Slum Class
Short Story
“It’s a trade-off, I suppose!” shouted Henry over the noise of the aeroplane.
Aziz nodded and shrugged, in spite of the straight-jacket of clothes he’d wrapped himself in before takeoff. “I mean, it was a hundred bucks!” he shouted in response.
The two men shivered in the freezing cold, the plane careering through the sky somewhere over the Middle East. They stood, rather than sit on the thin layer of hay cast over the cold, metal floor. Besides, there wasn’t enough room to sit down, anyway. The luggage took up most of the space; the other passengers of Slum Class took up the rest. There were fifty of them crammed into a space barely bigger than a small office.
Trans-Pacific Airways, in an effort to prop up their bottom line, had recently introduced ‘Slum Class.’ Although slammed in the twenty-four hour news cycle for the use of “offensive language” used to describe this subsection of passengers, the move had proved quite popular. For young backpackers and cheapskates everywhere, like Aziz and Henry, $100 from Sydney to London was the steal of the century — whatever they were referred to as, and despite the frankly torturous conditions of the journey.
Fourteen hours to Dubai, where Slum Class were let out to defrost for a few hours in the sweltering heat, before being piled back into the cargo hold for another seven hours to London. Most of Slum Class were backpackers, around Henry and Aziz’s age, though there was one ambitious father had his son with him. The kid had stopped complaining only after the other passengers pooled their remaining Ambian and gave it to him. After all, there wasn’t enough space for them all to succumb to chemically-induced sleep.
“Are we there yet?” asked Henry, not for the first time.
Aziz didn’t acknowledge his friend’s tired attempt at humour. Some other passengers did. “Shut it, heathen!” yelled a priest. The Vatican, it seemed, were cutting costs.
“Yeah, shut up!” yelled someone else, a great big unhealthy man with a blank scalp.
A few other passengers joined in the chorus. It seemed that violence was inevitable in the poorly-lit container. Hours in the cold with only one toilet was proving too much to bear.
“Alright guys, I’m sorry, I — ” started Henry, before the cabin was suddenly awash in light. A flight attendant, appearing in a door above, artfully crouched with her knees closed.
“You lot alright?” she yelled in to the din.
“Yeah,” Slum Class begrudgingly replied in unison.
“Alright,” she said. “Lunch time.”
From behind her appeared large bins, held by the other flight attendants. They were tipped and emptied, their contents cascading down. All the unfinished meals from First Class to Economy fell onto Slum Class, and Slum Class scrambled to scavenge what they could.
“It’s a trade-off!” shouted Henry again, as he snatched at a small bread roll.
“Shut up!” Aziz yelled, as he clutched a half-eaten apple.
