Kathmandu Page 5

  “I have! I went to France,” Leo says, doing the same, feeling the first rush of the nicotine surpass nausea and suppressing a cough.

  “Yeah, Disneyland. That doesn’t count.”

  “And I’ve been to Belgium,” Leo retorts.

  “That was a school trip.”

  “Well it’s not that easy. I have a job, I couldn’t get the time off.”

  “You couldn’t get the time off in five years? You know what I think of that job anyways, they treat you like shit.”

  Leo knows she’s right, he never takes his holidays properly. There’s always something to do at work. When he does take some time, it’s a few Fridays at the end of the year. The rest gets lost in the confusion of headlines, deadlines and targets for the newspaper’s shrinking staff.

  “Well, I want to go,” Mya says, taking another deep pull on the cigarette and looking out towards the ocean. “I’ve been thinking about it more and more in the last few weeks, I want to go, and I’m going to.” She exhales. “I would like you to come with me,” she turns and catches his eye, “but I’m going to go, whether you do or not.”

  Leo stutters a reply.

  “You’d get a lot from it,” Mya continues, talking over his efforts to diffuse the confrontation. “We’d get a lot from it together. Think about the memories.”

  At that moment the sun spills through a crack in the cloud, inches from the horizon, filling the city with light. Both look towards it. Every rooftop, every eddy and bump of the ocean, even the usually mournful gulls which streak overhead, sparkle in the dying light.

  “Okay,” Leo says, feeling his heart thump with the words.

  “Really?” A smile spreads across Mya’s face.

  “Yeah, you’re absolutely right,” Leo says. “There’s all this world out there, and I’d love to explore it with you.”

  Mya beams and nestles beneath Leo’s arm, and her eyes glitter by the light of the colours which spear across the sky.

  Leo, his mind a tempest of worry, forces a smile. He’d do anything for her, whether he wanted to or not. But somehow, as colour and light sink from the sky, he knows this won’t end well.

  Chapter 20

  After his meeting with Stockwell, the proposal, and his acceptance of finding Allissa in Kathmandu, Leo needed his run more than ever. He needed to feel the spray across his face to bring himself alive. His mind was still in tatters from the decision he had made – part of him, the bigger part of him, didn’t want to go to Kathmandu at all. It didn’t want to go anywhere. That cowardly part wanted to phone Mike, the Echo’s editor, grovel for his job back and sit behind the safe glare of his computer screens. That way, he knew what he was dealing with, he didn’t have to come up against people like Stockwell, people who his better judgement said not to trust. Yet Stockwell had given him fifteen thousand pounds just as a down payment.

  Looking out over the ocean, Leo tried to think of a time when he had made a decision like that. He couldn’t come up with anything. He had done things in the past because he had been persuaded to or it had been the obvious choice, but he couldn’t remember one single occasion when he had actually decided. When he had actually said, no, I’m not going to do this, I’m doing that instead.

  He knew to an extent his lifestyle was a decision. He had rejected the graduate schemes, pension plans and home ownership ideals of many people his age. That was really just the way things had turned out though.

  Thinking about it, Leo wasn’t even sure how he’d ended up being a journalist. Sure, he’d read a lot and liked writing, but that was a tiny part of the half-political, half-promotional job at The Echo which he’d been doing for so long.

  Was this trip to Kathmandu his opportunity? he thought to himself as tattered trainers slapped concrete. His opportunity to make a decision that meant something?

  Was this his way of standing up to the world and saying, define me by this, this is what I stand for, finding people that are lost, helping people that need it?

  The thought filled Leo with a sense of excitement. He now had something to plan, something to sort. He’d have to book flights, arrange accommodation, research the city, come up with some ideas for what he was going to do when he got there. Fires of anticipation and excitement began to rampage with the thought.

  But how could he do this?

  He wasn’t trained in finding people. He didn’t know the language, the local customs, the places that someone might go in Kathmandu. He’d never been there himself. Sure, he could come up with a plan, but the idea of it actually working was so far removed from the darkening promenade that it felt like a dream.

  Who was he to think he could do this? This wasn’t a job for some out-of-work journalist who knew a little bit about finding people but so far had found exactly no one.

  Leo pushed harder against the concrete in an attempt to quell the feeling. It didn’t help – the anxiety continued to creep across his chest.

  He knew the feeling now, like it had always been there. He was almost used to it. The crippling self-doubt growing into his tightness of breath followed by the feeling of suffocation.

  He was thirteen or fourteen the first time it had come. The tightness of his chest. Clawing for breath. Each inhalation shallower and more futile than the last. His mind trying to grab at the strands of oxygen that his panicking body would let him have. That was his fear, that suffocating, drowning feeling that had rendered him nearly unconscious countless times.

  Sometimes, years passed without anything. Sometimes three would come in the same week. He had good days and bad days. On the good ones he felt like he could achieve anything, make anything work, take on the world. On the bad, his anxieties would snowball, picking up pace, becoming more violent and debilitating until he was a writhing mess. Even on the good days though, the fear of the bad haunted him, the knowledge that they could come, they could start, they could be there. They haunted each step, each breath and each decision he did or didn’t make.

  Over the last fifteen years, Leo had seen many people who said they knew how to help him. He’d been on drugs for a while, although he’d stopped them when he realised they were making him docile and vacant. He’d learned breathing exercises, coping strategies, hypnosis, had therapy and tried every weird and wonderful solution he’d found online.

  He had only ever found one thing which seemed to fix it completely – Mya.

  From the moment they’d met, his life seemed more purposeful and complete. She gave him something to think about when the anxiety threatened. Something to focus on as he clawed through it. Someone who would listen without judgement. With her, there was a calm that now, and before they’d met, eluded him.

  Above him as he ran, gulls swooped and arched, stitching the sky together with their curving flight. A car load of people slowed to the traffic lights beside him. Two children in the back, bickering with each other, while in the front, a man in the passenger seat tried to navigate on a small smartphone. The infuriated female driver attempted to oversee the navigation and soothe the children simultaneously. Even they were out, going somewhere, thought Leo. They’ve got everything they need in that car, and they’re going.

  Taking a deep breath, Leo pushed harder along the promenade. His eyes were closed to slits against the spray, arms pumping, each step harder than the last. The clarity running brought him finally fighting its way through his mind.

  Whether he had anxiety or not, whether it got him closer to Mya or not, this was his decision. Maybe the first real one he’d ever made. With stinging legs and the cold wet air of winter filling his lungs, Leo knew he was going to Kathmandu.

  Chapter 21

  “But how come the princess always ends up with some guy at the end?” Chimini asked, closing the book on the table of the guesthouse’s small kitchen.

  “That’s just how these stories go,” Allissa said, stirring the steaming pot before adding more turmeric.

  “Are they saying it’s essential to have a guy to be happy? Because
I certainly don’t think there are any princes in Kathmandu.”

  “You don’t need to think about it in that much detail,” Allissa said, turning from the stove. “I just saw the books in a shop window on the way to the market and thought of you. Not because you love princes, but because you might want something to practise reading in English.”

  Chimini looked through the pile of brightly-coloured books on the kitchen table, muttering to Fuli who sat beside her. Allissa had been helping Chimini improve her English over the last few months, but reading it was still a challenge.

  “Well, if that’s the case, I need to get you something to read in Nepalese,” Chimini said with a smile.

  “Yes, definitely,” Allissa said, turning back towards the food so that neither woman would see her frown. The thought of reading the curved script of Nepali writing felt like climbing a mountain. “I’d love to,” Allissa said, looking into the bubbling liquid.

  “See, look, so in this one,” Chimini said, flicking through a different book with colourful pictures, showing each one to Fuli next to her, “she looks so unhappy until the prince comes along. Miserable! Like there is nothing to her life, it’s…” She searched for the word.

  “Boring?”

  “Yes, it looks like she’s totally bored before she gets to meet this man.”

  “Well if you don’t like them…” Allissa said, beaming a smile across at the women.

  “No, no, I like them. I’m just wondering where’s the one where the princess gets so sick and tired of being treated badly by men that she decides a life of being on her own is better.”

  “Well, let’s write our own,” Allissa said, stifling a laugh as Chimini explained something to Fuli. “It’s ready, I think.”

  Neither responded. Chimini’s eyes darted from Allissa to the books, her mouth hidden behind the palm of her hand talking towards Fuli. The blank expression that was, a moment ago, on Fuli’s face had melted into a smile.

  “What are you saying about me?” Allissa said, pointing the wooden spoon towards the two women at the table.

  “Nothing!” Chimini replied, whispering again to Fuli, who started to laugh.

  “Tell me now, or there’ll be trouble,” Allissa shouted, taking on the deep voice of a fairy tale villain and holding the spoon like a weapon.

  “No, I’ll never tell you!” Chimini shouted, feigning fear, then winking towards Fuli. “We will never tell you…”

  “Right that’s it…” Allissa said, taking a step towards the giggling women.

  “Okay… okay…” Chimini said, recovering enough from her fit of laughter to speak, “we think you are the princess.”

  As shrieks and laughs echoed through the guesthouse, outside Kathmandu slipped into restless darkness. The final residents scuttled home amid emerging tourists who looked with wide eyes for somewhere to eat and drink. Some may have heard the legend of the restaurant advertised only by the bare bulb. They may be making their way down the warren of reducing passages already, hoping to try the Himalayan Lamb.

  Chapter 22

  The first thing Leo noticed about Kathmandu was the taste. It rushed into the plane as the door was opened on the sweating tarmac of the airport. Leo didn’t like it. It tasted like disaster and misery, pain and insecurity. But he knew, to the three million residents of the mountain city it was opportunity, and more arrived each year for a piece of it.

  Flying in across the Kathmandu Valley, Leo had peered nervously from the bouncing plane. Below the sprawling concrete city, surrounded by snow-capped mountains on all sides, it looked as though it was sinking into boggy earth. The scale of the city was daunting, as was the idea of looking for someone who may not be there. He was going to look all the same.

  It had been a long flight across continents, starting an indeterminate number of hours ago at the familiar London Gatwick. He’d queued next to a pale, dreadlocked man who looked totally out of place in the modern veneer of the terminal. But Leo knew that soon, this is what westerners would look like. He, in one of his usual collection of t-shirts, would be the outsider.

  Harbouring a fear of missing flights, he’d arrived hours early, before check-in had opened. Unable to find anywhere to sit, he’d pushed his bag against a wall and lowered himself on top of it. Next to him, a quick-fingered Asian man packed and repacked the same suitcase, supervised by two women who muttered comments Leo didn’t understand but was sure weren’t helpful.

  The flight was uneventful. Tray table upright, emergency exits, take-off and landing. In Delhi he’d had to wait three hours for his connecting Yeti Airlines flight to Kathmandu.

  The part of him that wanted to go home screamed louder than ever as Leo pushed through the noisy, humid, tussle and scrum of people assembled around the airport’s exit. The threat of the unknown, looming large and fearful, weighed on his mind while his bag cut into his shoulders. He would have to get out amongst the lives and experiences of people in the city. He would have to ask questions and chase shadows, possibly putting himself in danger, all in pursuit of Allissa.

  Finding a taxi waiting at the curb outside the terminal, Leo opened the back door, pushed his bag in and then climbed in himself. The car, a pink and white hatchback whose engine squealed to life, was covered – windows, chipping paint and faded seats – with dust. It clung to the car as though it was in the air itself, clogging both man and machine. The green digital clock on the dash said five in the afternoon, but to Leo it felt like the middle of the night. He supposed it was. He needed to find his hotel and eat proper food on solid ground.

  “To the Best Kathmandu Guesthouse,” Leo said to the driver, who stared at him in the rear-view mirror, cocking his head to one side after a few seconds.

  “The, Best, Kathmandu, Guesthouse,” Leo said again, slowly. Again, the driver listened this time tilting his head the other way, both hands never leaving the steering wheel.

  Leo exhaled slowly; this was going to be more difficult than anticipated.

  “The… Best…” he started, sounding each word as though his pronunciation was at fault.

  The driver didn’t wait for him to finish. Snapping the flimsy gear stick forward and firing the engine, he sent the car screeching from the curb. Leo, not expecting the sudden movement, fell back into soft, worn seats, where he searched frantically for the seatbelt and buckle.

  As the engine noise built in pitch and ferocity, teetering on the brink of combustion, Leo peered from the back seat. They were heading for a wall of sneering traffic at the end of the short slip road from the airport. Taking a deep breath, Leo watched the driver. Knuckles white on the steering wheel, head whipping from side to side.

  Screeching engines and screaming horns.

  Up ahead, a gap between another taxi and a bus appeared. The driver pushed forwards, accelerating for it, the car’s vibrations becoming violent. They slipped into the gap with inches to spare, the driver’s sharp braking forcing Leo into the footwell.

  Picking himself up, Leo looked for the seatbelt a second time, before concluding there wasn’t one.

  Through the window the city was streaming past. Kathmandu looked the same from the car as it had from the air. An ungainly, untidy concrete mass of buildings, each no higher than a few storeys but seemingly endless in their number.

  What couldn’t be seen from the plane, though it was obvious to Leo now, was the life that inhabited the city. Everywhere he looked the city was alive, moving or working. Each tiny shop opened onto the street and the business spilled out onto it. Welders, mechanics, what looked like a pot maker spinning clay on a wheel.

  The traffic engulfed them. Lorries overladen with bulging loads. Buses with their windows pushed out and people leaning from them. Donkeys pulling carts, and amongst them all, an army of pink and white taxis, the engine of each protesting at a slightly different tone.

  Leo had travelled in India with Mya, so he thought he knew what Kathmandu would be like. But doing it on his own was different, and this time he had a job to
do. He would have to go where the trail took him, whether he wanted to or not.

  The doubts swarmed into his cluttered mind. How would he know who to trust? What if the taxi driver took him to the wrong place? What if someone tried to rob him? Tourists were known to carry lots of money, and Leo’s pale complexion and painfully long trousers made him look more inexperienced than most.

  Leo thought he could probably overpower the small driver – he felt his fists tighten – but what if he took him to a place where his friends were? Two or three of them and Leo would have no chance.

  He felt his chest tighten.

  Breathing quicken.

  Focusing on it, he tried to bring it under control.

  Breathe in.

  And out.

  In.

  He thought of Mya and their taxi ride from the airport in Mumbai. It was his first experience of India. They’d come through a similar scrum and into the wet heat of the Indian summer. In that first taxi ride from the airport, he felt like he’d learned more about the diversity of human existence than before and since. The sprawling slums of glinting shacks, wet in the early morning mist, surrounding the brand-new airport terminal of marble and chrome. Leo remembered the seemingly disconnected images: cars, lorries, bikes, a motorway. Cows, chickens, pigs. Children playing. Men working. People washing from pots on the side of the road, making breakfast, or just sitting and watching the world fly by as though time was running short.

  Leo had felt amazement at the spectacle, pride that he was there, guilt that he lived in such an opulent way by comparison, shame that he didn’t appreciate it, and fear that it was all so different. Then he felt Mya’s hand on the seat between them, her fingers knitted with his own. With that came comfort, reliability and the knowledge that things would be alright.

  The taxi moved violently, marked by a cacophony of horns, snapping Leo from his reverie. They’d shot to the right of the carriageway and stopped in the middle of the road, vehicles behind streaming to the left, scattering dust from the road surface which pinged and skittered.