I've Been to Paradise But I've Never Been to Me
Set on a bus travelling from Barcelona to Toulouse, this short story came together a few months ago when a friend asked me to write something in response to the prompt 'meet-cute'
I've Been to Paradise But I've Never Been to Me
Today a girl watches a landscape from a bus’s window. She sees a pool shop named Ibiza, and behind it, the Pyrenees. Huge empty tubs painted blue and beige lean against the storefront, bearing their basins to her like cavities or open wounds. She associates their emptiness with the rest of the view of open highway and fields that stretch to the feet of the mountains. Skywards, grey clouds are materialising and soon they will break as the bus moves inward, past the border to France. This is the first time the girl, Trisha, has seen this colour grey in more than a month. She can expect her period in a week, which means she can take the weather to have the same ominous, metaphorical meaning it has in books. It has also been a month since the rupture; the first encounter with true heartbreak that the young girl has ever had.
With sun on her skin, Trisha finds it easier to detach, to move away from herself. For a month this has been the only agenda. The beaches of Spain’s Costa Brava have made the perfect context for the frying of her body and its slow untethering from her consciousness. She has discovered the joy of anonymity you experience when alone and moving around a foreign country, which has only enabled this process, something she has never before desired so much. She would love to stay suspended, to continue to enjoy being unknown and not knowing herself. But clouds have finally appeared and they are about to break above her.
*
Protected, inside the bus, there is a lot of life. She can hear at least three different languages being spoken around her, which thankfully don’t include English. There is a group of men, middle-aged and with loud voices made gravelly by smoking, speaking to one another in Spanish. A couple rows in front two goth teens are sitting lovingly wrapped into one another, sharing earphones. A boy around Trisha’s age, with curly chestnut hair, is sitting by himself and staring out of the window on the opposite side of the aisle. In respect to all this life, Trisha feels far away. If anything, she identifies more with what she sees out of the window - the open highway and fields, and empty pools at the shop named Ibiza, made almost unrecognisable out of their usual context - than her fellow humans on the bus.
In the moment in which she thinks of this, it would be impossible for her to speak without feeling like a fraud. But, as fate would have it, she finds a face appearing before her, calmly demanding that she does find a voice. The face has brown eyes and a still, intense expression. It asks in a French accent whether Trisha has a phone charger that she’s not using. It belongs to the lone boy that she noticed staring out the opposite window earlier.
At once, she is taken by a feeling of both self-consciousness and envy. For, if she were the absence of self or identity, here would be the fullest expression of a person, a life. The intensity of his expression, a very rare feature of the exchanges between strangers in the warm, passionless southern country she has come from, embarasses her. By the time she has made her way from the empty grey fields outside, understood what is being asked of her and found an imposter’s voice with which to respond, there has been too much of a pause for it not to be acknowledged. She does so by way of a silly smile, which is quickly reflected back at her in the white teeth and previously hidden but now unmissable deep dimples of the man playfully smiling back. Trisha apologises and he tells her not to worry, before moving onto the next person.
Trisha now admits to herself that she can’t be as numb as she thought she was if she is still able to experience the bodily sensations this brief encounter has left her with. As the warmth spreads and tingles in her cheeks, she fixes her eyes once again on the passing landscape outside. She feels let down by her complexion. She hates how little it takes for her to blush, and thinking of this reminds her of her mother, who can be held responsible for this trait. In fact, this tendency became such a problem for her mother, Jen, in her early life, that she had hypnotherapy to cure it. In conversations they have had together in the past, Jen has described shyness as her greatest obstacle in life. In Trisha’s late teens, she watched her mother have a significant moment of self-discovery, spurred to some extent by menopause, that led to a career change. While still plagued with doubt and self consciousness, Jen thinks of these years - her late 50’s - as the period in which she finally left her shyness behind.
“You’re lucky you didn’t inherit this from me,” Jen once said in a conversation with Trisha when she had just turned 19. It was her birthday, and so Mother was taking Daughter out to lunch to distract from the fact that so few of Trisha’s friends had been in touch or were able to see her. They sat across from one another at a table in a large room, while waiting for their food to arrive. “I’d have given anything to be able to hold a group in suspense with a funny story, when I was your age.”
But it wasn’t true, Trisha had replied, she couldn’t bear to be watched by many eyes and be expected to say something entertaining or of value. Her life was to be perpetually underwritten with shyness, too.
“But I’ve seen you do it a thousand times.”
*
The thought of her mum sitting across from her saying these words sends Trisha’s mind travelling out of the restaurant’s glass door and down the road to a drama school where she once took classes during her university’s winter break. Driving home from class every night she would cry to herself. She had thought that it would be a good way to make friends and push herself, but the mortification of each class never left her in the mood for socialising. Something about the complete freedom of being in the car at night, with no one expecting or keeping tabs on her, mingled with the cold and often rainy air, made her feel so unbearably alone.
In Trisha’s mind, those classes and that road she came to know so well are associated with the period of life of her undergraduate degree. The blush count during that time was at its highest ever, which only worsened when lessons came to be taught online. She recalls now being called upon by the teacher in an online Spanish class. Having zoned out for the previous ten minutes, and feeling so in shock and unsure of what was being asked of her, she left the call without saying a word. Recalling this brings her an embarrassment that she feels in her body even now. Thankfully, something out of the window now captures her attention, and breaks this sad chain of associations.
In the middle of a field appears an enormous circus tent. With the lead-grey sky behind it, it looks like a huge mushroom that has shot up suddenly after rain. Beside an opening in the tent, people are sitting on bales of hay, smoking. In the brief moments Trisha has to glance at the opening of the canvas tent, she is sure she sees the body and huge trunk-like feet of an elephant. Once again she is struck by the same feeling of unreality, of witnessing something that seems so far from what it should be that she wonders if she is making it all up. But the red and beige canvas, the circus artists on a smoke break and the elephant feet draw out another memory, from an even earlier time in Trisha’s life. She remembers herself as an eight or nine or ten-year-old, dressed as the ringmaster of an imaginary circus. The context of the memory eludes her for some moments, and as it starts to come back, she is distracted by the same handsome face before her again.
The bus, having slowed down, is turning into the carpark of a service station. The boy stands up to stretch and glances at the book Trisha has held in her lap without reading for the past hour. Their eyes meet, and she is flashed with dimples again. He opens his mouth to speak, while Trisha is still holding onto that strange memory of herself wearing a tophat and monocle with a fake whip in her hand, finding herself pulled between the present moment and this memory that feels important to recollect. He asks her where she is from, and gets excited, like everyone does, when she answers ‘Australia’. The standard remarks are exchanged between the two of them; sharks and dangerous spiders are mentioned, Trisha relays the lengths of the flights she took, the boy explains why he speaks English so well and compliments her on her courage to travel alone. His voice is like a river, with subtle French inflections that Trisha finds irresistible.
After the bus has parked, the passengers start to funnel out of the doors for a pitstop, and she loses the boy ahead of her. As she disembarks, she notices a group of young people standing around a caravan. In the sticky air made humid from the promise of rain, she moves across the carpark, and at the last minute, wills herself to approach the group. She surprises even herself when she turns to move toward them, but something about the encounter with a stranger on the bus has given her a fresh boldness. She attempts, in her best Spanish, to greet these young people and ask whether one of them would give her a cigarette. She is met with friendly smiles and one of them passes his pouch over to her.
They are heading east to Bilbao, she learns, for a theatre festival. One of them, a girl around Trisha’s age with a short fringe and hair to her waist, is performing there. Another girl sitting on the steps of the caravan with a guitar resting on her legs compliments Trisha on her Spanish and she feels the heat in her cheeks again. They are a group of six in total and they are all looking at her with kindness and interest. Being thought of as interesting seems absurd to Trisha. She asks the girl with the short fringe what kind of act she does, and learns that she performs as a payasa, a clown, in a solo comedy act. Once again the ringmaster-memory returns to Trisha and she sees the little stage they had in the hall at her primary school. She finishes her cigarette, regretting it, but not the encounter with these new friends, and says goodbye.
Walking into the service station, the previously elusive memory comes to her fully formed. She recalls the play that her primary school put on in her final year there, in which she played a leading role in an androgynous interpretation of a circus ringmaster. She sees her young unblemished face with a fake moustache and monocle over one eye, tripping and getting entangled in her whip in a comedic death scene at the end of the play. There was a certain facial expression she learnt to do in the rehearsals for that play, a sort of mischievous swindler’s face, with one eyebrow raised and a half smirk, which she thinks she still uses now, around people she’s very comfortable with. Rediscovering this memory is like looking through a window, or a screen, to another person’s life. She had so forgotten this moment, and this young girl who would put her hand up for a role like this, that it is like meeting someone new.
It’s love at first sight.
*
Inside the service station, the lighting is anaemic and there are bodies all around her buying and consuming things. She gets herself a coffee and a pastry and finds a spot to sit down at a sticky table, not far from the beautiful boy from the bus. Two sweaty men have clocked Trisha and are routinely looking back at her. Through the radio they are playing a vanilla song from the 1970’s by Charlene called I've Been to Paradise But I’ve Never Been to Me, which Trisha recognises from childhood trips in her mum’s car. Outside the window, she sees the Spanish kids beside their caravan, and behind them, the dark grey clouds still deciding whether or not to break.
By the next time she looks up from her coffee, the new friends are disappearing inside their vehicle. The engine starts, but luckily by now Trisha has decided. As she’s running out from the service station to stop them and ask if they’ll take her too, she feels the first drop of rain touch her skin.