The other boy’s smile disappeared. I’m sure Alun only invited me to annoy him.
“We’ll be there by tea time.”
“Really?” I’d always thought hitchhiking would be slow and dangerous.
I followed them up the road.
“You can’t hitch with a suitcase,” the other boy said, as we walked out of Vichy.
It was the first time I’d heard him speak. He was English with a posh accent.
“Leave her alone, Val.” I finally knew what his name was. “It’s only a little suitcase.”
Val put on his sunglasses as if looking at my colourful suitcase hurt his eyes. “Very groovy,” he said.
They both had well-used khaki rucksacks. Alun shifted his on his shoulders. It had a small Welsh flag sewn onto it—a striding red dragon on a green and white background.
“What are the toilets like in Italy?” Alun asked. “I’m not going anywhere they don’t have proper toilets.”
Val picked the spot to hitch a ride, near a roundabout where drivers would have to slow down. I’d always imagined that hitchhiking would involve walking along the roadside with your thumb out and your back to the traffic. I was pleased to find that it involved standing in one place. I didn’t want to walk far; I already had blisters from walking around Paris in my platform shoes.
Val stood facing the oncoming traffic and stuck out his thumb.
“You have to make eye contact with the driver,” Alun explained. “Make ’em feel guilty for passing you by.”
It wasn’t working. We stood there for over an hour and no one stopped.
“Tell me five things about yourself, Adelaide,” Alun said.
My mind went blank.
“Anything.”
I couldn’t think of a thing to say.
“Okay, I suppose I’ll have to go first. My name is Alun Gawain Davies, my favourite food is chips, I was born and bred in Aberystwyth, I wish I lived in the Middle Ages, and I’ve got acrophobia.”
“What’s that?”
“Fear of heights.”
“I thought that was vertigo.”
“No, that’s a medical condition. Dizziness because there’s something wrong with your sense of balance. Acrophobia is an irrational fear. Your turn.”
“My name is Jackie Olive Mitchell, I was born in the backseat of an FX Holden on the way to the hospital, I’m the middle child in my family, I wish I lived in the 1960s, and I’m going to be a fashion designer.”
I smiled at him. We had something in common—we both would’ve liked to have lived in another time. I’d only missed my era by a decade, but Alun was about five hundred years out of sync. Val didn’t want to play the game.
“Fucking French,” he said as another three cars went by without stopping.
“Look at those cars!” Alun said. “All the latest models.”
Another one whizzed by.
“Did you see that one?”
“It was a Porsche 911, I think.” Dad subscribed to several car magazines and I always read them.
“If we were in the Middle Ages, the first horse and cart would have stopped to give us a lift.”
“If we were in the Middle Ages, there wouldn’t be Porches for you to drool over,” Val said.
Alun ignored him. “Where I come from, a recent model Mini is a luxury car. It’s like being at a mobile motor show standing here.”
After another half an hour someone finally stopped. Alun was disappointed. It wasn’t one of the sparkling new cars, but an old truck loaded with bales of hay. Val opened the passenger door.
“You sit next to the driver,” he said to me.
He and Alun squeezed in next to me. Unfortunately the farmer was actually going in a different direction to us, so he could only take us as far as the main highway. In twenty minutes we were standing by the side of the road again.
“If you’re next to the driver, it’s your job to talk,” Val snapped. “You should’ve chatted him up, he might have taken us as far as Lyon.”
“He was at least sixty!”
“That doesn’t mean he doesn’t appreciate a good pair of legs.”
I didn’t know whether to be angry or flattered.
“She’s a hitching virgin, aren’t you, Adelaide?” Alun said. “She’ll get the hang of it.”
As we waited for the next ride, Alun explained the etiquette of hitchhiking.
“There are three sorts of drivers who pick you up. Some think it’s their duty. They might want to tell you about their children or they might want to drive in complete silence. Some drivers only pick you up because they’re bored or drowsy and they want a chat. Chatting to the driver is usually my job. Then there are the ones who think they might get lucky. We don’t have a lot of trouble with them because they usually only pick up people hitching on their own. If you do get one, they’re usually cool if you say no. Otherwise you play along. That’s his job.” He jerked his head towards Val. “They’re never interested in me, naturally. If it’s a chick, Val might be willing to oblige. If it’s a guy we jump out when he stops for petrol or at traffic lights.”
I sat on my suitcase and left the hitchhiking to the experts. All the young men in flashy red cars, who looked like they might be travelling a long distance, possibly to a Pink Floyd concert, zipped by without glancing at us. After nearly an hour, a delivery van stopped.
“Je vais à Cambery,” the driver said.
That wasn’t a long way, but at least it was in the right direction. Alun looked at Val. Val nodded. We wedged our luggage behind the seats and got in just as it started to rain. The driver shook hands with all three of us as he drove off. His name was Lucien and he was delivering ice-creams. He was the sort who wanted to chat. He didn’t speak English, but Val’s French sounded perfect. Lucien was nice, and handsome in a rustic sort of way. He reminded me of Franco Nero in the film The Virgin and the Gypsy.
We had to stop often to deliver ice-creams, but I was happy to watch the French countryside go by. The sun came out again and the roads were steaming. The fields looked clean and fresh after the rain, and such a bright green—a lot different to the dry, yellow countryside in South Australia during summer. Along the roadside, there were hawthorn hedges, some small trees hung with bunches of red berries and wildflowers—poppies, purple daisies and a plant with blue flowers that I’d never seen before. There were also hedgehogs, lots of them, most of them squashed flat, but one or two lumbering along the roadside.
I squealed. “Look out!”
Lucien braked and Val banged his head on the windscreen.
“There was a hedgehog crossing the road. We ran over it,” I said.
Lucien and I got out to look at the hedgehog, which was still in one piece, but curled up in a spiky ball with only its wet nose visible. I’d never seen a real one before. It was smaller than I’d imagined, much smaller than an echidna, and its spikes looked like they were sharp at both ends and someone had just stuck them all over its body. Val sat in the truck with his arms folded. Lucien opened up the back and gave us all an ice-cream.
We turned off the main road to make a delivery in a village that had a neglected abbey with plastic nailed over broken windows. Lucien gave us another ice-cream while we waited and Alun dripped strawberry ice-cream down his pants. When we set off again, I played I-spy in French with Lucien, hoping that it counted as chatting with the driver. I was quite enjoying myself. We crossed over the highway again to deliver to towns on the other side and Val took something from his pocket. It was a pair of dice.
“Did you steal them from the Monopoly at the Hostel?” I asked.
He ignored my question, shook the dice in one hand and threw them onto the palm of the other. “Stop!”
Lucien put his foot on the brake—gently this time.
“This is too slow,” Val said. “We’re getting out.”
We got out. I thanked Lucien and he drove off. The sun disappeared behind a cloud. It was late afternoon, but we still hadn’t reached Lyon, we
’d travelled less than forty miles.
After another hour of watching European cars flash by, Val turned to me. There was a bruise forming on his forehead.
“You try. Take off your cardigan.”
I felt silly standing by the roadside in my hot pants, with my thumb sticking out. Val and Alun stood behind a road sign where the drivers couldn’t see them.
The plan worked. The next car stopped. It was a yellow sports car, low slung with headlights hidden under flaps. Val and Alun stepped out from behind the road sign.
“Jesus,” Alun said. “What’s that?”
“It’s a Maserati.” It was a bit flashy for my taste.
Val opened the door, and threw their rucksacks on the back seat.
“Nice car, man,” Alun said, as he squeezed in alongside the bags.
I turned to get my suitcase.
“Pas assez de place,” the driver said.
“Peu importe,” said Val as he climbed into the bucket seat next to the driver and slammed the door.
Alun shrugged apologetically and waved as the car drove off, spraying pebbles at me.
“Sugar!”
Seven
Ugly Duck
That was the second time in three days I’d been left by the side of the road. I stood there for a moment waiting for something else to happen—for them to drive back and say it was a joke, for a nice lady to stop and offer me a lift all the way to Verona, for Dr Who to materialise in the Tardis and take me back in time to before I lost my folio. Nothing happened.
It was a quarter past six. I had no idea how far it was to the next town, but I knew I couldn’t walk far in those boots. There was only one thing for it—I’d have to hitchhike.
It didn’t take long. A girl hitching on her own was bound to attract attention. In less than ten minutes, a semi-trailer pulled up. I remembered Alan’s instructions for getting out at lights if the driver tried anything. I wasn’t entirely sure I could jump down from the cabin in a hurry in heels. I took out my Swiss Army knife, put it in my pocket and climbed up into the truck.
The driver was Italian and he was going to Milan. He didn’t tell me his name, where he was from or what was in the back. As we drove into the dusk, his eyelids started to close and the semi veered towards the middle of the road. I nudged him. It was obvious why he’d picked me up. He wanted something and it wasn’t sex—he wanted me to keep him awake.
His English wasn’t too bad, so I told him all about myself. Anything that came into my head—my dream of becoming a fashion designer, our house at Semaphore back in Adelaide, my neighbours in my London bed-sit. I got him to sing Italian pop songs and asked about his wife, his children, his parents, but every time I paused, his eyes would glaze over, his eyelids would droop and I had to think of something else to say.
As it got dark, the truck started to climb. The road twisted and turned its way up into the Alps. I thought of Alun and his fear of heights. I was glad I couldn’t see how high up we were. I might not be scared of heights, but I am afraid of plunging off a mountain in a semi-trailer! Acrophobia seemed perfectly rational at that point.
I talked about Terry, told the driver about the Movers and the Shakers and how they’d started off playing Led Zeppelin songs, but were now trying to write their own music. Thinking of Terry reminded me that the postcard I’d written in Paris was still in my suitcase. I didn’t want him worrying about me, though, so it was perhaps just as well he thought I was still in London, safely tucked up in my bed. For a moment I wished he was there with me, but then I changed my mind.
Terry was never good in a crisis.
It doesn’t happen to me very often, but about two in the morning I ran out of things to say. I’d had hardly any sleep since I’d left London and I started to doze. I woke with a start to find the driver asleep and the semi on the wrong side of the road. I just managed to wrench the steering wheel before we careered off the road into the darkness. I made the driver stop in a lay-by and get out for some fresh air.
“You need to sleep.”
He shook his head. He was running late and it was only thirty miles to Milan. He got back in the semi and looked at me. I shook my head. There was no way I was getting back in. It was a cloudy night. When the driver crunched the truck into gear and drove off, he took all the light with him.
I’d never been so tired in my life. My body was already asleep, but there was a tiny bit of my brain that was still awake and keeping me upright. I could have easily lain down on the side of the road, but then the moon took pity on me and came out from behind a cloud. It was full and it stayed out for a minute or two, just long enough for me to climb over a stone wall, before everything went dark again.
So there I was standing alone in an Italian wheat field, in the dark, wearing hot pants and pig-skin boots. It was all Val’s fault. I wanted to be angry with him, but I didn’t have the energy. I flattened a patch of wheat to make a nest, took off my boots, crawled into the hostel sleep-sheet and covered myself with my long purple cardigan. I opened up the longest blade on my Swiss Army knife. Just in case. I sneezed.
It wasn’t the first time I’d slept in a field, but it was the first time I’d done it on my own. In a foreign country. Even though I was exhausted, I couldn’t go to sleep. When I was younger, my family went camping every year. I tried imagining them all around me—Dad pointing out the stars, my sister cracking endless elephant jokes, my little brother throwing peanuts at me, and Mum telling us all to go to sleep.
There were noises—night bird calls, animal rustlings, passing cars. I was chilly, and there was the sneezing. How could I be allergic to wheat? My mind just wouldn’t switch off. It wasn’t that I was scared. Well, that’s not quite true, I was scared, but I didn’t know what of. Every time I started to doze, I saw my hands, my own traitorous fingers, putting my folio behind the fold-down seat in the London taxi. No matter how many times I ran it through in my head, I couldn’t undo that.
The next time I opened my eyes, the darkness full of hidden danger had turned into a bright and harmless field. I was lying near a clump of tall plants with pink flowers waving gracefully in a light breeze that was blowing pollen in my direction. I sneezed again. The field was at the foot of low green hills, beyond which were towering snow-capped mountains.
During the night I’d made a decision and it didn’t evaporate in the daylight along with my night-time fear. I had to face it; I’d lost my folio. It wasn’t the end of the world. Wandering around Europe on the off chance of running into the American girls was crazy. Going to Paris had been a stupid idea in the first place. I’d go back to London, where, with a bit of luck and fast-talking, I’d still have a job in the fashion industry. My big break hadn’t come yet, but things happen slowly in England. I’d have to be more patient. It would take a while to redraw my designs all over again, but I could do it. I’d have to face the girls at Konundrum too. They would laugh at me, but I’d just have to put up with it.
Since I couldn’t blow-dry my hair, I tied it back in a ponytail. I’d ripped my maroon tights climbing over the wall, so I put on a green pair. They clashed with the purple cardigan, but let’s face it, no one was there to be critical of my fashion sense. It was too warm for my boots so I put on my platform shoes. I couldn’t find my eyeliner (I must have left it in the railway station in Paris) but I put on some lipstick and mascara and brushed the bits of straw off my clothes.
I climbed back over the wall without damaging my new tights, crossed the road and faced back the way I’d come. I stuck out my thumb. A car and then a van stopped, but neither were going far, so I politely refused. I’d got the hang of hitchhiking. I knew I had to choose my rides carefully. About half an hour later, a pale blue Citroën stopped—one of those snub-nosed cars they call ugly ducks that look like a cartoon. There were two boys in it.
“Where’re you going?” I asked.
“We go to Paris first,” the boy in the passenger seat said. “And den to our home in Amsterdam.”
&n
bsp; I climbed in and couldn’t help smiling. All I had to do was chat when the boys wanted me to, keep quiet when they didn’t, and I’d have a lift all the way to Paris. Maybe I could even go as far as Amsterdam with them and catch the ferry from Holland.
“We go to Milan because we hear dere will be a secret Pink Floyd concert. Someone tells us it should be in de piazza outside de cathedral last night. But it doesn’t happen.”
The Dutch boys were brothers. They were very cheerful, considering they’d just driven more than five hundred miles on a wild-goose chase, and now had to drive all the way back. They shared their breakfast of chocolate milk and chocolate with me. Their names were Dolf and Thomas. Thomas (who was driving) was the older and the better looking one. He had dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and a nice smile. I was quite looking forward to getting to know him. Dolf was younger, pimply and fidgety with a mass of blond curly hair that reached to his shoulders.
“People say I look like Robert Plant,” he said, running his fingers through his curls.
“Who?” I asked. Thomas laughed.
“De singer from Led Zeppelin,” Dolf said, as if I’d said I didn’t know the name of the Queen or the capital of France.
I’d heard of Led Zeppelin, of course, but I didn’t know the members’ names. It wasn’t my sort of music. I preferred Wings and Cat Stevens, but Terry was a big fan. I could see that Dolf was trying hard to look like the singer. He was wearing tight, low-cut jeans and a girl’s blue blouse with puff sleeves. The blouse was several sizes too small for him and it was open to reveal his chest. It was a style that worked on Robert Plant, who had muscles, but on puny Dolf it just made him look like a girl. They asked me questions about Australia. We’d been driving for less than an hour when they stopped for a game of Frisbee, running and jumping like children. They were happy. Dolf had a high-pitched laugh that was infectious. I was soon laughing with them. I felt like I hadn’t smiled for a week, hadn’t laughed out loud for months.
“We learn to speak English by listening to Rolling Stones’ songs,” Dolf said when they got back in the car.