Hostage by Clare Mackintosh

TWELVE

PASSENGER 17F

My name is George Fleet, and I’m a passenger on Flight 79.

When you’re out shopping and you get hungry, you grab a sandwich, right? Or a burger? And maybe you eat in, or maybe you take it outside, sit on a bench—even eat as you walk. Right?

Now let me tell you how it works for me.

First, I have to psych myself up. Do I really have to do this? Am I hungry enough to put myself through it? Hell yes, of course I’m hungry—I’m always fucking hungry. Okay, so I have to eat. I’m sweating just thinking about it, but I’m gonna do it.

I’d like a burger, but am I going to bring that on myself? When the calories are right there, printed on the wall by each picture? Nope. Not gonna do it. A sandwich, then, so I join the queue, start looking through the glass at the trays of tuna and egg salad.

Did you know you canfeel people looking at you? Never experienced that? You’re lucky. It burns like acid on the back of your neck, even before you hear the whispers, the sniggers. Gets worse when I order, of course. Ham and salad, I think. That’s okay. That’s healthy.

“Do you want mayo?”

My stomach growls. Somebody laughs. I shake my head.

“Butter?”

Mostly I say no to that too. Swallow down dry bread rather than face the jeers. But sometimes—fuck it!—sometimes I want to eat what everyone else eats. What you eat, without even thinking about it.

“Yeah,” I say. “Butter would be good. Thanks.”

A snort from behind me. A muttered aside. I tap my card, take my sandwich, fighting to get out before the violent flush I can feel on my neck reaches my face, where they’ll know they’ve got to me. I’ve heard it all.Fatty. Maybe try a salad. Ever heard of exercise? Oink oink…

I’ve always been big. Tall with it. Broad. And yeah, fat. At thirteen, I had bigger tits than the girls. On the first day of GCSEs, I walked into the hall to find they’d shipped in a load of chairs with desks fixed to each one, a gap on one side for you to get in. I thought I was going to be sick. I caught Mr. Thomas’s eye, silently begging him to realize that there was no way I was going to get into one of those chairs, that they were made for fucking Hobbits, but he just looked at his clipboard and ticked me off his list.

I still have nightmares about it, you know. Wake up sweating in the dark, because for a second, I was back there, hearing the laughter of a hundred kids echoing around the gym, burning with humiliation as everyone else sat down and I stood waiting for them to haul in a table and a chair.

I never finished my exam.

So anyway. Buying a sandwich. Maybe I take it to the park and walk till I find a bench they haven’t added those armrests to. They’re to stop people from lying down on them, but you try wedging your ass cheeks between them when your jogging bottoms are made to order from BigBoys.com. Maybe you’d just flop on the grass, kick off your shoes, and enjoy your sandwich in the sun? Yeah. If I try that, I’m not getting up without some serious machinery.

By the time I’ve found somewhere I can sit down, away from the judgmental stares of people who think fatties shouldn’t eat, my sandwich has lost its appeal. A man’s still gotta eat, you know? Dropping five hundred calories a day is enough to lose weight steadily, they reckon. Well, that still puts me needing well over three thousand a day.

Funnily enough, I don’t get out much. I’ve had enough embarrassment in pubs to know you can’t tell a chair’s strength just by looking at it, and I can’t stand for long because of the pain in my hips. Ironic, really: I wanted to be a stand-up comedian.

I’m funny, you see. Maybe not now, not like this, but I can be. Only way to cope, isn’t it—laughing at yourself? If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry, they say.

So on the plane, when I realized the seat belt wouldn’t fit, I made a joke of it to the guy on my left. “I’m your airbag. I guess I inflated a bit early!”

He forced a smile, even though half my butt cheek was bursting under the armrest onto his seat. I wondered how cool he’d be after five or ten hours of leaning to the left. I’d seen his face as I lumbered toward the empty seat next to his.Fuck’s sake. Why does he have to sit next to me?

I’d been given an aisle seat, thank God, which just meant twisting to the side each time the trolley passed, so I supposed I’d be staying awake for twenty hours. No rest for the wicked, isn’t that what they say? I could have done with the extra room in business class, but there’s a pecking order everywhere you go, and I’ve always been at the bottom of it.

I knew I wouldn’t be able to get the tray table down, so I didn’t even try, even though it meant saying no to every meal. I had energy bars in my pocket so I could eat them in the toilet—assuming I could get into it. So much to think about, so much in my head as the plane took off.

But I’m going to change everything in Australia. Lose weight, make friends, kick-start my comedy career. Flight 79 marks the end of a chapter I never want to read again and the beginning of a whole new one. I’m starting over.

I’ve never been happier.