by Rachel Dann
He’s already backing away from me towards the door, reaching for his car keys, and with him also goes the brief spark of excitement I felt at Dr Vélez’s offer.
How could you even consider it? Your place is back in the UK.
In Fenbridge.
With Harry.
Yet even as I tell myself these words, I realise I barely believe them anymore.
‘Look, make sure you get a registered cab, okay?’ The look on Sebastian’s face is of pure anguish, oblivious to the turmoil of a different kind going on inside me. ‘And text me when you’re home, right?’
‘Yes, yes, I’ll be fine – you go! Don’t worry.’
Still he lingers, looking positively tortured. ‘Also I’m sorry if I was a bit… just now, I didn’t mean to come across as…’ He trails off just as his phone bursts into life again. ‘Oh God.’ He jogs forward again and gives me a hasty cheek-kiss, then turns to run towards his car. As he draws level with it he turns back. ‘And Kirsty – thank you, so much, for everything.’ Then the car door slams shut behind him and he disappears with a screech of tyres to visit his disaster.
Will I even see you again? I find myself wondering, taken by surprise at the feeling of plummeting desolation that follows.
I stand on the pavement holding my arm out listlessly for a taxi, feeling suddenly and acutely alone. After being part of something so monumental, getting a cab back to Liza and Roberto’s house for tortillas and an episode of The Colour of Sin seems like a bit of an anticlimax. I feel like Naomi and I should be going for a wild night out on the town in sparkly heels, knocking back tequilas and toasting her new future.
Instead, I have to face Harry. With a cold shudder of adrenaline and dread, I remember my promise to myself this morning that I would talk to him today. About his secretive behaviour… but not just that. The uneasy feeling that has been hovering on the edges of my consciousness for days now makes its presence known again, in the form of a churning sick feeling. I have to talk to Harry about everything. How I feel. What I want. Where we go from here…
I am so mired in these uncomfortable thoughts that I almost don’t notice a taxi has pulled up in front of me.
I step forward to get in, and with a start recognise the swinging red dreadlocks of the man climbing out.
‘Luke!’
He looks up from paying the taxi driver, and I can tell it takes him a few moments to recognise me. ‘Oh, Kirsty, hey!’
We cheek-kiss awkwardly. ‘So, how are you finding life in Quito?’ Luke’s brummy accent lilts. ‘And, wow! You look… smart.’ He takes in my clothing and lingers a little too long on the skirt. ‘Have you been somewhere, like, important?’
‘Oh, it’s a long story,’ I laugh dismissively, desperate not to have to explain why I am standing outside a courtroom with a tear-stained face and a too-tight suit on a Friday morning.
‘I’m sure it is…’ Luke continues, still addressing my skirt. ‘Well, anyway, say hi to Harry for me.’ He visibly shakes his head and forces himself to look at my face. ‘He’s been great these last few weeks – a real help to me, all the students love him.’
Well, at least this proves he has at least been showing up there sometimes, a jaded voice somewhere in my head tells me, besides whatever else it is he’s been getting up to.
‘I’m only glad I could accommodate him,’ Luke goes on. ‘We get quite a lot of applications from teachers, you know – foreigners passing through for a few months, Brits, Americans, Aussies… but I’m glad I gave Harry the chance. He really has been a help. In fact, do you know how much longer you guys are planning on sticking around?’
My heart has started to pump faster, its echoes roaring in my ears.
‘You mean… Harry asked for the job?’ My voice comes out strangely high-pitched.
Luke peers back at me with an expression that tells me he thinks I might be a little bit deranged.
‘Yes… of course. The night we met in that bar. He was so keen, I was impressed. Few too many drinks that night, eh, Kirsty? Memory loss, at all?’ He winks and nudges me awkwardly with his elbow. I just stand there.
‘SEÑORITA! You taking this cab or not?’ I realise distantly that the taxi driver has been waiting for me, leaning impatiently out of the window, now hooting his horn to get my attention. I wave him away distractedly, and he pulls out into the road shaking his head and tutting. I turn back to Luke.
‘And the teacher whose aunt died… in the USA… your desperately needing cover…’ My voice is barely more than a whisper now, the traffic roaring behind me and my knees starting to shake.
‘Sorry, not following you now, love. Nobody’s died yet, as far as I know…’ Luke makes an awkward guffawing noise and starts to edge away, my derangement now a certainty to him. ‘So, anyway, I’d better be going… need to pick up some supplies from the, er, stationer’s…’ He gestures limply somewhere at the street behind him. ‘Erm, so, just let us know, yeah? Whenever you’re planning on leaving. I’d be sorry to see Harry go…’ With that he turns and flees in the opposite direction, and I stand rooted to the spot, watching him go, as the traffic and pedestrians bustle around me, the implications of his words painfully sinking in.
***
I don’t remember getting home. In the same way that after so many years working in London I would sometimes end up walking up to the front door and putting my key in the lock with no memory at all of the commute, I now find myself marching up the stairs to the apartment, my mind a strange blank. All I can think about is Harry, on the other side of that door, knowing all the things I need to know, yet still determinedly, infuriatingly hiding them from me. I fumble for my keys impatiently then fling the door open.
All the blinds are pulled down inside the apartment, blotting out the midday sunlight, the only sound the muffled chatter in Spanish from the little radio on Harry’s side of the bed. Then a door creaks behind me and Harry is standing there, framed in the bathroom doorway wearing just a pair of shorts and rubbing his hair dry with a towel.
‘Hey…’ He eyes me with a cautious expression, then reaches past me into the wardrobe for a T-shirt. ‘I just got back from a run. So… how did it go?’
I watch him pull the T-shirt over his head, observing with detachment his taught abs, ruffled blond hair, the tan lines on his upper arms where the skin has turned a warm caramel colour. I feel nothing towards him except burning resentment, and, buried somewhere far below that, like a layer of sediment at the bottom of the ocean, the beginnings of a deep sadness.
‘I want to talk to you.’ My voice comes out icy, controlled.
Harry’s head snaps up at my tone. ‘Okay…’ He sidesteps past me into the kitchen. ‘Want a drink?’
‘No. I want to know if you’re involved in drugs.’
I hear the clatter of something falling to the floor and follow Harry into the kitchen diner, finding him standing in the debris of what used to be the coffee pot.
‘What the fuck?’ He picks his way over the shards of glass and plastic, staring at me. I back away from him, knowing that if he touches me I will lose my tenuous grip on self-control.
‘You heard me. Harry, I just need to know. I can’t carry on just—’
My phone makes a rude vibrating sound against the worktop, bursting into life with an incoming call.
‘LEAVE that!’ I bark at Harry, seeing his eyes slide longingly towards it. ‘Now answer my question.’ I can feel the hysteria rising in my throat and struggle to control it. ‘We’ve been together nearly six years, we’ve got a mortgage, you persuaded me to come to fucking SOUTH AMERICA with you… whatever it is that’s going on between us, Harry, you owe me an answer.’ Tears threaten to choke my voice but I swallow them back in determination. ‘So, I want you to tell me honestly – are you or are you not involved in some sort of drug-related…’ I flail around for the right word, ‘…situation?’
Harry stares at me. My phone starts buzzing and singing again,
but neither of us looks at it. After an agonising silence he lets out a blunt, humourless laugh, shaking his head.
‘Kirsty, I really think you’ve been spending too much time at that prison…’ He trails off and rubs the back of his head, frowning. ‘What on earth would make you think—’
‘I bumped into Luke.’
‘From the school? Okay… and?’
I turn away from him, take a deep breath, then spin back towards him and look up to meet his eyes. If only hours ago I found the courage to stand up in court and plead compassion to a whole panel of anti-narcotics judges … I must surely be able to confront my own boyfriend, once and for all.
‘Luke told me there was no teacher from the USA whose family member died. No favour you were doing him, agreeing to work there at his request. YOU, in fact, asked for the job. You applied.’ I stare at Harry, daring him to oppose me. ‘All this about being nearly ready to leave, just waiting until that teacher gets back from America… it’s all been a load of crap, hasn’t it? You could have left whenever you wanted! We could have…’ The sob comes out now and I let it. Tears roll down my cheeks and I furiously wipe them away, keeping my eyes fixed on Harry.
He sits down suddenly on the coffee table with a long sigh, all the air rushing out of him like the last helium balloon at a children’s party. My phone starts up again, the noise jarring and invading the space around us.
‘Will you just – shut that fucking thing up!’ Harry waves in the general direction of the phone with jerky irritation. ‘And come over here, and sit down?’
I stride over to the phone and cut off the call with a stab of my finger, not even looking at the number, then switch it off and slam it back down again on the side.
‘There – happy? And I’ll stand, thank you very much.’ My voice is shaking but I stand opposite Harry with my arms folded. ‘I’m still waiting for your answer.’
‘Oh, God!’ He runs his hands through his hair again and stands up abruptly, sending the coffee table flying backwards behind him. ‘Okay, okay. Kirsty, will you just… okay.’ He takes a deep breath. ‘First of all, it’s not what you’re thinking, all right? Jesus, so you’ve been going round thinking I’m some sort of a…’ He trails off and laughs bitterly. ‘Yeah. Well. I suppose you would.’ His blue gaze meets mine for the first time today. ‘I was actually going to tell you everything.’
At that moment a strange noise explodes behind us, and it takes me several seconds to realise it is Harry’s phone, launching into a badly rendered polyphonic version of the James Bond theme tune. It gets as far as the ‘de-de-DUM, de-de-DUM’ crescendo then abruptly cuts off, before starting up again immediately, the urgency of the caller coming through in the disjointed repetition of the sound.
‘I’m going to get that,’ he says, speaking slowly and holding out his arm towards me in the way one might with a hysterical person standing on the edge of a tall building. ‘Someone is clearly trying to get hold of one or other of us.’ He backs towards the phone, keeping his eyes on me. ‘Then we’ll keep talking, okay?’
‘Harry, don’t you da—’
‘Hello?’ I watch in silent fury as Harry holds the phone to his ear, his eyes flicking back and forth in concentration as he takes in whatever the caller is saying. Then he visibly pales and his other hand goes to his mouth.
‘Yes… yes, Kirsty Morgan. Yes, she’s my girlfriend… I’ll put you on now.’ He holds the phone out to me, his eyes wide. ‘It’s your dad. He’s in hospital.’
Chapter Twenty
The voice I am met with as I hold Harry’s phone to my ear is not my father’s but a woman’s, speaking extremely fast Spanish in a strange, unrecognisable accent. Through my panic I make out what I think are the words ‘collapsed’ and ‘unconscious’ and my father’s name, repeated over and over.
‘Wait! Could you just slow do—’
Even as I plead with her, the phone makes a shrill humming sound and the terrible signal completely wipes out all but the last few words of the woman’s sentence.
‘…Centro Medico de Mindo, in the main street, two blocks from the park. Ask for Dr Rivas, that’s me.’
I shove the phone under my ear and scrabble for a piece of paper. Harry thrusts a biro into my hands and I scribble down the information, all the while begging the woman – Dr Rivas – to tell me more about my father’s situation.
‘He just got here. We are doing tests,’ she tells me ambiguously. Then, in English, ‘You will come, yes?’
‘Wait!’ I plead, sensing she is about to end the call. ‘Is there somebody with him? A woman?’ My mind races. If he’s been rushed to hospital for some sort of – my stomach plummets at the thought – medical emergency, Dorice must be there, too. She’ll be able to tell me what’s going on.
‘No woman,’ Dr Rivas replies. ‘A man brought him in, he found him by the riverbank, apparently he was searching for someone when it happened…’ Her voice is swallowed up again by almost deafening interference on the line, then the call goes abruptly dead.
I cling on to the side of the kitchen worktop, still clutching the phone to my ear with my other hand, black dots dancing before my eyes and panic threatening to overwhelm me. I’m vaguely aware of Harry hovering behind me, his hand resting awkwardly on my shoulder. It takes every scrap of strength I can summon from within myself not to sink to the floor in a trembling mess, but instead step forward and take decisive action.
‘Help me pack a bag. I’m going to ask Roberto to drive us there.’
‘Liza and Roberto aren’t here… they left earlier to go and visit her brother in the country for the bank holiday weekend. It’s Halloween tonight and Day of the Dead tomorrow – it’s a massive celebration. The whole country has Monday and Tuesday off work. They’ll be back Tuesday evening.’ I blink and shake my head, trying to filter through all the unnecessary information. Harry is looking at the floor. ‘They did tell you this morning, but you were a bit, er, preoccupied before going to the court hearing…’
‘Then we’ll take a bus.’
I’ve already started throwing items into a backpack – toothbrush, phone charger, socks – feeling strangely numb.
‘Hang on, don’t you think we should wait a bit?’ Harry is following me into the bedroom now, reaching for my hands, trying to get me to sit down. ‘Mindo is over two hours away. Wouldn’t it be better to wait here for a bit until we get some more news, keep trying to phone the hospital back, come up with a plan?’
I don’t look up from pulling off Liza’s uncomfortable suit and tugging on a pair of jeans. ‘Harry, my father is in hospital in the middle of the cloud forest. I don’t know what’s happened to him, he doesn’t speak Spanish and Dorice apparently isn’t there.’ I blink back tears at the protective emotion that washes over me. ‘So I have a plan, and it is to get a bus. Now.’ I haul my backpack up on to my shoulders and look Harry squarely in the eyes. ‘Are you coming?’
The words hang in the air between us, and Harry’s split second of hesitation is all the answer I need.
‘Kirsty, wait…’
I keep striding to the door without even turning back to look at him.
‘I just don’t think it’s a good idea to rush off now before we know what’s really happened…’ He trails off, and I pause with my hand on the doorknob. ‘And you and I need to finish talking.’
Now I do turn to stare at him, incredulously. ‘Yes, we do. But my dad is in hospital. And right now I need you to…’ Support me unconditionally, whatever is happening between us, I continue in my mind, without saying the words out loud. If he doesn’t get it, what’s the point in trying to explain? Shaking my head I ignore the angry tears filling my eyes and Harry’s calls for me to wait. Then I open the door and run down the apartment steps to the street.
Functioning on autopilot, I pay the taxi driver and climb out at Quito’s northern bus terminal, squeezing through crowds of tourists – backpackers and families and couples holding hands
– all bustling to escape Quito for the bank holiday weekend. Knowing I must maintain control of my emotions for long enough to navigate this journey, I become filled with a strange numbness as I scan the rows of ticket desks, find the one I need, purchase a one-way ticket to Mindo and join the queue of people waiting to board. I look up at the pristine new double-decker coach with my destination name flashing across its front screen. As my fellow passengers call out to each other in an assortment of languages around me, passing backpacks over heads to the uniformed men loading up the storage space under each bus, I stand silently frozen to the spot, focused on suppressing the creeping panic still threatening to overpower me.
As the bus pulls away jerkily into the busy streets of Quito, memory after memory flashes through my mind like a series of spectres from the past. My father, clutching a bottle of apple juice and awkwardly speaking Spanish with Liza and Roberto. My father, sweeping aside the contents of his dining table and laying out a sheet of paper, titling it ‘Kirsty’s career plan’.
My father, slamming shut the door of a removal van and bending to kiss the top of my head, before disappearing.
It had been about two months after he actually left. Well, that’s how I remember it – as much as a five-year-old has any idea of time passing. It could just as easily have been two weeks, or six months. Mum arranged for my Grandma to take me to the seaside all day, perhaps naively believing this would distract me from what was really going on.
After trudging silently up and down the deserted, shingled beach countless times, we were both so cold and damp that Granny relented and took me home again. Dad was still there then, standing in the driveway giving instructions and maintaining a strict twenty-foot distance from my mother, who remained inside the house, anxiously following the removal men from room to room, checking each and every item they attempted to take outside. Even now I remember the feelings of mounting desperation, of panic, of hope that, if I made enough fuss and cried hard enough, maybe they’d all stop this madness and go back indoors and put the kettle on and behave like normal, calm adults again. Like a family.