(diaryland) November 02, 2010 - 9:09 a.m.

OK. I'm writing a novel this November, in case you didn't know. Here's the start of it.

Chapter One � From Here to Salvador

o flower fawn
about to come out playing
in this flower water
out there
in the flower world
the patio of flowers
in the flower water
playing
flower fawn
about to come out playing
in this flower water

- Yaqui

15 Flower World Variations

Finally, he woke up.

Bryn Mossman, I mean.

When I say finally, I should qualify that. He had only been asleep for four hours. But, typically for Bryn, as soon as a ray of early morning light managed to make its way (rather admittedly fairly easily) through the unlined curtains of the otherwise reasonably nice artificial log cabin thing and warm up his cheek infinitesimally, he was fiercely awake and there was nothing he could do about it.

He had always been like that. If he went to bed past seven-thirty AM, he kind of got negative sleep sometimes. He�d just lie there for a bit, thrash around and then feel half an hour less well-rested.

It didn�t help that it sounded like eight thousand giant coach buses with toilets on them seemed to be choosing this time to depart from the other side of the cabin wall.

He turned over and roared. Roaring helped when stretching, which he was doing too. Because of the bus situation outside, the chick in his room, Marcelle, did not wake up. This was even though her right ear was in Bryn�s direct roaring line.

Marcelle was OK. She�d been sharing with Bryn for the last week-and-a-half because they�d become a couple in the inevitable Contiki way. Everything to do with other people on this trip was heightened and claustrophobic and happened so fast and not in the way you wanted. And so it was with Marcelle.

She was Canadian so she was going to go back where she came from after this holiday and Bryn would go back to where he came from. He assumed a few e-mails would happen, assumptions of meeting up again someday to pick up where they left off, vague sentences in text about one of them going to work where the other one lived, then nothing. Such was the way with Contiki, as is my understanding.

Bryn lifted his head off the flabby pillow.

Woah, bad idea.

He laid his head back down again, using his hands. His brain seared as his head made contact with the pillow. Owies.

He had an Incredible Headache. Again. In fact, soon after Day One of this trip, he had developed this Incredible Headache which was unable to be shaken off. It was a sharp headache, and he assumed it hurt more than giving birth from the temples, if you could really do that. This headache may have had something to do with being consistently badly rested and being continually drunk, trying out crappy new drinks of different colours and basically going with the crowd. Nobody else seemed to have bags under their eyes like Bryn had. Bryn�s inability to fend off eyebags might have been because he was coming to the end of Contiki Trip eligibility and they weren�t. Yeah, he was the oldest guy there by five years. He was slightly over thirty.

He was pretty sure Marcelle was slightly under twenty.

Bryn wasn�t tragic yet. If he was thirty-four and had come here on his own, then maybe. But he was only thirty-two. And had come here on his own.

Bryn got into a foetal position without moving his head. His body ended up mostly on the pillow.

God, what did he do yesterday?

Oh, yeah. He was drunk on a helicopter, going over the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon itself was a blur. He�d had four Margaritas of varying pastel tones beforehand. He had a vague idea that some French guy who kept bringing Bryn more drinks before 11AM was trying to put him off his game, so to speak, but Bryn had triumphed and had only thrown up that evening of his own volition, and still went home with the girl.

In the early morning light, through a hungover lens, the cabin did actually look crapper than he�d remembered. Maybe Marcelle did too. Or maybe she just didn�t look that good when she was asleep. Some people just don�t. Or maybe it was because she was a bit rumpled as she had spent a lot of the previous night holding Bryn�s head over the railing of a dramatic cliff so that his barf could escape to freedom instead of languishing on or near the toilet as had been happening a lot during the trip. A Lot.

It was some of the most dramatic barfing that had ever been seen by the comprehensively bejewelled night sky, except for all those other bodily releases from countless pilgrims of 18-35 trips to the Big Name tourist spots of the world.

Young tourists barf dramatically a lot in cool places.

Well, I made that up, but it sounds real. When I went to Greece, I didn�t vomit at all, not even at the Parthenon, even though I was under 35. But there was a suspicious looking puddle in the marble of the Acropolis. I�m not saying it was vomit; it was green, though. Some American female tourists commented on its unappetising look.

Bryn lay there for about twelve minutes, feeling like an eternity was passing. There was an extra dimension of head pain like a deep throb every geological age.

He had his first flashback to the desert. That wasn�t such an outlandish thing since he was currently housed in the desert, and had been staggering around the desert for the last couple of days, trying to see cacti and all that. Cacti, strange geometric flowers, mesas, really tiny sand. Shitloads of blinding, blinding searing light. Someone off in the distance, standing there in the pulsing air like one of those Sad Native Americans on posters about the Last Things. Far, far away, but with a presence.

He imagined the distant person opening their arms. He knew that bit wasn�t real because people standing far, far away in wiggly hot air can never be properly discerned. That�s a rule, quite possibly written down somewhere on the edges of the internet.

Yeah, the last few days were weirder than he�d thought. Or maybe it was just the alcohol. Or the pot someone had provided down behind the kennels at this cabin place where you�d laugh to the sound of barking in tiny spaces.

Ah, fuck it. Whatever. That person in the distance could have actually been a big cactus. Those big cactus things take hundreds of years to get to that convincing human height and girth. He knew that now. It was just about the only piece of information he had retained recently. He definitely couldn�t remember looking down at the Grand Canyon on the helicopter ride, so he hadn�t learnt anything there. He had shouted, �WOO!� a lot, though. This he knew.

Bryn Mossman got up and brushed his teeth. Or defurred them. This was the second last day of his Grand Southern trip.

What lay ahead, as far as Bryn Mossman knew, was this: get on a plane. Try and sleep in the tiny Economy seat and fail. Spend two nights in Bangkok. Fly home. Clean the kitchen which he was expecting would be ultra messy. Note that people had probably been in his room. Go back to work two days after that. Feel like he�d never been on the trip at all and deal with tons and tons of paperwork, so it felt like going on a holiday was purely a punishment.

Things wouldn�t turn out like that. Well, they would and they wouldn�t.

I don�t know how yet. Get off my back. JESUS.

Bryn found some tablets for headaches that had never quite worked all holiday and swallowed them. He chucked them up into the basin immediately. They clattered down the drainhole, still fully formed. It had a lot to do why they didn�t work very well.

Fuck.

Marcelle woke up at the sound of the tablet evacuation. Bryn didn�t understand why she didn�t wake up before, when things were happening right in her ear at a hundred decibels instead of twenty-five over the other side of the cabin. He had always been into decibel measurements. It was a hobby of sorts.

She turned over and looked through the open door into the bathroomette. You could not call it a bathroom. She saw a bloodshot man in boxer shorts with cartoon flies on them and a belly that had been formed exclusively over the course of this holiday.

�You look like crap,� she said.

�You look like crap,� said Bryn, and then immediately cupped his hand over his mouth. Partially it was because he regretted what he just said, which didn�t seem fair since she�d just said the same thing (without italics, admittedly), but mostly it was because he was pretty sure that he was going to chuck again.

Yeah, he did, but only a tiny squirt of water, squeezed from the entrance to his stomach. It trajectoried neatly into the basin before him.

He felt sore in the bottom of his tummy.

�Sorry,� he said, and then sat on the toilet with the door still open.

That was when Lenny opened the cabin door with great force, as it was locked until that point, and shouted, �You�ve got twenny minutes! Hey, nice toilet!� Then he gave the thumbs up at Bryn.

God, Lenny was so positive. He was paid to be that way. And his job was pretty cruisy. It seemed that as one of the tour guides, he was lucky enough to not have that �no fraternising with the clients� rule thing bother him in the least. He was knobbly-kneed and tall-haired and had probably seen enough drunken breasts of foreigners to last seventy generations of Mystery, that main guy from The Game.

Lenny�s knees were unsheathed his morning. The cargo shorts ended on the lower thigh. Those knees looked like they had been beatified, the way the piercing morning sun was creating a halo behind them. The knees disappeared to bust in on someone else trying to pieces their lives back together on the toilet. The knees had taken the rest of Lenny�s body with them, thank God. I hate it when knees walk off and leave the rest of their bodies behind, a gap in each leg. It�s the worst.

�I can�t do it today. You�re going to have to stop them,� said Bryn, talking through his teeth and his hands and a towel.

It was Group Photo day.

�I can�t, eh. It�s just the way it is,� said Marcelle. Bryn was starting to think that she believed in things like karma and just desserts or something. She did work in a health food store.

Fifteen minutes later, he had been in the shower for fourteen and had no intention of not being in the shower anymore. It as unthinkable until all the drunkenness washed away. It could take days; he knew that. His head was tucked in the light blue tiled corner. It kind of felt OK like that. Removing it from its new home would be bad.

Suddenly Marcelle pounded on the door and Bryn�s head flew out of that cosy, pointy corner anyway. He realised he�d been snoring. In the shower. Wasn�t this how Jimi Hendrix died or something?

�Come on, man, I�ve got shower rights too, you know!� Yelled Marcelle through the torrent.

�I just need to be more of a prune. Give me a moment,� he shouted back weakly.

Not sure if you can shout things back weakly. It could just be classed as answering.

One of the miracles of the world; one of the Incredible Unexplainable by Physics things like hummingbirds� wings, or that church in England that�s not supposed to stand up because it�s not structurally made right or something, is that Bryn Mossman somehow got to the Group Photo on time. Marcelle made it too and she didn�t even look crap anymore, maybe purely because she was awake now.

They all gathered at the point which had been previously been agreed upon, which was the railing over which Bryn had ejected many units of pastel coloured alcohol the previous night, and sorted themselves out according to height in front of the Obligatory Incredible View. As always, the tallest people got in front. They tended to do that. They half kneeled down awkwardly so that their legs became incredibly foreshortened to look extremely unpleasant in the photograph, and Lenny got in there right in the frontest of all, lying down with his head propped up on his hand, his knobbly knees the centre attraction of the picture.

The bus driver took the shot because he wasn�t counted.

�OK, everybody say cheese,� he said, the miniature camera in his puffy, huge hands.

�Cheese,� said everybody in a lukewarm, loose way, but the thumbs up over sixty percent of the crowd was giving were gestures of passion. The passion for experience, curiosity, learning, losing brain cells through alcohol poisoning.

Bryn Mossman wished he�d done one of those thumbs ups, perhaps even a double thumbs up, but he�d gotten distracted by something a little bit. Looking back on the photo one day in the distant future, he would glance at his dog-eared smile and distant gaze and quickly shut the �Contiki Trip 2010� folder on the computer with gusto, except with the opposite sentiment. You know, like, still fast and with a flourish, but not happily as gusto seems to imply. Maybe he just did it quickly, and with a twinge of pain. Yeah, he would close the folder quickly, one day, deep into the future.

He�d gotten distracted by that wiggly human cactus hybrid he�d seen in the desert a couple of days ago again. Yeah, sure, bits of the same deserts look the same, and maybe cactuses looked the same too, and maybe humans did. It had the exact same vibe to it, though. Wiggling far away in the brutal air, up a hill behind the log cabin complex, seeming like it was regarding him in some fashion. No wonder Bryn didn�t look that good in the photo after all that.

The crowd dispersed to get their stuff out of the dust for the last stop of the tour, so Bryn snapped out of his daze. Marcelle came over to him, touched his tummy, and said, �I gave the thumbs up. Did you give the thumbs up?�

Shit, no, he didn�t give the thumbs up. Fuck. He was going to have to break up with her.