I knew I would have to let the jigsaw pieces go. In the corner of my lounge were shelves of toys belonging to my daughter Emma, amongst them three wooden jigsaw puzzles. For the eleven months of my maternity leave, my last job of every day was to return the toys to their rightful box, and match the pieces onto the board. I hadn’t even been back at work a week, and there were two pieces missing.
I was a flight attendant, and had always intended to go back when my leave was up. I’d budgeted and saved to cover my share of the bills for the year I was at home. ‘That wasn’t what we meant by equality,’ a friend’s mother had sighed when I mentioned the sum I had put away for the year. It was a common topic of conversation with my workmates during my pregnancy—how to juggle the demands of long-haul flying with parenting. There were lots of us at a similar stage of life, taken on in our twenties during a period of rapid expansion at Air New Zealand in the Brierley years. ‘Four-hundred series,’ we called ourselves, as our five- digit employment numbers all started with the number four: me, 41358. My best friend, from the same intake: 41359. My mother had jumped at the chance to be Emma’s nanny. Other people, who didn’t fly, found it disconcerting. ‘You’d leave your baby, really? For days on end?’
I was able to ease back into it. There were formalities to complete, such as emergency procedure training and exam days. We covered the usual topics: drills for evacuating the aircraft, emergency equipment locations. We spent an hour on hijacking; the procedure was always to comply, but with delay tactics. To observe, and be able to report. Our training manuals suggested asking to see the hijacker’s boarding pass, and that always got a giggle. There was explanation of Stockholm Syndrome. Our head of security had deadpan humour and a lazy eye. ‘We don’t screen for weapons on domestic flights,’ he said. ‘By all means, take the aircraft to Invercargill.’
I followed up with a couple of trans-Tasman ‘double bangers’: days of travelling Auckland to Sydney and back, with a trainer, to get signed off on safety matters. They watched me arm the door for take-off, and quizzed me on the requirements for passengers sitting in an exit row.
About a month before I started working, Emma’s behaviour changed. She started waking multiple times in the night, and screaming at strangers. ‘The good thing,’ my husband said, ‘is that this is happening now. If she’d gone downhill after you’d gone back to work, you’d have blamed that. This just shows she’s got her own stuff going on.’
My first overnight trip was to Singapore. Emma had no idea of the meaning of events which would become a routine: her mother appearing in uniform, a suitcase waiting by the door, a taxi in the driveway. On the aircraft, there was comfort in rituals. I checked my emergency equipment; oxygen bottles filled to 1600 psi, fire extinguisher indicators correct, smoke hoods sealed. The loud hailer made an audible click when I pressed the push-to-talk button. Any misgivings I had about leaving Emma were stowed with my cabin bag in the tall coat cupboard by door 1-Left.
They didn’t resurface when I arrived at the hotel post-flight, dragging my suitcase into my room and closing the door on a space that was all mine. I took a long bath and ate room service in a dressing gown. Our flights through Singapore at that time were super-efficient with just a twenty-four hour turn around. The older crew would reminisce about multi-day layovers: shopping on Orchard Road, eating at the Satay Club, and drinking in the Long Bar at Raffles, but for my generation it was pretty much straight to bed. We stayed in several Singapore hotels over my career, and I can’t remember which chain this one belonged to. I remember more vividly the first one I stayed in, as a brand new flight attendant, where there was a remote control just for the curtains.
The time difference meant that I was awake ridiculously early, like four in the morning early. Breakfast was a big deal in Asian destinations; we would all be famished by seven, having been awake for hours, filling in the time with gym workouts or too much CNN. The first person down would secure a big table. Singapore did a good hotel breakfast; the benchmark was whether it offered a cook-on-the-spot omelette station. Inferior breakfasts only offered scrambled eggs in the bain-marie. As good as the breakfast in Singapore was, without fail, someone would mention with regret the best breakfast venue ever.
‘This is good,’ they’d say, ‘but it’s not Bangkok is it?’ Bangkok was lost to us as a destination in the wake of the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, and the merger of Air New Zealand and Ansett Australia. There would be a communal sigh, and we would all remember the waffle-station in the sun-filled breakfast room by the river there.
On this trip, the crew had a European flavour. Hans was one of my favourite Inflight Service Directors, our leader on the aircraft. He was Dutch, and had kept his accent, despite having lived in New Zealand since he was a young man. Even if he was being stern, he always seemed on the verge of a smile or a joke. Years later, I was to sit with him in a hotel lobby in Pasadena, Los Angeles and confess that I was in the grip of a bewildering mid-life crisis. His reply was, ‘Oh Carolyn, mid-life crises are easy, you just have an affair.’
Helga, my business-class colleague, was German, and keen that after breakfast we traverse the covered walkways to the large Carre Four supermarket in the mall. Her husband also flew, which I thought was enviable, but about a year later he was sacked after being caught on a security camera stealing money from a woman’s handbag in a hotel.
I had my own money again! Not a budgeted amount from the savings I had put away for my year of non-earning, but cold hard Singapore dollars supplied in a brown envelope. I bought a Lego Duplo set for Emma; a clear plastic container, shaped like a fish, with pieces that dropped into it through a hole in the lid. Skechers for me, lined with fleece, at a bargain price, as there was little call for such warm shoes in Singapore.
I didn’t ring home. My husband was a man of few words, and I’d learnt early in my career that calling him when I was isolated in a hotel room, to be greeted with monosyllables, only made me feel lonelier. Emma didn’t yet talk, so no use phoning her. It’s hard to remember, in these days of easy and continuous connectivity, the days when going away meant separation.
‘Facebook? Texting?’ I remember one old hand saying not long before I left the job in 2014. ‘In the old days we would go to London, and back via Sydney. You’d be gone for sixteen days, and I might make one phone call. My wife was at home with three pre-schoolers.’
By mid-afternoon we were back on board the aircraft, heading for home. By now I felt I had never been away. A pre-dinner drink, a meal each to the twenty-four passengers in the 767 business-class cabin. ‘First rest’ for me as the galley flight attendant. Crew rest on the 767 was rudimentary; just four seats with increased pitch beside the passenger toilets. Only recently had they been upgraded to a hard-shell surround, instead of just a curtain. It was intimate; if the person by the window had to go to the toilet during rest, they would have to straddle the one in the aisle seat to get out.
One time, I had a particularly vivid dream, during which I stood up and turned to face my three sleeping colleagues. I held up my hands and shouted, ‘Stop!’ before dropping back into my seat. I only remembered when gently reminded after wake-up by one of the disturbed crew.
There’s a sweet spot in any night flight where pretty much all the passengers are asleep. First rest, right after the dinner service, was never deemed as desirable as second rest, the shift just before breakfast. Second rest got you home in better shape, but it meant getting out of bed, fighting for a bathroom to throw on some make-up, and beginning the service while still wading through sleep inertia. I liked first rest, as long as I could get up to a cabin full of sleeping passengers.
The rests weren’t long on Asian flights, barely two hours. On really long flights, like Los Angeles to Sydney, or Vancouver to Auckland, the extended stretches of quiet through the night led to all sorts of illicit activities. Cakes were baked from mixes bought at Trader Joes or Costco, and dark secrets shared. I knew about Janine, raised as a good Christian, abstinence before marriage. Now she was married, she found sex so physically painful that six months in, the marriage remained unconsummated. Bella had married in haste, on the rebound after breaking up with her long-time love. For years she carried on an affair with the old boyfriend. Did I take my turn, telling in the middle-of-the-night galley confessional of my eighteen-month long sex drought? My husband had found both my pregnancy with Emma and nine months of breast-feeding, ‘disgusting’. Perhaps I did.
One of my friends liked to boast about the time the passengers were all so sound asleep through the night, that he removed his pants and underwear, and did a circuit of the whole, dark, economy cabin offering water from a jug, bare-cheeked, wearing only his apron.
This night, the cabin was in that deep-sleep zone when I got up. I made a cup of tea, and got a couple of chocolate after-dinner mints out of a stowage to go with it. I remembered that a memo had just been circulated asking us not to eat after-dinner mints on board, and so took a couple more. Even though it was my first night flight for over a year, my sleep-disrupted life at home meant that I was quickly alert. I wandered into the flight deck to see what the pilots needed—one of the last times I would ever be able to do that, as it turned out.
It’s a common misconception that pilots and flight attendants spend a lot of time in each other’s company, and are constant risk of inappropriateness. In fact, contract conditions meant that at many out-stations we stayed in different hotels. We loved to complain about each other. Pilots, according to flight attendants, were dull grey men who wore slip-on shoes and had mothballs in their wallets. Flight attendants, according to pilots, were often air-heads who loved to have drinks bought for them, and were always saying mean things about pilots.
I didn’t know the pilots well on this flight. In the middle of the night, I would expect to find the flight deck quiet. They would have run out of things to say; the more gregarious would be pleased to see me, and I might sit with them a while, and chat. There were always safe conversation starters, ‘How is your roster? Have you been busy?’ They may be reading, or doing cross-words. Or they may be deep in their own strategies of staying alert through the night, and not want much interaction. On this night, they were listening to a radio broadcast.
‘Sit down,’ said the captain. ‘You should listen to this.’
I stacked the pile of newspapers spread over the empty second row seat, and made room to sit. I had no idea what the broadcast was talking about; I couldn’t follow the discussion.
‘Two planes have been flown into the World Trade Centre in New York,’ said the captain. I don’t think I even knew what the World Trade Centre was at that time, having grown up when the Empire State Building was the world’s tallest building. ‘I read a novel once where something like this happened,’ said the first officer, which I thought was weird. This wasn’t a story. The broadcast said that survivors were jumping from the 93rd floor. I was confused by the term ‘survivors’. ‘Does that mean they will be okay?’ I asked the captain, hopefully imagining a circle of people holding big round safety nets at the bottom, like a scene from a Little Golden Book I had owned as a child. ‘When I Grow Up’, it was called, and the picture was on the page about firemen.
I went back to the cabin and found Hans. ‘Something has happened,’ I told him. ‘People have flown planes into the World Trade Centre in New York.’
He stared at me. ‘Are you making this up?’ he asked, then quickly went into the flight deck himself. When he came out, we sat side by side on the fold-out jump seats in the cross- aisle between doors 1-Left and 1-Right, and stared at the wall in front of us.
It says something for the magnitude of the news that we had learnt it in-flight. Usually bad news was delivered by the ground staff at the opening of the aircraft door. When Princess Diana was killed, we heard of the accident when we let the passengers off in Sydney. That Dodi Al-Fayed was dead. ‘She doesn’t have much luck does she?’ we said, and were told of her death on arrival in Auckland.
My thoughts returned to home. It would be on the news there. My husband would hear it on the bedside radio he kept playing through the night. I wondered if Emma had slept through. Perhaps he would get up to her, and turn the television on.
‘We won’t tell the passengers,’ Hans said. But it was hard news to keep to yourself. As the passengers started to wake, Hans couldn’t help but disclose the news to some of our frequent travellers. This was in business class, where the risk of mass hysteria seemed less. My memory is that I also told others while I made their beds up, but I realise now that this was before we had lie-flat seats, and we never did get them on the 767, so it must have been as I laid up the trays for breakfast. ‘What an incredible act of war,’ one of the passengers said.
We landed in Christchurch, and the ground staff met us with grave faces. We had some time before taking a domestic flight back to Auckland. ‘Come with us,’ they said. As we walked through the terminal, people cleared the way. ‘Here come the crew,’ I heard someone say. ‘Worrying for them,’ said someone else. Suddenly, it was no longer hypothetical, but personal. Aircraft used as weapons. Hijacking. We went to a room somewhere in the bowels of Christchurch Airport and, for the first time, watched the now famous footage on television. The impacts, the flames. I finally understood that the people who had jumped from the building were not survivors at all. Chronologies were beginning to be strung together. The flight attendants on United Airlines Flight 11 had alerted ground staff that their flight had been hijacked at 8.19 am. They hit the towers at 8.46.
‘I’m supposed to go to Los Angeles on Saturday,’ I said to Hans.
He had news from Auckland. ‘US airspace is closed. There are crews and aircraft stuck there. It’s total bedlam.’ I thought about my careful planning for the three days away of this trip. The cubes of mashed vegetables in the ice trays of my freezer, my mother’s plans to go away at the end of the week.
‘I wouldn’t expect to go anywhere on Saturday,’ Hans finished. He was right, I thought. I didn’t need to deal with this. I would go home, and stay there. It might be weeks before everything returned to normal.
When I got home, Emma was sitting in her high chair, chewing on a piece of apple. I watched slow recognition dawn across her face. I know this lady from somewhere. My mother had the television on, the news updates being played in a continuous loop.
‘The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear, ultimately,’ said Rudolph Giuliani.
I put some toys away, and searched again for the missing jigsaw pieces.