Random Acts of Heroic Love

by Danny Scheinmann

  ‘It’s just that my friends went off without telling me and I’ve been waiting for a night bus for ages.’

  It turned out she was a fresher at the same university and she had seen him around in the college bar. She wouldn’t have asked a complete stranger to walk her home. She was chatty and they talked all the way back, although Leo could no longer remember anything they talked about, the only thing that stuck with him from that first encounter was her mass of hair and her distinctive gait. She seemed to bounce on the front of her foot, her weight slightly forward, her head bobbing up and down. There was something about that walk that was so joyful and carefree that Leo had to try it for himself. He dropped her off at her hall of residence and walked the Eleni walk home to see what it felt like. The shift forward in weight gave him a sense of purpose, the bob of the head after each step made him feel naively optimistic, and the extra energy through the foot had an enthusiasm about it. It was a revelation to him that the way he walked could affect his feelings. Perhaps every emotion had its corresponding walk. He tried walking slowly, he stooped and he staggered. If anyone had seen him that night they would have mistaken him for a lunatic. This is better than therapy, he thought; depressed people should just walk differently. They should look to the sky, they should breathe deeply and they should bounce like Eleni.

  The next time he saw her she was sitting at an Amnesty stall in the student union trying to get people to write letters to Colonel Gaddafi to complain about victims of torture in Libya. Leo sat down at the desk and they chatted about the work of Amnesty. Eleni spoke like she walked. Listening to her he rediscovered the purpose, the optimism and the enthusiasm that he had felt in her walk. He wondered what came first: the bouncy walk or the bouncy talk? Which had influenced the other? She was persuasive and passionate and Leo felt good about writing to Colonel Gaddafi. Unfortunately Gaddafi was not a very good pen pal, he never wrote back, he never thanked Leo for his interest or let him know how his letters had moved him. But nevertheless Eleni encouraged him to come back again and again. During the next couple of months Leo wrote to a whole cartload of obscure African kings, Arab dictators and the odd American senator to plead for the life of political activists, poets and death-row interns. He became Amnesty’s most avid letter writer. He wrote so frequently that every fascist, Stalinist, military crackpot, nutcase despot in the world must have known him by name. If there had been an award for the dogged pursuit of justice by one man and his pen Leo would have won it. Until eventually he could bear it no longer; he sat down at the Amnesty desk and wrote:

  Dear Saddam Hussein,

  How many of these bloody letters do I have to write before

  Eleni will go out with me?

  Lots of love, your old friend,

  Leo Deakin

  He gave it to Eleni who perused it carefully. She nodded to herself and then looked up disapprovingly at Leo. His cheeks flooded with embarrassment. Eleni put the letter on the table.

  ‘And I thought you really cared about human rights,’ she said.

  ‘I do, I really do, I care about everything you care about. If you ran a dog home I’d come round every day with dog biscuits. Don’t you see I just want to be near you?’

  ‘You don’t have to write letters if you want to go out with me.’ She appeared totally unimpressed by his charm.

  ‘Well, what do I have to do?’ he asked. This was desperate, he felt like he was sinking into a bog and she was watching him drown.

  ‘You just have to ask me.’

  ‘Oh, right . . . will you go out with me?’ he asked meekly.

  At last she smiled and Leo felt a rush of hope, suddenly he was above the clouds. She was teasing him. Of course she liked him.

  ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll think about it?’

  ‘I’ll give you an answer in a week.’

  What kind of response was that? Think about it? What was there to think about? It was a torturous week. At first Leo was confused. His pride was hurt. What would she know in a week’s time that she did not know already? She obviously didn’t care for him and he didn’t want to be with a girl who had to persuade herself that she did. He mulled it over at night, imagined a thousand scenarios, planned his responses and prepared little speeches. Like a small boy with two armies of toy soldiers he played out Eleni’s possible motives and then calculated his best defensive strategy. As the week progressed he became exhausted by his obsession and began to feel manipulated. She had isolated him from the decision-making process. It was now her choice alone whether they were to embark on a relationship. She had manoeuvred him into a position of weakness and he resented it. He began to despise her. Didn’t she know she was torturing him? He decided that whatever she said to him at the end of the week he was no longer interested. She had blown her chance and that was that. With the issue resolved in his own mind he adopted an air of false joviality whenever he saw her. She was in for a surprise.

  Eleni was not confident in love. She was deeply suspicious of anyone who expressed an interest. She had had too many experiences of surrendering herself to boys who only wanted to practise on her until someone better came along. That night, after Leo had surprised her by asking her out, she sat in front of the mirror and examined herself. It just wasn’t plausible that Leo, a sweet-looking third year who always seemed to be surrounded by what she considered to be infinitely more attractive girls, could want to be with her. Everywhere she looked there were better propositions than her, taller, funnier, fairer, smarter. What did she have? A podgy face, a wide nose, heavy black eyebrows on broody eyes, tiny short legs which dissolved into doughy thighs, and a general lack of definition. If she were to sum herself up in three words, it would be ‘out of focus’. In school photos she was the kid whose features you couldn’t quite make out when everyone else was smiling and clear. Her only redeeming feature was her long curly dark hair; an expensive wrapping on a poor gift.

  And she was even convinced that if someone looked closely they would notice the black cloud that hung over her head like a curse. For Eleni had been born with a specific purpose: to build a bridge between her parents, the philandering Georgios and the depressive Alexandria. But she failed spectacularly in her duties and was only able to prove unequivocally that they should never have been together in the first place. Her home on the small Greek island of Kithos was a war zone in which she was the battleground. When she was four years old the marriage finally imploded in an orgy of recrimination and Georgios ran off to the mainland with another woman. For a few years he struggled to sustain even a lazy contact with Eleni, and the biannual visit, monthly phone call, holiday postcard and late birthday present slowly dwindled to nothing so that by the time she was eight he had disappeared altogether.

  When Eleni was fourteen Alexandria hit another depression and decided to pack her off to England to live with her aunt. She wanted her daughter to be free; free of the claustrophobia of Kithos and free of her mother’s mood swings, but it left Eleni feeling intrinsically unlovable. It was easy for her to suspect Leo of being a philanderer, why else would he be interested? Was she really going to succumb to a charmer only to be dumped yet again? But she adored him; he was attentive, humorous and without a trace of vanity. He never combed his hair, he wore ill-fitting clothes from the charity shop and yet, with his tall, slender body and bright green eyes, he always managed to look lovely in a haphazard kind of way. She wrestled with herself and finally resolved to chance her weary young heart one more time, fully expecting that it would all be over by the next new moon.

  She could not foresee that two years later, sitting in the Camden flat she shared with Leo, she would look in her mirror again and realize that the black cloud had gone and that she was beautiful. Nor could she know that her relationship with Leo would be her last and most loving and that she would be dead before the end of her twenty-second year.

  Exactly one week later, she found Leo in the bar and said somewhat formally: ‘Regarding that
business last week, the answer is yes.’

  Leo’s resolve unravelled on the spot; he instinctively put his arm round her and kissed her. ‘I hate you with all my heart,’ he said, and threw the rest of his prepared speeches into the dustbin of his thoughts. He was ecstatic. All he wanted to do was run his hands through her magnificent mane of hair and bounce.

  5

  LEO SHUFFLED OUT OF THE ROOM, DOWN THE CORRIDOR OF the sleeping clinic to the telephone in the foyer. He hovered over the receiver wondering who to call first. Start with the easiest, he thought, so he dialled the hotel in Quito where they had been staying. They had kept their room on for the Cotopaxi excursion and left half their luggage there. Leo and Eleni had grown very fond of the owner, Celeste, in the few weeks they had stayed there. She was more matriarch than manager; a zestful attractive lady in her forties who advised and mothered the young backpackers who frequented her hotel. When she discovered that Eleni could sing she taught her a host of Ecuadorean love songs. Leo couldn’t think of anyone else in the country who he could rely on for help, and true to her caring image Celeste promised to be in Latacunga by morning.

  Then he called his parents, but it was 5 a.m. in England and the answering machine was on, so he tried his friend Charlie, who answered in a dozy mumble. He listened to Leo’s strained voice and wondered whether he was not in one of those twilight nightmares that appear so real you are convinced you are awake. ‘Is this a joke?’ he kept repeating and: ‘Do you know what time it is here?’ He pulled himself up to sit on the side of his bed and turned on the lamp. It was only the dual shock of gravity and light that eventually brought him tumbling out of his torpor. There was a long silence.

  ‘Leo, what happened?’

  ‘It was a bus crash, but I can’t remember anything about it.’

  ‘My God, are you all right?’

  ‘Bruised and cut, nothing broken. I’m fine.’

  Charlie could not disguise his relief and he felt guilty for enquiring after the living.

  ‘Charlie, I can’t get hold of my mum and dad, and I’ve got to tell Eleni’s mum. I can’t call direct from here. Will you ring her and tell her to call me?’

  ‘Oh, er . . . I don’t think I can do that, I don’t really know her.’ Breaking the news to Eleni’s mother, Alexandria, would be like opening a window in a flood. There would be a deluge of grief that would flatten all in its path. ‘Look, I’ll keep trying your parents, maybe they should contact her.’

  Ten minutes later Leo’s father called; Charlie had managed to rouse him from his bed. He was clearly shaken and he spoke in an unfamiliar high pitch that cracked and wavered yet never quite broke. Leo’s father, Frank, was as soft as a runny Brie, a gentle man who had survived a difficult childhood. Both his parents were dead before he was thirteen and he had been adopted into a poor family from Leeds who made him sleep in an attic, but he was not one for discussing his past or his emotions. Occasionally in a cinema or theatre some ancient trigger would be released and he would be catapulted back to his youth, right into the heart of the grief that he had been too young to name, bypassing in an instant the intervening years of middle-class stability, and he would find himself silently crying.

  Now, once more, he saw himself as a child without his mother and his heart opened up like an oyster, his intestines knotted and his breath faltered. He’d harboured a soft spot for Eleni ever since their first meeting, when she had thrown her arms around him and hugged him like a long-lost relative.

  Frank knew what Leo was going through but he offered no words of comfort. He never knew what to say, so he generally said nothing. From a very young age Leo had known that it was pointless trying to discuss anything emotional with his father. Whenever Leo was going through a rocky patch Frank would go inside himself and behave like a helpless bystander while Leo’s mother, Eve, would try to sort things out. Leo attributed his father’s silent impenetrability to his childhood as an orphan, not that Leo knew much about it. He had given up hope that they would ever have a proper adult relationship.

  ‘Dad, I want to come back with Eleni as soon as possible. I may need you to check out flights and help organize the funeral, but I’ve got to speak to Alexandria first,’ Leo said curtly.

  ‘You mean she doesn’t know yet?’

  ‘No, you can’t call Greece from here – don’t know why. Eleni used to go to the central telephone exchange. Anyway, I wondered if you could speak to Alexandria and ask her to phone me?’

  There was a long pause. Leo could hear his father blowing his nose. ‘I don’t know,’ Frank said, his voice rising as he tried to suffocate his tears. ‘Don’t you think it would be better coming from you?’

  Again this refusal. Breaking the news to Alexandria was a morbid responsibility and no one wanted to put their hand in the fire, least of all Frank. ‘Please, Dad.’

  Frank sighed. ‘All right, wait by the phone . . . I’ll . . . I’ll wake up Eve and get her to call.’

  Within minutes the phone rang again. Leo looked at the receiver and began to shake involuntarily. He took a deep breath and picked it up. He could hear Alexandria’s voice before he even got the phone to his ear. She was in full flow as though she was in the middle of an argument.

  ‘You promise me you look after her. You promise.’

  ‘There was nothing I could . . .’

  ‘Leo, you give me your word. I knew it was stupid idea to go there. You should have stop her. Why didn’t you stop her?’

  ‘I couldn’t stop her, the best I could do was follow her.’

  ‘Now she’s gone. My baby, my baby. It’s my fault I should never have relax.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘All this time I worry about her. I was so thinking about her all the time but this last two weeks I relax. I stop even to praying for her.’

  ‘Alexandria, it’s not your fault, it’s not my fault. It was a bus crash.’

  ‘But I should have been more strict from the start. I had bad feeling about this trip. I should have force her not to go. She would have hate me but at least she would be alive.’

  She was not the only one who had had a bad feeling about their trip. Leo’s own mum, Eve, had sought many reassurances that it would be safe. They had discussed every worst-case scenario imaginable and he had calmed her with a confidence which masked his own fears. For Eleni, Latin America was a lifelong dream, she was going whether he came or not. But Leo had never been drawn to the place, and so he found himself in the strange position of rebutting advice which he secretly agreed with. There was only one reason he was going and that was because he loved Eleni so much that he could not contemplate a year without her. If he’d been given the choice he would have gone east to Thailand or Indonesia.

  ‘Why did God do this?’ Alexandria said. ‘Why take someone so young? She was such a good girl. Why? I don’t understand!’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t think God cares who dies,’ Leo said. ‘If God did this then I don’t know why you believe in Him. Why bow down to a murderer?’

  Alexandria was stunned by this remark and for a moment she fell in thrall to its cynical logic. After a long pause she said quietly, ‘Bring her back to me, Leo. I want to bury her here on Kithos. Here I look after her,’ and she hung up.

  Leo was exhausted as he trudged back to his room. A bolt shot up from his knee and he gasped in pain. He manoeuvred himself gingerly into bed and slumped down once more to keep vigil over the eternal night, desperately chasing sleep, wondering how long he could stare at the crack in the ceiling before his eyes would bore through it and the entire weight of the universe would come crashing down on top of him. He threw the word ‘bus’ to the dogs in his mind that were scavenging for memories of the crash, but all he got back were the chewed remains of a different journey.

  They were in Esmeraldas on the northern coast of Ecuador. The town’s reputed remoteness was its biggest draw, there was no access by road so they had come by boat through lush mosquito-infested marshlands. The only other wa
y was by an old plantation train which dropped steeply down from Ibarra high on the Andean plateau. It was supposed to come every three days or so but there was no timetable. Every morning at dawn a crowd would gather at Esmeraldas station for an hour or so in case it came. On the days the train did come the whole town knew about it in minutes and people would come flooding to meet it. But only those who had waited could be sure of a seat out of town, the rest would scramble for standing room.

  Leo and Eleni had spent a couple of days in this charming humid town where the electricity went off at eight in the evening and, with no cars, it was so quiet that they could hear people chatting several streets away. They were lucky that on the very day they wanted to leave, a train magically showed up and they managed to get seats.

  They had been travelling an hour or so and climbed maybe a thousand metres when suddenly all the passengers began to gather their bags and clamber out of the windows. The train was slowing down but had not stopped and people were hanging out of the windows and doors.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Leo asked Eleni.

  ‘I don’t know but perhaps you should do what they’re doing,’ she said.

  Leo climbed out of the window and shouted to the next man along to ask what was happening.

  ‘There’s only one bus. No more buses for two days,’ the man called. Leo did not have a clue what he was talking about. They were miles away from Ibarra, and he could not understand why everyone was getting off and in such a hurry. Before he could ask any more questions two more men had climbed out of his window and they were all hanging on shoulder to shoulder like swimmers at the beginning of an Olympic backstroke competition. By now all the men were on the outside of the train and the women, children and elderly were pushed up against the doors. There was such pandemonium on the train that Leo knew that, for whatever reason, it was best to be ready to jump out.

  Eleni shouted out of the window to him, ‘There’s been a landslide further along the track and we have to get out here. Apparently there is a road from here up to Ibarra. A woman told me that we have to get the bus because there’s nowhere to stay here and there are a lot more people on this train than can get on that bus. She said there was only one bus driver prepared to make the journey. The track’s been blocked for a fortnight. Someone could have told us!’