The Canterbury Sisters (7 page)

The laconic bartender is still in the exact position where I left him, leaning against the wall, arms folded. I spew out my story. Describe the phone, with its vineyard-themed cover, the picture of Freddy on the screen. Point out where I was sitting. Mention the man who had dined beside me, who I had the sense was somewhat of a regular. But there is no phone. He looks beneath the bar and in the back to make sure, even goes to talk to the hostess, but returns empty-handed.

“How can it just be missing?” I ask him. I can hear how shrill my voice is. I am right on the cusp of screaming. “What in the name of God am I supposed to do now?”

He leans back against the altar of liquor, his arms once again crossed over his chest. “You could buy a new one,” he says.

“You don’t understand. It isn’t the phone itself. It’s what was on it. My whole world was in that phone. I’m not even sure how I’ll get back to America now.”

He shakes his head. “No need to panic, miss. You can’t really lose anything anymore, not the way they have it all fixed today. Everything you need is in the cloud.”

“It’s just that . . . are you sure you didn’t see it?”

“Here you go,” he says, reaching into his shirt pocket. “Use mine and call yourself.”

“But roaming charges . . .”

“Quite all right. No one will answer. We’re just listening for the tone, aren’t we?”

Good point. I struggle for a moment to remember my number and then thumb it in. The phone rings . . . and rings. My ringtone is church bells, and I’m not sure why. Perhaps it was the default mode and I never bothered to change it. The young man turns down the sound system behind the bar and he and I both listen, intently, for church bells.

No luck. I hear the click and then my own voice on the outgoing message starting and I hang up. The bartender shrugs. “So it would seem to be gone, eh miss? Poor luck.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Exactly. Poor luck.”

Four

F
or the first night of the trip we stay in a little town near the start of the trail, which has a carved wooden statue dedicated to the Canterbury pilgrims in the village square. The next morning we all take turns posing beside it, our walking staffs in hand. My camera was on my phone, so I have to rely on the others for my shot.

The two pilgrims in the statue have differing facial expressions. One of them is solemn and sorrowful, his gaze lowered to the ground, while the other’s head is thrown back with a knowing smirk. The carving is relatively new, according to Tess, so I suppose the figures are meant to represent a contemporary view on why various pilgrims might have taken to the trail. For some it was a mission of penitence, and for others, more of a spring break road trip—an excuse to get the hell out of town for a while, the proverbial change of scenery, a chance to drink, carouse, or bed a wench from another village.

The Athlete’s name has turned out to be Steffi. She takes my picture when my turn comes and promises to email it to me. I have no doubt that she’s the kind of woman who will do exactly whatever she says she will do, but we haven’t yet set a foot on the trail, and she’s already getting on everyone’s nerves. She keeps peppering Tess with questions about how far we will walk today, how much elevation we will gain, and our approximate pace per hour. She has one of those Fitbit things strapped to her wrist and she consults it every few minutes, even though Tess has patiently explained that exercise is not what this particular walk is about.

“Each group must find its own pace,” Tess says, “and the first day out is always a bit of an experiment. I’ll be able to give you a greater sense of the numbers this evening, when I see how far we’ve come.”

It’s a rather incomplete explanation. This is Monday, and we know we have five days to walk the trail before a pilgrim blessing awaits us in Canterbury Cathedral at three o’clock Saturday afternoon. Not to mention that our nights in various inns have been prearranged along the route. In order to meet those obligations, it would seem that Tess would have to have some sense of how far and fast we will walk. Steffi jumps on the discrepancy at once.

“So you adapt the route based on the speed of the group,” she says, her voice disapproving. Even a little frantic, like I imagine mine was when the bartender back in London told me he couldn’t find my phone. “If you can see that we’re slow, you cut off part of each day’s walk, is that how it works? So you’re saying there’s a chance we won’t see it all?”

In the past eighteen hours I’ve learned not only that Steffi is black and female, which of course is obvious, but also that she’s a doctor whose specialty is heart disease in women.
She’s used to fighting
, I think.
Used to taking every step along the path, climbing every hill, and it chaps her ass to no end to think there’s something out there somewhere that we might miss. Even if what we miss is just a few miles of farmland that look precisely like all the others.

I start to say something, to tell her not to worry about it, that walking fifteen miles a day isn’t any more likely to purify your soul or challenge your body than walking ten, but then I stop myself. I’m still the outsider. And not just because I missed the opening lunch at the George, but because I missed dinner last night as well. By the time we’d gotten there and unloaded the van it had been nearly dusk, and the fact that I’d flown the red-eye the night before had caught up with me. I’d begged off of joining the others in the pub, and climbed the narrow stairs to my small, nunlike room, my suitcase clanging behind me with every step.

I’d snatched a banana from a basket on the registration desk but when I sat down on the bed to eat it, I saw that it was dusty. Perfect. Evidently that fruit was intended as decoration, not as an invitation for the guests of the inn to randomly pillage. In fact, by fishing a banana from the bottom of the bowl I may have messed up the symmetry. Maybe the whole arrangement was now off balance, with apples and pears tumbling to the floor left and right.
Crazy bloody Americans,
the innkeepers were undoubtedly thinking.
If we don’t lock them in their rooms at night, they’ll probably eat the shrubbery off the lawn.

I showered and put on my nightgown, exhausted but with the sense I’d have trouble falling asleep. Normally I use my phone to wind myself down at night, reading articles from links on Twitter, checking email, playing Angry Birds. When I’d gone to the window and looked out from my high little room, I could see the whole village, such as it was, with a smoky autumn dusk settling over the town. A single human was visible: the vicar, walking from the church in his robes, weaving his way among the listing tombstones. And I wondered how I’d come to be here, in this place I hadn’t even known existed until a couple of hours before. How I had found myself surrounded by strangers, with no clear way back to the airport or America or anything real, and as I looked at the village it had suddenly struck me that, without my phone, I couldn’t even call for help. The only thing I might have done was open the window and scream . . . but there was no one to hear me but the vicar and I had no idea what sort of assistance a vicar could provide.

A cat was there too. He’d come to the window and was looking at me with exasperation, pushing at the panes of glass with his paw. Evidently I was in his favorite room. I cracked the window open—no screens—and he slid silkily through, then claimed his place on the lumpen little bed.
Okay
, I thought.
Here’s what I don’t have. I don’t have a mother, or a lover, or a phone, or any fucking clue of why I’m here, where I’m going next, or what any of this means. But I do have a cat and a dusty banana and a vicar across the way, so let’s see what comfort I can derive from these small certainties.
And maybe I could read. I could hold a book in my hands. If memory served, the feel of a book was generally quite soothing. I’d passed a bookcase on the landing, halfway up, crammed full of whatever had been left by the inn’s former guests, the titles pointing this way and that.

So I’d crept halfway back down the stairs and looked through the abandoned paperbacks, finally choosing a techno-thriller with a screaming black and silver cover, the sort of thing I would never read at home. And sure enough, along with the purrs of the cat, the book put me right to sleep. In fact, it was the best night of rest I’ve had in as long as I can remember and I needed it, although now in the light of day, the other women are all chatting easily among themselves and I’m the one who still isn’t sure of their names.

“Jean has the first story,” Tess is saying to Steffi, who seems nearly panicked at the thought that there is some field somewhere in England we’re not going to tromp through. “So she will be the one continually walking and talking, which can be rather draining, even for someone who is fit. It’s hard to say what rhythm she will fall into, and the one who tells the story is the one who establishes the speed of the group. That’s an unbreakable rule of Canterbury—that the listeners adapt to the storyteller, and that each story demands its own pace. For listening is a bit like a dance, isn’t it? You move to the music of the moment. I’m sure you understand.”

“I’m sure you understand” is what you say to people who clearly don’t, but as she speaks, Tess glances pointedly from Steffi to Jean. Jean knows how to dress for her body, so she looked slim enough yesterday in the George, but now, in boots and pants and the harsh light of day, it’s obvious she’s heavier than she first appeared. In other words, Steffi is just going to have to get a grip on herself. With Jean as our storyteller, we’re not going to be breaking any land speed records this first morning.

“And we won’t walk single file,” Tess says, this time turning to speak to the whole group. “If we march in a straight line, like good little soldiers, the one in the front won’t be able to hear the one in the back, and vice versa. So we shall travel like true pilgrims, walking abreast.”

Great. Now the Broads Abroad are the Broads Abroad Abreast. The furrow in Steffi’s brow deepens. She’s probably thinking that walking in a clump will slow us up even more. She’d be better off unclipping that Fitbit right now and flinging it into whatever cosmic black hole has sucked up my iPhone. Otherwise she’s going to spend the entire trip in torment.

“And the route won’t be especially picturesque until we’re farther out from the city and the landscape opens up,” Tess continues, speaking as if we’re walking out of New York. The town seems utterly picturesque to me, kind of like the front of a jigsaw puzzle box. But Tess is pointing into the distance, toward a vista of rolling hills in colors of sage and moss and gold. The light is already beginning to grow slowly around us.

“I may walk in circles around the group so I can keep up my pace,” says Steffi. “Promise you’ll speak up if anyone finds that irritating.”

And so we start. We move down the sharply pitched road that leads from the town toward the fields, our boots skidding a little in the pebbles. Becca hangs back and I find myself dropping a bit away from the clump of women too, falling in step with her.

“Don’t you want to hear your mother’s story?” I ask, even though I know it’s a loaded question. Diana’s ashes are jostling along with me in the backpack. I debated keeping the ziplock bag in the suitcase and sending it ahead with Tim to the next inn down the trail, but then decided that to do so would be to defeat the whole point of the trip. She wanted to walk to Canterbury, not ride in a van to Canterbury, so it would seem that her remains must come along with me, pressed into their own little pouch.

Becca shoots me a sour look. “I’ve heard it.”

I bet you have
, I think, because I realize, maybe more than the others, that whatever we’re about to hear from Jean is not a spontaneously told story, but a tale that she has recited many times to many listeners, a narrative that has been polished and sharpened through the years. This is why Jean was not alarmed at the idea of going first. She’s more than ready. And Becca has heard it all so many times before that she’s gone numb to the meaning. The girl has long ceased to be able to distinguish fact from fantasy in her mother’s pet stories, even if they’re about events she herself witnessed, even if the events happened to Becca as much as they happened to Jean. My mother collected family legends too—stories of how my parents came to Aunt Letitica’s orchard and cleared the land, stories of how my father built the first cider press with coat hangers and the shell of a broken washing machine. The pond in the back, so bountiful that sometimes fish leapt unprompted into rowboats. How much I loved that pond, how I could swim before I could walk. Could I really swim before I could walk? Did the fish really leap into rowboats? Does it matter?

Most families have their official stories, I imagine, and they tell them to each other over and over, each repetition reassuring both the speaker and the listeners that the world is an understandable place. I suppose you could even argue that the very act of telling a story is an act of faith, for it advances the belief that life truly has a beginning, middle, and end. The belief that we’re all headed somewhere, that the seemingly random events of our lives mean something, that tomorrow will be more than just a repeat of yesterday, all over again.

“Here’s the gate,” says Tess, as we step off the country road and turn toward an open field. A small blue tile nailed to the fence shows a stick man walking with a staff and a pack on his back. Google was right. A trailhead like this would be easy to miss.

“So this is where the official route to Canterbury begins?” Steffi asks, her voice doubtful. I think we were all expecting something more.

“Our feet are now on the path,” Tess says as we step, one by one, over the muddy ditch and through the gate. She nods at Jean. “So begin whenever you wish.”

 The Tale of Jean