The Ribbons Are for Fearlessness Read online

  Only I wasn’t.

  Because one day, almost exactly a year later, Jack just got up and announced he was going to Patagonia.

  “I need some time out.”

  He took everything. His books and shirts and Therm-a-Rest. His Patagonia duck down jacket. His climbing ropes. His Bialetti espresso maker and Trangia. Both his surfboards, and all the pieces of my shattered heart. The only remnants of our time together were the half dozen old tapes, which he said I might as well have, since he had no use for them, and one of his shirts that I hid because it smelled of him.

  It killed me to think about it. It killed me to think about Jack’s big, capable hands exploring some other girl’s body.

  But it killed me even more to think about Andrew.

  Andrew with his stupid jokes and crazy dreams, his great big bags of leafy home-grown and his gift for making even the crappiest things seem funny.

  Andrew was so far away it turned me inside out. But thinking about him was a really bad idea right then, even though this whole thing was his fault.

  I sat paralyzed in the driver’s seat.

  Another man in fluorescent overalls tapped impatiently on the window. I gathered up a spare sweater and climbed several flights of echoing metal stairs until I found myself alone on the open deck. I leaned on the railings and watched as England shrank and vanished into the gray gloom. I stared down at the fizzing gray water and thought about my cello. I wondered how it felt about being stored like a sardine in a rusting yellow tin at the bottom of this huge ferry.

  It had been mine since my grandfather had died when I was seven. Sometimes I felt like it was actually a part of me, like a leg or an arm. After Jack left I took it out of its case and put it on the floor by the blow-up mattress, so I would see it when I opened my eyes in the morning. Somehow this was comforting, which I suppose dated back to childhood. When things got tough for my family my cello was my best friend and my refuge. I told it everything. I was left alone to practice, and the melancholy music I gradually learned to play was like a lifeboat, pulling me through more storms than I cared to remember. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Until now.

  It was raining. I went inside and found the room in which I had been allocated a reclining chair. I seemed to be the one and only passenger on the whole boat who had been unable to afford a cabin with a bed. Instead I had 150 reclining chairs and 150 purple nylon blankets, all to myself. I spread some of the blankets out on the floor and lay down under a huge sloping window. I watched angry gray clouds spit bursts of rain on the glass. I stood up. I sat down in one of the reclining chairs and stared at the wall and thought about my cello some more.

  It was my cello that got me through the months after Jack left. I’d play in secret with my eyes half closed while tears dribbled out of them and made dull patches on the varnish. When I wasn’t playing my cello in secret with my eyes half closed and tears dribbling out of them, I was sitting by the phone in Ben’s shabby, chaotic office, staring into space, reading and rereading Jack’s single text message—I wish I could feel you naked beside me—which only made the whole thing worse. Or lying in the shed on the cheap airbed I had bought that kept going flat, with my head buried in the shirt that already smelled more of damp than of him. Or scouring the second hand shops in Penzance for a tape player and trying not to think about him with beautiful, confident Argentinian girls sporting perfectly toned and tanned bodies. I used to love Broadsands. It used to feel like a refuge. After Jack left it felt like a prison.

  Until the day that altered everything forever.

  3

  Jack had been gone three months.

  I wandered into the bar. Ben was doing a crossword and smoking a joint.

  Andrew was rolling another joint, a half-drunk pint of Guinness parked on the table next to him. I slumped on to a stool. Ben passed me the joint. I looked at it. All we ever did was drink and smoke. All over the world people like Jack were laughing and loving and surfing and climbing mountains and sleeping out under the stars and all we ever did was drink and smoke.

  “Do you need a brandy?” said Ben.

  “No.” I shook my head. “I need to get out of this dump.”

  “Maybe it would help if you spent less time with your head in Jack’s shirt.”

  He leaned over me to pour himself a pint of Doom Bar. “Don’t you think it’s time you got over it?”

  “Yes,’ I said, through gritted teeth. Sometimes I hated Ben. “Like I said. I need to get out of here.”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “You don’t pay us, that’s what’s fucking stopping me. I haven’t got any money.”

  “Well, I haven’t got any fucking customers.”

  Andrew passed me the other joint. I passed the one I already had back to Ben.

  “I was watching telly the other night,” said Andrew, breaking the tense silence. “It was a program about two guys who busked their way across America. They had an old van and a couple of guitars and they were pretty crap but they did it. All the way from Canada to Mexico.”

  Ben and I looked at each other. We knew what was coming.

  “And I thought that’s exactly what we should do. Sack this place off and be troubadours.”

  “What’s a troubadour?” said Ben.

  “A busker, you dickhead. A busker that travels. We could get an old van, like they did, and drive over to France and busk our way around.”

  I looked at him.

  “Are you serious?”

  “Of course he’s not serious,” said Ben. “He doesn’t even play anything.”

  “I play the recorder,” said Andrew, puffing out his chest. “Anyway, that’s why we need Catrina.”

  He turned to Ben. “I thought you could be the one who goes ’round with a hat collecting all the money.”

  “Don’t they normally get small children with missing limbs to do that?”

  “You could dress up,” said Andrew.

  “Fuck off,” said Ben, in his northern way. “I hate buskers. And France.”

  “You’ve never even been to France.”

  “I have.”

  That’s when Andrew had his brainwave.

  “We could go to Nordkapp!”

  I stared at him. “Fuck!” I said.

  “We could go to Nordkapp and see Jack’s flipping midnight sun,” said Andrew. “And it wouldn’t matter that it was too expensive because we’d make all our money on the road.”

  Jack had a thing about Norway. According to him, it was just like New Zealand, only minus the backpackers, and close enough to drive to from England. He said one day he and I would get a van and fill it up with tins of food and drive it all the way to Nordkapp. I used to lie with my head on his shoulder and imagine myself safely strapped into the passenger seat while he took charge of everything. I’d picture the midnight sun, too, bouncing around in a sky full of stars, with reindeer wandering the cliffs and wondering what to do with themselves in all those hours of sunlight.

  “Where the fuck is Nordkapp?” said Ben, who hadn’t spent a lot of time listening to Jack.

  “Most northerly point in Europe,” Andrew and I said in unison.

  “Uh, North Pole?”

  “Is the North Pole in Europe?” Andrew looked at me. I shrugged my shoulders.

  “Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” said Andrew. “The point is there’s bears and reindeer and everything. It would feel like the North Pole.”

  “You’re mental.”

  “Hey,” said Andrew, practically jumping up and down with excitement, “we could go from Nordkapp to Cabo San Vicente.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a lighthouse in Portugal.”

  “A lighthouse in Portugal,” said Ben, shaking his head. “Surely the other end would be Italy. The opposite of north is south, you know.”

  “Crap waves in Italy,” said Andrew.

  “I like Italy,” I said, even though I’d never been there.

  “I hate Norway,”
said Ben.

  Andrew wasn’t listening.

  “We’d be free, out of the system, like the guy on that film who walked off on his own in Alaska and lived in an old lorry and ate berries.”

  “The one who died of starvation,” said Ben.

  “We’re going to die anyway. It’s getting shorter every day, you know.”

  “What is? Your dick?”

  “This!” He waved his hand vaguely around the bar. “Life.”

  Ben snorted.

  “That why you want to sit in a puddle of your own piss on street corners all over Europe playing ‘Imagine’ on a recorder, swigging wine out of a carton and kicking dogs.”

  “Busking is not the same as begging,” said Andrew. “Busking is a public service. The government ought to pay people to do it. Stop them killing themselves after they’ve been shopping in Tesco.”

  “Catrina’s cello makes me want to kill myself.”

  “He’s right,” I said, flushing with embarrassment. “You can’t busk with a cello. It’s much too big and sad.”

  “If you can hitch with a fridge you can busk with a cello.” Tony Hawks was one of Andrew’s heroes.

  “Oh my God,” said Ben. “Shut up about that stupid fridge. It’s not funny any more. It never was funny.”

  “It’s jazz. Hitching with a fridge is jazz.”

  “Why?”

  “Shut up.”

  “You shut up.”

  There was a pause. I passed the joint back to Andrew.

  “If you won’t come with me,” he said, through a mouthful of smoke, “I’ll go on my own. I’m going to busk from Norway to Portugal before I die if it kills me.”

  I caught Ben’s eye. We both tried not to laugh. The list of things Andrew was going to do before he died was longer than the Argos catalogue. Like us, he never actually did anything.

  But then he did do something.

  He died.

  4

  The reclining chairs were still all empty and the angry gray clouds were still spitting bursts of rain on to the sloping window. The door opened and a short, grayish, tough-looking man strode into the room, carrying a suitcase. He put the suitcase down on the floor and held out a hand for me to shake.

  “Stan. Pub in London. Drive with the Arabs.”

  Stan needed a drink, and I knew that if I was left alone I would start crying and never stop, so I followed him to the saloon, which was full of noisy fruit machines and excitable teenagers. I slumped on a stool, my chin resting on my hands, while Stan necked tiny cups of instant coffee, chain-smoked cigarettes of a kind I had never seen before, and asked me a whole load of questions I didn’t want to answer.

  “What’s a girl like you doing sleeping in a van all on her lonely, anyhow, heh heh?”

  I shook my head and tried not to cry.

  “Don’t know. Good point.” Stan roared with laughter, ordered another coffee and lit a cigarette. Among the smoke and the jukeboxes he had the commanding manner of an animal in its natural habitat.

  “Got plenty of dosh have you? Not cheap over there.”

  “None.”

  “None?”

  “I’ve got a cello.” My voice shook slightly. “I’m going to busk my way to the midnight sun.”

  Stan bellowed with laughter. I thought about sticking a small plastic fork in his eye.

  When he’d finished downing coffees Stan moved on to small plastic bottles of warm white wine. I was more enthusiastic about these. He watched approvingly as I knocked them back. He winked and held up a small fat hand for a high five.

  “Where you headed then? South? East? You’re not staying in Norway? Save the easy ones f’when you’re old, heh heh.”

  I thought he was quite old.

  “Reckon Helsinki first, then Moscow, Beijing, do China f’a couple weeks then Prague, see the Czechs, Athens, heh heh. Joke f’you. Lady asks a waiter how they prepare their chickens. Waiter says nothing special we just flat out tell ’em they’re gonna die.”

  After they closed the bar we stumbled back to the room full of chairs. It was still empty.

  I lay down on my pile of blankets and tried to read an ancient copy of Europe on a Shoestring, published in 1988, that Ben had kindly given me before I left. Stan was still chatting, presumably to himself.

  “Get out as quickly as possible, buy a sandwich, heh heh, Stockholm, Helsinki, play with the Russians.”

  Europe on a Shoestring was full of dire warnings. In the section on Norway it told me that mobile homes were not allowed to overnight in rest areas ever. I told myself sternly that nobody in their right mind could possibly mistake my lurid yellow rust bucket for a mobile home. I trembled at the thought of it being towed away in the dead of night and crushed, with me sleeping peacefully inside. Or what if I was woken up by tall, blond Viking policemen wielding clubs? Although maybe that wouldn’t be as bad. Jack always said I had chronic anxiety and an overactive imagination. I tried as hard as I could not to think about Jack, about the way he used to zip me up inside his Patagonia duck down jacket while he was wearing it, and how safe I’d feel, but the more I tried the worse it got. I pulled some purple nylon blankets over me and huddled under them. Stan started snoring and snorting and twitching in the corner.

  What Jack liked about Norway was the fact that there weren’t any people there.

  “Norway has the lowest population density in the whole of Europe,” he’d say, propping his beautiful head on a muscled arm and staring at me with his clean blue eyes.

  “It’s three times the size of England, but with less than a tenth of England’s population. Do you know what that means?”

  I didn’t.

  “Over here there are nearly four hundred people to every square kilometer. How many do you reckon there are over there?”

  “I dunno. Two hundred?”

  “Eleven.”

  I picked up the book and turned to the driving section.

  “Always carry a spare can of fuel because vast sections in the north are sparsely populated and gas stations are hundreds of kilometers apart.”

  I put the book down. I didn’t even have a spare tire.

  5

  At midday on 17 June, almost twenty-four hours after it left Newcastle, the ferry docked in Bergen. Bergen is surrounded by a ring of seven mountains. It is also on the coast. If you have ever spent time in Wales you will know what that means. In an average year Bergen sees 294 days of rain. I arrived on one of those days. And it wasn’t just any old rain. It was God on high with a pressure hose, desperately trying to purge the world of humans, who all had their heads down and on as they fought their way through the downpour.

  The first thing I had to do was buy diesel. But before I could do that I had to change the fifty-pound note that had been a leaving present from Ben, who had done a whip ’round at Broadsands on one of the few occasions that the bar was busy. I parked the van and walked straight into the middle of a very busy fish market. Music blared from dozens of portable radios. Tall, blond men shouted and smiled and held out skewers with pieces of raw fish stuck on the end of them. In spite of the hostile conditions, everyone was stoically eating ice cream. I fought my way through the stalls and out the other side to a large square called Torgalmenningen, where I finally spotted a bank. It was closed. Across from it was another bank. This one was also closed. I summoned up the courage to ask a tall, blonde girl who looked like a supermodel if she knew why all the banks were closed. It was Saturday, she said, kindly, and with perfect English. I must go to the tourist office, on the Vagsallmeningen. She checked her watch. And I must hurry. The tourist office would also soon be closed.

  I emerged half an hour later, sweating and soaking, with a handful of useless leaflets and four hundred and eighty two Norwegian kroner stuffed into the back pocket of my torn and faded jeans. That’s when I realized I had absolutely no idea where I’d left the van.

  Unfortunately I had left it in a bus stop. Uniformed officials were frowning and looking at the ti
res and writing things in notebooks, while a bus waited to pull in. There was a long line of traffic behind the bus. I tried to look as if I was about to cry, which was not very difficult. The officials glared at me and told me to fuck off in Norwegian. Or at least that’s what I think they said.

  The first garage was closed. The second had one of those low ceilings suspended in the air with lights hanging off it. I only remembered I was driving a forty-ton truck when a fat man came charging toward me shaking his fist. It was lucky he did. A few seconds later and I would have been driving a forty-ton truck with no roof. The third garage didn’t take cash. By the time I reached the fourth garage, a bright orange Statoil, my hands were shaking like an alcoholic who had run out of wine. I handed over four hundred of the kroner, the equivalent of about forty pounds. The tank was just under half full. The rain hammered on the window.

  “It is thirty degrees in Oslo,” said the man, who was wearing orange overalls.

  “How far is Oslo?” I croaked, as little rivers dribbled out of my sleeves and onto the floor.

  “Oslo is five hundred kilometers,” said the man.

  Back in the van, while the rain hammered nervously on the fiberglass roof, I tried to work out if just under half a tank of diesel would be enough to get me 310 miles. I started the engine. There was only one way to find out.

  Driving in Norway is very different to driving in England. Oslo and Bergen are the country’s largest cities, but the road that connects them is smaller than the A30, with a speed limit that never exceeds 50 mph. What the road lacks in size, however, it more than makes up for in engineering. Desolate caves as long as the Channel Tunnel burrowed through the mountains, lit with creepy fluorescent green lights. Bridges straddled vast, salty rivers and there was so little traffic I began to wonder if I’d missed something important, like the fact that Norway was about to be hit by a massive earthquake and everyone should stay inside. At least navigation wasn’t a problem. You could go north or south, with the occasional option of east or west. That was it. I went north for a while, then I went east. Then the rain finally stopped and I pulled into a lay-by, turned off the engine, filled a kettle with water from my jerry can, spilling most of it on the floor, lit my secondhand gas stove, opened the side door and sat staring at snowcapped mountains.