Rachel Dann - Pieces of My Life

Some kind of volunteering… As I climb exhaustedly into bed, Harry’s words echo in my mind, and behind them a tentative question starts to form. Could I do that? I’d already been researching volunteer opportunities, although admittedly none of them had been in such a hazardous location as a prison… a tingle of excitement, tinged with fear, darts through me at the idea. Actually, I think I could do that. As I finally surrender to sleep my head spins with thoughts of Joel, Ecuadorian prisons, volunteer opportunities and my folder of travel ideas, and my ears are filled with the repeated pinging noise of two days’ worth of emails flooding through to Harry’s phone.

***

I wake up from scrambled dreams about being chased through a busy airport by a throng of angry men in prison uniform shouting at me in Scottish accents. The first thing I see is a vividly coloured wall hanging, depicting in graphic tapestry an Inca warrior cutting the head off a bearded white man on a horse. A shiver runs down my spine. Gradually the events of the past day come flooding back and I remember where I am. I scramble for my phone on the bedside table and see that it is nearly six p.m.

What the…?

It feels like first thing in the morning.

Harry is nowhere to be seen. I sit up, feeling disoriented. The doors to the balcony are open and a lovely warm breeze brushes my face, bringing with it the sounds of traffic and cars hooting and children calling in the street outside… and Harry’s voice, unmistakable and shouting, filled with anguish.

I stagger out of bed and tiptoe towards the balcony, teeth clenched in sudden fear. Who could he be shouting at? What if something is happening to him – maybe he’s being mugged, or kidnapped? Could this be the last time I see my boyfriend before he’s bundled into a waiting car and driven away as a hostage, and all this time I’ve been here in the hotel room sleeping. Suddenly my mother’s voice bursts uninvited into my consciousness. ‘ Dangerous part of the world… drugs everywhere… ’ I physically shake my head and tell myself I’m being silly. But, even so, I edge towards the balcony, keeping my back flat against the wall while craning my head as far forward as I dare to see out over the wrought-iron bars.

Harry is standing about three metres away in the street below, his back to me, mobile phone pressed to his ear. His raised voice reaches me again over the background noise of cars passing and distant salsa music playing from a café at the end of the road. Although I can’t make out any actual words from so far up here, his body language emanates anger and frustration. Still with his back to me, he raises his free arm and seems to shake it at the street in general, then brings it to his face and runs his hand through his hair in an all-too-familiar gesture of exasperation.

There are no gangsters, hostage takers or drug pushers anywhere near him, just a few bemused pedestrians who all turn to look back at Harry as they pass. He seems to be really shouting, but from up here all I can make out is the anguished tone of his voice. Relief floods through me that he is in no apparent danger, but is then immediately followed by troubled curiosity. Who the hell could he be talking to?

I edge forward on the balcony and strain to hear more, just as Harry starts to swing round and pace back towards me. I hurl myself backwards into the hotel room and out of sight, as snatched words from his conversation drift up to me, clear as crystal – in Spanish .

‘ Por favor! No entiendes! ’ is all I hear him shout before the balcony curtain swishes back in place and Harry is once again drowned from earshot.

Please – you don’t understand .

I sit down heavily on the cool marble floor of the hotel room and lean back against the foot of the bed. What was all that about? Who would Harry be speaking to so forcefully, in Spanish? He had said something about making a complaint to the airline when our connecting flight in Madrid was delayed. But surely he wouldn’t do that on our very first day here? They had been really polite and apologetic, and served everyone orange juice while we waited at the departure gate. And he’s usually so laid-back… it’s very unlike Harry to get upset over something like that.

‘Jet lag?’ I’m suddenly aware he is standing in the doorway, smiling down at me warmly. I swallow back my irritated curiosity and silently watch him enter the room and start pulling clothes out of his backpack, slinging them over a chair. All traces of the anger and tension I saw in him just now have gone. He even starts to whistle to himself as he pulls out his razor and heads into the bathroom, turning the tap on.

‘Harry? Are you… okay?’ I call after him.

He turns to look at me through the open bathroom door, and his face breaks into a broad, gorgeous smile.

‘Of course, babe – why? I was going to ask you the same thing… you look a bit rough sitting there on the floor like that.’ He chuckles and turns back to the mirror.

‘Oh… just the jet lag, like you say,’ I mutter, feeling stupid, and haul myself to my feet. I potter about unpacking some clothes and the silence in the room grows.

Just ask him what the hell all that was about .

The question is on the tip of my tongue. But something about Harry’s overly cheerful demeanour feels like a kind of warning. He has to be faking it. There’s no way even someone as impulsive and spontaneous as Harry could go from shouty, hair-tuggingly anxious phone calls to bright and breezy unpacking in the space of two minutes. With a wrench, I’m reminded of Harry’s increasingly distant behaviour in the weeks before the trip. His irritability when I tried to ask him about it. It had seemed so unlike the laid-back bloke I was used to living with, and I’d put it down to the stress of planning such an ambitious voyage. But now we’re here, shouldn’t he be relaxing and embracing the adventure ahead? I stare at Harry’s back and admit to myself the uncomfortable truth that, at times, I feel like I have no idea what makes him tick.

Wasn’t this trip supposed to bring us closer together?

If his behaviour over the last few weeks is anything to go by, he’ll only get all defensive if I ask him what that phone call was about , I realise. I briefly imagine what it would be like if we fell out, now, today. He’s all I have in a strange country. Plus, I still feel like my body clock has been taken out, rewound and shoved back in upside down. It was probably nothing anyway , I almost manage to convince myself. It could have been the airline, or one of the hotels or tour companies we’ve looked at .

‘By the way, it’s because he’s been living here twelve years and Spanish and English have started to mix together in his head,’ Harry calls from the bathroom, patting his face off with a towel.

‘Eh?’

‘Ray. That’s why he speaks like that. He can’t really tell the difference between the two languages anymore, so he uses Spanish word order when speaking English, and vice versa. He came backpacking here after uni, met a girl and never left.’ He comes back into the room, produces a cold beer from somewhere and hands it to me. ‘I’ve been down in the bar all afternoon with him, waiting for you to wake up.’

‘Oh.’ Suddenly I’m hit by a wave of homesickness. But not for our house in Fenbridge… to my surprise, an image of my mum’s living room fills my mind. I’m in the armchair, drinking hot chocolate, with Steve in the corner behind his paper and Mum watching Strictly Come Dancing with the volume turned down. I wouldn’t need to worry, then, about who Harry has been shouting at, or whether he’s keeping some sort of secret from me. I could just slide back into my old routine and pretend none of this had ever happened. For the first time in weeks, I feel something other than excitement and eagerness about our forthcoming adventure. For if we’ve only just arrived and Harry is behaving like this… what do the next three months hold for me?