by A. E. Grace
“You get many people buying up train cabins in rural China?”
“Well, no, but sounding confident is part of the job,” he confessed. “But the prices aren’t expensive, and I see no reason why you can’t just buy up both beds.”
Terry thought about it for a moment. Did she want to share an overnight train ride with a stranger in a foreign country? One she likely couldn’t communicate with? This was, after all, her first time out of the UK, and so no time to be taking unnecessary risks.
“Let’s give it a go,” she said, nodding.
“Right. Well, that leg will be from Guangzhou to Nanning.” He pointed down at the tablet, and Terry could see the red line extend up into southern China, and then weave west toward Vietnam. “From there, you’ll catch a connecting train to Pingxiang – and that’s only a couple of hours – to where you’ll be able to walk across the border. So you’ll be in Vietnam one day after you leave Hong Kong.”
“Fine,” Terry said. “Let’s book it.”
“Did you want to arrange accommodation for Vietnam, too? I presume you’re going to Hanoi first?”
“I am, but I don’t,” she informed him. “I’m going to organize that when I get there. You know,” she added, smiling. “Have a bit of an adventure. Wing it a little. There are guest houses everywhere, from what I’ve read, and it’s never difficult to get a room. Plus, it means I can look around and find one I like, rather than rely on photographs.”
“That sounds all fine,” Tom said. He looked at her for a moment too long, and Terry rapidly blinked at him a few times. “Oh, yes,” he said, snapping out of whatever thoughts he was having. “Were you planning on flying back to the UK from Vietnam? Do you want to book those tickets now?”
“Eventually,” Terry said. “But I don’t know when that will be.” She noticed that she stumbled over the words a touch. She didn’t know when she would be coming back. Had that been an unconscious thing? Not setting a definite return date? What did it say about home to her? Did she even want to come back?
“Yeah,” she said again, nodding. “Not sure when I’ll be back.”
“Okay,” Tom said.
“So can we do all of that?”
“Of course, that’ll be no problem. I’ll just need to go over some things with you, including our policies, insurance, and of course our fee, which is the lowest of the five major—”
“Yes, alright.”
“We can also arrange traveler’s checks for you here,” he said.
“Sounds good.”
“We can’t do currency conversions.”
“Obviously.”
“But we can recommend certain banks or converters with the best rates.”
“Perfect.”
“Alright,” he said, smiling at her. “I’m just going to get all the relevant information printed, and we’ll go through it together.”
“Good,” Terry chirped, watching him as he got up from his desk.
“I think what you’re doing is very brave,” he said a moment later, while standing at the printer.
“Sorry?” She looked up at him and then back down at the nail she was nibbling on, seeing its roughened edge.
“Leaving like that, just going away.”
“How do you know that’s what I’m doing?”
Tom shrugged. He waited for the printer to finish. Terry tapped her foot to the sound of the printer’s ink cartridge zipping across the paper, stopping every now and then to gather itself. It sounded a bit like when her brothers reloaded their paintball guns. She rubbed the side of her thigh distantly. The bruise was all green now, healing, but she still couldn’t believe her oldest brother had shot her. They were both in their thirties, still lived at home, and they were total man-children.
When everything was sorted, all her plans finalized, tickets booked, money having changed hands, relief coursed through her. She knew she wanted to do this, but she didn’t think she’d have the guts to actually see it through. Now she had her one-way ticket booked. Now she had her train tickets booked. Now she had paid for it all.
The simple truth was that now she just had to get on with it! She was about to embark on a new chapter in her life. There was no backing out now.
At any rate, this would represent her first real foray into a strange and foreign land. She had always wanted to see Asia, was fascinated by it when watching documentaries or travel shows. She was finally doing it, now. She was going on her own, and with no time limit and a fairly healthy sum of savings. It was going to be a blast. It had to be!
And who knew what might happen? She might even meet somebody.
The sense of direction calmed Terry’s turbulent doubts, and she smiled at Tom.
“Thank you for your help.”
“It’s no problem at—” The sound of the door to the back office opening cut him short, and out walked an older woman, hair graying, and a severe face dotted with freckles. She was the manager.
“Tom, you were supposed to buzz back here if someone came in,” she scolded, tutting and shaking her head.
“It’s alright, Mrs. Peterson, everything is sorted.”
“Everything is sorted?” the woman repeated in disbelief. “You made bookings and didn’t buzz back?”
“Everything is fine,” Terry said, looking between them. “Everything is actually sorted.” She nodded at the woman. “It’s okay. He did well.”
The manager stopped her warpath-like advance on Tom, and forced a strained smile at Terry. “Are you sure you don’t want to go over everything with me?”
“Quite sure,” Terry replied. She wasn’t going to give herself the chance to cancel it all, to start generating any self-doubt. “Thank you again, Tom. You did wonderfully.” She looked at him as she turned, put on her coat, picked up her umbrella, and opened the glass door.
Beneath the howl of the wind, and the drum of the rain, she could hear the manager shouting at the young man as the door closed slowly behind her.
“You’re just an intern!”
*
The air smelled like crap, and that wasn’t in the least bit surprising to Terry. At the front of her train carriage were two pigs, two sheep, what looked like a young buffalo, and a dog. She wrinkled her nose, and turned to her neighbor. She was an old Chinese woman, her life spelled out in the permanent bend of her spine, and the deep creases carved into her face.
The train carriage, nothing more than a wooden box on the verge of falling apart, was narrow, and only three people could stand shoulder to shoulder comfortably across its width. There were no real seats, but lining each side were benches made out of planks of wood, and supported on uneven logs with rusty metal brackets securing them to the floor.
The train was filled to bursting. Being one of the first to climb aboard, she had managed to secure herself a space on one of the benches, but it meant that her back was against the window and she was staring into the stomach of a man she guessed was a farmer. He looked a little less ancient than her neighbor, but seemed to only consist of skin and bones, which was simply more evidence of the completely different lifestyle people lived in these rural parts.
The countryside wasn’t alien to her, but what she knew was the gentle green hills and cute cottages of well-off southern England, and not the rickety rail lines, endless farms and paddies, and ligament-and-bone farmers of rural China. Many parts of China were still poverty-stricken.
It was a change, and a pretty big one. There was an element of culture shock to it, Terry admitted, but perhaps it was also quite humbling. That wasn’t always a comfortable feeling, though.
The man directly before her, with a wicker basket at his feet carrying large turnips, looked down at her occasionally. It wasn’t a curious look, or even a judgmental one. It was just a look, vacant eyes every now and then meeting the top of her head, flicking briefly down to her face, before returning to their previous position, looking out of the window.
Terry grew used to it. She shared a train with livestock in
the rural countryside. She wasn’t in a big city, whereupon tourists were aplenty. Her carriage was full of local people only, and she wondered if she’d missed some kind of first-class carriage that all the other backpackers and traveling foreigners were riding in. If not, then where were they? She fumbled for her train ticket, but saw no indications that she had paid for anything special.
It was about twenty minutes into the two hour journey that Terry decided it would be better if she could look out of the window. It would at least offer more interesting scenery than the sea of waistlines in front of her. The click-click--clack of the train, without visual reference, was starting to make her feel a little nauseated. She needed some fresh air.
But the window was behind her, and though she could get up and stand, leaning over her bit of the bench, it wasn’t ideal, and she had the distinct impression from a couple of people eyeing her that if she did, they’d squeeze in beneath her and knick her seat.
Aha, Terry thought, coming up with a great idea. She reached down in between her legs, and picked up, with some difficulty, her large backpack. Sidling off her bench, she put her backpack where her bum was, and then swiveled on the spot so that she was facing out the window. Green whipped by in a blur while she struggled to get her knees onto the bench, straddling the backpack like it was a saddle.
It was awkward work, and she felt a little embarrassed doing it, but swatted that silly feeling away. Twisting and turning on her seat like that, a little clumsily, too, was bound to draw glares, but that was just the nature of things. After all, if she was on the underground back home, she was sure that someone faffing about on a seat would earn the ire of other passengers.
“Mei guan xi,” she said, knowing that her Mandarin tones were probably awful. It directly translated to ‘no problem’, but apparently could also pass for ‘excuse me’. At least, that was what her travel guidebook told her.
“Excuse me,” she said in English automatically as she shifted her right knee a little, digging it accidentally into the old woman beside her. After a bit more shuffling, scooting, wriggling, and writhing, she accomplished what she had set out to do. With her backpack on the bench, she was straddling it, leg on either side, knees pressed up against the wall of the carriage, and her head out of the window, the wind roaring past her ears. She got her elbows up and over the half open window, forced it down a bit into its sheath so that she could lean on the edge of the dirty glass comfortably. She lay her head down, cradled in the nook of her arm, and watched the countryside and farmland whizz by.
Grinning and feeling rather pleased with herself, her quiet moment of victory was dulled by a distant wondering of what the rest of the passengers were thinking about her. Were they thinking that she was ill-mannered? Well, judging by her experiences so far in rural southern China, she wasn’t particularly convinced that manners mattered all that much. At least, not ones that she was accustomed to. No doubt the cultural divide meant she missed a lot of nuance.
A stray thought, rogue and evil, flitted through her mind, and Terry grew cross with herself. Were they contemplating her size? She knew she was overweight, with wide hips and thick thighs, and she was on a train filled with people who looked like they barely got enough calories to survive.
She was a little ashamed to admit that upon arriving in China, she had become extremely aware of how slight everybody was, especially the women. Terry was a big girl here, and as her doctor had pointed out to her last checkup, she was past the healthy range on the BMI chart. She reconciled that particular factoid with the knowledge that the BMI chart put body builders in the unhealthy range, too, that it was not a be-all-end-all. She had big bones and wide joints, after all, a trait she got from her mother.
Still, it had been on her to-do list for a while. To get healthy. Of course… it was easier to plan doing it than to actually do it. She knew that fact very intimately.
Terry reprimanded herself internally for letting such a harmless little worry prick her like that. This was supposed to be her big adventure! This wasn’t her. She never worried about things like this back home. It was just the sheer difference in the size of people. It was also the fact that she was a tourist, stood out – and even above – people who very likely had little or no experience with outsiders.
Forget it, she thought to herself. For years now she had been perfectly at ease, and very comfortable with herself. She was waiting for the right person and she knew, in her heart, that she would meet him and he’d love her for who she was. Once a friend of hers had rolled her eyes when Terry said that, but Terry believed it to the bone. Was she a romantic? Yes. Was it hopeless? Definitely not.
The dark clouds of insecurity faded quickly. If there was one thing Terry was proud of, it was her resilience. She was strong mentally, and she had to be, growing up with her family. Two brothers with severe cases of extended adolescence, a father who liked the drink a little too much (though wasn’t mean, just aloof), and a mother who fancied herself an entrepreneur, trying to start up online businesses, even after the dot-com bubble had burst, putting needless financial pressure on the family. She had worn hand-me-downs at school, had been that girl who wore trousers, or her brothers’ passed-down gym shorts. If only she’d had an older sister instead…
She awoke from her brief moment of reverie. The train was rattling on its rails, only five carriages long, each one sounding as barebones as hers. The engine car was huffing out leathery plumes of smoke, and there was enough of a crosswind to pull them away so that they did not spoil the view on her side.
The weather had changed overnight, from grumbling clouds and annoying intermittent showers to clear skies, humid heat, and harsh sunshine. Far off in the distance, back toward the city of Nanning, she could see the city’s gray smog hanging in the air.
Terry grinned when she remembered that she had thought that the train ride would be like ones she had seen photos of in India, with mountains of people holding on for dear life on the sides and tops of the carriages as the train sped loudly along its way. But that had been just an ignorant assumption, something she was quite glad to be wrong about, especially since the train wasn’t stable at all. People would be falling off left and right. It would just be a total disaster.
In front of her, four windows up, she saw a hand poke through the gap. She desperately hoped that the person wasn’t going to open the window. But the person did. The hand shot down as the window slid into its recess, and Terry’s nostrils were flooded, once again, with the smell of manure. It streamed down from the front window right toward her.
“Damn,” she said quietly to herself. Oh well, it was better than having her head inside the train.
A small farm shot by, and she got a brief glimpse of a young girl picking vegetables out of the ground. She couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old. Having spent the last few days in cities, she hadn’t really been confronted by the staggering poverty in China until going out into the country, though it was unlikely she would ever get an accurate sense of its scale.
Hong Kong had been rich, prosperous, civilized, and easy. Everybody spoke English pretty well, and people were polite and conscientious. Guangzhou was a little more difficult, a little harder to grow used to, and the city planning had done a good job of hiding the impoverished, relegating them to the outskirts. Out of sight, out of mind, as was much of the mindset here. Not just here, too. Even back home it was like that, just less on the nose. She was reminded of how spikes had been put beneath bridges, in tunnels, and even on benches, all over London to stop homeless people from sleeping there. Out of sight, out of mind…
Still feeling nauseated, she pulled her head back inside the window and climbed down as carefully as she could off the bench, picked up her heavy backpack with some difficulty, and began to push her way through the throng of people toward the door at the end of the carriage. She figured there would be somewhere to stand outside where the two carriages were joined, and she could feel less cramped.
“Ex
cuse me,” she said, remembering then that probably nobody understood her. “Mei guan xi, mei guan xi.”
She pushed her arms in between bodies and pried them apart so that she could get through. It was sort of amusing at first, until she realized that she was going to have to get through about thirty people. Terry couldn’t help but laugh. And she thought the tube back home was bad!
“Sorry.”
“Excuse me.”
“Mei guan xi.”
Eventually she made it to the door, exhaling with relief. She twisted the handle, pulled the door, and heard a dull metal thud.
Shit.
“You’ve got to be joking,” Terry said, twisting the handle again and rattling the door in its frame. “Why would they lock it?” She could feel the frustration welling inside her, and in a momentary outburst of irritation, shook the door again. This time it slid open, and she looked to her side to see that somebody standing nearby had pulled a latch which had unlocked the door.
“Thank you,” she said, blood rushing to her face. “Xie xie.”
She hoped she had said it right in Mandarin, and quickly slid the door shut behind her. All of the people looking at her were blocked out of sight, and she felt immeasurably better.
“Thank God,” she muttered. She reluctantly conceded that her ultimate getaway, her great escape, her big adventure, wasn’t going as fantastically as she had planned. But it was only the beginning. There was still plenty left in store.
In front of her, across a small bridge with no handrails, was the door to the next compartment. Instead, she moved toward the side, along the small ledge that protruded, as though the carriage was sticking its tongue out, and where there was a railing. Moving toward the edge, she poked her head out from in between the two carriages, felt the sudden rush of wind against her face, the roar of it drowning out even the sounds of her own breathing.
Fantastic, she thought. She couldn’t smell the manure here anymore. Happy with that simple pleasure, she leaned against the railing, watching the countryside whisk by, a blur of dark green, brown, and the gray-smudged-blue of the sky. The sight was framed by the dark edge of the carriages that she was in between, making it seem brighter than it really was.