by Cath Barton
Brian Portentous realised pretty quickly, as half-stifled giggles erupted around him in the restless crowd waiting at Gate 9 for the delayed flight to Dubrovnik, that striped trousers were not a good choice for the person seeking to holiday incognito, and neither were the designer sunglasses which had looked quaint in the shop but which he now realised were tastelessly flashy. He sighed as he removed the glasses, and the generously-proportioned woman who he had not noticed squeezing herself into the vacant seat on his left reached out a hand to his knee, cooing at him in a scarily-provocative manner as she stroked her long and rather sharp tangerine-painted finger-nails painfully up and down his thigh, muttering something about how she could ‘show him a good time’. Trapped between the woman’s unwanted and heavily-perfumed attentions and a somewhat malodorous elderly man to his right, Brian felt increasingly uncomfortable, but was unwilling to relinquish his seat as the waiting crowd had just been informed that the plane would, as far as he could make out from the barely-audible tones of the announcer, be delayed for an unknown period because of extreme weather conditions in the eastern Mediterranean.
Brian sighed again and the perfumed would-be temptress, apparently misinterpreting this as an invitation, pressed herself against him, causing him to lean heavily to his right towards the elderly man, who crumpled forwards and onto the floor with a horrible crash, precipitating a rush of previously-absent airline staff and a stretchering-away of the man, while a stern-faced official invited Brian to ‘step into his office’, where he was asked in aggressive terms to ‘account for his unwarranted assault on that unfortunate individual’. By this time Brian was, not surprisingly, sweating profusely from every orifice and wishing, once again, that he had not chosen the striped trousers, which were sticking to him in places to which he preferred not to draw attention.
The delights of the islands of the Adriatic were to remain a closed book to Brian Portentous, whose flight left without him three hours later; the financial compensation which he finally received for what the airline described as ‘a regrettable incident’ enabled him to holiday in a quiet four-star hotel in Whitby, where he enjoyed the views of the North Sea from his bedroom window and dined nightly on fish and chips, food which he doubted could ever have been bettered in Croatia.
Cath Barton is an English writer who lives in Wales, and is familiar with delays in airports, though not like this one. Her story Women’s Work, is in the new anthology from Linen Press, Skeins.
