Timothy Lea - Timothy Lea's Complete Confessions

She winces when I say the word and adjusting her stupid hat sweeps across the passage-way. The tap has stopped of its own accord and the basin is now nearly empty. I push in after her and depress the tap.

“It was jammed,” I say. “Look.”

I take my hand away and the tap stops. I can see that Ange is about to say something very unkind when suddenly the plane drops two thousand feet. Maybe I exaggerate but it felt like that at the time. I grab Ange and she can see from the look in my eyes that this is not a clumsy pass.

“Turbulence,” she says like somebody has just burped. “Absolutely knee-uthing to worry about.”

It is very cramped in that toilet but I have a feeling that if I open the door I will step straight into space.

“You’re not free-heightened, are you?”

“Terrified.”

“See-it down. I’ll be be-ack in a me-oment.”

The plane gives another lurch and she has to prise my fingers off her one by one before I will let go. I sit down on the lav and look for the safety belt. There is no safety belt. What a diabolical way to go, I think to myself: bouncing round the inside of the kasi. You don’t meet a nice class of person that way.

“He-ear you are, drink this.” Ange pops round the door and hands me a glass of water with something fizzing in it.

“What is it?”

“It should he-elp to key-arm you dee-own a bit.”

“Great. Ta.”

The stuff slides down like Enos fruit salts and I slip on my grateful smile No. 143B.

“Captea-urn Barclay will tea-ache us up above the we-eather, I expect,” she murmurs and her voice is almost soothing. “Everybody has their see-it belt on knee-ow so you me-ite as we-ell stay he-ear. Knee-owe-body will key-um bar-gin in.”

“Seat belts!?” My hand sneaks out again, just in case she should be about to leave me.

“I repee-it knee-uthing to we-ury abee-out. You we-ont feel a thing in a mee-oment.”

That is what is worrying me.

“I’m terrified,” I mutter.

“Stand e-up.”

I do as I am told and she picks up a bottle of Eau-de-cologne and starts dabbing my forehead with it – I mean with what is inside the bottle.

“Be-etter?”

I nod slowly and find my arms slipping round her waist. Honestly they might belong to somebody else sometimes, the way they go on. I rest my head against her shoulder and let my hooter soak up her upper class pong. There is always something a bit sharp and bracing about the stuff birds like her wear – a whiff of the Young Conservative Pony Club outing to “Salad Days”.

Luckily the plane wobbles about a bit more and I can snuggle closer.

“You are free-heightened, aren’t you?”

“Not when you’re here.”

I hold her so tight that I expect to see her makeup cracking and she gives a little gasp like one of those squeeze-me dolls.

“Relax.”

To my amazement her hand drops to the front of my trousers and she starts to ruffle the hair at the back of my neck.

“De-ont be disturbed.”

A pretty stupid thing to say in the circumstances, but I am not complaining. With a practised ease that surprises me she flips open my fly and feels inside like she is taking her pet bunny out of its hutch.

“There, the-at’s be-etter, isn’t it?”

She is dead right it is. I don’t know whether they teach them that at air hostess school or whether it is just a personal service but what she is doing sure takes your mind off the horrors of flying.

“Dee-ont kiss me,” she says. “I can’t afford to get my me-ache-up smudged. Key-an you reach one of those peeaper tiles?”

A few minutes later I am making my way back down the aisle towards Ted feeling a pleasant glow fanning out through my thighs. Most of the passengers are asleep but the bloke who was sitting between Nan and Nat is hanging on to the seat in front with both hands and biting his tongue. There is a wild staring look in his eyes. I can’t see Nat or Nan, although there are a pair of female legs sticking out into the aisle. I sit down next to Ted who smiles at me a trifle contemptuously.

“You came over a little queer, did you?” he says.

“No,” I say. “Over a paper towel, actually.”

Isla de Amor sounds romantic, doesn’t it? Like a beautiful woman’s name. Can you imagine the deep blue ocean softly stroking the sinuous sandy shores? The warm Mediterranean sun embracing you in its lover’s caress? The tasty tipple in a small discreet taverna before an evening of self-revealing sensual exploration? Chances are that, if you can, you have read the Funfrall Continental Brochure. That is where it says all that stuff. In reality, Love Island is a little different.

You approach it from the airport in one of Funfrall Continental’s fleet of luxury coaches (i.e. two, one of which is always out of service). “Luxury” is pitching it a bit high, too, though I suppose they offer marginally more room for stowing thirty people’s baggage than the Wells Fargo jobs. Through the fly-splattered windows you can see dust, small children making very common market-type gestures, Coca Cola signs and the kind of crumbling villages that Clint Eastwood would be ashamed to book for a lynching. The sun is there alright, and the roof of the coach feels like the lid of a pressure cooker. In fact, there is almost too much sun. It glares out of the sky as if determined to reduce you to a blob of fat before you can get your swimming costume on.

There are mountains in the background but the coach takes you away from them, through land which is pretty flat – or, more exactly, flat and not very pretty. The scenery may be drab, but at least this prepares you for your first glimpse of “the pleasure dome of liberated sensuality” – no prizes for guessing where that came from.

At the fag end of a small fishing village, on a driftwood strewn beach, stands a ramshackle wooden jetty pointing like an accusing finger at a low-lying island separated from the grateful shore by about five hundred yards of water. It is difficult to get an exact idea of its size because it appears to run away at right angles to the beach but it is certainly not going to give Australia an inferiority complex.

“Is that it?” I say the first time I see it, hoping that someone is going to disagree with me.

“That’s what the sign says.”

“How do we get there?”

“You take a running jump from the end of the pier. What do you think they built it for?”

It is true that there appears to be no boat to speed us to to our new home and this is causing Manuel, who met us at the airport, and who we have discovered to be unofficial leader of the Spanish anti-deoderant movement, great anxiety.

“Fission, fission!” he keeps muttering angrily.

“He means it’s the world’s first nuclear slag heap.”

“No he doesn’t. He means that the ferry boat has gone fishing.”

An hour later we find the latter explanation to be correct and cross to the island with fourteen sardines and a small octopus. All the way, Manuel shakes his head and shrugs apologetically whilst occasionally excusing himself to tear a strip off the boat’s skipper who ignores him and continues to gaze resignedly into space. In the next few weeks we meet a great many Manuels, all of them bearing a responsibility that ends just short of the job you want doing. In fact, we come to say that when a job is done “manuelly” it means it is not done at all.

Another expression we adapt is “traditionally Spanish”. This is much used in the Funfrall brochure and can be employed to describe everything from plumbing – taps that spring from the plaster when touched and wave in front of you like angry snakes – to the electrical fittings which don’t.