Walking on Air

by Christina Jones

  He laughed over the screech of the tone. ‘Great message, Billie. It’s me: Jonah. We’ve had to divert to Southampton, so I’ll be a bit later than I’d anticipated. Please wait for me if you can. If not, leave a note and we’ll fix up another time. Hope all’s well, and –’

  There was a crackle and a clunk.

  ‘Jonah?’ Billie’s voice was breathless. ‘Hi. Sorry, I keep forgetting to switch the answerphone off. Are you OK? Why have you diverted? Not something wrong with the plane?’

  ‘No, we’re fine. Somebody else took our landing slot at Whiteacres and it was better for my passengers to fly in here rather than circle. We’ve been told we’ll be cleared for takeoff in about thirty minutes so I can be there in an hour at the outside. Will that be OK?’

  ‘Yeah, of course. I’m still working anyway.’

  ‘No more hassles with Reuben?’

  ‘None. We’ve all had letters from Maynard and Pollock this morning naming him as the new owner, but I haven’t seen him or anything. I’m pretending it’s not happening. If I don’t see him before, then I’ll corner him at the club.’

  ‘Which club?’

  ‘He’s opening a new nightclub in Amberley Hill in a couple of weeks’ time, remember – I think I told you? Miranda’s press-ganged me into going. I don’t want to, but it’ll give me a great opportunity to poke him in the eye, won’t it?’

  ‘Metaphorically or literally?’

  ‘What do you think? Oh, I’ve got loads to tell you. Everyone’s working their socks off here, getting ready for the show. It’s great that the Incs are taking over health and safety and crowd control and all the boring bits, isn’t it? Maybe I can be employed on the gate taking money?’

  ‘What?’ Jonah grinned into the receiver. ‘You won’t have time for that! I’m intending to give at least ten barnstorming displays during the afternoon and –’

  ‘Yeah, I know.’ Billie sounded impatient. ‘But they won’t involve me now, will they? Which is a pity because I’ve been weightlifting with baked bean tins and I’ve got this –’

  ‘Why won’t they involve you? Oh Christ – you haven’t had second thoughts about it, have you?’

  ‘No . . .’ Billie sounded slightly indignant. ‘I haven’t. But you obviously have. I mean, I know Estelle’s a lot more glamorous than me, but I’d have thought you might have told me that you were going to use her in place of me.’

  ‘What?’ Jonah screamed into the receiver, making Vinny gawp across from the next booth. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

  ‘Estelle doing the wingwalking. She said you’d decided she’d be better because she’s more aero-user-friendly or some such crap. She’s here now. Practising in the Stearman.’

  For the first time in his flying career, Jonah wished that he was on the ground. If he’d been driving he’d have broken all the speed limits to get back to Whiteacres. As it was, he was practically tearing his hair out by the time he landed at Whiteacres, disembarked, and dumped his paperwork with air-traffic control.

  Shedding his cap, jacket and tie as he belted across the tarmac and onto the grass airstrip, and then flouting all the Aviation Incs laws by cross-countrying through the Aeroclub’s allotted runways and praying he wouldn’t be mown down by a Piper Cherokee or a stray Cessna, he practically hurdled the broken-down part of the perimeter fence.

  The doors of the units were all open in deference to the gaudy May sunshine, and the burned-out hatchbacks on the concrete now had their seasonal covering of snaking pink and white convolvulus. And, thank God, Billie’s liveried van was still parked outside her warehouse.

  ‘Estelle!’ Jonah panted to a halt inside the shed. ‘Estelle! What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Practising.’ Estelle’s voice floated lazily through the dusty darkness from the Stearman’s upper wing. ‘I know you’d said Billie had volunteered, but that was before I was given the option, wasn’t it? Naturally, I assumed that as I’m of no use to you personally, then the least I could do, as a member of Sullivanair, was –’

  ‘Please come down.’

  Estelle laughed. ‘Why? I thought you could start her up and we’d have a couple of hours’ flying time before the light goes.’

  ‘Estelle,’ Jonah sucked in his breath, ‘stop messing about. You know that Billie’s doing the wingwalking. We’ve already discussed it and –’

  Estelle leaned down from her standing position on the wing high above him. Her blonde hair tumbled forwards. ‘No, we didn’t. There was no discussion. You’d made the decision – one which I frankly thought was insane given Billie’s phobia – and to be honest I couldn’t give a toss about who owns the airfield, but I do care about how outsiders will view it if I’m not part of your team, so now I’m offering my services.’

  In the shafts of filtered sunlight, Jonah could see that she was strapped into the rig. She was wearing the skin-tight leather trousers and a very brief white top. He had to admit that she looked breathtaking. He wanted to slap her.

  ‘Just get down. Billie is shorter and lighter and –’

  ‘She looks like a boy!’ Estelle hooted. ‘Where’s the glamour? Barnstorming is supposed to be pretty damned sexy, remember? Do you honestly think that that – that child, in her jeans and her tatty T-shirt, sweet as she is, would set anybody’s pulses racing?’ She leaned even further down and smiled directly into his eyes. ‘Although, of course, knowing that your sex drive flickers somewhere just below impotence, she might appeal to you.’

  ‘That’s not very nice, is it?’ Billie’s voice said quietly from the back of the warehouse. ‘And I’d really prefer it if you didn’t scream at each other in my unit. I’m expecting a customer shortly, and I don’t want to give the wrong impression. And, Estelle, I’ve done my barnstorming homework too.’

  Billie walked out of the office. Estelle, from her high vantage point, having a better view than Jonah, exhaled loudly. Jonah turned and peered through the low-light gloom and nearly fainted.

  Billie, glaring at them, was clad, head to toe, in a skintight shimmering bodysuit. It was spectacularly sexy and left absolutely nothing to the imagination. With its silver base and swirling tongues of emerald and purple, it was like an animated Sullivanair advertisement. Her climbing boots had been sprayed silver to match her gloves, and her hair was hidden beneath a tightly fitting silver, green and purple matching cap.

  ‘God Almighty!’ Eventually finding his voice, Jonah shook his head. ‘You look absolutely bloody amazing! When – I mean who – I mean, why the hell didn’t you tell me?’

  ‘Because I wanted it to be a surprise.’ Billie still wasn’t smiling. ‘It seemed to me that everyone else was doing so much, so quickly, to get this show up and running. I just thought that this . . .’

  Jonah could hear Estelle snatching angrily at her harness straps. He didn’t care. He simply couldn’t take his eyes off Billie.

  ‘Isla spent all week putting it together from material she’d dug out. It’s the real thing: high-density Lycra. She’s even made me a fleecy skin suit to wear underneath it to keep out the cold.’ Billie shrugged. ‘Pity, really, seeing that I won’t be needing it.’

  ‘Oh yes you will.’ Jonah rushed across to her, again wanting to hug her. But instead, he just gazed at her, still shaking his head in disbelief. ‘You’ll be the star of the show. Christ – who’s going to be looking at the Stearman with you dressed like that?’

  ‘No one,’ Estelle said, leaping to the ground. ‘My apologies, Billie. You look wonderful, but my argument isn’t with you – you know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I suppose so.’ Billie shrugged, her silver shoulders sparkling. ‘I mean, we’ve sort of become friends, haven’t we?’

  Estelle laughed. ‘Strange as it may seem, we have. United in a common lost cause. So please don’t take this personally.’ She swivelled her face round to Jonah. ‘Well, how about it, Mr Sullivan? You needed a wingwalker – and now you’ve got two. Which one of us is it going to
be?’

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Confused by London, and not truly understanding the intricacies of professional football, Faith Pascoe hovered outside the imposing green and white wrought-iron gates of the Putney Soccer Village, and wanted to go home.

  As nonstop traffic droned past, a million people pushed against her, speaking, it seemed to her, in every language under the sun except any that she understood. Her head ached in the throbbing May heat and her feet, in the shoes bought specially for the occasion, were absolute murder.

  The earlier part of the journey had been quite fun. Buoyed by the unfamiliarity and a sense of adventure, Faith had purchased a newspaper and two packets of Polos and waited on a platform crammed with commuters, feeling very bold. She’d bagged a window seat, and the train journey from Exeter to Paddington had been remarkably swift and comfortable. She’d even struck up a conversation with someone in the buffet car and come away clutching her bacon burger and espresso feeling like a seasoned traveller.

  Getting a taxi outside Paddington station hadn’t been a problem either, and the chatty cab-driver had had no problems at all with finding Putney Football Club’s hallowed ground. But then, she supposed, he wouldn’t.

  The problems were all hers now – and Faith was pretty sure they could only get worse. This time, at least, she’d only partially lied about her journey. She’d told Stan and the boys that she was going up to London for the day to visit her one-time student nursing roommate, Alice, who was over from Canada. This part was absolute fiction – her roommate was called Mary and she now lived in Clacton – but Stan had luckily forgotten, and the boys didn’t know, and she wasn’t going to enlighten them. To Kieran Squires, she’d told the absolute truth – well, almost. There were a few things, like her relationship to Billie, that she’d saved for later.

  And that’s what bothered her really: the almost frenzied speed with which Kieran had replied to her letter and invited her up to see him, despite the fact that she’d used the surname Pascoe. Did this really mean that he was desperate to get hold of Billie for exposing his extramarital affairs? She was very much afraid it did.

  Even keeping Kieran’s letter from Stan had been difficult. After all, plush vellum envelopes bearing the crest of one of the country’s top football clubs didn’t drop on to the farmhouse doormat every morning. Stan had thought they’d won the pools. She’d scooped it up and dismissed it as junk mail with a great deal of flippant overemphasis, she realised now, then hidden it in the hens’ nesting boxes and thanked her lucky stars that she hadn’t been born a generation earlier. She’d never have made a wartime agent.

  Now, irritated beyond belief by the crowds and the noise and the nagging blisters on her heels, Faith, following the instructions in the letter, pushed the Putney FC bell ’and jumped as a disembodied voice answered somewhere to the left of her jawbone. Good heavens – now what was she supposed to do?

  As the intergalactic voice whined for a second time, she leaned towards the gates and taking a deep breath, used the tor-trembling bellow she employed when calling home the dogs. ‘Hello!!! I’m Faith Pascoe!!! I’ve got an appointment with –’

  ‘Madam,’ the voice remonstrated tinnily, ‘you merely need to speak slowly and quietly into the grille. No need to raise your voice to that pitch.’

  ‘Sorry!!!’ Faith yelled again into the air, turning her back on a crowd of onlookers. ‘We don’t have things like this in Devon!!!’

  ‘I can quite believe it. And you had an appointment with whom?’

  ‘Kieran Squires!!! I’m here representing the North Devon Boys Football Apprentice Training Scheme!!!’ OK, so she might not have told the whole truth . . . She straightened her shoulders. ‘He is expecting me!!!’

  ‘Very well, madam. When I open the gates you should proceed to reception and state your business. Quietly.’ He opened and Faith proceeded. Once she’d explained her mission to a woman with too many teeth and not enough eyebrows, she was asked to take a seat and wait. Faith sat, and immediately eased off her shoes. Ooh! The bliss! The blood pinged round the veins in her sore heels, and the blisters sucked in fresh air, and the whole felt almost as good as a warm lavender bath.

  Once her feet had stopped screaming and she could wriggle her toes, Faith took stock of her surroundings. It was all very swish and very tall. Like a modernist cathedral. Everywhere had the Putney FC motif picked out in green and white, and everything else appeared to be chrome and glass and chandeliers. Silent escalators rolled up and down from reception’s green and white carpet, carrying elegant men and fashionable women to and from who knew where, to do who knew what. It was light years away from the football ground at home where two dogs and a man in a wheelchair constituted a crowd, and Siddy Clargo from the papershop took your pound on the gate, and his wife, Beryl, sold fruit pies and weak teas at half-time.

  Through one of the plate-glass windows she could see the outlines of the Putney Shop, the Putney Bistro, the Riverside Restaurant, the Putney Hotel and a mass of turnstiles. The football ground itself, hidden from view behind huge striped fences, was only recognisable because of the floodlights.

  The walls of reception were crammed with photographs of Putney players past and present, and Faith whiled away several happy minutes perusing the faces. Some she recognised, others not. She could see Kieran Squires, though. He looked much the same as he had on Maeve and Declan’s Taunton mantelpiece, but without, of course, the accoutrements of Fenella and the kiddies.

  ‘Mrs Pascoe? Faith?’

  She looked up. The photograph had come to life. Oh, but it didn’t do the boy justice! He was gorgeous! God knows where he’d inherited his looks – certainly not from Dec and Maeve. The beauty must have skipped a generation.

  ‘Mr Squires . . .’ She stood up, extending her hand. Without her shoes she was about level with his chest. ‘Thank you so much for seeing me.’

  ‘Thank you for writing.’ He was still pumping her ’hand in an energetic fashion. And smiling. His voice was soft and husky. Another throwback to his Irish forebears, ’Faith thought. He pumped harder. ‘It was a bit of a lifesaver, your letter.’

  It was? Faith, her hand going numb, tried to remember exactly what she’d written and couldn’t – apart from the Apprentice Boys thingy, of course – so she muttered vaguely and hoped it sounded convincing.

  It probably did, as Kieran let go of her hand and indicated that she should follow him towards one of the silently gliding up-escalators. He had nice manners, she thought, as he stood back to let her go first, and then stepped on behind her, close enough to prevent her tumbling backwards, but not close enough to be threatening.

  Unused to mountainous moving staircases, as to much else in this teeming city, Faith decided not to pursue any further conversation until they were stationary. Apart from the unfamiliarity, she was still carrying her shoes, which meant that not only was she clinging on to the handrail for dear life, but that the escalator’s treads were soothingly vibrating through her sore feet. She wondered whether she might be allowed to stay on several more times for the full massage.

  As they reached the top, fearful of catching the toes of her tights in the workings, she took a giant stride and nearly cannoned into a trophy cabinet. Kieran was there immediately, holding her elbow, making sure she was all right, and not looking in the least amused at her obvious lack of experience. Nice boy, she reaffirmed to herself. Just the way she’d brought up Jon, Alex, Tom and Ben to behave. Maeve and Dec had done a good job.

  As they walked along a green and white corridor, Faith mentally reminded herself that this nice boy was not only playing away from home, risking losing Fenella and the kiddies, but had also obviously put the frighteners on her own daughter, and therefore was definitely not such a nice boy after all.

  It was what they always said back home, when she and Pat and Miriam got together for coffee: the quiet ones truly were the worst. Many’s the time they’d looked at the photograph of the latest baby-faced serial killer in th
e tabloids and read glowing reports of his character from his neighbours – nice boy . . . very quiet . . . kept himself to himself . . . bit of a loner . . . collected butterflies . . . Not that Kieran Squires was a serial killer, of course, nor had he obviously been very careful about keeping himself to himself, but the principle was the same.

  Faith suddenly realised that they’d stopped walking and that Kieran was smiling at her again. She hoped he hadn’t been talking to her. She didn’t think he had. It dawned on her that Kieran’s wide and warm smile hid rather slow thought processes.

  ‘Through here – this is the PR room.’ He opened a door leading into a tiny and deserted office crammed with brochures and folders and presenters and posters all in neat bundles ready for dispatch. ‘We’re very quiet today.’

  Faith padded across the ankle-deep carpet and deposited her shoes under an ivy green leather chair with her handbag neatly beside them. She sat down without being asked because she was beginning to feel quite disorientated and to wish she’d left well alone. After all, Billie was as chirpy as anything at the moment, if her phone calls were anything to go by, and she’d certainly been the life and soul of the family party over Christmas. And all Faith’s probing into whether Billie was being hounded by gangland hoodlums had brought hoots of laughter and not a flicker of fear – so whatever, or whoever, had driven her to flee in the first place was probably long forgotten.

  If this gloriously handsome but not very bright man standing in front of her was truly the cause of Billie s flight, mightn’t she just be raking up all sorts of nastiness, and causing more problems than she solved? It seemed that whatever reservations she had, it was far too late to back down now, as Kieran had hitched up a matching leather chair and was still beaming at her.

  She beamed back. ‘This is very nice. Very plush . . .’ Oh God. Get it over . . . ‘You said that my writing to you was a lifesaver. Can I ask why?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Faith waited, then realised that he was merely answering her question. It was probably like being interviewed on Match of the Day to Kieran. Stating facts, not offering explanations. He’d probably say ‘over the moon’ or ‘sick as a parrot’ or ‘at the end of the day’ in a minute.