‘Not a chance, Uncle Ray. I cannot wait to get to Kansas and to see Dr Gale. I feel like Dorothy off to see the wizard! The wonderful Wizard of Oz!’ And for the first time in a long time, Ray saw his niece’s face light up with a smile.
Chapter 16
Greta and Ray spent most of the first leg of the journey watching movies. Their transit through Toronto Airport was seamless. Their flight to Kansas City was only a few hours long and, not for the first time since they took off from Dublin, Greta realized how lucky she was to have this opportunity.
‘Uncle Ray. Thank you. In case I don’t think to say that every day, thank you.’
‘You’ve thanked me lots, and besides, this trip is as much for me as it is you.’
Greta looked at her uncle and realized that while she knew she loved him and he her, she didn’t know much about his life. He’d always been there in the background, taking care of all the Gales, in his quiet way, but she’d never really asked him any questions about his hopes and dreams. ‘Tell me why. I want to know. Honestly.’
‘Well, a few weeks ago I came to the conclusion that my life had become small,’ Ray said.
‘Woah!’ Greta exclaimed. ‘That’s a big statement.’
‘I suppose it is. But it’s true. Maybe I got up on the wrong side of the bed, but a few weeks back I woke up irritated by every single boring moment of my small life. Every day my alarm goes off at seven a.m. I shower using the same brand of toiletries that I’ve used for over twenty years. I eat two Weetabix with a banana chopped up on top and low-fat milk, every single day. I see the same people on my commute to the office, but the most we ever do is nod at each other. I realized that I was stuck doing the same mundane things every day. And none of it mattered. It was quite the realization. And by the time lunchtime came, I was at the tipping point. Mary, that’s the dinner lady in our staff canteen, well, she didn’t even wait to see what I wanted. She just ladled soup into a bowl and said, ‘Same again, Ray.’ Not a question. A statement. It really annoyed me. Something inside me snapped.’
‘What did you do?’ Greta asked, her eyes wide in shock.
‘I told her to take back the soup and give me the special of the day. I hadn’t even looked to see what it was,’ Ray said, shaking his head at Greta.
‘You rebel!’ Greta laughed.
‘Well, to me it was a rebel moment. It was cottage pie, and of all the pies in the world, that’s my least favourite.’
‘That’s funny. It’s Dad’s favourite.’
Ray sighed. ‘I know. We had it every week when we were young because Stephen loved it so much. Sometimes we’d have it twice, because Stephen asked. Anyhow, I took the pie and, with each bite, I tried to pinpoint what was wrong with me. I thought that maybe I was coming down with a bug. But I knew that wasn’t it. Twenty-four hours under a duvet wasn’t going to cure whatever was wrong with me. On the way home, I watched the other commuters on the bus. Most had headphones on, swiping left and right on their mobile phones. One or two read books and others just stared ahead, blankly, waiting for their stop. But all of them looked as bored with their lives as I felt.’
Greta felt embarrassed that she had missed all of this. She had been so focused on her own issues, she hadn’t noticed that someone she loved was also having a hard time. ‘Oh Uncle Ray, I’m sorry you felt like that. I had no idea.’
He patted her hand lightly, then continued his story. ‘There was a young man and a girl sitting close to me. I’d not seen them before. The girl was telling a story that involved a lot of hand movements to punctuate her every point. And her boyfriend was transfixed by whatever she was saying. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. And I felt a stab of jealousy so sharp that it winded me. This life, the one I cultivated and protected for decades, felt meaningless. What was the point of anything?’
‘That must have been some look the boy was giving to the girl,’ Greta said.
‘Yep it was. Adoration. Love. Isn’t that what any of us really want, after all?’
Greta sighed in recognition of his words. She’d never felt that before. Maybe one day, when she lost some more weight, she could allow herself to dare to dream of a boyfriend.
‘Do you know that song, “Pure Imagination”? The one Gene Wilder sings in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.’
‘I love that song!’ Greta said.
‘Me too. It’s my humming song.’
‘Your what?’
‘The song I’m most likely to have fixated in my head, the one I hum along to when I’m on my own.’
‘Oh right! My humming song is “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”. I give it loads in the shower every morning.’
‘That I knew,’ Ray said. ‘There’s a bit in the song that talks about travelling in a world of your creation. I keep thinking about those words. This boring, small, insignificant life I lead is all my creation. I’ve been feeling quite pathetic and stupid, to be honest.’
‘Oh Uncle Ray, I had no idea. You are anything but pathetic or stupid!’ Greta said.
The problem was that Ray had grown up in the shadow of a much cleverer older brother. His parents told everyone who was willing to listen that Stephen had been nothing but a pleasure to rear, giving them non-stop proud, heart-bursting parental moments. But Ray was a different kettle of fish altogether.
‘Night and day, my two boys,’ his mother used to say. There was never any malice to her words. Ray knew that both his parents loved him and his brother equally. But there was an undeniable truth that he could not avoid. They found Stephen’s company more interesting.
He remembered his mother saying – whenever she went to his parent teacher meetings – that Stephen made her feel ten feet tall. ‘It’s a sin to be so proud, but my boy, he’s a wonder. Clever, he’s got brains to burn, that’s what his teacher said. And funny and kind too. He’s got it all. Oh, our Stephen will go a long way.’
Unfortunately Ray didn’t make his mam feel five feet tall, never mind ten. It wasn’t that he was a bold kid; in fact he was the opposite. Quiet and introspective. But no matter how hard he applied himself, the net result was always the same. He was a steady C+ kind of guy. Average. After a while he gave up trying to compete with his straight-A older brother.
He passed his Leaving Certificate. He took the exams to enter the civil service when he was eighteen and was accepted. He started work as a clerical officer, grade four, and since then he’d slowly, methodically, worked his way up the ranks. Now he was a principal officer and had a team of four people reporting to him. They liked him, he was a fair boss, always with his door open, ready to listen, to guide, to support. He didn’t say much and had the reputation as a bit of a loner.
He had more than most – his own home, a small, three-bedroom, semi-detached red-brick house, around the corner from his brother’s family. His mortgage would be paid off within the next twelve months. He changed his car every three years, but he rarely drove it, preferring the bus. When he wasn’t working, he spent time with his brother’s family. He volunteered at a local homeless shelter, doing the soup-and-sandwich run once a week.
Ray looked at his niece and said, ‘I’m not telling you this for sympathy, just to fill you in on where my head is at. I don’t want this to be as good as it gets. I want more. And so should you! I’m middle-aged now, and my hair is going grey. But maybe it’s not too late to stop life passing me by. And it’s not too late for you.’
‘Of course it’s not too late,’ Greta said.
‘Promise me that you won’t let yourself end up like me.’
Greta thought about her own life. It was as if she’d been asleep for years. And it was now time to wake up. She just wasn’t sure how to do that. ‘I can’t promise that, Uncle Ray. If I were to end up like you, I’d be lucky.’
They sat in silence for a moment. Greta knew that she didn’t want to get to Ray’s age and be the same. She wanted to change, to evolve, to do better. But how to do that was the tricky bit.
‘Just don’t
waste the pretty,’ Ray said, breaking the silence.
‘I’m not pretty,’ Greta whispered.
‘Are you crazy? Of course you are. You just don’t see yourself as we all see you. And don’t dismiss my compliments. It’s rude.’
‘OK. I’ll try. Promise. But you have to tell me when you’re sad, too. You have one of those faces, you know. Hard to read.’
‘I’m not sad, at least not most of the time. But I’m not happy either, Greta. Something is missing in my life. I didn’t know what to do about it. Until we started to talk about this trip to Vegas and then the seed of an idea formed in my head. I don’t know if I have the guts to go through with it. But first I have to show you something.’
He pulled his wallet out and carefully extracted a photograph, torn and worn, folded in half and hidden behind his bus pass. As always, when he looked at the image, the overriding feeling was bittersweet. ‘Remember I said to you that my best year was in 1995, at the scouting jamboree?’
‘Yes.’ Greta was peering over at the photo in his hands, trying to see it.
‘Well, it was also the worst year of my life too. This is the reason why …’
Chapter 17
Greta hadn’t seen many photographs of Uncle Ray at this age. He was wearing his scouting uniform. A blue shirt covered in badges, with a red and white scarf and toggle at his neck. His smile took over his whole face, and his hair was a little too long and messy. She realized that he was quite good looking. She’d never thought about him like that. ‘You look like Aidan, I’ve never noticed that before.’
He had his arm around a woman who looked about the same age as him. Her uniform was a different colour, though. Khaki green with a purple and white scarf and toggle. She had the same broad smile as her uncle’s.
They looked very much like a couple in love.
Ray ran a finger gently across the photograph. He knew every detail of it off by heart, from her brown hair escaping its plaits on either side of her face, to the freckles on her cheeks from the sun. But most of all, he knew her smile. ‘She’s the only woman I’ve ever loved.’
Greta had never heard her uncle talk about this or in fact any woman before. They hadn’t even landed on American soil, and she had discovered so many new things about him.
‘When she smiled like she’s doing here, it made my head spin,’ Ray continued.
‘She’s pretty,’ Greta said. ‘What was her name?’
‘Billie Haley.’
‘Like the comet,’ Greta said.
‘I hope not,’ Ray said. ‘That’s only visible twice in anybody’s lifetime. It’s not due back here until 2061 … And anyway, it’s Halley’s Comet, not Haley’s, discovered by the English astronomer Edmond Halley.’
‘You are such a nerd.’ Greta laughed. ‘Her uniform is different from yours, so she wasn’t in the same scouting group as you?’
‘Correct. She’s American. From the Midwest. The first time I ever laid eyes on her was at Schiphol Airport on the day we arrived for the jamboree. You should have seen the arrivals hall. There were thousands of scouts from all over the world. It was chaos as everyone waited for their luggage. It was my first jamboree, and also my first time out of Ireland. I thought I’d stepped into another world.’
‘A “we’re not in Kansas any more, Toto” moment?’ Greta whispered.
‘Exactly that. We were waiting for our bags to come out onto the conveyor belt and I was trying to keep an eye on the younger lads in our group. We had twenty kids ranging in age from twelve years old to eighteen years old. They were hyper, as you can imagine. And sure I wasn’t that much older than them myself at twenty-four. Billie walked by me. It was actually her hat that caught my eye. A bright purple one. And it fell off her head and landed at my feet.’
‘She literally set her cap at you, Uncle Ray,’ Greta giggled.
‘Not so sure about that. Dumb luck, I reckon, that it landed by me. She was laden down with a rucksack on her back with another bag on her front. Which was the norm for scouting trips, the lot of us were in the same boat. But because of that, she couldn’t reach down to get it, so I picked it up for her. She smiled that smile you see right there in the photo, and I swear, Greta, I fell in love with her on the spot. I know that’s not a cool thing to say, but it’s true.’
‘I don’t think it’s uncool to say you love someone. What happened next? Was it all toasted marshmallows around the campfire while you sang “Ging gang goolie goolie whatsit”, to each other?’
‘Funny girl. Nothing happened at first – she disappeared, following the rest of her scouting group out of the terminal. And, to be honest, I thought I’d never see her again. You’ve got to remember that there were hundreds of countries taking part. Plus I had a job to do too, with lots of prearranged activities for our own scouting group.’
‘You should have ditched those kids and gone looking for her.’
‘Life is not all Hollywood moments, you know.’
‘Ain’t that the truth.’
‘We pitched our tents and I have to tell you it was a sight to behold. Every colour under the sun, in that big field. And there was huge excitement because Queen Beatrice was coming to visit too.’
‘Fergie and Andrew’s daughter?’
‘No. She’s only a princess. Or is she a duchess? She’s not a queen anyhow. I mean the queen of Netherlands. Lovely woman.’
‘Did you meet her?’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘But she did give a rousing speech.’
‘That does sound lame, Uncle Ray. If you’re telling the story again, I’d skip that bit. Just saying.’
‘Noted. But you did ask. Anyhow, once the opening ceremony started, I got lost in the parade and the music. Our crew were all singing, “Singing in the Rain”.’
‘A-ru-cha-cha, A-ru-cha-cha …’ Greta sang softly.
‘That’s the one. We were belting it out. And I suppose Lady Serendipity wasn’t done with us. Because, despite the tens of thousands of people in that field, I saw Billie again. I’ll never forget that moment – these big walking tulips were going by. Don’t ask. And there she was, looking right at me too. She remembered the airport and tipped her purple cap at me.’
‘I told you she was setting her cap at you! Please tell me you went to speak to her then.’
Ray nodded. ‘I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling stupid, regretting things that I’ve done or not done. But the single best decision I ever made was at that moment. I marched over to her and pretty much from that moment we spent every spare minute of the ten-day holiday together.’
‘Smooching around the campfire, eh?’
Ray smiled, and Greta thought he looked just like the young man in his photo again.
‘We had our first kiss under the stars,’ Ray admitted. ‘I can’t look at the stars any more without thinking about that kiss.’
‘Uncle Ray …’ Greta had never thought about her uncle as a romantic, but he was making her all emotional as he recounted his tale. She had a lump in her throat listening to him.
‘Your first-kiss story is so much better than mine. I can’t even remember the name of the guy I snogged. Pretty awful kisser he was too, to be honest. A lot of clashing teeth and tongues.’ She shuddered.
‘Not sure I needed to hear that,’ Ray said, shuddering himself.
‘Sorry. Moving swiftly back to Billie.’
‘While we didn’t have a long time together, camp time is different to real time. One day is like a week. So we crammed a lot into our short holiday.’
‘What happened afterwards?’
‘She had to go back home, as did I. We both cried. We swore we’d stay in touch. And we did for a while, writing to each other every week. She said she was going to come to Ireland, as part of a big European trip. I looked into getting a career break to go with her. But then her letters slowed down, dwindling until they stopped completely. I carried on writing to her for a few months. But I’m not a complete eejit; eventually, I had to give up. She
moved on, I suppose.’
‘That’s so sad.’ Greta patted his hand. ‘Long-distance relationships rarely work out.’
They sat in silence for a while, both looking at the photograph. Greta decided there and then that she would put all her efforts into finding him a girlfriend when they got back home. Whether he liked it or not, she was putting his picture up on Tinder.
Ray shifted in his seat, turning towards Greta. ‘I need to tell you something else.’
‘There’s more? Jeepers, Uncle Ray, you’re a dark horse!’ Greta replied.
‘You’ll never guess where Billie lives …’
‘Surprise me.’
‘Kansas. In a town called Cawker City.’
‘Shut the front door!’ Then the penny dropped. ‘That’s on our wish list! You put that place on our wish list!’
‘Ssh,’ Ray said to Greta, who was shouting now and drawing looks from the other passengers.
Greta looked at her uncle with sympathy and said, ‘You do know that it’s probable that she’s married, with kids. The chances are that when her letters stopped, it was because she met someone locally.’
Ray found it impossible to visualize an older version of Billie, with her own family. To him, she would always be that twenty-year-old he fell in love with. ‘I need to find a way to move on from 1995. I feel like I’ve been stuck since then. Just going through the motions, but not really living.’
‘Is that why you kept going to world jamborees every year? You were hoping to find her again?’
Ray flushed red. ‘Yep. But in my defence, I do enjoy the festival too.’
‘So this trip, it’s not just about me meeting Dr Gale and getting away from it all. It’s a quest to find your first love too.’
He shook his head. ‘I don’t know if it is yet. But it might be. I know it’s stupid. But the closer we get to Kansas Airport, the more I believe that we’ve got to try to find her. Do you think I’m crazy?’
‘Hell, yeah. Certifiable. But I also think you’re a fecking legend Uncle Ray. Count me in. Let’s go to the last address you have of hers and see what we can find out. If she’s married with a gaggle of kids then—’
My Pear-Shaped Life: The most gripping and heartfelt page-turner of 2020! Page 13
