Then there are the long-term volunteers. Equally intimidating. If they’re not with the staff, riffing in fluent Spanish, then they’re sitting at the long table at the back of the comedor, closest to the rats. They’re foreigners who’ve been here longer than a few months. Sammie and Harry are long-termers, as are Bobby, Tom and Jane. They shower on average once a week, have an unhealthy pallor and sleep in the monkey room. They wear permanent manic, exhausted, blissful expressions, as if they’re ready to pick up a machete and race off into the jungle at any moment, and they’ll talk to you about “their cat” until your ears fall off.
Anyone who isn’t staff or a long-termer falls by default into the final group. The short-termers. People who still walk around wide-eyed, who find it weird that there are monkeys grooming themselves using the wing mirrors on the motorbike, who reminisce about hot showers and still use soap. Me. I’m a short-termer. And I cannot comprehend what it would take to be anything but that.
As I approach the trail to the long drop, I keep my gaze averted. But at the last minute, my eyes flick up, meeting Harry’s. I regret it instantly. Katarina, who sleeps in the bunk below mine, who’s been here about three weeks, who’s from Serbia but lives in London, and who’s engaged in an ongoing, savage war with Panchita, whispers gossip up through the slats in the bed frame as the candles flicker. She’s told me about Harry. About the short-termers he sleeps with like it’s a merry-go-round. And she’s advised me not to touch him with a barge pole.
I trip on a loose brick, almost falling head first into Teanji, who’s rooting around in a pile of laundry that has—by some misfortune—been pulled off the line and trampled by some large compost-covered four-legged beast. Teanji beeps in alarm, his stripy orange tail rising off the ground, and scurries away.
“Sorry!” I mutter, righting myself, my face hot.
“Frodo,” Sammie calls. Her hair is wrestled back with a jaguar-print headband and she’s fanning herself with the lid of a fruit bucket. Frodo? The word bounces off the overhanging trees, which give the little clearing the pervasive scent of rotting citrus. She beckons me over, the gesture sending out a long shadow. I hesitate, fearing a joke at my expense. I’m validated when she laughs. When I glance at Harry, my heart sinks further. He’s trying not to laugh.
“Sorry.” Sammie grins cheekily. “But, you know. You’re always reading The Lord of the Rings. And that is what you look like.”
“Like a hobbit?” I exclaim.
“No!” She has the decency to look embarrassed. “But just . . . like you’re miserable. As if you’re walking up a fire-spewing mountain and you don’t know if you’re going to make it.” She shrugs, waving her hand. “Don’t worry. It gets easier. Are you coming to the village? It’s Oscar’s last night.”
My face is the colour of pìo poo. I quickly make an excuse and scurry away. It’s only when I’m on my own in the long drop that my breathing steadies. Here! Ridiculous. I cannot believe I’ve started to sit in this long drop longer than I need to, because it’s here that I feel safest. With the worms and maggots and the moths that are folded like origami!
My hands shake as I run them through my greasy hair. My normal ways of coping—making sure I look nice, I’m smiling, I fit in, I’m fine—are crumbling around my blistered, dirty fingers. The spider, the yellow-and-black one that made me scream on my first night, hangs from a huge web in the rafters. I’ve named him Hagrid. He watches me now, his dark eyes thoughtful. I can’t seem to make my smile work. Can he see all the way into the dark place in my stomach, where all the bad stuff gets hidden? On the surface, it’s all: Tea and a Jaffa Cake, please, how’s the weather? But inside, I’m climbing fucking Mount Doom. Can Wayra see that too? Is that why she doesn’t want to be around me? The realisation of this is so upsetting that I start to cry.
The world outside the long drop holds its breath and I try to cover my mouth, muffling the sound. Unlike any place I’ve ever been in, despite all the noise, all the other creatures, the trees, plants, fungi, rocks and earth that stretch for miles, the jungle really seems to listen to everything. I’ve never felt so vulnerable. It won’t stop listening, and I don’t know how to tell it that I hate it.
I make it to the road just as a big group starts to leave—nineteen of us, more volunteers have turned up, two more this morning. It’s dark and I’m glad of it. There are no mirrors, so I can’t see how red my eyes are, but I fall in beside Katarina and try to make the smile that I give her genuine. There’s a full moon and the road is washed with silver, the trees made magical by fireflies. There is a loud singing, so loud I think it can’t possibly be the frogs, but when I turn to Katarina to ask, she just nods an affirmative. I wish I knew what they were doing, what it meant that they’re singing so loudly.
We start to walk.
“How far is this village, then?” I hear one of the new volunteers ask. There’s suspicion dripped into every word. He feels familiar, like so many boys I went to college with. Lads playing rugby and driving their dads’ cars. I would never have been friends with him. He’s tall with baby-blue eyes that I can tell he’s relied on since he learnt to walk. The way he looks around him suggests that he would be much more at home in some party hostel, like the ones I stayed in and hated. But seeing him here, now . . . his familiarity is worryingly reassuring. I think he introduced himself as Bryan. The other is Paddy. Toothpaste-model handsome, with a tan that’s near orange and dimples deep enough to put a finger in. He’s jumping around with enthusiasm, rolling his eyes at his miserable friend.
“Bry, don’t whine!” He chuckles. “It’s probably not that far.”
“It’s an hour-and-a-half walk,” Katarina corrects tersely.
Paddy, Bryan and I stop short.
“An hour and a . . . what now?” Bryan splutters.
“Surely there are . . .” Paddy pauses. “Buses?”
Katarina snorts. “Twice a day, if you’re really lucky. You might be able to hitch but . . .” She looks pointedly at the empty road. “I don’t like your chances. Not at this time of night.”
“Oh.” Paddy nods, assimilating this information. Then his smile returns with a vengeance. “Well. An hour and a half isn’t that far!”
“To get a beer?” Bryan gazes desperately at Katarina, but she’s wandered off after the others, migrating away in a cloud of fireflies, torch-lights bouncing. The road isn’t empty. Not by half. Bryan seems to realise this now, and flinches. There are too many things out here, things you can and can’t see, things you can and can’t hear, an uncountable number, huddled around this one stretch of tarmac. “There’s really no cars?” he whispers weakly, the dark jungle hanging over him.
I shrug. “This is my first time too.”
Unimpressed, he gazes at me. “How long have you been here?”
“Almost a week.” Almost a week? It’s nothing and an eternity. A shooting star sails across the sky, the points of the Southern Cross edging over the tops of the trees, which are so black they look almost blue.
“Wow,” Paddy marvels. “I assumed everyone had been here years. You look so efficient.”
“Not me!”
“Yeah. I saw you cleaning the kitchen. You looked like you knew exactly what you were doing.”
I stare at him. After I’d taken the compost bucket out, I’d flailed around in the darkness for at least twenty minutes trying to find the pigs’ enclosure. I’d come back covered in muck and on the very edge of a serious mental breakdown. I think back to my first few days, when everyone had looked the same and I knew nobody’s names. Every single person had indeed seemed like they’d lived here years. This rocks me. Now I know, of course they hadn’t. Maybe they’d all just been stumbling about in the darkness, just like me.
“This place sucks,” Bryan mutters.
“It’s not that bad!” I blurt out.
“Not that bad? Have you seen the dorm they’ve put us in? Six people in that thing? Six? And six plus what? I know this is an animal sanctuary but I don�
��t have any desire to provide sanctuary to rats, thank you very much.”
I grin. They’ve been put in La Paz with me.
“Give it a few days, Bry. Then decide whether to pack it in or not.” Paddy looks at me hopefully. “It gets better, right?”
I hesitate. “Have they given you a cat yet?”
“Yeah.” Bryan narrows his eyes. “I got some jaguar. Rupi?”
“And I got Yuma. I think she’s a puma.”
I don’t know Rupi or Yuma. But I know Bobby now, a little. I feel oddly defensive of him and the cat that he loves beyond reason. And Tom, the quietest of the long-term volunteers, has told me about Yuma, once when he came home late one night covered in mud and scratches, his face gleaming. He told me as he lay in the hammock taking off his boots that she’s sort of like Wayra. Wild. Confused. A bit crazy.
“Well,” I say slowly, “once you’ve signed up for a month and you’ve started with your cat, it’s hard to leave after that.”
They both stare at me. The tarmac has a strong smell, like roasted meat and hot tar. The road is so straight, it’s as if it’s been dropped from the sky.
“Why?”
“I . . .” I trail off. I don’t know why. It’s just a cat, if they want to leave, why can’t they? That’s what I’d have said a few days ago. “It’s something about trust,” I mumble.
Paddy nods sagely. “Who’s your cat?”
“Wayra,” I answer too quickly. My cat. I picture her sharp cheekbones, angled away from me. When she looks upwards, at the clouds or at a troop of capuchins in the trees, the shape of her face changes. I’d noticed that my first day, but every day it seems to get starker, as if she’s getting less and less real, as if she’s going to metamorphize and fly off into the sky. I swallow painfully, my throat dry. “She’s not,” I clarify, “mine. She’s no one’s.” And I surprise myself by laughing, thinking about how she sat in a patch of sticky mud today and when she realised, she snarled at it as if it had placed itself there on purpose just to torment her. She spent the next two hours angrily cleaning herself. When we laughed, she pinned us with a glowering death stare, as if we were all in cahoots.
Bryan looks at me strangely. “What’s she like?”
My face falls. She hasn’t hissed at me as savagely as that first day, but she has very obviously made the decision to ignore my presence. Although when she’s trying to sleep, which she does for hours on end, she grumbles every time I move, breathe, make a noise. I ache to scratch the reams of mosquito bites I’ve incurred waiting for her to get up. I shake my head over how Oscar and Jane scuttle after her, attending to her every whim, and how she gives them nothing back apart from a few irate licks at the start of each day.
I sigh. “She can be a bit of a bitch really.”
The village—Santa María—appears on first encounter to be little different from any of the other villages I’ve seen across Bolivia through the windows of buses. There is a row of huts flooded by a sorry trail of overhanging street lamps that flicker pale orange, struggling to keep themselves alive. It’s in a sort of basin, sheltered by towering rocks that are so big they seem to have breath of their own. Dirt tracks peel off left and right, where I assume homes lie under the cover of darkness. Some of the huts on the main drag are shops, with fruits and vegetables stacked in wheelbarrows, manned by women in wide velvet skirts, long plaits hanging down their backs, babies on their hips. Some are little eating places with wooden tables where men sit and eat fried chicken, gesticulating with beer cans. Television sets blare out action movies that crinkle painfully at the edges. The dusty verge is littered with rubbish. Bones, plastic bags, broken bottles. Chickens get under our tired feet. Street dogs sleep uncaring in the road.
Katarina guides us towards a thatched building, lit by harsh electricity and the metallic hum of eighties music. She nods towards the walls, covered with posters of semi-naked ladies.
“Welcome to Porn Bar,” she says wryly as she opens a fridge and pulls out a handful of beers. I stare at the one she hands me, not caring that it’s warm, not caring that it smells faintly of urine. I cradle it as if it’s made of moon dust. In front of me are shelves stacked with crumpled cigarette packets, potato chips and old, dusty spirits, the labels faded. Through a doorway I see a patio. There’s a mattress on the floor, piled with the crumpled bodies of sleeping children. When the woman I’ve seen around camp comes out of the back, Katarina grins, hugging her. “Doña Lucia!”
The woman smiles shyly, adding up our purchases and putting the bolivianos we give her into a rickety old cash register. She has a tattoo that says “AMOR” across the knuckles of one hand. The fact that her bar is covered in porn seems incongruous. She’s about forty, I think, with a warm, pretty face. A boy of about six is clutching her legs. He’s holding a puppy, eyes barely open.
“She runs this place as well as cooking for us,” Katarina whispers to me. I look around for a husband but I can’t see any evidence of one. Later Katarina points him out to me, snoring, blind drunk in a hammock in front of the TV.
I lean back against a wall and take a sip of my beer.
Paddy’s eyes are wide. “What do you make of this, then?”
I look around. The local men staring at us from one corner of the bar as if we’re a zoo attraction? The edged, orange darkness outside? The rocky hills that have risen out of nowhere, the flickering lights, the whirring hum of the generator. The screaming children climbing on Bobby’s shoulders as Jane guards a box of puppies. The street dogs, two of them on the pool table being fed fried chicken bones by Harry and Tom. Doña Lucia patiently trying to shake awake her husband, the babies asleep in the back, the eighties CD that plays over and over on repeat, the cool dirt under my toes where I kick off my sandals, the heady taste of this cigarette, the moon looming above everything, the feeling of being in the middle of a wilderness that stretches for miles and miles, the knowledge that out there, not too far away, are wild jaguars and pumas and monkeys. Hunters too. I stare into Paddy’s handsomely glowing face. He is from Peterborough. In Bolivian terms, where journeys can stretch over days, Peterborough is a short train ride from my home.
“I think it’s very strange,” I say, one of the few honest things I’ve said since I’ve arrived.
Paddy nods, holding up a bottle of cheap rum. “I do too. Want to get drunk?”
I wake up in the mud somewhere behind the comedor, bright sun scalding my eyeballs. Panchita’s hairy snout is in my face, and Harry is next to me, not wearing very much at all. I’m naked and covered in dirt. The immediate “oh fuck” feeling hits me hard. I push Panchita away. She snorts as if she’s finding this extremely amusing and can’t wait to tell absolutely everyone what she’s seen. I put my hands over my eyes and start to scrabble desperately for my clothes.
“You keep your mouth shut, Panchi,” I hiss, whimpering as the night begins to come back. I remember rum. I remember dancing. Dancing on the pool table. Dancing on the pool table with Paddy, Jane, Agustino, Tom, then, finally . . . Harry. I remember hitching back in the rickety heights of a cattle truck, oh gods. I remember . . .
Harry lies on his back, watching me scrabble, and grins. “That was fun.”
“Um-hmm,” I say, pulling on my jeans. Shit. Shit. I’ve been bitten to hell and cannot even begin to wonder at the horror of what might have crawled over me during the night. Let alone . . . Harry . . .
“You OK?”
I watch a line of ants bigger than my thumb passing inches from his leg. He seems not to care.
“I’m fine.”
“Frodo, you don’t look fine.”
“I’m fine!” I snap. There’s something deeply humiliating about being called a hobbit by someone who’s just seen you naked. When I sneak a look at Harry’s face, though, I think he didn’t mean to offend me. I like his eyes and the way his smile crinkles behind his ridiculous beard. I look away, cursing myself. I’ve been told this guy has relationships with girls he can guarantee will be gone in a few weeks.
Worse, he has sex and then doesn’t talk to the person afterwards.
My mum sometimes tells me with a laugh that I have a fear of commitment. It’s a fair call. It might be true. I’ve been single for a long time. Four years. Five. I don’t really like to think about it to be honest. I’ve had only one relationship and it ended terribly. I’m just . . . I don’t know. Not that interested? I’m sure I’ll be fine. No need to panic, Mum . . . I don’t need to go to therapy yet.
But Harry. Wow. I can only imagine the field day my mum would have with him. I look at him out of the corner of my eye as he scratches Panchita adoringly around her middle. I’m ashamed at the lump that comes up in my throat. He’s had sex with me now. I suppose I fit his pattern. I’m a short-termer. I’m fleeting. I don’t matter. I wander around with an expression like a hobbit out of Mordor. It feels the same as when Wayra stepped scathingly over my sweaty leaf without even a backward glance.
I’m counting down the days until I’ll be able to shower with hot water again. Sit on a chair with a cushion. Be able to stand still for more than a second without being bitten . . . But there’s something about the way Harry is sharing a kiss with a pig bigger than he is, as a wild capuchin monkey looks on from a branch above, casually eating mango, and the way the sun gleams through a crack and makes the mud golden . . . something that makes a part of me open a little inside. Something yearning. Something I hadn’t even known was there.
But then I shake myself. By all accounts this guy is a massive jerk. And the pig is covered in old porridge and shit. And Wayra . . . Wayra is just an angry bully. I say this firmly to myself as I speed off, back to my dorm, leaving Harry and Panchita to wallow together to their hearts’ content.
Oscar leaves before breakfast. I watch the bus pull away. I feel emotional, confused. I put it down to hormones, an outrageous hangover and a lack of vitamins. Mila cried. She clung to Oscar as if she couldn’t bear to let go. But then the bus left, and it’s—I don’t know—it’s as if Oscar never existed. Mila cleans up her face, and then she’s giggling with Tom about something one of the cats has done. One moment Oscar is there, tall, laughing, and the next he and his bags are gone. The road is empty, and where for a moment it smelt of exhaust fumes, metal and burnt tyres, now it just smells like the jungle again.
The Puma Years: A Memoir Page 6