Layover by Simon Ashton

Layover | Simon Ashton

“‘Scuse me, but are you alright?”

Kirsty felt very fucking far from alright. Between the jet lag and the fluorescent lights, her brain was untethered from time and had given up guessing what hour it was. Her mouth felt and tasted like an airport carpet. She wondered if throwing up would help or just add bile to the list of current indignities. Her best friend was back in London. The boyfriend that she kept forgetting was her ex-boyfriend was God knows where. Her plans were in tatters, her head was throbbing, and to top it all off some bastard in Bangkok International had stolen her laptop.

“Aye, I’m fine,” she said. 

“Choice. I’ll leave you to it.” He turned back to his phone.

He sat across from her in a row of seats divided by metal armrests which, Kirsty could attest, made it impossible to lie down. She felt rough, but he didn’t look much better. There were a couple of businessmen speaking Japanese at the end of his row. Their perfectly tailored suits and excellent posture provided a stark contrast.

He was unshaven in a way that suggested circumstance rather than intention. His T-shirt had seen many better days. Below that, faded cargo shorts, possibly once black, gave way to the dingy cast covering his left leg from foot to thigh. 

Back home she’d have told him she had a boyfriend and cheery-bye. But she didn’t have a boyfriend, and she was as far from home as she’d ever been. She hadn’t spoken to anyone but airport staff in a couple of days. Besides, he wasn’t a threat; with that cast he’d be pretty easy to shove over. 

Kirsty wiped her nose on her sleeve. “Do you have any tissues, by the way?”

He looked up and smiled, “Chur, bro,” and tossed her a small travel pack.

“Cheers. And paracetamol? I’m feeling a bit peely-wally.”

He fished in his bag. “Here you go. Had a big one on the turps, eh?”

“You a Kiwi?”

“Very good.” he smiled. “Most guess Aussie, but you’re right. Dunedin. South Island.”

“Little trick I learned living in London. Aussies don’t care if you think they’re from New Zealand, but Kiwis get pissy if you think they’re from Oz. Same thing with North Americans; guess Canadian and you’ll save yourself a lot of lectures.”

“And you must be Welsh?”

“Get tae fuck! Ah’m fae Scotland!” Kirsty spat back, her accent strengthening with each syllable.

He smiled. “I know. Just my little joke. I’m Matt.”

“Kirsty.”

It was supposed to be her new start, the big trip to Asia. Fiona’s idea. Best way to get over a break-up, she said. 

“It’d be a lot cheaper to just pick up some gadge and have him shag me senseless.”

“Only in the short term,” Fiona countered, “But then you’d be back to scrolling his Insta and crying into your Deliveroo. Look, you’ve got savings, you’re young and unencumbered, this is the way. Trust. Fuck January in this country! This is no place to change your outlook, I mean, seriously?” She gestured to the damp park around them – mud and cold, bare trees and puddles. 

“Whereas, a week’s R and R in Thailand? And Bangkok’s a hub – from there you could pop over to Hong Kong for a bit of shopping therapy, or sushi in Tokyo, elephants in Laos, whatever you fancy. Doesn’t that sound more appealing?”

And, Kirsty had to admit, it did.

This wasn’t the plan, Kirsty thought, as she tossed the pills into her mouth and swallowed them with the last gulp of her water. 

Matt looked at her. “Not being rude, but you look like death warmed up.”

“Jesus, none taken. Naw, I’m fine. Just… yeah. Having a bit of a time of it.”

“If you fancy talking, I’ve got a couple of hours then you’ll never see me again. The priest in the confessional.” He saw her smile drop. “Oh shit. You’re not religious? I didn’t mean…”

“Naw, it’s just…priests. When I was wee…a priest… Haha! Your face! I’m just fucking with you. C’mon, grab your crutches. I’ll let you buy me a drink, Father. Hair of the dog.”

There was an American-themed sports bar a short distance down the concourse. They ordered a couple of Thai beers and grabbed a booth, Matt hoiking his injured leg onto the laminated plastic bench.

“What happened there then?” she nodded at the cast.

“I’ve been telling people it was rugby – gotta act the part – but as we’re mates now, I should be honest.” He adopted an accent that would have made Steve Irwin blush, “Fair dinkum, I was attacked by a ‘roo.”

“That’s Australia, mate.”

He laughed. “Busted. Nah, there’s no great story. I walked into traffic in Manila. Told my friends to continue the trip without me, while I spent yonks alone in the hospital. But it’s all good now. Flew from there to here this morning, fly out at six.”

“Where you headed?”

“Meeting the lads in Berlin next. You?”

Kirsty sighed. Where was she headed?

Usually, she kept her calendar sectioned off into blocks of colour, like an overly-stressed Mondrian. She liked to know where she was and where she was going next: gym, coffee with Fiona, all staff meeting, birthday drinks with Denise. She blocked off time for sex with Sean as ‘movie night’, or ‘lunch date’ if he was lucky. All of it written down, right at her fingertips.
If she looked at it now, it would tell her she was en route to Koh Phangan. And she would yell, “Do I fucking look like I’m en route to Koh Phangan?!” 

There’d been a Tube strike in London so getting to Heathrow had been a nightmare. The plane to Zurich was late due to icy fog. Then her connecting flight to Bangkok was further delayed while the luggage handlers loaded the backlog. By the time she arrived in Thailand and made it through immigration, 23 hours after leaving her house, she had missed the domestic flight. 

“So, I bought some whisky in the Duty Free, found an empty corner to sit in, and had myself a wee pity party. At some point I fell asleep, and when I woke up my laptop was gone. Which was bad enough, but the fuckers finished the last of my whisky too. Although it’s possible that was me. Anyway, you know what us Scots say about the best laid plans of mice and men.”

“They ‘gang aft agley’,” Matt continued the poem.

“Fuck off!” Kirsty laughed, “You know Robert Burns?”

“Know him? We have a statue of him in Dunedin.”

Kirsty raised an eyebrow

“Seriously. He has his back to the church and he’s facing a pub.”

“Aye, that’s him. Well, he wasn’t wrong. My plans have gone the fuck agley. I was just considering whether to jump on the next flight home when you stuck your nose in.”

“I’m glad I did. Let’s have another, then I’ve got something I need to show you.”

“Cool. But I’m telling you now, if it’s your dick I’ll break your other leg.”

Matt laughed. “No, it’s even better. Swear.”

One more became two, which became three, with some food. They talked families, schools, films, music. Drinking, smoking, and other drugs. They covered travel, where they’d been, who they liked to meet abroad (the Irish, in small doses; Malaysians), who they didn’t (the English, obviously; Americans, even more so), where they wanted to visit.

“After Berlin, I’d like to see the other capitals: London, Dublin, Edinburgh. Paris, obviously”

“You know, I’ve never been to Paris? I think that was part of why we broke up, Sean and me.”

“He dumped you because you’ve never been to Paris?!”

Kirsty laughed.

“First off, he didn’t dump me, it was mutual. And no, I meant because he’s a snob. We never went to Spain, we went to ‘Catalonia’, or even better the ‘Basque Country’. He said he wouldn’t be caught dead in Paris. Too touristy’.”

“But it’s one of the world’s great cities; everyone loves Paris! Picasso. Hemmingway…”

“Daft Punk. Charlie Parker.”

“Oscar Wilde. Jim Morrison.”

“Hitler?” Kirsty offered.

Matt snorted. “Exactly!”

Of course, that wasn’t the reason for the break-up. She knew that. It was one of a hundred reasons. Yet she had still been crushed. She was doing it all as she was supposed to: school, uni, work, boyfriend. Check, check, check, check. She assumed life would continue in the same vein: fiancé, wedding, house, babies. 

Sean had his own plans though. Ones that might’ve included her – but not mortgages, definitely not babies.

Instead he moved out. 

Now here she was, semi-drunk with a stranger in an airport that wasn’t even meant to be a stop.

 “Shit! Look at the time,” Matt said. “We’ve got to get a wriggle on. Reckon we could cadge a wheelchair around here?”

With a lot of miming and broken English, a staff member wheeled one over, laughing as he did so. Matt directed her. Down this hallway. Turn here. Elevator. Roof level. More hallways.

“You do this a lot?” Kirsty wheezed. “Pick up wee lassies in airports and have them roll you around?”

“You’re my first. You’re killing it though, a natural.” He motioned to a door that looked exactly like every other door. “Here we go.”

It opened to a small glass-covered rooftop courtyard, maybe twenty meters by ten. There were four stone benches dotted around a miniature pond, amid ceramic pots of ficus and ferns. The sunlight slanted through the glass, leaves casting sharp little shadows across the pebbled floor. There was a scent of cut wood and mint.

Kirsty’s exhausted, confused brain seemed to stutter for a moment, her jaw dropping open in wonder.

“Isn’t this unreal?” Although there was nobody around, Matt was whispering. “It’s for the airport staff to come and pray or whatever.”

They were quiet for a minute. 

“You know,” Matt said, his voice still low, “I didn’t tell you the whole story about this.” He gestured to his cast. 

“I’d made a big show of not being bothered, insisting my friends carry on and I’d see them in Europe. But the hospital was a fucking nightmare. The food was half-deadly. I couldn’t walk, barely slept, and the bedpan,” He shuddered. “I got depressed. I was lonely and mad at the universe. I was supposed to be diving with whale sharks or whatever. Living. But there I was, lying on this bloody cot, listening to some bloke snore so loud it was like he was taking the piss.”

He paused. Looked up at Kirsty.

“But mostly I was scared. Proper scared. Like, what if this was it? What if my big, brilliant adventure just… stopped? I’d made all these plans, y’know? Places I was supposed to go. Things I was supposed to do. None of them involved carking it in a Filipino hospital where nobody knew my name.”

Kirsty swallowed, choking back the recognition she felt.

“But then,” he said, a smile returning to the corners of his mouth, “I remembered this place. 

“I was on a layover a couple of years back, heading to Mum’s for Christmas and got talking to this guy from Nepal who worked in one of the shops here. He had nothing, really. Sent every penny home to his family. But he’d come here at the end of every shift and just…chill for a bit. Said it quieted his mind, made him thankful. It’s so peaceful, y’know? Listen.”

Kirsty listened.

It was incredible. In the middle of one of the busiest airports in the world, it was practically silent. She felt the weightlessness of a kid shrugging off a school bag.

“I thought about it every day when I was in the hospital. I don’t know why this place. I’ve seen nicer gardens. Maybe it’s magic – or my subconscious was imagining it was. Maybe it was just the quiet. Doesn’t matter. Whatever it was, I’d try to picture what it would be like to be here. Like, if I could just survive the hospital, I’d come back and sit here for a while. Just be.” 

He looked up at Kirsty, giving her space to mock. She said nothing, just looked at him, the sunlight catching in her lashes.

“I know, it sounds so New Age wanky, it’s a bloody airport garden. But it kept me going. I realized sometimes plans just change. Why fight it? Maybe it’s okay to just be where you are for a bit.”

The words hung between them, as weighty as the stone bench and as light as the sun all at once.

Back downstairs, Kirsty continued to push the wheelchair until they arrived at his gate. Six hours earlier she hadn’t set eyes on him. Now she had to say goodbye? What the fuck?

“So,” Kirsty said.

“So,” Matt replied.

“Really, thank you for showing me your magic airport garden. I needed this.”

“And I’m glad I crashed your pity party. It’s not every day I get to meet a girl who can swear like a sailor and recite poetry.”
“Too fucking right. I’m one of a kind.”

Matt stood to hug her as Kirsty reached out to shake his hand. For the first time that day, things felt awkward. Forced.

“Well, enjoy Europe.”
“Enjoy Asia. You’re sticking around, I hope?”

“Might as well. I’ve no other plans. Find a hut on the beach. Just… be.” Kirsty winked, but she wasn’t ridiculing. She meant it.

They swapped WhatsApps and wished each other well. Goodbyes were so cringe. 

Matt wheeled himself away.

****

A few days later a newly suntanned Kirsty picked up her phone. She considered it for a moment before returning it to the shelf by her bed. Instead, she turned and walked toward the ocean. 

The sand’s warmth felt therapeutic on her feet. The waves, so gentle they were barely waves at all, kissed the edge of the beach. She walked in, beyond waist height, then submerged.

Kirsty lay on her back, letting the salty ocean take her weight, and watched the white clouds moving so slowly overhead. The scent of pine trees mixed with her coconut sunscreen. She stayed like that for an age, just floating, before returning to her beach hut. 

She wrapped herself in a towel, then finally, for the first time in days, opened her phone to the calendar. There was a lot of white. She blocked off three days, two weeks from now, and composed a text.

-Kia ora, mate! Turns out I’m going to Paris in a couple of weeks. Coincidentally, right around the time you’ll be there. There’s a wee garden near Notre Dame that sounds right up your street. I don’t suppose you’d like to Just Be there with me for a while?

Kirsty stared at the screen. Her thumb hovered. Maybe it was stupid. Maybe it didn’t matter. She smiled to herself. Maybe it didn’t have to. She pressed send.

There was barely a delay before her phone pinged in response.

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