2.1
She stood in the aisle beside her back-row seat. Behind her the other passengers jostled for a place in the tightly packed queue. After a ten-hour bus ride, another hour in transit to Tullamarine airport, and a tedious three-hour wait for a smooth four-hour flight across the desert guts of Australia, her skin felt dirty and sticky and she hankered for somewhere, anywhere, quiet, cool and still.
Instead, the steward opened the plane’s rear door and Perth greeted her with a gust of hot, dry air. November, and it must have been a hundred degrees.
The heat was at once exotic and familiar, the heat she grew up with in Perth, the sort of heat she craved all those years in London, the heat that drew her to Malta. Heading for the shelter of the concrete and glass arrivals building she felt
