Once Upon a Time There Was a Traveller

by Kate Pullinger

  ‘No, that’s not it. I don’t really go in for boyfriends. I’m going to be a —’

  I didn’t let her finish. I couldn’t bear the thought of all the jokes George would make, of the endless stream of humour it would provoke, that I wanted to date a nun. I stumbled again as she said it, pulling her against me as I fell, her body against mine. Feeling her fingers reaching for balance as we fell, reaching me.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m so clumsy,’ I said, as hands came from every direction, pulling us upright.

  I could have hurt myself. It was a risk on that unfamiliar stair. It was worth it, just to stop her talking.

  I’ve thought about it since, and tried to finish the sentence another way. I’m going to be abroad, I’m going to be a bit busy. But I know, really, my instinct was right. That crucifix she was wearing hit me in the face as we fell.

  I got it wrong. I thought she was flirting, when all the time it was just her Christian duty. No doubt she loves all God’s creatures, especially the blind ones. I could hear the pity in her voice; she was just another Irene really. That’s why we tend to stick together I guess; you know where you are with your friends. But she’s why I remember Coventry – my stupid attempt to reach out, to presume – and how I got away with it. At least they’ve never mentioned her again.

  We made it back okay – of course we did. We’re seasoned travellers by now. It was just another adventure – quite an easy run. Pete thinks we should try an overnight trip next time. He quite fancies flying to Edinburgh, when we’ve saved up a bit. George, kilts, Scottish accents. It could be an entertaining trip.

  Birds Without Wings – Angela Readman

  Last summer it was Eva and me against everything evil in the world. Swimsuits, kale, something that buzzed in our room. Yet I couldn’t stop thinking about Diana Pinter – some girl at school who went to Paris with her mother. I lay on a bunk scratching mosquito bites and pictured them outside the Eiffel Tower eating salad in the rain. I flicked through the magazines Mom posted, girls with eyes lost as gazelles. Their hair was molasses, toffee-apple shiny, the colour of Twinkies. My stomach growled. It would be dinner soon, something steamed. A postcard and cash fell out of Vogue, my mother’s handwriting like spun silk. Hope you’re having a good time. Be good! We’ll go shopping when you get home. I knew what ‘be good’ meant. I shoved the twenty in my sock and dangled to high-five Eva on the bottom bunk.

  This summer would be different. Mom wanted us to take a trip. Dad was working and my brother wouldn’t come; Ed was oddly self-maintaining. He lived in a fort of science books in his room. At nine he wasn’t interested in space camp. If there had been an accountancy camp he’d jump in line. A camp where boys learnt to give bad financial news, and crinkle their brows exactly like their fathers, would suit him just fine.

  ‘What do you think? Just the two of us,’ Mom said, ‘Won’t it be fun?’

  I wasn’t sure. Fun and Mom went together as well as she said my shoes matched my blouse. I watched her fiddle with lilies in the vase in the lounge again, fingertips unable to resist giving them tips on which way to turn to be elegant.

  No camp! I thought. No hikes, kale or treasure hunts (hikes in disguise – except with fruit and a whittled wooden otter, rabbit, any animal that could be described as a ‘critter’, at the end).

  ‘Where d’you wanna go?’ I said.

  ‘Mexico,’ my mother replied.

  Not Paris or Venice, which was weird. Her friends usually took their daughters to glistening cities of tiny espresso cups and art galleries to cram in a few more ‘sit up straights’ before school pushed them out into the world.

  ‘Why Mexico?’ I said.

  She let the lilies be, looking down like she did when she told Dad the drapes were a steal.

  ‘I don’t know. It’s different,’ she said, ‘I read something about the spiritual side.’

  I supposed being different was the appeal, and maybe the cost, though she’d never admit it. In the contest of who had the best holiday, I guessed spiritual trumped cultural every time.

  ‘Suppose it might be cool,’ I said.

  My mother smiled, something up her cashmere sleeve. Mexico? Whatever. It couldn’t do any harm. I phoned Eva to break the news.

  ‘Mexico?’ she said. ‘Well, at least she won’t make you go clothes shopping.’

  She was wrong.

  I followed my mother past counters like ice cubes. The air-con was on overdrive. My shirt stuck, sweat from the street chilled on my arms – shopping was a fever, hot and cold at the same time. My mother strolled, confident her hands were clean enough to stroke every dress on the rail. I pictured Diana Pinter and her mother swapping clothes in Parisian changing rooms, laughing when a cocktail dress suited Diana, and a pleated skirt and blazer looked inexplicably apt on her mom.

  ‘How can I help?’

  The assistant’s suit was endive pale. She smiled at her commission in the form of a woman with a Chanel purse and hair like a cinnamon bun, coiled at the nape.

  ‘I’m looking for something for my daughter for a trip,’ my mother said.

  The assistant’s smile slipped; she pinned it back into place on her face. I knew the look well. Sales girls and I have a history. She looked at me now, wondering how to squeeze me into something that fit my mother’s sense of style.

  ‘She looks like a very mature young lady,’ she said.

  And off we went, following her towards the back of the store. I was far too ‘mature looking’ for Junior Miss. I wondered what ‘she’s a mature-looking young lady’ is in Spanish. My shame would translate.

  Mom pushed another dress into the changing room. Some things never changed.

  ‘How you getting on? Don’t force the zip. You need another size.’

  Her voice peered through the curtain. It reminded me of the bus home from camp. For two minutes a year my mother looked hopeful. When the bus pulled in, I’d see her on tiptoes, watching me walk from the back seat. Moving from window to window to the front of the bus, my head and shoulders were all she could see. Anything was possible.

  ‘Lovely to have you back!’ she said, looking me up and down.

  She paused, like she had to swallow the words her mouth wanted to say.

  ‘Is that you? What happened to you!? You look…’

  We walked past parents using words we didn’t use. Mothers hugged daughters, fathers hugged sons, amazed how little of their arms were needed to fit round.

  Outside the changing room, my mother said, ‘Twirl.’

  I twirled. She stood back and frowned.

  ‘Maybe something with a smock waist?’ she said.

  The sales girl flitted away, dresses like failed parachutes in her arms.

  If Mom could free me from camp, I could give her the sky on the plane. We switched seats so she could have the window. It was our first trip alone other than weekends in Cape May – long days of Gramps on the boat, Gran trawling yard sales and Mom looking ashamed. Every night we met in the kitchen, Gran taking an interest in fishing in exchange for Gramps looking at the junk she’d bought, listening to the haggle of getting a dollar off, the drama of beating a neighbouring hand. I thought about their exchanges on the plane. Eating Mom’s leftover chicken, I waited to hear: ‘Are you sure you aren’t full?’ It didn’t come. If anything she smiled a private smile, maybe the same way I sometimes could when she tilted the lilies in the vase. I took her giving me her cookie as a sign. I wanted to believe we could be friends.

  The bus wound down the dizzying road to the hotel. Out of the window were pine trees I hadn’t known Mexico had. I didn’t know a lot. I could smell the pine, the orange of the Japanese man behind us, and the perfume of the woman in the seat in front nursing a kid old enough to chew jerky. My mother had a million pictures of churches in her purse. She looked at them, determined not to look at the woman. Most of the passengers weren’t American.

  ‘San Cristobal,’ she’d said. Certain. ‘Says here, it’s popular with Europeans. I
found out about something local we have to see. It’s…’

  She changed the subject to the hotel.

  We got off the bus and took our passports to the desk to check in.

  Mom held on to them with white fingers. ‘Do we have to leave our passports?’ she said, ‘I have American Express.’

  The clerk shook his sad head. We handed over our passports – two little faces in bad light.

  ‘We can manage,’ she said. ‘Men can take things the wrong way,’ she whispered, hauling our cases to our room.

  The room was peach. Two beds, an iron table on the balcony, and chairs with scrolled backs. My mother wiped the rail in the wardrobe to hang our clothes. Then she laid stuff out on the bed to assemble a survival-kit tote: Spanish phrase book, guide-book, traveller’s cheques, handkerchiefs, toilet paper, toilet-seat covers, bottled water from home, pepper spray, Sweet and Lo.

  ‘We have to smile but not be too friendly,’ she said, reading about women travelling alone.

  I smiled in a not too friendly way.

  I kept a journal on vacation though I was never the diary type. I hated the idea of my thoughts all being in one place to be used as evidence against me sometime. Dad gave me a journal before we left. It had a bunch of blue and lilac stamps printed on the cover and a quote in typewriter print: A traveller without observation is a bird without wings. Dad customised the pages inside. Under each day he wrote: Stuff I Liked, Stuff We Did, Stuff We Ate. He gave it to me with a smirk, an acknowledgement passing from hand to hand.

  Under Stuff I Liked I wrote: The smell of cinnamon, mountain views, jack hares, markets, little tin things, red, bicycles, breakfast, the tile rose on the table, hot chocolate, raffia baskets, a whole family woven from corn on a craft stall, not knowing the language, being aware of my smile because it had to do all the work.

  Under Stuff We Did I wrote: Walk, look, photograph old buildings, look in our phrase book, sneeze, touch milagros, be afraid to haggle, smile (in a not too friendly way), say ‘No, thank you’, say everything slower, tell taxi drivers we’re on the way to meet Dad, walk away.

  Stuff We Ate had two columns, one for Mom, one for me.

  Grapefruit

  Mexican breakfast

  Coffee and cigarette

  Pozol

  Egg white omelette

  Mole chicken

  Orange juice

  Pozol

  Grilled fish

  Fish tacos

  Banana & bran

  Burrito

  Coffee and cigarette

  Pozol

  Then I got bored with Mom and just did my own. Pozol was like sippable chocolate popcorn. I had it at the hotel, in a café in the old square and from carts. On the street my mother shaved off my milk moustache with her fingertip. I decided to add a new column to my book.

  Stuff I Don’t Like: My clothes laid out every morning like instructions of how to match Mom’s purse. Hills. Cobble-stones & Mom’s heels. Mom’s fork turning over every bite to spot food poisoning lurking beneath. The dummies in The Museum of Mayan Medicine – a midwife and a spread woman with no mouth. The long walk through unknown streets to get there, one of Mom’s hands on the zipper of her purse, her other clutching American water. (It reminded me of Eva and her coke, a can in her hand all day; it stopped her fidgeting, she said. She missed it so bad at camp she poured water into an empty can, trying to trick herself.)

  Most mornings I took buses with my mother to small villages and lakes surrounding the town.

  ‘Now this is what I had in mind,’ Mom said.

  People with backpacks squinted off the bus like turtles with ill-fitting shells. Most wore slacks and took sloppy photos. They looked like they were saying, ‘I was here, next to this crumbling church. Okay, I looked sloppy – so what?’ Outside the church in San Juan Chamula was a market crammed with pottery, woven blankets, paper Frida Kahlos and skeletons in red skirts. I touched strange milagros: tin fish and angels, the Virgin Mary, disembodied hearts, silver hands and feet that looked like they’d snap on the weight of a prayer. I wasn’t sure what they meant but I bought a stripey armadillo for Eva (a hard little shell). Mom bee-lined to a stall of hand-embroidered skirts, peasant blouses and lace shawls.

  ‘Stand back,’ she said.

  I stood under the canopy. Two old women looked on, silently embroidering in wicker chairs behind the stall. My mother draped a shawl over my shoulders and another on hers. Both were white lace, delicate feathers on our arms.

  ‘Do you like it?’ she said, combing fringes.

  ‘I like this better,’ I said.

  I reached for a black one embroidered with white flowers. She stroked the quality and picked up another covered in red roses, a garden on her back. She bought all four shawls, an embroidered and lace one each. It was the first time she had asked what I liked without saying I had no idea what suited me.

  Back at the hotel Mom wrote postcards to Dad and Ed. I started one for Eva at camp – I only needed two sentences, but none were right. What I wanted to send was a river of pozol, tamales like rafts. I wondered if Eva had managed to find a junior counsellor saving for college this year. There was always one, looking both ways, sliding down a zip in the boat shed, a duffle bag of Peanut Buttercups, Butterfingers, Tootsie Rolls. Eva and I stared at plastic packets glistening like jewels in the half dark. The counsellor smiled the way shop assistants eyed our mothers in stores. ‘This is a customer who knows what she wants. Take your time. Look. Anything else I can get you? No trouble at all.’ Every night, Eva and I sat by the lake talking about our moms, eating chocolate with a mark-up to make them blush, laughing till we could burst a gut.

  ‘You’re peeling,’ my mother said, rubbing lotion on my shoulders before bed. I thought about Eva peeling sunburn off my back at camp. She had held up a mirror like a hairdresser showing a lady she was fit to go dancing. Carefully, I had set about Eva’s back, wishing we could just peel off a layer and reveal, underneath our old skin, the sort of daughters our moms could take on a trip.

  It was Thursday when my mother suggested we wear the white shawls. She got me up early, insisting I wear my best, and least comfortable, dress. I put it on. I still wanted to please her.

  ‘Hannah, get a move on,’ she said.

  Her fingers twitched as if looking for lilies. She tucked my hair behind my ear. I didn’t see what the big deal was. I’d had my fill of ruins, mountains and villages. Tomorrow we were spending the day in San Cristobal doing last-minute shopping before our flight. Suddenly my mother looked as eager as she did the morning of the sale at Bloomingdale’s. This village wasn’t in the guide-book, she said. No tour buses went from the square; all she had was a slip of paper with instructions on how to get there. Outside the old cinema we rammed ourselves into a colectivo – a van packed with backpackers and locals. The driver’s music was deafening. The van jerked to a stop outside fields to let people on and off. We got off at a dirt track surrounded by corn.

  ‘This way,’ my mother said, looking at her map.

  ‘Where we going?’

  ‘You’ll see,’ she said.

  I think she was smiling. Later I wanted to remember if she was smiling so bad it hurt. I hoped we weren’t visiting another old church; pretty as they were, they didn’t mean more to me than an hour in the shade. Walking around them my mother looked sort of bored, revived only when she saw tiles or woodwork that would look great in the summer house she was trying to persuade Dad to buy. I followed her uphill now, stopping to sip water and whine about the bugs picnicking on my arms.

  ‘There’s nothing here,’ I said.

  I looked around at cattle sheds, the odd house with a rickety tile roof.

  ‘Here,’ she said, ‘I think.’

  I panted behind her towards a white, stone house with a skinny guy stood aside. He leaned against the wall, watching us approach. My mother took a handkerchief out her purse and wiped the dust from our shoes. The man walked towards us, not smiling, just watching our clean s
hoes.

  ‘Hello. Is this the right place? We’re here to see, we heard…’

  My mother fumbled in her purse, digging for her phrase book buried under breath mints and flyers.

  The man nodded and held out his palm, sky up.

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  She handed him pesos – I’m not sure how many – and we followed him to the house.

  ‘Here? Thank you.’

  My mother zipped her bag closed over her camera, like she did before we went into churches.

  ‘What is this? Some cheese-making place or something?’

  ‘Sshhh,’ she said.

  We stepped into a narrow hallway. My mother’s hand rested on my back. Someone, an old woman, was coming out of the door at the end of the dim hall, rubbing her eyes. I squeezed in my stomach to let her pass. She stopped right in front of us, cupping my cheek with the walnut of her hand, she cried, ‘Señorita gorda encantadora. Señorita gorda encantadora.’ There were tears in her eyes. I stared at her lips, like a drawstring bag, tightened around contents I couldn’t recognize.