On The Other Side Of The World, A Language We Do Not Know.
Even here, the air was thin. Every breath seemed shorter than the one before. The summit seemed to get farther away with each stolen look upward. The sky was so blue it hurt Lacey’s eyes to look at it, so she gazed at her feet in their solid hiking boots as they moved in and out of her field of vision, forward and back and over and over.
Each laboured push uphill made the tendons in her calves stretch tight, like a ship straining against a mooring rope; every lift of her leg from the ground was blessed relief, a moment of free movement in air before the next bout of friction and momentum. The rest of the group were making better time than she was. Gavin had kept up with them, leaving her further and further behind. He’d barely spoken a dozen words to her since the argument last night. He’d started it, about which wine to have with dinner. He only ever argued about the inert trivia that no one else would notice, like the smallest fish in the ocean feeding from the bottom, picking up the scraps of decaying matter and leftovers every other creature failed to notice.
“We start in Australia and work our way up through Asia. When we run out of money, we head for the nearest airport and come home.” It sounded so immediate and romantic, something that people of their age should just do, just for the sake of it. Otherwise it would be forever on a list of regrets, in an atlas of roads not taken. How could she say no? A rhetorical question, unfortunately.
The fish she’d eaten last night seemed to be moving about within her. It moved, she imagined, around and about like the second hand of a clock inside her stomach. If it struck the hour, she’d be sick. It was just a matter of time.
She walked on. The blue of the sky seemed to intensify the dull browns and greys of the land. Gavin and the rest of the tour group were even farther ahead when Lacey felt the ground levelling out beneath her tread. She slowed her pace and stretched the muscles in the small of her back lazily. She closed her eyes against the sky.
She thought of a cold winter’s night in England; a walk to The Star in freezing rain that pricked and whistled around her, and the warm pulse of whiskey as it smoothed its way down her throat. And then a drunken walk back to her flat in the dark and frozen night, streetlamps casting their sodium tinge against graffiti walls, reflected up from hardened ice puddles, catching everything in their pumpkin haze.
Lacey just wanted to go home.
Feeling flowed back into her legs as the rocky terrain flattened out entirely and she headed for the nearest large boulder and sat down.
She closed her eyes again and lolled her head backwards. The inside of her eyelids glowed blue. She could almost see the veins in silhouette, the thinnest branches of a winter tree against a bright spring sky.
Moments later, she was sure, Lacey looked around and saw that she was alone. That infernal blue sky lay like a bowl over and around the summit, the rocks and sand of the ground spilled around her and fell away at the edges, leading down the noise and grime of the towns below.
Lacey stood wearily and turned about. She took the path she had been on, which was only trodden sand in the midst of rocks, and walked quickly. But the path she had come up on seemed to have changed and she was disoriented as she looked about and tried to get her bearings. There seemed now to be many paths where before there was one. On the rise each path was distinct and separate, but here on the summit they met and merged like the spokes of a wheel.
She gripped the sides of a huge rock and hauled herself onto it. From there she looked around and saw immediately the splash of bright colour that was the old woman’s blanket. Lacey jumped down and jogged over. The old woman sat in the centre of the cloth, her legs crossed in a way that looked inhumanly uncomfortable for a woman of her age. She looked up at Lacey and pushed her woollen cap back from her brow. Her face was squat, almost folded up into itself like a dried apple, and her eyes sat like egg yolks in the hollows of their sockets.
“Komola,” she said. “Tan ko maha de hija?”
“I’m sorry,” said Lacey, “I don’t speak… I don’t speak the language. I just need to now which way the rest of my group went. Did you see them?”
The woman squinted her awful eyes into a close gaze and nodded eagerly. “Mata. Bahi me ko maha.” Then she placed her index finger to her mouth and shushed Lacey.
Lacey crouched down closer. “But I don’t-“
“Mata!” the old woman yelped.
Lacey sat down sharply in surprise. The tension that had built up in her back and legs began to melt away. Within seconds the heat that had baked into the earth seeped into her wherever she touched the ground.
The old woman moved her hand from her mouth and crooked her index finger at Lacey. There was no nail at its tip, Lacey noticed absently, no mark that a fingernail had ever been there, just the rounded nub of flesh that beckoned her closer.
The old woman breathed in slowly. Her rheumy, liquid eyes did not blink. She looked up, held her head there for the longest time.
The fish inside Lacey’s stomach rolled again. She had a question she couldn’t ask, couldn’t seem to recall. She remembered the hard British winters, and some people, and a job she’d once had. Her mother had a maiden name, she was sure.
When the old woman looked again at her, Lacey saw that her eyes were the most painful blue.
The old woman seemed to smile.
“The sky,” she said.
