sky from my highland home to this sultry, seaside capital in a tiny plane, as an empty Coke can caught in a wind so that we were buffeted and tipped and I, an exceedingly nervous flyer, was white knuckled with fear and focusing on the podcast I had dug into my ears at volume 10 – gave my driver lip, I interjected in Swahili, please don’t hold us up, I have a plane to catch from international. Laughter all round. They weren’t expecting that: impatient Kiswahili, ‘Really mama, you are an African!’ Memoirist Alexandra Fuller doesn’t believe we can be African if we have white skins, if our heritage is muddied and smudged by the movements of itinerant grandparents. But if I’m not African, if I’m not African when my family has called this continent Home for 111 years, what am I? English today. It is as an unfamiliar and slightly ill-fitting overcoat that I wriggle into from time to time. I know it doesn’t suit me. Drinking tea because I’m masquerading as English and because it seems the decorous thing to do at 10 in the morning. Ten in the morning where though? Where I’m headed – it’s ten in the morning in England. Where I am as I sit to write and sip my tea, it’s past noon – at home it’s after lunch – but it seems impolite to ask for a beer. Reckless. I wonder – by others’ orders – what time it is for them. Eclectic tastes and scrambled time zones – that’s the essence of airports isn’t it: lives suspended, between one world and the next. A bubble. My world is greenfieldtea and mist and dogs and my darling, darling Ant and filling hours the fullest I can with whatever I can find to hand. For the next two weeks, time will be tight. I won’t be able to amble through its wide corridors awash with silence and space so that I can hear myself think. I already anticipate the hurly-burly of the next fortnight with some trepidation. Except for the weekend with my children. That will be as a pillow beneath my head. I have rented a cottage so that I can scoop them up, cook them generous meals, listen to their stories, hear their laughter, reassure, hug, hold, kiss, scold. And there, in the cocoon that we will carve of a stranger’s home for a precious few days, we can be whoever we feel we really are.

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