Overland to the World
Peaking into the Lurkingplaces
A short story
I.
Geoffrey Snow spotted Ava Hargrove, lounging across the back four seats, like some elegantly bored Cleopatra awaiting the arrival of Marc Antony— or her asp if Geoffrey finally resisted — once and for all.
Eye contact with Ava could be avoided if he was blind. Her stare was everywhere — a presence awkwardly awakening in his navy khakis. Her bare arm was used as a pillow. Her blonde, slender hair was always up in public, but plummeted like Victoria Falls in private.
This was her third ETA tour. She “insisted” Geoffrey as their tour guide. Who else would do the job — just right?
“He’s simply the best,” Ava always said. “Brought to life from the pages of Jane Austen.”
If Geoffrey Snow was too educated for any practical purpose, then working as an international tour director was ideal, as long as remaining single, British, and poor remained respectable.
But for one unaccustomed to labor, with back-to-back tours through the spring, summer, and early fall, it was agonizing. He liked to imagine he was a “man of the people” until he started mingling with so many people. Why sacrifice Art and Talent and Time by deigning to dazzle Susie and Willie “Slip” Smith from Sioux Falls, South Dakota about the wonders of the Rosetta Stone and a Grecian Urn?
But such snob thoughts — were they really Geoffrey? Or an affectation?
How long could he endure a nomadic lifestyle? When would that one lass appear — a lass with intelligence and charm and resistance — to, well, establish a family? When would it be time to step off the motorcoach, take off the ETA costume, untie the ascot, and retire his red and blue name tag?
Since graduate school, Geoffrey Snow, in the suburbs of thirty, had worked for Education Travel Adventures. He knew that packaged tours, many from the States, were largely for the shy, scared, or lazy traveler who didn’t really like traveling, but still felt obligated to see the world from a coach window — especially the Americans, who largely treated Europe like Disney World; Cinderella’s Castle was the American hajj.
The American pilgrims on this tour all hailed from the same Catholic Church in New Jersey.
Each year, Ava Hargrove organized the trip. For her efforts, Ava received benefits — a free trip, stipend cash for each traveler enrolled, and — well — sex. The husband — or the ‘forever fiancé’ back home — never joined the pilgrimage.
An affair is one thing. But now it was a yearly “fling.”
And now that he had finally released that partially engaged Italian woman from his imagination, he could open himself to the possibility of traditional respectability — and get married! If he wasn’t married by forty, he reasoned, he would give up the ghost and remain forever like the western wind — unchained — or like the infamous Mistral — that Provençal wind.
There was no emphasis on “no” last year, but lately, there had been a Trinity of Losses for poor Geoffrey. First, he ended that morning that mad, bad, and dangerous quest of the partially engaged Stefanie — an Italian woman — that you may know — having read that comic and pathetic preface about the three Chelsea pugs that saved poor Geoffrey. That all happened prior to setting out on the Tube for Heathrow.
Also, his three-year-old blue beta fish ‘Sushi’ gave up the gills.
And his debut, his premier novel was just relegated with suggested edits if he wanted to join the ranks of the terrifically unread literati of Britain. Would writing for Netflix be a better option?
With all of her passengers and parishioners around at Heathrow, Ava introduced Geoffrey to everyone, grabbed his hand, and then she slipped a pink note into his palm, which he pocketed to read later.
He hoped it read: “We need to end this. I am getting married soon.”
As soon as Geoffrey spoke, Ava sighed, and said, “He’s our own Mr. Darcy, isn’t he? Didn’t I tell you, everyone, you would fall in love with his voice?”
Up until that point, all that Geoffrey had said was “Welcome to London, everyone. I’m Geoffrey Snow, your Tour Director. It’ll be my pleasure to get to know all of you better as we tour the gems of Europe.”
II.
The first day in London was cool and breezy: an April morning after an Irish rain. The tour, too, started smoothly. The traffic was light — Zombie Apocalypse-Light — to the Lancaster Gate Hotel near Hyde Park. During the drive, Geoffrey sauntered up the aisle, dangling charms before the forty ‘pilgrims’ about the wonders on the “Cultural Capitals of Sophistication Tour” — London, Paris, Lucerne, Venice, Florence, and Rome.
This one fifty-some-year-old woman with two-toned blonde hair, and seeming double D breasts in a sea-blue V-cut blouse, with perfume acting like reconnaissance, bounced like a pinball down the chute, leaning over fellow passengers, apologizing, taking snaps of sites: the tobacconists, the off-license, and the kebab shops. Simple things excited her — the “for let” signs and the spellings of “centre” and “colour.”
“I’m Cookie Berne,” she gushed to Geoffrey, holding out her paw. It was soft and lathered in lavender moisturizer. “You’re so young and well-groomed. Except for that gash in your beard there!”
He smiled. “In the mirror this morning, I noticed not so much crow’s feet, but little finch-like talons mucking about my eyes.”
Cookie laughed. “And you’re so funny! I was just telling my husband, Bill, that’s Bill back there, with our friends Dot and Mat, that if I were ten years younger, I’d be all over you.”
“Why would you want your husband jealous?” he asked.
“Are you that naive about married women, Sir Geoffrey?” she replied.
Seizing Geoffrey around the shoulder, she snap a pic. On the cheek, she kissed him — with more moisture than a Channel crossing in winter. He smelled his blazer. Eau de Cookie would cling to him all day — hopefully annoying Ava. As a pothole rumbled the coach, Cookie collapsed into his arms.
“You must have a million girlfriends,” she said.
“Well, like Buddha, I tend to avoid attachments,” he said. “I can’t keep house plants or a beta fish alive. Cookie must be a nickname. In Britain, we’d call you Biscuit.”
“That’s just too much!” she gushed. “My real name is Constance. Oh, I just adore your accent.”
As soon as Geoffrey smiled and escaped, a tall man in an oversized Eagles shirt tugged at Geoffrey’s blue blazer. Was there a way to see a soccer match?
“Tou should have selected the ‘Football Hooligan Tour for Americans.’”
Was there really a tour like that?
“No, but there is a friendlies match at Wembley this weekend.”
“I told him he could see one game,” replied his wife, sitting next to him while text-messaging her mother back in Jersey. She reached across her husband and said: “I’m Jaslen Brionas, and he’s my husband, Nate — but he likes Nathaniel.”
“Oh — you like Nathaniel but are married to Jaslen. Very complicated.”
Geoffrey walked up the aisle, balancing like a gymnast, asking questions to those who seemed accessible. They all had some tale. A young man was writing beside his friend. He had long, wavy black hair with olive skin and dark eyes. They both seemed just out of secondary school. “What are you writing?” Geoffrey Snow asked.
“Words — words — words — ”
“A Hamlet allusion!” Geoffrey exclaimed! “This is no Yankee Yahoo here, I can tell you, mate. Anything about me in that thing yet?”
Derek read from his journal: ‘And the tour director grinned as he passed the knackered American passengers with his tall, graceful ease and rugged good looks, wearing a tailored blue blazer and blue paisley ascot.’”
“Brilliant!”
The eighteen-year-old high school graduate crossed out the word in his moleskin journal. His friend Thomas, also the same age, sat next to him. Their mothers sat five rows behind them. The trip was a graduation gift for the two young men who wanted to “experience” Europe.
“You see, I’m a writer too,” Geoffrey told Derek, “but I never show anything to anyone so I guess it’s utter fiction. Why not keep the fiction going that I’m actually brilliant? I imagine, however, that my characters are all variations of my own personality.”
Derek proudly asserted he was an Anglophile.
“Really? Dreadful!” Geoffrey said. “I thought such nonsense went out with The Great War or after The Beatles broke up!”
Thomas rubbed his hands together. “Maybe I’ll meet someone at a pub or a club with a low tolerance for alcohol who adores Yanks.”
“There aren’t any — with the low tolerance I mean,” Geoffrey said.
Geoffrey thought “wankers” and padded them on the shoulder.
III.
Geoffrey Snow continued up the balance beam. He almost tripped over a black, oblong case on the blue carpeted aisle.
Another man, balding — or well, completely bald, snored in back of her. Jet lag — yes — happens to us all.
Geoffrey spotted a most fascinating creature — and that was some feeling for that was part of his job — both as a tour director who meets thousands of creatures a year, as well as a writer, who dissects his personality into a million sub creatures.
She had short — shoulder length and straight auburn hair that curved in toward her long and graceful neck. She sat with another fair damsel who was catching the London sun with her eyes closed; her hair looked like the last quarter Hunter’s moon. A white scarf luxuriated around her neck, and a navy blue blouse with tan chinos completed the attire. To say that she exuded confidence was an understatement. She had an amazing amount of what the French called “Je ne sais quoi.”
Geoffrey was exquisitely fluent in all phrases French. It startled him that she addressed him first. “Geoffrey, please. I’ve been in the habit of preferring Geoffrey.”
“I’m Jane Reynolds,” she said. “Do you usually use more words than necessary? My friends call me ‘Crazy’ Jane. I teach science in Leicester, but I don’t smell a bit like formaldehyde.”
He wanted a retort, but his wit chambers were empty. What did the French call this feeling? ‘L’esprit de l’escalier!’ The Brits called it “being British.”
Geoffrey did mention, feebly, that her subtle intonations were worthy of that region. “You also said just ‘University’ — like going to hospital, without the definite article “the” or “a.”
She padded her black case. It wasn’t an AK-47 used against “toxic males.” It was her banjo, “the most reliable lover she ever loved.”
“You don’t sound thoroughly British, really, but oddly, you do.”
“I lived with my mum in Britain,” ‘Crazy’ Jane said, “but my father was from the States. This is my sister, half-sister, same father, mind you — Kaela O’Malley, and my two lovely nieces, Laura and Sarah.”
Kaela the Mother was squished between two vivacious daughters. Laura shook hands with Geoffrey.
“I’m her older sister,” Kaela inserted — her accent thoroughly Yank. She had been listening the entire time. Her tone, full of lingering sorrow. “Our father was an American. He had an affair here. Never came back. Disappeared. Now he’s dead.”
“Kaela and my nieces live in New Jersey,” Jane said, “and they’re visiting. We haven’t seen each other in — many years.”
“How long has it been?” Kaela asked softly, mostly to herself.
“What are you looking forward to on the trip?” Geoffrey asked the older daughter
“Can you believe I’m eleven, and I haven’t even seen Paris yet?” Sarah O’Malley said. “I have been anxious for the Louvre. I’ve read so much about it. My daddy loved art. He’s home —
“In New Jersey, working?”
“No, home with God.”
“I’m — I’m so sorry to hear. You speak better than most Oxford profs.”
Sarah grinned demurely. Said thank you. “And what about you?” Geoffrey asked the other daughter.
“Castles and princesses!” shouted the younger Laura with red hair.
“Well, you’re in luck,” said Geoffrey, “because there’s a vacancy in Versailles, you know, with Marie Antoinette losing her head and all.”
The woman next to Jane Reynolds, enjoying the sun like a cat in a window box with eyes sealed, roused herself from a slight slumber.
“This is Sheri O’Malley, my sister-in-law,” Jane said. Geoffrey waved at Sheri. This was getting all too confusing. Was everyone on the trip-related? Well, New Jersey was a small state, right? Sheri was the sister of Kaela’s deceased husband — Bennie. Sheri appeased with a smile sliced in half. Was she most suffering from a headache, jet lag, or the banter?
“I’m from Philly,” she said quietly as if obligated. “But I took a medical leave of absence from work due to — ”
“You didn’t have a flight,” Geoffrey said, blading her reason. “Were you already in Britain?
In a cottage on a loch, she hibernated for two months in Scotland. Jane chuckled. She wasn’t by herself.
Behind every coach seat, secrets lurked. Should he scribble notes for a future book of the tour?
When Geoffrey walked along, he overheard Sarah ask her mother if Geoffrey was gay. Being funny and fastidious and fashionable and handsome doesn’t make one gay, he heard the mother.
Oh — so she thinks I’d dashing! I wonder — her age? Older — and yet — perhaps —
“But Uncle Mike wears an ascot, too — and he’s — ”
Geoffrey knew a fellow tour director who actually collected the panties from women on tours. It was his ‘Conquest of the World Collection.’ He cataloged them in a drawer. It was safer to seduce near the end of the tour — which was easy because his name was actually Roger. Geoffrey hated him.
Up ahead, soon, the last routine on the balance beam: Ava Hargrove and the unraveling of that pink note in his blazer pocket.
IV.
Geoffrey Snow startled Mia Thomas who was writing a Heathrow postcard. Her teenage son “Deke” was stretched out in the back of her, taking up two seats listening to something in the orbit of music on his oversized mega headphones. It was a Mother-Son Combo — what every teenage boy desires.
From the tour sheet, his name was Devin Thomas, and at fifteen, he was trouble with the plain white tee and the expensive red trainers and the chains and the blue tracksuit. The best way to deal with punks, he thought, was to try to relate to him by asking him about his political angst and fighting the Man and social justice, but then he heard him, rapping loud obscenities. How I wish he would lose that damn smartphone! “If there be a God in heaven, grant me that wish!”
The political agenda of young punks had changed. Dealing with children was unusual for Geoffrey. Tour groups were usually full of the elderly who wanted the Old World before the Next World.
“So what are you listening to?” Geoffrey asked him, touching his shoulder.
“Beats, man. Beats. Beats!” he yelled. “Can you beat it?”
“I wish as well as Michael Jackson. What are you listening to?”
“What I want to, home-boy!”
“Can I take your picture?” Mother Mia asked. “I want to show my friend back home what you look like.”
“Wow,” he said. “I feel like a rock star.”
V.
Geoffrey passed a couple who were clearly sleeping, another elderly couple who were reading the same magazine, and so he nodded his head and smiled, and moved along, wishing them a good morning. A man with a beard didn’t notice Geoffrey because he was complaining about the cost of the cappuccino in Heathrow.
Behind them sat an effervescent fellow. His name was Michael Fadden. He was balding and wore a green shirt and jeans.
He introduced Geoffrey to two lovely ladies, “This is Eleanor Rossano, and this is her good friend, Marian Fellson. They’re single, so you need to be careful.”
“No, they need to be careful,” Geoffrey said. “You know what they say about European men? You may have to act like their father to protect them.”
Marian said. “I have 13 cats.” Eleanor said she thought she had 11. Michael thought 9. “They come and go, you know,” Marian said, twisting a black ribbon around her wrist.
“How are you today, Geoffrey?” Michael Fadden asked.
“If I must confess, my morning was horrendous. One of my neighbor’s three thug pugs urinated on my trouser leg. I was unusually sociable at that ghastly hour, with Jenkin Jenkins, my neighbor, who is either distraught over a Chelsea or delighted over a win. What I get for my hospitality? Urine!”
“Don’t you like pets?” Eleanor asked.
“Well, I once had a dog, but I was high maintenance, so he had to get rid of me.”
Michael Fadden laughed. Marian looked puzzled. Michael added: “It was a joke.”
“No, no, the dog really did get rid of me,” Geoffrey said. “I took the dog to my mum’s and it wouldn’t leave her house.”
“So where are you from?”
“I’m from Durham. Way pp North, but I live in London now, way up on the Northern Line where I can afford a spacious closet.”
“Did you attend Oxford?” Eleanor asked. “You look like you did.”
“No, someplace with better ale and party groove: Newcastle-upon-Tyne. I have two Master’s degrees, so I’m highly qualified to escort you around Europe
VI.
To soothe his nerves, Geoffrey pulled out a bag of baby carrots, still cool from the cooler upfront by the coach driver. As he sat down next to Ava Hargrove at the back of the coach, he rolled the carrots on his temples. In standstill traffic, the coach idled on the A4 in Hammersmith. So much for the promised apocoplyse!
Ava observed that he was still addicted to carrots. “But they usually go into one’s mouth.”
“I used to smoke in college,” Geoffrey said casually after the initial surprise. “But beta carotene is better than nicotine. And since I still possess this pesky oral fixation, I thought carrots would at least be a healthy alternative. And then I discovered that rubbing cold baby carrots on your temples helps relieve tension.”
“Does it have anything to do with me? You know — the tension — and all?”
The bag of carrots fell to the floor. Her eyes brightened. “What is this magnetism you have with American women?”
“Oh, it’s not just women — it’s carrots and — .”
“Oh — I didn’t know you — ”
Being attractive and personable and friendly and intelligent has its drawbacks. Had ETA reserved that single room for her? On another floor — away from the others? Geoffrey nodded. He knew the routine. Secrecy was part of the allure. Had he unrolled the note? What was this? Grade school?
He wanted to wait until later to read her “missive” — so that her words wouldn't arouse anything to arouse alarm among her lambs.
She held Geoffrey’s hand furtively, using her middle finger to massage his palm. “Your way with words is so — intoxicating!”
He sat back, sighed, and rolled rigorously two fresh carrots on his temples. She took his carrots and wrapped her lips around them, and then snapped.
Soon, they pulled up to the Lancaster Gate Hotel in Hyde Park. It was the beginning of a strange trip with odd bedfellows — literally and figuratively.
