Sixteen hours after takeoff, I walk out into the arrivals hall at Heathrow. I’m feeling stoned and confused. I’m not sure if the issue is one of time or space. Maybe it’s the weather (raining in Bogotá, raining in Madrid, sunny in London). Maybe it’s the joint I shared with Ricardo yesterday … Was that really just yesterday? But it’s probably all of the above. I left Bogotá in the early evening, snoozed in a plane for ten hours and found myself having lunch in Madrid. I then dozed for another three hours and woke up here in London. Nothing in our genetic makeup was ever programmed to deal with this. Our bodies will probably take another million years to catch up.
I head straight for the train station. I’m travelling with hand-luggage only, quite proud of the fact that my days of lugging suitcases around and flying home with unworn clothes are now over.
The train journey to Camberley takes another hour and a half – an hour and a half I spend trying to coax my iPhone to connect to a network, any network. But despite Comcel’s assurances that my Colombian sim card would work here, it clearly doesn’t. And now of course I can’t call Comcel to get it fixed, or Jenny to see if she’s home, or even check my email to see if she knows I’m coming.
Between these increasingly hopeless checks to see that my phone still doesn’t work, I look around the carriage and play spot the difference. When you return home from a long period overseas, something new is always revealed about your countrymen. Today I’m noticing how varied everyone’s clothes are. There are guys in sober suits, and a lad in a pink hoodie, and a woman with bumblebee stockings. The guy opposite me is a goth, with pink hair and zips on his clothes and an assortment of scrap metal protruding from his head. Who would have thought that goths still existed? In Colombia, as in most of the world, the majority of men still haven’t strayed from white shirt and pleated trousers.
I’m noticing how at home I feel too. Even though these people have nothing more to do with me than the average Colombian, I understand who they are. I have no worries about how they might behave.
And whereas when I lived in France, I always used to notice how often the Brits smile at each other – how often they laugh – today I’m noticing how subdued everyone seems. I wonder what the French must think when they arrive in Bogotá. The effusive carnival of Colombian society must be quite a shock for them.
The sun is setting by the time the taxi pulls up in the anonymous close containing Jenny’s mother’s house. Stupidly I don’t ask the driver to wait, so by the time I realise that no one is in, he is disappearing from view.
“Shit,” I say tiredly. The best laid plans of mice and men. Or in my case, I would have to admit, the worst laid plans. No working phone, no-one in, no taxi, nowhere to stay.
“You twat,” I mutter, heading for the neighbour’s house.
On the doorstep, are two red-cheeked gnomes. They are something I never really believe that people actually own. I stand, staring at them in a tired daze until I hear someone unlatch the lock.
“There’s no-one there,” the woman, who looks uncannily like June Whitfield, says as she opens the door.
“Hello. Yes, I know,” I say. “Do you have any idea where she is, or when she might be back?”
The woman thins her lips and stares me in the eye. I realise that this thin-lipped pulling in of the mouth is where the thousands of tiny wrinkles around it have come from.
“I’m sorry,” she says, looking not-very-sorry-at-all. “I can’t help you.”
A wave of fever sweeps over me. I feel so overcome with exhaustion I might just faint, or cry. “When did you last see her?” I try.
“You’ll have to ask her daughter if you want to know more,” she says.
I frown. “Sarah?”
The woman tuts warming very slightly from “glacial” to merely “icy.”
“Look, who are you looking for?” she asks.
“Jenny,” I say. “Jenny Holmes.”
“Right,” she says. “Sorry, I thought you were looking for Marge.”
“Well, no. She’s dead isn’t she?” I ask, wincing at the realisation that I should probably have used, “passed away,” or some such euphemism.
“Yes. I didn’t know if you knew, you see.”
I nod and force a smile. “Sure. I understand. No, I’m here for the funeral.”
“I see.”
“So can you help me? Do you know where Jenny and Sarah are?”
“I’m afraid I don’t. They left the day … well, the day it happened.”
“Do you have a number for her? Because I only have the house number and her email address, and she doesn’t seem to be answering email. Well, she wasn’t answering when I left.”
“I’m sorry,” she says, crossing her arms now. “I can’t help you.”
“Do you know when they will be back?”
“Well on Friday I would imagine,” she says.
“Friday?”
“For the funeral.”
“Right,” I say. “And do you know where that is?”
The woman sucks her bottom lip and then says, “Look love, I’m sorry. I don’t know you from Adam. I have to go. My tea’s getting cold.”
I watch the door close and think, “So much for the friendly Brits.”
The neighbour on the other side isn’t in, and the man in the house beyond that, who is fixing the wing mirror on his Freelander, tells me that he’s sorry, but that he “Didn’t have much to do with her.”
But as I turn despondently away, he adds, “I think the funeral’s at Saint Paul’s if that’s any help.”
I pause and look back. “Saint Paul’s?”
He laughs. “Yeah, just the local one.” He nods beyond me towards the main road. “It’s just over there. I think that’s where the missus said they’re having it.”
Saint Paul’s is less than a hundred yards from the entrance to the close, but it’s locked and bolted (I for some reason assumed that churches, like petrol stations were open 24/7) so I add the phone number to my non-functioning iBrick and start to walk back towards the town centre wondering what to do next.
I take a bus back to the station, and for want of a better idea, take another train to Waterloo. If the funeral isn’t until the day after tomorrow then I might as well head for London. Two nights in Camberley on my own isn’t what the doctor ordered.
Unsure if I need breakfast, lunch or dinner, I eat a reliably bland cheddar sandwich from the trolley and then at Waterloo I take the tube to South Kensington.
I once stayed in an Easyhotel at South Ken’ and I remember it being cheap and I remember the street being stuffed with other low-cost hotels. But more than anything, in my exhausted, despondent state, I’m feeling the need for some kind of familiarity, no matter how corporate, no matter how orange.
I check into a windowless, not-quite-as-cheap-as-I-remember room which is stunningly tiny. Indeed, the single-piece moulded bathroom is so small that when I bend over in the shower to pick up the soap I have dropped, I actually hit my head on the edge of the toilet bowl.
I briefly wonder if I shouldn’t have checked some of the other places in the street first – but I don’t wonder for long. Within seconds I sink into a groggy, jet-lag, or perhaps concussion-induced slumber.