Lindsey Kelk - We Were On a Break

Somewhere far, far away, I felt my grandmother spinning in her grave. Somewhere closer, I heard Maura in 22C let out a stuck-pig snore.

‘You’re not throwing sweets at my face on a plane,’ I said quietly, holding up a hand in front of my face. ‘Stop it.’

‘You know I can do it,’ Adam repeated, readying a blue M&M. ‘Open your mouth.’

With lips pursed tighter than the average cat’s arse, I shook my head, still mad about being woken up and slowly remembering all the other reasons I was upset with him. Last night’s weirdness, the airport phone calls and, oh yeah, the complete and utter lack of a bloody proposal.

‘Fine, whatever,’ he muttered, emptying half the bag directly into his mouth, slumping back down in his seat and producing a tiny can of Coke from his backpack. ‘Sorry, Mum.’

‘Excuse me?’ I turned so sharply a curtain of my own sun-bleached blonde hair slapped me in the face. ‘What did you call me?’

‘Nothing,’ he replied with a smirk. ‘Mum.’

‘Oh, be quiet,’ I replied, mostly peeved because he was right. It was happening more and more often, I would open my mouth and my mother’s voice would come out instead. I had Motherettes. ‘That’s so not funny.’

‘Oh, it’s so not funny?’ He let down my tray table without asking and placed his can in the little indentation without a napkin underneath. ‘I hate when you talk to me like a child, you’re not my mother, you know.’

‘Thank god,’ I quipped without thinking.

The smirk wiped itself off his face.

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

I should have known better, I really should. I knew I wasn’t allowed to make comments about his mum, ever, no matter what he felt like saying about mine. It was the number one unwritten, unspoken rule of dating a mummy’s boy. Never make a joke about his mother, ever.

‘Nothing.’ I picked up his drink and snapped my table back in place to cross my legs without hitting my knees. ‘Is your tray broken or something?’

‘At least my mum’s fun,’ he muttered, nipping the can out of my hand and glugging. ‘At least my parents aren’t boring.’

‘Don’t start.’ I closed my eyes and tried to think of happy things like my friends and my cat and advent calendars and Tom Hardy and the Topshop summer sale. Nothing was really that wrong, it was just the enclosed space and the lack of sleep and the night before and … oh god, I really was going to kill someone. At least Maura was completely unconscious so there wouldn’t be any witnesses.

‘I can’t be arsed with you right now.’

‘ Me ?’ Adam replied, incredulous. ‘What have I done?’

‘Other than all those weird phone calls? And the moody silences?’ Once I’d started, I couldn’t stop myself and an unpleasant feeling began to fizz up in my chest. ‘Or, I don’t know, completely ruining the last night of our holiday?’

‘I didn’t feel well,’ he protested. The strings of his hoodie were still tied in a neat bow under his chin and it was all I could do not to choke him with them. ‘You couldn’t walk in those stupid shoes anyway; you would have ended up moaning all night. You should be grateful.’

‘I would not have moaned.’ My foot was still throbbing underneath the four layers of plasters. Ten minutes away, my arse. ‘You were the one who said it was ten minutes. And can you please take that hood off when I’m trying to talk to you?’

Adam yanked the hood down, his hair springing up around his face, all fluffy and dry from the recycled plane air. He looked like a furious Pomeranian and it was very hard to take him seriously.

‘So, I made a mistake.’ He chugged his drink and crumpled the can like a slightly less impressive Incredible Hulk. He was, in fairness, almost as green. Adam was not a good flier. ‘I’m sorry I’m not perfect all the time like you. And it wouldn’t matter if you hadn’t been wearing those stupid shoes in the first place.’

‘I’m not perfect,’ I said, brushing my hair behind my ears as my eyes began to burn. It was just the dry air. My eyes were watering because I’d gone to sleep in my contact lenses. I definitely wasn’t crying. ‘I’m just not stupid.’

I felt Maura seize up at the side of me, not nearly as unconscious as I had originally thought.

A condescending sigh escaped his mouth and he flipped his hood back up over his head, pulling it down over his eyes.

‘That’s me, so stupid. Not like Professor Liv. I’ll shut up before I say anything else that offends you.’

I didn’t know what to do. We never argued, ever. Well, there was that one time he’d deleted the Downton Abbey finale off my Sky+ but he’d replaced it with the DVD and all was forgiven. What was I supposed to do? Let him calm down, I told myself. Take Elsa’s advice and let it go. That would be the clever thing to do.

‘Arsehole.’

I closed my eyes the second it was out, ashamed. Elsa would never call her boyfriend an arsehole – Olaf, maybe, but never Elsa.

‘I’m an arsehole?’

Adam yanked the hood down and turned in his seat to give me his full attention.

‘I’m an arsehole?’ he repeated.

I opened my mouth but nothing came out. Oh brilliant, now I couldn’t think of anything to say.

‘You’ve been acting like a mentalist for two weeks,’ he said in an angry whisper that woke anyone still sleeping in a three-row radius. ‘Whining, sulking, constantly complaining and I’m the arsehole.’

‘When was I whining? What have I complained about?’ I replied, trying to keep my rage to an appropriate volume level. My grandmother would have come back to life just to die again if she’d seen us arguing in public. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘“What are we doing today, Adam? Where are we going tonight, Adam? Adam, I need a drink. Adam, it’s so hot. Why don’t you carry me, Adam? Why didn’t we hire a donkey, Adam?”’

‘I was only joking about you carrying me,’ I replied, flushed. ‘And obviously I didn’t really want to hire a donkey. You’re totally exaggerating.’

Admittedly, I had googled the donkey thing when a girl rode one past us halfway up a mountain but apparently you had to buy it outright and I knew my credit card limit wouldn’t stretch to it. Not after that bloody stupid frock. For the most part, any questioning on my part was because I was anxious about the supposed proposal, but I could hardly tell him that.

‘I’m very sorry the Mayans didn’t build their ancient civilization closer to the hotel,’ Adam seethed. ‘What a bunch of selfish fuckers.’

‘It was hot and I was thirsty,’ I glanced around the plane and everyone quickly looked away. ‘But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t having a good time. Don’t make out like all I did was complain.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you enjoyed yourself,’ he said, either oblivious to or unconcerned by the scene he was creating. ‘You love complaining, you complain constantly.’

‘I do not.’ At least, no more than any other self-respecting Englishwoman. ‘I tell you when I’m upset about something, that’s not the same thing.’

‘Then you must be constantly upset. Liv, how do you cope?’ Adam said, sharpening his spine and wrapping his arms around himself, pulling himself further and further away from me, severing every point of physical contact. ‘Nothing’s ever good enough for you, is it?’

‘What are you talking about?’ I was so incredibly angry I could barely see, and worst of all, I was almost certainly about to cry. ‘You’ve totally lost me.’

‘Mexico’s not good enough, my family’s not good enough, I’m not good enough,’ he carried on ranting in a mad whisper, banging his elbows on the armrests and his head hitting the ceiling as he threw himself around in his seat like an overgrown toddler. ‘Nothing’s ever good enough.’