Once Upon a Time There Was a Traveller

by Kate Pullinger

  ‘Bendígale. Bendígale,’ she said.

  She rushed past us to cry at the unsmiling man outside. My mother nudged me through the door at the end of the corridor and I lurched into the room. It was bare, a girl lay in an iron bed. In the corner was a woman on a chair. She stood, her hand gesturing us to the bed. She spoke in short bursts.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘my daughter. She not eat since year of too much rain. Crops fail. Only small water touch her tongue for two years. Yet she alive. Is miracle. She a saint, everyone say. ‘

  Her English was bare as the room. She made a cross with her fingers over her shoulders and head. My mother followed, dabbing on a cross like perfume. I don’t know why but I did the same. I stared at the girl asleep in the bed, the light from the shutters making gold bars across her pale face. Her eyes were closed, her eyelids dark. I could hear her breathing, I thought. The white sheet, pulled up to the neck, barely moved.

  The mother lifted the sheet for us to see stick legs, twig arms poking out of a white nightdress. Through it I could see ribs; frail as a house of matchsticks it looked like a sigh might blow her down.

  ‘We lost cattle. Corn. My daughter dream about angel. She know she did not have to eat,’ the woman said.

  My mother nodded as if she understood. Something about the woman looked proud. My cheeks burnt hot and red. I stared at the girl, then the mothers. Why? I wanted to yell, Why are we here? What good does it do? How can this happen? Who let it? Who would it save? I looked up at the shutters and had the urge to throw them back, let sun flood the room, drown us all. I wanted to grab my mother’s purse and drop mints in the girl’s mouth one by one, feed her like a bird. I glared at my mother, opened my mouth and not a word came. I was close to the bed. I couldn’t move. My hand touched the back of the hand of the girl, so cool it washed the heat from my own.

  ‘Thank you,’ my mother said, ‘Bless you.’

  The words were alien, spoken like a child repeating something she didn’t know the meaning of but wanted to know. The mother of the girl looked at me and patted my mother’s hand. The door opened then, a skinny man and a boy with crutches limped into the room. My mother and I stepped into the slim hall, following the jangle of coins in the man’s pocket outside.

  Trawling downhill, my mother said we were lucky to see a miracle, a living miracle, in our lives. Even if it wasn’t a miracle, they believed it, she babbled, they really believe.

  ‘How many people can say that?’ she said, opening her purse to take a picture of a farmer skinning a duck, that little extra bit of local colour rammed in her purse.

  I didn’t speak. I walked behind her, sun strapped to my back, our shadows swallowing each other if we got too close.

  ‘We have to hurry,’ she said, sipping water. She handed me the bottle. I shook my head, refusing the breath mints she offered. I just marched on, downhill towards the colectivo, the village, a little gift shop in town where we found a plastic money box of some saint with pink paint smeared on her lips and a slot in her crown.

  ‘Your Gran would love this!’ Mom said. She combed tangled fringes on my shawl. ‘Is there anything you want?’

  I shook my head. No. There was not.

  Duty-Free – Helen Dunmore

  They were the cleanest airport floors I’ve ever seen. Even so, a man was buffing up sparkles in a corner of the duty-free, beside a display of silver leprechauns. I was not quite the only customer in the half-acre of perfumes, whisky and cosmetics. Two or three of us drifted, desultory, fingering but failing to buy. The goods that shone inside the cabinets seemed to have nothing to do with us. A sound-system played music that broke on our ears as waves break on the shore. The staff were so attentive, so knowledgeably eager to carry out the tasks which could not be completed without the absent passengers. Even as you quaked for their jobs, you couldn’t help warming to their unfounded optimism.

  Friendly were the security staff, gassing to one another about a football match. No one mentioned the result. Perhaps they’d all stopped watching at the same moment, to keep up the suspense for yet another working day. Warm and tasty drifted the smells of chilli con carne and mushroom lasagne in the restaurant. I ordered a cup of coffee.

  ‘Will there be anything to eat with that?’ sang the young man behind the counter, and I had to fight not to ask for the whole sweep of it, piping hot, just so that his face would light up. But he flourished the coffee on to the counter before me and smiled as if mine were exactly the order he’d been hoping for.

  The mica glitter of the floors was getting to me. I’m easily disorientated, and on my way back through duty-free I was busy counting the small airport tasks that I had yet to carry out: buying a bottle of water and the newspaper if they had it, checking my email and the price of Chanel No 5… So I organise even my empty hours. There was a recycling bin handy, and there I sorted and threw away the papers from the conference I’d just attended. I held on to the timetable for a moment. It was marked out with notes, and the couple of sessions I’d presented were highlighted in green, the colour of a knot in the stomach. Strange how things could be so important, and then not important at all.

  When I looked up the desert had flowered. The duty-free was packed. Scores of soldiers, men and women both, a hundred of them, no, many more than a hundred, milled purposefully around the displays or lined up in front of the tills. They had big boots and pale sandy uniforms. They were large, eager, polite, weary. You could see their health and youth in their springing hair and quick, observant glances. Their skin, however, was poor.

  They all wanted to buy something in the short time that they had. Packed into bulky trousers, women soldiers compared lipsticks. Men queued for cologne. Names were murmured like prayers: L’Oréal, Shiseido, Versace, Prada, Paco Rabanne…

  Even though the duty-free hall was now full, it was not far from quiet. The assistants had risen to great heights and were changing dollars into euros in their heads as they advised on a set of headphones while clicking up a fragrance purchase. Politeness flowed over us all, ample as a river.

  ‘This one is seventy-three euros, or would you prefer the larger size?’

  We were at home again, in the kingdom of our preferences. Cabinets were opened and disclosed their contents to eager hands. White glossy packages were fetched down from the highest shelves. Leprechauns tinkled against one another. I fell into the swing of it and began to search among the lipsticks for number 719, the one I always wear. A young woman soldier alongside me waved a perfume-tester strip beneath her nostrils. She had stains of fatigue under her eyes. Maybe this one wasn’t right for her, she said. All she could smell was aeroplane.

  ‘You can’t go wrong with Chanel No 5. It’s a classic,’ I said, as I say to my daughter.

  The soldier’s face lightened. ‘I guess it is, but I don’t know that it works on me,’ she said. She sprayed again, on her wrist this time, and turned it this way and that. She had a Southern voice. Her skin was pitted, not beautiful.

  ‘Where are you all going?’ I asked her.

  ‘Afghanistan.’

  ‘I think it works on you,’ I said, breathing in the wrist she held out to me. There was her body smell under the perfume. It was dry, powdery and somewhat metallic. She was correct. She smelled of aeroplane.

  It was a short stop-over for refuelling. These soldiers must have spent thousands of dollars in their brief time off the plane. After they had made their purchases they sat quietly on banks of plastic seats in the hall outside the duty-free, waiting for the tannoy. The bulk of their uniforms made them sprawl somewhat, legs apart, but not as students sprawl, ostentatiously at leisure, infantry of the gap-year dream that other travellers can only envy. These soldiers rested. The group beside me talked of mobile phones as if there were nothing else in the world.

  How vast the airport was, and how bare of purpose. The life in it, for which it had been built, had sunk down to barely a murmur. Cafés, departure gates, transit lounges and scanners were becalmed. A c
offee machine hissed to itself. Only everywhere, as far as the eye could see, there were these soldiers.

  ‘Where are you all going?’

  ‘Afghanistan.’

  They were not even born in the days when the boldest of my generation took the Magic Bus to Kabul in search of Afghan gold. Here they sat, composed, under orders, touching Irish soil; or at least their boots touched mica particles in the flooring that caught the light as far as the eye could see. They were not unhandsome, some of the men. The girls, too, rested utterly, closing their eyes so that the harsh overhead light exposed the pure cut of the lids and every blackhead on their overworked skins. All the same, they were not unbeautiful.

  There was one low-key call for their flight. Immediately they were on the move, down the long hall through an exit which had nothing to do with the civilian airport. There was no gathering of hand-luggage, mustering of children, wheel-chairs, pushchairs. The soldiers were there one minute, filling the lounge, and then they were gone through a flap that had appeared somewhere in the wall of the airport, revealing it to be no more than a transit shed which had served its purpose. On my left the duty-free still glittered. Now there came four or five stragglers who had just succeeded in making their purchases. They loped past me, and for the first time I saw that they were fit and fast for all their heaviness. They quickened almost to a canter, laughing for the first time, then they too disappeared. The tin shed turned back into an airport. The soldiers’ big-bellied plane was already receiving them into itself.

  An incident, I thought. A notable moment, equal to the sighting of rare passerines. But I was mistaken, because at that time they came in almost daily. A quarter of a million US military personnel, it seems, went through that airport in one year alone.

  Backwards and forwards the planes go, settling briefly on this small space of Irish soil, releasing their uniformed passengers. The lifeblood of the duty-free now that the Celtic Tiger is a shamefaced joke and the acres of car-park around the airport stand empty.

  They go up slowly, those big-bellied planes. They are far from new, and they labour sometimes under the weight of what they carry. The youth inside them, packed into flesh, packed into uniform and then filling the metal skin of the DC-10. The youth that comes once, and doesn’t come again.

  ‘Where are you all going?’

  ‘Afghanistan.’

  Beautiful place, Shannon, in its arrivals and its departures. A dream of water, an enlacement of low-lying land by shining tributaries. As your plane rises you see it clear, and then the wing tilts and the sky is there instead, reeling away from you, all that greyness thickening to muffle your eyes, your ears, your lips. You will never see earth again. You say good-bye to it without emotion, among the whiteness, as if this is the death you have always expected; but as it happens this time the plane keeps climbing, and you punch through the clouds and out into the blue.

  Hwyl – Emily Russell

  The summers at Tanodd Carreg were jade and myrtle but the winters were black and white.

  Tanodd Carreg was a solid Welsh farmhouse – though no farm remained there, having been eaten up by bigger ones to the north and south. The exterior walls were three feet of impervious grey stone. Great square blocks one atop the other.

  The house stood alone and undaunted on a natural ledge. To the back, the hill rose up steeply and disappeared skywards. To the front, forty yards of solid ground dropped away, down to a dark-green valley dotted with plastic cows. So high up was Tanodd Carreg that often the valley was obscured by thin low-lying slips of cloud. Some days the cloud was no more than a grey whisper, other times it was dense and opaque, and then the valley became a giant’s mixing bowl filled with the soft peaks of egg whites. In early spring the cloud would gather around the house itself and on those days Tanodd Carreg was a ghost; a phantom in damp swirls of cold, white silk.

  The link to the outside world was a long stony track, lined with foxgloves in the summer and nothing in the winter. It curled up the hill, which rose sharply on the right and dropped away to the left, between slopes of soggy, gawking sheep. Three hollow steel gates barred the way along it. Named the ‘wailing gates’ by the two children who lived in Tanodd Carreg, they sung in the wind – a desolate noise that sank into Nina and Jay’s bones as they slept and nourished them like calcium.

  Past the wailing gates and at the top of the track ran the mountain road. This was the way out. But they never went up that road. Up was the way things got mad, with the ruins and the hares and the sky. Down, eventually, over cattle grates and through muted woods of Sitka spruce, led to villages – chapels, post offices, schools.

  It was on this road the children stood for three mornings running one January, waiting for a school bus that didn’t come. It had been snowing since New Year. Nina was six and her brother, Jay, a year younger. By 8.45am, abandoned, frozen and excited, they trudged back down to their world to change out of school uniforms and into matching green snow-suits.

  The snow drifts on the east side of Tanodd Carreg had reached the first-floor windows and the lie of the land around had become tacit beneath ten billion sticky flakes. Even the cottage of their only neighbour, Gwen, which usually stood out like a splinter on the scrub-land to the south-west, was barely there any more. But while the earth slept the children played and that week was one of the busiest of their lives. They only went indoors when they could no longer feel their toes, and then their mother, Vivien, would fill them with sweet porridge. Woollen gloves were hung above an old Rayburn in the kitchen until the wool was dry and crispy and smelt of the tangy woodsmoke that permeated everything at Tanodd Carreg.

  Nina and Jay’s father, Steve, worked six, sometimes seven days a week chopping down tall pines for timber. That week, unable as he was to get further than the second wailing gate, was the longest he had ever spent at home. He exhausted most of the short daylight hours in the barn, fixing holes in the roof, oiling the generator and chop, chop, chopping the logs. By the time the snow thawed there would be enough firewood to last them until the following Christmas.

  Vivien spent her time in the kitchen – boiling up scraps, frying up leftovers and trying to make the freezer bigger than it was.

  The cooking and the chopping of logs was nothing compared to the plans of Nina and Jay, who went to sleep every night concerned that the morning might bring a melt and leave so much undone.

  On the first morning they built snowmen and decorated them with soggy chips of wood and a great aunt’s old hats, which they found buried in the back of their mum’s wardrobe. When they were done they built snow monsters and then a snow bear before they grew bored and decided to go hunting for real bears. Several times Jay thought he found promising tracks in the snow. Nina wasn’t so sure but they followed each of the leads anyway, all the way to disappointment.

  The next day their dad took a break from chopping logs to build them some simple sledges from the obscene amount of wood which had filled the barn. They were basic but they went fast and Jay eventually had to be picked up and carried home, while Nina stomped behind in the fading light.

  The third morning Nina woke to find flakes the size of party rings sneaking down around Tanodd Carreg. Beating like a heart, she woke Jay. He looked out of the window and then at Nina and laughed. On their way down the narrow staircase she whispered in his ear, ‘You know that wishes count for more today?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of the snow. It’s magic, and the stone will be covered in it.’

  Their mum was leaning against the kitchen sink drinking tea. She was dressed in jeans and a large grey jumper, her brown hair tied back. The radio was on but she didn’t seem to be listening. ‘Nina, you shouldn’t wake your brother.’

  Jay had cornflakes, and Nina had toast and peanut butter.

  ‘I want toast,’ Jay said, looking at his sister’s.

  ‘You said yesterday that you hated it.’

  ‘It looks different today.’

  His mum picked up the bo
wl of dry cornflakes and poured them back into the box before putting some more bread in the toaster. ‘Nina, I don’t want you taking Jay up to that rock today. It’s too far.’

  The outside door opened and their dad walked in, stamped snow off his boots and on to the doormat. ‘Morning, you lot.’ He moved over to the table, sat down and started on a plate of plain buttered toast.

  ‘I think we’ll find the bear today,’ Jay said.

  Their mother looked at him blankly for a second over her tea and then at their dad, who had already risen from the table, toast still in hand, and was heading back towards the door. She raised her voice slightly, ‘Well, actually, Steve, before you go, I think someone should go down to Gwen’s today.’