Sleight of Hand (3 page)

On hearing me request my vegetarian meal, she breaks her silence and asks me in near-perfect English where I'm from.

“England,” I say. “Near London.”

“So you're on holiday?” she asks.

“No, I'm kind of living here,” I say. “Well, living
there.”

“So you like Colombia?”

“Of course,” I say, reaching past her for my tray which has now arrived. “Everyone loves Colombia.” If there's one thing I have learnt it's that the only opinion you should ever express about their homeland is one of pure positivity.

“A miserable country of third-world under-achievers,” she says.

“Really? I like it,” I say, unflummoxed by the remark. It's very fashionable in Colombia to slag the place off. I know it's all bravado. “So you're not Colombian?”

“Sure I am, but I live in Valencia these days. It shows, doesn't it?”

“Sure,” I say. I restrain myself from adding,
“You have that euro-tranny look down to a tee.”

“I prefer Spain,” she says.

“Well, Spain is great too.”

“So you
like
Colombia,” she asks again, incredulously.

“I do,” I say. “It's amazingly beautiful. Don't you think so?”

“I suppose. And the people?”

“Oh, they're incredibly friendly,” I answer. “The happiest people I ever met.” And it's all true. Colombia
is
stunningly beautiful. It's like a dramatised version of France, only with rain-forests and a few Caribbean beaches thrown in for good measure. And the people
are
the most welcoming, smiling, contented people I have ever come across.

“Yes in Europe people love you or hate you, or they just don't care.”

“Right,” I say.

“In Colombia we love you or we kill you. Sometimes both at the same time.”

I laugh. “Yes, well, there is that.”

“And that doesn't worry you?”

I shrug. “Nowhere is perfect,” I say.

“It's got much better since Uribe got in,” she says.

“Yes, everyone says so.”

“Though it's probably time for him to go now. But you didn't used to be able to go out at night,” she says. “It's not scary anymore.”

“No, well, I'm sure … I mean, if you were used to it before. It must feel very different.”

“You never came before?” she asks. “In the eighties and the nineties when they had the … what do you call it when you can't go out at night?”

“Curfew?”

“Yeah, the curfew.”

“No,” I say. “No, thank God. Even now, it's about as scary as
I
can cope with.”

She twitches her nose, and then peels the aluminium foil from her dish with her vast fluorescent fingernails. “It's pathetic,” she says.

“Airline food?” I ask.

“The way you people look down your noses at everyone.”

“I'm sorry?”

“You would think that nothing bad ever happens in Europe,” she says.

“Oh,” I say, realising that I have broken the golden rule of untainted adulation. “I didn't actually say
that.”

“There are murders and gangs and drugs in Europe, you know. Where do you think all the cocaine goes? Who do you think they grow it for?”

“No, you're right,” I say, frowning. “You're totally right.”

She forks a lump of non-specific vegetable matter from her dish and makes a “Humph,” sound, and then pops her headphones into her ears. And that's the end of our conversation.

As I eat my meal, I think about the differing nature of violence in England, France and Colombia, because of course, as Lolita says, shit does happen back home. If the media are to be believed, then it happens more and more.

But it is somehow
different
shit. It's drunken shit, and racist shit, and sometimes homophobic shit. But it's shit that I understand, and for the most part, shit that I know how to avoid. I can sense when a bar brawl is about to happen and leave. When faced with a group of a certain kind of men after a certain hour in a certain part of town I can cross the road. It's the way Colombian violence springs from a glassy lake that unnerves me. It's the way it vanishes back into it leaving barely a ripple. It's the way it bursts from smiling happy people who, often without even dropping that smile, pull a knife or a gun. There's no aggro, no negotiation, no tension. It's often not even about obtaining anything. It's just about stopping some dog, or some
one
, doing some
thing
that is found to be irritating. It cracks like thunder, and then
vanishes leaving the bystanders to roll a cigarette and sweep up the storm damage. In the end what makes it so unnerving is that lack of understanding … it's that I don't get the context.

There is a specific Colombian attitude to life as well. It's as if, living amidst so much mayhem, they have learned to enjoy every moment. And they have looked death in the eye and accepted its inevitability as well. So, no matter what you discuss, you will hear how Colombian thinking has been forged between a rock and a hard place. On money:
better spend it today. You might be dead tomorrow
. On suicide:
Well, if you don't like the film, I can't see why you should have to stay to the end
. On paedophilia:
What's the point of all that? A trial and a judge, and years of prison. Such a waste of money. Far better to deal with it the Colombian way. Click. Done. Over
. On cigarettes:
I'd rather die of cancer at fifty than sit in my own piss till a hundred
.

And when you hear these viewpoints often enough, your own relationship with death starts to shift too. Life starts to seem like it
is
an episode of Desperate Housewives, where the
obvious
answer to a whole clutch of problems is murder. It's catching yourself thinking the Colombian way, that's the most unnerving of all.

Sixteen hours after takeoff, I walk out into the arrivals hall at Heathrow. I'm feeling stoned and confused. I'm not sure if the issue is one of time or space. Maybe it's the weather (raining in Bogotá, raining in Madrid, sunny in London). Maybe it's the joint I shared with Ricardo yesterday … Was that
really
just yesterday? But it's probably all of the above. I left Bogotá in the early evening, snoozed in a plane for ten hours and found myself having lunch in Madrid. I then dozed for another three hours and woke up here in London. Nothing in our genetic makeup was ever programmed to deal with this. Our bodies will probably take another million years to catch up.

I head straight for the train station. I'm travelling with hand-luggage only, quite proud of the fact that my days of lugging suitcases around and flying home with unworn clothes are now over.

The train journey to Camberley takes another hour and a half – an hour and a half I spend trying to coax my iPhone to connect to a network, any network. But despite Comcel's assurances that my Colombian sim card would work here, it clearly doesn't. And now of course I can't call Comcel to get it fixed, or Jenny to see if she's home, or even check my email to see if she knows I'm coming.

Between these increasingly hopeless checks to see that my phone still doesn't work, I look around the carriage and play spot the difference. When you return home from a long period overseas, something new is always revealed about your countrymen.
Today I'm noticing how varied everyone's clothes are. There are guys in sober suits, and a lad in a pink hoodie, and a woman with bumblebee stockings. The guy opposite me is a goth, with pink hair and zips on his clothes and an assortment of scrap metal protruding from his head. Who would have thought that goths still existed? In Colombia, as in most of the world, the majority of men still haven't strayed from white shirt and pleated trousers.

I'm noticing how at home I feel too. Even though these people have nothing more to do with me than the average Colombian, I understand who they are. I have no worries about how they might behave.

And whereas when I lived in France, I always used to notice how often the Brits smile at each other – how often they laugh – today I'm noticing how subdued everyone seems. I wonder what the French must think when they arrive in Bogotá. The effusive carnival of Colombian society must be quite a shock for them.

The sun is setting by the time the taxi pulls up in the anonymous close containing Jenny's mother's house. Stupidly I don't ask the driver to wait, so by the time I realise that no one is in, he is disappearing from view.

“Shit,” I say tiredly. The best laid plans of mice and men. Or in my case, I would have to admit, the
worst
laid plans. No working phone, no-one in, no taxi, nowhere to stay.

“You twat,” I mutter, heading for the neighbour's house.

On the doorstep, are two red-cheeked gnomes. They are something I never really believe that people
actually own. I stand, staring at them in a tired daze until I hear someone unlatch the lock.

“There's no-one there,” the woman, who looks uncannily like June Whitfield, says as she opens the door.

“Hello. Yes, I know,” I say. “Do you have any idea where she is, or when she might be back?”

The woman thins her lips and stares me in the eye. I realise that this thin-lipped pulling in of the mouth is where the thousands of tiny wrinkles around it have come from.

“I'm sorry,” she says, looking not-very-sorry-at-all. “I can't help you.”

A wave of fever sweeps over me. I feel so overcome with exhaustion I might just faint, or cry. “When did you last see her?” I try.

“You'll have to ask her daughter if you want to know more,” she says.

I frown. “Sarah?”

The woman tuts warming very slightly from “glacial” to merely “icy.”

“Look, who are you looking for?” she asks.

“Jenny,” I say. “Jenny Holmes.”

“Right,” she says. “Sorry, I thought you were looking for Marge.”

“Well, no. She's dead isn't she?” I ask, wincing at the realisation that I should probably have used, “passed away,” or some such euphemism.

“Yes. I didn't know if you knew, you see.”

I nod and force a smile. “Sure. I understand. No, I'm here for the funeral.”

“I see.”

“So can you help me? Do you know where Jenny and Sarah are?”

“I'm afraid I don't. They left the day … well, the day it happened.”

“Do you have a number for her? Because I only have the house number and her email address, and she doesn't seem to be answering email. Well, she wasn't answering when I left.”

“I'm sorry,” she says, crossing her arms now. “I can't help you.”

“Do you know when they will be back?”

“Well on Friday I would imagine,” she says.

“Friday?”

“For the funeral.”

“Right,” I say. “And do you know where that is?”

The woman sucks her bottom lip and then says, “Look love, I'm sorry. I don't know you from Adam. I have to go. My tea's getting cold.”

I watch the door close and think,
“So much for the friendly Brits.”

The neighbour on the other side isn't in, and the man in the house beyond that, who is fixing the wing mirror on his Freelander, tells me that he's sorry, but that he
“Didn't have much to do with her.”

But as I turn despondently away, he adds, “I think the funeral's at Saint Paul's if that's any help.”

I pause and look back. “Saint
Paul's?”

He laughs. “Yeah, just the local one.” He nods beyond me towards the main road. “It's just over there. I think that's where the missus said they're having it.”

Saint Paul's is less than a hundred yards from the entrance to the close, but it's locked and bolted (I for some reason assumed that churches, like petrol stations were open 24/7) so I add the phone number to my non-functioning iBrick and start to walk back towards the town centre wondering what to do next.

I take a bus back to the station, and for want of a better idea, take another train to Waterloo. If the funeral isn't until the day after tomorrow then I might as well head for London. Two nights in Camberley on my own
isn't
what the doctor ordered.

Unsure if I need breakfast, lunch or dinner, I eat a reliably bland cheddar sandwich from the trolley and then at Waterloo I take the tube to South Kensington.

I once stayed in an Easyhotel at South Ken' and I remember it being cheap and I remember the street being stuffed with other low-cost hotels. But more than anything, in my exhausted, despondent state, I'm feeling the need for some kind of familiarity, no matter how corporate, no matter how orange.

I check into a windowless, not-quite-as-cheap-as-I-remember room which is stunningly tiny. Indeed, the single-piece moulded bathroom is so small that when I bend over in the shower to pick up the soap I have dropped, I actually hit my head on the edge of the toilet bowl.

I briefly wonder if I shouldn't have checked some of the other places in the street first – but I don't wonder for long. Within seconds I sink into a groggy, jet-lag, or perhaps concussion-induced slumber.

The eggs are grey and taste like an eraser. The hash browns are greasy and lukewarm. In fact, eating breakfast at McDonald's ignores just about every aspect of aesthetics, taste or ethics I can think of. But they do have
free wifi
, and with free wifi I can use Skype to call Ricardo. Waking up alone for the first time in fifteen months has left me desperate to hear his voice.

The second I switch my phone on though, the unadjusted clock informs me that it is now one a.m. in Bogotá – the call will have to wait.

I check my email, hopeful that Jenny will have replied but find an email from Ricardo instead.