Five Bestselling Travel Memoirs Box Set

by Twead, Victoria

  (Toby had an opinion to offer on this subject much later in our room. Between explosions of laughter he told me, “You should always keep a condom in your back pocket, mate!” He never seemed to run out of this vital, if a little untimely, advice.)

  We emerged from the darkened beach to find the party much reduced. Toby had headed off for the night, as had all but two of the parents. We sat back at the table with Alice, and gazed into each other’s eyes. Then she glanced around the (now even smaller) crowd a little nervously.

  I tried to kiss her again, but she lent back out of reach and smiled instead. Huh? She looked around again, then said something to Alice. Again I picked out the word ‘lady’. Alice introduced herself in turn, and it finally trickled through my drink addled brain that the Spanish word for ‘lady’ was nothing like the English one.

  Alice turned her attention to me “So, what have you been up to then?” The way she stressed the word ‘you’ made it clear she didn’t need me to answer. Plus she was giving me knowing eyebrows. My lady kissed me quickly on the cheek, then glanced around guiltily.

  I was so confused by this stage, with no idea what was going on. “I don’t think she likes me anymore,” I mumbled at Alice. The glory of the night was evaporating quicker that the foul spirits in my glass.

  Now Alice looked sympathetic. She turned and chatted to Lady for a few minutes. Lady glanced around again in that conspiratorial manner, then replied. I was closely watching Alice’s face, trying to read the news before it arrived, and I caught the exact moment of comprehension as it dawned. Her eyes widened just a little, her forehead creased and her jaw loosened somewhat. She said something back, then turned to me.

  “And?” I had to ask.

  In fairness to Alice I feel that at this moment, had Toby been in charge of this revelation, he would have pissed himself laughing. To her credit Alice merely looked a little concerned.

  “Okay, for starters the Spanish word for ‘lady’ is ‘mujer’. What she was telling you is, her name is Lady.

  “Ah! Yeah, I just got that!”

  “And she’s not a teacher. She’s here with her two children.”

  I choked on my drink. Meths and Coke dribbled down my chin.

  “And she’s nervous about kissing you in public,” Alice continued, “because some of these people know her husband.”

  Return of the Red-Eye

  The journey home from Esmereldas was considerably more comfortable than the journey there. I was still sitting on the floor of the bus, but this time my mind was occupied with happy memories. And wild fantasies. Every few minutes I stole a look at the back of Lady’s head, half a school bus away, and imagined what it would be like to run my fingers through that lustrous shiny black hair, when it wasn’t covered with sand. Occasionally I caught her sneaking a glance back at me, and when our eyes locked even I blushed at the intensity of our combined desire. This was the perfect distance – from here I could admire her, and picture her naked, and not have to speak to her. Why oh why had I been so slack in my language studies? Well, now that would have to change. The prospect of seeing her again without a drastic improvement in my conversational skills frankly terrified me.

  We stopped for lunch at another beach, and Lady subtly signed to me that we should sneak off. We walked hand in hand through empty streets looking for somewhere, anywhere to be alone together. After last night’s drunken antics she was determined to be more circumspect. Her last whispered comments to me before I’d staggered off to bed had left me in no doubt that she wanted us to be together, and a passionate embrace outside the hotel had rekindled my desire for the same. But this was a big deal for Lady. Her children were on that bus, along with probably half the people she knew. I was immune to local gossip; she would have to cope with it every day.

  Eventually we wound up sitting in a tiny cafe, fingertips still touching, drinking coffee with our free hands. I stared into the hypnotic darkness of her eyes and tried to think of something, anything, to say.

  Then a horn blared. A voice shouted. I looked up.

  The bus was parked directly outside the cafe. It was fully loaded – kids, teachers and two very amused gringos stared down at us from dusty windows. The driver honked again, and some of the kids started to bang on the windows. The shout came again, evidently from whoever was in charge of the expedition. I looked back at Lady to see her face frozen in shock. She’d gone pale – no mean feat for someone with her complexion. Suddenly she lurched to her feet and grabbed for her purse. I dropped a few coins on the table and followed her out of the cafe. We were greeted outside by a chorus of catcalls, whoops and sniggers from an entire bus full of comedians. I just grinned like an idiot and pretended not to notice it was anything out of the ordinary. Poor Lady seemed mortified. I could only guess at what was being said to her, as Alice felt it too vulgar to translate. And anyway she was laughing too hard.

  “When you’re trying to shag another man’s wife,” Toby advised as the bus lurched towards home, “you should try to be a bit discreet, mate. Just a little bit.”

  How – Are?

  It was a long time before I lived down the events of the holiday. It probably didn’t help that I developed a habit of daydreaming, fantasising about Lady in the middle of the most random tasks. Even Jimmy joined in the teasing, with a predictably macho thrust. “Be careful,” he warned me, “I’ve seen her husband. He is a very big man.”

  One of the few benefits of being a gringo finally came into play for me. “Big man eh?” I held a hand across my nipples. “So he’s about this high then?”

  Luckily something came along to take our collective minds off my romantic complications.

  I was walking past Johnny’s truck when it growled at me.

  I froze instantly. This was unusual behaviour even for Johnny’s truck, though it had been known to cheap or chirrup on occasion.

  The growl came again – deep, guttural, filled with menace. It was the kind of sound that, if you hear it from less than three feet away, means its time to shit yourself because you’re about to die. I took a few cautious steps back from the truck. Either we were about to inherit a tiger, or someone was sitting in the back watching the Discovery Channel with the volume right up. Shivers of fear and excitement rippled down my spine as the deadly noise replayed once more, quieter this time and all the more dangerous-sounding for it.

  I had to stifle an impulse to reach over the side and thrown back the covering tarpaulin. The war between curiosity and sensibility raged within me for several seconds until the first surge of adrenaline wore off. I noticed that I was shaking, and not from the cold. Well maybe a little from the cold. The truth was, I was getting through my first aid kit fast enough already. And there wasn’t much for loss of limbs in there. Instead I sought out Toby, the wellspring of all knowledge – or at least of some knowledge. Occasionally. I managed to deflect his request for a game of chess by recounting my last few minutes.

  “I think it’s a tiger!” I told him breathlessly.

  “Woah… Dunno mate!” Toby replied. “I heard from Johnny that he was getting something today, dunno what it is though. Something South American. ‘How-Are’ it sounded like, with a rolled ‘r’.”

  “How Arre?” I mimicked. “How Arrrrrre?”

  “I’m not bad mate, thanks. How are you?”

  “You’re an arsehole,” I told him.

  The mystery was solved the following morning. There was, of course, no tiger. It was a jaguar. Full grown, adult female, almost two metres of magnificent golden jungle cat, spotted all over with dark brown rosettes – and in a really bad mood.

  “Man that jaguar is pissed off,” said Toby.

  “Tiene ambre,” explained Johnny. The cat was hungry.

  But we couldn’t feed her much as she was. Leonardo arrived to tranquillise her and the rest of us set to creating a new home. Johnny had obviously been making enquiries of his neighbours, because moments later a truck rolled up with an enormous cage, brown with rust, p
erched precariously on the back of it. The bars were as thick as the ones on a prison cell. God only knows where it came from. I couldn’t imagine any reason why anyone would own such a cage, other than for torturing people who’d seen something they shouldn’t have. I made a mental note never to visit this particular neighbour. It took the whole team of us to pull it off the truck and move it a few steps at a time all the way to the galpón.

  That’s when Jimmy winked at me and fired up the welding machine. Oh shit. I made myself busy carrying twisted metal bars over as he donned the ridiculous mask and started blazing away. He was a pro though. It only took him a couple of hours to turn wreckage into… well, wreckage, but fours sides of wreckage and a roof that were all cleverly fastened together. I’d had one more go at welding in the meantime, accidentally burned a small hole where two bars were supposed to meet and gone stomping off to sulk. Even Toby was better at it than me. The git.

  The jaguar was fast asleep. How long for was anyone’s guess – even Leonardo couldn’t say for sure. Ketamine was notoriously unpredictable in its effects and it wasn’t like he anaesthetised big cats on a daily basis. We hauled the cage a few feet at a time around the front of Johnny’s house, past cages full of curious monkeys, and manoeuvred it into position on a plot of scrubby grass beyond the parrots.

  Toby sighed. “I was saving this area. I really wanted to make a garden here. Grow some veg, you know. It’d save loads of money.” Poor Toby. Not only was he vegetarian (which was already a recipe for disaster in my book), he was vegetarian in a country that just wasn’t ready for it. And to top it off, he couldn’t cook vegetables. Basically he was screwed.

  Now that the cage was in place I was more than a little confused by it. It looked like a relic of the Spanish Inquisition and was very nearly as scary as the jaguar herself. Johnny had explained that it would only be a temporary home, as he’d ordered enough materials to build her a brand new enclosure to rival our best. That was an eye-opener in itself – Johnny buying something new! I’d believe that when I saw it. But for now this evil prison would be the cat’s home. To my mind it seemed to be missing something. Like, oh I don’t know, a front! I had a nasty feeling Jimmy was going to wait until the cat was inside and then produce a roll of duct tape to seal off the end with.

  Carrying the Jaguar was an altogether more exciting experience. I took her head, marvelling at the deep grunt every time she drew breath. Not as many hands could be brought to bear as on the cage and the cat weighed a tonne. And it goes without saying we couldn’t stop every ten seconds and drop her for a rest! We staggered over to the cage and lowered her massive golden body to the grass. I had to move away before allowing myself to collapse – there seemed to be some primitive survival instinct that just would not let me lie down next to her. Especially when she kept twitching violently. Probably tearing us all to shreds in her dreams…

  The cage was manhandled across and dropped over the top of her, the bottom edges coming to rest in shallow trenches Johnny had dug whilst Jimmy was welding. Finally it all made sense! Four sides and a roof, grass underfoot… and no door.

  “Um, how we… get inside?” I haltingly asked Johnny. He took a step back and looked at me as though I’d just sprouted a large penis from the top of my head. I think his expression could best be described as disbelief.

  “We DON’T!”

  Cat Food

  Lunch was disturbed by a screech from the front door, followed by Johnny’s head poking through. “Okay. Jaguar is awake,” he told us. “Now we feed her. You want to watch?”

  I did. Of course we did.

  “Can we feed her?” Toby asked.

  Probably not without crapping myself I thought.

  “No.” Johnny was very direct about it. He obviously had our best interests at heart. “She is very dangerous. I will have to feed her.”

  He pantomimed the actions, to save talking to me in baby language. It was a powerful performance – first he became the pair of us, bravely approaching the cage and with exaggerated caution, placing the food on the ground outside the bars. Then he was the mighty jaguar itself, coiled for the spring, and with brutal directness he pounced on the fence, shoved his mighty paws through the bars are dragged his prey inside. The look of abject terror on his face as he became us again clearly demonstrated our unsuitability for the task.

  It was quite an act. I almost applauded.

  “He puts the food outside?” I checked with Toby, since he’d been the sole beneficiary of the audio commentary accompanying our little play.

  “Yep,” he confirmed, “he says she’ll pull it inside herself.”

  Interesting! This really was something I had to see.

  Outside, I stood with Toby, eyeing the caged jaguar in awe. Even motionless, curled up on her side in a corner, the beast radiated power. When she was up and pacing the smooth, sinuous motions and rippling of the muscles beneath her sleek hide screamed danger. This was not a beast to mess around with. She was without a doubt the most beautiful animal I had ever laid eyes on. And she was totally, utterly deadly.

  Perhaps that explains the attraction. Johnny snapped me out of my reverie. “Listo?” (Ready?) he enquired. I nodded.

  He swung his arm in a couple of loose practice arcs, then gently lobbed the dead bird towards the cage. It was a perfect shot – the meal landed exactly at the base of the cage, on the opposite side from the jaguar herself. It really was a big chicken, and made an impressive thump as it hit the ground.

  We held our breath and waited.

  The jaguar looked up, slightly puzzled by this turn of events. A second later I could almost see the moment when the scent hit her nostrils. An electric shiver ran through her whole body. In an instant she was transformed from curled relaxation to coiled spring. An audible heartbeat passed before she pounced.

  One spring carried her clear across the cage. Before we’d registered the leap she had both paws through the bars, claws fastened in the chicken’s flesh. She pulled and jerked back, flinging her entire weight into the motion, once, twice, and on the third time the chicken gave. It was like watching the bad guy in some sci-fi movie getting sucked out into space through a tiny hole in the spaceship’s hull. The chicken was torn in two, the sections buckling in on themselves with a series of sickening cracks. In less time than it takes to tell it had been dragged back into the cage, through a pair of three-inch square gaps in the bars.

  Amazing.

  We stayed to watch while she fed, pinning her meal down with her fore paws and ripping strips off it with her teeth. It took only a couple of minutes to dismember and consume the entire chicken.

  “Man. She was hungry.” It was all I could think of to say.

  “Yeah!” Toby enthused. “That was fucking awesome!”

  Johnny rolled his eyes at our childish glee, but the light in his eyes said he’d been excited too. He straightened up, turned and strode away without saying anything more.

  Toby looked after him briefly, then turned to me with a conspiratorial smile. “I’m gonna feed her again later. Did you see that? Oh my God, she’s fast!”

  Johnny evidently didn’t want her feeding again so soon. “Ten cuidado,” he warned us when we asked. He sighed at our obvious enthusiasm. “Ella es muy peligroso!” (She is very dangerous!). But I was entranced by the beast. A short while later I slipped out of the house, camera in hand, and warily approached her cage. She was lying on the far side of it, apparently asleep. “You are so beautiful,” I told her, and was rewarded by a flick of her tufted ears. I crouched down to put her on eye level and crept a tiny bit closer.

  Mistake.

  As she exploded into motion my own much slower reflexes kicked in to throw me backwards. For a second I was hung up on something, then fell back as it was pulled free. I landed on my arse a good two metres from the cage. It was a second or two before I even realised what had happened. My blood, too, seemed to be caught off guard by the speed of the attack. It took another long moment before it welled out
of my hand and ran down my fingers to drip onto the ground.

  In that split second blur of motion the jaguar had crossed the cage, shot a leg through the bars, and raked me with a single claw before I could tumble out to safety. I’d thought I was well outside her reach, at least a metre or more from the bars. Somehow she had managed to get her entire limb through a tiny hole. Deadly she was indeed, I reminded myself as I shakily rose to my feet.

  I backed away another few steps just to be sure. The jaguar was pacing the cage, agitated. I didn’t want to stir her up any further. Far enough away to finally feel safe, I started to calm down. I dared to look at my injury and discovered it wasn’t too bad. One solitary claw seemed to have hooked me, tearing a small chunk out of the back of my hand. Blood was flowing freely from the hole; it looked deep, but not wide. Thank the Goddess, I thought, that my hand had been the closest part of me! If I’d been pushing my face closer to get a better view… it didn’t bear thinking about.

  I shook the worst of the blood off my hand and headed back to the volunteers house. Hopefully I’d get it cleaned up before anyone noticed. Toby was just coming out as I went in. “You alright?” He asked.

  “Yeah, man.”

  “Oh. Sure you’re alright?” He asked again.

  “Yeah, fine, why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Ah, well… your eyes are massive! And you’re white as a sheet, and…” he trailed off as he glanced down at my feet. I followed his gaze.

  “And you’re bleeding on the floor,” he concluded.

  “Seriously? The jaguar?” Toby sounded impressed. Once he’d persuaded me to let him examine the wound I’d felt inspired to tell him the tale.