Monday 14 January 2013
I do not have a window seat. I have not been happy about this since I found I could not check in online 24 hours ago. I knew this would culminate in my not having a window seat. With a window seat I stood a chance of sleeping the whole way or at least a bit, but as it is I will need to tune into the in flight entertainment.
The person who has got my window seat, G, a chap in his 20s, greets me in such a friendly way that I wonder whether I can ask him straight away to swap. G has been away from South Africa for ten months, during which time his second daughter has been born. He left his pregnant wife and elder child to travel to England in a last-ditch attempt to get himself off drugs. And it's worked: he has not touched them for the whole time he has been here. He tells me he used to disappear off for weeks at a time, taking drugs or moving in with other women or, I suspect, both. He tells me he will not sleep on this flight... and I wonder whether it would be very rude at this point to ask him if we can, in that case, swap seats.
I am nervous about this trip to RSA, very nervous, but I do not have that much riding on it. If I believed in such things I'd think I'd been sent G to remind me of how lucky I am. As the journey progresses he tells me about his father leaving when he was 13 and about his alcoholic stepfather who killed himself last last year. I say that maybe he should not be so hard on himself, with events such as these during his formative years it's not very surprising he has an addiction problem. He, however, is adamant: he's done with self-pity. He has two brothers, neither of whom have managed to derail themselves as he has. Everything he had done was his responsibility.
We both have a pretty sleepless nights, he flails around quite a lot. It's an odd thing sleeping - or not - right next to a stranger on a plane. Every time I flip up my eye muff to see how many nano seconds have passed since I last did so he's there, making lots of effort to get some shuteye. As we make the approach to Johannesburg I can feel his tension rising so that by the time we have landed he is one of those people who leaps up to stand in the aisle while we don't get off the plane yet. He tells me he cannot sit down any longer: he is terrified that he has lost everything and it may be there there is nothing he can do to save himself. If she won't have him back he will be free to return to the UK, which he loves, but that will be because he is no longer wanted at home.
I've been stopped at passport control in South Africa before now - when I was travelling there from Rio years ago, so long ago that the fact that I did not have my outward ticket from South Africa was enough for them not to want to let me in (I'd been mugged in Peru, but that's a whole other story). These days I have no paper evidence of anything on me whatsoever, apart from my passport. It all goes smoothly, though, and what with the swanky, shiny arrival side at Oliver Thambo International in Joburg and the fact that for the first time in my life no one is meeting me from my plane at this airport , I can almost forget that I am back in the same place, my sister's home from home.
G and I bump into one another again, pushing our trolleys along. He has somehow found a few more stress notches above max and, as we head for the arrivals area he tells me that he has had to bribe a police officer to get back into the country - he would have gone to prison if he'd not done so. I ask who's meeting him. One of his brothers, he says. When I say that's nice, he looks at me wryly and says that his brother doesn't want him to come back at all that he'd rather he stayed, with all the trouble he's caused, in the UK. We step into South Africa and he sees his brother, points him out to me. He hugs me, I feel his terror, he wishes me luck and as he heads off towards this unwelcoming brother I feel my own terror rise again.
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