Stranger Abroad
Boil it down to fundamentals.
I am in here. They are out there.
You can make the most complex situations digestible if you reduce them to the basics.
It started with the old lady. Up in some village or other in Cyprus, in the mountains. Brown leather skin. Sitting on the doorstep, half not seeing with that one bad eye. Her lips curled back, her graveyard grin.
I wake up before I’ve even realised that I’ve fallen asleep. The whole place knows that I’m here, by now – a crack in the wood of the barn door shows more of them there there were before. Old folk and women, now, but soon enough the men will come in from the fields.
I lay my head back on my backpack.
Of course, I didn’t work it out at the time, but it actually started six months before, in a small hamlet in Thailand. That was where I first saw her.
The brown leather. That cemetery smile.
It just wasn’t till Cyprus, so many places later, that I realised that I recognised those tombstone teeth. The peculiar feeling of familiarity that I’d felt in so many of these remote settlements coalesced, like the milky film in her fish eye.
It was the same old lady! The knowledge followed at my heels, as it chased me from the country.
The sound of the door rattling in the frame brings me round once again. Loud male voices bellow, rage infected. I am in the uncanny valley – the sounds are formed from familiar anatomy, which makes their incoherence to me all the more distressing. If there are words, they mean nothing to me, the language alien.
I had fled from place to place, trying to get further away, further ahead. Every time, she was there before me, saying nothing. Just staring through me, smiling.
Sometimes she’d cackle laughter at something an aged companion said. I began to form a clearer understanding of what was happening – the people with her were from the other places too.
They never moved on me. They never got the chance. I always ran.
Through the cracks, I watch the assembled, the whole village turned out to see what is going on.
A younger man, that I have seen everywhere else before, stands apart, looks in my direction. Then he calls back into the mob, and I see something bobbing above them, toward us.
Something hard, and also familiar.
I look at the other shotgun, the one already in here, discarded in the corner. I already know that it is empty.
By the time I arrived in this place, months had passed. Exhausted, harried – horror had slipped somehow into anger.
I didn’t even know that I wasn’t scared any more until I already had the old woman’s wrists in my hands. I screamed my questions at her, although truth be told I don’t know exactly what I asked. My words were all spit and fury. After so long running, I think I may have forgotten how to make myself understood.
And I couldn’t understand what she was screaming back, so I leaned in closer, feeling the bones of her wrists grind into dust.
That was how the butt of the shotgun failed to connect with the back of my head.
Her friend was an old man with the same brown leather skin. Naturally, it turned out that I already knew him.
He was weak, and I took the gun from him easily – the last few months had made me spry.
A hand hard in the center of his chest put him on his backside in the road, looking lost. Without thinking, I slammed the wooden stock of the shotgun into the bridge of his nose, and he fell onto his back, slack.
The woman wouldn’t stop crying, wouldn’t answer my questions.
I had expected her skin to feel rough under my fingertips, but it felt like parchment.
The gun outside is now in the hands of the young man. He is heading for the door in front of him. It is also the door in front of me.
I look over at the old man’s shotgun, now empty, and I have no doubt that the blast from the one outside can get through the door that I have braced shut..
Before today, I had never fired, or even held, a gun. I was shocked to discover that it was very easy.
You know, it really all started before Cyprus. Before Thailand, even. I remember this now that things have become so simple.
It’s difficult now to recall whether keeping my job and Rachel got so hard because I couldn’t cope with the city any more, or if it was the other way around, but once I had nothing left, I had no choice but to get out.
I got what money I had left out of my account – the cashier looked at me the same way Rachel did, the same mix of pity and disgust. For that brief moment, it was as if they were the same person.
I bought the backpack and a tube ticket to Gatwick, and that was that. The city, all of the cities, were just too confusing to me, just too many faces, all the same. I had to get away.
I think I’m going to open the door before the man outside blows it to splinters. I feel calmer now. I feel sure that I can make them understand – they are all so familiar, we should be able to talk the same language, where I am now.
Where am I, anyway? America? Canada?
When I left the old lady on her doorstep, I no longer recognised her.
