by Rachel Dann
‘I still don’t get why you’re so keen on doing this,’ he muttered over his cereal as I bent to kiss him goodbye, determined to rise above the tension emanating from him and filling the apartment.
‘Well, I am, okay?’ I told him as cheerfully as I could manage, before fleeing outside to Marion’s waiting car, and not looking back.
I didn’t really understand what Harry’s problem was. All I knew was that I wasn’t going to let it stop me.
***
But now, as I climb the steps back to the apartment, I can’t help being filled with a sinking feeling at the reaction awaiting me. Just as I am about to slide my key into the lock, the door swings open and Harry is standing there, frowning down at me.
‘Where have you been?’ he asks irritably. ‘You said visiting time finished at eleven – I thought you’d be back ages ago!’
I knew it. Edging past him into the flat, we sidestep each other like two swordsmen preparing for a duel.
‘We took longer than expected, and stayed past visiting hours.’
‘But you’re soaked!’ he exclaims indignantly, looking at me as if I’d just walked in after five years away at war, not a morning’s prison visit. ‘What the hell were you doing in there?’
I suddenly think of Naomi and her fake swagger. I take a deep breath and force myself to meet Harry’s eyes.
‘I actually had a really interesting time, and have agreed to help one of the prisoners.’ I nudge past him and kick off my sodden shoes by the door. ‘That means I’ll definitely be going back there. I know you don’t agree with me doing this, but then I wasn’t too thrilled either when you got a job here and now spend half your time at the language school.’ I ignore the look of spreading shock on Harry’s face.
We stare each other out across the breakfast bar, until he eventually lowers his gaze.
I take a deep breath and consciously make my voice softer, more conciliatory.
‘I think it’s only fair for me to have an interest as well, if you’re out almost every morning at the school. And I am actually really excited about this… the girl I met today, Naomi, is trying to appeal to be released early and go home to the UK, and I’m going to try and help her…’ I trail off as I realise Harry has turned away from me and sat down at the kitchen table, his head in his hands.
‘Harry?’ I walk around the kitchen table so he’s forced to look at me again. ‘Seriously, what’s going on?’
Harry slides his chair back abruptly and gets up, turning to switch on the kettle and pull a mug from the cupboard, avoiding my eyes again.
‘Nothing, Kirst. Sorry. I just…’ His voice lowers a notch, so I can barely hear him. ‘I just feel like I don’t recognise you at the moment.’
I stand rooted to the spot behind him, momentarily lost for words.
‘You don’t recognise me?’ My voice is filled with incredulity. I can barely believe he is saying this. After all the surprises he has sprung on me lately!
Harry puts the mug down on the counter a little harder than necessary. ‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ He’s staring at me dumbly, looking as if he genuinely doesn’t get it. I stride over to the counter and face him, my feeling of indignation growing.
‘What I mean is… how do you think I feel? We come here to go travelling, then within only a day of arriving you change the rules and get a job – yes, I know it’s only temporary, and yes, I did agree to support you in it – but now I’ve found something to interest me as well and pass the time while we’re here, instead of supporting me in return, or even – God forbid – taking the slightest interest in it with me… you say you don’t recognise me?’ I stop for breath, feeling my determination grow with every word. ‘So, I just want one thing to be clear. For as long as we stay in Quito – I am not giving up on this. I promised today to help someone, and I fully intend to do so.’ I stare back at Harry, daring him to say something. He doesn’t. I let out a deep breath, feeling a sense of release at finally getting all that out. ‘Okay then. I’m going to have a shower.’
Before the bathroom door closes behind me I get a fleeting glimpse of Harry standing with an empty coffee mug in his hand and his mouth half-open in shock.
Ten minutes later, I come out of the bathroom to find the apartment silent and empty. Then I spot something on the kitchen worktop.
There’s a note in Harry’s familiar scrawl, next to a rapidly cooling mug of coffee and a plate bearing two little round yellow yucca cakes, Liza’s speciality. I pop one in my mouth and enjoy its warm, spongey texture as I read the note.
Sorry for being a grumpy prat. Liza’s made yucca bread for lunch, come downstairs. Love H xxx
Even as I read I feel my anger towards Harry dissipating as fast as it came. He might have been inexplicably off with me about visiting the prisons ever since I first voiced the idea, but at least now he’s apologised. Everything is going to be okay.
But instead of heading straight downstairs, I go over to my handbag and pull out my phone, finally deciding to do something that has been at the back of my mind, pressing for my attention, ever since we left the prison earlier. Ever since I heard Naomi’s heartfelt longing when she talked about going home. When she talked about her father.
I clutch the phone in my hands, staring at its blank screen, properly realising for the first time the power held by this tiny device – the power to cause conflict and distance, or… to reach out.
I scroll through my contacts list until I find his name. Casting aside the fact that we never talk this way, that given the time difference he might be asleep already, that I am not even sure whether it is still his number… I hit ‘dial’.
Chapter Nine
‘Thank you, Liza, that was delicious…’ I lean back in my seat, stretching out to try and accommodate my swollen stomach after another enormous lunch.
‘Yes, it was wonderful,’ adds Harry, looking equally stuffed.
We’re sitting round the kitchen table with Liza and Roberto, surrounded by empty bowls and chicken bones as the only evidence of the delicious soup and homemade yucca bread we’ve just polished off, lazily watching the local news on the ancient, flickering television on the worktop opposite us.
I reach over and take Harry’s hand under the table, while surreptitiously sliding my phone out of my trouser pocket with my other hand, checking it for the hundredth time since we sat down. But still it remains disappointingly, resoundingly silent.
Out of the corner of my eye I notice Harry glance at his watch. ‘I’m going to have a few drinks with Ray this afternoon,’ he announces, just as Liza jumps to her feet excitedly and reaches to turn up the volume on the TV.
‘Oh, look! They’re talking about the prisons.’
The news report flashes to a clip of the United Nations Secretary-General hailing the Ecuadorian government’s investment in prison conditions as ‘revolutionary’. Liza and I both lean forward in our eagerness to hear more. The reporter concludes that the opening of the new prisons will represent a time of significant change in Latin America, and position Ecuador as a global example. I feel another flash of something – pride? – at being a small part of something so monumental. I think of the brown envelope inside my handbag upstairs, containing Naomi’s good conduct certificates, just waiting for me to render them into English, and feel a growing impatience to get started.
‘A few of the other guys are going, too. I won’t be back late,’ Harry continues, having received no reply to his first announcement. ‘Is that okay, babe?’
‘Of course.’ I smile at him, giving his hand a squeeze before letting go of it to get up and take my dirty plates over to the sink, glancing over at Liza, still engrossed in the television. ‘Why wouldn’t it be?’
Even as I say this, I realise that, until very recently, an announcement like this from Harry might have annoyed me… upset me, even. I remember with a pang of embarrassment how only a few days ago I had practically begged him to go out with me for the evening.
Now, however, the overriding feeling is of relief as I realise I have several uninterrupted hours ahead of me in which to make a start on Naomi’s translations.
‘While you’re out I’m going to make a start on those papers I told you about – to help the prisoner I met today,’ I tell him.
In spite of my outburst less than an hour ago, when I had laid everything out to Harry in no uncertain terms, my heart still pounds with a strange feeling of rebelliousness. As if, by looking him in the eye and telling him what I’m going to do, I am breaking some sort of unspoken rule or doing something wrong.
Ridiculous, I think. It’s not like you need his permission to do this. My conviction grows as I march up the stairs to the apartment. You can do whatever you want! HE certainly does, after all…
Upstairs, I open Naomi’s folder to make a start. Shortly afterwards Harry comes to say goodbye on his way out to see Ray. I’m sitting cross-legged on the bed, papers splayed out around me, as he leans down to give me a long kiss on the lips.
‘I’ll be back soon… okay?’
‘Sure!’ I watch the door close behind him, surprised by the flash of relief I feel as I hear his footsteps receding down the stairs towards the street. This will give me at least two or three hours of uninterrupted time and space to read through Naomi’s documents.
I turn back to the papers and try to arrange them in some sort of order. There are various certificates issued by the prison, confirming Naomi’s participation in a range of activities – dance, singing, woodwork, Spanish class. Even this small selection is impressive. And they don’t look very difficult to translate – just a summary of her achievements. Like school, she had joked.
Then I notice, shuffled in among the certificates, a few sheets of crumpled paper ripped straight out of a notepad and filled with a tight, almost illegible scrawl in blue ink. I carefully pull one out and hold it up to the light, reading the signature at the bottom – All my love, Dad. P.S. Mum sends kisses. I stare at it for a moment, a confusing range of emotions passing through me, then slide it very carefully back inside the folder.
In spite of myself, I pull out my phone and check it one last time. Dad didn’t answer my call earlier. He must already be in bed, I’d reasoned then, as it went straight to voicemail. OR he’s deliberately ignoring your number, a more insecure voice tormented me. The voice message I left may not have made the most sense, but once I’d started there was no going back.
Looking at my insistently blank phone screen now, I feel a flash of embarrassment. What had I even been thinking, anyway? Dad doesn’t want to come to Ecuador. He probably doesn’t even remember that jokey comment he made just as I left his house, the last time we saw each other, about maybe coming out to visit us. The only communication we’ve had since then has been a very brief, polite email exchange the day after I arrived in Quito, in which I’d told him I was still alive and he acknowledged receipt of that information.
He definitely won’t have expected a slightly rambling, hesitant voicemail nearly two weeks later, asking if he would consider doing it for real, even going as far as to say I would like his company here. He’ll think I’ve gone mad… even so, a spark of hope remains at the back of my mind. He hasn’t replied either way yet… and the last few days and weeks have proven to me that anything can happen, especially here in Ecuador.
I find myself staring at the door Harry disappeared through only a short while ago, and feel a twinge of frustration that he just doesn’t understand what the last two weeks in Quito have meant to me, how much this trip has already changed me. He might have apologised for getting angry after the prison visit, but that’s a long shot from joining in my excitement about it. In the same way I didn’t share any of my research about volunteering with Harry before the trip, I now feel I can’t really talk to him about Naomi or the translations.
But that doesn’t really matter… does it? Harry and I have enough other things in common. We don’t have to understand each other perfectly in every area of our lives.
For the first time in ages, I find myself casting my mind back to when we met. From our very first few dates, the things that drew me to Harry weren’t necessarily being able to confide all my secrets to him or staying up late, having long, heartfelt conversations about our innermost feelings. I had my girlfriends for that. No, my attraction to Harry was more centred on things like his stability and our shared life goals. Well, that and the obvious floppy blond hair and bright-blue eyes and cheeky smile. During the years I spent quietly observing him (okay, lusting after him) from the back of the Spanish class, I’d realised Harry was not one of the typical university lads who went out and got wasted and brought home a different girl each night.
Then, when we did start dating, we both knew right from the start that it was going to be something serious. Most of my friends didn’t understand that. But then, none of them had ever come home halfway through their first week at primary school and found their dad’s car gone from the driveway, or seen their mum break down and sob hysterically in front of all the other mothers and half of the teacher-parents committee. Trust me, once that has happened to you, long-term reliability becomes a much more important quality in a boyfriend than being able to pontificate about your deepest emotions.
So I’d never actually told Harry about Joel, or my time at the solicitor’s office all those years ago. Well, he knew I spent my work experience shadowing a paralegal and that it shaped my decision to study law. But I never elaborated on the emotional impact it had had on me. And I’d never told him I still thought about Joel sometimes, or that the memory of his court hearing was enough to make me want to help more people like him, people at a disadvantage or those who needed a helping hand to get their lives back on track. Harry had always known I wanted to do the Law Practice Course and go on to be a solicitor, but he wouldn’t have understood my deeper reasons for this ambition. Even if I’d told him. Perhaps especially if I’d told him. So it had remained something private and personal to me, a dream I’d nurtured and held on to from within the secrecy of my own heart.
The only people I did talk to about my experience at the solicitor’s office were my parents. Mum didn’t see much past the joy and relief of hearing I wanted to study law and would therefore go on to have a Proper Career and Stable Job, giving her – in her own words – ‘one less thing to worry about’. But Dad, I remember with a fresh pang of emotion, had actually been pretty excited about it. That was back when he still made an effort to see me a couple of times a month, either taking me out for a meal or inviting me over to his place for Chinese on the pretext of helping me with my homework. He never really did help much, and my principal memories of those days are of sitting across the dining table from him making stilted, awkward conversation over the crispy duck pancakes and chicken chow mein, as I counted down the minutes until it was time for Mum to come and pick me up.
But on this one occasion, straight after my work experience finished, something made me open up to him. Maybe I was just so fired up with excitement and ambition that I forgot who I was talking to; maybe my seventeen-year-old naivety got the better of me. I ended up telling him all about the client interviews I was allowed to sit in on, the different sorry characters who passed through Bourne & Bond’s offices, and how thoughts of each new case would stay with me as I went to sleep every night, as I wondered what would become of them. I even told him about Joel and his court hearing, how I had watched in admiration as Tracey argued his case with such passion, as if she were fighting for her own son. How Joel had cried when the judge decreed he should be moved to the front of the queue for council housing and allowed to begin his life again.
That night I told my father I wanted to become a solicitor, and defend people’s rights the way I had seen in the courtroom that day. It makes me cringe a little now to remember the undiluted, youthful enthusiasm with which I raved to my father about my big plans for the future. But instead of reacting like the distant, rather bored person I had
become used to, he responded with enthusiasm and even suggested we draw up a plan of action to help me work towards my chosen career. We spent the evening googling law qualifications, reading through careers advice websites and noting down the names of universities offering my chosen course. I never admitted it to him, but it was actually really helpful.
Dad wouldn’t remember any of this now, of course. Not long afterwards I went off to uni at the other side of the country and the Chinese takeaway nights stopped. By the time Harry and I finished our studies and moved down to Fenbridge, my contact with Dad was limited to birthday and Christmas phone calls and the very occasional meal out.
Over the intervening years since that evening, I’ve deliberately blocked out its memory, as a form of self-preservation. Only now, feeling so refreshed and emboldened, and – being honest with myself here – humbled, after meeting Naomi, do I feel able to see things differently. Perhaps it’s not too late for Dad and me, perhaps it is possible to have more…
Telling myself to stay positive and wait for his reply, I consciously push aside thoughts of both my father and Harry, turning my attention to Naomi’s papers.
An inexplicable shiver passes through me as I realise that, if I’m really going to do this, I’ll have to ring that Sebastian person we met outside the prison. Now, hours later, with the thrill of excitement from the prison visit gradually fading, it is beginning to feel like a crazy idea ever to have volunteered for this. What if he realises my Spanish really isn’t at professional level and politely tells me my services won’t be required? I’m not a lawyer or translator… just a girl who studied law and taught herself Spanish, a very long time ago…
‘What were you thinking?’ I ask out loud to the apartment, suddenly filled with insecurity. My own voice echoes slightly off the walls in the spacious, empty living room, but provides no answer. I open the folder again and stare at the crumpled letter to Naomi from her father, feeling something bordering on horror. This is someone’s life, a real human being with parents and family who miss her… what if I let her down?
