Girl on a Plane Read online

  Contents

  * * *

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  Epilogue

  Postscript

  Acknowledgments

  A Q&A with Miriam Moss

  Singular Reads

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2016 by Miriam Moss

  All rights reserved. For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to [email protected] or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

  This book is a work of fiction based on the author’s own experiences. The names and identifying characteristics of individuals are entirely fictional. Though based on a real-life hijacking, dialogue, characters, and incidents have been fictionalized, and some time frames have been compressed to convey the story. Please read the postscript on pages 273–74 for further information.

  www.hmhco.com

  Cover photo © 2016 David Williams/Corbis

  Cover design by Carol Chu

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Names: Moss, Miriam, author.

  Title: Girl on a plane / written by Miriam Moss.

  Description: Boston ; New York : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015034013 | ISBN 9780544783997 (hardback)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Moss, Miriam. | Hijacking of aircraft—Fiction. | Hostages—Fiction. | Survival—Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION / Action & Adventure / Survival Stories. | JUVENILE FICTION / Biographical / European. | JUVENILE FICTION / Historical / Middle East. | JUVENILE FICTION / People & Places / Middle East. | JUVENILE FICTION / Social Issues / Violence.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.M85353 Gi 2016 | DDC [Fic]—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015034013

  eISBN 978-0-544-86815-1

  v1.0816

  For my family and in memory of my father and mother

  The vastest things are those we may not learn.

  We are not taught to die, or to be born,

  Nor how to burn

  With love.

  How pitiful is our enforced return

  To those small things we are the masters of.

  ​—​Mervyn Peake

  1

  Tuesday, September 8, 1970

  Bahrain—​1400h

  A Forces child, that’s what they call me.

  It’s all I’ve ever known: living in rented houses and moving every few years to a different country. So being here in Bahrain, on this small teardrop of an island in the Persian Gulf, feels normal.

  Moving so often means leaving friends, starting new schools halfway through the term, and being the new girl over and over again. Catching up with schoolwork can be a struggle too, so when I was eleven, my parents decided to send me to boarding school back in England. Now I travel out to see them for the holidays, when they can afford it.

  My dad’s in the army. And my mother, who I’ve always called Marni, is a primary-school teacher.

  It’s the last day of the summer holidays, and tomorrow I’m leaving Bahrain forever because we’re moving again. My two younger brothers are traveling back to school a couple of days after me, and my parents will go at the end of the week. Dad’s been stationed back in England for a while. We won’t be coming out to Bahrain again.

  I’m supposed to be packing, but I refuse to engage. I’m staying put, right here on the roof, lying in the shade next to Woofa, our dog, and stroking his golden ears. He is looking at me with puzzled, toffee-colored eyes that say, So how come I’m suddenly allowed up here?

  The house roof is flat, with a chest-high wall around it. It’s where we all come to catch the breeze. And on unbearably hot nights, we’re even allowed to sleep up here. Then the light in the pink sky and the doves cooing in the date palms and the muezzin calling everyone to prayer wake us early. By seven the sun’s so hot, you have to go back inside anyway.

  The walls were once painted a blinding white. Now they’re smudged and pockmarked from the blows of endless cricket and soccer balls, especially around the goalmouth and the stumps my father painted on for the boys. The only things left up here now, stacked against the wall, are two green sun loungers. When you open them up, the sharp cogs pinch your fingers and the metal frame burns your bare skin.

  Woofa is sending me waves of sympathy, as only dogs can. He knows that all I have to look forward to now are school and exams. He knows we’re leaving. He’s known for a while. He attached himself to our family after being abandoned by his previous one, so he’s seen it all before.

  I lift one of his ears. The inside looks like curled pasta. “You’ll be all right, Woofa,” I say. “You only have to move next door this time, to live with the Adelmans. They’re really nice.” Mrs. Adelman is American and once taught me how to make cookies, half-plain, half-chocolate, in a roll that you cut into slices before baking.

  “Anna!”

  Oh dear. Marni. I put my arms around Woofa’s neck and bury my face in the thick fur of his ruff, but then, hearing my mother’s footsteps on the stairs, I get up quickly.

  “There you are!” Her eyes slide down to rest on Woofa. “Oh, Anna,” she says. Woofa sidles guiltily past her and down the stairs. “You,” she says to me, “are very naughty.” Her frown is disapproving, but her dark eyes don’t mean it.

  “I know.” I smile at her. “I am.” She puts a firm arm around my shoulders, turns me, and gently guides me down the stairs in front of her.

  But I still don’t go to pack. I sit down at the dining room table beside Sam, my nine-year-old brother. He’s drawn what I think is a hippo and is coloring it in purple.

  “Anna?” Marni says as I settle down next to him.

  “I’ll go in a minute. I promise,” I say. “That’s really good, Sam.” He goes on, concentrating, the tip of his tongue between his lips. The overhead fan whooshes the smells of wood chip and furniture polish around the room and flutters the pile of newspapers that Marni’s using to wrap up the glasses. She picks up a water jug, rolls it in Arabic newsprint, and packs it carefully into the silver foil-lined crate. She’s done this so many times before. Her brown hands move quickly, her engagement ring catching the light.

  “At the party last night,” I say, “they said loads of planes have been hijacked.” My words hang in the air. The date-palm fronds finger the windowpane as if they’re trying to get in.

  Marni rips a sheet of newspaper in half. “Ignore them,” she says. “They’re just trying to unsettle you before you fly.”

  “No, Marni, they really have,” I insist. “Everyone was talking about it. They were all teasing me,
saying it’d be my turn tomorrow. It was quite funny, really . . .”

  Marni looks straight at me, her eyes intense. What Dad calls her still waters run deep eyes. “Well, you aren’t going to be hijacked.”

  She reaches for the yellow and terracotta vase they bought in Venice on their honeymoon and starts wrapping it.

  “No, you’re right, I probably won’t be.” I turn to Sam. “Maybe you will instead.”

  “Anna!” Marni shoots me a look.

  “What does hijacked mean?” Sam pipes up, pulling a black crayon from the box and scribbling on a whiskery tail.

  “Anna’s being silly, darling. It hardly ever happens, and usually no one gets hurt.”

  “But what is it?” he insists.

  “It’s when people hold up a plane to make it go somewhere else,” she says. Then she turns to me. “Now, have you got enough envelopes to write home with?” I don’t respond to this unsubtle attempt to get me to pack. I want to see if she’ll say, Anna, it’s time to gird up your loins. Or her favorite: Anna, I’m going to have to put a bomb under you. But it’s neither. She just says, “How much pocket money do you think you’ll need this term?” And that’s when I know she’s heard about the hijackings too. She’s thinking that we all have to fly this week and doesn’t want us to be worried about it, especially me, as I’ll be traveling alone. Anyway, she said it hardly ever happens, so I suppose I’ll probably be fine.

  She tries another tack. “You know Dad brought your school uniform back from the cleaner’s when he came home for lunch?” She pauses. “It’s on your bed, ready to pack.”

  That’s hard, really hard. Now that it’s here, I can’t pretend anymore, and she knows it. Now I have to face the facts.

  I really am leaving tomorrow.

  I wander into my room. And there it is, lying under transparent plastic: one brown tweed skirt—​box pleats, regulation knee length—​matching brown regulation sack coat with horn buttons, fawn cardigan, itchy woolen sports uniform, specially designed to give you diaper rash. I stuff it all out of sight, right down at the bottom of my case, next to my granny-style school shoes. I’m not wearing that stuff on the plane. I’ll change into it at the last possible moment, probably in the back of the taxi going to school from the station.

  I put my traveling clothes out on my chair instead: a cream wraparound miniskirt, a bronze T-shirt, and the wide, black silver-buckled belt I bought in Chelsea Girl last term. Then I slump down on the bed. I can’t bear it. I won’t see my family again until the end of the term, fifteen whole weeks away, and that’ll be in yet another new place where I won’t know anyone at all. Again.

  I roll over and curl up. A wave of homesickness washes through me, and just when I’m feeling really desperate, I hear Woofa’s tail wagging against the end of my bed. He comes alongside and leans his snout sympathetically on the edge of the sheet. “Oh, Woofa,” I say. “Please think of something that will stop me from having to go back to school.”

  He nuzzles my hand, but there’s nothing he or anyone can do to stop the inevitable.

  2

  Wednesday, September 9, 1970

  0900h

  They’re loading my case into the car.

  I dash up onto the roof to have one last look over the balustrade, across the waste ground stretching to the blue-domed mosque with its two white minarets. I will never ever live here again. I will never lie here with Marni, slightly tipsy after the Adelmans’ Pimm’s party, crying with laughter at something neither of us can remember the next day.

  I clatter downstairs and out into the front garden to find Woofa. He’s lying in the shade under the old palm tree, near where we found the abandoned litter of puppies. I hug him one last time, choking back my tears, seeing his sad eyes saying he knows it’s the end. Then I run through the blurring house, past my parents’ bedroom, where once Dad flung out his arm and smashed the bedside lamp while having a nightmare. Into the hall, past the open linen closet where the fresh towels lie in rounded stacks, past the bathroom, where the dodgy light with the loose connection electrocuted me. Past the cutlery drawer in the hall lined with baize and smelling of lacquer, under the arch, into the sitting room, where Dad’s new tape deck blasts out Harry Belafonte and the chorister at Christmas always sings “Once in Royal David’s City.” Past ghost marks on the wall where the pictures used to hang. Finally I say goodbye to the tall cream fridge that hums and wheezes all through the night.

  I close the back door. The screen door bangs shut behind me. Marni is standing by the Peugeot, wearing her turquoise shirtdress and a matching silk scarf. She ties the scarf in a knot at the back, but it never manages to contain her coppery curls. The boys are already bouncing around in the back of the car. Dad pointedly revs the engine. Marni and I climb in.

  She glances down at the man’s watch she always wears halfway up her arm. “You’ll have to put your foot down,” she says, “or we’ll miss the flight.”

  “Anna’s going to miss her flight!” the boys chant over and over, until Marni hushes them. We judder down the potholed dust track and out onto the tarmac road. And we’re off under the blue Bahraini sky, tilting as we circle the roundabout to take the airport road to Muharraq.

  The hot wind, smelling of goats, drains, and exhaust fumes, buffets in through the open windows. Marni’s scarf tails dance wildly, as if struggling to escape. The king palms lining the road shiver and toss their heads, trying to shake off the sea breeze. Suddenly there’s a whiff of cardamom, reminding me of the glasses of tea the shopkeepers offer in the souk.

  “Must be well over a hundred degrees out there already,” Dad shouts above the noise of the broken exhaust. And I feel beads of sweat gathering. They trickle down my spine and pool in the small of my back.

  As we cross the causeway to the airport, everyone in the car goes quiet. I know this quiet. It’s full of dread, the dread of us being separated. We’re all thinking the same thing: it’s all change again. None of us wants it, but what can we do? I feel a terrible heaviness, the sort you get just before tears come.

  When we finally park, Dad grabs my case, and we run in a straggle across tarmac softened by the intense heat. And I think how the impression of my footprints will be the only thing left of me in Bahrain.

  Marni pulls open the swinging doors to the departures hall, Dad heaves my case inside, and I feel a cold blast of air-conditioning. We slow to a walk, stop panting, and start to fit in with the quieter throng milling about on the concourse.

  “Salaam alaikum,” Dad greets the man wearing a turquoise BOAC uniform at the check-in desk. Marni passes over my ticket. The man tears out the duplicate flight page and gives it back. I watch my case being weighed. I’m here and not here, in a daze, feeling condemned.

  “Now, don’t you go losing that, will you?” Dad says, handing me the ticket. His teasing is meant to raise my spirits. When I don’t answer, he looks down at me again, his gray eyes questioning.

  “I’m fifteen, Dad. Done this loads of times,” I say flatly.

  “I know.” He smiles and puts his arm around me. “But you’ll always be my little girl.” I can smell his Old Spice after-shave. I look for the patch under his bottom lip that he always misses when he shaves. There it is.

  The boys stand on either side of Marni, solemn as statues.

  “You’re lucky, Anna,” Mark says. “You don’t have to wear a stupid Unaccompanied Child label anymore, like we do.”

  “No.” I ruffle his sun-streaked hair. “I’m a big girl now.”

  “Unaccompanied Child.” Sam says it slowly, looking up at Marni. “Like we’re orphans.”

  She’s stung. “Well, you aren’t, and you know you aren’t. You all know exactly why this is necessary—​and how horrible it is for all of us.” Her voice breaks slightly.

  “Come on now, you boys.” Dad is all forced cheeriness. “Let’s wave Anna through the gate.”

  A blond girl in front of us, older than me, clings to her mother, weeping. Her mother pa
ts her back once, very quickly, as if she mustn’t, as if it’s no longer allowed. They move, walking as if through deep sand, toward the gate, where her sister stands palely by their father.

  I hate this next bit more than anything. Marni says to do it very quickly. No point dragging it out. So I walk up to her. She puts her arms around me, and for a moment I’m in that soft, safe place where I can always be just me, with the smell of her, her lipstick, her Pond’s cream and Je Reviens perfume.

  “Stay safe, my most precious girl,” she says, stroking my head instinctively just above the ear, as she always does. Then she kisses me and pushes me gently away. I turn, tears streaming, to hug the boys. They come both together, their arms tight around my waist. Then I hug Dad quickly and walk away.

  I turn once, see the boys’ tears, Dad’s frown, and Marni’s terrible, distorted smile. And for a moment I waver.

  “Go!” she says. But I stay, trying to absorb them, burning them onto my mind’s eye. Then I turn away and walk, holding up one hand, waving without looking.

  The tall boy in front of me in the line waiting to board looks constantly back over my head. He’s ashen faced with tension. I hand my ticket to the man at the gate, show my passport, heft my shoulder bag, and walk past the neat, smiling stewardess.

  My bag thumps against my thigh as I walk out across the tarmac to the waiting plane. It’s a white VC10 with a high tail and BOAC written in huge navy-blue letters down its body. I’ve never flown completely alone before, not without the boys or a friend. Anxiously I recheck the ticket in my hand. BOAC, it says across the front. All over the world, the British Overseas Aircraft Corporation takes good care of you.

  3

  1030h

  A camel just beyond the perimeter fence wobbles in the heat as the plane’s engines rage briefly. There’s a surge as we begin to move forward, then I’m thrust back in my seat as the tarmac races. I feel the slant and lift as the front wheel, then the back wheels, leave the ground, and I imagine them spinning as the earth falls away.