she couldn’t help it could she? He needed someone to see him off and she had a little present for him. A diary. I have written my email address inside the front cover.He must write in the diary every day so that she could share in his adventure and talk to him about it when he returned. Be careful what you eat and never let your passport out of your sight. I’d better get going Eleanor, still have to get through customs you know. And thanks for the diary. Then the hesitation, maybe in Eleanor, hope. Eliot put out his hand and as their hands touched she leant forward and kissed him on the cheek. In a whirl of unease they shook hands again and Eliot joined the queue without turning back and as he disappeared he heard her voice.
Safe travels Eliot. I will be praying for you. See you when you get back.
An unseen wave and a smile framed with bright red lipstick.
When he sat in the boarding lounge with his backpack at his feet, at first he felt like he had escaped. But slowly it crept over him that he could have been a little more gracious, a little bit more friendly. She had made the effort and he hadn’t. Still, time to move on. His well-worn security blanket that had protected him from the air conditioning in airports all over Asia rested on his knees and he tapped his passport and boarding pass in his top pocket. He reached out for his back pack, unzipped the front pocket and removed his new diary from the brown paper bag. Ok he would keep a diary. Inside the cover of the diary was the email address. Edobson @gmail .com. and the words, safe travel, best wishes, Eleanor x. Perhaps he could send her an email when he settled in India.
He put the diary back. The new energy was still there. He hadn’t felt this way since before Marion had died, it must be that going somewhere was making him feel important again. He had a good idea of the challenges in front of him, he thought of what Special had said, about all of the things that could go wrong, especially travelling on your own. But generally things didn’t go wrong. Experience had shown him that. He knew what Special was saying and it was equally true that some people were just born lucky. He smiled to himself and realised that this smile was something that was starting to happen more often. He looked around the departure lounge. From behind him a voice was asking him a question.
Excuse me is this seat taken?
A young woman. How does a man decide that a woman is very attractive? Eliot had stopped thinking about that, he thought that he had lost what you needed to think about this but yes she was unquestionably attractive. Tall and blond. She stood with her legs crossed leaning slightly forward as if she knew that this would help get the answer she wanted. Whatever friendly vibes she exuded it worked and the next moment he wanted to say something more than just yes and he did and what he said was dumb. But if she felt that way she gave nothing away.
Yes certainly …….you off to KL then?
She smiled a most engaging smile, with her mouth and her eyes, put her backpack down on the carpet and sat down next to Eliot in a manner that suggested that she thought that talking to him would be just fine, that she was saying just because you are old, certainly doesn’t mean I won’t sit and talk with you.
Yep. I am. You and me both I guess. Otherwise you wouldn’t be sitting at gate forty nine.
She smiled. Her smile was so engaging it made Eliot blush and he had to look away so he looked down at her feet in sandals and the freshly pink painted toenails and then when he had recovered back up at her neck and shiny fair hair in a ponytail. Why did he feel a little guilty? He thought that Marion’s letter told him he shouldn’t feel guilty.
Later, when he fastened his seat belt in his aisle seat beside a Chinses couple who smiled at him nicely because they couldn’t speak English, he was agitated in a way that he hadn’t been for a long time, since when he first met Marion and then all the firsts that they had shared together. He realised that after Marion’s death he had crawled into a cave and curled up but then a young woman had roused him. He followed her down the aisle of the plane, followed her with his eyes until he said this is my seat. Her seat was way down the back of the plane. She had a shoulder bag in one hand and a backpack in her other, her boarding pass clamped between her teeth. She turned and gave him a kind of a wave and on she went. He put his bag in the overhead compartment and sat down.
I hope you don’t mind me asking but are you travelling for holiday or work?
Work, I’m going onto Payakumbuh in West Sumatra. You know Payakumbuh?
Yep. I do. In the mountains behind Padang. So what job are you going to do over you there?
Wow! You’re the first person who I have met who knows where Payakumbuh is. I’m a nurse, a midwife and I work for Red Cross. I am going to work for a year or maybe two in the maternity section of the hospital there. They’ve been having a few problems, a strangely high infant moratlity rate over the past few years. I’m supposed to identify whether it’s down to, bad practice or some other less easily identifiable factor……Oh, I’m rabbiting on, aren’t I, sorry, my name is Carol.
I’m Eliot, nice to meet you.
He thought that she was attractive in every kind of way. He looked at her and then quickly away. He felt elevated by her presence. She could do this for someone. An open face. A ponytail that gave you her neck, her blue eyes, her roundness, her smile, her manner and the way that she spoke. She talked a lot and as she spoke it was if these words were especially for him, yet so natural too. Yes, she liked to talk, that was obvious but Eliot knew that one would love her for it. She kept talking.
She wanted to be a nurse ever since she was sixteen, ever since her mother sat her down one day to tell her a story. Her mother was a nurse in the Vietnam War, serving at a hospital in Long Xuyen, a couple of hundred miles from Saigon. She dealt with the horrors of the Viet Cong’s Tet offensive. Her mother told her lots of interesting things about the war like how she had to sign a declaration saying she’d take the pill to avoid pregnancy if she were captured and raped. She kept silent about her service, so did the government.
One day her mother just opened up to her and said that she was so proud to have been a nurse and that you couldn’t do a better thing. In war and peace nurses were heroes her mother said, so how could I do anything else? She said that she thought back to all those Christmas presents, the nurse’s cap with the red cross on the front, the nurses scrub and the stethoscope. Her mother was hoping and she was thrilled when Carol got this job.
Carol’s eyes met Eliot’s.
Oh, I’m so sorry Eliot, I talk too much, I know that, so what is taking you to KL?
The friendly, familiar tone of her voice and the sound of his name tightened his chest and he could hardly believe it
I’m on my way to Uttar Pradesh, in India. To work in a school.
Sounds exciting and challenging.
For both of us. So you are from Melbourne?
Yes, I work out of the Red Cross office in Melbourne but I’m originally from Shepparton .
Really, I grew up in Benalla.
They talked, Carol most of the time, until the call to board and it was so easy. About the common experience of growing up in the bush and all it did to you and then the move to the big smoke as Eliot’s father always called it. And about what they did in Melbourne. Their talk, unfolded very naturally as if they had known each other for years.
Carol was interrupted mid-sentence and they looked at their boarding passes and saw that were at different ends of the plane and Carol said that their luggage would be in transit but they agreed that they would make sure to say goodbye
