I would like to express my gratitude to those who read and reviewed the early drafts of my work, especially my dear friend Trudi Morrissey and my niece, Ronnie Deery.
I should particularly like to mention authors Diane Dickson, Kirk Haggerty and Tonia Marlowe whose critiques helped me to improve the story.
To my beta readers who never fail me.
We called them rough books or jotters, those thick, grey-covered exercise books we were given for taking notes in at school. The ones we used for ‘real work’ were coloured according to the subject: blue for Maths, yellow for English, green for Geography and so on. Anyway, none of that really matters. What was important was that I’d found a rough book after all those years … well, to be precise I’d found my rough book from year 10. I’d been fifteen and full of it! The battered grey cover was smothered in graffiti: ‘I luv J.G.’, ‘Luvsik Kitten Rules!’ and other similar sentiments declaring my undying love for the band of the moment. Almost thirty years on, I smiled at the memories brought back by my teenage scribblings.
Clearing out the attic had been Trudi’s idea. She thought it was high time I got over the whole divorce thing and put Bob out of my mind for ever. Not that I was thinking about him much by then. The hurt was healing at last. Hearts don’t really break, do they? They just get squeezed out of shape by life, and I was better off without him anyway – everyone said so. Anyway, it was a wet Friday evening in October and, having nothing better to do, I’d decided to tackle the boxes that I’d dragged around unopened for most of my adult life. It was kind of fun – until I opened the rough book and flicked through it. That was when I discovered the list. If I hadn’t found the bloody thing I’d have been fine. ‘My Plans for Life’ – written when I was fifteen – my hopes and dreams summed up in a few bullet points, and here I was, well past my sell-by date, and I’d achieved hardly any of them. Where did I go wrong? How did those dreams escape so easily? Unable to come up with the answers, I did what any woman would do in the circumstances: I sat on the floor and cried my heart out.
* * * * *
The next day, Des called round for breakfast. I hadn’t seen him for a few days and he was just what I needed. He always knew the right thing to say. Over bacon sandwiches, I revealed the cause of my distress.
‘Why don’t you just go for it?’ he asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The list – why not do all the things on your list? How hard can it be?’
I loved his optimism. I’d known Des for eight months. We’d met at a Creative Writing group I joined just after my divorce and had been great mates ever since. He was a dreamer too, but he had this really positive outlook and once he made up his mind to do something it usually got done. If anyone could make dreams come true it was Des. He asked me to give him the list.
‘I’ll help you. We can do this.’ Then he looked at it and laughed out loud. ‘Lydia, honey, you are one crazy lady.’
‘It’s impossible, right? I’m just one big, fat failure destined to live a life of disappointment!’ I was close to tears again, but Des put his arm around my shoulders and stroked my hair.
‘Not at all; you’re just unhappy and lacking in confidence.’ He hugged me. ‘But, you’re also a bit of a drama queen.’ He released me and sat at my desk. ‘Now let’s look at your list again and get this show on the road.’
So Des drew up an action plan. Seriously, he tackled my list as if it were a business proposition.
‘We need targets,’ he said, ‘SMART targets.’
‘As opposed to dumb ones?’
‘It’s an acronym … S.M.A.R.T. Your targets should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-scaled. That’s how it’s done in the business world.’
‘We may have a problem with achievable and realistic,’ I said, looking over his shoulder at the table he was creating on my laptop.
‘Don’t hit me with them negative waves so early in the morning.’ Des’s impression of Donald Sutherland in Kelly’s Heroes always cracked me up.
So we set about our plan of action, because now it somehow belonged to Des too. I wasn’t alone any more and he was determined not to let me fail. I printed the action plan and stuck it on the fridge.
‘So you’ve never been on a plane?’ Des was amazed. ‘How does that work? Haven’t you been abroad?’
‘Of course I have. I just don’t fly. It scares me.’
‘How do you know if you’ve never done it? I mean, you wrote this when you were fifteen, right? Most kids of that age are dying to travel the world. They don’t know what fear is.’
‘Well, maybe I do … er … did. Anyway, I had my reasons and I’m still scared, OK?’
‘Do you want to talk about it?’
‘No, thanks. Shall I make more coffee?’
It wasn’t that I didn’t trust Des, or that I thought he wouldn’t understand; it was just too difficult for me to open up to anyone about … well, anything really, but especially about that. I still wake up at night sometimes, remembering Mum crying when she told me Dad had suffered a fatal heart attack, flying home from his cousin’s funeral in Ireland. I was nine at the time and he was my world. I blamed the plane, of course. At nine, I didn’t know any better, but the idea stuck with me.
Des squeezed my shoulder gently. ‘I’ll make the coffee. You get onto Mr Google and see if you can find out how to get over this.’
* * * * *
There are lots of ways to overcome your fears, I’ve discovered. There are also lots of companies advertising on the Internet who can’t actually deliver the goods.
I googled ‘fear of flying’ and soon found a number of likely looking courses that claimed they could help me. I’d probably have done better to go to one of the major airlines who all offer courses, but the cost was prohibitive.