All Of Monday’s Reasons - 2
2. Westward
Map
It was four thirty when I woke up on the first day of the trip. Leo, my girlfriend at the time, had been on holiday with me in France, where we were staying with my mother in Valbonne, back up from the coast some way in the foothills. We ate our cornflakes in the cool morning as we watched the first rays of sunlight graze the lower Alps under the clear sky.
My mother ran through a mental and verbal check-list to make sure we had everything, but I might as well have already been hundreds of miles away.
We had planned to catch the six nineteen from Antibes to Toulouse, and my dad came to the station to see us off. It had been months since I last saw my parents together and that seemed more remarkable than what I was about to do.
The train pulled in on time and I said goodbye to my parents, almost not believing that I was finally setting out for the journey I had been looking forward to for years. I was even more quiet than usual that morning as I wondered how I would react to a month on the road. Despite the veneer of teenage arrogance, looking back now I don’t think you ever really know how you will react to things when you are eighteen.
They waved to me from the platform, I sat down, the train moved west and I sank deeper into thought. Leo brought me back to the straight up and now as the train pulled away when she pushed her shoulder against mine and said,”This is it…”
This was it, and I loved it just for the moving. It was turning light, with the sun still low.
The train rattled west with the sea to our left, through the Var region while the affluence of the Cote d’Azur faded away. There were more buses on the roads and fewer teenagers zipping around on mopeds. There was no grass on the traffic islands, which in Nice would have had to be watered five hours a day inspite of the heat. The hills were covered pines and small oak trees in contrast to those bristling with villas further east; summer pieds à terre for rich Parisians.
We turned inland at Narbonne and headed up to Toulouse as the local industry shifted from tourism to agriculture. Fields of sunflowers and vines spread out towards horizons and past villages which were little more than a railway station, a butcher’s, a boulangerie, a cafe and a dusting of houses. I thought they would be perfect for an overnight stop, rather than heading for big cities.
We changed trains at Toulouse for a connection to Agen, where we had aranged to stay with some friends from school. At Agen station we hailed a taxi, and I checked the time more out of curiousity than duty. The perspex face of my watch had come off and the minute hand was pointing away up into the air at an angle like a sundial. Not bad, I thought, for day one.
The taxi pulled up and Kara, Sian and Luke rolled up to us to greet us. I paid the driver and hauled my rucksack towards the house. Aimee, Tesni, James, Lindsay, Patrick and Zarya quickly joined the welcoming committee. Patrick and Lindsay grabbed our bags and took them into the house. A beer was thrust into my hand. I finished it before I reached the doorstep, where another awaited me. It felt good to be among friends.
We spent the next few days catching up on old news, listening to music, cooking big meals and doing the things I would realise later I had taken for granted. It had been a month since I last saw my friends, and it seemed a long time after having lived with most of them for four years.
We went into town on Bastille Day for the evening celebrations of fireworks, wine and music. For a small town like Villeneuve, the display was impressive. I watched the children enjoying the display. I remembered how I used to go to the Fourth of July celebrations by the college when I was a kid. I wondered if I would one day take my own children to see the fireworks.
It seems people would never grow tired of fireworks and would always be sorry when the last one had exploded. After the display, the crowd melted away, heavily, like the smoke, and we followed them into the large square int the town centre.
On one side of the square they had set up a large stage where a band was tuning up. “Go over and ask them what time they start,” Luke said to me.
I had lived in France for a few years growing up, as I said before, and had picked up the language quickly the way kids do, along with a smattering of divorce ligitation. I went up to a man checking lights at the front of the stage and asked him. He pouted above a Gallic shrug and said, “Whenever the people get here.”
“Well, we’re here aren’t we?” I said. Nous y sommes.
“Alors, a bientot,” he said. Soon enough, then.
We went to a cafe and ordered some beers and when the music started we each threw our twelve francs into the middle of the table and drifted with the masses towards the stage. A French folk band complete with accordion and fiddle was playing polkas and waltzes which the older folks enjoyed more than the young. We swam into the crowd and danced like ravers to nineteenth century folk music, but it didn’t work.
The next day we slept off some of our first real hangovers until the heat of the late morning made us feel even worse and at the end of the week-long stay we went different ways.
I had been growing conscious that it was time to leave and do some travelling anyway. It was sad but I found myself looking forward to it, wondering how it would feel to be lonely after getting used to being among friends.
James, Luke and Patrick were heading back to England and were taking a taxi to the station later on that day. Lindsay would the share the ride with Leo and me, since he was going to Toulon for a while to see his grandparents. The girls’ next stop was Barcelona where Leo and I would meet them later. They were catching the night train to avoid having to pay for a place to sleep, travelling on the main route and arriving in the city the next morning.
I was also going to Spain, but with the emphasis more on going than Spain. We left the morning before them because I had read about a scenic route over the Pyrenees from Toulouse that cut through the mountains on a small train and that’s where Leo and I were headed.
I didn’t want to sleep through the scenery, and although I wasn’t sure if it was going to be beautiful or not, I knew that if I opted for the faster night train along the coast, then I would never know. The whole idea of the trip was to enjoy the priviledge of youth, to go by what I felt and what I heard and most importantly, to not be afraid of taking chances.
We arranged to meet with the others at the Columbus statue in Barcelona at lunch time the next day. I had never been to the city, so I picked a landmark that appealed to my romantic, if slightly pretentious notions. This was entirely practical in those days; in 1990 only stockbrokers had mobile phones and a rendez-vous really meant something. I was grateful for Leo’s company, which even now, years later, sounds a shallow confession given that I was about to leave her behind.
Risks and mistakes the priviledge of youth. I knew long before I set off that if I didn’t wander in the sun at some stage in my life it would burn away at me forever, like a love hasn’t been left to run its course.
I didn’t want to get to one day, starting another week behind a desk in a striplit office on some rainy morning in the future, wondering why I took the night train, despite all of Monday’s reasons.