There are times when the stars really do line up

Joe Bennett is an award-winning Lyttelton-based writer, columnist and playwright

OPINION: Towards the end of last century a plane was crossing the Atlantic. Among the cabin crew was Sally.

She worked the upstairs cabin, the part beyond the rope of crimson velvet, the part that you and I don’t get to visit. Even at 39,000 feet some people climb a few feet higher. Class they call it, first or business, but its only honest name is money.

Every airliner’s an Icarus in embryo. It speeds through air too thin and cold to breathe, and solar radiation that would shrivel us to nothing, and a single puncture of the metal skin would bring disaster. And yet we passengers sit casually at ease, snacking on the fruits of an earth we’ve left behind. A plane’s a tube of hubris.

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Sally’s job was to attend mainly to men, men with money and status who’d paid above the odds for her attentions. She fed them delicacies. She pampered them. She gratified their whims.

Among the men on that particular flight was Sam with whom I went to university, quick-running and quick-witted Sam, who played a good game on the wing and a fine one in the bar. He’d gone into commerce and now at 35 or so was UK head of some giant international corporation, forever flying the world to boost the business.

But Sam’s material success had failed to solve the matters few of us ever solve. He’d married young, too young perhaps, and the marriage had soured into divorce. So now he was alone again, and still, despite the briefcase and the business class, beset by shyness. “I’ve always been rubbish at asking women out,” is how he puts it. Inside every suit there’s a teenager.

It was a night flight, so Sally had only one ambition: to get a little soporific booze into her brood and then, with lighting dimmed and seats turned horizontal, to lay them down and tuck them in until the cabin of the potentates reverberated with their snores. Then she herself could snatch a little rest before her charges sprang back up again demanding breakfast.

But Sam did not sleep. As you’ve already guessed he’d taken a shine to Sally. He gawped at her then blushed whenever he caught her eye. Sally paid him no especial attention. It was not the first time she’d been ogled at work. Indeed, ogling came with the job.

Sally too, as it happened, had failed to solve the mysteries. Though she was a mother of two, the children’s father proved feckless and he and she had gone their ways. But none of that leaked from her professional exterior.

When the plane landed, Sam had an all too familiar feeling of having failed to prosecute his case. Another flame would gutter as soon as lit.

But as he stood to disembark amid the mess that rich men leave behind after just a few hours of consumption, he remembered a brazen friend from university days. This lad had had business cards printed even when still a student and had handed one to every woman he found attractive. As a reproductive principle it was like the thistle sending out a thousand tiny parachutes of seed in the hope that one, just one, would land on fertile ground.

So as he filed past Sally at the door, who was all smiles and bye and thank you and please come again as per the corporate instructions, Sam slipped a business card into her tiny hand.

And last night, in a Lyttelton seafood restaurant, I had dinner with the pair of them. They’ve been married for 23 years. Happy things do sometimes happen. That’s all.