It was, evidently, a bad day to travel.

When Matt dropped Rona off at the airport, it seemed well before time: almost an hour before her flight. He'd assured her it would be plenty of time: he could testify that he'd caught many a flight with only twenty or sometimes even fifteen minutes to spare. "They might tell you to run" he said, "but you'll still make it."

Well, that confidence withered pretty quickly when they got to the airport. The queue reached from the Virgin check-in area down the length of the terminal so far that it started to get tangled up with queues for other airlines, such that Rona and Matt - he'd parked the car and come in with her, he was a little worried about her as she still hadn't really told him what this was all about, other than that it was a "family emergency", and he hadn't wanted to push her - they ran up and down the queue, trying to determine the lines of people and where they split off towards each desk, or each self-check-in machine.

Rona had never seen one of these machines before. It'd been that long since she'd last flown. She had to seek out a Virgin employee and ask her to explain the process to her, and after she'd gone through it all, after she'd checked herself in, she found that she still had to queue anyway to put her luggage on the 'plane. "Well what the hell was the point of that, then?" she asked Matt.

Matt didn't answer: he took the question to be rhetorical, and maybe it was, and anyway he was more pre-occupied by the serpentine throngs in the airport. He certainly would've remembered if it'd been like this last time he'd been here. "It must be Christmas" he murmured.

Rona eventually got to the head of the queue, put her bag on the scales, said goodbye to Matt, went through the x-ray, found the right gate. The flight, at least, was on time and relatively quick. But the problems hadn't finished: Rona got off the flight, and walked through Sydney airport to the luggage conveyors, and waited, and waited, and waited. Eventually the conveyor stopped moving, and Rona went looking for the lost luggage desk. A couple of quick 'phone calls from the man behind the desk confirmed that her bag had never made it onto the 'plane.

"But it's only one flight!" Rona pointed out, disbelief in her voice. "How could they fuck that up?"

"I'm sorry, madam" the man said. "I'll see if I can get your bag put on a flight later today. If you write down the address where you'll be staying in Sydney, we'll courier it to you."

Rona sighed, and did as he suggested: she didn't have much choice, really. It was frustrating: not so much her bag being still in Melbourne, but the fact that she couldn't express her anger about it to anybody. It wasn't the man behind the counter's fault - it wasn't even his company's fault. The airline was safely insulated behind this company, whose unhappy role it was to retrieve the luggage that the airline had lost. Rona wrote her 'phone number down, too, so that the company could call her and let her know what was going on.

So she picked up the small shoulder-bag she'd taken on board the 'plane and stepped outside to look for her aunt, who had volunteered to pick her up. The weather hit her as soon as she stepped outside: warm, just like in Melbourne, but humid, too. She'd forgotten how humid Sydney could get. It was like a close embrace. Rona couldn't help it: in spite of everything, a grin came to her face, her mouth opening wide like a flower blossoming. She just couldn't hold it back. It was the first time she'd grinned in a long time.