The skinny woman sitting next to me mocked my weight throughout the entire flight and kept insisting that I was taking up too much space
The skinny woman sitting next to me mocked my weight throughout the entire flight and kept insisting that I was taking up too much space — eventually, I moved to another seat, but what I left behind made her scream so loudly the whole plane heard her.
I am sixty-one. I am overweight and I have had type 2 diabetes for a long time.
And that is why I always book the aisle, so that I am not a bother to anybody.
The woman at the window looked about forty. Thin, expensive watch, and a scent that got to the back of the cabin on its own.
And when she sat down she looked me up and down.
And about twenty minutes in I got a small bar out of my bag, because I need to keep things steady.
And she sighed and said: "You're eating that?"
"I need it," I said.
And she rolled her eyes. "Of course. Has it ever occurred to you to eat less? You're already in part of my seat."
And I cleared my throat. "Sorry? I'm in my own seat. I'm not in yours."
And she laughed. "Have you looked at yourself? Your leg is coming over."
And I looked down. I was inside my own seat. I put my knees together to be sure. I was not touching that woman.
And a few minutes later she asked me to let her out.
And I got up, holding the seat in front, and let her past.
And she said: "Why does it take you that long? People ought to know their size and think about everybody else."
And my face went.
And when she came back there was a girl from the cabin crew going past, and she stopped her and started.
"Look at it. Her arm's all over the armrest. Aren't people like her meant to buy two seats? I'm squashed."
And that girl looked at our row and said, politely, that I was in my own space and not in hers.
And I asked the woman to stop, because it had gone past anything reasonable.
And she started properly then, pointing at my leg, saying it was coming onto her seat and that I was crushing her.
And the girl sighed and offered me a seat further back.
There was an empty one towards the rear. Nothing like the aisle seat I had paid for. But five more hours of that was not something I could do.
"I'll move," I said.
And she smiled and went back to her phone.
And then I had an idea.
And I took something out of my bag and put it on the seat.
And I moved.
And about a minute later her scream went down that whole cabin.
"WHAT IS THAT?"
And every head on that aeroplane turned, and I could not help it.
What I left.
The seatbelt extender.
Black webbing, about two feet of it, with the metal buckle on the end.
And I did not leave it in a heap. I laid it along the seat with the buckle at the head end and the strap running down, and then I put my jacket half over the top of it so that the buckle was showing and the rest was not.
And a woman who had been bent over a telephone looked across in a dim cabin at something black and long lying on a seat eleven inches from her elbow.
And she screamed.
And then she worked out what it was, in about two seconds, which is why she went quiet so fast and why the second half of that cabin never knew what the noise had been about.
What the extender was.
Mine, in the sense that I had asked for it.
I ask for one every time. I have done since 2014.
And I had asked for it at the door that morning, from a man on the gate, in the voice I use for it, which is light and quick and gets it over with.
And then I sat down and did my belt up and it fastened perfectly well on its own, the way it has every time since about 2019.
I did not need it. I have not needed one in six years.
I ask because the alternative is finding out in front of people, and because once, in 2014, on a flight from Haleford, I had to ask in the air with a queue behind me, and I have organised my life around not doing that again.
So it sat in my lap, in its plastic, for forty minutes.
And then a woman told me to look at myself.
And I put the one object in that aeroplane that had been issued to me because of my body onto a seat, and arranged my jacket over it, and walked away.
What I have been telling people.
That I moved, and then had an idea.
That is the order in every single telling and it is not what happened.
The idea came first.
The girl offered me the seat at the back and I said I'll move, and what I was already doing while I said it was working out that I was about to have a seat that woman would be sitting next to with nobody in it.
I have gone over it about four hundred times and I cannot make the order come out differently.
I did not accept a rescue and then think of something clever.
I accepted a worse seat, five hours from Corran Bay, partly because it gave me somewhere to leave something.
The ninety seconds.
That is how long I took.
I know because the girl came back to see whether I was settled and I was not finished, and she waited in the aisle.
Four feet of a cabin crew member's time, standing there, while a woman of sixty-one arranged a seatbelt extender and a jacket on a seat.
And she did not say anything. She waited, and then she said all right?, and I said yes, and I went.
She was twenty-four. Her name is Oyin and I did not know it on the day; I know it now.
The two hours and four minutes, which I have been calling just over two hours and which I have now put a clock to.
She said the thing about the bar at about twenty past nine.
And I got up out of that seat at twenty-four minutes past eleven.
And in that time she said four things to me and three of them are in the account above.
The fourth one is not and I have never repeated it, and it is the only one that was not about my body.
At about half ten she said, out of nothing, looking at her phone: "Does anybody actually travel with you?"
And I said no.
And she said: "No."
That is the one. That is the one I think about at four in the morning, and it is not in any version I have told, and the reason is that it is the only true thing that woman said in five and a half hours.
I do travel alone. I have since 2019. My sister has asked to come twice.
And the three sentences about my leg and my arm and my size have been repeated by me about forty times, because they are outrageous and because they make the listener angry on my behalf.
And the sentence that actually went in is the one I have never said out loud.
What happened to Oyin.
The woman complained about her.
Not about me. About the crew member.
She wrote in the following week — she is the sort who writes — and she said that she had been made to feel unsafe, and that an item had been placed on an adjacent seat, and that the cabin crew had moved a passenger rather than addressing it.
And there was a process.
And Oyin Balogun had something on her file for four months while Lanark Air looked into whether an item had been left on a seat by a passenger with the knowledge of crew.
Which it had. She watched me do it.
And she did not say that in her account, because she did not want to put me in it.
And I did not write anything.
That is the whole of it.
I got off that aeroplane at Corran Bay and I told my sister on the telephone that evening and I have told about forty people since, with the scream in it, and the heads turning.
And I did not write one line to Lanark Air for four months.
What I did in the fourth month.
I found out.
Not from her. I rang about something else entirely — a refund on a different booking in the February — and the woman on the telephone said something about the ninth of October and I asked her what she meant.
And then I wrote. Properly, two pages, with the whole of it, including the ninety seconds and including that the crew member had been standing in the aisle.
And it was closed in about three weeks and there is nothing on that girl's record.
And I have been told by two people that I did the right thing in the end.
I did the right thing in the February, having found out by accident on a call about a refund.
Four months.
And the four months, which I have put down as a thing I did not know about.
That is accurate and it is not the only thing that is true about them.
Because I thought about Oyin Balogun in the October.
On the aeroplane, in the new seat, in the five and a quarter hours, I thought about her twice.
Once at about one o'clock, when she came down the cabin with the trolley and did not look at me — which I noticed, and which I decided at the time was because she was busy.
And once at about four, landing, when it occurred to me, in the way these things do, that she had stood in that aisle and watched me.
And I had the thought — I can produce it exactly — that she probably shouldn't have let me do that.
That is what I did with it. I turned it into a small criticism of a twenty-four-year-old.
And then I got off at Corran Bay and did not think about her again until a woman on a telephone said a date to me in the February.
So it is not true that I did not know. I did not know about the complaint.
I knew, in the air, on the day, that there was a crew member who had watched me do something and had said nothing about it — and I filed it as her problem.
The woman.
I am not going to rehabilitate her.
She told a stranger to look at herself. She used the words people like her. She stopped a twenty-four-year-old in an aisle to make a complaint about somebody's body.
And she sat in the row behind a woman doing it to for five and a half hours afterwards and never once came back.
And I do not know her name, because I never looked, and because there is no version of this in which I need it.
And the man across the aisle, who I counted as a witness and who I have thought about since the April.
He was about fifty and he was in the aisle seat opposite and he heard all four of them.
And at about ten to eleven, after the thing about the armrest, he leaned over and caught my eye and did a face.
A sympathetic face. Eyebrows up, small shake of the head. The face you do.
And I did one back.
And that was the whole of it. Two adults doing faces at each other across an aisle while a third carried on.
And I have been counting him for fourteen months as one of my four witnesses — as somebody who saw it and could confirm it.
He did not confirm anything, because nobody ever asked him, because I never wrote to the airline until the February.
What he actually was, on the ninth of October, is a man who had an aisle seat and a voice and five and a half hours, and who used both on a facial expression.
And I was pleased with him at the time. I remember being grateful.
That is what we have come to, the two of us and everybody else in that cabin. We do faces.
What I actually got.
Eleven seconds.
That is what the scream was worth and I have been spending it for fourteen months.
And here is what I have had to look at since about the June.
I had my phone in my hand.
I had taken it out before I sat down in the new seat and I had it up, at an angle, on my knee.
I did not film anything. I want to be clear. There is no footage and I never pressed anything.
But I had it out, pointing down the cabin, before it happened.
I was ready.
And the only reason there is no video of a woman of about forty screaming at a seatbelt extender is that it happened faster than I expected and my hands are not what they were.
And the seat at the back, which I have been calling worse.
It was 34B. A middle seat.
And I said in my own account that it was nothing like the aisle seat I had paid for, which is true, and which I have used to make the move sound like a punishment.
What I have not said is that the row was empty.
All three. There was nobody in 34A or 34C and there was nobody in 33 either, and Oyin had picked it deliberately, because she had about four seconds and she chose the quietest part of that aircraft for a woman who had just been through two hours of it.
So I spent five and a quarter hours in a row of three to myself, with both armrests up, more comfortable than I had been at the front.
That is what the girl who later had something on her file for four months did for me in four seconds.
And I have described it, thirty-one times, as being moved to a worse seat.
It is not a lie. 34B is a middle seat and I had paid for an aisle and I would have had grounds to say something to Lanark Air about it, and I never did, because I did not want to be asked what happened to the front one.
What I wanted.
Not to be left alone. That is the thing.
If I had wanted to be left alone I would have moved at the twenty-minute mark, when she first said it, which the girl would have arranged inside about ninety seconds.
I sat there for just over two hours.
I asked her to stop, which is the correct thing and which I would tell anybody to do.
And then I sat there, and she carried on, and the flight attendant saw it, and a man across the aisle heard it, and the woman in front turned round twice.
And by the time I got up I had four witnesses to what that woman was.
And I have thought a great deal about whether I stayed in that seat because it was mine and I had paid for it, which is what I say.
And some of it was that.
And some of it was that every minute I sat there she made herself worse in front of more people.
And the letter I finally wrote in the February, which I have presented as putting it right.
Two pages. And I have read it again since, in the June, and it is not what I remembered.
The first page is the ninth of October from my side — the bar, the leg, the armrest, the word people like her. All of it true and all of it, now I look at it, in the order I use when I tell it.
The second page is where the actual information is: that the item was mine, that I placed it, that the crew member was standing in the aisle and said nothing because I was a passenger in distress and she was being decent.
And that is the paragraph that cleared her, and it is four sentences long, on the second page, after a page and a quarter about me.
I wrote a letter to exonerate a twenty-four-year-old and I put my own account first and gave it most of the room.
And Lanark Air did not mind. They thanked me. They closed it.
And in the June, reading it again at my own table, I thought: I could have written four sentences.
Four sentences, in the October, when it had not even happened yet, would have meant it never started.
Instead I wrote two pages in the February, and I got most of a page of being wronged out of it first.
My sister.
She is fifty-eight and she said one thing to me on the telephone that evening that I did not want.
I had got to the scream and she did not laugh.
And she said: "What did you do with the rest of the flight, Marcia?"
And I said what did she mean.
And she said: "Five hours. What did you do?"
I did not sleep. I did not read the thing I had brought.
I sat in a seat at the back of a Lanark Air aircraft for five and a quarter hours going over it, and composing it, and deciding which bits to put in.
And by the time we came down at Corran Bay I had the version that I have told about forty times since, including the heads turning, including the line about not being able to help it.
I built that on the aeroplane. Five hours of it.
And my own sister asked me the right question inside about four minutes and I did not answer her.
And Oyin, who I wrote to in the April.
Through the airline, because you cannot write to crew directly, and it took them about six weeks and I do not know whether she ever got it.
One side. I apologised and I said what she had done and I said she had been right not to put me in her account, and I said I was sorry it had taken until the February.
And no reply, which is correct and which I did not expect.
And in the June I did the thing I am not proud of, which is that I looked.
Not for her. For the airline's own staff thing — there is a page, there are photographs sometimes.
And I spent about twenty minutes on a laptop in my own front room trying to find out whether a twenty-four-year-old still works for Lanark Air.
I did not find anything.
And when I shut that laptop I sat there and understood what I had been doing, which is not checking on her.
I wanted to know whether the harm had gone all the way.
Because if she is still there, then it cost her four months of worry and a letter, and I can carry that.
And if she is not, then what I did on the ninth of October is something else entirely, and I would have to know it.
I would rather not know than find out it was worse.
The bar.
One more thing, and it is small, and it has stayed.
When she said you're eating that, I said I need it.
That is true. I did need it and I knew I did and I had worked out roughly when I would, the way you do after twenty years.
And I have thought about why I answered her at all.
I did not owe that woman a medical explanation at nine in the morning, and the two words I gave her — I need it — put the whole thing onto a footing where my body was a subject we were both discussing.
And once you have explained yourself once to somebody like that, you have agreed that there is something to explain.
I have been doing that since about 1998. In shops, at weddings, at work.
And the version of me that does it is extremely good at it, and gets sympathy, and is never rude, and has spent about thirty years quietly licensing people.
And the forty people, who I have mentioned twice and who I went and counted in the August.
It is not forty. I did a list, which took about twenty minutes, and the honest figure is thirty-one.
My sister. Two people at the surgery. The woman who does my hair, twice, which I think counts once. Four at my cousin's thing in the December. The man who came about the boiler, which I am not proud of.
And a woman at a bus stop at Haleford in the March who I have never met before or since, and who missed her bus.
Thirty-one, in fourteen months, which is about one every other week.
And I have got it down to about four minutes, and there are two places where I pause, and I know which words get the reaction.
And the thing that stopped me in the August, writing that list at my own table, is that I could not remember telling eleven of them.
They are on the list because I worked out that I must have, from where I was and who I saw.
It has stopped being a thing I decide to tell. It is simply what I do now when there is a gap in a conversation and somebody is being pleasant to me.
And the last thing.
I still have it.
You are meant to hand them back. They collect them.
And when I got off at Corran Bay I had it in my bag, because Oyin never came to ask for it and because by then she had other things going on.
And it is in the drawer in my hall and it has been there for fourteen months.
And I have taken it out twice.
And I have told myself, both times, that I keep it because of what I did with it — because it is the one occasion in sixty-one years when the thing that embarrasses me was the thing that worked.
That is the version. It is a good version and I have very nearly believed it.
And what is actually true is that I have asked for one of those on every flight since 2014 and I have not needed one since 2019, and there are going to be more flights.
I did not keep it as a trophy.
May you like
I kept it because it is mine, and because I would rather have it in a drawer in Haleford than ask a man on a gate for one again in that light, quick voice.
And that is the same sentence I have been saying since 2014, and it has nothing to do with a woman on an aeroplane, and I spent fourteen months dressing it up as a story about her.
