The Woman Who Took a Chance Read online

  THE WOMAN WHO TOOK A CHANCE

  Fiona Gibson

  Copyright

  Published by AVON

  A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2022

  Copyright © Fiona Gibson 2022

  Cover design by Caroline Young © HarperCollinsPublishers 2022

  Cover illustrations: Shutterstock.com

  Fiona Gibson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008386023

  Ebook Edition © March 2022 ISBN: 9780008386030

  Version: 2021-12-07

  Dedication

  For Sue, Chris and Millie at Atkinson-Pryce

  Epigraph

  ‘No one meets in real life, Mum.

  It’s all algorithms now.’

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Keep Reading …

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  The fear of redundancy is like a spot brewing on your chin. Although you try to ignore it you know it’s still there, simmering away under the surface.

  With that spot, you find yourself obsessively charting its progress. You wrestle with the urge to poke at it and find yourself arranging your social life around it. You almost wish it would peak, or even explode dramatically – because at least then the worst would be over.

  That’s how it feels when your industry is in crisis. I am a flight attendant with BudgieAir, an airline firmly aimed at your cheap and cheerful holiday market. It’s all I had ever wanted to do, since I was a little girl – to work for an airline, wear the smart uniform and fly all over the world. So I’m clinging on to the hope that we’ll weather the current financial storm and I’ll continue to demonstrate the safety procedures and hand out packets of pretzels with a big, bright, BudgieAir smile.

  And, as a bonus, perhaps that menopausal spot currently brewing on my chin might not peak after all, but be magically reabsorbed by my face during the night.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Bare feet. There’s a lot of them about on this Palma–Glasgow flight. They’re propped up on bulkheads, dangling over armrests and jutting out into the aisle. There are gnarly toenails, bunions, several cases of severe sunburn and some of these feet are, I have to say, not the freshest I’ve encountered. I serve teas and coffees, politely ask passengers to put their socks back on and catch Freddie demonstrating his patented method of upselling our airline’s mascot.

  Blue velour with plastic feet and a wind-mechanism, Billy Budgie is available to purchase on every route – just ask your friendly flight attendant.

  There are gales of rowdy laughter as he slips into his sales routine as follows:

  Home in on a particularly high-spirited group.

  Demonstrate that two budgies, when wound up simultaneously, can be set loose to copulate on a tray table.

  Rack up a heap of sales as each party member buys two budgies each.

  It’s hard to believe that, in the golden age of air travel, flight attendants once served martinis and roast beef dinners on real china crockery. These days it’s vodka and tonics and super-heated cheese toasties in cellophane bags. But there’s still a thrill to it; a kind of glamour I suppose. After nearly three decades in the job I still experience a frisson of pleasure as I clack across an airport concourse, fully made-up with not so much as a single pore scandalously naked. I feel right, somehow, when I’m wearing one of our few approved lipstick shades.

  ‘What about your human rights?’ my daughter Hannah exclaimed, when she’d just reached her teens and was appalled to learn that my employer dictated my choice. ‘I mean, what if you don’t want to wear lipstick?’

  ‘Well, we’re expected to,’ I said.

  ‘Oh my God. That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘I know, love, but it’s part of the job to look polished – to send out the signal that we’re a team,’ I explained, and that’s exactly what we are: an army of highly trained individuals in our crisp white shirts, fitted blue suits and jaunty blue and yellow silk scarves at the neck, bearing our chirpy budgie logo. Yes, I know we’d be just as capable of calming nervous flyers and attending to minor medical scares with our faces bare. But our super-groomed appearance acts as a kind of armour – like an armadillo’s horny plates. With my heels on and my hair pinned up in its chignon, I am armed to deal with the backchat, the enthusiastic drinking, the flare-ups and occasional punch-ups, the sub-blanket fumbling and couples attempting to cram themselves into the loo together – because we’d never notice, right? Or we’d believe the guy who says, ‘I’m just going in to help her get something out of her eye.’ For a while, among my colleagues, it was a euphemism for sex; i.e. to the friend who’d just started seeing someone: ‘Has he tried to get something out of your eye yet?’ ‘No, but I think it might be on the cards for Friday night.’

  So yes, this job can be challenging but we’re trained to manage even the most demanding of passengers in the most pleasant way possible. Smiles cost nothing so we give them for free. That’s one of the little phrases that was drummed into us during training, along with MEFS: Make Every Flight Special. And I try to, I really do – even today when the woman in seat 32A starts to sand at her bare heels with a pumice.

  ‘Excuse me,’ I start, ‘would you mind not doing that in-flight please?’

  ‘What?’ She glares at me.

  ‘Doing your feet—’

  ‘I’m exfoliating them.’

  ‘Even so,’ I say brightly, ‘I’m afraid we have a no bare feet policy on board.’

  ‘Jobsworth bitch,’ she hisses as I stride away.

  I gather that there’s less of this kind of behaviour on the classier airlines, where passengers just want to snooze, or prepare for meetings, and alcohol is consumed with restraint. However, I have never been tempted to work for anyone else. BudgieAir is where I started, along with a brilliant bunch of new recruits – including Freddie – who became my best friends. We work hard but it’s not all graft; we have our parties, our awaydays and the camaraderie is like nowhere else. We also have our annual awards ceremony when the flight attendant who’s sold the most Billy Budgies that year wins an amazing holiday. That’s why it’s such a big deal, flogging those darned toys. Last year Freddie won, and the year before it was me. While he and his husband took their prize trip the following month I still haven’t redeemed mine. It’s a week for two on the Greek island of Santorini in the honeymoon suite of a spa hotel.

  ‘It does look very honeymoonish, Mum,’ Hannah remarked, when I suggested we went together.

  ‘You don’t have to be newlyweds to go there,’ I pointed out. ‘I mean, there’s no rule.’

  ‘I just think you should save it for s
omeone special,’ she insisted. Who was more special than her? I asked. My friends have been the same. It’s been all, ‘Oh, no, Jen. Don’t waste it on me!’ Like I need to be in an intimate relationship with someone to fully enjoy going on holiday with them.

  ‘’Scuse me,’ a passenger calls out now, waving a pastry in the air. ‘What’s in this exactly?’

  ‘That’s a sausage roll,’ I reply, ‘so it’ll be sausage meat, sir.’

  ‘Is it?’ he splutters, sunburnt head glowing. ‘It’s like eating a fart.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry. It’s premium sausage meat from naturally reared pigs—’

  ‘Yeah, right,’ he snorts.

  ‘—But if you’re not enjoying it,’ I add, ‘I can exchange it for anything else in its menu section.’

  Clearly primed for confrontation, he seems taken aback. ‘Oh, can you? I’ll have the cheesy thingy then.’

  ‘No problem, sir. I’ll be back in a minute.’ I whisk away the substandard pastry and Freddie winks as I pass. It’s always a treat to find we’ll be working together. I felt lucky, back in the early Nineties when we trained together, and I still feel lucky now, at fifty years old – even as the foot-sanding woman glares at me as she disembarks.

  ‘Have a great day,’ I say cheerily, ever polite and professional with my BudgieAir smile: the brightest smile in the sky.

  I catch up with Hannah when I’m home. My uniform has already been swapped for tracksuit bottoms and a saggy sweater, my make-up thoroughly cleansed away. She’s on her way home from work, walking from Mile End tube station to her shared house; it’s when she tends to call. My only child left home three years ago, jumping straight from college here in Glasgow to a junior job with a podcast production company in London. She has already been promoted to an assistant producer role. Although I miss her terribly I couldn’t be more proud of her.

  ‘I’ve got a date tonight, Mum,’ she tells me.

  ‘Really? That’s exciting. Who with?’

  ‘Just someone I’ve been chatting to.’ I catch the smile in her voice. ‘You know what?’ she adds. ‘You should do something fun to take your mind off stuff at work.’ She knows all about our rival airlines shedding staff and, in some cases, ceasing to operate. No one’s been gloating about this. We’re horribly aware that, while a determined beach lover will always prioritise their fortnight in the sun, post-pandemic an awful lot of people are choosing to stay closer to home. Who’d have imagined that drizzly Britain, with our chips and midges, would be so appealing?

  ‘Like what?’ I ask, although I know exactly what she’s hinting at. Lately, my daughter’s been on at me to at least be open to meeting someone. There’s been the very occasional adventure over the years, on a layover far, far from home. This industry is rife with flings and shenanigans in resort hotels around the world. But it’s been at least a couple of years since I’ve even kissed anyone properly, and apart from a brief relationship three years ago I’ve been single for pretty much forever.

  Hannah’s dad and I weren’t even together in the conventional sense – although I do count Rod as one of my very best friends. We’d been great mates, and flatmates for a time, at college. Sometimes that had tipped into flirtation but he was never short of attention from girls so I assumed he just regarded me as a friend. Then a few years on, we’d got it together after a party. Although we’d done a great job of laughing it off as a mad, drunken thing, that wasn’t quite the end of it. At twenty-six, I was accidentally pregnant.

  The truth is, being Hannah’s mum and managing my work roster have consumed just about all of my energy over the years. And I’ve been happy, mainly, being able to do my own thing and not being answerable to anyone. However, things have felt a little different since she left home. We were always super-close, and I suppose it’s hit me that now it’s just me, who hasn’t had a proper boyfriend since before Hannah was born. And maybe that is a little weird.

  I also suspect that, since she moved out, Hannah’s been worried about me being lonely. Maybe I am, very occasionally, when I’m not working over a weekend and everyone is busy doing cosy family things or going on dates or visiting the garden centre or whatever it is that normal, fully functioning people do. On occasion, Rod has teased me that I am actually married to BudgieAir, leaving no space for anyone else. And perhaps he has a point.

  ‘You know what I’m talking about,’ Hannah says now. ‘Get yourself out there, Mum. It doesn’t have to be anything serious. It can just be a bit of fun.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so, love,’ I say firmly. ‘With work and everything, I hardly have a minute—’

  ‘You’ve always said that,’ she teases. ‘You’ve always blamed your job for never getting around to meeting anyone. But you know what?’ She pauses. ‘I don’t think that’s the real reason anymore.’

  ‘What is the reason, then?’ I’m intrigued as to what she has to say.

  ‘It’s doing it online, isn’t it? Meeting someone through an app or a dating site—’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I say. ‘I hate the thought of being judged by a little profile, and all the swiping and that. Which probably means I don’t want it enough, doesn’t it?’

  ‘But that’s how it happens these days,’ she insists. ‘It’s what people do, Mum. I don’t see why you’re so resistant to it.’

  I love our chats, and of course I don’t mind my daughter talking to me as if I had been stored in a freezer since the era of dial-up internet and only just been thawed out. ‘For your generation maybe, but not for me, Han. And people must still meet in the normal way.’

  ‘This is the normal way now,’ she insists.

  ‘It seems so contrived, though.’

  ‘It’s just convenient and efficient. And it works! That’s the whole point of technology, isn’t it? To make life easier and better?’

  ‘I’m not sure if it is better,’ I start.

  ‘Of course it is,’ she says firmly. ‘Imagine …’ She pauses. ‘Imagine you still had to write letters to people instead of messaging them.’

  ‘Letters were nice,’ I say, frowning. ‘I loved having pen pals when I was a kid. I had Val in France and Bonnie in Pennsylvania and a nice boy called Gino in Venice who I was completely crazy about—’

  ‘That’s sweet,’ she says with a chuckle. Then: ‘Remember that castle in the Highlands that you and Dad took me to when I was little?’

  ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘And they had massive copper pans and a mangle in the kitchen?’

  ‘Yeah?’ I think I know where this is going.

  ‘So, you’re saying that instead of having a washing machine you’d rather wash your clothes in the sink and then mangle them?’ Hannah retorts.

  ‘I’d love that,’ I tease her. ‘It’d seem wholesome and quaint. Next time you come home there’ll be a gap where the washing machine used to be and I’ll have a huge, bulging bicep from all the mangling—’

  ‘Great arm workout,’ she sniggers.

  ‘See? The old ways have benefits …’

  ‘Are you still running, by the way?’ she asks.

  ‘Um, I wouldn’t exactly call it that, but yes.’

  ‘That’s a really good thing to do. For stress, I mean,’ she adds gravely. Since when did twenty-three-year-olds start counselling their mothers? ‘And you really should get on some dating apps,’ Hannah adds. ‘How’s it going to happen otherwise?’

  I stretch out on the sofa and extract a cookie from the jar on the floor. ‘I might just … meet someone one day?’

  ‘Like in the films?’ She is referring to the romcoms we used to love watching together, when it was just me and her, snuggled up with Meg Ryan, Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson – all our favourites – with a duvet across our laps and a plate of hot buttered crumpets between us. When it felt like nothing bad could happen.

  ‘Like, she’s in a bookshop,’ Hannah reminisces, ‘and she turns around and there’s this hot man just standing there …’

  ‘Or she’s in the supermarket,’ I add, ‘and she collides with his trolley—’

  ‘There was a lot of colliding in those days,’ she says, sniggering.

  ‘Well, there was no Tinder then. People had to crash into each other …’

  ‘With an armload of books. She was always carrying books—’