Jamie Drew has a blog

Notes on being lost

“Guys… where are we?”’

‘That’s still not funny,’ Jeff tells him.

‘Seriously, though?’

Jeff exhales, beats out a 3/4 rock pattern on the hot roof of his old, red Fiat and looks around. Somewhere sunny, with a salty taste to the air muddied by the car fumes. There’s a village perched in warm colours on the cliff a few miles down the road, a small team of backpackers hiking behind them, heads down. One of them is called Katrina– Kay, for short. He knows this because it’s impossible to forget. ‘Cinque Terre, I think. That’ll be Manarola, over there.’

‘This is what, the third time now?’ Pete says, running a hand through his hair like Kay will do later. Just yesterday he had– will have– will have had just a handful of hairs to count in his chair in the old folks’ home. Jeff comforts himself with the thought.

The backpackers trudge past them, sweating and heaving. Jeff can hear metal in someone’s earphones, bursting into the quiet afternoon and over the Riviera.

‘Three,’ Jeff says, to break the silence.

‘Well,’ Pete says, gripping the Fiat’s door and getting ready to push, ‘we wanted to travel.’

Jeff had relented to this trip the first time around, a man unsuited to adventure and willing to try out this travel thing, but had had no desire to hit a spacetime rift between Kelvinbridge and Partick and bounce back into this single holiday with his former best mate– emphasis on the former– three times or more. As he pushed the Fiat towards Manarola, the muscles he’d built for his next gig long gone, he berated himself for not checking out the car before setting off.

‘I’m fucking tired of this,’ he pants.

‘Whit?’ she cries. She is his eight-year-old sister Hailie and he’s idly strumming on his dad’s nylon-string guitar for the first time. It’s a rainy Sunday in Ayrshire. He’s ten years old, and he isn’t the best of friends with his sister just yet– that’ll come when he breaks her first ex-boyfriend’s nose. ‘Why d’ye sound aw poash?’

He sounds all posh because in thirteen years’ time, and two years ago, and now, his manager tells him Americans can’t understand a word he says. It drives an impenetrable something between Jeff and Hailie, so he tells him to stick it up his arse this time around.

‘Noan-linear causality,’ he says, some time later.

‘What’s tha’ then?’ the old man asks him with that look in his eye you get when you forget someone’s name. His eyes, once blue, are glazed over and vanilla-white. Jeff isn’t even sure Pete can see him, let alone recognise him.

‘Fuckin’ around wi’ time travel.’

‘Oh. Aye, I did tha’ once.’

In the village, the Fiat slows and stops, perfectly at home among the reds, pinks and yellows. An espresso is raised to them from a nearby café– Kay always says that was for Jeff, alone. Pete thumps his head against the other side of the car, leaves it there a few minutes while he watches the sun set behind him, over the Riviera, in the glass.

They weren’t going to Partick together. Jeff had been on his way to meet Hailie and his brand-new niece at the Kelvingrove. Pete thinks “unfinished business” dragged him from a stage lighting rig in Oxford into his 22-year-old body. Entanglement, he called it, with that look in his eye you get when you don’t understand quantum physics but want to sound impressive.

Suddenly, Pete starts to laugh. A madman’s laugh, tired and unstoppable. ‘I almost killed you today,’ he says when he calms down, between breaths. ‘The Fat Boab. New Year’s, 2014.’

‘Aye. Cannae say it isn’t temptin’.’

In the cold, final hours of 2014, Kay has her fingers in Pete’s hair and it’s the first time the trio have seen each other since Italy. They had written and rewritten entire timelines in the backyard of the Fat Boab, hands at each other’s throats with a pint glass, a stone or simply the tightest grip they could manage.

‘I’m sorry,’ Kay had said when the screaming stopped and the world shifted out of focus, too many times to count now. ‘Just stay here. Stay.’ And Jeff had, or would have, or did, but elsewhere, and here, it had been Pete. So it goes, and lately every time they’d come back to the Fat Boab one of them simply looked into their pint glass, not at the other, and suggested everything leading to Manarola wasn’t to be messed with.

Now, every time it became tempting, Pete would show up in Vancouver, or Versailles, or Warsaw, like he knew. He’d come with a 24-crate of Tennant’s under his arm, an expectant grin on his face and they’d forget about it.

This was their third time in Manarola. In Pete’s room in their halls of residence, next to Jeff’s, they planned this trip. Jeff tapped the scorching red roof of the Fiat. Pete mumbled something in response.

‘How many beers do we have, at this point?’