Wilderness

The journey south was bleak and cold.

The train to Temuco was sleek, fast and luxurious, and I managed to take a small gauge train a little further south. From then on, the journey rose in complexity. In a way too, I left the Chile of my imagination behind. As I headed into the Antarctic regions, more and more of the Chileans I met were only there to serve the tourists trying to get as near as they could to Antarctica, and they were far out-numbered by the tourists themselves. This makes it sound crowded, but it was not. It was very, very empty. Which suited me, as that was how I felt. Until I was far south near the end of my journey, I barely noticed the time or the miles go past. In a practical sense, all I had lost was the couple of days in Santiago with Lucia, then our future post and email/messenger conversations. But how had I left? How had I twisted and destroyed the way Lucia would see me? I couldn’t think about it without being filled with a sweaty rage. But I still thought that for Lucia’s sake I was right to go the way I did, without ruining the image of her mother for her. I thought that would be classed as a good thing. Balarubu only cares about truth, but that doesn’t mean goodness isn’t important too.

While I was down there, almost at the foot of the world, I decided to call Lucia. Hard to believe, but there was a decent signal down here, as there hadn’t been for at least a hundred miles: perhaps because it was clear that there would never be lines laid down here, some enterprising company had put mobile base stations here, to pick up the tourist traffic and the shipping and fishermen. As it was so remote, I suspected the traffic must be punted to a city: maybe even to Santiago.

My heart kicked up a gear as I picked her off the dial list.

‘Lucia!’

‘Hello, Micky.’

‘Oh! Ava.’

‘I told you not to call, Micky. But I also told you that it would be fruitless. Calls from your mobile to any of our numbers come straight to me.’

‘That’s very trusting of you, Ava.’

‘I told you not to call and you did. Why should I trust you?’

‘I left without making promises, Ava. I owe you nothing. You owe me quite a lot. I didn’t tell Lucia what you did. I deliberately chose not to. She probably wouldn’t have believed me but I would have planted seeds, wouldn’t I? Could her precious mama do anything so cruel and so wicked?’

‘I’m not responsible for your weakness, Micky. Don’t try to get in touch again. I will make you regret this attempt. Go any further and it will be worse for you.’

I hung up. Her threats rang hollow down her in the wilderness. I tried to forget her, put her amount of my mind and take in as much as possible of the quiet, brutal emptiness of the archipelago.

The journey now stopped my mental turmoil, because no matter what had happened to me, I realised I had been right to push on to Tierra del Fuego. It translates to Land of Fire. I couldn’t understand how such a cold, white place, teeming with birds that also all seemed to be black and white, including the huge fields of penguins, came to have a name to do with fire. This place was the black and white antithesis of fire.

And then I saw my first Antarctic sunset. In the many inlets, all icy white, with fresh glaciers growing, and others calving smaller bergs, crashing off into the half frozen water, as the falling orange sun sunk and its low light shone into the inlets, the light playing on the ice was an amazing sight that might make someone who hadn’t just found a new God think of Hell.

Fire and Ice.

It was the most otherworldly place, a terrain a European would never associate with South America, so attached to images of jungle and cattle savannahs, cocaine and gauchos, salsa and tango. I wanted to stay longer but as all supplies needed to be brought an awful long way in, it was an expensive place. I had money, but I knew how much I needed to get back to Bogota and it was time to leave. From Santiago to here, I had barely had a conversation that was more than the barest necessary to buy transport, food and a bed for the night. Now, heading back, I knew that the end point of the journey was home in London, that that meant engaging with people, and that in turn meant I had to learn to do that, to talk to people, and at the same time, always to tell the truth.

Transport to Tierra del Fuego, and back, was mostly in five seater pick-ups, the luggage stowed in the back, along with the shovels, spikes, tarps, winches and ropes that could be needed at a moment’s notice if the weather turned bad and the terrain with it. On the way down I had managed to get rides in Chevy and Ford pick-ups. Right now, the only ride on offer was a battered old Toyota Hi-lux. I didn’t want to take it, but it was maybe a sign. If I wanted to move on, I had to accept the fact of that fateful day of Her warning as a matter of solid, Japanese engineered fact, and in some way too, of history. I made small talk with the other riders, a sabbatical year English professor from Milwaukee, a pair of early retiree restaurant owners from Nogales in Arizona and a freelance travel writer from Barcelona. It seemed strange that amid these four people with rich and interesting lives, my youth, my lack of experience of anything much before the last few weeks, made me the focus of interest. Again, with it becoming more like a script with over retelling, I told my entirely true, Balarubu skipped, dulled down and joked up version of my journey. And now I could escape the disapproval I won with my early tellings of my sneaky departure, by starting the departure in Bogota. When people asked if my parents weren’t terribly worried, I learned the politicians’ trick of answering an entirely different question that seemed to satisfy, that told the truth, and that seemed to cover the ground of the earlier, hopefully forgotten question.

‘My mum came out to meet me in Santiago. We had a mid trip get together, stayed with friends, had a few nice hugs. Now she’s gone back and I call her whenever I can.’

‘I hope that’s extremely often.’ Said Sharon, the front of house manager at Painted Wind, the restaurant they had recently left behind in Nogales to see the other half of their continent.

Her husband Geoff grunted approval of her question. He had spent his years in the kitchen, and left the conversation to Sharon for the most part, except when he called home to their son, every couple of hours it seemed, to check everything was running as it should. It looked to me as I was one end of the scale of parent influence, their son was at the other.

It was a tough ride in the pick-up, and there wasn’t much relief. It was also a very slow journey. Once you are south of Punto Arenas and heading down into the archipelago of Tierra del Fuego, there is a constant succession of islands, small and large. Some are bridged, some are permanently linked by ice. A small number require precarious ferries powered by motors pulling on steel cables crossing the water. It made for a tiring and sometimes scary journey, no less arduous for being a repeat of the downward journey made just a couple of days before.

Some of the stretches of water were too tricky to ferry the trucks and took people alone, which meant we had to change frequently, one pickup to the next. Some stayed in the southern Antarctic seasons until the weather turned and the tourists went away for the winter. We were the first of the spring tourists, and apparently the journey was easier for us because there were still many ice bridged islands that would need ferrying later. So several times, we left a pick-up, decamped into a small motor launch which would cross the choppy, ice cold waters where a new truck would pick us up at the other side. Fortunately, to save a lifetime’s haggling, the ferries and pick-ups worked closely together and we had a arranged a complete price for the journey. Believe me (because you know you can believe me) it wasn’t cheap.

No roadside cafes down there, just more and more rock and ice and snowstorms and flocks of seabirds. The travel journalist was constantly shooting. He must have filled his camera’s memory card and dumped the shots down onto his laptop a half dozen times. I was aware that I would never see all this again, but still I just wanted to sleep. Maybe I was too young for all this travel, maybe I was homesick, maybe, between Lucia and Balarubu, I’d just taken too much of an emotional beating, but I’d had enough. I was also keenly aware that while the journey down here had been a marvel of unseen newness every day, there was no practical way to get back to Bogotá without simply unreeling my journey and replaying it in reverse. In theory I should have been able to travel back up the opposite South American coast, through Argentina and Brazil. But then I would need to cross the continent at the top to get back to Bogotá, and a combination of difficult routes and my dwindling budget meant that was simply impossible, so it was straight back up the Pacific coast: Chile, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia.

When we were dropped outside a traveller’s hotel back in Punto Arenas, it seemed strange to have your feet back on a proper pavement instead of a hard-packed mix of dirt and snow. It was damn cold and I’d bought a grotty old parka from a second hand shop. It had been cleaned but it wasn’t especially clean and it still smelled of sheep. Punto Arenas has a big docks and ships out tons of wool, from the enormous farmlands in Southern Chile and Argentina too, and minerals from the mines. It was a busy working port that just happened to be near the Antarctic, but it had more going on that us few tourists. We were just one more little thing in its tough and busy city life.

The hotel had a few like us, on the way to or from the South, and a bunch of more serious minded people, there on real mining, shipping and wool business in the world’s southernmost city. I felt relieved. I could slip away into the background. As I checked into the hotel, the desk clerk smiled at me, a big, ‘pleased to see you’ smile. Everyone else he checked in with a great big nothing. Sharon, who was still trying to mother me, asked if I wanted to come out and find something to eat when we’d all freshened up.

‘I’d love to.’

‘An hour,’ she asked.

‘I’ll see you both here.’

The room was plain and anonymous. In the morning, I would look for a bus north. Unless Sharon and Geoff, as they had discussed, rented a car that they would drop off in Santiago. If they did, I thought if I offered to chip in for fuel, they would let me ride along at least for the first day of two until we hooked up with a town with a decent train, like Temuco, where I had stopped on the way down.

I rinsed my socks and undies out in the sink, took a quick shower and changed into my… not as recently worn jeans and put on a thermal long sleeved vest I’d bought with my stinky parka, put a T-shirt on top, and the parka, and headed downstairs. Just as I opened the door, a couple of men came in. They didn’t wait to ask, they just barged in. One of them took hold of my neck, turned me round and held my head down against my mattress. The other threw my stuff back into my bag and hooked the strap over his shoulder. Even from my position, I could see that the bag didn’t really go with his cheap grey business suit.

As my head was yanked back up, I lashed out, hoping to kick the side of the heavy’s knee, and as he staggered off into his colleague, yelping in agony, I would make a miraculous escape. He neatly sidestepped my kick, let go of my neck and slapped me, hard around my head. I fell to the floor, dazed.

‘Kid,’ he said.

‘Do you understand me? Do you speak Spanish?’

‘I do.’

‘OK. You’re coming with us.’

The other man passed over my passport and air ticket from Bogotá to London. He flicked open the back and checked the photo, looking at me. He tore the ticket in two and stuffed it in his trouser pocket, putting the passport in his inside jacket pocket. This was no robbery. I was worried. I thought of Ava.

‘Don’t try to kick me again or I will break something.’

I had no intention. The two of them looked tough and unforgiving. Hard faces and emotionless eyes. I was clearly just a job, and I was also not a difficult one.

‘OK.’

‘There are three ways. Unconscious, conscious in pain, and like a good boy.’

I gave a weak smile.

‘I’m a good boy.’

‘Get up then. Follow him, I’ll be right behind you.’

We trailed through the hotel and down to reception. I saw my rear guard flick an arm out, something flew through the air and the sleazy guy behind reception caught it. It was a small roll of grubby notes tightly bound with an elastic band. He treated me again to his face-splitting smile.

Sharon and Geoff were waiting on a small sofa in reception. They saw me coming towards them. I saw something in Sharon’s eye as she saw my bag being carried by the man in front. They both stood. The man behind me stepped round and simply stood in front of them, saying nothing but, I had to guess, giving them both his famous wall-eyed stare.

‘What’s happening, Micky?’

I shrugged. Man behind, who understood bully psychology perfectly, ignored Sharon and planted his hand on Geoff’s chest to push him back down to the sofa, assuming he was a kid sister; a soft handed, gringo desk jockey. Geoff had spent years running a busy kitchen in the Arizona heat, with hands, after thousands of cuts, like shoe leather. He stood firm, took hold of the wrist pushing at his chest and the other to rear guard’s throat. He was obviously holding tight. Man in front, who I had thought of as the junior partner, didn’t hesitate a beat. With his right hand he grabbed my hair holding me firm at elbow-locked arms length. With the other, simultaneously, he pulled a battered looking handgun from inside his jacket ad pointed it towards Sharon’s stomach.

Geoff’s arms shot straight in the air.

‘Go!’ he said. ‘Put the gun away and go.’

He looked at Sharon and then at me.

‘Sorry, kid. Real sorry. Take care of yourself.’

As we bustled through the revolving door, my hair still held tight, I heard Sharon yell, ‘Painted Wind.’

That was the last I could pin down as a definite detail for a while. Man behind didn’t appreciate being pulled out of a fix by his partner. As we reached the street, just before he threw me in the back of a tiny little Korean panel van, he punched me hard in the kidney. It was no friendly tap. I can describe the red splashes that brightened up my pee for the next couple of days if you like, but who needs it. After five minutes or so, no more, we parked up near the docks: sea salt smells and seagull sounds. Then it went dark and then it came light, and it was just going dark again before I heard from anyone.

I didn’t pound on the van. I was dealing with South American tough guys, I was an East London schoolboy out of his depth. Besides, I’d told them I was a good boy, and good boys don’t bang on vans, they sit tight. I was so scared I hardly dared pee, but eventually got up and peed against the back door, hoping it would find a way out. It did, though the van was so cold I think it would have been more likely to form icicles than to build up too much of a stink. As the light from the few cracks in the bodywork began to fade late on the second day, the van started up again. It can hardly have driven more than a couple of minutes when it stopped again, the engine stopped and the back doors opened. A large plastic box, maybe four feet square, was thrown in the back.

‘In the box.’

It looked too much like a coffin for my taste. I sat still.

The two men, the same thugs as before stepped closer to the van. The one I thought of as man behind stepped inside, hunched over.

‘If we want to kill you, we’ll do it. We don’t need to put you in a box to give us the advantage. Now get in and you’ll be out in ten minutes.’

Shaking, and scared stiff, I climbed into the box. I stood upright, the box edge just past my stomach. Man in front threw a lid in and man behind jabbed a finger down at the floor. I did as I was told and squatted down.

Man behind picked up the lid, but before he closed me in, he leaned down and smiled.

‘You don’t look much, kid, but you’ve really pissed off some big mean people. I like that.’

Then he snapped on clasps around the lid, slid the box to the edge of the van where they roughly pulled it off. It didn’t seem to drop far enough and I started moving, so I’m guessing I was loaded onto a handcart. Then there was a bit more thrashing around and vibration. Knowing what I know now, that would be when they attached straps because moments later, I swung into the air. Unable to see where I was or what I was doing, this was pretty scary, but as I was already pretty near the end of the red zone on the scarometer, it hardly made a difference. A minute or so after that I found myself on another handcart, then a short time in a lift, a hundred yards or so more handcart and I stopped. The lid was opened and I saw a new face.

He gestured for me to get out of the box. After the darkness I could hardly see. He took the box and cart through a door, closed it and locked it. The lock sounded like serious business. As my eyes adjusted I saw that I was in a pretty nice cabin. I already guessed I was aboard a ship. It had a single porthole—on the sea rather than the dock side, looking across the Magellan Channel, to an icy nothingness—and the room itself was probably nicer than just about any of the hostel rooms I’d stayed in so far. It had a nice little cubicle for toilet, sink and shower, with a sign warning me not to drink the water. On the table beside my bed was a bottle of water and a glass, each in a rinky-dink surround to stop them toppling over in rough seas. There was a small wardrobe built into the bulkhead and a small chest of drawers. When I looked inside, my clothes were tidily put away: tops folded in the chest, my single spare pair of trousers apparently laundered, pressed and hung up on the single used hanger. All that seemed to be missing was my passport and my mobile phone.

I guessed I would be stuck inside this room for the duration of the ship’s journey, however long that would be. I had a shower and dried off, laid on the bed, hands behind my head, to wait for the future to happen. My kidnap, or whatever I chose to call it, had been timed pretty smartly. I had been laid down no more than half an hour when the ship began slowly to move out.