Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  Pain was the third reaction.

  Searing bolts of white heat lanced through my skull. I jerked my fingers away and squeezed my eyes shut tighter against the pain. Slowly it subsided, and the accompanying strobes of colour faded from my vision. Blackness reached up to me, cooling, soothing, and I decided not to fight it.

  When next I woke the sun on my face felt less intense. I was probably burnt to hell, but I was far more concerned for my eyes. Experimentally I tried to open them. A tiny chink of light seeped in under one eyelid, but it was enough. My eyelids felt huge. It felt as though I had a thin layer of crushed glass trapped beneath them. Even the tiniest of movements was like scouring my eyeballs with sandpaper. Closing them more tightly seemed to offer a temporary relief, but I couldn’t keep it up. A million tiny pins pricked my eyeballs as I opened them to the crack of light again.

  I could see. Not much, and only for a fraction of a second, followed by several minutes of intense, pulsing headache. But I could see. I lurched out of the hammock, determined to die in my bed if necessary. It was only when I reached the dorm room that I realised I either had to climb six feet into my top bunk or shift everything I owned from the bottom one. Neither appealed. What I still couldn’t cope with, was what the fuck had happened to me? I was terrified.

  I sat heavily on the edge of the bed. Something square lodged its corner between my buttocks. My dictionary. And my salvation! With it I could communicate my pain to the only people around. And so for the next hour, after staggering back to the haven of my hammock, I studied. Each time I opened my left eye a crack it felt like someone was pushing a knitting needle into it. Yet I could see with it, just enough between my shielding eyelashes (for which I have never before, or since, been so grateful) to make out a word from the book held point blank against my face. Slowly a sentence took form in my mind which exactly expressed the difficulty I was experiencing. “No puedo (I cannot, a classic from my audio course) abrir (to open, infinitive verb) mi ojos (my eyes, plural).” I had it! With this one phrase I could solve all my problems. I only had to find someone to tell.

  I made it out of the hammock, out of the gate, down the drive and up to Johnny’s front door. I knocked, and after a short while Brenda answered. “Hola?” she greeted me, surprised.

  “Hola,” I responded, then rolled out my hard-won phrase. “No puedo abrir mi ojos!” It was the make-or-break moment.

  “Ojos?” she asked. I imagined her tapping her own eyes.

  “Sí, SÍ! Ojos!” I was excited, and desperate.

  “Tienes una problema con sus ohos?”

  “SÍ!”

  “Ah…” She seemed to have some understanding of my problem. Maybe because my eyes were screwed up so tightly my cheeks ached. She can’t have believed that was normal behaviour, even for someone from England. I heard her bustling around the kitchen for a few seconds, then she pressed a cloth soaked in icy-cold water to my face. Though I understood nothing of the accompanying commentary of presumably helpful advice, her tone and demeanour was the first indication that I was going to get better. If she’d had a volunteer permanently blinded within a week of arriving I figured she’d have been a little more frantic. That kind of stuff almost never looks good when you’re in the middle of a volunteer recruitment drive.

  The light was starting to fade as I made my way slowly back to the volunteer house. It was a total walking distance of about twenty five metres. I shuffled it in less than five minutes, which was a feat unto itself. I made it as far as the hammock, and rested there for a while. But the temperature was rapidly cooling, and soon I would have to be inside, or face freezing to death. Not that it was any warmer inside, but at least there were blankets.

  I was sitting in a chair in the lounge wearing three jumpers when Johnny knocked on the door. He looked concerned. I almost felt guilty. I mean, I’d been freaked out to start with – blindness was a totally new experience for me, and not one I was anxious to continue. But it was hardly his fault. The last thing I wanted was for him to think he’d picked the wrong guy, and to regret letting me come here. I had to convince him that I was cool. The only thing I could think of was to underplay how scared I was. My eyes? So what! It happened all the time… well maybe not, but there was no reason to let him think that I was pathetic.

  “Tienes una problema?” he asked straight away. “Con sus ohos?”

  I was thrilled that I understood what he was saying. “Sí,” I replied, then laid out my phrase for him. It was certainly earning its mileage. Johnny nodded and held up a little bottle. Just the shape of it screamed eye drops. I could have kissed him. Better not though – given the slight misunderstanding when we first met. I might really scare the poor bloke.

  Sunday was also spent in the hammock. My eyes were still filled with glass, but it was soft glass with all the rough edges ground off. Probably ground off on my eyeballs, judging by the amount of juice and gunk that had seeped out of them during the night. My pillow was a hideous sticky mess. I’d had to peel my face off the unpleasantness before even daring to try opening my eyes. It was several minutes before I managed it. They were sealed with a crust of something so unspeakable that I won’t even try to describe it. Eventually I steeled myself against the hideous ripping sensation and prised them open. It made me want to vomit, but it worked. Well, kind of. My vision was like something out of a poorly-animated computer game. I could see out of the very bottom of my eyes, and light of any kind hurt like a head-butt from a filing cabinet. I took my music out to the veranda, wincing at the metallic scream as I dragged the front door open. Was it louder because the empty house was so much quieter? Or had the loss of my vision honed my other senses to an almost superhuman sensitivity?

  Or maybe the door was just fucked.

  I lounged, eyes blissfully closed, listening to soothing music. Had someone complained that I was sleeping in the middle of the day, for the first time in my life I could respond honestly that I was ‘just resting my eyes’.

  The firm step of booted feet nearby brought me back to wakefulness. Jimmy stood over me, looking down at my tranquil form in the hammock. For a guy less than five feet tall it must have been a novel experience to look down at anyone.

  “Qué pasa?” he asked with his usual sly smile.

  “No puedo abrir mi ohos,” I told him, ignoring the fact that it was by now a blatant lie – I was looking at him as I spoke, albeit through the smallest of squints.

  “Ah,” he responded knowingly, then launched into a rapid explanation in Spanish, of what I presume was his innocence and lack of responsibility for the accident. Then he studied my face pityingly. “Not look,” he suggested with a gesture of his hand towards an imaginary welding scene between us. They were the first words of English I’d ever heard from him, and from the effort he’d put into pronouncing them, probably carefully learned and rehearsed over breakfast.

  “Yes,” I wanted to say in a burst of sarcastic bitchery, “no look at fire! Now tell me not to try and eat the fucking thing!” But he didn’t speak English, so there was no point. Or was there?

  “Fucking idiot!” I grinned back at him. “Teach me to weld in ten minutes? You fucking blinded me you arsehole! I’d gouge your eyes out to see how you liked it, but it’d only make you prettier, mutherfucker!” I said it all with a smile.

  Jimmy smiled back, seeming to share the joke. “Fuck!” he agreed.

  “If only I could grin like a fucking idiot when I didn’t understand something, I’d be happier too!” I pointed out. Then “Fuck!” I added, waving my hand in front of my eyes for emphasis.

  “Ha!” Jimmy laughed. ‘Fuck.’ The universal gift of the English language to foreign nationals.

  And with that everything was okay again. Jimmy wandered off, shaking his head and chuckling under his breath, no doubt at the ineptitude of foreigners and his easy mastery of their language.

  I chalked up a rather childish victory to myself on equally flimsy grounds, and sank back into my hammock. I closed my eyes l
eisurely, then partially opened them again just to be sure. Never take anything like this for granted again, I told myself. It could be taken from me so easily. There was a deep philosophical point to be explored here, about my life, youth and fitness, and how to make the most of it before it was gone. But I really couldn’t be arsed with that right now. Instead I yawned and dozed off with the heat of the sun on my face.

  And bless their hearts, my employers didn’t forget me – Johnny sent Brenda over with an enormous plate of fried chicken and rice for my lunch.

  It was much later when Toby arrived back from his sojourn in Quito. “Alright mate!” he greeted me jovially as he strode in the door. I was sitting in the lounge in the last of the light, testing my eyes on my Spanish dictionary. The weekend’s events had strongly encouraged me to learn more. If I had to explain in court that I’d accidentally inserted a welding iron into Jimmy’s rectal passage I wanted the judge to know that it wasn’t due to a lack of cultural sensitivity.

  “I see the deer’s arrived for our new enclosure. All makes sense now doesn’t it!” Toby was relentless in his upbeat attitude. Obviously he’d had a good time in the capital.

  “Erm… it does? I didn’t know.”

  “Haven’t you seen it? It’s a mouse deer! About the size of a big rabbit! I’ve never seen one before, it’s cute as hell.” He gave me a second to digest the news. “So, how’s it going?”

  “Not too bad,” I told him, “but not great. You know, a few problems.”

  “Oh!” It stopped him in his tracks, the cheerful wind stilled in his sails. “What, um, what went wrong, like?”

  “Well…” I couldn’t decide whether to be dramatic, and seek sympathy, or be subtle, understated, and earn admiration for my quiet strength in the face of adversity. Sympathy won. All I’d wished for throughout the ordeal was for my mum to be there. I guess I still had a lot of growing up to do.

  “I blinded myself welding.”

  “What?”

  “I blinded myself. Jimmy showed me how to weld, for about ten minutes, then made me do it. I burnt my eyeballs ’cause I couldn’t close the mask and still see what I was doing, so I looked right at the light. I lay in the hammock to chill out, and when I woke up I couldn’t see at all. Shit, it was like my eyelids were completely glued shut! I was really fucking scared, you know, but after a few hours I could just open my eyes a crack. So I looked in my dictionary for how to say “I can’t open my eyes” in Spanish, then I crawled over to Johnny’s house and told Brenda. She sent Johnny round with some eye drops. I can just about open them now, but it still hurts like hell. It’s like my eyes are full of glass.” That seemed to cover it. “Man it hurts!” I added for emphasis.

  Toby was silent for a few moments, digesting this information before commenting. His answer, when it came, was fairly concise.

  “Shit mate, that sucks. Anything else?”

  “Oh! Well… the coatis escaped again, but I caught them.”

  “Nice! Good job mate.”

  I had childishly hoped to elicit a bit more sympathy, but it didn’t seem to be forthcoming. I clearly wasn’t impressing the desperate nature of the accident on him. I tried a new tack. “It’s really fucking scary, not being able to see. I didn’t know if it was temporary, or if I’d be blind forever. You know what I mean?” I prompted.

  “Yeah,” came the reply, “I did the same thing myself the first time I welded. Hurts like shit don’t it?”

  I was lost for words. Well, almost. “Er… yeah, it does!”

  “Nothing else though?”

  “Um… no, that’s it. Did I mention I couldn’t see for two days?”

  Toby considered me with a slight smile.

  “Did you use the mask?”

  “No, I wanted to see the pretty colours,” I retorted.

  “Ha! You know the thing to do?”

  I had a nasty feeling that I did. “What’s that?” I humoured him.

  He did a fair approximation of Jimmy’s mock sincerity. Gesturing at the ground between us, he fixed me with a gaze full of feigned concern.

  “Is Very Bright… No Look!”

  A Close Shave…

  To me, a trip to Tambillo town meant food. There was a tiny bakery which sold bread rolls and an equally minute dairy shop which sold a kind of weak-tasting, soggy white cheese. I was living almost exclusively on these two products. Shopping with Toby had been such a sensory overload that I hadn’t really spared much attention for what he was buying. A day later I’d awoken to the realisation that we still didn’t own any meat – in a country where the staple diet was chicken and rice, living with a vegetarian would be a singularly bland experience. We had an infinite variety of fruit of course and plenty of oatmeal. Hell, we might as well be eating straight from the animals’ feed bowl. It suited the monkeys. But alas, Toby’s shopping list had been utterly devoid of anything I consider food.

  He’d bought a carrier bag full of chillies though. Seriously, the man was obsessed. He put them in his cheese and bread rolls. He put them in his rice. He put them in my rice. At times he put so many in that they outnumbered the rice. I could tell from his face when he was eating his cornflakes that he was wondering whether or not a dash of chilli would spice them up.

  So when Toby decided he needed a haircut (and insinuated that I might be similarly in need), I jumped at the chance. A hike down and, later, back up again was adventure enough by itself, since it involved leaping crevasses in the road, climbing several fences and trying to walk for almost an hour at a forty five degree angle to the slope. It was murder on the thighs. At the bottom was the short road into Tambillo town – and on that road sat the Empanada Woman.

  What is an empanada? Now that’s a tough one to describe. It’s… some kind of substance, not unlike Play-Dough, deep-fried, covered with sugar and filled with cheese. Sounds disgusting eh? But they tasted like heaven. Especially since there was no burning sensation associated with eating them. I’d tried them twice and was already considering offering the woman who sold them hard cash for the recipe. She was so friendly, sitting on the step behind her pavement stall. She had merry eyes and deeply etched laughter lines, and skin-tight blue jeans. Probably a stunner twenty years ago – or maybe five? Ages were almost impossible for me to guess as I had no basis for comparison. The Empanada Woman was weathered in body, but young in heart. She always smiled and asked simple questions like ‘How are you?’ and ‘How are the animals?’ This meant I could actually formulate answers, and feel good about myself in the process. I guessed that Toby had taken other volunteers to sample her delights (by which I mean her empanadas!).

  With the late afternoon sun on my face I strolled casually along the street next to Toby. Stallholders and the odd passer-by threw us an occasional “Buenos días!” Across from us stone steps led down to a series of formal gardens arranged around a central monument. Together they formed a square, bordered on all sides by the road, and the whole lot sloped sharply away from us. The buildings that lined the square formed Tambillo town – apart from the gas station on the Quito road and the payphone shop on the street leading back up to it, there really wasn’t much else. It was peaceful, especially at this hour, and quaint. Every wall needed paint, every shutter repairing, but the people seemed relaxed and friendly. I was starting to like Tambillo for more than just its sodden cheese.

  We ducked into the hairdresser’s minuscule shop, and a slim, middle-aged woman with smiling eyes wasn’t there. She was in the shop next door, chatting happily to its owner with no fear at all of what was happening in her own little place. Which was strange, because there was a young lad with half-cut hair still sitting in the padded armchair and picking his nose in front of the mirror. Our presence was clearly the reminder she needed though, and she quickly scooted in through the door making the place feel quite crowded. She seemed scaled to fit the room at about four foot nine, and as he stood up, apparently satisfied with what I still maintain was an incomplete haircut, the boy proved to be equally
small. I watched him leave, fascinated by his sense of style. Or maybe he could only afford the first stage and was having his hair done in instalments.

  Toby took his turn first, chatting amiably to the young woman. She seemed very friendly. It didn’t take long, largely because he emerged from the chair unchanged to the naked eye. Apparently he’d had something cut off somewhere, and I decided to pursue the matter no further than that. I was starting to believe his faded red baseball cap was actually grafted to his skull anyway, so it seemed unlikely that his life would be changed overly much by the absence of such a microscopic amount of hair.

  He nipped next door to buy us a couple of beers, leaving me alone and within clear speaking distance of the hairdresser. I gave her a wide smile, then carefully studied the lino floor.

  “Something something something?” she asked. I recognised by the rise in her voice at the end that it was a question. I glanced at the door. Toby was still very inconsiderately buying me a beer. I groped for an appropriate response, and came up with a technique I’d been falling back on more and more recently.

  “Sí,” I replied.

  She seemed satisfied.

  Then as if by magic Toby was back, handing me a nearly-cold beer, joking with the hairdresser, and beckoning me forward for my turn under the scissors. I was feeling a little nervous as I parked my ass in the chair. I really hoped she wasn’t fond of small talk. I was liking silence.

  Toby asked me what I wanted.

  “Just a bit shorter, really – short back and sides, nice and tidy. Not too short though,” I warned him.

  I still don’t know the exact Spanish words he used, and I’m sure he doesn’t remember them either, so I’m probably paraphrasing here. He turned to the hairdresser with the barest trace of a grin. “Shave it all off,” he said.

  And she did.