‘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
