by Zoë Folbigg
How the fuck?
He thought about the first time he saw her. No, not the first. It was the fourth, but it was the first time they had held each other’s gaze. It was the first time Daniel realised that Olivia was more than just a crush, that there was something deeper behind those fiery eyes.
I’ll write it as a love letter to her.
He stared at the white rectangle.
No, I’ll write it to the girls.
Daniel’s fingers hovered over the keys and he looked up at the screen. Cardiff City were losing to Arsenal.
Fuck.
Four
I looked out of the window and there she was. Beyond the dust swirling in the air, through the smears arching across the glass, I saw a bronzed leg, long and carefree, stretching out of the passenger window of a battered orange campervan. The colours of the road, the sand, her skin, were all genuinely as golden as the halcyon image of my memory. She crossed her other leg over it, her dusty brown boots looking like they might fly off in the wind, and from my vantage point and the height of my seat on the Greyhound bus, I had a view into their van. There were people in the back, bags and pillows scattered around. From their movements I could tell music was playing even though I couldn’t hear it. Although her face was obscured by her hair, I knew it was your mother. There is no other hair colour in the world like it, apart from yours, Flora.
I sat bolt upright and pressed my hand against the window. It was cold, despite the heat of the dry highway outside. Air conditioning blasted against the glass, messing with my senses and the red and gold parched earth outside it. I couldn’t open the windows, they were locked and useless and I felt trapped. But I had seen her again. That brought me some comfort.
I thought about her jewellery, nestled inside my bag, and felt frustrated I couldn’t open a window and shout out. Not that I would have known what to say. Even at 20 – wayward, unpolished and slightly gawkish – she was the sort of woman who left men a bit speechless. But she looked so carefree! Men – boys, I was just a boy – didn’t know what to say to a girl like her, and I was envious of anyone who did.
‘Hey!’ perhaps. I wished I could just shout ‘Hey!’, and my shout would burst open the glass, but I sat up, my mouth dry and my voice silenced. My Walkman headphones fell out of my ears. I don’t know exactly what I was listening to – Uncle Matt had given me his Pulp Fiction soundtrack tape as a parting gift. But it was probably a mixtape. The Fugees. Pulp. Beck and Björk.
That’s it.
It was Björk – ‘Hyperballad’. I had that album too – Post – and her cries tumbled out of my earphones and onto my lap as I sat up and pressed my palm flat against the window.
Björk galvanised me through the solitude and heartache of travelling alone, as glimpses of your mother had. It was the soundtrack to my trip.
I placed the music back in my ears and drowned in the comfort of it, then your mother looked up, out of the campervan window. She was laughing about something, looking inland, perhaps she was checking to see if the sky really was cloudless all the way from the east coast to the west. She was attempting to roll a cigarette – she smoked back then, though not very often; she wouldn’t want you to think she was a smoker – but she lost her grip on the cigarette paper and it flew out of the window. She looked up to follow the paper’s fast and delicate trail as it spiralled up into the air and saw it land, slapping and rippling against the bus window, just below my face, level with my mouth, like a gag. I gasped and felt my throat tighten. I was mesmerised and knew we didn’t have very long. But there she was. Trying to tame her Titian hair in the wind – you remember Titian, my loves? He was Italian too.
She stopped talking to her friends in the van, or singing along with them, and I was tempted to look at them more studiously, to see the company she kept – but I didn’t want to take my eyes off her.
There she was, moving her hair out of her eyes and looking up at me as her campervan gained on my cumbersome Greyhound bus. We both laughed. Her mute laugh looked like it was still trailing from a conversation in the van. Mine came from out of nowhere and I worried other passengers on the bus might think I was mad.
Then her laughter dropped to a look of puzzlement, as if she might recognise me, and her smile faded. We just stared at each other for what felt like an eternity but must have been just seconds, until we both looked to the white rectangle under my nose, a thin white Rizla paper separating us, fragile and determined. A bemused smile crept back across her lips and then, as fast as the paper whipped up in the wind on the highway and took off, she gave a half wave, and the campervan flew off ahead too. She was gone.
Five
June 1996
Queensland, Australia
It’s her.
Daniel watched the orange campervan zoom off up the dusty highway, beyond his silver rattling coach, past giant fruit made of concrete and fibreglass; past kangaroo roadkill squished into the verges. Off to a destination he hoped was the same as his. He rubbed his eyes, dry from the cold air conditioning firing down from the vents between the window and the bus roof, and he thought of Kelly. Whether she might be at the next stop too. He was glad, for the first time, that she wouldn’t be. He only wanted to see the girl with the long bronze legs and deep red hair.
He had seen her three times already in recent weeks, and this was the first time she had seemed to really notice him.
Three times! He totted up.
Three times in obscure corners of the planet, far from the other side of the world, the continent they both called home. OK, he conceded, maybe not such a coincidence if we’re treading the same beaten track. But even so, for his uncomplicated English mind, a brain that didn’t look for chance encounters of significance and serendipity, Daniel had a weird and unusual sensation that the universe might be conspiring for him to see her, and so hoped she would be in Cairns, where his bus was terminating.
It’s just a coincidence. We’re all treading the same path.
*
The first time Daniel had seen her was on his second day in Sydney. It was late afternoon and he was walking down the Blues Point Road, the smell of coffee, freshly cooked pastries and optimism propping him up as he explored the energetic and sociable city draped elegantly around its sparkling harbour. Trying to get his head around jetlag and the fact he had done it. He had gone to the other side of the world on his own. Trying to get his head around the fact that his girlfriend was there too.
Ex-girlfriend.
Two weeks before Daniel and Kelly were due to go travelling, Kelly summonsed Daniel to Brighton, to her student digs. It was a Sunday night during finals week and he thought Kelly was panicking and needed his support, his arms around her. So he took two trains from his beige university house share in Farnham to Brighton, so he could rub Kelly’s back and tell her it was all going to be OK. That she would ace her speech and language therapy exams. She was a diligent and bright student.
Except it wasn’t all going to be OK. Kelly was dumping Daniel for a guy called Ian, who she had met at a gig on Brighton beach, and she was really sorry about it all – but would Daniel mind if Ian went travelling with her instead?
‘Erm, yes,’ said Daniel, baffled, as he stroked his messy brown hair. ‘It’s my ticket. In my name.’ Kelly’s insolence and surprise delayed Daniel’s heartbreak for the moment; he was so confused he was unable to take it all in.
‘You wouldn’t still go on your own, would you?’ Kelly spat. ‘Travelling was my idea.’
Daniel leaned back on Kelly’s single bed, with tiny ditsy flowers on the duvet cover, and looked up at the Alanis Morissette poster on the wall as he tried to hold the tears in. They had made it, from A levels all the way through to the last week of university, without splitting up. Without cheating on each other, despite the temptations of lads’ holidays, freshers’ weeks and years of getting drunk in the student union. Despite all the advances that had been pressed upon him. Well, Daniel had made it anyway. He had been loyal.
‘He’ll pay you for the name change fee of course.’
‘That’s nice of him.’
‘I asked the travel agent, it’s £104. Plus the flights. Of course he’ll give you the money for the flights. He’s come into some money since his gran died, so it won’t be a problem.’
‘Oh great,’ Daniel said sarcastically.
He could feel his hands shaking as he sat awkwardly on the bed, hunched under the slope of the attic room ceiling. ‘But still. No.’
‘What?’
Kelly’s long mousy brown ponytail swung from side to side as she stood up to close her bedroom door. This was going to be more difficult than she expected and she didn’t want her housemates to hear. They had all been on Team Daniel and urged her not to do it.
‘What did you say?’ she repeated.
Kelly had a proactive, head girl way about her, which Daniel had always found endearing. But now her cold efficiency in wanting to sign Daniel’s round-the-world ticket over to a guy called Ian was tearing into him, as was the thought of a faceless man having squeezed into the single bed he was sitting on.
‘No, sorry Kelly. I’m not letting him have my ticket. I’m still going.’
Daniel didn’t want to go travelling by himself. He was terrified. At 22, he’d never travelled on his own before, except the journeys from his family home in Elmworth to uni in Farnham, to see Kelly in Brighton, and back again. Staying at home for the summer and watching Euro 96 with his brother and schoolmates back in the pub seemed far more appealing, and would have been a good tonic, he knew that. But Daniel was more stubborn than he was terrified. He had worked every university holiday, either in the Co-op in Farnham or the Red Hart in Elmworth, so he could save up enough money to go travelling with Kelly at the end of his degree. They had planned it for four years, he didn’t even remember that it was her idea, they had both looked forward to it too much. A few months in Australia, travelling up the coast as lots of their friends had done, going to foam parties and surfing shitfaced; then to New Zealand and the Cook Islands before coming back home via LA and settling down; getting proper jobs and maybe buying a place together. And when Daniel planned something, something that had taken time and research and consideration, he saw it through.
‘No. I’m going. If Ian wants to go travelling with you, he can buy his own fucking ticket.’
*
Daniel stood firm, finished his post-grad course in journalism, packed up his room, returned to Elmworth where he bought insect repellent and had his jabs, and a week later his older brother Matt dropped him at Heathrow and shook his hand at the check-in desk.
‘Good luck mate. Hope you get to watch the matches Down Under.’ Matt wasn’t one to get emotional – but he admired Daniel for doing something he never would. Matt was a homebody and liked to know his favourite tea bags (PG Tips) were always to hand, which they were (aisle five, opposite the biscuits), in his job as assistant store manager of the Elmworth branch of Safeway. Matt had started working there aged 15, stacking shelves in the evenings, then as a Saturday boy, before leaving school at 16 and working his way up, through dairy, then head of the fish counter (which Daniel and their parents weren’t so keen on – the smell of fish was impossible to shake) to checkout manager and assistant store manager, all by the age of 24.
Matt was the kind of boy who took great pride in wearing his black blazer, red tie and name badge. In Being Official. He met his girlfriend Annabel there too, while she worked weekends on the cheese counter to fund her accountancy training. Their lives were simple, provincial, and they always knew where they could get a good cup of tea. That was how Matt liked it. He had no wanderlust whatsoever. Daniel wanted to see the world and live it – to do a bungee jump, to go night swimming, to drink from freshly cut coconut on an island – with some planning, of course – and their parents were extremely proud of both sons.
*
As he paced Sydney, Daniel tried to process all of what had happened in the past few weeks: the shock dumping, the jealousy, the rage, the indignance, the heartache and the loneliness. He walked and walked, taking in the sight of the Harbour Bridge and Opera House from every angle he could, the white pearl gleaming on the harbour, always reminding him of his coordinates. Walking and processing and sightseeing, so he could distract himself from the pain in his stomach. So he could get used to the idea of three terrifying months on his own.
On that tiring second day, he ducked into a bohemian-looking coffee shop next door to the youth hostel he was staying in, in search of a caffeine boost before a rest on his bunk.
‘Killing Me Softly’ was playing on the speakers, and a girl with hair like a bonfire, bronze skin and straight dark brows over burning eyes was sitting at a rectangular wooden table, her back to the wall, holding court over the whole cafe. Her face was sprinkled with a dusting of freckles which sparkled at the back of the place. She was speaking Spanish or Italian, Daniel didn’t know the difference then. Of the group she sat with, this girl was laughing the loudest, gesticulating the most enthusiastically, chinking cups the most heartily. All eyes were on her and she seemed completely comfortable with that. A boy with curly hair and little round glasses stood as he responded to her anecdote with one of his own and the whole group fell about laughing. The group – an assortment of nationalities in an assortment of vests, hareem pants, crochet tops and board shorts – looked like they hadn’t all known each other long, but they were all united by the ease at which they made friends. Most people were interjecting in English but they all seemed to know what each other was talking about. Daniel didn’t have a clue.
He felt very boring, and quietly ordered an iced coffee from a woman with intricate henna patterns on her hands. As she made his drink, Daniel tried not to look at the group at the back, the Proper Travellers, lest he seem lonely. But he couldn’t help it, the girl with the wild arms and hair was too compelling. She stood up, and Daniel looked away sharply as she made her way around the table, helping a girl with jet-black hair lift a backpack as they made their way to the front of the cafe. Daniel kept his eyes on the drink in progress, but did his best to eavesdrop as they spoke in English.
‘Sorry to love ya and leave ya,’ said the girl with the backpack; her voice was soft and high and her accent Australian. ‘I’m worried about missing my bus.’
‘No worries!’ the redhead purred, sounding not at all Australian. ‘Safe trip, heh?’
Daniel stared at the creamy coffee, captivated by its centrifugal force, straining to listen. The girls said something about meeting in Melbourne, which Daniel struggled to hear over the whizz of his drink being made.
‘Don’t run off with any of those cute guys huh?’ Daniel couldn’t see it, but he could tell the Australian was gesturing to the backpackers at the table. ‘Mike is looking forward to seeing you!’
Who’s Mike?
‘Ha!’ the girl laughed, the sound of it knocking Daniel for six.
‘The olds can’t wait to see you either. Dad is desperate to show you what a real pizza tastes like…’
The redhead mumbled something in another language as the girls laughed and hugged each other tight, one much taller than the other, and the shorter one left.
‘Five dollars please,’ said the barista with beautiful hands. Daniel paid with a plastic banknote he hadn’t seen before, picked up his drink, and glanced sheepishly over his shoulder at the redhead as she returned to the big table. As he stepped into the late afternoon sunshine he heard the girl’s laugh punch the air, echoed by the cries on the rollercoaster rolling on the wind from Luna Park across the harbour. That distant cheer, the rise and fall of excitement and intrigue, tumbling in the breeze with the smell of suburban Sydney’s frangipani trees, all made Daniel feel like a terrible humbug. For being antisocial. For not having any friends. For wishing that he was the funny guy with the little round glasses and that the redhead was laughing at his jokes. For feeling a stab of jealousy that someone called Mike knew her. For hoping that Kelly and Ian
were having a worse time than him. That they hadn’t made any friends either.
They don’t need to. They have each other.
Daniel walked and walked that day. To tire himself out of jetlag more than anything. To distract himself so he was too exhausted to think about Kelly and Ian – who had pressed on with their plans to travel despite the inconvenience of Daniel not giving up his ticket – and which attractions they had hit first. Taking in the city, visiting Mrs Macquarie’s Chair and Darling Harbour, slumping on his bunk with a copy of The Beach and wondering if the girl in the cafe next door to his hostel might be staying at his hostel too. She hadn’t noticed him in the cafe, there were more exuberant people there.
*
The second time Daniel saw her was six days later, at a nightclub across the city in King’s Cross, a steamy suburb where walking down the street was a colourful joyride for the senses – especially for a Home Counties boy. Daniel had transferred to a hostel in Woolloomooloo, which cost less and had more cockroaches, and he was on a night out, a short walk away from the hostel with a crowd of backpackers he’d got chatting to while heating some Super Noodles in the communal kitchen.
‘Come out mate,’ said a man with an Essex accent and hair like Dougal from The Magic Roundabout. ‘I’m going to a club wiv some French geezers and a couple of birds from the birds’ dorm. It’s fancy-dress film night. Alcopops are two for one during happy hour.’ Daniel looked unsure. ‘Catch the football if you stay up late enough? Miss the football if you pull…’ he added with a wink.
