The People You Meet: Chapter 18
What are the chances?
Ailsa slid gratefully into her business-class seat. She looked every bit the executive with her impressive Louis Vuitton bag, a gift from her dad, evidence of her now being on the first rung of the executive ladder, he had explained. It’s how he indulged her best, designer shoes, solid white-gold jewellery, and bags. He had a keen eye for what she liked, and he always delivered, and despite her protestations, and there were many, his comeback was that she was totally worth it!
“Can life get better?” she asked herself? With any luck, given that the aircraft didn’t look too crowded, it might be possible…might even have the two seats all to herself, with no overweight businessman leaning unintentionally, or otherwise, into her space, sometimes snoring fitfully, after that first glass of wine. It’s why she always requested an aisle seat where possible.
Wide as the allocated spaces were, she had seen, in her time, a fair few executive gentlemen who she believed, should have been weighed with their luggage, causing her to wonder at the marvels of aeronautical technology, gigantic birds that could lift the whole bloody lot into the air and land everything safely at the other end, excess luggage and all!
Her father had been insistent that he buy the ticket, and now, after a week of struggling to get his apartment into shape, she was glad that she’d given in to the joy of this creature-comfort indulgence. Only five minutes to go…
On her lap was a Jodi Picoult book, given to her by a friend, “Handle with Care”. She loved how Jodi was able to brilliantly pinpoint the realities of living with disability, or being marginalized, and wind the challenges through such incredible narratives, and enjoy a huge following, and bank balance, at the same time. She had no sooner read through the synopsis when she heard a familiar voice.
“Well, the people you bump into on a plane,” he said.
She looked up to see Dr. Stafford smiling down at her, a little uncertain, but smiling nonetheless.
“In this case it may well be literally,” he added. “I think you will have my company for the duration!”
“Dr. Stafford! Hello! Yes, it looks like we’re buddies, if this said seat is actually yours,” she said, indicating the seat on her right, “but it looks like there are lots of spare seats if you’d rather be on your own.”
“Now why would I choose to sit alone, when I can have the engaging company of an attractive woman…unless of course, you are hell-bent on reading Jodi. To be honest I have never done battle with her. For me it would be an absolute first.”
“Battle?”
“Well,” he answered as he stuffed his luggage in the locker, and seated himself beside her, “I’m told she can weave some magical stories around medical issues. I wouldn’t be able to help myself. I’d be picking all the flaws in her research.”
“Is that right?”
“Sadly, yes.”
“But then, YOU would have to be an expert in so many aspects of medicine, and I assume you aren’t, unless of course, you are one of these lucky people who enjoy a seventy-two hour day with the energy to match.”
“Oh perish the thought! I love my sleep. Seventy-two hours be damned! And, I’ll pull my head in. You are absolutely right. I would be no more an expert than you.”
“Hmm! You might have the edge on me, but, I’m willing to bet that if you had read even ONE of her books you’d probably be like me, one of those pathetically-pathetic followers who wait with bated breath for each and every new book she writes to come on the market. Oh to have her following! Or her bank account! Actually, this one was given to me by a friend, so poor Jodi won’t be sunning herself in the Caribbean due to my support, not this time at least, AND, since I haven’t started it, you are pretty safe. Normally I’d be too hooked on her plot to allow ANYONE to distract me. BUT in this case I’m not, so I will graciously allow you to chat with me instead.”
“In which case I’ll fasten my seat belt before the air hostess reminds me! And could we maybe dispense with the formalities? My name’s Alistair…so, is this back to work for you?” he asked, still struggling with his belt.
“Unfortunately yes, I do love my job, but I also enjoy down time, IF you can call wading through Dad’s apartment, downtime…and what about you? Is this trip for work, or pure pleasure?”
“I have to say it’s about absolute pleasure. I’m catching up with my two children for a few days. They’ll be in high school in a few weeks and I can already see the redundancy flag on the horizon for me. It’s a bit scary to be honest! Each time we meet up is a reminder of their race to the finish line.”
“The finish line?”
“The redundancy I talked of…that nebulous stage in their lives where it’s no longer cool to be seen with your dad.”
“Oh I see! Well, I suppose the time does come, though I didn’t experience it. I love my dad and enjoy being in his life. I don’t have children, so I can’t speak with any authority, but it certainly seems to happen for most parents.”
“Sad, isn’t it! I find I appreciate my children more when we’re packing so many punches into very limited time. I’m from a rather large extended family, so they also have to be taken into account when I visit. THAT can be a bit overwhelming at times. I think a picnic in the park should be enough, then whoever is able to come, can, and nobody need feel left out. It seems simple enough, but it doesn’t work that well in practice. There’s always somebody complaining that their needs weren’t met.
“And you…do you struggle to keep up with everybody in your family?”
“It’s a cinch! That’s because there’s only me and my brother…and I’m lucky to see him once a year.”
“Really?”
“He seems to be permanently overseas these days, and so, as you can imagine, Christmas is an exciting time for us. Mom keeps hoping one of us will provide a grandchild or ten.”
“Oh the pressure,” he grinned.
“Only if you succumb, and believe me, I don’t.”
“My children are twins, a boy and a girl. Ava is the girl. She’s the kind of child I wish I’d been when I was young. She’s confident and headstrong, hard-working, pretty, though she has no idea about that, AND her mother and I plan to keep it that way, but at the same time, she’s surprisingly compassionate. In so many ways she’s an uncut diamond.”
“Well wasn’t it Jung who said that children learn by what their parents are, rather than what their parents say? Maybe you both should take credit for that.”
“I have no idea, but yes, I see some of me and lots of her mother in the way she is. Marcus, our son, is far more reserved, a thinker who speaks only if he is totally convinced of something.
“Sorry, here am I doing what I do best, talking about my children. It happens when I have them at the forefront of my mind. Let’s talk about you, unless you were just being polite and you’re dying to jump into the gospel according to Jodi!”
“Jodi can wait. As for me, well, there’s not a great deal to tell, much to the chagrin of my mother.”
“Oh I doubt that!”
“Okay, maybe not so much now, but in the days when I didn’t finish the many university courses I began. All around her, parents boasted of their children’s achievements, and…look, I have to say I was a great starter. I could have done a PhD in starting, even a post-doctoral with a little effort, but I always found excuses not to complete study, even with two of the Dean’s awards for excellence! I don’t know why I wimped out. Nothing grabbed me and in the end I just sloped off, before the powers that be, ‘sloped’ me off!
“When I think about it now, I wonder that my parents didn’t summon writs of habeas corpus to the many universities they supported!”
“Well that would have been a first. Or maybe many have been served and the universities chose to keep quiet about them. Sounds like you could easily have completed your study, had you wanted to.”
“I suppose so…Dad was always cool with it, no pressure, Mom not so much, though these days she’s accepted that there are so many ways to skin a cat. Actually she reckons I’ve skinned way too many…in different ways!”
He smiled, clearly amused by her ease of talking.
“So you didn’t complete a degree?”
“Correct, so you can leave now,” she answered, looking directly at him, a devilish, arrogant smile playing on her lips, eyebrow raised, ready for a reaction.
“You’d be surprised about what I think. University is not for everyone, and anyone with a bit of nous can do well in life, perhaps even better than graduates, if they are doggedly determined to find a way. If we imagine that we’ve wrapped up all our learning by the time we turn twenty-one or so, then lord help us all.
“So, much to the disappointment of your mother you are not a graduate, but what exactly do you do?”
“Right now I work as our CEO’s personal assistant, which in layman’s terms means that I am the glue that binds all manner of business things together to form that perfect big picture that everyone just assumes comes with the odd little bit of cobbling. The reality is though, that describing it as meticulous planning doesn’t even cut it. One loose page and who knows where things might lead…or not?”
“Sounds too simplistic the way you put it, and overwhelming the way I see it…like a lot of responsibility! I have a whole staff to support me in an equally-difficult, but different work environment.”
“But then yours is about life and death…though sometimes I could say the same for my own job. Look it absolutely is challenging, responsibility without the big fat salary that should go with it. If I overlook things, it’s held as entirely my fault and not that of the executive. Responsibility for things happening as smooth as glass is left entirely to me. Fortunately I am, like Dad, super-organized, so we rarely have slip-ups, and my firm recognizes my diligence and gives very generous bonuses. I look forward to those. They almost make up for balancing my life on the eternal tight-rope!”
“And would you change things…if you could?”
“Maybe, maybe not…I know I am capable of anything my boss is called to do, and on many occasions I’ve had to cover for him and do the odd presentation that was his responsibility, but you know. I love and thrive on the variety, day-to-day planning, often meeting really interesting people, arranging tours, overseas trips, buying birthday presents and cards where I can pretend I have more money than sense, making conferences bigger and better than the one before, and of course ensuring that everything runs smoothly.”
“YOU have to do all of that?”
“I do, and believe me, there is so much more, but it’s exciting, and the agencies I deal with, conference centers, the large hotel groups and the likes, know that if dinners aren’t up to scratch, or venues are less than favorable, uncomfortable beds, cleanliness in doubt, there is absolutely no repeat business. So they are forever wooing me. I guess you could say that I have help, but it’s up to me to determine who I can trust. I’ve spent many years sifting through the hype of their advertising. I know which questions to ask, and I have a handle on the tricks they can get up to.”
“Next time I go on a conference I will be checking with you, I think.”
“But, stressful as it can be,” she added, ignoring his comment. “I’ve seen a lot of the world through this job. The travel makes everything worthwhile. I’ve tacked some weeks of annual leave on to places I’ve wanted to see more of, Paris being one. That was the cheapest holiday ever. I swapped my little pad for a pretty snazzy Parisian one, so all I had to pay for was food.
“I also had a skiing trip in Austria while my Austrian exchange grabbed a bit of sunshine on our Australian shores, Byron Bay to be precise. All I had to do was find the sweetest venue…too easy, though she would have had no clue about that. And then there was the freebie from a group of Irish hoteliers, as long as I promised to consider them for a huge conference that was coming up.”
“And you did?”
“I did, but they had to earn it let me tell you. There’s no free lunch as far as I’m concerned.”
He loved that he could sit back and let her ramble. Never had he met such a refreshing free spirit, intelligent, witty, and more than a little attractive.
“Gosh I love those Paddies,” she sighed. “I nearly married one. Sean was his name…probably still is!” she chuckled. “He was a fine specimen of a man, and pretty well-heeled, but hey, no amount of money can make up for living half of your life in darkness and the freezing cold, so despite all the Irish love songs he sang to me, I just had to let him go.”
“I think the course of true love is geographical Ailsa. We’re spoilt here in Australia. I had no idea about winters in the northern hemisphere, and like you, it came as a shock. I swear I’m still suffering frostbite from the six winter months I did in a Swedish hospital.”
“Six months of winter?”
“Eleven, if you take away the summer when it squeezes itself in.
“But, you’ve given me food for thought. My job just seems to become more and more stressful, especially when I doubt some tightly-held treatment protocols and beliefs we are mandated to follow.”
“I can only imagine…so, should I put in a good word for you with my boss?” she asked playfully.
“Too easy…unfortunately, though I’m ashamed to say this, your salary might not service my lifestyle commitments, or should I say, my children’s…camps, music lessons, tennis lessons, cross-country racing, school fees, clothes, holidays, pocket money and so on. Sometimes I wonder how the average Joe manages, earning so much less money than I do.”
“Well my mother would have an answer to that, but we won’t go there. Alistair Stafford, that sounds like you have Scottish ancestry. Would I be right?”
“Partly…my dad was born in Scotland. I was named after his very best friend who surprised everybody by becoming a priest right in the middle of his heyday. Not a soul saw it coming. Dad was devastated as they were great mates.”
“Maybe you were a replacement for him!”
“Or in memory of him…I suppose we will never know. Seems he was a lad about town…in the best possible way…he was good-looking, popular, had the girls hanging on his arms, and was the life and soul of the party, so that being the case I have much to live up to,” he winked.
Ailsa couldn’t help thinking that he had fulfilled the good-looking part. As to the ‘popular and attractive to the fairer sex’, she could only surmise that he was all of that too.
“So you’ve never met him?”
“I never have. Dad married a couple of years after Alistair left and then moved away as well. Life gets busy with kids and marriage, and other responsibilities and gradually people are relegated to the far corner of your mind, forgotten until somebody sparks a memory. So there you are, Scottish with no chance of finding out anything about my namesake.”
“But he must have had family.”
“Of course, but his parents moved away when they retired, and his sisters, three of them I think, are married and living who knows where. If I had time I’d LOVE to find them.
“Imagine the trips down memory lane we could have. One day maybe, when I’ve scaled down my work and the children are off and doing their own thing, I think I’d enjoy that.”
“Well don’t leave it too late. Just imagine how it would be to find out about a whole family you are linked to, if only by name and friendship.”
“Exactly!”
“See that’s where I’m different. There would be no stone unturned until I’d sorted out every minutiae of his life. I just can’t help myself. I need to iron out every quirk…maybe that’s why I love my job so much.”
“Seems you’ve missed your calling Ailsa…maybe you could do the research for me.”
But suddenly, all too quickly, they realized that they were descending and about to land.
“Goodness, this is the shortest trip I’ve ever made to see my kids,” Alistair declared, “or maybe I can put it down to good company.”
“That’s the best compliment I’ve had today,” Ailsa laughed, “because it’s the only one.”
“Well I’m glad I was the purveyor. Someone like you should have showers of compliments every day.”
“Oh I do…Monday to Friday, and you bet your bottom dollar I deserve every damned one of them,” she said, as she made to reach for her luggage.
“Allow me,” Alistair suggested, as he rummaged through the locker. “Now, I’m looking up here at a very stylish, tan leather weekender. Would that be yours?”
“Correct…a present from my ever-doting dad! I’m not sure how to stop him indulging me, no matter what I say.”
“I’m thinking it’s a two-way street. You don’t get anything for nothing, Ailsa.”
Suddenly Alistair’s mind raced. It was a very long time since he had been seriously attracted to someone. Right now, Ailsa ticked all his boxes and had his heart beating a little faster than normal, so that he feared she might hear it.
Here was a gift, begging to be opened. Would he, wouldn’t he? Time was running out and if he were to believe that opportunity strikes but once, there was no time like the present, so like a schoolboy bent on winning his first date he blurted out,
“Are you in a hurry Ailsa?”
“Not especially…in fact, not at all. My little pad is empty except for the inch of dust that will have built up since I left, and maybe the odd short-changed cockroach. I could easily delay having to deal with that.”
“Well,” he continued nervously, scratching his head, “we could go for a drink…if you’d like to!”
“Now why didn’t I think of that?” she laughed wickedly. “Like I said, I have all the time in the world. A drink would be great. You know what?” she asked, noting his puerile discomfort, “most of my best dates have been made over one drink or another, or should that be one drink AND another?”
She looked at him, her head cocked teasingly to the side, to see if she’d registered any shock, but he stood there, belying his education, and the responsibility of the medical position he held, as well as his past marital experiences. It was clear that he was totally at odds with how to counter her response.
“Oh bless his cotton socks…he could be on the spectrum, if I didn’t know better,” she mused to herself. “I need to knock that out of him, if ever I get the chance. Life is too short for missed opportunity”, so she quickly accepted before he had the slightest chance to change his mind.
“A drink would be great, and after that we could head on over to the registry office, and after THAT, maybe a respectable nine months or so, my mother can have the first of her longed-for ten grandchildren…or you can escape while the going is good…your choice!” Her eyes held a teasing that in a lifetime he could hardly resist.
“I think I need that drink,” he laughed.