“Ruby, it’s time to remember the happier days I had walking here, when we were laughing so much that the other walkers would smile as they passed us by. Tortured couples would grimace in envy, wishing they too could share in our hilarity and be dragged away from day-to-day humdrum life, if only for a while. One of the funniest days was when I told the girls the ‘bus story’. Will I tell it to you, Ruby? This is the last story that I will tell you on the wall.”
I turned and strolled back up the wall in the direction of Dublin Port. To my left the Sugarloaf majestically peered over Dublin Bay and early-morning sailors cheered up the sea with their coloured sails. Dublin Bay had never looked so good; it was as though it was putting on its very best performance for our day out.
“Just after my thirtieth birthday, so that is ten years ago, I was stuck in a rut in my life. Everything was fine, just ticking along, but there was nothing wildly exciting or particularly fantastic to entertain me. I decided, as they say, to ‘get a life’. I thought that I should fall madly in love, so I tried that but found no one fantastic to fall madly in love with. I concluded that I was more attracted to the idea of being in love than to finding the right person. Eventually, I parked the idea of falling in love. Instead I would take a year out and head off and travel. Gladly I gave up my well-paid, steady job, and borrowed a pile of cash from the bank. I decided to go to South America. I would begin my travels in Buenos Aires and travel anti-clockwise around the continent, arriving back in Buenos Aires a year later. I would of course be both inspired and invigorated by my journey. I might even eventually figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I bet, Ruby, you’re thinking how crazy your mum is.”
I looked down at my protruding belly. My little girl was still fast asleep – she must like the stories and the stroll.
“My intention was to travel overland on buses. There they have great buses that are very luxurious, with seats that at night become comfortable beds. I would sleep and travel by night and by day walk, hike, cycle, swim and ski. Did you know there are fifteen different countries on the continent? Fifteen was too many to get around, so I selected seven or eight for my visit.”
A tall skinny man, slightly stooped over, appeared from behind me. As he passed me he called out: “Beautiful morning!” Off he went, bouncing up and down in a high visibility vest.
“Are you listening, Ruby? Listen because it’s the last story. Where was I? Yes, my travelling plan worked just fine a lot of the time. However, as I travelled through Venezuela towards the Brazilian border, getting around began to get more difficult because the area around the Amazon basin is so remote. The roads have potholes as big as craters, there are no signs on the roads, and the bus rarely comes – a bit like Ireland, I suppose. I needed to get from a place called Santa Elena de Uairen – that’s on the Great Plain of Venezuela, in the jungle, and in that jungle you can’t walk so only the animals can go there – I had to get from there to Manaus in the Amazon Basin. You know, Ruby, the Amazon is the second longest river in the world. Did you know that?”
I looked down at her but she didn’t respond, so I continued on with my story.
“I waited a day for a comfortable bus to come along but there was not another one due for two days, so I got on an ordinary bus. No beds on this bus. It was made for tiny people and my legs didn’t fit in the seats – I stretched them out in the narrow aisles. There was a huge mirror at the front of the bus, to the right of the bus driver’s head, so that he could see all the people on the bus. The journey was going to take eighteen hours on this boneshaker. Do you know what the Venezuelans call those buses? They call them ‘Aspirins’, because when you get off the bus you have to take two aspirins to get rid of the pain in your head from all the rattling.
“When I got on, the bus was very busy with lots of people going from Venezuela to Brazil. They thought that I was an alien – I mean, from outer space – you see, Ruby, in other countries people are not used to seeing freckles and reddish-brown hair. Because I had been in the sun so long, all my freckles were stuck together so I had groups of freckles on my face, especially on my lips and my eyelids. They looked – the freckles – as though they had bumped into one another, the groups of freckles.
“Do you know, Ruby, that your dad has heaps and heaps of freckles too. And so does your gran, Lizzy. That is a lot of freckles, must be hundreds of thousands of them, for just one family. Funny, isn’t it, how Ireland has so many freckles and such a big country like Bolivia doesn’t have any – seems unfair, doesn’t it – given that freckles are such beautiful things? You see, the thing about freckles is that they are hereditary. Do you know what that means? Do you, Ruby? Well, what it means is that if someone in your immediate family has something, like red hair or freckles, then you are likely to have them too.
“When they told me you were incompatible with life, I was afraid that it was something hereditary – that you got it from us. I mean, you did get it from us cos we created you – but I thought it was genetic – that it came from our genes – but it isn’t genetic. So maybe someday we might try again – for another you but a different one – one that is compatible with life.
“Oh yes, I was telling you about the Argentineans – they call freckles ‘kisses from God’ – isn’t that a lovely saying? And do you know that once when I was on a bus in Bolivia a little girl, only about seven, came and sat on the seat next to me. For the first while she just stared at me, from my toes to the top of my head, then her confidence grew and she stretched out her small sallow-skinned index finger. Very slowly her finger approached the back of my hand. Lightly, she tapped the freckles there. I smiled down at her and she started to giggle. Then with the same finger she repeated the exercise but this time she rubbed my freckles a bit harder. Her deep-brown eyes looked down at her little finger. Slowly she turned her fingertip so that it looked up at her, but the freckles were not on the top of her finger. Her eyes looked sad. Then she looked at me, and in Spanish she said: ‘Can you please give me just one freckle? You have lots and my mummy has none. I would like to give her just one of yours.’ I told her that they don’t come off. She said ‘Okay’ but I knew it was not, that she didn’t believe me. I wonder, if you were not fatally sick, would you have had freckles and reddish-brown hair like your mum, or would you have your dad’s beautiful chocolate-brown eyes, like a Dairy Milk Chocolate bar? I wonder would you have been like him, cool, calm and kind. Your dad is a good man, Ruby, a very good, kind man.
“Sorry, I’m rambling again – oh, the bus, yes, the bus story. I was on the bus, just smiling back at all the staring eyes. I took out my book, water and sleeping bag and settled in for an eighteen-hour journey. After a few hours I was awoken by a big jerk forward. We had run out of road and were travelling down a dried-up riverbed of the Amazon. I needed now to go to the loo. The bus driver looked at me as I stood up. I felt like an oversized giant. I smiled at him but thought it would be better if he concentrated on the road, instead of on me. I waddled down the bus, trying to avoid bumping off the passengers seated on the aisle. I opened the door of the chemical toilet. It was filthy, but filthy or not I had to go. I locked the door from the inside. There was no question of actually sitting on the bowl. I hovered over it, trying to steady myself over the toilet before I actually used it. No wonder the bloody thing was so filthy. There was a loud bang on the door. I opened it to a tiny shrivelled-up lady who blabbered something, with emphatic gestures, about not using the toilet now, because the road for the next while was very bumpy.”
We had nearly reached the end of the wall. I looked at my watch. It was 11.06, and my companion on the wall was still fast asleep. She felt lifeless.
“I thanked her for her concern; she seemed surprised when I answered her in Spanish. I closed the door. Not wanting to touch anything in the toilet, I rolled my sundress right up and tucked it in securely under my bra. I repeated the exercise at the back, shoving my dress up firmly under my bra strap. The Aspirin bus was wobbling like h
ell and it jumped each time it struck a pothole. I gripped the handrails and, with my bum poised ready to pee, I tried to align myself with the toilet bowl. I squatted down even further to get closer to the bowl. I was just about to relieve myself when the bus hit a huge crater in the road. I was flung to the left, my elbow banged down on the handle of the unlocked door, the door flung open and I crashed down on the aisle of the bus.
“There I lay in shock with my dress firmly tucked underneath my bra, pretty much entirely naked for the entire bus to see. I looked up and all the eyes on the bus were staring at me in complete amazement. For the passengers who didn’t have the pleasure of seeing the fall, they got the second half of the action in the huge mirror as I struggled to remove my dress from my bra. By now I thought my bladder was going to explode. I crawled like a beaten animal on my hands and knees back into the toilet cubicle, where I began once again the process of trying to use the toilet at the bottom of the Amazon basin.
“Maybe, Ruby, it is just as well that you never got to know your crazy mother. I wonder who you would have been like – would you have been sporty and adventurous like your mum? Or would you have been more creative with your hands like your dad? Or maybe you would have been musical. Your dad claims he can sing but, having listened to him in the shower, honestly he is not up to much. Or you might have been completed different from us both and just been your own person.” I would never know.
I opened the car door. It was 11:38, and we were running slightly over schedule, though still on time.
We passed the Shelley Banks, where kite-surfers looked unhappily at the calm seas. In the distance the East and West Piers stood stately in Dublin Bay.
“Wave bye to the piers, to the coloured lighthouses, Ruby!”
But she didn’t hear me, she was fast asleep. Our whirlwind tour was nearly complete. We drove away from the stone pier with the red lighthouse. We left Dublin Bay and the lighthouses in the rear-view mirror, forever.
“Do you know that I often know what your dad is thinking by what he sings in the shower? Often he sings ‘I Love You, Baby’. But his favourite song is ‘Let’s Get It On’ – that means he’s looking for love – before he started working abroad he would sing it aloud at least twice a day. I would run around the house to get away from his constant demand for love and attention. When he isn’t singing, I get worried. Your dad doesn’t sing when he’s very sad, Ruby. I don’t think he will sing for a long time after you have gone, maybe never, but I hope he will sing again some time, some day. That’s another job for you when you’re up in the sky: to encourage your dad to sing again. I know you’re asleep, but you can hear me, can’t you?”
I flung the change into the coin basket and the red-and-white barrier flew up.
“That’s the Liffey we’re crossing now – it’s the river in the middle of Dublin city, so it’s not very clean. It’s the river that your dad races down every year. You know that for every mouthful of water you swallow during the race, you have to drink a full pint of Guinness to kill all the bad stuff in the water. Every year he swallows more and more water.
“Ruby, look there, to the right out the window. Do you see over there, the bird right there, perched on the top of the bridge, the one with the red beak and red feet? Can you see how the top half of its head is black and the bottom half below the beak is white? That bird is called an ‘Arctic Tern’ – watch it fly and then glide. Those are my favourite birds – they fly from one end of the world to the other and back again in just one year. Imagine that! Flying over forty thousand kilometres a year. Do you know why I love them? Because they follow the sun – they see more sunlight than any other creatures in the world – they are called ‘the bird of the sun’, and they remind me of your dad and his need for sunlight. They stop in Dublin for a little city break on their way around the world – they seem to like it here.
“Hang on now, my little girl, don’t be scared – we’re going to head into the tunnel – it will be darker than normal in my tummy, but don’t be scared – Mum will look after you.
“Your dad grew up in the sunshine and he really misses it, so he always says when we win the lotto we will follow the sun. Then I told him about the Arctic Tern one day when we were walking the wall and he told me that he believed in reincarnation. Before, he wanted to come back as a dog, as a chow with a black tongue and white fur, but now he wants to come back as an Arctic Tern and fly and glide around the world following the sun.
“I wonder after tomorrow, Ruby, will you come back as a bird of the sun? What do you think? Who are you going to come back as? Are you going to come back to look after us? To make sure that your dad won’t be sad forever?”
Chapter 9
“Is it just yourself?” the young pimply check-in guy enquired.
I looked around me as if I expected someone else to appear.
“Yes,” I responded. “I’m travelling alone.”
He looked down at my bump and back up at me.
“Will I give you an emergency-exit seat? Are you fit and healthy?”
“Yes, yes, thank you, I am,” I lied.
I slid into my seat in the emergency-exit row by the window.
They have a look on this low-cost airline, I thought. The boys are skinny and sallow-skinned and their hair is so gelled that it stands up, dead straight. Their male waists are a size zero. They are overzealous and super-beautiful as if constantly posing for the annual charity calendar. There is now a low-cost speak too that is used on all flights and for all announcements. There are no full stops or commas, not even a breath of air is taken – any pausing is simply time-wasting. All the sentences flow into each other: the announcements are one long unintelligible sentence.
“God, Ruby, wouldn’t you hate to think what might happen during an emergency?” I whispered to her. “When they all reverted to their native languages chaos would ensue and they would all fix their hair for the emergency landing. You know, the sales pitch would probably still go on – no doubt the emergency drill would include selling smokeless cigarettes to calm the customers as the plane nose-dived. Well, Ruby, this is the only way to get to Liverpool so we don’t have much of a choice and if it’s any consolation you’re on a one-way ticket.”
Over the last couple of days I had become an expert at avoiding all types of eye contact. Once you do it a few times, it becomes quite easy. You don’t want to be blatantly rude either. There is an art to it. You look over someone. It’s as though you’re looking at their face, but you are in fact looking at the top of the back of their head but from the front. You see just beyond them. Eye contact can open up a series of uncomfortable questions, eye contact can tell too much.
I put on my head phones and closed my eyes. I dozed off, feeling tired after our early-morning outing.
I woke having slept for only fifteen minutes though it felt like I had been sleeping for hours. I sat up and looked around, afraid I had been dribbling or snoring or both.
Her squinty eyes and cold-steel gaze felt as though they were going to pierce every bone of my body. She glared out of the corners of her eyes. The small wiry woman frowned at my stomach, then at my face, then moved on to my eyes and then back down at my bulge. Her watery dull-brown eyes and her mean lips were invading my space. She had wavy dull-brown hair and plum-coloured lipstick that was plastered just outside the outline of her lips. She was dressed in a light beige suit with a plain off-white blouse. A remarkably unspectacular outfit, I thought. Her outfit matched her personality, as I was about to find out, devoid of colour and life.
I closed my eyes to avoid engaging with her but I was too late: eye contact had been stolen from me by her. She was in. I had made another fatal mistake.
“Off to Liverpool then?” she chirped.
“Yes,” I replied, trying to shut off the conversation.
“For just a couple of days? Meeting someone, are you?”
“Yes,” I replied to her second and third questions. “Yes, I am meeting people there.”
“Oh, that will be nice. Have you ever been to Liverpool before? Great city, you know, lots of shopping, lovely restaurants and some great disco bars too. Or so they tell me. They say that the nightlife is the best – well, you would easily know by the tiny little skirts that they wear – so short and you know they even wear them in the middle of winter – it’s a wonder that they don’t get pneumonia. I’d say half of them have kidney infections except they are so cold and drunk they don’t even know it.” She appeared relieved now that she had got that rant out of the way.
I fixed my gaze just above her head, pursed my lips and nodded my head. “I know,” I replied. I could think of nothing more to say.
“I suppose you won’t see much of the nightlife in your condition!” She giggled to herself aloud, as though not including me in our conversation. “You can’t keep going for long these days, I suppose? But still, even in your condition it’s nice to get a break, isn’t it? So where did you say you were staying?”
“I’m going to a conference – an IT conference.” I hoped that by providing all the essential information in a single statement she would be both satisfied and disappointed with my story.
“Oh, I see, that will be nice, won’t it?” Either she was softening a little or more likely she hadn’t got the faintest idea what the IT bit meant – I mean, how could an IT conference be nice – nicely dull perhaps!
“Yes,” I said. “I’m going with Ruby.” The words were out and the ball was back in her court now – not what I wanted.
I fixed my eyes on the white tissue paper on the headrest of the seat directly in front of me. I dug my nails firmly into the palm of my hand, and blinked. Maybe she did see the tears well up in my eyes – because the questioning eased. Maybe she did have a gentle heart and just a bad manner. I gave her half a smile.
Ruby's Tuesday Page 10
