Then Penelope had insisted in a loud voice that she had to go to the loo and Eva had had to squeeze past the man at the end of the row to go with her. When they got back and Eva had squeezed back to her seat, Josephine said she had to go too. Eva took her and Emmeline and Samantha just to be on the safe side. By this time–and they had taken their time trying out various buttons and the toilet water–Eva needed to go herself and just at that moment it was announced that passengers had to return to their seats for take-off. Eva once more made the difficult passage past the man at the end of the row who said something in a foreign language which she didn’t understand but which she suspected wasn’t very nice. Then when they had reached cruising height and she could go again and in something of a hurry too, what he had to say didn’t require any knowledge of a foreign language to tell her that it wasn’t nice at all. Eva got her own back by treading on his foot when she resumed her seat. This time there could be no mistaking his feelings. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Mind where you’re treading, lady. I ain’t no doormat.’
Eva pressed the button for the stewardess and reported the matter.
‘This man–I won’t call him a gentleman–said…’ She paused and remembered the quads. ‘Well, he used a rude word.’
‘He said ‘Fuck’,’ Josephine explained.
‘He said ‘Fuck you’,’ Penelope added.
The stewardess looked from Eva to the girls and knew it was going to be a bad trip.
‘Yes, well, some men do,’ she said pacifically.
‘No, they don’t,’ said Samantha. ‘Not impotent ones. They can’t.’
‘Shut your mouth,’ Eva snapped and tried to smile apologetically at the stewardess who wasn’t smiling at all.
‘It’s true,’ Emmeline joined in from across the aisle. ‘They can’t get erections.’
‘Emmeline, if I hear another word out of you,’ Eva bawled. ‘I’ll…’ She was getting to her feet when the man beside her got there first.
‘Listen, lady, I don’t give a goddam fuck what she said. You ain’t corn-crushing my feet again.’
Eva looked triumphantly at the stewardess.
‘There you are, what did I tell you?’
But the man was also appealing to the stewardess.
‘You got another seat? I’m not spending seven hours sitting next to this hippopotamus, I’m telling you I’m not.’
It was a thoroughly unpleasant scene and when it had been cooled down and the man had been found another seat as far away from Eva and the quads as possible, the stewardess went back to the galley.
‘Row 31 is trouble. Keep your eyes open. Four girls and a mother who is built like a power lifter. Sperm bank her with Tyson and there’s no one would go a single round with the baby.’
The steward looked down the rows.
‘Thirty-one is suspect,’ he said.
‘Don’t I know it.’
But the steward was looking at the man in the window seat. So were two men in grey suits five seats behind him.
That was the beginning of the flight. It didn’t get much better. Samantha spilt her Coke, all of it, on the trousers of the man by the window, who said, ‘Forget it, these things happen,’ though he didn’t say it very nicely and then went off to the toilet. On the way there he noticed something that caused him to spend a far longer time locked inside than was needed for cleaning his trousers or even relieving himself. Still in the end he came out looking fairly calm and went back to his seat. But before sitting down he opened the hand-luggage compartment above and found a book. It took him some moments to get it out but in the end he succeeded and to avoid having a Coca-Cola spilt on his trousers again he offered to sit in the aisle seat.
‘The little lady can have the window,’ he said with a sweet smile. ‘I got more room for my legs here.’
Eva said that was real kind of him. (She was beginning to adjust her language to American and ‘real’ was just as good as ‘really’.) She was also beginning to distinguish between nice Americans who didn’t complain when one of the quads spilt things on them and were polite and called them little ladies, and the other sort who said ‘Fuck’ and called her a hippopotamus just because she stepped on their toes. After that the flight continued pretty harmoniously. There was a movie which kept the girls interested and Eva concentrated on what she was going to say to Uncle Wally and Auntie Joan about how kind it had been of them to invite them over and pay for the tickets especially as there was no way she could have come; the quads’ education cost so much and clothing them etc. In fact she dozed for a while and it was only when the stewardesses came round with the trolley again and they had something more to eat that she woke up and took particular care to see that there was no more spilling on people’s trousers.
In fact she got talking with the nice man in the aisle seat who asked if this was her first trip to the USA and where she was going, and who was real interested to learn everything about her and the girls and even went so far as to write their names down and said if they ever came down Florida way this was his address. Eva really liked him; he was so charming. And she told him all about how Wally Immelmann was head of Immelmann Enterprises in Wilma, Tennessee, and had a lakeside house up in the Smokies and how her Auntie Joan had married him when he was at the airbase and an Air Force pilot flying out of Lakenheath, and the man said he was Sol Campito and he worked with a Miami-based finance corporation and sure he’d heard of Immelmann Enterprises, like everyone had it was so important. An hour later he took another ‘hygiene break’ which was a new term for Eva and meant going to the toilet again. This time he didn’t take so long and when he came back he put his book away in the luggage compartment and said he was going to get some shut-eye because he had to catch the shuttle flight down to Miami and it was a long trip from where he’d come, like Munich, Germany, where he’d had some business. And so the flight wore on and nothing untoward occurred except that Penelope kept asking when they were going to get to Atlanta because she was bored and Sammy wouldn’t let her have the window seat so she could look out at the clouds. Behind them the two men in grey suits watched the man who had given up his window seat for Samantha. One of them took himself off to the toilet and was in there for five minutes. He was followed half an hour later by the second suit who stayed even longer. When he came back he shrugged as he sat down. Finally by the time Eva was getting really tired the Jumbo was slowly dropping down towards the land and the countryside seemed to be coming up to them and the undercarriage was locked down and the flaps were up and they were down with only a slight thump and lurch and into reverse thrust.