Sara's Story - by Jonathan Malory - Chapter X - Aboard

A complicated sequence of events led to Sara finding herself sitting in a washroom of a Virgin Airways plane flying from Tokyo Narita to London Heathrow. She was four hours into the flight with over eight hours to go. She wasn’t sure she could bear another five minutes sitting next to Mrs Cooper and her endless recollections of her family achievements and pitfalls.

Charlie Cooper won his year’s spelling contest at the age of five, it had taken Mrs Cooper over an hour to get to this point in her son’s life but she assured Sara that it would be a roller coaster ride for the next sixteen years or so.

At the ripe old age of six he was the top of his class in maths, setting himself up for a life of accounting. When he was seven Charlie raised a total of seven pounds and fifty pence for a local charity, it was the second largest amount any pupil of his school had ever collected that year.

The highlight of his eighth year was the brave rescue of an orphaned hedgehog. Mrs Cower had mowed down the rest of the family in her Vauxhall Viva, then driven on without stopping. The hedgehog was formally christened Gilbert and became a member of the Cooper household, residing in a shoebox under Charlie’s bed for nearly a whole year.

Two days before Charlie’s ninth birthday poor Gilbert passed away, a solemn burial ceremony was carried out by Charlie himself on the field behind the school. The neighbours said it was worthy of anything Father McGuire could cook up on a Sunday morning.

Still, Charlie's ninth year on Earth was remarkable for more than his legendary ‘Sermon on the Field’; it was this year, during the summer break, that Charlie met his first ever girlfriend, Gladys, while on holiday in Eastbourne.

Oh how pleased his family were that Charlie was becoming a regular Casanova. The love affair of the century lasted nearly a whole three weeks, another twelve years would pass before there was a second girlfriend in Charlie’s life.

After the heartbreak caused by his first love, Charlie announced to the world that he would have nothing more to do with girls.  Mrs Cooper was not certain at which point this decision ceased to be choice and became a regrettable lifestyle. It was around this time that Brenda, Charlie’s mum Mrs Cooper, started to notice his lack of friends.

Charlie never had callers at the house, never read comic books, never read any kind of books but, instead, seemed to have an unnatural obsession with counting. To this day his psychiatrist seems to think this may be something to do with his early success in the area of mathematics, combined with the overwhelming shower of praise that his mother bestowed upon him at the time and the loss of his father at such an early age.

Charlie was focusing on his one great, possibly only, success in life. Mrs Cooper went to great pains, at least an hour’s worth, to explain to Sara that this was of course complete and utter nonsense. There was a whole string of successes in Charlie’s life that had nothing to do with counting, Sara was informed by Brenda. After which she went on to list a number of counting related upsets in his life.

Charlie’s favourite number is 100, it has to be a figure and not, one hundred; he likes to count items up to 100 then start again until he has another 100, and so on until he has 100 100s. This was not a huge problem when counting pins, matches and buttons and such, but one day Mrs Cooper came home and found 100 ornamental gnomes congregated on her front lawn, with Charlie centre stage screaming with joy as Constable Shoemaker leant over the picket fence and attempted to interrogate the fanatical counter.

Charlie would not allow the gnomes to be returned to their home gardens, the neighbours were very nice about the whole affair, happily accepting Mrs Cooper’s offer of monetary compensation.

The 100 gnomes cost Mrs Cooper a grand total of £2500, a number that greatly disturbed Charlie for many years to come. This was also Charlie’s first experience with the harshness of reality and the consequences of one’s actions, as Mrs Cooper put it, and made it her lifelong mission to remind Charlie of the incident on a weekly basis.

When Charlie was twelve he received £5 pocket money per week from his mother. On the same Friday he rushed to the post office and had his disturbing £5 note exchanged for 100 lovely silver 5 pence pieces and, as is hobby was collecting pocket money, he never ever spent any of it. On the following Friday he took his coins and his note to the post office and exchanged them for 100 10 pence pieces; the next week he’d be left with 100 10 pence pieces and 100 5 pence pieces; then 100 20 pence pieces the week after that. After ten weeks he was very happy to change all his money for 100 50 pence pieces, which were bigger and much nicer; until ten weeks after that when he had 100 £1 coins.

Then, for the first time, a month short of two years Charlie came sort of full circle when he had 100 £5 notes. Charlie did get jobs and earn more money but remained obsessed with collecting £5 pounds per week and amassing units of 100 until, nine and a half years later, he’d collected 50 lots of 100 £5 notes, kicked his mother’s front door in and carpeted her front room with the Queen’s head and ran out of the house laughing like an escapee from Alcatraz. Brenda put it all down to his new girlfriend, thought little more of it and spent the money on a trip to Japan.

For Sara the story was tedious to say the least. It would have been bad under any circumstances, but Sara had already lived through the entire conversation in a vision she had in the Gobi while carrying the Book. She knew everything Brenda was going to say and do, either moments before she said and did them or, sometimes, she saw the next ten minutes to half an hour spread before her like a thick tangle of utter tedium.

Sara was sitting on the toilet now, breathing deeply and bracing herself for the second onslaught. Brenda was going to relate the unhappy tale of her daughter, Sandra. The memory flashbacks hadn’t started coming to Sara yet, but she had a deep sense of anxiety and was clinging desperately to the little washbasin trying not to have a full-blown panic attack. The effects of the Door, her wandering in the desert, the pull of the island and Brenda Cooper were gnawing at her temples like a brace and bit.

Then she heard it and everything was all right, those first words that marked what should be a frightening situation, only she’d already seen it all the way through to its conclusion.

‘Everybody please remain calm, no one will be hurt if they all do as we say, the plane will be taking a small detour.’

Sara made to step out from the washroom with the biggest grin of relief she could ever have imagined. It was like she was watching herself from within, she knew everything she was going to say and do, there was no way of avoiding it, and she liked it.

Two men in blue business suits were nervously making an attempt at hijacking the plane, it was like a rerun of her favourite movie; the one where everything turns out okay.

She was sort of separate from it all and found herself able to have her own internal dialogue apart from the main action. Sara opened the washroom door a few inches, she could only see one of the hijackers through the inch-wide opening, but she knew there were two, she was the director of this little movie… Begin waving weapons in 3, 2, 1 and… Business suit number two, with the spiky short black hair, began waving a couple of crudely put together pistols over the passenger’s heads… Sara steps fully out of the washroom and startles hijacker number one and… Cue hysterical Brenda the bore, her most thrilling performance ever…

‘Why, why are you doing this?’ Photographs depicting the many stages of Charlie Cooper were strewn like ceremonial rose petals as they spilled, curling at the corners, from Brenda’s lap.

Charlie smiled from his spinning rectangle of photographic paper as he danced through the air in a ballistic arc from Brenda’s whirling 1970s cream vinyl hand bag and landed with a sting like a ninja’s throwing star in the blond haired hijacker’s left eye.

Sara let out a wild laugh as she watched Brenda, for a second time, unable to control her momentum, tumble completely over the bundling terrorist like a circus clown and knock herself out on the silver corner of an arm rest.

‘Hello, what are you doing?’ Sara asked the still standing wannabe hijacker, who was a little unnerved by Sara’s disregard for her fellow passenger and the fact that despite him having two pistols pointing at her, she had a grin traversing her face like a single span suspension bridge. ‘Now you tell me to go back to my seat, that way you wont have to shoot me.’

‘Well you should just go back to your seat, please,’ he sounded a bit desperate, ‘then I wont have to shoot you.’

 The spiky-haired man came sidling along the opposite aisle, training his useless pistols on the grinning Sara. She took the time to look around at the other passengers, never having noticed how terrified they all looked the first time. She felt a little sorry for them, wishing she could tell them everything would be fine in just a few seconds.

‘Oh don’t be silly, you can’t shoot me with them; in fact you aren’t going to shoot anybody.’ Sara folded her arms and leaned her back against the partition wall, crumpling the grey-blue curtains that separated the first class passengers at the front from the comedy special being played out in economy.

The man was getting very suspicious now, figuring some kind of trap had been laid for him. He sharply swept the curtain away on his side of the plane then spun too quickly back towards Sara. He carelessly crunched his kneecap on the corner of the metal armrest, the cousin of the silver assailant that laid Mrs Cooper out cold. Yelping and cursing, extremely angry now, the man aimed his pistol at Sara, ‘Sit down now before I blow your fu..

‘Oh come now there’s no need for all that cursing, we’ll have you locked up in a dingy Moskva prison in no time; nice and cosy.’ She taunted.

Both the man’s guns backfired and sent streaks of powder burns up his blue clad arms and across his face from either direction, making him look like an imitation of Stan Laurel after a gunpowder related accident, that was only emphasized by his black spiky hair. His body gave way and wilted to the floor as Sara wailed with joy, definitely better the second time around.

An angry mob, that didn’t see the funny side at all, jumped the other hijacker and tied him up with cord they ripped from life preservers. The other man was helped by a doctor before being tied up himself, the captain heard nothing of the scuffle or even the misfired gunshots. After a brief talk on her radio, she diverted her plane to Domodedovo International Airport, south of Moscow in Russia, where the duo were wanted for questioning.

Mrs Cooper had a suspected concussion and was kept back at a Moscow hospital for overnight observation. Unfortunately, poor Mrs Cooper could not continue on the same flight to London with Sara.