They went to the sea, Her Royal Majesty

I’ve been published by the Parisian literary journal Her Royal Majesty. The story is called “They went to the sea”. They’ve even got me doing a reading of it. Enjoy.

http://www.heroyalmajesty.ca/

Washington D.C., United States of America

Washington D.C., United States of America

It was good to get my bag back. I packed it, thought of Pedro, and left for Washington. We had returned from Cuba eight months previously.

***

Washington is designed. I run around it, and from the things that accompany me, on the first evening there. I am on a week-long business trip; my first.

I run to the top of Capitol Hill on which the senate building sits, then down towards the needle of the Washington Monument; towering and single. The paths are clean stone; gentle, purposeful, curves. From the needle I continue in a straight line, and come to the elevated hall of the Lincoln Memorial. It is cacophonous, as are the words carved into its walls.

In London, democracy has evolved without written constitution. It has wiggled and dug, changed and sprung as time has passed. Its various contortions and developments are as extensions to the nation’s buildings. Its form is somehow lumpy. Washington is by contrast, precise; a statement in perfect stone, and unrequiring of addition.

I see the city, as philosophy, from the rounds of Lincoln’s eyes; the height and point of the needle, the rectangular seat of the Capitol’s wings. The various shapes, the various articulations of democracy, aligned in one, nationally unifying, nationally celebrated, gaze.

I am in Washington and a lawyer, Pedro is in London and a lawyer.

Neither of us are in Havana. And neither of us were lawyers then.

***

We came from Cuba and asked where it was. Where was Havana at? For a pittance we stayed in a majestic apartment. It was a family home called a casa, and the family still lived there, but they didn’t bother us.

We take in the view from its balcony.

To our left, the malecon is fronting up to the sea, to the right we look out over the mix of buildings, of rooftops. The roofs seem to crack beneath us, the way a jigsaw puzzle does if you try to pick it up. I can see dogs on the roofs. The old town is ahead, a huge statue before it. Havana is a town of monuments and martyrs, slogans and loose brick.

Inside, in a basket, are a stack of magazines. “Watch out Victoria! Euro Wags hatch a plan to BED David”, from March 2009; a Good Housekeeping, vol. 228, June 1999. Another from June again, this time 2001. The salt shaker is a ceramic frog, he looks tired, older than me. There is an air of flake, of stress and patch up, about the lamps, the bed frames, the light switches. ‘Things’ aren’t thrown away here. ‘Things’ aren’t easily replaced.

There are plants throughout the huge rooms though, capturing the early morning sun’s rays. The newness of their growth only serves to highlight the odd assortment of multi-aged pieces that have clicked together to make this place function.

We walk around the city, and I write a story. The jinteros don’t bother us much. We play golf at one of the two courses in Cuba. I win, and we return to the apartment. The streets feel both safe and dangerous. We speak to virtually no one who doesn’t want to sell us something. There are two currencies here, and the tourist one, which we operate in, is where the value lies.

In Leicester Square this place is worth ten million.

A final incongruity, as we leave the matron of the house hugs us and bids us a safe trip. Pedro asks me after, “Did she have tears in her eyes?” Another nugget of the unexplained.

***

We take a bus, then a cab to get to Playa Giron, the Bays of Pigs. The place where the Yankee invaders were stopped, signs tell us. We expect historical pomp, socialist ceremony.

It is not how we imagined. We find a thin collection of distant streets where the people hate us because we refuse to spend all of our money. I ask Pedro how a one horse town can have so many horses. There are animals with xylophone ribs, dogs with big heads and small bodies. A skull will only shrink so far when you are poor and hungry, bodies go further.

We go to the beach seeking a scuba centre, we find a shelled resort. A hurricane no one told about has ripped through, years before. Homes and cabins separated like feathers by the pull, limp wood clacking in the wind. There is an abandoned lookout station on a limb of the land. At night we hear music and see lights coming from it, soft flare on the ocean. But we never see any people. Jaw bones lie on the ground.

We do go scuba diving in eye-blue seas, and after are left on the side of a dusty road for four hours longer than we should be because we will not buy a further dive. The gear hisses and I have to hold my regulator in my mouth at points. We dive deeper than we should go which is fun. But they still leave us for four hours. “Pura Vida” we say, once we have finally returned to the casa, by way of sarcastic thanks in a reference to Costa Rica. Prick.

There is a swimming pool, its bowl drained of water amongst the abandoned houses. We get out of the casa in which we have been staying and buy terrible pizza, all the food is terrible here in Cuba because there is no way to get ingredients and we have a couple of beers in the only café in town. Pedro is asked to a ‘discotheque’ by a woman who is the size of three women tied together. He declines, politely. I take a piss in the street.  

There was a war here once. But no one cares. Just give us your money they say. I say to Pedro of the casa owner that a sour cow is a sour cow in any language. He by this stage is too tired to argue with me, or perhaps he agrees.

For a non-capitalist country a tourist office somewhere has done an incredible job of selling Cuba to the rest of the world.

***

We charter a ride to Cienfugos, and take a seemingly prehistoric drive as the sun comes up. It is more apparent than ever that there are two Cubas; the one with the paved roads that the government invests no money in, and the rest left to wrack; a reflection of the slimness of the chance of a tourist coming along these bumpy roads.

Oxen are yoked to the land, and the sun is rising. The island is scrubby Caribbean; it is culture and feature less. After the dramatics of the Central American Isthmus it seems to possess an indifferent topographical nature. The barrenness of that early morning, its drive at me, is accelerated by the country’s self-professed cultural status; the assertions of guidebooks and people that culture lives and breathes in Cuba. The spirit of a revolution that, in text at least, lives on, is what the socialist state trades on. That and rum. But the land I see, is land alone; unimpressive, without bold features.

Why should it be anything else?

Cuba is at base simply a very poor country. We are the only car on the road. When we pass through villages, serf like figures, crane their necks to try to see into our windows. We negotiate the potholes, for hours.    

***

At Cienfugos there is colonially French architecture, not much more. We have awful dinners in beautiful surroundings, one in the courtyard of a townhouse, the other at a marina. At the marina the water’s smell is an unpleasant marination for the blandness of the chicken. We attend a baseball game at which we are the only non-Cubans. The national anthem sung prior to the start is as limp as the flag that remain uncracked in the air. It is hot, and the bus station is unclean. The casa owner was a surgeon, but he only wanted our money. We are running out of patience. Back to Havana.

In the old squares we drink beer and wonder about the future. We leave Havana. The future happens. Time passes.

***

Pedro and I catch up, a few months later in a pub in London near where we both work. He has been working hard; there is a line on his face, like a crease deep shirt, from it. I am shocked by the change. I wonder how I look to him. (Damn handsome probably).

We talk about the trip. I notice how places have become names. Feelings have become stories. The past has been memorialised, packaged by now. The leap onto the next stage of life has been made.

In my flat, the Motorcycle Diaries, I watch alone, one evening. It seems in some ways relevant, and in other ways a film. I think of Pedro. In our new roles the past is more a story understood than an experience shared. 

But need it be totally that?

I remember foreign sunsets seen, and hands shook, people baffled and baffled by, forests we were bored in and waters we laughed in, blood shed and tips given, beers drunk and travels travelled, Hemmingway read and tales written.

I remember a relationship with all the usual clichés of travel; written, lived and avoided.

In the Washington light I am again far from home, this time without a person I care for. There is no one to fear for in the river. The light is crystal and crystallising, ice on the buildings. It makes me think about that time once more.

It was a good time, and a time I learned. It was a time that my friend **** put up with me, and that I was grateful to him. Most of all it was a time we could pretend, and so we did.

We pretended his name was Pedro.

***

TALE OF THREE CITIES – THE MEN OF THE FAMILY

I’ve been published in a new arts and literary journal called Tale of Three Cities with a story called “The Men of the Family”.

Check out http://taleofthree.com/ for more details, or look on facebook.

Edition one features Zadie Smith, Maggie Gee, Todd Zuniga and a host of others…

Its beautiful, its solid and its so so much more exciting than the Evening Standard.

Place your orders now at the website. A snip at £8 including P and P.

Also my piece is great too, just great, everyone says so.

x

Notting Hill Gate

Notting Hill Gate

 A doctor’s mask;

 leech-like, sealed tight.

The downward escalator, a Japanese girl’s mouth.

 

Her; scared eyes.

Us; spewing lipped.

 

Going up,

so,

the kiss that I blow,

is a match that I have flicked;

a tweezer for her tic.

 

My aid to operation,

X,

(a kiss).

Panama City, Panama

Panama City, Panama

The skyscrapers of Panama City are statements of intent.  Josh, Anastasia, Pedro and I have a couple of days to feel their pull.

If the city had the time, you feel it might tell you it was moving forward. Unlike Bocas, its birthmark, its tourist draw, has no natural fragility; the canal is hard, precise and functional. Unwieldy and mammoth; the ships’ bulks move straight in it, like rail-locked trains. On both sides, the metal of their flanks are consistent in their paths. They glide, inches from the concrete edges.

Soon the ships pass through the lock. The City does not wait to see if they look back.  

***

There is a green parrot, wings clipped, in the hostel’s yard. “Ola”, it says to me, over and over.

“Ola”, I say.

 It waits for a bit. “Ola”, it says again.

***

A storm of horns summon us out into the street. The horns seem to never stop; there is no shelter from them. After several attempts we flag down a blaring taxi. Sometimes these already have passengers in them, but they take you anyway.

The vehicles are packed like Tetris pieces into the streets. Metal hangs off the cars as holes in the yellow paint disclose cables, wiring. The seats are ripped and the roads potholed. As they move each vehicle forces its own arc.

That is the way we travel, in constant, curving lines.

The cars, battered and bruised, set to it. They have places to go, broken parabolas to draw.

***

I try to negotiate on a couple of things. My first attempt is over a Panama hat because of a song I like. Over the days I also grind at a few cab fares.

My success is extremely limited. Even when a vendor is shown a lower, competing, offer, he won’t drop his fee.

I hope to find a better hat option than the quote I initially receive. I resolve to leave it to fate, to see what comes up as I traverse the City. Panama City, Panama hats, I think.

I never do get a hat.  

***

We go to Casco Viejo, the old city and the historical centre of the country. It is a succession of quiet tumble-down streets and squares that no one seems keen to love. There are soldiers on the cobbles carrying wire fences to block off an alley.  Only whippy foliage embraces the stone.

Water drips from decrepit balconies. I see a railing hanging from a high floor, precarious. It would drop onto a planked walkway; a rusty crust is all to hold it. Casco is empty, empty apart from the traffic, and the traffic does not want to be there.

There are upper windows with crumbling ledges, gaping pavements. The Gulf of Panama peaking down skewed side streets. Thin pigeons congregate in the Plaza Catedral.

The guide tells us that the Panamanians celebrated their independence in these streets less than fifty years ago. The legend goes they poured streams of champagne over their new leader’s head for over an hour. We see the building they did that in. It is now just a shell.

One of the soldiers shouts at us in Spanish as we try to go down another tired street. We turn back. Later, I ask a woman in another square what is happening. She doesn’t tell me, instead, “The police are good she says. If you see police you are safe. Don’t go anywhere else.”

***

Still in Casco, a cracked wall is next to me, I am looking out across a broad bay. On the other side of it are the towers; a New York skyline, shines. Needles scrape needles, ziggurats; shimmering in the heat.

The buildings are glass insistences.

I suppose all the people must be there because it seems like no one remembers here. To my left little stones tumble unnoticed from the wall’s face. To my right, across the water, big blocks are being hurled into the sky.

***

Two Americans get out of a busted up cab. “I think this guy has a coupla other jobs”, one says to me. “Check the sound system”. I ask him to put something on. The cab shakes with the noise as we drive back to the City, the shadows of the numerous cranes flick over our roof.

Pedro and the Australians are in the back, their faces are rictuses with the power of the speakers. In the front, I smile. I have a childish weakness for this. The locks in the doors are rattling, the wing mirror trembles.

At some lights our driver berates another, across me. Fashion posters are stretched across the buildings. So many of them are half complete, I think. There is almost an indecency to the number of structures thrusting themselves upwards, shouldn’t they be more gentle with the sky?

The cabbie gives us his number as we get out, “Call me I’ll take you around. Shopping, whatever”.

***

We walk a little back to the hostel, appraised by the men around us. This place isn’t just for tourists, I think. In Panama City you feel the eyes on you.

It is angrily hot, the car exhausts seem magnifying glasses to the sun. I try to walk in the shade, but my skin still flashes.  

The hostel has high speed Wi-Fi and bed bugs. I download the new Cold War Kids record. I can hear you louder than ever.

***

Friday night at the Calle Uruguay. Party buses, people hanging out of their windows, crank.

The hand stamps are UV at the clubs with the escalator entrances. The impression is indelible.

The young are out, tight dressed, full walleted, a marked difference from the older generation, Anastasia observes. Slick shoed against the age heeled. The lights flash and the air crackles.

The canal, the start of it all, is the slowest thing I have seen. The energy as hypnotic as the passers-by, I sip and watch. Trying to get a taxi back there is no negotiation in the excited night.

***

My tale of three cities; the ruin, the ruined and the ruinous? Maybe.

We have seen two already. I didn’t know one was hiding, under the earth and between the trees. Certainly no locals told me. But we find it eventually.

The third, and the first. Panama Viejo was the original city. Sacked by British pirates, how long back? Who cares? To our driver, it is another fare. Ruins now.  

We climb a fractured bell tower and feel more crumbling stone.  

I wonder how insistent a city Panama Viejo was once. The guide book: “it was an important base for new world exploration”. Amongst the ruins you can still see the new city’s towers. Its march is inescapable.

The three cities to each other? For me, they are counterpoints; for Panama, counterpunches?

***

Bocas Town, Bocas Del Toro, Panama

Bocas Del Toro, Panama

There is word of mouth and there are words on mouths. Accuracy aside, travellers talk.

Out here most words have the same function. As you will never know the majority of people you meet, and as escapists, travellers rarely want to talk about the mundanities of home. It is the activity of conversation rather than the substance that often indicates a successful exchange.

As I demonstrate, what people really like to talk about is their views on places. Amalgamating the opinions on our next destination, we have been told that Bocas, on a once pristine island, is ‘a proper town’.

That means that it drags with it the things proper towns do. It is dirty we are told, congested. It has bars which compete over happy hours, and is lousy with dealers. There is a main street; we imagine that to be like a blocked nose.

Independently, we assume it will be ‘a proper town’ because the guide book says it has both a hospital and an airport. These are the things proper towns have, we think. After the remoteness and peace of Costa Rica our hopes of it are not high.

***

I am with Josh in the hospital. We met he and his girlfriend Anastasia in Puerto Viejo.

A local, during an attempted mugging, has bottled him. He is bleeding from the head. The time is 3am. He has an IV drip in his arm. It winds up to an emptying bag, there are bubbles, incongruities, in the solution.  

The police brought us here. Rattling along in the back of a truck, I had to grab Josh so that he didn’t fall out. They will ask later if I am his brother.

A suspicious looking nurse opened the door a crack to peer at us. Eventually she let us in.

The doctor was under a blanket, wedged into a dirty corner. She saw us, Josh’s bloody forehead, his singlet, the thongs on our feet, and tucked her head back under the covers. Mould is growing on the ceiling of the room Josh lies in; a dirty tea stain.

After half an hour more sleep the doctor comes to see us. “He is drunk”, she says. Minutes earlier, following a prolonged period of lucidity, Josh had collapsed hard into the floor. By now he is groggy and confused. I suggested concussion. No she says, it is Australia day, “Drunk Australian”.

***

The vast majority of people we have met in Central America have been helpful, tolerant and kind. That night I am confused by the doctor’s coldness.

At dinner the next evening I express this. In an area that feeds from tourism, I say, is it not to be expected that the health and safety of the tourists would be held in higher regard by the local people? I go further, in an island community like this wouldn’t you feel an element of social embarrassment, the desire to make a mends?

Anastasia replies. She has been told that the locals view the tourists as the indirect cause of these situations. More people means more demand for drugs, more drugs mean more suppliers, more suppliers mean more crime, and so I end up propping up Josh in the hospital.

I don’t claim to understand the landscape of the argument entirely, but it does seem to explain the doctor’s mood.

***

I am thoughtful on my experiences in the hospital, what they can tell me about this remote island chain, nestling in a lee of North Western Panama.

I think, where there is change occurring it will rarely be predictable or thorough, in the gaps, inconsistencies emerge. At the airport, stray dogs walk on the tarmac.  The islands bake in tranquil, aquamarine seas. Americans score coke in the club toilets. Tensions are at work.

Looking at the murmurs in the perfect bays, the secluded beaches laid like feathered wreaths at the islands’ edges; it seems a sad place for a battle.

***

Panama is a curious mix, less uniform than what we have seen of Costa Rica. It is a jumble and I will reflect it as thus.

I enjoy entering and leaving Bocas. At the Sixaola border I am forced to unpack my rucksack, piece by piece, by a burly officer. All the time I am doing this my hand luggage bag stays hanging from my shoulders, untouched and unsearched. Eventually I walk it, unaddressed, through customs.

At the ‘proper’ airport we catch our connecting flight to Panama City. A man weighs my bags on old fashioned scales. No digital here; he slides metal across like an abacus. Then I am weighed.

Once this has happened the man asks me to open my bag up. There is a small padlock on its zips. “Let me get the key for you”, I say and begin to rummage for it. It takes me a couple of seconds. “No worries. It will be fine”, the man says with a grin, and puts the bag into the hold.

We are all held in the main airport room, and then we are invited through security. We see the dogs lazing on the tarmac. At one end of the runway there is a football field, part of the same body of land. They must play while the planes land. Our blue boarding passes are numbered acrylic bookmarks, weighty, nearly the size of a paperback. It starts to rain.

When the twin-prop plane touches down on the wet runway, umbrellas are brought for each of us, then we are escorted to the plane.

***

So yes, Bocas has that familiar theme; tourists as polluters against tourist as stimulants. But this is too simple, too uninteresting. What I try to delve into are the town’s juxtapositions.

As a product of my scar I am unable to swim. I spend most of my time in Bocas sitting on the jetty bar of a Hotel. I look out at the flat water, the other extending jetties. Mostly I write, but I read some Hemmingway too. I especially enjoy ‘The Snows of Kilimanjaro”, though I get paranoid about gangrene afterwards.

From my seat I watch the day pass. The bay is in front of me, the fishing boats cross paths in the lake-like sea. The water is a broad plane. The dive boats come and go, beyond them, shallow upside down hulls; other islands. In the sky, birds with the wings of bats, wheel darkly. They look prehistoric, Pedro observes.

I am served by charming, friendly locals. Even though I am on antibiotics I sneak myself a beer every now and again. The sun rises and sets. It is warm. Pedro says it could be the Florida Keys.

There are other things though. One evening in our room we lose electricity. There is a thrill in the power cut at night; strangely, though I am asleep it wakes me. I am aware of the sensation of complete darkness. It is disturbing. I take a while to get back to sleep.

 Neither is there any hot water.

In pools by the road side, stinking pools prickle with life. Initially I think of rain drops, so disrupted is the surface. But the sky is clear.

In the supermarket I buy a block of Dairymilk chocolate, it will taste wonderful, but before I open it I have to extricate it from the aisles of the main supermarket, the haunt of rotting meat.

Off shore there are reefs which Pedro tells me about. At night the drinks are cheap; the music, the people stagger.

Where are we, exactly?

***

I can take Josh to the ‘proper’ hospital that night because I have already been there for the removal of my stitches.

There are no signs for the entrance to the A and E. I speak bad Spanish to a man in a room like a monk’s cell, untidy files make a disjointed wallpaper. It must be the town’s medical records. I talk to him through a rough-hewn hole, a lumpy square in the stone.

He gives me directions, though I must follow them incorrectly. Pedro and I walk down a long, dirt streaked corridor.  To our right the wards open up. Metal rusting frames with black withered limbs in them. Heads creak weakly up to look at us. The smell of faeces and sweat is strong. They are crowded these wards, no white faces, no scuba accidents. Tropical disease and tropical death. Someone shouts at us to get out.

Redirected, when we find the right room, there are cobwebs in its corners. The bed sags beneath my weight. The cupboards, where the equipment it kept, remind me of my school’s biology labs. The nurse picks at me with a scalpel. Her hands are steady and firm, skilled, at odds with the building.

The toilet basin has no running water. Turning the tap turns the tap. The wall has little spats of blood on it.

***

The best thing we do in Bocas is go to dinner. A band plays. Another girl, this time a Panamanian, sits with the band, her tongue flicks over soft harmonies. She is the wife or girlfriend of the bongo player, and brings around the tips jar at the end of the night.

She wears a light, flora dress. In an interlude, they kiss in a corner; I see his hands on her back. When she sits down, she dances, her arms flick and turn in perfect, lithe, time. He is perfect too in his rhythms, using every surface, every tension in his fingers and wrists, his nails. He is natural, gifted, relaxed and smiling. She holds thick red wine in a tall glass between slender, elegant fingers.

The next day I see her handing out flyers for a club as night falls. I wonder what he is doing, another dollar gig for the tourists?

That is the complexity of this town. The beauty and poise of it, next to its realities.

Like the prostitutes of Vegas I wonder about their off-stage life. How do they cope with the power cuts, the lack of hot water? Will they have to for long? And what will they lose if and when they don’t have to?

As usual, a glance, a single encounter, is a diving board only. The pool below I can only pour myself into.

***

We are on our way to the airport early in the morning. Earlier even than the divers, who have not set out yet.

The sun is rising, and with the streets uninhabited I have the luxury of relaxed observation. During day time there is threat and heat.

I notice the roads; American style, thick and purposeful, strafed by yellow lines. I see too the real dilapidation of some of the houses. Their usual porch dwelling protagonists are asleep inside presumably. It is like looking at the theatre before the curtain is raised. Seeing them for the first time without human distractions, seeing the rot in the roofs, the splinters of wood, I realise the strength of the roads’ spell, the delicacy of its veneer.

When we get to the airport, I read “The Bocas Breeze”, a local publication with tropical, hand drawn illustrations. It is printed on thick, stiff paper. It talks of a corrupt judiciary manipulating land purchase schemes in the area. It talks of the best way to stroke a stingray.

As the Breeze shows, the town is all too aware of the possibility of expansion, the way to do it, the possibility of it. Like the drug dealers, the politics of all this has been thrust upon the place. Everything is directed towards the same issue, the next move for this odd tangle of first, second and sometimes third worlds.

Preparing to leave, I wonder how the islands will endure. It is as hard to say in what capacity as it is to find any current uniformity.

On the flight out I look over the islands.  I see their slow give-and-take with the sea, the stately green drops amongst the blue. The view only serves to highlight the spasming nature of the current human erosions. The lines being snorted and heads being broken.

I am still of the opinion that it is the future which will define this rope of islands, and I still believe that the tug of war will be no great thing to behold.

Even with all of it, what is undeniable is that they possess something, a quality.

Another, less journalistic thought, occurs as we head for the smoke of Panama City. Though I do not think expansion inevitable, like looking at teenage talent, I think how interesting it has been to see the islands as they are now, to see them in the midst of their growing pains.

***

Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica

Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica

What is the point of souvenirs? They sell some, not many, in Puerto Viejo. They sell them on the punctured track that is like a shadow to the beach. From the stalls rainbow cloths drift on hooks. Linked beads bask. The sun. Sky-coloured stones.

Should I buy something? Something to leave on a whitewashed shelf in a rented apartment? Something so I can have a little gallery in a bedroom in Old Street, or give a present to cold roaded Fulham?

I went there, it would say for me. Undeniable. Tangible. I could let it be my excuse; like a physical opinion. 

We are leaving Costa Rica soon.

Good pupils should have something tangible to say, we have been taught. They need to draw solid conclusions. They need to get their souvenirs. What have we learned?

***

It can have no more than fifteen roads, but we have disappeared into them.  Gently and silently Puerto Viejo smothers time.

They call it the Jamaica of Costa Rica. Toothpick porches and tin roofs. Slow pavements. Reggae and weed. A settlement, settled, by a weary sea. On wooden pylons, drooping, a confusion of wires.

Turn on the spot and be wrapped in the Rasta flag. The yellow of the chalk boards. The striped green of painted pillars. The brightness of the clothes on dark skin.

Racial homogeneity too, every hue from careless black to wan yellow. Dreadlocks, with the texture of wasp’s nests. Weave. 

On the beach the sand is tired grey, the water a thin blue. I sit on the swell at a curved palm’s base. I watch the people swim; they are boxed into troughs by the sharpness of repeating shale banks. Plump children, muscled male frames, the women’s bodies are generosities. Beneath the men’s skin are dark cords; worked veins.

The children play in the shallows, salt and curled hair. Looking out over the surf, the smudge of forested islands. In the deep, a reef break pours. The spray is the colour of my bandage. 

When I trail my feet through the water I can see the bulge of my knee cap, in my white, narrow legged reflection. “Casper”, the men shout, “Hey Casper”.  

At night the fires burn. The flames leap like hands. There is always the richness of smoke in Puerto Viejo. The thickness of dope. Outside their houses the people leave the fires. Dogs meander between them. The street meat sellers waft their scents at us, the sound of bending card. There is a jungle pig, spitted. Gradually, it turns.

In my memory, I walk all this only once. It takes me four days.

***

The dream of the party hostel is as follows; cheap living, hammocks for worry and a vibrant community brimming with new, international, friends. The reality is shit in the showers, mosquitos, thievery, and base people spreading venereal disease. 

Our mosaic palace lasts one, bed bug ridden, night, and then we move on.

No names are taken in Puerto Viejo. It is other worldly here. We return to the hostel for a full moon party.

On the surface, the theory of this life seems sound enough. The maximisation of concepts we are all familiar with; relaxation, easy living, time out. Sunday supplement style; I could write it in fifteen minutes, eyes closed; “Rough Glamour Sands”. Does anyone need that piece?

Honestly though, I don’t see those things in the people I meet. I see worms under the skin. Jobs lost. Identities sought. Drugs for walls; and washing; and talking.

Scrappy moustaches and stained fabric. A sign reads, “maximum stay three months”. Pedro and I laugh. But, people do it. People never want to leave.

An American is red, bare chested at the bar, his mouth is an animal. He tenses his muscles, smashes his arms into the wooden top. Behind the bar is a lantern in which are kept the souls of people who sold them for a drink. Handwritten names on paper are tacked to the inside. Nasty, sweaty spirits.

We sit on the beach; the jungle juice they brought in a bucket has had its way with Pedro.

I feel alone amongst the lost boys. And I am sad, because I always thought I might like to be one; the nobility of abandonment. I try to look at the moon and the beach, no words come.

On a log, four bedraggled guys smoke a spliff. I’m not a user, but I have no problem. Sometimes here the air is quite fragrant with it. But there is only frustration in me as I look at them now. I see the affectation in their languid hands, the screw-up face at inhalation. It is the same the world over. Jerk your chin up, pout the smoke out.

I’m going to take Pedro home. As we leave, “Stay lost”, I think.

***

The warp of the hostel aside, the town is the most gentle of collisions. It rocks me to sleep. I couldn’t tell you what I did there to pass the time.

The kitchens remain in my thoughts though. We must have visited them. We must have eaten?

I remember them as thoroughly Caribbean; staff startled that you might want to order, bills which emerge so slowly you wonder if they want you to pay. 

We eat wraps with jerk chicken; the tang of hot sauce. We eat smooth refried bean. We taste the sweetness of the shrimps in ‘Mare Nostrum’, chilli and garlic speckled, their juices running into mounds of warm rice.  We drink smoothies, candy floss coloured, buckets of iced melon.

The town is slow cooking, infused, alive with it. The air absorbs it, mixing it with the scents of the trees. You could stir the air but for the snap of salt water, the hiss of the sea, a tonic which mercifully is never far away.

***

The lull of Puerto Viejo is not easy to shake, we extend our stay. We say it is so my arm might heal. We don’t analyse this statement too much.

I read and I write. Pedro, though only at my insistence, scubas.

One morning we do decide to brave the potholed roads and cycle down the coast. We get up early and hire one gear pushbikes. We weave in and out of the craters; cars overtake us as they weave too. It takes us a while to work out you need to peddle backwards to break. We sing, “Is this the way to Man-zan-illo”. There is only one road, so it is.

On the road we hear the honk of the howler monkeys, intimidating in the trees overhead. We see a sloth climbing a tree; the smooth, slow, extension of its limbs. At one stage a car nearly runs me off a bridge. Pedro says that it was 50/50 my fault/his fault. A snake whips its tail off the path before us.

It is 13k to Manzanillo. When we get there we take photos before its creaking black and white sign, bubbles of rust worry its edges. The town is even smaller, and slower, than Puerto Viejo.

I think, there is no ceremony to things here. Things just happen as they do. The future is vague. This tiny group of buildings, the whole Caribbean coast, seems smaller even than the thin chapter in the guidebook.

Faded colours in Manzanillo, a big man occasionally cuts the heads off coconuts with a machete.

We sit in a popular soda and eat lunch. I think of the difference between a place being full and a place being busy. Nowhere has ever made me think this before.

We watch a Rasta, with a beer in one hand and a dog on a lead in the other, go and greet his friends. The beer sprays and froths onto the dog’s back. The glint of the sea is behind this scene.

We walk on the beach. Then we cycle back. It is a good day.

***

The bridge at Sixaola will take us from Costa Rica. It goes into Panama. It looks like an unwashed cheese grater, its floor is planks and wire, and there are holes in it and a river below. Too soon we have left Costa Rica. Urchin boys ask for money; their teeth are good.

We do not give the urchins money, nor have we bought souvenirs.

At times I feel deflated, by the pace at which things happen, by my inability to give suitably sharp analysis. At times, I feel I have learned nothing of the country we have just left. What was the point of it?

But sometimes, little things do make me think that I am not entirely blunt.

Today, we took the public bus here. After a while a girl got on at one of the banana plantations. We had been driving through them; past the rows of blue plastic bags they hang over the fruit to speed its growth. In front of the banana trees, that was where she got on.  

She had beauty; very slim, finely made-up, and tall. Her belt had a hint of design about it. None of these things were what you would call big. The beautiful exists, in variant, throughout Costa Rica. But she was different, I recognised her as that. I could not say how.

Is that not the way of things? Isn’t it always easier to say what something is not, than what something is? The via negativa, the road to Manzanillo.

It is something I find hard, and not just now. I imagine you, wherever you are, looking out of your window. Can you tell me something definite about the place of the things that you see? Is it a wandering couple, a man on his way to work, a landscape, the sea? Is it a bus stop?

We are in Panama now and I am remembering the girl on the bus. What I know, I don’t know. But it is something.

***