Blue Dress Hot Mess

I have nothing to do in Shanghai airport and 8 hours to do it in. Shanghai lies outside the window, but all I can see is a Holiday Inn. 

There is a family of matching Christmas-jumper wearers and a mango smoothie all over the floor. (My suitcase wheels slid through it, dragging yellow mush for miles down the moving travelator). A woman wraps her bag in sellotape and a girl cries great mascara-clumping tears down the phone on the benches. I eat 2 cereal bars in quick succession and buy a Starbucks chai latte to make me feel like bedtime. 

There is a whole group of us in the ladies loos brushing our teeth and washing our faces before a flight. I feel oddly part of something, like this is the traveller’s version of the girl’s loos in a dingy night club, reeking of fags and dehydrated piss. Shanghai smells like Pho noodles and sanitiser. Better, I feel. 

The world goes on out there, so I am too excited to sleep. My window is a black opal. An oval stone, an engagement ring. I know I am screwing myself over, not sleeping now, but I can’t do it, can’t do it, can’t do it. At least I have pretended. I am watching films at 3:32AM and pausing them to kiss the clock for good luck at 03:33. The digits clang through me slightly; 03:33. It will be a long day. New Year’s Eve. Beach clubs. Parties. 

Today is tomorrow is yesterday and I have never needed a coffee more. They are being slow with breakfast. It is prawn garlic pasta (it is 08:40AM) and I will eat it all up. (I eat quickly and hungrily, leaving the lychee jelly and yoghurt which tastes like baby formula. The milk bread and honey is good; the rest I’d rather not think about. I wonder what the French would make of such a spread). My handwriting has turned childlike and curly. I didn’t realise the effect of no sleep on my brain would render me stupid and babyish, but it has. I have finished a large bag of nuts and berries and now feel sick, but still hungry. It says it is 08:28. It isn’t – at least not where I’m going, nor where I came from, nor where I am. It has turned to night again outside my window (we had blue sky over Japan, cerulean), and I realise suddenly that I am flying through seasons, backtracking winter — autumn — to land ripe-plum hot into summer. 

I fill out my Visa card and conveniently forget the packet of truffle nuts packed in my pale yellow suitcase. No, I have never set foot on a farm. I write the address – 31/12/2025 – for the last time. It feels like some minor victory, some great completion. My eyes are dragging anchor. The plane is still in the sky. 

My nose is pressed to the window, not a black opal anymore but a dirty moonstone — dusty. Am I in the right country? I’m sure I can see snow on the mountains. The plane is landing (slowly, slowly), so perhaps I could ask it to turn around. It looks like desert beneath me. I am thinking of rosé and hot springs. I am so ready. (My snow is clouds. We are still high up. I am delusional and flying through time, ether, mist, years). 

The first guy I see has a mullet. He is driving the suitcase trolley, at speed, backwards. Thick plumes of black hair protrude from under his cap. They are playing Auld Lang Syne as we step off the plane. China Eastern Airways wishing you a pleasant ongoing journey. Kind regards.

01/01/26:

It is the New Year, and Australia is more beautiful than I had imagined. Lucy’s mother’s first comment as we walked through the door was a demand to rationalise the heaped pile of flip-flops at the beach house’s entrance. I smiled. I had not travelled hundreds (of thousands?) of miles to have the same deaf-child’s ears as at home. The International Language of Mothers requires no translation.

He held her like a prize he wasn’t quite certain how he’d won. He had no acceptance speech prepared, just two fake-steady hands around her slim peplum-topped waist. The New Year is half an hour old and I have discovered that Orion’s belt is buckled tighter in Australia; his waistband — that black-blue bottom mascara in the waterline of the sky — is so much vaster than it is at home. Belt loops shrink; sky grows; crystal stars and studded belts. Lady Gaga singing about Leather Studded Kisses in the Sand). His lips are hot from her kisses. My back is burning in this heat; I welcome the New Year alone.

All the girls are asleep. We wear friendship bead-bracelets made by a little blonde girl by the beach, who said shyly that she was saving up to buy a bunny. (She had bunnies on her cardi, and wanted one in her hands — chubby and stubbed, as all 6 year-old’s hands are). Her big brothers sold Lemon-AID for two dollars per plastic cup (red) and operated a smart-card machine like big-city brokers. (Beach-side banking). We buy soda and flush away our hangovers. We wear matching thongs – flip-flops and underwear. I feel part of a trans-Pacific sorority. Red love hearts, pink knickers, Vegemite toast and apples. The clouds chase the sun; there is no time for jet lag here. My mind left my body in Shanghai. (Perhaps it was Japan). I am uncertain I will find her again. I am a half-self; so happy.

02/01/26:

The sun is a blushing child hiding behind her mother’s knees. The tan in Europe is a glow; here it is a flat-tan, deeper than the skin, rooted in muscle and bush. I have not seen a kangaroo. I walk uncertainly on the wrong side of the road and feel the oil of my face running, slipping, slicking as I pull my fingers across my nose. They say they have Hayfever, so I forget it’s winter somewhere.