Postcards from the Departure Lounge
by Gavin Broom
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: Glasgow Airport's departure lounge is limbo for the girl trying to write postcards to a life she's leaving behind.
_____________________________________________________________________
It's a question of timing, she decides. It's a question of distance. Give it a few hours and a couple of thousand miles and she could be sitting in an identical pub, surrounded by a similar crowd, drinking the same kind of drinks, eating the same kind of food and no one would think anything of it.
But rather than doing it a little later somewhere in the Canaries, she's doing it here and now, on the faux terrace outside the Wetherspoon's pub in the international departure lounge of Glasgow airport and it's this difference that attracts the curious looks and clumsily concealed sniggers. She knows that this place is a hub of Outbounds, not Returns and because of that, no one is going to mistake her for some exotic foreigner. She's the odd, wee-bit lassie writing her holiday postcards before she's even left the country.
She's seventeen now -- not so wee anymore -- and she's sitting alone with a battered address book and an Argos pen, writing postcards while the ice in her Diet Coke melts and the estimated departure time of her flight creeps closer. She's written quite a few since she arrived and as she pauses to massage her right wrist, she realises there's only a couple more to do. Considering these aren't the Wish You Were Here sort that can be mass-produced, this isn't bad going. She has enough time. She'll complete her task.
As her shoulders relax, she admires the overlapping images looking back at her: George Square, Kelvingrove, The People's Palace, the obligatory Highland Coo and, in one instance, a completely black image with the caption Glasgow At Night in the top corner. Unfamiliar at first, the sensation stretching across her face is a smile. There's nothing better, she thinks, than photos of home to accompany these truths.
Home. This was never home; never a new start. Dark, damp, poisoned in so many ways.
Frantic. Hands in hair. Eyes zipping round the room. Her room.
Was this ever just my room?
What has she forgotten? She must have forgotten something. Taxi toots its horn for the second time. Quick. Quick. She needs to be quick but she needs to be sure. Quick. Quick. Something ...
Where are the dolls? Where are the declarations of love scribbled on a school jotter? Where are the posters?
Check the checklist. Clothes already thrown in a bag. Not much. Some cosmetics. Shades. A Yankees baseball cap. She pats her back pocket. Two envelopes. These are the important items. If all else fails, she needs to keep these envelopes close. One contains a new passport, opened only once, and a ticket. The other is stuffed with his money. Benefit money for kids he never had, injuries that never happened. Topped up by under the table, under the counter, secretive work. Secrets run long and deep in this house and what use is a secret without a place to hide it? And what good is a hiding place if everyone in the house thinks like a spy?
There were never any posters. He didn't like thumb-tacks in walls. He didn't like sharp things. The walls were kept bare. Except --
A postcard. There when they moved in. A solitary, tiny rectangle of colour in a grey room. A postcard of a tropical island, lush and green, surrounded by a glittering ocean, sunned under arcs of cloudless, infinite sky. La Gomera. Later, her mother found it on the map, curious to know how her daughter had heard of such an insignificant little spot on the planet. It took a while to find, but there it was; nestled amongst the Canaries. A secret island. The perfect hiding place. She takes a chance and shows her mother the postcard. They talk for a long time that night, about dreams and fantasies and they cry in each other’s arms but the front door opens and the mood is killed along with any hope of talking about the well-known reasons behind the tears. The next day, her mother is so distant, it's as though the conversation never happened.
She stole the postcard down from the wall before he got a chance to take it from her and she hid it under the bed. Over the years, she kept it there. It grew faded and dog-eared and when the bedsprings screamed long into the night, all she saw behind those clenched-shut eyes was that postcard, that island, that escape, until eventually the sound of waves lapping the shore drowned out everything else and the warm breath against her skin felt like a summer breeze.
The postcard joins the passport and the ticket and then she can wait no longer. Moments later, in the back of the taxi with the sun threatening to rise at her back, the driver asks if she's away anywhere nice. She can't speak because her heart swells in her throat and her lungs are ready to split and burst, but she can nod and she can smile and when she closes her eyes, she doesn't need to imagine anything.
Her flight is called on time and there's a near stampede as the bar empties, only to gather around the gate, maybe a hundred feet away. She stays in her seat for now because she's nervous about flying and needs to find her focus. Plus, she's still got one more postcard to write.
The batch of Scottish-themed cards are neatly stacked now, picture-side up, one for each of the men her only-child father introduced as an uncle. Perhaps not all of them, but some, maybe most. Enough.
She thinks of how odd and contradictory the custom of postcards really is, because while they can contain the deepest and most personal of thoughts, they're on display for anyone to read. They're conversations that invite guiltless eavesdropping. They're the worst place to store any kind of secret if you want it to remain that way. She wonders how many hands these will pass through before they find their homes, how many eyes will read her words.
The last card will take no time at all to finish, but still she finds she has to keep her breathing in check. It's too dangerous to leave a message so it's only the address she has to complete. The pen sinks into the soft paper and fails to write and for an awful moment the world trembles and threatens to collapse. She licks the nib of the pen, likes she's seen on TV, and gives it a shake. After a pause, she tries again, trying to be careful, realising the fragility of the card and the completion of her plan. She slows her breathing, considers alternatives. It's not the end of the world. There can be no shortage of pens in the shops and bars, but then the old Argos pen must find its focus and composure, or borrow some of hers, and the ink begins to flow again.
She writes her mother's name and below it, she adds the care of address she's memorised over the last few days. It's another house of secrets but these are better ones, she's decided. These are secrets that can mark a start rather than delay an end and in the meantime can provide shelter and refuge.
So while people start dripping through the gate towards their own personal escapes, she gathers her things and walks towards the Bureau de Change and specifically the post-box that's fixed into the wall next to it. One by one, she feeds each postcard through the slot and slowly breathes through her nose while the weight evaporates.
The last card -- a washed-out, drained La Gomera -- takes some effort to release because she doesn't know if this one will ever reach its destination. But in the end it isn't so hard to let something go, and with the sensation of the postcard slipping away still fresh in her fingertips, she joins the end of the depleted queue at the gate. Her passport shown and ticket handed over, she shuffles through these smiling strangers, hoping that her mother will replay that conversation and the dreams that were discussed that night and will recall the tiny, inconspicuous island in the Atlantic and remember how to find it.
Swearwords: None.
Description: Glasgow Airport's departure lounge is limbo for the girl trying to write postcards to a life she's leaving behind.
_____________________________________________________________________
It's a question of timing, she decides. It's a question of distance. Give it a few hours and a couple of thousand miles and she could be sitting in an identical pub, surrounded by a similar crowd, drinking the same kind of drinks, eating the same kind of food and no one would think anything of it.
But rather than doing it a little later somewhere in the Canaries, she's doing it here and now, on the faux terrace outside the Wetherspoon's pub in the international departure lounge of Glasgow airport and it's this difference that attracts the curious looks and clumsily concealed sniggers. She knows that this place is a hub of Outbounds, not Returns and because of that, no one is going to mistake her for some exotic foreigner. She's the odd, wee-bit lassie writing her holiday postcards before she's even left the country.
She's seventeen now -- not so wee anymore -- and she's sitting alone with a battered address book and an Argos pen, writing postcards while the ice in her Diet Coke melts and the estimated departure time of her flight creeps closer. She's written quite a few since she arrived and as she pauses to massage her right wrist, she realises there's only a couple more to do. Considering these aren't the Wish You Were Here sort that can be mass-produced, this isn't bad going. She has enough time. She'll complete her task.
As her shoulders relax, she admires the overlapping images looking back at her: George Square, Kelvingrove, The People's Palace, the obligatory Highland Coo and, in one instance, a completely black image with the caption Glasgow At Night in the top corner. Unfamiliar at first, the sensation stretching across her face is a smile. There's nothing better, she thinks, than photos of home to accompany these truths.
Home. This was never home; never a new start. Dark, damp, poisoned in so many ways.
Frantic. Hands in hair. Eyes zipping round the room. Her room.
Was this ever just my room?
What has she forgotten? She must have forgotten something. Taxi toots its horn for the second time. Quick. Quick. She needs to be quick but she needs to be sure. Quick. Quick. Something ...
Where are the dolls? Where are the declarations of love scribbled on a school jotter? Where are the posters?
Check the checklist. Clothes already thrown in a bag. Not much. Some cosmetics. Shades. A Yankees baseball cap. She pats her back pocket. Two envelopes. These are the important items. If all else fails, she needs to keep these envelopes close. One contains a new passport, opened only once, and a ticket. The other is stuffed with his money. Benefit money for kids he never had, injuries that never happened. Topped up by under the table, under the counter, secretive work. Secrets run long and deep in this house and what use is a secret without a place to hide it? And what good is a hiding place if everyone in the house thinks like a spy?
There were never any posters. He didn't like thumb-tacks in walls. He didn't like sharp things. The walls were kept bare. Except --
A postcard. There when they moved in. A solitary, tiny rectangle of colour in a grey room. A postcard of a tropical island, lush and green, surrounded by a glittering ocean, sunned under arcs of cloudless, infinite sky. La Gomera. Later, her mother found it on the map, curious to know how her daughter had heard of such an insignificant little spot on the planet. It took a while to find, but there it was; nestled amongst the Canaries. A secret island. The perfect hiding place. She takes a chance and shows her mother the postcard. They talk for a long time that night, about dreams and fantasies and they cry in each other’s arms but the front door opens and the mood is killed along with any hope of talking about the well-known reasons behind the tears. The next day, her mother is so distant, it's as though the conversation never happened.
She stole the postcard down from the wall before he got a chance to take it from her and she hid it under the bed. Over the years, she kept it there. It grew faded and dog-eared and when the bedsprings screamed long into the night, all she saw behind those clenched-shut eyes was that postcard, that island, that escape, until eventually the sound of waves lapping the shore drowned out everything else and the warm breath against her skin felt like a summer breeze.
The postcard joins the passport and the ticket and then she can wait no longer. Moments later, in the back of the taxi with the sun threatening to rise at her back, the driver asks if she's away anywhere nice. She can't speak because her heart swells in her throat and her lungs are ready to split and burst, but she can nod and she can smile and when she closes her eyes, she doesn't need to imagine anything.
Her flight is called on time and there's a near stampede as the bar empties, only to gather around the gate, maybe a hundred feet away. She stays in her seat for now because she's nervous about flying and needs to find her focus. Plus, she's still got one more postcard to write.
The batch of Scottish-themed cards are neatly stacked now, picture-side up, one for each of the men her only-child father introduced as an uncle. Perhaps not all of them, but some, maybe most. Enough.
She thinks of how odd and contradictory the custom of postcards really is, because while they can contain the deepest and most personal of thoughts, they're on display for anyone to read. They're conversations that invite guiltless eavesdropping. They're the worst place to store any kind of secret if you want it to remain that way. She wonders how many hands these will pass through before they find their homes, how many eyes will read her words.
The last card will take no time at all to finish, but still she finds she has to keep her breathing in check. It's too dangerous to leave a message so it's only the address she has to complete. The pen sinks into the soft paper and fails to write and for an awful moment the world trembles and threatens to collapse. She licks the nib of the pen, likes she's seen on TV, and gives it a shake. After a pause, she tries again, trying to be careful, realising the fragility of the card and the completion of her plan. She slows her breathing, considers alternatives. It's not the end of the world. There can be no shortage of pens in the shops and bars, but then the old Argos pen must find its focus and composure, or borrow some of hers, and the ink begins to flow again.
She writes her mother's name and below it, she adds the care of address she's memorised over the last few days. It's another house of secrets but these are better ones, she's decided. These are secrets that can mark a start rather than delay an end and in the meantime can provide shelter and refuge.
So while people start dripping through the gate towards their own personal escapes, she gathers her things and walks towards the Bureau de Change and specifically the post-box that's fixed into the wall next to it. One by one, she feeds each postcard through the slot and slowly breathes through her nose while the weight evaporates.
The last card -- a washed-out, drained La Gomera -- takes some effort to release because she doesn't know if this one will ever reach its destination. But in the end it isn't so hard to let something go, and with the sensation of the postcard slipping away still fresh in her fingertips, she joins the end of the depleted queue at the gate. Her passport shown and ticket handed over, she shuffles through these smiling strangers, hoping that her mother will replay that conversation and the dreams that were discussed that night and will recall the tiny, inconspicuous island in the Atlantic and remember how to find it.
About the Author
Born in Falkirk, Gavin Broom now lives in Stirling. For now. He's been published over fifty times online and in print, and he edits fiction for The Waterhouse Review.