Short Story: The Journey

Short Story: The Journey

I made several journeys that summer, each one progressively shorter than the last.

Three consecutive dry weeks in April made up my mind; this would be the Summer I travelled, despite all, as I reasoned even though my condition was getting worse, I needed something, an experience, let's say, without precedence in my mundane existence to date, to escape to when the end hoved into sight. No punctuation of life's closing paragraphs before arriving at the inescapable full stop, was an insidious thought that would destroy me if I did not do something about it.

**

I packed after supper, went to bed an hour early, got up a couple of hours sooner than I generally had, showered as normal.

Before I was completely dry I phoned a taxi before I changed my mind. The taxi arrived within half an hour and drove me to the bus station.

I had left a note for the landlord, put the keys through the door, got in the cab and wound down the window.

My hair was still damp in places.

At the bus station I directed the driver to platform A6 where he helped me retrieve my backpack, which he had stowed in the boot. I gave him a twenty-euro note and did not wait for the five I was due in change. He said something to me in Croat that sounded like 'nas-drav-ye', which I took to mean thank you, but which I later learned meant God bless you.

The bus departed twenty minutes late heading north-east with the majority of passengers, including myself, sat in shade, at west facing window seats. A couple of hours went by before we pulled off the main drag into a small market town, where the driver announced a fifteen-minute toilet break.

Nearly all the passengers got off the bus. Some bought hot drinks at a burger stand. I remained put and watched a queue form at the toilets, but as I had only drank one small black coffee all morning and did not want to urinate just yet, I thought it best to look away from the toilet block.

Over by the main road leading north out of town, a line of Poplars partially obscured electricity pylons emerging out of a pale wash horizon. I squinted to see better but the pylons still appeared unsubstantial in the mid-morning heat haze. I imagined at their zenith a secret highway in the sky, engines fitted with silencers, no car roofs or windows or traffic calming measures just wind and sun and warm rain, orderly travel without destination, or limit upon time.

I thought about the highway in the sky whilst I ate a sandwich. I imagined my blood sugar levels were low. I took five draws on my nicotine inhalator, put the mouthpiece to my nose and breathed in deeply before I shoved it back in my jeans pocket. Traces of smoked cheese on my fingers, redolent of burned tobacco, completed the smoking charade.

I looked up and saw a new batch of travellers get on the bus. I averted my eyes from them, but was a little late in doing so and when I woke all of three hours later I realised the young woman who had caught my eye boarding, who asked if I minded if she sat next to me, even though there were several empty window seats she could have taken, who immediately told me her name was Catriona, that she was named after her great-grandmother, who confessed conspiratorially she had very little money, fewer morals still, and was not a person I could trust, who later informed me she was thinking of doing Art or maybe becoming an English student, she wasn't sure which right now, and could not it later transpired, care less, whose dainty hands trembled when she fell silent, whose cheek and stomach muscles sporadically danced or 'jamped around wildly' as she put it, 'like a bride's hair extensions on her wedding night', who I thought may never tire of discussing the Spanish Civil War, The International Brigade, Picasso, Orwell, Laurie Lee et al, still slept soundly; my shoulder a makeshift headrest.

The bus left the coast road, five minutes later pulled into the station at the hub of the resort.

I eased Catriona off my shoulder and prised her fingers away from my arm. I brushed my black cotton T-Shirt clean of a powdery pollen-like substance (pale blusher) and observed her still sleeping. I drew back a curtain of bleach blonde hair from her cheek and taking her shoulders, corrected her posture, but found that every time I tried to set her head and body straight her head lolled back toward me.

'Time to wake up?'

She did not wake or even stir so I had one last go at trying to get her head to fit into the crook of the headrest, but it lolled again, and this time, with somnambulant tenacity, Catriona lassoed my arm with both of hers, tightened the noose on me when I tried to free myself.

Passengers who had already got to their feet were now gathering bags, searching pockets for cigarettes and mobile phones.

I gave up on the idea of leaving Catriona asleep and trying to squeeze past her and thought it best to wake her.

'This is me,' I said, gently easing her back towards her own seat, 'I get off here.'

'What...' Catriona opened her eyes, quickly let go when she realised she had me snared in an arm-lock, 'oh sorry...what time is it?'

'Just after one.'

'Is it, aye. It is, is it?'

She blinked heavily, several times, which when done seemed to entice a small group of her facial muscles just to the left of the nose, to 'jamp'.

After the blinking subsided she first shook her head then yawned. After the second in a series of yawns came to an abrupt end the jamping face muscles stilled. All the while I observed Catriona I felt...something. Her eyes were lavishly decorated with dark blue eyeliner and a platinum coloured eye shadow. Her short nails had once been varnished metallic blue, but not for some time. Hair shaven at the neck was cropped less short around about ear-level, which made me think of a championship golf course and two neat cuts of fairway rough. I saw that the longer bleached hair on top of her head showed redder at the roots and was alternately spiky and limp. A white vest top in stretchy cotton, buttoned below her small breast, was tucked into denim shorts. Dirty ballet shoes in canvas were no bigger than size four.

Catriona, I decided, did not have great dress sense but was very pretty.

When the yawning stopped at last and she forced her eyes to open wide, I focussed on her face.

'You sure you're okay?'

'I just need my rest. It's the meds you see, I have to sleep sometimes. Sorry about me... you know?'

She indicated my shoulder.

'Using me as a pillow?'

'Hmm,' her faced jamped, but only slightly.

'Well then,' I said, 'I ought to be getting off.'

'I'm away for a slash, too,' she said.

Catriona tagged her way onto the tail end of departing passengers. I waited a moment. The isle was clear by the time I got my things together. Coming down the steps I saw Catriona light up a king size cigarette in the queue for the ladies. I made for a kiosk that sold soft drinks and overpriced minimum strength C-Bombs in foil wrappers. I got there without limping holding my stick just below the neck and clear of the tarmac pavement, behind me. At the kiosk I bought a can of home brand Dandelion & Burdock. My would-be Art cum English student friend from Scotland, who emerged from the loo with another cigarette just lit, joined me at the kiosk. I declined the offer of a drag on her Silk Cut, and gave her what was left of my fizzy drink. A new driver got onboard the bus. Catriona bought a bag of sherbet lemons. I declined one when offered and hefted my back pack onto one shoulder and left it there because I hadn't far to carry it but chiefly because I could not seem to fit my arm in and behind the other strap in order to position it symmetrically on my back, in the manner the manufacturer advised in order to safeguard the user from injury.

I spied a taxi rank less than seventy-five metres away. When I half-turned to get a better look I felt my lower back twinge.

'Well,' I said smiling at Catriona, 'bye then?'

'Wait!' Catriona skipped around me and grabbed my upper arm. She extricated the errant strap, which had apparently caught on a zip, and guided my arm through the space, helped me ease the weight into place.

'Better?'

I shrugged twice to settle the weight more evenly.

'Thanks,' I said not smiling this time and she immediately averted her eyes. I noticed that her ever-so slightly concave belly trembled. She handed me my walking stick, which I had propped against a bollard.

'Here you go.'

'Thanks,' I said, '...Catriona.'

I felt uneasy. I suspected that was because I had used her name and at once wondered in doing so had I sought a measure of intimacy with a stranger I had no right to do, and it was that which made me feel peculiar?

Catriona looked a little glum when she asked me my name. I told her my name and she immediately burst into a fit of laughter.

When she stopped laughing Catriona asked me, 'Is it just your legs then?'

I saw her cheek quake another lightening fast myclonic spasm.

'Sort of?' I said and smiled, but not invitingly this time, or indeed in a manner approving of youthful forthrightness, because I think, I think I felt this minor flirtation had gone as far as it should.

Soon after I shut down on her, Catriona stubbed out her latest cigarette. She looked glum when I said goodbye again and only gave a little wave.

I headed for the taxi rank and a wooden bench, nearby, keeping to around two-thirds my optimum pace, and yet, despite the precaution, less than halfway to the bench I experienced a familiar nothingness ghost through me. Rubbery feet and hollow legs floated over the uneven ground.

At least there were no taxis at the rank. No rush for me to get there quick. Not that I could, unless perhaps my life depended on it, when no doubt a sudden and necessary adrenalin rush would necessarily turbo-power me out of harm's way?

When nothing of a life-threatening nature materialised, I continued on, now, at less than half-pace; my Adrenalin level safely within normal parameters; muscle and central nervous system mitochondria necessarily sluggish, all of which produced a rounded or arching like gait and impression to a bystander that I am perhaps some bizarre sort of variety act rehearsing a Buzz Aldrin skit. Either that or I have a Pythonesque kind of humour.

One small step, I said to myself, laughing at the ataxia absurdity of it all, and slowed still further to quarter speed.

Quarter speed was an unnecessary precaution, perhaps, as the likelihood an onlooker might wonder if my sudden shift to a moon-like gravity style of walking meant the world had suddenly fallen off it's regular axis, seemed a little far-fetched. In reality, intoxication, to the eye of a casual observer, of one sort or another, might have better explained my sudden and catastrophic walking difficulties, but as I had now slowed to an I-have-all-day-to-get-there creeping pace, it now seemed unlikely anyone would notice the peculiarity of my gait. In fact, I was hardly moving. Ten more slow-motion metres to the bench.

The distance now seemed impossible. I was the tortoise. It might take me an eternity to get there, but if I did not stop and rest awhile I might not get there at all.

I stopped. I looked over at Catriona. She was still smoking, still watching my laboured egress.

The last thing she told me before she fell asleep was that she had jacked in a two-hundred thousand euro a year modelling job, not because, she explained, of her increasingly embarrassing 'neuro-affliction', as she put it, but because life was, she said, with none of the weary resign of middle-age, too short to be spent dossing around with a bunch of phoneys.

I stopped looking at Catriona when she lit up yet another cigarette and on cue the bus driver honked his horn, calling the passengers back.

**

At a roundabout where patchy pine-green chewing fescues were rapidly losing ground to lighter green plantains and hardy daisies on a sandy-looking soil with a lilting palm tree centrepiece, shadowing much of the grounded vegetation, I saw a private hire vehicle approach from the south, the top half of the vehicle swing around the walled, spherical road feature.

Signs marked Beach stood on every corner it seemed, as did young people low on cash and high on a mixed bag of recently legalised narcotics.

Behind me I heard the engine on the bus soon-to-be venturing north along the coast road, catch, a farewell blast of diesel departing a jittery carbon-crenulated exhaust.

The taxi, a silver Peugeot with dirty alloy wheels, having completed the circumnavigation of the traffic island, returned whence it had came, south, slowed, indicated right, coasted into the two platform bus station. When it reached a miniscule white-paint-on-tarmac quasi-roundabout the driver made a tight circle presumably employing full wheel lock. The Peugeot came to a stop at the taxi rank a car's length in front of me. The driver jumped out. I handed him my backpack, which he deposited directly in the boot. I waited for him to beckon me inside, which he did as I suspected he would, wordlessly. I declined the beaded front seat and got in the passenger side at the back. I was about to say, take me to the Four Winds Holiday Lets, please, when the rear driver's side door swung open.

Catriona smiled at me. Her face muscles a merry jamp.

**

We made love fitfully, always in the morning, usually after breakfast, and never on a Sunday, apart from one time, the only time, I ever saw Catriona cry. I did not ask her why she cried; instead I went to the second-hand bookstore two doors down from our flat where I bought her Laurie Lee's, A Moment of War.

Most days I returned to sleep until around midday, then got up, stuffed a cool bag with whatever the fridge gave up and went and found Catriona on the beach reading about Spain, smoking, often wrapped in some colourful beach scarf and wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat I bought her for her twenty-second birthday, two days after we arrived. I had paid two months rent for the holiday let. I paid for everything, in fact. Flip-flops, ice creams and print T-Shirts from overpriced beachside stalls, wine from the Offy, H-Blasts and Coolers from the State-Licensed street vendors (who by law could not venture onto the sand) and never withdrew more than a hundred euros cash at a time from any of the many ATM's around the town my bank allowed me access to. I bought a second-hand two-person, single-geared, no seat, two-wheel stand-and-ride electric scooter with the old-fashioned foot brake, for seven hundred euros, from a shop selling mainly quality electric guitars and amps. I let Catriona ride us back from the beach on the days she only drank beer and never at weekends when the street traffic spilled onto the road and cycle lanes, and at all times, kept an arm around her declining waist, a hand on the upturned rubber-bound passenger grip-hold next to the 'accelerator', my eye rarely leaving the tiny Speedo that maxed out at twenty-five KPH.

I watched the ebb and flow of that damn needle destined eventually to hit the buffer of nought, much like our days together I figured would inevitably come to nought; represented in my increasingly distorted minds eye as sea water washed over sand, a distinct darker fudge-coloured patch, scummed cappuccino beige-brown at the edges, a patch of sand only apparent for a spell after waters retreated, and a short spell at that, before elements (sun or more sea water depending on the tide and prevailing wind and cloud cover) discarded the impression, leaving in their wake a pristine sand-canvas to be etched or whittled away at, but not by us, or at least not by me.

Passages of thought such as the former persuaded me to cut back on the H-Blasts and red wine and foolishly I tried to get Catriona to do the same, but she had twenty years on me, so why would she not partake as often as the whim took her when I was paying and she was in time with her surrounds whilst I was a sloth behind real time?

Here was a shift in affairs I thought, I could not ignore. Much came to me that summer and some of it stayed too long.

I was the man in a space suit with Apollo landing legs in a non-lunar landscape riding a quasi-scooter, nevertheless liberated from earthly concerns.

It was the way of things that summer.

**

Mid-July saw the second-leg of my journey. Catriona stowed the stand-and-ride in the cavernous hold of the bus, along with our backpacks. We followed the coast road for thirty kilometres North with certainty in our symbiotic existence, the same-way flow rarely punctuated never pierced track our minds travelled, our bodies cosied into. For a moment that seemed to stretch time, so that the smallest scrap of thought that ordinarily flashed by, as light would, slowed to a point where each beam-like particle broke free from its neighbour and I saw and understood and felt without need of calculation or acuity of mind normally required to distinguish and determine, work out and conclude, that I was a form without form, an energy without fire.

It was not the way of things for long. Such things cannot, of course, last.

Something broke the spell. A merest quiver in the aura surrounding us shattered our nirvana and I felt something escape me and wondered if the same was true for Catriona? I suspected it was and it was then I knew I would make my next journey without her. It was then I understood I had to rejoin my idios kosmos - my own universe, and leave the koinos kosmos I had shared with Catriona, if I was to remain sane.

Perhaps I knew this time would come all along. It was, after all, I understood, the way of things.

**

It did not rain until mid-September. For three days torrents worried sand from the town's litter strewn gutters, erased ice cream imprints from the promenade.

Catriona had gone. Three weeks past she left a note in block caps stuck on the fridge, which said, 'Should have gone sooner. Always. Catriona. PS - thanks for the plastic.' I had put the card in her rucksack a week previously; it had five thousand euros on it.

**

Today I got a postcard from the girl whose face muscles jamped and jiggled like a bride's hair extensions, whose rare 'condition' did not warrant a name. She was in Spain, living in a two hundred strong all female commune cum retreat. On her way there she had stopped off in France and seen a Specialist. He could not tell her anything definite. He had not told her anything she did not already know.

It is the way of things.