Baggage

Image credit: CJ Dayrit

Allison looked down at the spidery vein that seemed to have appeared overnight, tracing the bulging blue green wavy line that now ran up her calf with her finger. Her hair was matted under her cap after her slow morning jog along the Paseo Marítimo –  its cruise ships towering over the historic port, spilling out thousands of tourists each day. Despite it being her first visit to Palma, Allison resisted thinking of herself as just another tourist. Like the networks of veins pumping deoxygenated blood back to her heart, there was a vital life force connecting her to Spain.

Sipping tea on the palm-fronged terrace of her hotel room, she looked down on the diners slowly gathering below for breakfast. It was the international uniform of the wealthy and well-travelled. Middle aged men decked out in pink or striped shorts, loose crisp white shirts, tasselled moccasin slippers. Women modestly covered in long flowing dresses, nipped at the waist by woven leather belts, hair set perfectly in freshly blow-dried bobs or casually tied into a chignon, seemingly unfazed by the early summer heat. There were one or two solitary travellers too like her. One man lounged on a pouffe scrolling on his phone sipping a short of coffee.

An older woman stood by the exit to the courtyard nearest to reception, a Liberty print carpet bag parked at her feet. Her voluminous faded auburn hair fell in waves over a tie-dyed dress. She swivelled round to reveal a crumpled cleavage and pillow-box red lipstick rather hastily applied. Where was she off to next? The ferry across to mainland Spain, then on to Valencia, where Allison had visited last year or perhaps a little further south to  Alicante? Allison had spent three sleepless nights there and now religiously carried a miniature case of silicone ear plugs whenever she travelled.

Maybe this exotic woman was an island hopper, like the young rucksacked travellers she had seen queueing at Balearia’s terminal earlier. Or perhaps she would later board one of the 100 or so planes that fly in and out of Palma Airport each day. And where was home - an unloved semi on the outskirts of a non-descript town? Allison pictured her tie-dye rotating on the washing line under leaden grey British skies before being packed away for another year. No, she deserved a better ending. Allison decided to gift this woman another couple of days in the sunshine, settling on Ibiza – imagining an inland retreat, great leathery vines carrying huge blooms of magenta Bougainvillea up and over the finca. Arriving at her new island home she would be greeted by, let me see, yes, a sinewy yoga teacher. Let’s call him Roberto, no better, Toni, a former Albert Dock worker who had moved to the island after being laid off in the 1990s. His fluent Castellano was still inflected by his Liverpudlian accent. Toni would gently strum on his guitar as they imbibed the local liqueur infused with rosemary, thyme and fennel. Who knows what would happen next?

Allison watched as a young man in reception (her son?) casually picked up the women’s bag and escorted her to reception. At least the people below were dressed for this place.  Allison knew she had looked faintly ridiculous when she had staggered through those reception doors just half an hour earlier. Whoever said that you cease to care what others think of you as you get older had clearly never stood in a hotel lobby wearing compression socks. She had tried to sneak unobserved into the dining room to get a cup of hot water. She always brought her teabags with her in a little zip-lock plastic bag in her ancient Antler bag – the same one she had bought for their honeymoon to Andalusia over 30 years ago. Too late, the waitress had intercepted her.

“Agua caliente?” Allison had asked, pointing to the coffee machine. “Of course,” said the waitress, the faintest flicker of distaste as this British tourist wiped away the sweat that was beginning to pool under her cap and trickle down her crimson blotched face. “Gracias,” said Allison keeping up her one-sided exchange in pidgin Spanish. “Not at all,” the waitress replied curtly. She had carried the tea back up to her balcony where she could cool down out of sight.  

Breakfast was coming to an end.  The buffet of yoghurt, cold meats, cheeses, slivers of fruit, preserves and fresh bread were being discreetly packed away while latecomers lingered. She wouldn’t rush down now; she would just have a coffee in her room. There was one of those little N’Espresso machines tucked away just above the safe and the mini-bar. Her eyes shifted away from the courtyard scene below, past the large, shuttered windows to the bed where she had slept after arriving late last night. The starched linen remained untouched on the left-hand side – the side Chris usually slept on.

It had been her idea to visit Palma – its cultural and linguistic ties loosely tying it to mainland Spain and, in particular, to Catalonia. An echo of where she and Chris had first met. She had loved that they had begun their lives together teaching English in Barcelona. Their gap years, forever binding them to that corner of Spain, even though they would return a year later to the UK where they would later marry and raise their family. Their children, grown up now, with busy, complex lives of their own would often laugh at her romanticism and her physical yearning to return every year.

She had been only 21 when she moved to Barcelona. She had felt restless that first summer after graduating from Glasgow University. Returning to her childhood home, degree certificate in hand, she would stand at the bus stop outside the Caledonian Brewery on Slateford Road, the sickly aroma of burnt barley redolent of her teenage years spent waiting, wondering, wanting. The air on Saturdays blue with the distant chants of Hearts fans, tinged with menace if they were playing against their old rivals Hibs, their hostilities openly spilling out from the pubs and takeaways strung along Gorgie Road. Sitting in the back garden of her parent’s terraced house, the distant chimes of Mr Whippy or Walls ice-cream could be heard across the disused railway line that separated their street from the rows of Shandon colonies. Small enough for a child to squeeze through, they used to seek out a gap in the wrought iron railings before running down its steep, grassy slopes to the line below.

“Allie”, her older sister Binkie would call out, exasperated, ‘Mum says you’ve to come back now for tea.” This forbidden playground for children growing up on either side of the tracks – that first cigarette, kiss, fight, fumble, love bite before they grew tired, bored or their families moved away. The bus stop on Slateford Road was opposite the fish and chip shop where she and Binkie would queue up on Friday nights: “Do ye want salt’n’sauce on that hen?” Allison never would get used to chips down south, nostalgic for Edinburgh’s peculiar briney blend.

The No. 44 bus would take her right into the city centre, when every August it would come alive with Fringe perfomers in a swirling dervish at the foot of the Mound. The host city bristled with this unwanted invasion of English folk, emerging fresh-faced from Waverley Station, gigging on the cobbled Royal Mile.  For Allison those four weeks every year gave her a taste of freedom and her future. That summer after graduating she had landed a job as a reviewer on The List magazine, albeit reviewing shows for the under-fives. Allison would set off each day, spiral notebook and pencil in hand. Returning later to her attic bedroom, having filed her copy, she would lean out of the Velux dormer window puffing smoke rings and wondering where life would take her next.

After getting dressed, Allison decided to visit Palma Cathedral  – getting her bearings by climbing the 215 steps up to the terraces and soaking in its views across the city and out to the Mediterranean Sea. Descending into its cool exterior, like countless before her, her eyes were drawn upwards to the spectacular Rose Window flanking the east side of the cathedral, studded with 1,236 pieces of stained glass. Gaudi’s crown of thorns illuminated canopy loomed large above the altar. Then following the well-trodden route round to the Chapel of the Holy Sacrament she stumbled unawares onto the Modernist masterpiece of the Mallorcan artist Miquel Barceló. His marine murals picked out in shimmering tones of blues, grays and greens, creating a subterreanean fresco, at turns wondrous and overwhelming.

Later, sipping a chilled vino rosado at the seafront suburb of Portixol, just along from Palma’s city beach, Allison took in the seaside scenes around her.  

Menu del dia

The fideua was as good as the waiter had promised. She finished with the traditional Gató d’Ametlla almond cake and an expresso. It was now 5pm. She had been sitting in the café for nearly two hours. The pebbled beach directly in front was clearing a little with tourists packing up, making way for young families to take their place in the early evening sun. It was the best part of the day as the locals gathered on the cooling sands.

Allison watched the children race down to the water’s edge teasing each other to jump up and over the waves. She had always been a strong swimmer and loved the sea, unlike Chris who hated beaches – “Too much sand”, he would joke every summer holiday. Allison would make her way out beyond the shoreline in long purposeful strokes to the buoys marking the perimeter of the safe swimming area. Sometimes, she had gone out of sight to where the yachts were moored or behind a jutting headland away from the hue and cry of the beach. “I wasn’t drowning,” she would say grinning at her shore-dwelling literary husband, “I was waving”.

Allison smiled at the memory. Chris was just as impulsive as she was, just as prone to pushing past the buoys to the unmanned seas beyond, just as likely to say why not when common sense suggested why now. They had always egged each other on to try new things. Even now, he was probably at home planning some half‑mad scheme involving their campervan, a map of Europe and a playlist of songs they’d forgotten they loved.

Travelling alone wasn’t her means of escape. It was simply her way of stretching her limbs, of remembering the young woman who stood on the steps of Sagrada Familia with a notebook of ideas in her pocket and a whole life ahead of her. She wasn’t running from anything; she was simply taking stock.

Allison reached for her phone and opened the photo she had taken earlier of the Rose Window, its stained glass blazing in the morning light. She would send it to him later. And he would reply, as he always did, ‘Wish I were there with you. When are we going  together?’

She smiled, looking out at the setting evening sun. They would. They always did after her solitary recces.

Back in her hotel room that evening, the bed re‑made, coffee pods restocked, her compression socks still hanging on the balcony, she felt a familiar spark - the one that had carried her from Scotland to Spain to her later life in the Home Counties and was still ignited, on the cusp of her sixth decade. In a few days she would board the ferry and make the eight hour crossing – back to where their life together had first started. Barcelona.

This abridged short story, inspired by a stay in Room 105, Icon Rosetti, Palma de Mallorca, is the first  in Baggage -  a series of short stories set in hotels.