Trusting a Stranger

by Kimberley Brown

  She was sitting at the window brushing her hair and sipping at coffee he had brought back from the restaurant car.

  ‘A little bit,’ said Ethan. ‘People say more like me. She has my colouring. You saw her on the video.’

  ‘Only very briefly.’ Hayley took another long sip.

  Ethan was watching her too closely. She wished he would look away — because she wanted to stare at him.

  This was the man she had made love to last night. It had been so long since she had been with anyone that it seemed hard to believe. And yet her body was still thrilled with the memory of his intimate caresses.

  ‘That film was shot a few years ago,’ she said.

  ‘She hasn’t changed much,’ Ethan told her. Mostly, she’s just gotten bigger. She’s still gorgeous.’

  ‘You sound like such a devoted father.’

  Hayley had something she wanted to say to him, a confession she wanted to make, and she wasn’t sure how best to direct the conversation. ‘

  Ethan looked at her now and nodded.

  ‘I was raised by my father,’ Hayley reminded him.

  ‘I’m glad to see that fathers on their own can do a good job,’ Ethan said, smiling.

  She could tell from the way his crossed leg was bouncing slightly that he was full of tension and anxiety for what the rest of the day might bring. She thought about what he must be thinking right now. That their night together had been wonderful but it was only a brief break from the life and death drama they were caught up in. Now, they had to get back to reality.

  ‘Did you always want to have children?’ Hayley persisted.

  He looked thoughtful. ‘I don’t really know. I suppose if anyone asked me I would have said I expected to have them one day.’

  ‘I’ve always thought I wouldn’t have children,’ Hayley told him.

  He was looking at her, far more closely now.

  ‘Yes?’ he asked, clearly aware that she felt this was something important for her to say.

  ‘People say I’m a lot like my mother,’ Hayley said.

  ‘You look like you don’t think that’s very complimentary.’

  ‘I don’t know. She was pretty enough. I think. I don’t remember very much about her. She smoked. One day she dropped me off to school and told me I was to take the bus home. I was happy about that. It felt like a big adventure. When I came home, the house was unlocked. She had left the front door open for me, you know.’

  She paused for a moment. The memory was painful and hard to share.

  ‘And?’ asked Ethan. His eyes were guarded but he asked the question gently, careful with his feelings. Hayley felt a surge of gratitude towards him for that.

  ‘And she was gone,’ Hayley said. ‘She just wasn’t there. I looked for her for what felt like hours. I searched every room, I looked in ridiculous places like under the bed and inside wardrobes. Finally I went next door and asked my neighbour if she knew where my mother was. She took pity on me and rang my Dad. He came home from work early. He said her bag was missing, all her important papers and details. Eventually he had a message from her. She had gone off to India, I think. Maybe Sri Lanka. Somewhere like that. “To find herself” she said. And that’s why I thought I’d never have children.’

  ‘It’s a terrible story,’ Ethan said. ‘It must have been terrible for you.’

  Hayley smiled. ‘I had a feeling you’d understand,’ she said. ‘It’s something that I haven’t always found easy to discuss.’

  He hugged her.

  ‘You know in some ways the hardest thing was explaining the situation to my friends,’ she said. ‘No one knew of a mother who had just walked off before. One of the girls in my class had a mother who died. Honestly, I think it was easier for her to talk about it. People understand death. I looked her up, I found her. It was years later. By then she was dead. Lung cancer. That’s why I hate smoking.’

  Hayley was quiet, suddenly, as she remembered that Ethan was bringing up a little girl whose mother had died. He might have quite a different perspective on this than she had.

  ‘It must have been terrible,’ Ethan said. He looked out the window for a while.

  She waited for him to continue the conversation in his own time.

  ‘You say this made you never want to have children?’ he asked eventually. ‘Couldn’t it have made you want even more to be part of a family?’

  ‘I’m too much like my mother. I wouldn’t trust myself,’ Hayley explained.

  ‘You think you’d be like her?’ Ethan looked startled.

  ‘I don’t know who else I could be like. She was the only mother I ever saw. And she couldn’t cope with it. When things got difficult, she ran away.’

  Ethan took a long moment to compose his thoughts. His legs, jean-clad, were stretched out in front of him.

  ‘You wouldn’t do that though,’ Ethan said.

  Hayley turned sceptical eyes in his direction. ‘You seem very sure about that.’

  ‘I am sure,’ he said. ‘I know we haven’t known each other for very long, but it’s been very intense.’

  She nodded. She had to agree that this was very true.

  ‘Already I know a lot about you,’ Ethan continued. ‘And one of the things I know is that you’d be just about the last person to run away from a situation just because it was difficult.’

  Hayley was quiet now. She hadn’t thought about her own situation like this before. It was a new idea to consider. Perhaps she wasn’t as much like her mother as she had always feared.

  Not that she could let this change her mind about decisions she had already made. If there was even the slightest chance that she could not manage mothering, then she had to keep away from it. Children were too precious and those dreams she had about one day having a family of her own were too dangerous to indulge. After her own damaged girlhood, she could never bear to be the person who might hurt a child.

  ***

  It was only a short while before their train slowed as it approached the main station at Naples. Hayley pushed all of her clothes into a new bag and sat beside Ethan at the window.

  ‘Grotty city,’ Hayley observed, wrinkling her nose.

  ‘Very few places are at their best near the central station,’ Ethan reminded her.

  He leaned forward suddenly and stabbed at the window with his finger.

  ‘Did you see that?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘In that taxi over there.’

  They had entered a part of the city where the train lines and the road ran very close together and the train had slowed until it almost seemed that they were stuck in traffic. Hayley leaned forward and tried to follow the length of Ethan’s finger as he pointed towards the queue of traffic.

  There were many taxis in view. Hayley tried to guess which one he might mean but in the end shrugged helplessly.

  ‘That one,’ Ethan said again. ‘That’s Katy!’

  He leaped to his feet and raced for the door. Hayley grabbed her bag and followed, zipping it up as she went.

  Outside their compartment, she saw Ethan duck and weaved among the passengers, who were ready to disembark, and their various suitcases and travel gear as he bounded for the end of the carriage corridor.

  Ethan reached the end and pulled roughly on the emergency brake.

  ‘Hey, what you doing?’ demanded an elderly man nearby, in Italian.

  ‘Emergency,’ Ethan replied between clenched teeth as he seized hold of the door handle and tried to pull it open.

  ‘Yeah I got an emergency too,’ the man continued. Now he looked more resigned than angry. It was clearly too late to do anything about the situation. ‘An emergency called “I got to get home before my wife kills me”. Called “I don’t want you doing anything to slow us down”.’

  ‘This train has to stop,’ Ethan said.

  ‘You don’t look like you’re having a heart attack,’ said one of the other passengers.

  ‘At least the door has to open!’ Ethan insiste
d.

  The train shuddered to a halt. Ethan pulled one more time on the door handle and it twisted open in his hand. He glanced over his shoulder to make sure that Hayley was with him and she nodded.

  The conductor appeared from one of the nearby compartments. His hat was crooked.

  ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ he demanded in English. He had remembered that much about his passengers.

  ‘I have to get off,’ Ethan said.

  Hayley thought it was worth waiting a moment to explain. ‘His daughter’s been kidnapped. He thinks he’s seen her,’ she said.

  ‘Kidnapped!’ the crowd around them divided into two camps, the cynical and the astonished.

  Fortunately the conductor fell into the latter camp. He ducked back into his compartment as Ethan and Hayley jumped out the door and down the short distance to the rocky verge that ran beneath the tracks.

  ‘Signor! Signora!’ the conductor called out behind them.

  He held some sort of radio to his mouth and as Hayley stood and turned, the train began once again to move. He must have told the driver that the emergency was false, or over.

  ‘Your passports!’ the conductor called, throwing the documents towards them as the train gathered speed.

  The papers fell to the ground a few metres away and Hayley ran to pick them up. When she returned to Ethan he was scanning the passing traffic, still looking for the taxi.

  ‘You’re sure it was her?’ she asked.

  It seemed a reasonable question. There were so many cars and most of them were quite difficult to see into. Not to mention that it would be an incredible coincidence to see Katy just about the first moment they entered Naples.

  But Ethan scowled at her. ‘I know my own daughter!’ he said.

  The traffic around them began finally to move.

  ‘There she is!’ he yelled, and began running forward into the traffic jam.

  He could run quickly and Hayley knew she would soon be left behind. She felt torn when the traffic began to move more quickly still and Ethan paused. It would have been wonderful if he’d been able to reach Katy’s taxi now, but at least she could stay with him if they had to find some other way of getting there.

  Ethan reached into his pocket and removed two one-hundred Euro notes from his wallet.

  ‘Come with me!’ he yelled towards Hayley as he ran down a concrete slope towards a wire fence.

  How would they get through that?

  Ethan reached into his bag this time. He must have been a boy scout, Hayley thought. It was either that or the long-term living with danger that had taught him to be prepared. The next thing he had in his hand seemed to be a pair of wire cutters.

  He knelt before the fence and began cutting a hole in the wire. Hayley looked around, certain that there would be police or railway staff or someone along soon to stop him. But they seemed to be on their own.

  Ethan cut a small hole, wriggled through and then turned to help Hayley. She was much smaller than him and crawled through easily.

  ‘The taxi was going that way,’ Ethan pointed.

  ‘What are we going to do?’

  ‘Hold my hand.’

  Hayley shrugged, and reached towards him.

  Ethan turned and ran again, this time towards the nearest taxi. He still had the large-denomination Euro notes in his hand as he reached for the vehicle’s back door.

  From within, two protesting faces turned in his direction and yelled: the passenger and the driver.

  Ethan passed them one note each and repeated his earlier statement about it being an emergency.

  Hayley watched as the driver turned towards the woman who had been his original passenger and made a shooing gesture with his hands. The woman looked resentful but she clutched the note in one hand as she opened the door beside her with the other.

  As she climbed out, Ethan slid in and across to the seat that she had just vacated. He waved with his arm for Hayley to follow.

  ‘There’s a taxi up ahead,’ Ethan said, as the car began to move. ‘A hundred metres or so. I want you to follow it.’

  ‘A taxi?’ the driver muttered.

  It was hard to tell if he was excited or annoyed at finding himself at the centre of unexpected drama.

  ‘Not too far ahead,’ Ethan repeated.

  ‘There are hundreds of taxis.’

  ‘Only one of them has my daughter in it,’ Ethan said, grimly. ‘Look, you just drive, I’ll tell you where to go.’

  He settled back into his seat. Hayley rested her hand on his leg but he seemed barely aware of the comforting gesture. His own hand was gripping onto the door handle as though he might want to leap out at any moment.

  ‘Turn left up ahead,’ he said a after a couple of moments.

  ‘I know this neighbourhood. There’s nothing down that way,’ the driver objected.

  ‘I said turn left.’

  ‘I know these streets. This is my home,’ the driver said. The lights ahead of him turned orange and he slowed.

  Ethan gripped the back of the driver’s seat in frustration. ‘I don’t want you stopping unless there’s actually another car in the way!’ he said. ‘And I want you to turn left.’

  The driver turned to look at them. His mouth was hanging open. ‘Just because I’ve taken your money doesn’t mean you can talk to me like that,’ he began.

  Hayley thought it was time they gave the man an explanation. ‘We’re looking for my friend’s daughter,’ she began. ‘A little girl. She’s been kidnapped —’

  But Ethan clearly thought the time for talking was over. He opened the door beside him and climbed out.

  What was he doing? Hayley reached for her own door handle, determined to join him, but Ethan had stepped towards the front of the car and swung the driver’s own door open.

  ‘I’ll be doing the driving now,’ he said. ‘Move over or I’ll toss you onto the street.’

  ‘You can’t do this! This isn’t my car!’ the driver yelled. ‘I’ll be killed if I don’t take it back!’

  ‘Then move over,’ Ethan repeated, reaching in to seize the much smaller man’s lapels.

  ‘I’m moving! I’m moving!’ said the driver. He backed away, over the hand brake and over the gear stick and into the next seat.

  Ethan revved the engine as the traffic they were crossing slowed. The lights were about to change.

  Chapter Ten

  The taxi ahead of them had turned onto a less busy street and was able to gather speed before they reached the corner. But the better traffic conditions also meant it stayed more visible as they sped between facing blocks of dirty concrete houses.

  Ethan ignored the complaints of the driver beside him as he sped along. The roads leading off to both side streets suggested a warren of streets and he feared that if the other taxi turned outside his line of sight, then it would be lost forever.

  ‘My car! My car!’ said the driver.

  He was jumping up and down in the seat but had not bothered putting on his seat belt.

  ‘My car!’

  ‘I thought you said it wasn’t your car,’ Hayley observed from the back seat.

  ‘It’s more than my job is worth if the car is in an accident,’ the driver told her, yelling. ‘Someone else driving and it is more than my life!’

  Ethan shrugged. He was a good and practiced driver and knew he wasn’t going to have an accident. And he was glad that Hayley seemed to have a knowledge of Italian that was almost as good as her own. Otherwise, she might have thought from the level of his whinging that the driver had something far more serious to say.

  As it was, the driver continued moaning and one of Ethan’s brief glances into the rear vision mirror revealed Hayley sitting there, stretched to one side so that she could do her best to keep up with where the taxi was as well.

  Ahead of them, the taxi slowed.

  ‘He’s stopping!’ Hayley called.

  The other vehicle stopped while she was speaking. Ethan pulled up a few metres away. There was
a chance that, in the traffic, they had not been spotted. If they could maintain the element of surprise, perhaps this would give them an advantage over Katy’s kidnapper.

  Ethan leaped out of the car from one side, aware of Hayley doing the same from the other.

  ‘Hey! Aren’t you going to pay me?’ demanded the driver.

  ‘You’ve already got a hundred Euros,’ Hayley reminded him.

  The driver seemed to think about that. ‘You want me to wait here for you?’ he asked. ‘One hundred more?’

  But Ethan didn’t care. After quickly checking that Hayley was with him, he was striding quickly along the street.

  ‘Stay close to the wall,’ he said, looking at Hayley over his shoulder.

  The taxi ahead was disgorging its passengers, too. A thickset man and a tall woman in a headscarf — and Katy.

  What to do? If he called out from here that might give Katy the chance to turn and run but, well, she might not. And if something went wrong and the adults with her realised who he was, then they would have plenty of time to react before Ethan got there. If he wasn’t careful, Katy could end up in even more danger than she was already.

  ‘If we see them go into one of the buildings we can call the police,’ Hayley reminded him in a subdued voice.

  Every fibre of his body was screaming for him to break into a run and go grab Katy now but Ethan just couldn’t do it. He didn’t know enough about the situation to make a judgement call like that. He didn’t even know if Katy’s captors were armed.

  He was too involved. His judgement was impaired. He would not think it wise for any father to be in this position. But what choice did he have? Ethan closed his eyes and tried to imagine what he would suggest if that was someone else’s child up there. But his imagination simply wasn’t up to the task.

  That wasn’t someone else’s child! It was Katy!

  He paused for a moment. He’d never been in a situation like this in his life. The thin woman wrapped her arm around the little girl’s shoulder and seemed to be directing her to follow the man.

  The man was walking towards the nearest building. He pressed a buzzer on the wall as they approached.

  ‘Try to look casual,’ Ethan said to Hayley.