Jefferson Tweedy had had better days. By the time he sank into seat 13A on the slightly delayed flight from JFK airport to London Gatwick, he was in a state of sweating dishevelment. It had all happened in the blink of a socially excruciating eye and now as he stared out of the window, he took a moment to reflect on life’s cruel irony and also to have a furtive look at his trousers.
He had been late for the flight and spent a rather fraught half an hour softly whining abuse at the knot of traffic just outside the airport. He toyed with the idea of abandoning the hire car in the unmoving traffic but chose instead to sit impotently whilst contemplating the prospect of missing his flight. Towards the end of the half an hour he decided that this was probably all Ailsa’s fault.
Once inside the terminal he lost further precious seconds searching for a packet of pear drops. A friend’s father once told him his one simple rule for flying: if he had not answered a clue from The Telegraph crossword by the time the stewardesses finished their ‘in case of emergency’ routine, then he would pick up his hand luggage and get off the plane. It was the same for Jefferson only with pear drops. He had to have finished a pear drop - sucked not crunched – before the flight was ready to depart or else he too would up and leave. He had been plied with the sweets by his mother on childhood flights to see Aunt Joan in Belgium. The flights to Belgium stopped the day his ‘Uncle Gert’ ran away with the whore from Antwerp (confirming his mother’s suspicions about men with moustaches); by which time the young Jefferson equated pear drops with safety in the skies and so the habit never stopped.
Having secured the sweets, he hurtled towards the boarding gate where he didn’t quite barge an elderly couple into the rope that cordoned off the boarding area, although his actions were enough to elicit a loud tut from the air steward who was guiding the couple down the ‘nasty slope’ to the plane. Jefferson, hand luggage bouncing, threw an apology over his shoulder and ran on towards the plane. Later on the flight, he allowed the same old man to move ahead of him in the queue for the plane’s toilet. This was a gesture he was to regret somewhat after the gut wrenching discovery he made on the old man’s departure. Having overcome the first wave of nausea, Jefferson reflected that there was probably some kind of natural justice in all this, before taking a deep breath and reaching for as many paper towels as he could lay his hands on.
Boarding the plane, Jefferson swiftly spotted the potential difficulties of seat 13A. It was the window seat as requested, but ensconced in seats 13B and C was a mother and child. A mother and child of gargantuan proportions. The child was in the midst of destroying a family size packet of crisps whilst the mother gently grazed in a travel bag of sweets. Jefferson himself had never been svelte and lived by the benefits of a favourably cut suit but now the heat rumpled linen of his present model would be severely tested by the perilous approach to seat 13A.
He never relished this sort of situation and envied the confident manner in which he’d seen the Americans deal with such moments; he knew decisive action was the key, possibly accompanied by an authoritative smile. This was how Ailsa (although Scottish) did it when they went to the theatre, although her father (also Scottish) in similar situations chose to dispense with the smile relying rather on a combination of clear purpose and superiority.
Jefferson began the journey to 13A with a weak smile directed towards the heavy boned mother. She responded with a teeth radiating, my sweet Jesus it’s the man of my dreams, ten year old in her first school musical, beamer of a smile. Sweat broke onto Jefferson’s brow. He felt obliged to grin a little wider, hoping that his eyes would convey the necessary social deterrent, before pressing on towards his seat. It seemed at this early stage of the manoeuvre that the mother was going to stay seated, so Jefferson fixed his eyes firmly above her and shuffled into the first foot space. As he planted his right foot on the vacant patch of floor he felt the shift from beneath him and looked down to see the rise of the behemoth. She rose to eye level with a breathy ‘room for a little one’ and a mouthed ‘hi’, opening her eyes a little wider to heighten the effect. Jefferson felt a fresh dampening of his forehead but pressed on. As he shuffled away from the mother a dart of liquid splashed his ear and he thought for one terrible moment that she was licking his ear lobe. Horrified, he looked to his left and saw the fat son’s hand squeezed tightly around a cartoned drink, the still dripping straw peeking through between fat index finger and fatter thumb. In response to this the mother was now pressing herself against Jefferson in an attempt to reprimand the son and it was at this point that Jefferson felt the undeniable twitch of arousal in his trousers. Horribly proud, he pushed roughly past both mother and son and lurched into his seat.
It couldn’t be denied. The very thing he’d longed for two hours ago had arrived when squashed between an obese mother and her son. He looked down at his trousers, uplifted and stained with blackcurrant cordial. He decided to stare out of the window and visualise drowning puppies.