If I told my new friend the truth, our friendship would be over

‘Achoo!’ was the first thing the girl sitting next to me on the plane said as I took my seat beside her. She groaned and blew her nose, coughed, spluttered, and apologised. ‘It’s hay fever, honestly,’ she said. She was in the window seat, I was in the middle. The older lady beside me in the aisle seat grimaced.

‘Please, don’t worry,’ I said to the sneezing girl. ‘I’m so over it. I couldn’t care less if it’s hay fever or if it’s Covid.’

She smiled, fumbled, and offered me a Strepsil, that well-known cure for the effects of pollen. I liked her immediately – something about her fidgety energy, her tousled short hair – so I took a cough sweet even though I don’t like them. She popped it out of its blister pack and it flew down between the sticky budget airline seat arms.

I poked my hand down, retrieved it from an absolutely filthy little nook and put it in my mouth. She looked impressed. ‘I am so past all of it, I just couldn’t care less about anything,’ I said. She laughed, nodded frantically.

I even like lefties here, I thought

She was Irish, a nurse. We began chattering and before the pilot had taxied to the runway we were firm friends. She agreed with me wanting to move to West Cork. She was going back there to help her parents paint a post and rail fence. But she loved London, working in a busy teaching hospital. She had kept her clinic open throughout lockdown. We had a grand meeting of minds as we told each other how we felt about people who hid away and were scared. ‘When your number’s up…’ I said, stopping myself because we were on a plane, after all.

She said: ‘Right!’ Then: ‘And anyway, you’ve had all your vaccinations, haven’t you?’