Holding breath

Long shadows fell over the airstrip. We were all craning our necks, searching the clouds for the silhouette of the aeroplane. I swear everyone held their breath at that moment, no one daring to breathe in case it had an effect on Davy and Jeremy.

But I’m getting ahead of myself here. Let me backtrack slightly.

I’m Marianne. I’ve been married to Davy for a day; actually, it’s less than 24 hours. I didn’t want him to go up in the damn plane. I told him so, too. He chose not to listen.

“Honey, what could possibly go wrong?” he’d said.

It’s not as if I could simply list them out, ticking them off on my fingers as I went. Some of them he would have dismissed instantly, others he would have laughed at; some may have made him stop and think, but still he would have buried any fears and stepped on that plane, even if I’d lay on the ground and begged him to not to. Like I say, we’d only been married a short while.

We met while on a cruise of the South Pacific. That was back in 2001. We dated for the intervening years, bought a house, kept some pets (only the dog is left) and generally lived like we all do. Life got on with itself and we travelled along with it by clinging on to the coat tails of time. Now, I had the feeling it was going to shake us off and we’d land with a big bump.

This was going to be more than cuts and bruises.

There were cries from the others that stood around me, encircling me as if they could possibly protect me from… not sure what they thought I needed protecting from. I held my hand to my face, shielding my eyes from the low winter sun. The plane was twirling as it came towards the ground; I could hear the whine of the engines above the rustle of the wind in the trees and the gasps of the other spectators.

I instinctively looked away, pointing my gaze to the ground. I noticed things in those last seconds: bugs crawling through the grass, each separate blade an entire eco-system; I saw each granule of dirt, the tiny droplets of water clinging to the grains’ surface and the bacteria performing the front crawl in these bubbles of liquid.

I almost didn’t dare look back up. I forced myself to lift my eyes. At that point I saw Davy and Jeremy’s plane disappear behind the screen of trees that stood in the distance.

We all waited for the explosion, the flames and the column of smoke that is inevitable in these situations.

All I could think was: breathebreathebreathe.