A man spent four hours spreading into the seat I had paid for and told me I was too small to need it. When he came back from the toilet, his jacket was folded on the floor by his feet.
PART 1 — FOUR HOURS
I am sixty-one and five foot two and I was flying on my own for the first time in forty years.
My husband died in the February of last year. Odhran did every booking, every check-in, every passport we ever owned, for thirty-nine years, and I had not stood at an airport desk by myself since 1986.
And I was going to meet my granddaughter. Nine days old. Brid had sent four photographs and I had looked at all four of them about two hundred times, including twice in the car to the airport, which is not safe and which I did anyway.
I had been getting ready for that flight for three weeks.
I do not mean packing. I mean the whole apparatus a person builds when they have not done something alone in forty years.
I printed the boarding pass at home and then had it on the phone as well. I wrote the terminal on a card and put it in my coat. I got to Carradale three hours and twenty minutes early and sat in a cafe with a tea I did not drink, watching the board.
Odhran did all of it for thirty-nine years. Every booking, every check-in, every passport we ever owned. He used to stand at a desk and do the talking and I used to stand slightly behind him with the cases, and I have not stood at one on my own since 1986.
I had the window. 27A. I chose it and paid the extra for it, because Odhran always put me at the window, and because I did not want to be the one making people get up every time I needed the toilet.
I have thought about that second reason a lot since.
I paid eleven pounds to be the person who is trapped rather than the person who is an inconvenience, and I did not notice myself doing it.
The man in 27B was about fifty-two, broad through the shoulders, in one of those expensive half-zip jumpers and good trousers and shoes that had been polished that morning.
Before we had left the stand, his knee was about four inches over.
I moved toward the window. I assumed he would notice.
He opened his legs wider.
I waited until we had levelled off and then I said:
"Excuse me. Would you mind moving your knee back a bit?"
He looked down at me and laughed.
"Seriously? Look how small you are. You don't need all that."
I thought for about two seconds that it was a joke and that I had missed the tone.
It was not. He meant it completely. He had done a calculation about my body and arrived at a figure for how much of a seat I was entitled to.
I said, "I've paid for the whole seat."
He moved about an inch and within thirty seconds his knee was against mine again.
And then it got worse in stages, over two hours, the way these things do.
His thigh against my leg. The armrest, entirely. His jacket over the divider onto my half. And at about the ninety-minute mark he put one foot across into my footwell and left it there.
Every time I shifted away I ended up harder against the window.
By the second hour my hip had started.
I have had a thing with that hip since 2018 and it does not like ninety minutes in one position, let alone four hours at an angle with my weight all on one side.
I tried everything you can try in a seat without making a scene.
Legs across to the left. Shoulders round. Sitting forward with my back off the seat, which works for about nine minutes. Sitting right back with my knees together like a schoolgirl.
At one point I tried putting my book on my lap and my hands on the book, as though taking up a precise and tidy amount of space would communicate something to him.
That is the sort of thing you do. You start conducting a negotiation that the other party is not in.
I counted the rows on the screen about every twenty minutes. Three hours twelve. Two hours fifty-one.
And the worst of it is not the hip. The worst of it is the running commentary in your own head, which goes like this.
He is probably not doing it on purpose.
He is a big man and that is a small seat.
If I say it again I will be the woman who went on about it.
He will think I am making it about him being a man.
It is four hours. You have had worse than four hours.
Six separate sentences, on a loop, for a hundred and twenty minutes, every one of them in my own voice and every one of them arguing his side.
Nobody else in that cabin said a word either, and there were four people who could see it. The man across the aisle looked twice.
That is not a criticism of them. I have been the person who looks twice and says nothing about four hundred times.
Then I turned to him again.
"Could you please keep your legs on your side? I'm getting really uncomfortable."
He pulled one headphone off and did a sigh you could hear over the engines.
"Love, I'm six foot three. Where do you want me to put them?"
And I said — and I am still pleased with it —
"In the space that came with your ticket."
He grinned at me. Not nastily. That is the thing. He was enjoying himself.
"If you're not using it, what's the big deal?"
And he put the headphone back on and carried on with his crisps.
That sentence sat in me for the next two hours.
If you're not using it, what's the big deal.
He had looked at a woman of five foot two and concluded that whatever I was not actively filling was available.
The trolley came round at about the two-hour mark.
I reached for my tray table and his elbow was across it.
"Excuse me. Could you move your arm so I can get my tray down?"
Nothing. He did not look up.
I waited about twenty seconds and said it again, a bit louder, and I heard my own voice go up at the end the way it does.
And he rolled his eyes, still not looking at me, and said:
"You women can turn anything into a problem."
My face went hot. Sixty-one years old, in a seat, by a window.
And I did not say anything, because that is what I do.
Odhran used to say that if I walked into a chair I would apologise to it. He said it for about thirty years and it got a laugh every time and I laughed too.
I sat there against that window with my hip going and about two hours left on the screen, and I thought a thing I had never put into words before in my life.
He is not misreading me.
He has read me perfectly. He clocked me at the gate, probably — a small woman on her own, sixty-odd, polite — and he has taken what he was always going to take, and the only thing I have contributed is forty years of practice at letting it happen.
PART 2 — ONE MINUTE
At three hours and fifty minutes he took his headphones off, undid his belt and stood up.
"Toilet."
The man on his other side got up to let him out, and I watched him go all the way down the cabin.
And then, for the first time since we left the ground, the seat beside me was empty.
I straightened my right leg out and the relief went up me like warm water.
I put my shoulder off that window. I moved my hip. I sat with both knees facing forward like a person.
It was unbelievable. I sat there in a perfectly ordinary economy seat and nearly cried about how much room there was in it.
And I looked at his empty seat.
All of it. Every inch he had spent four hours taking off me while telling me I had no business minding.
If you're not using it, what's the big deal.
And I sat there and I smiled, which I have thought about a great deal since, because I do not think I have ever once in my life smiled in that particular way.
I put my hand up.
The girl who came was called Imogen and she was about twenty-eight.
She was there in about four seconds, which I assumed at the time was luck and which I found out at the end of that flight was not luck at all.
I said: "I'm sorry to be a nuisance. Is there a free seat anywhere? Anywhere at all, I don't mind where."
And she did not ask me why.
That is the bit I want to put down properly, because it is the whole reason this worked.
She did not say is everything all right. She did not say what's the problem. She did not make me stand in an aisle and describe a man's knee out loud while he was four rows away in a toilet.
She looked at me, and then at the empty 27B with the jacket over the divider, and then back at me.
And she said: "Yes, there is. Give me one minute."
She told me afterward, at the door, while people were getting their bags down, that she had walked that aisle eleven times in four hours and had seen all of it.
And I said, "Why didn't you say something?"
And Imogen said: "Because he'd have said he wasn't doing anything, and you'd have said it was fine, and then you'd have had three hours sitting next to a man I'd just embarrassed."
Which is exactly right, and which I had not thought of, and which is apparently something they know.
Then she said the thing I have repeated to about nine people since.
"We can't move you until you ask. You just have to ask. That's the whole of it."
That is all it took. One minute, after four hours.
I collected my bag and my book and my cardigan and I went up seven rows to 20C, which was an aisle seat with nobody in the middle beside it, and I sat down and put my seatbelt on.
And then Imogen did the other thing, which was not my idea and which I did not know was going to happen.
There was a woman called Dalia about nine rows behind us with a baby of about eleven months on her lap, in a middle seat, between two strangers, and she had been at it since Carradale.
Imogen moved her into 27A.
A window, a free armrest, and a bulkhead-side view for a woman holding a child for five hours.
And while she was doing it she folded that man's jacket off the divider and put it on the floor under his own seat, because it was on somebody else's seat and the somebody else was now a baby.
PART 3 — WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO
He came back up the aisle about four minutes later with no idea at all.
I watched the whole thing from 20C.
He got to the row and he stopped.
He looked at the seat. He looked at the baby. He looked at the window seat where I had been. He looked back down the cabin and then up it.
And then he found me, seven rows forward, on the aisle, looking straight at him.
And that man went crimson from the collar up and pointed at the row and shouted, loud enough for about forty people:
"WHAT THE HELL DID YOU DO?!"
Heads came round all over that cabin.
Imogen was on him in about three seconds and she was extremely polite and completely immovable, and I could not hear most of it.
What I did hear, because he said it at volume twice, was: "That's my row."
And what Imogen said back, in a perfectly pleasant voice, was: "It's seat 27B, sir."
I did not say anything at all.
I sat in 20C with my hands in my lap and I did not even feel triumphant, which surprised me. I felt sick, actually, for about ten minutes, the way you do after you have been shouted at in public, even when you have won.
He sat down eventually. He had an hour and fifty minutes next to Dalia and that baby and he did not spread into anything, because there was nowhere to spread and because Dalia had a child on her and would not have noticed if he had set fire to himself.
And the thing I keep coming back to is that I did not take his space away from him.
He kept his seat. Every inch of 27B was still his.
The space I handed over went to a woman who actually needed it, on the exact principle that man had been shouting at me for four hours.
If you're not using it, what's the big deal.
He got his own sentence back and he could not bear it.
We landed at twenty past four.
He was off that aircraft fast. I watched him go up the aisle with his jacket over his arm and he did not look at anybody.
Dalia came past me with the baby on her hip about four minutes later and stopped at my row.
She had about nine words of English and I have none of hers, and she said "thank you" and did a thing with her free hand toward the window, and I said something useless about the baby.
She did not know. That is what I want to put down. She had no idea there had been anything at all — she had been offered a window seat by a member of the crew after four hours of holding a child in a middle seat, and she had taken it, and that was the whole of it for her.
She thought she had been lucky.
I stood in that aisle waiting for the doors with my bag on my shoulder and I thought: that is what it looks like when somebody gets something.
Nobody announces it. There is no apology from anybody. A woman simply has a window seat for the last two hours, and she assumes it is luck, and the man who had been hoarding it has to sit there and watch.
PART 4 — 2007
Now the part that is mine, and it is not about an aeroplane.
In the November of 2007 there were about twenty-five of us at my sister's for a birthday.
My uncle Ambrose was there. He was seventy-one then and he died in 2013 and I am not going to turn him into a monster, because he was not one.
He was a grabber. That is the word we had for it in that family and we used it fondly.
He pinched. He held on to your wrist while he was talking to you. He pulled the girls onto his knee well past the age where that is a thing anybody should be doing, and he tickled, and he did not let go when you pulled away, and he thought all of it was affection and so, apparently, did everybody else.
Brid was fifteen.
She had brought a book to that dinner, because she was fifteen and because she had worked out that a book is a way of being at a table without being available.
I was doing something with foil at the worktop. I can see the worktop. It was that green marbled stuff my sister had until about 2012.
And Brid came and stood beside me, at my elbow, the way children do when they want to say something without being in front of you.
And she said, quietly, pitched so that nobody through the door would hear it:
"Mum. I don't want to sit next to Uncle Ambrose."
She did not say why. She was fifteen and she did not have the words for it and if she had had them she would not have used them in that kitchen.
And I did not ask.
I took the book out of her hands.
I did it without thinking about it at all, the way you take a phone off a child at a table, and I put it face down on that green worktop and I said:
"Give me that, you're not reading at the table. Go and sit next to your uncle and don't make a fuss, love. It's one dinner."
And my daughter looked at me for about a second and a half.
I have had eighteen years to decide what was in that look and I have never managed it, and that is probably just as well.
Then she said, "Okay."
And she went in and sat down next to him, at the far end, where I could see her the whole time.
Three hours. I watched him have hold of her wrist twice and the back of her neck once, and I watched my fifteen-year-old laugh both times in the way you laugh when there are twenty-five people watching.
And at about half nine she asked to go and sit with her cousins in the other room and my sister said of course, and that was the end of it, and nobody ever said another word about it.
Including me. Not in the car home. Not the next day. Not ever.
The book was still face down on that worktop when we left and I picked it up and carried it out to the car and put it on the back seat beside her, and we drove home listening to the radio.
PART 5 — THE CAR
She brought it up once.
The August of 2019, in a car, coming back from somewhere, twelve years later.
She was twenty-seven. I was driving. We were coming back from her cousin's wedding on the Ardwell road and we had been talking about the band and about somebody's hat.
And she said, in a completely light voice, looking out of the side window:
"Do you remember when I asked you not to sit me next to Uncle Ambrose?"
She had built that sentence. I know now that she had been carrying it in the car for about forty minutes waiting for a gap, because she told me so in the March.
And I said: "No. When was that?"
Straight away. No pause at all. It came out of me before I had decided anything, which is what forty years of practice buys you.
And Brid said, "Doesn't matter."
And she put the radio on.
We did the last eleven miles to that house listening to somebody talking about a football match and neither of us said another word.
She was twenty-seven years old and she had worked herself up to ask her mother one question in a moving car, and she got four syllables back, and she never tried again.
I remembered it perfectly. I remembered the book. I remember the cover of the book. I can tell you which worktop I put it on.
I said no because if I had said yes, the next thing would have been why did you make me, and I did not have an answer for that in 2019 and I did not have one in 2007 either.
The true answer is that I was more frightened of twenty-five people noticing than I was of my own daughter being pawed at for three hours.
That is the whole of it and it has taken me eighteen years and a man on an aeroplane to put it in a sentence.
I did not teach my daughter to be polite. I taught her to be available, and then I let a man use her, in front of me, and told her it was one dinner.
Odhran was at that dinner.
He was at the other end of the table and he did not see her ask me, and he would have put a stop to it in about four seconds if he had, and that is the truth about my husband.
But he laughed about the chairs for thirty years.
That is not nothing. I have had to think about that very carefully this year and it is the only unkind thing I have ever thought about that man.
He found it charming that I would apologise to furniture. He told it at dinner parties. And in thirty-nine years he never once asked me where it came from or whether I would like to stop.
Once, in 2019, after the hip, he did say something.
We were in the kitchen and I had been on about not wanting to ring the hospital back, and he put his cup down and said:
"You know you're allowed to want things, Nessa."
And I laughed, and said something about how he was allowed to want his dinner, and he laughed, and that was the end of it.
He died fourteen months later.
I got to Ardfern at half four in the afternoon.
Brid was in the arrivals hall with the baby in a sling and she is called Odhrana, which I did not know until I saw it on a card, and I had to put my case down in the middle of that floor.
I did not mention the flight for two days.
I told her on the third night, in her kitchen, at about eleven, with the baby asleep on her and both of us too tired to be careful.
She asked me how the flight had been. That is all. Just the ordinary question you ask on day three.
And I started on it and could not stop.
I did the whole thing. The knee before we had even pushed back. The armrest. The jacket over the divider. The foot in my footwell. The crisps. Where do you want me to put them. You women can turn anything into a problem.
Brid went very quiet about a third of the way through and put her hand flat on the table.
And then I got to my hand going up, and Imogen, and Dalia and the baby in 27A, and that man standing in the aisle going purple and shouting at a cabin full of people.
And my daughter laughed until she had to hold the table with the other hand, with a nine-day-old on her chest, at eleven o'clock at night.
And then she stopped laughing and said: "Mum. You moved seats."
And I said, "I did."
And she said, "You've never done that in your life."
And I said: "No."
And then I said the other thing, because it was eleven at night and because she had a nine-day-old asleep on her and because I was never going to be braver than I was in that kitchen.
I said: "Brid. I remember the book."
She went very still.
And I said: "In 2019, in the car, I said I didn't. I did. I've always remembered it. I'm sorry, love."
And my daughter sat at her own kitchen table with her daughter on her chest and cried for about four minutes, and then she said one thing that I will carry to the end.
She said: "I thought you'd forgotten because it was nothing."
Eighteen years she has had that. That it was so small that her own mother had not retained it.
She has not let it go and I have not asked her to.
We have talked about Ambrose three times since. The first was that night. The second was on the phone in the January and lasted about twenty minutes and was mostly me listening.
The third was in the March, when I went over again, and it was hard, and there were about forty minutes of it where I wanted very badly to say it was a different time and did not, because it was not a different time. It was 2007. She was fifteen. I was forty-three and I had a mouth.
What she wanted from me was not an apology, in the end. She had that on the first night and she said so.
What she wanted was for me to say out loud which bit I had known at the time.
And I knew. That is what I had to say in that kitchen in March, properly, with it put into words for the first time in eighteen years.
I knew about Ambrose. Everybody in that family knew about Ambrose. We had a word for it, and the word was fond, and it did its job for about forty years.
She said something on the last day, at the airport, with the baby in the sling and about nine minutes before I went through.
She said: "You know what the maddest bit is? It took a bloke's knee."
Give me that, you're not reading at the table.
I said that to a fifteen-year-old in a kitchen in 2007 with twenty-five people through the wall, and I took a book out of her hands, and I sent her to sit next to a man she had just told me she did not want to sit next to.
And eighteen years later I sat against a window for four hours with a stranger's foot in my footwell, because I could not make a fuss.
The two things are the same thing. I did not know that until somewhere over the water.
Odhrana is eleven months old now. She is enormous and she has opinions.
May you like
And when that child does not want to sit next to somebody, she is going to be believed the first time, by both of us, and nobody is going to take anything out of her hands.
THE END
