by Sara Barnard
“In this country there will be,” Khalil says. “Peyton is a very Canada-friendly name. You’ll find your people.”
I know he’s joking, but I can’t help the jolt of longing in my chest. My people.
“I should look them up,” I say. “Go on a mission to find all the Peytons.”
“Great idea,” Khalil says. “That can be your plan for this trip instead of—what was it you’re going to do? “Figure it out as you go? In the second-largest country in the world?”
I know he’s teasing me, but I tell myself it’s friendly, not mean. “Speaking of plans. If they’re so great, what’s yours? How come you’re both here?”
“We’re traveling the world,” Beasey says.
“Seriously?” I say.
He nods. “Seriously.”
“Oh my God,” I say. “That’s so cool.”
They both grin immodestly. Clearly, they’ve had this conversation a lot, and they love it. “We’ve done Southeast Asia,” Khalil says. “Thailand, Singapore, Malaysia. We just spent six months in Australia, working as well as traveling.”
“Where did you work?” I ask.
“Just a couple of bars,” Khalil says. “We spent some time in New Zealand, too.”
“Not enough,” Beasey puts in.
“Not enough,” Khalil agrees.
“And now you’re in Canada?”
“Are we?” Khalil says, looking stunned for effect, and I roll my eyes at him. He grins. “Why not, eh?”
“That’s so cool,” I say again.
Khalil smirks. “Says the girl who hopped on a plane to Canada, of all places, on, what… a whim?”
“Hey, I had my reasons,” I say, pleased with how cool and mysterious I sound. (Or think I sound.) “So what brings you here?” I ask. “To Vancouver?”
“One,” Khalil says, holding up a finger. “Very cool city.”
I nod. “Of course.”
“Two,” he continues. “A friend of mine is at uni over on Vancouver Island. I said I’d swing by this way so we could go and say hi.”
“Friend,” Beasey says, meaningfully.
“Friend,” Khalil confirms, straight-faced.
“And three,” Beasey says, rolling his eyes, “is that we wanted to work a ski season in Banff, which is in the Rockies, over in Alberta, but we couldn’t find a way to stay and work there without actually losing money.”
“The whole point was we’d earn enough to move on with,” Khalil says. “Like we did in Australia. But it didn’t work out.”
“So we’re just going to go hang out there for a couple of weeks,” Beasey says. “Stay in a hostel, like we are here, maybe ski a bit, do a few hikes—weather permitting—and then move on.”
“Where’s next?” I ask.
“The US,” Beasey says. “Well, through there, anyway. We’re going to go down the West Coast, then into Mexico.”
“Sounds amazing,” I say wistfully. “I’m so jealous.” Jealous of the plan, of them being intrepid explorers and seeing so much of the world, but mostly jealous of how they have each other. They’re so easy together. It’s clear they’ve been friends for years.
“Well, before all that, we’re heading to Vancouver Island in a couple of days,” Khalil says. “Seeing my friend Heather”—Beasey coughs, then laughs when Khalil throws a sugar packet at him—“and spending a few days in Victoria, then heading up to Tofino. A couple of the guys are coming too so we can all save money on an Airbnb. They played cards with us last night? Lars and Stefan? They’re cool.”
“Did you know them before?” I ask.
“Not before meeting here, no, but that’s what traveling’s all about, right?” He says this so easily. “Meeting people, going on adventures. It’s not just what you see—it’s who you see it with.”
Is that true? I hope it’s true. I want it to be true so badly.
Beasey’s laughing. “Nice. Deep.”
“It’s true,” Khalil says, grinning, unruffled. “That’s how we met Heather,” he adds to me. “Last summer, when we were working near Sydney. She’s Australian. She’s at the university over in Victoria for a semester.”
I smile. “You detoured all the way here for a girl? That’s so romantic.”
He frowns. “We were coming this way anyway.”
Beasey meets my eye and shakes his head, smiling drily.
“She’s just a friend,” Khalil adds.
Beasey mouths, “Just.”
“Anyway,” Khalil says. “Peyton, if you don’t have a plan, you can come too, if you want. There’ll be room in the Airbnb—it’s pretty big.”
I somehow manage to stop myself saying, “Really?!” with the kind of breathless excitement of a literal child. Instead, I nod thoughtfully. “Yeah, maybe—that could be good.”
“Cool. And why not, right? It’s not like you already have plans,” Khalil says, raising his eyebrows teasingly.
“See, this is why I don’t have plans,” I say. “So I get to be spontaneous and get invited along on other people’s cool-sounding trips.”
They both laugh. I made them laugh. These cool, older Scottish guys who’ve been traveling all over the world. I made them laugh.
We head together to reception to meet up with everyone else going on the group tour and Spencer, our guide for the day. He’s Canadian, with shaggy blond hair, perfect white teeth, and a lazy smile. Khalil, Beasey, and I spend the journey to our first stop—Capilano Suspension Bridge Park—chatting about the UK and the lives they’ve left behind. (I am, obviously, less talkative about that side of things.) They’ve been away for a lot longer than me and they miss it more, reminiscing about things it hasn’t even occurred to me to miss, like Marmite, pubs, Greggs, and British TV.
“And haggis?” I ask, teasing.
Beasey lets out a huff and points at me. “Haggis,” he says, with emphasis, “is a lie. A big Scottish lie.”
Khalil gasps, very loudly. “You traitor,” he says. “Surrender your thistle and kilt.”
At the Capilano Suspension Bridge Park, we start with the bridge itself, seventy meters above the Capilano River, very wobbly and very cool. Khalil and I challenge each other to walk across without touching the sides, but neither of us makes it more than a few steps without instinctively steadying ourselves. Beasey has gone very quiet, his face rigid, clutching the side with both hands.
“Not a fan of heights?” I say.
“Or vertigo,” he mutters, as if he thinks talking at a normal volume will disrupt his balance.
“It’s completely safe,” I say. “Spencer said it could take the weight of two 787s.”
“That sounds like bullshit,” he says.
“It’s not!” I say, shocked. “He’s the tour guide. He knows.”
“And anyway,” Beasey says, teeth still gritted. “Boeing 787s can’t trip up and fall over the side.”
“You’re not going to trip,” I say. “Come on. Most of the group’s already across.”
A small child comes running past us, shrieking with joy as the bridge judders and sways, and Beasey looks at him with such horror you’d think the kid was on fire.
“I’m going to go back,” he says, beginning to claw his way in the opposite direction. “I hate this—oh my God.”
“Come on!” I say. “It’s fine, honestly. Look, am I scared? No. And I’m a tiny little girl.”
“I’m a feminist,” he says. “That’s not going to work on me. Shame on you for”—the kid starts jumping and Beasey groans—“trying to masculinity-shame me.”
I try not to laugh, because he really does look scared. Instead I take my place beside him, resting my elbows on the steel cable. “Isn’t this view amazing, though?” I say. “It’s just incredible. I’ve never been anywhere like it. Have you?”
Beasey looks at me like he knows what I’m doing, but he answers. “I grew up in the Scottish Highlands. But yeah, it’s amazing.”
“Totally worth it, right?” I smile at him and he rolls his eyes
but smiles reluctantly back. “Come on.” I hold out my hand. “I’ll guide you across. I’ll be your Support Peyton.”
“Then if I trip, I’ll drag you with me,” he says.
“I promise I won’t let you drag me to my death,” I say. “Come on. Buck up.” I tap his hand and he releases his claw-like grip on the side of the bridge to let me take it. His hand is sweaty. “Try closing your eyes.”
“Is that a joke?!”
“Okay, fine, don’t then. Just put one foot in front of the other. What’s the best thing you’ve seen since you’ve been traveling?”
He thinks about it, carefully following my footsteps. “Kuang Si Falls.”
“Favorite place?”
“New Zealand.”
“Do you miss home?”
“Yeah, but less than I thought I would. Do you?”
“No,” I say. I’m not sure if this is really true, but I don’t want to think about it too hard to find the real answer. We’ve reached the end of the bridge and I carefully, casually, let go of his hand. “Look! We made it.”
Beasey lets out a huff of a sigh, a smile lighting back on his face. “Never again.”
“It wasn’t that bad, right?”
“It was worse,” he says. “But thanks for being my Support Peyton.”
It makes me feel funny when he says it. “Anytime,” I say. “I’m here for all your high-bridge needs. Or at least, for as long as we’re both in the same country.”
He laughs. “I’m not going anywhere near any more high bridges. But isn’t there a cable car up to Grouse Mountain later?” He makes a face. “I hate cable cars.”
“You really don’t like heights. Haven’t you been traveling the world? How can you do that and be scared of heights?”
“There’s no halfway liking heights or not,” he says. “They’re horrible either way. If I’m high up, I don’t like it. And I’ve always been scared of heights, whether I’m in Scotland or Vietnam. You must be scared of stuff, too. What are you scared of?”
Being alone again. “Snakes,” I say. “Climate change.”
“Ah yes,” he says. “Those equally scary things.” His eyes suddenly go wide, his smile disappearing.
“What?” I ask, but it’s obvious what. We’ve reached the Cliffwalk, which is a series of bridges, stairs and glass-bottomed platforms across the granite precipice of a cliff. “Oh.”
“Nope,” Beasey says.
“Face your fears?” I ask hopefully.
“Nope,” he says again. “I can accept my limits. This is my limit. You go—I’ll meet you all after.”
I give him a wave as I hurry on to catch up with Khalil and the rest of the group. Khalil laughs when he sees me appear without Beasey beside me, shaking his head. “You couldn’t convince him?”
“Nope,” I say. “That was beyond even me.” I love how this sounds when the words leave my mouth; like I have a history of convincing people to face their fears or something, that there’s more to me than the loneliness that’s the actual truth.
“Well, you got him across a suspension bridge,” Khalil says. “That’s more than I’ve ever managed.”
After the Cliffwalk, which makes my heart swoop inside me in the best way, we take on the Treetops Adventure, which is a series of small suspension bridges over the forest. There’s not enough time to do what I really want to do, which is sit down on one of the canopies and just draw what I see, so I take as many pictures as I can from as many different angles, hoping it will be enough to re-create it in pencil later.
When we finally all meet up with Beasey again, he’s sitting on a bench near the entrance to the park, playing on his phone.
“Mate,” Khalil says. “You missed out!”
“Devastating,” Beasey says, deadpan.
In the afternoon, we get the cable car up Grouse Mountain. Beasey closes his eyes for the whole trip, even when Khalil and I both tell him he’s missing the incredible views sweeping right across Vancouver. “I don’t care,” he says, through gritted teeth. “I cannot tell you how much I don’t care.”
When we get to the top, our feet on solid ground, he’s smiling again, back to the chill person I’d met in the hostel. “Holy shit!” he says. “Look at that view!”
The group splits off and scatters to spend some free time exploring, and I find myself torn between going on the zip line with Khalil and most of the group, or saving money and staying with Beasey. Doing the zip line would be out-of-this-world amazing, and I’m so tempted, but it costs about the same as four nights in the hostel. I can’t justify it to myself, not when I’m so aware of the money I’ve already spent since I arrived. It won’t last forever.
“Ah, well,” Beasey says, smiling. “The view up here is free. And solid ground is so much safer.”
We spend some time together exploring the museum and the shop, trying on a display of hats together. Beasey has just let me take a photo of him wearing a bright red toque when he says, “So what brought you to Canada, anyway?”
I feel myself tense instinctively and hope he hasn’t noticed, trying to smile to cover the unease. “Didn’t we talk about that last night?”
“Not really,” he says. “Logistics more than anything, which isn’t really the answer, right?”
“Why not?”
My voice hasn’t come out friendly, but he smiles anyway, like he understands, even though that’s impossible. “Want to talk about it?”
Obviously, I know exactly what he means. “Talk about what?”
He half laughs. “Okay, then.” He buys one of the toques and a postcard—Grouse Mountain covered in snow—and we head back out into the cool air together. “Sorry,” he says. “I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”
I shrug inside my coat, and that’s when our eyes meet. There’s something physical about eye contact, I realize in that moment. A tug of connection. I see him see me.
“You’ve got some walls,” he says. “High ones. All built up.” He mimes layering bricks, one on top of the other. His smile is knowing, but warm. His eyes are kind.
I put my two hands in front of my face in response, peeking out at him from over the top, which makes him laugh.
“Okay, I won’t pry,” he says. I drop my hands, trying to keep the relief out of my smile. “I am intrigued, though,” he adds. “You are intriguing.”
“I’m really not,” I say. But I want it to be true.
“Okay,” he says, clearly unconvinced, still smiling. “Well, if you want to talk, I can listen. Sometimes it can help, talking to someone you don’t know very well. Less pressure.”
For a moment, I wonder if he’s right. I try to imagine telling the story from start to finish. Claridge to college to that last night at Flick’s. My sadness turned to hope turned to desperation. I dismiss it. Better he imagines me intriguing than knows I’m pathetic.
“Or you could draw it,” he adds when I don’t say anything. “You’re an artist, right?”
“How do you know that?” I ask, startled.
He laughs. “You’ve been sketching all day.”
Yeah, but I hadn’t realized he’d noticed. “Drawing the present,” I say. “Not so much the past.” As I speak, I imagine doing it. Maybe it would help, turning those moments into pencil lines I can control. Re-creating Flick and Travis as characters on a page instead of the people in my memories.
“Just an idea,” Beasey says. “We should head to the end of the zip line to meet everyone. They’ll probably be done by now.”
* * *
When we get back to downtown Vancouver, most of the group stays together to get dinner at a burger place called White Spot, and I go along too because I’m feeling cozy and warm in the comfort of the day, emboldened by how well it’s gone. I haven’t embarrassed myself with these new people; maybe I’ve even, possibly, maybe… made friends.
I go to bed early that night, the residual jet lag I’d been keeping at bay catching up with me. The dorm room is empty and so I sit for a w
hile on my mattress before I turn the light off, playing with my phone. I create an Instagram account—peytontheadventurer—and spend a calming half hour going through the photos I took earlier in the day, adjusting and filtering, adding them to the account to get it going. It’s not my first Instagram account, but it’s the first for a long time. When I was at school, Amber Monroe and her minions had found my account and harassed me constantly on it, replying to everything I posted with jibes or joke praise or—worse—effusive “sympathy” for the fact that I had the misfortune to be Peyton King, regramming my posts with me replaced by a duck. I tried to withstand it for a while, desperate to hold my head high and ignore it like all the adults said I should, but I gave in and deleted my account eventually. I could have started a new one when I was at college, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it, too afraid of what could happen.
But now, I’m here. I’m brave and I’m free. I am living a life where I can have an Instagram account if I want to, and no one can stop me.
In the morning, I find a flurry of messages from my grandma on my phone, ending with a plea that I tell her when she can call me. When I message her to say I’m free, she calls me immediately.
“Peyton!” she gasps, without even saying hello. “It’s not true, is it? You’re not in Canada?”
“I am kind of in Canada, yeah,” I say.
“Oh, Peyton,” she says. “Why? Please don’t tell me you’ve gone to see your grandfather.”
“Obviously not,” I say. “I’m not anywhere near him; Canada’s huge. I just wanted to get away.”
“Hmmm,” she says, clearly unconvinced. “To Canada, of all places. Why didn’t you come here? What does Canada have that Cornwall doesn’t have?”
I smile into the phone. “Good point.”
It’s true that I usually go to Cornwall when I need a place of refuge. It’s always been a place I’ve felt safe, which is a lot to do with Grandma herself. She raised her son—my dad—as a single parent after her husband—my grandfather—walked out on them both. When my dad was good and grown, she moved to Cornwall with three other divorced friends, and they’ve lived there ever since, within walking distance of each other’s homes. I mean, talk about squad goals. “That twat leaving me was the best thing that could have happened,” she told me once, when I asked about my estranged grandfather. “He said he wanted his freedom. Well—who’s free now? Me!” She laughed her cackle-laugh. “And I earned it, unlike him, the lonely, bitter old man. To think, I could have wasted my life on him. I tell you, Peyton. Women are far superior to men, in every way.” She raised her glasses to look down at me. “In every way.” (It took me a few years to understand what she meant.)