Euro Tripped

by Sally Bryan

  That, at least, was true and we held hands as a small boat passed on the river and a pair of birds landed near our table and began singing their song as if they’d come to serenade us. His thumb gently grazed my skin as the last of the evening sun provided a pleasant warmth. An elderly couple smiled as they walked past, like it was genuinely pleasant for them to see an attractive young couple so much in love. Perhaps we reminded them of how they used to be and I wondered if Gabe and I would still be together when we reached their age.

  I turned back to him and couldn’t help but smile, remembering our encounter on the very first day of university. I’d been so nervous that day and found him lost, blundering around the biomedical sciences block. Together, we’d found where we were going and have been getting lost together ever since.

  There was, however, one thing that worried me because it seemed that whenever my friends and their boyfriends went on holiday, they always broke up soon after returning home. It was like taking a holiday was a test of what a partnership was made of. If a holiday was all it took to break them up then obviously it was for the best because how would they survive a marriage, or kids? Surviving had been easy for us because thus far the biggest obstacle we’d faced was not annoying each other during joint study sessions. Now, we were undergoing our first major test and I wondered if our friends were speculating on whether we’d still exist come the end of it and if so, well, I’d be happy to show them how strong we were.

  The mussels arrived still sizzling in the pan and were presented to us in the same, quite a touch I was unused to and the garlic, chilli and white wine sauce was like nothing I’d ever experienced. Once I forgot the wine’s price tag, it wasn’t hard to enjoy that too.

  “Better than our usual four quid bottle from Tesco.” Gabe remarked as he poured my second glass.

  “Agreed.” And we sat back and spoke about where the trip might likely take us. “Paris is a must, obviously, and Lisbon, and Spain has some incredible cities.”

  “If we make it as far as Southern Spain, perhaps we could drop by and visit Lizzie?”

  I tensed and glanced over at the viaduct, the river, the other couples eating. “Yes, yes, we could. But time’s an issue. Spain’s a big place and if we’d like to see Italy then driving all the way down there and back will kill several weeks. Besides, Gibraltar’s technically Britain, not Spain, so why bother leaving home at all?”

  He reached over and grabbed my hand. “Hey, it’s all right, it was only a suggestion, we can skip Gibraltar or even Spain altogether. In fact, I don’t know why I even brought it up.” Indeed, it was one of the few times he’d even mentioned my sister, though it was obvious the reason being we were now on the continent.

  I squeezed his hand and slowly sipped some wine. Lizzie, my elder sister who I’d not seen since her elopement, was understandably a sensitive topic. She’d met her now husband whilst visiting friends in the south of England, which was all I knew and I’d certainly never met the man and neither would my dad tell me why, in his opinion, he was unsuitable for her. What I did know is that it caused one heck of a shit storm in my family, which had far-reaching consequences for her and although I was kind of fortunate to have been away studying at boarding school at the time, it also meant I was never able to say goodbye, or learn the truth. That had been eight years ago and although I’d wanted to contact her, I could never get any assistance from Dad and, of course, the longer these things are left the harder they become.

  “Are you ok?” He asked after several minutes of silence.

  I nodded. “I am.” And it was only right that Gabe might be curious about the sister of the woman he’d been dating for five years and I wondered how the two of them would get along. “And I’m so happy it’s just the two of us.”

  My melancholy was interrupted by Gabe’s phone beeping and he let go of my hand to read his message.

  “Gabe?”

  He was grimacing into the screen and then his head sagged to the table.

  “Gabe?”

  * * *

  “I’m so, so sorry.”

  He clasped his head and sat on the edge of the bed, one of six singles in the room. By the window a girl rustled through her bag, politely ignoring us. If she understood English she was doing an excellent job of concealing the fact.

  “This is why I don’t use social media.” I was clutching his phone, scowling at his latest well thought through Facebook declaration. “I mean, who cares that we’re in France, really?” I wasn’t overly angry, more annoyed and disappointed but as on the rare occasion Gabe managed to get me this fumed, my dialect became more broad Highland, meaning he couldn’t always understand me, however, my stomping about the room could be understood in any language. The girl coughed, removed a book from her bag and rushed out the door.

  “I know but come on, everybody does it and how was I to know he was here?”

  My foot tapped an involuntary rhythm against the floorboards. “Who is Danny Belcher anyway?” I almost spat the name. “And why can’t you just tell him to fuck off?”

  He appeared small on the bed where he perched. “Because he’s my best friend who I’ve not seen since the day he left to travel over two years ago. If Kirsty was heading to Bordeaux, you’d insist we followed her too.”

  That was probably true. “Don’t you dare bring Kirsty into this!”

  “It’s true then.”

  I clenched my fist and stomped over to the window from where I could view a group of travellers loitering by the stream, cooking on a barbecue and drinking beers. “No,” I finally thought up a better response that might get the result I wanted, “I’m here with you so I’d tell Kirsty that if she wanted to see me then we’d best meet here or somewhere in between. I certainly wouldn’t drive three-quarters of the way down the length of the country, go completely out of my way for her, skip Paris and who knows what else in between. Bordeaux’s almost bloody Spain. Are you listening?”

  He threw up his hands. “Of course, I’m bloody listening.”

  “You’re just not taking notice.”

  “I am taking notice, I’m just not about to miss this opportunity, that’s all.”

  I crashed onto one of the spare beds, the one furthest away from Gabe.

  “So you’re not sleeping with…”

  My expression cut him off. “So much for our bloody Epic Euro Trip. Now we’re sharing with some smelly traveller.” I was probably being unfair but screw it, I’d suffered an injustice.

  He dropped his bag to the floor and tried to sound reassuring. “It’ll be one day, Doctor, that’s all we agreed and then we’ll find a lay-by, or maybe some travelling circus to ditch him.”

  I peeped up from the pillow. “You promise?”

  “I promise.”

  Chapter Two

  Bordeaux

  It’s true what they say about sleeping on your problems.

  Waking up to the French sun shining in through the blinds followed by a continental breakfast and good coffee tends to improve the mood.

  There were about forty of us in the canteen, munching on pastries, fruit and what looked like slices of cold, hardened toast pulled from individual packets, quite bizarre.

  I kissed Gabe on the cheek and he patted my leg beneath the table. “Sorry I blew up last night.”

  He turned inwards and slid a small dish of jam in my direction. “No need to apologise, it was totally my fault. I should have thought. Social media and all that…” he sipped from his mug of black coffee, “and I should have told him his request was out of the question, or to wait until we made it down there in our own time. I was just so excited to hear he was in France. Last I heard, he was still in Asia and then to find out he was back in Europe, I kind of just, I don’t know, got a little nostalgic.”

  I sniggered. “Oh great, when you put it like that, now I feel like the unreasonable one.”

  He waved it away. “It is what it is but I think you’ll like him.”

  “Well durr, he is your bes
t friend.”

  “And once we’ve met, had a meal, a few beers and reminisced, we’ll go wherever you want.” He left his words with an upward inflection, as if to enquire where that place might be.

  “Paris, no Barcelona, Madrid, oh, I don’t know. It’s too damned hard.” I slapped him on the arm because he was laughing at my indecisiveness but knowing we’d soon be back on the road, and free, had brought that indescribable feeling of exhilaration back. “So, how long’s the drive?”

  He sucked in air. “Uuuum, well…”

  * * *

  “Are you going to be silent all day?” He asked for the third time.

  I grunted and turned to look out the window, to the rolling green fields of Pays de la Loire, its vineyards, castles, the entire Loire Valley and the great city of Nantes, all of which we’d miss. “This Dan Belcher guy better be worth it.” I sulked under my breath, he didn’t hear and asked me to repeat myself. “Never mind.”

  He rubbed me on the knee. “Is poor little Doctor Frey-Frey hungry? Is that why you’re being so grumpy?”

  I slapped him on the leg and he laughed, which hardly helped my mood. “I’ll eat when we see this Dan guy you love so much. After all, it’ll be free food with his ability to turn water into wine.”

  “What are you talking about?” He asked through hysterics. “I thought you’d decided you were ok with it all now.”

  I folded my arms and angled even further away. “Anyway, how do you even know this guy and why’s he been on the run so long?”

  He exhaled in an exaggerated way. “Oh dear, doesn’t travelling bring out a different Frey-Frey. That didn’t take long, did it? I hope you’ll give him a fair chance.”

  “What? Even after he butchered our plans?”

  “And what plans are they exactly?” He cast me a sideward glance. “We don’t have any, which is the beauty of this whole trip. Tomorrow we might meet a hobo with tales of an Eldorado one hundred to one twenty miles due south by southeast and be so enthralled that we drop everything in search of this mystical new land. And then what of our plans?”

  He always had a way of making me smile, even when I was trying to be angry with him, an often impossible task. “Yeah, and you’d better stay off the drugs, Doctor.” I playfully hit him but it turned into more of a caress of his knee.

  “Promise me you’ll give Dan a fair chance.” He urged.

  I sighed. “Of course, I will. You’ve known me sulk but you’ve never known me not be fair.”

  “Good, and since you’re so interested, we grew up together. I’ve known Dan since we were five and went to the same school. We were both central midfielders on the local team, we had our first beer together, I even had a crush on his sister at one point though the less said about that the better.” He smiled and shook his head from some memory best left unsaid.

  I’d since turned back to face him because he was speaking with such warmth and feeling it was hard not to be caught up in it. “You’re close,” I said as a matter of fact. Of course, I knew all Gabe’s friends in Edinburgh, and he mine because most of them were mutual. But I’d never met any of his friends from home.

  His chin wrinkled. “Like I said, he’s the best friend I ever had and I’ve not seen him in far too long.”

  “Because he’s been travelling whilst you’ve been studying to become a bloody doctor.” Which meant I’d bagged the good one.

  He was quick to intervene in defence of his friend. “He’s not a bum. He just never had my brains. I guess we took two very different paths after school with my going to Edinburgh and his taking a job as a welder in the next town.” He shrugged, “I don’t know, how much can you change in two years?” then shook his head, “I suppose he got fed up of welding and took off. Can’t say I blame him really.”

  “And he’s been travelling alone ever since?”

  “Alone?” He barked and overtook another vehicle. “Not according to his Instagram. No, it looks to me like he’s been picking up and letting go of, shall we say, characters, every day for the last two bloody years.” He laughed and I thought best not to pursue down that road. “There was that one time we both spent a night in a cell.”

  My mouth fell open. “What? You? MD Gabe?” I mean, what? Really? “No, no, no, you can’t go silent on me now. You have to tell me what happened?”

  And then he pulled his annoying smirk, the one he always did when he knew I was exploding inside, and kept quiet, suddenly giving full concentration to the road and all I could do in response was grunt and turn away.

  * * *

  My cardigan was discarded immediately upon arrival and I shut my eyes, held out my arms and faced up into the sky. “How nice does that feel on the skin.”

  Bordeaux was a big city with lots of traffic and we were in the centre of it. Thus far we’d not seen anything to write home about, driving straight to the hostel and dumping the camper as close as we could whilst ensuring to close all the curtains. Earlier, Gabe had intentionally driven through a soggy field and now both flanks were caked in mud.

  “Nobody’ll bother breaking in now.” He said, thrusting out his chest and that was probably an accurate statement because it truly resembled nothing that any person with anything of value would possess, which was also true of us.

  Our shoulders burdened with backpacks, we entered the hostel and checked in, also grabbing a handful of tourist pamphlets on the way. Shockingly, our room possessed no fewer than twelve beds and although it was only six in the evening, there were already three people asleep and not one stirred when Gabe accidentally slammed the door.

  I don’t know what I was expecting but as I quickly learned, not all hostels were created equal. It was accommodation for fifteen Euros a night but after the pleasant stay of the previous evening, this was a crash back down to reality. In comparison to the Bretagne countryside, money obviously didn’t go quite so far in the city of Bordeaux. It wasn’t the cramped conditions necessarily, or the dusty floor or the broken lockers. It wasn’t even the many large backpacks and people’s belongings strewn all about the place that made my toes curl and soured the excessive saliva building in my mouth. What did it was that after such a long drive, all I desired was a mere ten minutes alone time, Gabe excepted, to sit, gather my wits and revitalise my soul. The last thing I’d wanted was to arrive and feel so inhibited, like I couldn’t change clothes because one of these people might happen to be watching the redheaded Scots girl.

  I opened a window overlooking the main road and one of the sleepers, a heavily bearded man in his fifties turned over, scratched down below and muttered something foreign. My instinct was to find a bed as far from the door as possible so that if any of these people turned out to be an escaped convict, I’d be the last target. It was all paranoia, of course, but survival instincts are deeply ingrained and hard to shut down and it wasn’t like I could even share a bunk with Gabe, inconveniently narrow as they were. I was being stuck up, which wasn’t like me at all, despite my upbringing and hoped I’d soon become desensitised and get used to it, or otherwise just stop caring. After all, squatting is a big part of travelling and there was no way we’d be able to escape it, at least not on our budget.

  The door flung open and, expecting Gabe’s friend, we both twisted around but after a second, Gabe lowered his head and continued making his bed from the supplied sheets.

  The newcomer, a man in his mid-twenties with closely cropped brown hair and the lazy demeanour of someone who’d long been on the road held my eye contact as he squeezed his way bedwards. “Evening, speak English?”

  I nodded, “I’m Scottish, so only just.”

  He flashed teeth, “and me Irish, which makes us fellow Celts.” He held out his hand and I had to reach over my bed to shake it as we exchanged names. His gaze passed over my neck, shoulders, breasts, abdomen, hips, thighs and back to my face, all very quickly. “How long you been out from the ginger factory?”

  I snorted and neglected the sheets for the moment. “Only since yes
terday.” I glanced over at Gabe and found him slowly spreading his sheets, making as little noise as possible with an ear turned towards us.

  The Irishman scooped up the mess on his bed, only to throw the lot against the wall at his feet. “Don’t mind me, Freya. You had chance to see Bordeaux yet?”

  “It’s hard to make the place much worse so go right ahead and no, not yet.”

  “Ah,” he collapsed on his bed and propped his hands behind his head, “tis a beautiful place. I recommend the river walk but Bordeaux’s all about the wine, we’re surrounded by the best vineyards in Europe, did you know that?” He continued to talk about the city and wine, a friendly guy with a certain charm, which kind of made him attractive.

  It was all fun and we were on this trip to make friends but I kept wondering when Gabe would bound to my side and drape his arm about my shoulders in some non-verbal declaration I was his woman but after four or five minutes he still hadn’t come forth, or even said a word, and now he was perching awkwardly with one leg on the bed, pulling items from his bag before stuffing them back in again.

  It wasn’t completely strange for me to receive admiring glances from men so I knew there were some out there who found me attractive and I’d often be approached on the rare occasion I ever hit the Edinburgh bars with university friends but for the most part, everyone on my course knew I was with Gabe, so it wasn’t something I regularly had to deal with. But here and now, I looked and felt dishevelled from the journey and couldn’t imagine how any man could find me appealing.

  “You won’t have seen any of the bars they got here then? There’re some great old worldy ones serving wine from St Emilion and I promise, you won’t have tasted anything like it. I’ll take you there when you’re ready,” he said almost as an afterthought, “there’s this one place that serves a very particular red Pessac Leognan Graves, its earthy and tastes of blackcurrant and cedar, goes well with the lamb you can order on these little crackers.” How the Irish could charm and if it hadn’t yet clicked with Gabe I was being seduced, it certainly had with me but what could I do? You can’t begin every conversation by declaring up front that you have a boyfriend because by doing so is to make the presumption they’re even interested and how would that look if the guy was just being friendly? No, the responsibility had been Gabe’s from the outset, to at least do something, to make some kind of a gesture, verbal or none, to show we at least knew each other.