Lifesaving for Beginners

someone who may not have been a qualified hairdresser. He had a thick fringe that fell to curious grey eyes. His face wasn’t just weather-beaten. It was much worse than that. It looked like it had been attacked by a gale-force wind. He had one of those ‘Irish’ noses: long and narrow. He had one of those ‘full’ mouths: wide and fleshy. The Farmers Journal was stuffed into his laptop bag and he was holding a copy of Dirty Little Secret , which happens to be the first of the Declan Darker books. A dart of something like electricity shot through me. I didn’t know why. I had seen lots of people reading my books over the years.
    That’s when he looked up and caught me staring. He smiled. He said, ‘Are you going to finish that?’ His voice was unexpected. The tone of it. It made me think about Wispa bars, for some reason.
    He nodded at the remains of the sandwich I had ordered from the steward earlier.
    I shook my head.
    ‘Would you mind if I have it? It’s just . . . they’ve stopped serving here and it’s past teatime and I’m maddened with the hunger. I had dinner at one o’clock.’
    I looked at my watch. It was thirteen minutes past five in the evening.
    He said, ‘I’m sorry. I wouldn’t normally ask but there’s no telling when we’ll get off this bird, with the situation inside.’ He nodded towards the terminal building.
    I handed him the box. I said, ‘It’s not very fresh but . . .’
    The remains of the sandwich were gone in two bites. He took a bottle of wine out of his bag, unscrewed the cap and took a long swig from it. Then he offered it to me.
    I said, ‘No thank you,’ in a voice that suggested I wouldn’t dream of drinking at such an ungodly hour.
    He said, ‘Oh, hang on a second,’ and he rummaged around in his bag again. This time, he brought out a crumpled paper cup into which he poured a good measure of wine. He set it on my table top, thrust one of his enormous hands towards me and said, ‘Cunningham. Thomas Cunningham.’ His accent was midlands. Cavan, maybe. Or, worse, Monaghan.
    I said, ‘Kavanagh. Kat Kavanagh.’ Not even Katherine.
    He said, ‘What decade are you on?’
    ‘I beg your pardon?’ Was this some new way of asking people their age? The cheek.
    He said, ‘Of the rosary. There’re four of them. Or five. I was just wondering which one you were on.’ I had forgotten about the rosary beads threaded round my fingers. I do that sometimes. On planes. And trains. In queues. They’re a great deterrent.
    ‘Oh.’ I stuffed the beads into my handbag.
    He said nothing then and I’d say that would have been that, which would have suited me fine. But then I said, ‘Is that one of those Declan Darker books?’ And, just like that, I turned into one of those people I have spent my life avoiding. People who strike up conversations with strangers on planes and trains and in queues.
    He nodded and picked up the book. He said, ‘Have you read them?’
    I nodded. He opened the book. Inside the jacket was a photograph of Killian Kobain. Well, a photograph of an actor posing as the reclusive Killian Kobain.
    Thomas looked at the photograph. ‘It’s funny, you know . . .’
    ‘What?’
    He shook his head and smiled. ‘I read this one years ago. A friend gave it to me. It didn’t have the author’s photograph on the jacket and I just read the book without really paying any attention to who wrote it and I just assumed that the book was written by a woman.’
    ‘Why?’ Nobody had ever questioned Killian Kobain’s gender. His sexuality, yes. Of course. You don’t get to have bone structure like Kobain’s without the occasional allusion to sides and which one you might be batting for.
    Without skipping a beat, Cunningham-Thomas-Cunningham said, ‘Because of the hands.’
    ‘The hands?’
    ‘The way he describes people’s hands. He’s always at it. Men don’t describe hands. And certainly not fingers. Here, try me.’
    He clamped the book over his eyes and said, ‘Go ahead.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Go ahead and ask me.’
    ‘Ask you what?’
    ‘Ask me to describe your hands.’
    It was obvious he wasn’t going to let up so I said, ‘Er, what do my hands look like?’
    And he said, ‘No idea,’ and he lowered the book from his face. ‘See? Now it’s your turn.’
    And there I was, sitting on a plane that was squatting on a runway at Dublin airport on a wet, dreary Friday evening in August, with my hand over my eyes and, beside me, a man I’d just