The Continuity Girl by Leah McLaren Read Free Book Online

in her mind, Picasso’s
Guernica.
Trails of human sausage links tangled and writhed across the industrial-tiled
     floor, and Irma was one of them, bravely navigating her small form through the seething mass. The din was dampened only by
     a faint misting of perspiration. The weight of this respirated atmosphere pressed down on Irma’s head like a dumbwaiter. Everyone
     took a place in line: queues of the paranoid waiting to have their old suitcases wrapped in cellophane. Mothers and infants
     in rows outside a metal door bearing a sign of a grinning cartoon elephant and the words BABY PIT STOP . A whole generation of smartly swaddled Saudi ladies waiting in line to get their VAT tax-back forms signed after their vodka-and-Prada
     sprees in Knightsbridge.
    Irma paused to watch a customs official, his nose decorated with gin blossoms, glare over the counter at a small Muslim woman
     shrouded in a Gucci-logo-print head scarf. He pointed at the woman’s bag on the floor. The woman bent down wordlessly and
     hoisted it onto the counter, spilling its contents before him. He held up a flimsy pile of paper and made a dismissive, uncooperative
     gesture. The woman stamped her foot and raised her hand in frustration. They stared at each other for a moment before the
     woman—perhaps because of a language barrier, perhaps because of sheer annoyance—swept up her purchases and her carry-on bag
     in two arms and clopped away, burka swishing out behind her.
    More than any other version of hell, Irma Moore preferred the hell of other people. As someone who had rarely behaved normally—let
     alone well—in her life, Irma thought it was lovely to watch otherwise polite people lose it. This was especially true in public.
     For this reason, she had a soft spot for airports. She cruised over to the arrivals board but couldn’t get a view for the
     mobs of people standing in front of her.
    “Ucchh,” she said. The Ulsterwoman’s trademark articulation of frustration. An involuntary, guttural reflex that she often
     made, and the only discernible trace of her middle-class upbringing in Belfast.
    “A poor-bog Irish peasant girl” is how Irma liked to describe herself, though in fact she had grown up in a tidy Protestant
     suburb. Her father was an eye surgeon, not a potato farmer as she sometimes passively led people to believe. But Irma had
     never been much of a fan of unadorned facts—the truth, in her mind, was too barren and plain. She preferred a more cluttered
     version of reality.
    Being a poet, Irma was big on metaphors. She rarely thought of things as they were, but instead imagined them as what they
     represented in the larger scheme of things. Human existence, in her mind’s eye, was a vast, messy castle with high turrets
     and secret passages, crocodile moats and magic suits of armor that might spring to life at any moment. Life was loud, animated
     and bloated with waste, not unlike Heathrow’s Terminal 4. But in the case of the great metaphoric castle, she mused, while
     craning her neck to read the flight numbers on the screen, there was one crucial difference: the castle contained only one
     royal personage. And that was Irma.
    Ah-
ha.
BA flight from Toronto due to arrive at 7:05 a.m. Just minutes ago, Irma noted, checking the pocket watch she carried
     in her handbag. For once, her daughter was late. Even if it wasn’t Meredith’s fault, Irma couldn’t help but take a bit of
     pleasure in this uncharacteristic tardiness.
    She pushed on, toward the arrivals gate at the other end of the terminal. When she got there, a man in uniform informed her
     this was the arrivals gate for domestic flights only. She would have to go back and check the message board to find the right
     gate. Irma reached through her batwing sleeve and scratched at a spot under the restrictive cummerbund of her traditional
     geisha’s kimono. (What had possessed her to put on this wretched thing anyway? She really should have worn the