The departures area was full of shops, and people sleeping across rows of seats, and noise. I loved it. There was a long queue at WH Smith, and I stood in it happily and purchased a guide book. I found my gate, where things were much calmer, bought a coffee from a little stand nearby, and sat and read, glancing out of the window at the planes more often than I glanced at the page.
Look at me, I kept thinking. Just look at me. I’m going on a plane.
There was a constant nagging guilt about the deception I was perpetrating on my darling Harry. However, I told myself that I was doing it for good reasons. I was doing it because I loved him. Even if he did discover my deceit, when I explained he would understand. It wasn’t me, it was Sarah. He would understand, because I knew he loved me and would forgive me, no matter what.
An aeroplane landed, right outside the window. People came off it, and trudged out and away, into the belly of the airport. Then, all of a sudden, I was on a plane. The air was stale and it was more mundane than I would ever have imagined. I found my seat, carefully fastened my seatbelt. After a while, the steps slid away from the aeroplane. I closed my eyes, and waited, and then I was away.
Some of the people on this train had also been on my flight. When we boarded at Heathrow, they had all seemed to be speaking English. Now, suddenly, the same people were Spanish. I had been trying to study Spanish. If I focused, I could understand the odd word. Two women sitting opposite me were talking, in a desultory manner, about Michael Jackson. I could tell because they kept saying his name. Some boys, younger than me, were, I thought, discussing a woman. After a while, I began to wonder whether it was me. I looked up and caught the eye of the youngest-looking one, who blushed and looked away.
Everything was different, intense. I had been swept along by the crowd, through Passport Control, where a thin-faced man barely even glanced at my shiny passport, and onto a shuttle bus where the driver did not seem to want any cash. I got off, following the masses, at the train station. A ticket was three euros. The machine gave me change.
Now I was sitting on a train from Barcelona airport into the city, and no one apart from that boy was looking at me. My little bag was at my feet, and the train was a bit smelly and clunked loudly on its rails, and I was a part of an entirely alien scene.
I studied the map on the back of the
Rough Guide
that I bought at Heathrow. I needed to change onto the purple line of the Metro at Passeig de Gràcia. I would get out at Monumental, two stops down the line, and walk a litde way to where I hoped I would find my hotel. I had not yet been on the London Underground, but I was well on my way to completing my first journey on the Barcelona Metro.
I got off at Passeig de Gràcia, and did my best to follow the signs to my next train. I walked and walked and walked. A huge corridor, its floor black and rubbery, stretched onwards, walls grimy but well lit, a man exactly halfway along it playing Bob Dylan on the guitar and singing ‘Blowing in the Wind’ with a heavy accent.
I stopped in front of him. He winked at me without pausing, and I put one of the euro coins that the ticket machine had spat at me into his hat. He smiled such a warm smile that I grinned all the way to my next train.
When I came out of the Metro, finally, at Monumental, I kept my head down. For a city that, according to the guide book, was busy twenty-four hours a day, it was very quiet. In fact, it was deserted.
The smell here was different. There were exhaust fumes on the air, and the indefinable smells of a city in which people ate different food and lived different lives from the ones I knew.
I found the right direction in which to walk. A few cars passed, but there were not many of them although it was a main road. Tall and broad apartment buildings, with wrought iron around tiny balconies, lined the road, but all their windows, rising up higher and higher above me in rows, were blank. I tried to imagine who was inside, but all I knew about Barcelona was what the relentlessly upbeat prose of the guide book had told me. I had been expecting people who were so cool they would not even look at me, people with asymmetrical haircuts and funky glasses, and quirky bars and clubs, and music everywhere. This quiet reality was both stranger and more mundane than anything I had expected. I tried to calm myself, and keep walking. I felt my breathing becoming more and more agitated, my footsteps faster, and in the end I ran to the hotel.
Its double glass doors slid open silently at my approach, and I walked into a lobby that had a fake marble floor, with a massive open-plan dining room off to the left, and a reception desk in front of me.
It was after midnight, and there was no one in the lobby at all. The lighting was low and spooky. I walked over to the desk and stood there, waiting for something to happen. Almost at once, a man walked out from a glass door behind the reception desk, and smiled.
According to his name badge, his name was Dean.
‘Hello,’ he said in perfect English. ‘Checking in?’
‘Yes.’ I wanted to ask how he knew I was English, but I didn’t. ‘My name is Lily Button.’ I could not help looking around the room as I identified myself. My name is Lily Button (which is a stupid name) and I should not be here. Yet I’m glad I am because this is already the best thing I’ve ever done. Apart from meeting Harry, that is.
He tapped at his keyboard, nodded, and handed me a form. Soon I had a key card in my hand and instructions to take the lift to the sixth floor. The lift took me up silently, and I passed rows of identical doors. Mine was number 628, and its door was different from the others, because it was on a diagonal piece of wall, on a corner. For a long time, I tried to work out how to persuade it to open with the credit-card-style key I had been given, and in the end, it turned out that inserting and removing the card, the right way round, very quickly, made a green light come on, and if I pressed the handle down at the very instant in which that happened, access was granted.
The room was beige, brown and orange, with a window that looked out on nothing but an expanse of white exterior wall and a blank window with its curtains closed. I was slightly disappointed not to see the entire city spread out before me, but
at least it was cosy.
I giggled aloud. Grandma had said those last five words, in my head, from beyond the grave.
I switched my phone on, and watched the little screen as it worked out where in the world it was, finally settling on a network called Movistar. As I looked, it beeped, and three texts appeared.
The first was from Harry.
I’m missing you like crazy. Let’s not be apart again
he wrote. My heart contracted at my treachery. The second was from Julia.
Hope you’re having a lovely time at your spa, you two! x
The third was from Al.
Sorry 2 turn up like that. Got some pills, doing ok.
I texted Harry back, hating myself, replied to Julia with a mendacious affirmative, and wrote to Al:
don’t be sorry. I’m the one that’s sorry, crap friend, really, everything is up in the air right now, will call you when I have news, see you in a couple of weeks? can you advise yourself about benefits and find a proper place to live again? I
brushed my teeth, and washed some of the airport grime from my feet. Then I lay down on the bed. I listened to the distant traffic, and wondered what on earth might be going to happen to me tomorrow.
I sat on a high stool at the bar and smiled at the thin woman who handed me a coffee in a white mug and a croissant on a saucer. Every café I had passed seemed to be exactly like this one: rickety tables and chairs, stools at the bar, a few people drinking tall glasses of beer. The air was thick with cigarette smoke.
‘Gracias,’ I said, and the woman still seemed to understand me and said something brisk in reply.
My coffee was small but strong. I surveyed the scene. It was strange, but not at all frightening. I had imagined foreign countries to be more intimidating than this. Moving a couple of miles into Falmouth had been far more difficult than this was proving to be, so far. This city made me feel the same way my brief glimpse of London had: that there was room for everyone, that I could exhale and be myself, and no one would mutter or gossip.
The map – Sarah’s map – was spread in front of me, part of it resting on the counter. I touched my current location with a finger. The closest of Sarah’s places to me was four blocks away, along the main road, Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes, and two streets down. It was just marked with a red cross. I would go there first.
I sipped my drink and pulled pieces off the croissant and ate them. I drained the last drops from my cup, paid my bill, and jumped off my stool, ready to go.
It turned out that it was easy to get around this city on foot, guide book in hand. I walked to the spot marked by the red cross with no trouble at all. My heart pounded as I approached it. I had no idea what I was going to see there: if it was an apartment building, I would have a good look round, just in case Sarah herself might be there.
She would not. I knew she would not. She was dead.
It was a little restaurant, a place down some stairs with a menu on a chalk board outside it. It was closed, but I peered in through the barred windows and saw tables with white cloths on them, set for lunch with cutlery and wine glasses.
Above it was an office block, and above that, I supposed, apartments, but I was not going to bother to check them out. I pictured Harry walking down the steps, arm-in-arm with his tempestuous wife, heading to the restaurant. It was all too plausible, and I tried not to be jealous of a woman he had married, lovelessly, when I was ten.
I walked to the Arc de Triomf, and down the large paved area south of it. People rode bicycles around me, and they jogged past, and walked in groups, and laughed and talked. I just carried on. At the end of the walkway, I turned and headed in approximately the right direction.
I looked around me as I walked. I glanced at wrought-iron window bars, the peeled paint on a light green door, a man kneeling on the pavement with a paintbrush. A black taxi with yellow doors swerved by far too fast. A small woman with short grey hair and glasses and a Mao jacket stared at me as I walked past her doorway.
I wandered down little streets with washing hanging out of all the windows, and through occasional squares with tables set out in them. I took a roundabout route to my destination, checking other places Sarah had marked. One of them was an English language school. Another was a government office of some kind. It was all just out of reach.
Half an hour later, I paused outside the police station on Carrer Nou de la Rambla. In this building, I was going to find out the answer to my question, one way or another. I would walk out of this door knowing that she was dead, almost certainly. Presuming that they were going to tell me, anyway.
It was strange to hope someone was dead, but I did. Then I would be able to go home and get married. Perhaps Harry would be amenable to moving away, to a city somewhere, and starting a new life in which no one knew our history. Maybe we could move to Paris, or New York, or Sydney. We could easily go and live in a place in which no one would ever give us a second glance.
I shook my head to dislodge the daydreams, and pushed the glass door.
It was bright and modern inside, and not at all scary. In my imagination, foreign police stations were horrific places, into which the tourist would disappear, only to emerge twenty years later, hairy and skeletal from a dirty prison.
There was a reception desk, glassed off from the lobby, and a good-looking, chunky man behind it smiled at me. His springy hair was cut short, but not so short that it lost its spring.
‘Hola,’
he said.
‘Hola,’
I said.
‘Habla inglés?’
‘Little,’ he said with a grin.
I did my best to explain that I was looking to speak to someone about my friend, who had died in Barcelona last Christmas Day. As an afterthought, I said that it was not actually my friend, it was my sister, because I thought they might tell me more that way. I asked, slowly and carefully, whether it would be possible for me to get a copy of whatever police report there was into her death. I looked at him, pleading with my eyes.
He frowned, then laughed.
‘It’s normal that someone steals your handbag,’ he said, in English. ‘Nobody steals your handbag?’
‘Nobody.’
He went over what I had just asked him, asked for my sister’s name, for my name, for the dates and locations, and he handed me a ticket with D6 printed on it, and told me to go to the waiting room.
I sat in a plastic chair in a large airy room with windows along the top of the wall, tiles on the floor, and two humming vending machines at the far end of the room. I nodded at a middle-aged couple who were sitting a couple of seats away from me, talking so rapidly that I could not differentiate the words, let alone understand any of them. I was not even sure whether they were speaking Spanish or Catalan. A man on his own sat right at the end of the room, near the drinks machine. I took my book out of my bag and started to read, but I could not concentrate. I was scared that Harry was going to call. I was scared about what I was going to find out.
The couple went to an interview room when their number came up, suddenly quiet as they crossed the room. Two French women arrived, talking, I deciphered, about a stolen handbag. The man on his own was called to a room. Three young black men arrived and sat where he had been. I stood up and walked across the room to read the posters on the noticeboard. One of them was a series of cartoons about what to do if it snowed. With the help of the accompanying cartoons, I worked it out: only go out if you have to, run hot water through your pipes, if you need to use the car, pack the boot with spare clothes, food and drink just in case. More people arrived, and were called. They seemed to have forgotten about me.
By the time D6 came up, I was on the verge of leaving. Then the machine buzzed, and it was there. D6 to B7.