(diaryland) November 05, 2010 - 7:24 a.m.

Chapter Two

Things had been a bit awkward after the group photo. Most of Bryn�s mind was occupied with the fact that he hadn�t done the thumbs up in it. He couldn�t believe Marcelle had done a double thumbs up and he hadn�t done anything. He�d forgotten why this shocking oversight on his part had been made. Because of this, it made him fume even more than if he�d remembered the reason he�d forgotten to do thumbs up was due to the fact that he seemed to be stalked by a far away cactus. He knew this thumbs up nonsense was irrational. He knew this was stupid. But if anyone was a thumbs up person, it was him. He was the thumbs up guy, not these amateurs. He�d just about brought thumbs up in ordinary photos back into fashion round the suburbs where he lived. Like, if someone was taking a photo with their iphone of a cake they�d made, Bryn would hop right in and go thumbs up in the most aesthetically pleasing part of the composition, as a public service as well as his own conceptual art hobby, in a way. His thumbs were all over facebook, tagged and untagged. Yeah, sure, usually just giving the one thumbs up was more his style, but, God. No fairs, man. No fairs.

Thumbs down. Thumbs fucking down. Jesus.

It wasn�t like he was one of those guys obsessed with having the upper hand, and that Marcelle now technically had the upper hand in this relationship. No, it wasn�t quite like that. It was purely thumb-based.

The next interminable stretch of the day was spent in a sulk. Marcelle sat next to him on the bus, but Bryn was looking out the window thinking jumbled up, irrational thoughts about thumbs, up, down, in all sorts of impossible combinations and gestures. The tour was on their way to a place near the airport, anyway. Just one more night.

He knew he was being dumb.

The headache intensified over the day. It got to the point that Bryn Mossman knew that for the first time this trip, he was going to barf not directly because of Margaritas. It was raging nausea associated with the pain of legend, this time. If someone had written a legend about Sisyphus getting a headache at work, this headache wold have been its inspiration. This headache was beyond the point of being cute.

Marcelle saw, and acted fast. She really was a good person. Sure, she looked crap when she was asleep, and she had done double thumbs up in the photo, and she was under twenty, and didn�t know that people generally didn�t have pet kangaroos in Australia, and she said, �eh� slightly more times per day than was sweet, but she was good. It didn�t even cross Bryn�s throbbing mind that she was being caring as she leapt up and said, �Stop the bus, eh! Bryn here is on the verge of vomiting!� All that occurred to him about her was that she had shouted something terribly shrilly and it made him shiver like he was trapped in a polygon of ice instead of a shabbily air-conditioned bus in the desert.

They had to break up.

Lenny and his terrible knees leapt up, which Bryn noticed through the fog of too much light trying to enter his eyes in a headachey state, and Bryn resented it. He hated helpful people that he hated, if that makes sense. He liked helpful people, unless they were people he already didn�t like. Forget it; you just couldn�t win.

That bloody French guy who had had his eye on Marcelle the whole time got up too, like an arsehole. Bryn�s eyelids fluttered. He was definitely going to chuck.

The bus driver knew what to do. The amount of times he had to pull over for people to hurl along the way on these trips was pretty much part and parcel of every day. No big deal. He didn�t like it when people climbed over each other and barfed out the windows, though. That was never one hundred percent mess-free. Technicolour yawns would drip all the way down the downwind side of the bus, and he didn�t approve. He�d made a sign about it in black texta on foolscap, but someone had accidentally vomited on it while trying to rush out of the bus a couple of weeks back. They�d also vomited on the texta and his hand, so he wasn�t going to bother trying again. It was a losing battle.

This bus driver did get danger pay because of these kinds of shenanigans. The Trafalgar tours, purveyors of nice holidays for the blue rinse set, did not, yet they were called upon at times to retrieve full sets of teeth from under seats. Surely that was fairly equivalent.

Anyway, Bryn�s two most detested Contiki Trip foes lifted Bryn by the armpits and dragged him outside, mostly just in time. Bryn convulsed as he lay in the swirling dirt, retching. Everyone gathered on the inside of the bus to watch him do that as the French guy and Lenny stood there, arms crossed, like executioners waiting for the body to cease its death rattle.

It looked like all that was going to come out came out. More seemed to have gone in, but that couldn�t be helped.

He turned onto his back, filthy. This was probably one of those many low points on his long graph piece of paper thing pertaining to his life I was talking about in the Prologue. One of a bunch to come, each time dragging his lifeline lower to the bottom of the page.

He�d breathed in a lot of the desert in between horrible dry retching; that swirly tiny sand on the edges of the cactus fields and the road was in his nose and his eyes and his tummy. He�d probably breathed in God knows what else; probably up to fifty dung beetles or scorpions or something. His lung felt torn inside.

He put his dust-caked hand over his eyes. I�m not saying his other hand wasn�t dust-caked either. Just go with me on this. Finally, his rattling body came to a sort of stillness with his legs twisting around ever so slightly at the pace of a lost worm on a hand. If he kept his hand there, over his eyes, he could feel better. He could tell. He�d just need to keep it there for about twelve hours and also somehow simultaneously be in a hospital bed and be hooked up to an IV. Dear God, he required saline. Sweet, sweet saline.

The French guy coughed politely like he wanted to bring Bryn back to reality and get up so everyone could just go back to where they were on the bus and get the hell over to the address of the final Grand Southern Tour piss-up.

Polite? That wasn�t like the French.

That was purely Bryn�s thought just above here. Not mine at all. No, sir.

Resentful of the polite coughing or not, it did the trick for Bryn. He did remember himself. What he was; where he was; how much dust was around and inside him; the fact that several pairs of sunglassed eyes were staring at him.

Oh, sunglasses. That could have been why he�d gotten so many more headaches than anyone else over this trip.

He got up, slowly and groggily. He mumbled, �water.� Someone handed him a root beer. It was then that he had to tae his hand off his eyes. Impressively, he�d done all that getting up without the need to see, probably because he�d been given a very wide berth by all who could whiff him. He had a horrible, crusty smell to him that was a lot like washed-up sea creatures. He grabbed the root beet with one hand, skeptically, and leant against the bus, near the door, with his other hand. In some ways, it was a good thing they were going to be on a bus for seven more hours, because he needed to be in a tight foetal ball shape for a while.

It was then that he looked in the rear view mirror. Things in rear view mirrors are smaller than they appear, so this was tiny. He swung his head round to look at this thing directly. This thing he could hardly believe, or be sure of. It was hard to fight the sun. So, so fucking hard, with the desert all shiny and amplifying the luminosity to the nth degree, and the air scorching itself and Bryn�s eyeballs fighting his brain.

So admittedly, he didn�t get a very good look at it. But he was pretty sure. Less sure than he had been the last time, but also more sure, because this was the third time.

That cactus that looked like a person again.

It was the furthest away it had ever been, which somehow offended Bryn slightly. It miffed him. It was like it wasn�t trying as hard to get his attention, or to communicate its message this time.

Was it exactly the same shape as the other ones? Yeah, probably. It was still giving off the same vibe. Surely it was the same one. Surely. It was alone on a hill again.

Could it be the literally exact same one? The sight lines here were incredibly unencumbered. Maybe you could see for zillions of ks. Maybe, it was just the same old cactus, the same old hill, just from different viewpoints. After all, it was further away this time. Everyone knows from the movies that evil cacti move closer to you every time you look in their direction, not further away. That was like Cactus Horror Movie 101.

Hey, wait a second. He was supposed to be pissed off at this cactus. Not Marcelle. This cactus, human looking thing was the cause of the entire lack of thumbs up fiasco of 2010. Goddamn that slow-growing fiend.

He shut his eyes in a personal gesture of forgiveness at Marcelle. He wasn�t going to say anything out loud to her about this forgiveness. He didn�t verbalise that he was mad at her in the first place, so it was fair.

He looked out again across the desert, and his heart ached in a beat.

The cactus was slightly closer. Maybe. It included the hill as well.

�Woah, everyone on the bus! On the bus!� screeched Bryn, almost imperceptibly actually due to his high lung-to-dust ratio. But his actions spoke louder than his words. He stumbled onto the bus, slipping on the top step and biting his tongue, scrambling furiously down the thin aisle and dumping his body next to Marcelle.

He needn�t have done that because about six people had taken the opportunity at the tail end of Bryn�s desert floor display to go and take a slash out in the open. If you keep at least one-and-a-half metes away from each other, you�re not a pervert.

Later that day, Bryn would invest in a pair of sunglasses and a hotdog from a roadside stop, but he shouldn�t have bothered. The sun was going down on the last day of the Contiki Trip. And Bryn threw up the hot dog after only ten minutes.

It was the end of a chapter of his life. And the beginning of a weird new one.