Chapter 10
Lesson 10: Trust your instincts—beans are not a breakfast food.
Reading List: Wuthering Heights by Emily Bront? (read)
Bridget Jones Tally:
breakfast meats—4
unwelcome memories—18
successful attempts to spare my pride—0
vomit—yes
I was awakened the next morning at what must have been the crack of dawn by a persistent knocking at the door. I sat up quickly,
my head pounding in angry protest.
“Just a minute.” I sounded like a frog with a smoking problem. I swung my legs down and gasped at the unexpected pain in my
knee, then threw on some pajama bottoms and opened the door.
It was room service. A young man wheeled in a tray, lifting the cover to reveal an obscene amount of food: a full English
breakfast with eggs, toast, sausage, ham, bacon, roasted mushrooms and tomatoes, more meat, and I don’t even know what else.
Are those baked beans? Beans? Also included in the feast were a large glass of orange juice and a huge mug of strong coffee with a note next to it. Fuel up! We’ve got a full day, and we leave in one hour sharp.
Something began to tug uncomfortably at the corners of my memory.
“It’s from the gentleman downstairs,” the server said in a thick Yorkshire accent. I mumbled something even I couldn’t understand
and tipped him one of those huge two-pound coins before sending him on his way.
With the room to myself, I went to the bathroom to wash my face. That’s when it all started coming back to me, one nonsequential
jigsaw piece at a time, falling in place to create a most humiliating image.
Oh, the crying in the bathroom! The fall! I looked down and saw a bandage on my sore knee .
OH.
MY.
GOD.
I forced him to undress me! The red thong! Oh, holy crap! This is bad... this is very, very bad!
This was even worse than that time I drunkenly sent several boudoir shots of myself in sexy lingerie to my boyfriend David
and then woke the next day to a very cold and displeased professional response from Dr. Davis underneath my typo-ridden Howm do you like my new linguine? I didn’t often get drunk, and this was exactly why.
My first reaction was denial: Maybe I had dreamed the whole thing. But no, all the evidence was there in my room. Next was
flight: Maybe I could just feign serious illness and tell them to go on without me. Then I would only need to find my way
back to Edinburgh, change my plane tickets, and get home just in time to die slowly of mortification and excessive Tater Tots
consumption.
I thought over my options while I choked down my delicious breakfast. By the end of the last sausage, I had come to the sorry conclusion that I had no real options. I would just have to suck it up and stick it out.
I came downstairs wearing all black to mourn my dignity, and with sunglasses on to hide my red, swollen eyes. I heard some
greetings and saw some waves as I got on the bus and sat on my usual bench. My own personal terrorist turned around in the
driver’s seat to look at me.
“Good morning, Alice Cooper,” he said. Then more softly, “How are you managing?”
“Mm-hmm,” I mumbled from behind my sunglasses.
I felt my cheeks redden. I wanted to own my poor behavior. I wanted to thank him for helping me against his better judgment.
I wanted to explode into a fit of gasping laughter and have a laugh with him at my expense. But now that I was in front of
him, I was on fire from head to toe and squirming under a fresh surge of humiliation as flashes of last night’s depantsing
danced to the front of my mind. So instead I just crumpled in on myself.
He looked at me a moment longer.
“Thank you... for breakfast.” I wanted to curl up and die.
I saw a mischievous smile play at the corner of his mouth, but he seemed to think better of teasing me, because he turned
back around to hide it.
“Welcome.” He started the bus and drove off. And yet somehow I felt the reprieve was temporary.
Still slightly drunk and spinning, I slouched down on my bench and promptly went to sleep. I don’t know how long I slept, whether it was hours or minutes, but I was woken rather suddenly by a lurching. A lurching of the stomach. One that cleared its throat, politely tapped on my shoulder, and whispered into my ear with the voice of Benedict Cumberbatch: “Hmm hmm... umm... excuse me, but I thought I should inform you that I’ve chosen to reject this, your most recent deposit, and will be ejecting it posthaste from whence it came.”
Oh no, you damn well won’t! I hissed back to my stomach. Betray me now and so help me God, I will get a gastric bypass. I squeezed my eyes shut and tried to go back to sleep. If I could ride out this wave of nausea, then I’d wake up later having
been through the worst of it, and would be able to handle myself admirably with decorum and grace—rising above in the face
of adversity. Mind over matter was all that was needed here. Totally achievable.
Just then, the bus began to hug the corners of a particularly windy stretch of single-track road, and all the sausages in
my stomach rode on a tidal wave of blood orange cocktail and baked beans from side to side.
I opened my mouth to speak but shut it immediately, not trusting that I could successfully control the floodgates. Instead
I reached a shaky, damp hand and clasped on to the shoulder in front of me with a death grip.
“Yes?” When I didn’t respond, he looked back in his mirror and saw the look on my face. “Right, ladies. I’ve just got to make
a brief pit stop and check the... washer fluid. I think the view over the fields to the right side is a lovely one. I would
recommend gazing out in that general direction to ponder life’s greatest questions.”
The second the door opened, I flew out of it to vomit zealously into a regretfully spiny bush with yellow flowers that smelled
of coconut.
I was a scene from The Exorcist . There was no earthly explanation for this. I looked over between bone-cracking, full-body heaves to see that he had lifted
the hood of the bus and was making a show of looking under it. He really needn’t have bothered. I had waved goodbye to any
hope of self-respect the night before, and shot it several times in the back for good measure.
His voice reached me from another world. “Are you gonna be okay? Can I get you anything?” I heard him draw near, and then felt a hand on my upper back.
The very last thing I would wish for at that moment was for him to see me vomiting. Had I not debased myself enough in front
of the man that he should see—and hear—this?
“I need you...” I said, stopping to gag.
“Yes? What can I do?”
“To go away. Now.”
“Ach. Don’t worry yourself. I was a teenager in Glasgow. I’ve seen and done far gruesomer things than this.”
I didn’t care about his teenage vomiting sessions. I would do anything to just make him leave immediately and not see any
more of the horror. I prayed that a tsunami would come suddenly to Yorkshire and scrub me from the face of the Earth.
“Would you... shut up? Leave me alone.”
“But...”
“Go away,” I gasped. “You fool.”
For a moment he said nothing, but when he did speak, his tone had changed. And I could hear the smirk in it.
“Fine then. Just be careful not to make us late again , will you?”
Is nothing sacred? Can’t a woman be shown respect while vomiting down the side of a mountain these days?
“I hate you.” It was all I could muster to convey the depths of my loathing.
“No, you don’t. It’s sounding a lot like you hate those blood orange cocktails, though.” He laughed.
I turned around and let my scowl do the talking for me, mostly because I couldn’t think of anything to say that sounded superior
while I was busy throwing up. He laughed at my anger, the respectful reprieve and distance he had chosen before clearly forgotten.
Heaving my way into oblivion with my face getting poked by a really thorny bush while some sadistic megalomaniac looked on and teased me was most certainly not included on my list of things to do on my trip to the UK.
I waved him off wordlessly and silently dedicated all upcoming upheavals to him.
“Vy are some of us getting out and not others?” I heard a German voice from the open door of the bus. “Are ve supposed to
go out?”
“No, Berrta. Please stay in. I’ll not be a moment.”
“Alice is out. I think either ve should all be allowed to go out, or all of us stay on the bus.”
“I’m sorry, but there’s not much room at the side of the road just here, and I want everyone to be safe, and ready to go soon.
Alice just needed a little fresh air.”
“I don’t see vy it should have different rules for different people. If some are allowed to break the rules, then this is
not a rule.”
Couldn’t they hear me retching? I could hear them.
“She had her camera with her,” Agatha said. My eyes widened. Was she purposely stirring trouble? “I’m sure I heard her say
something about a rare chaffinch.”
“Vhat?” Berrta exclaimed loudly. “There is no rare chaffinch. She doesn’t know vhat she’s talking about.” I heard the squeak
of her window being pulled down so she could shout out of it. “Alice! Vhat bird did you see? Is it still there? Alice, there
is no rare chaffinch. Your identification is wrong! Describe the plumage to me.”
In mounting frustration, she updated the group. “She is not responding to me. I see her there with her head in the bushes.
I am sure she is looking at something. Alice! Alice, can you hear me? Has it got a yellow crest? Vhat color is the breast?”
Finally finished with my grand performance, I struggled just to stand upright and walk back to the bus like a convincing biped
without also trying to convince Berrta that none of what I had seen in the last five minutes would interest her.
My head was throbbing. I grasped the railing and used the last vestiges of my fortitude to hoist myself back on to the bus. I could have used that little step this time. I heard the hood slam shut as I slumped onto my bench.
“Did you get a photo, Alice? May I see the photo? Robbie, ve are all here to see the sights, and it is not fair that you allow
some of the group to see more than the others.”
“I’m very sorry, Berrta. It was an unexpected emergency stop. I understand why you’re upset, and I’ll try to make sure that
nothing like this happens again. Don’t worry, I’m sure once Alice Cooper is finished with her nap she will regale us all with
detailed descriptions and photos of everything she saw. So that’s something we can all look forward to.” He winked at me in
the rearview mirror.
It was official. He was taking the proverbial olive branch that had momentarily bridged the gap between us and setting the
damned thing on fire. I pledged a solemn oath to myself then, floating as I was on the exhaust of last night’s cocktails,
that I would reap my revenge on this pea-brained moron, or die trying. I dug out my notebook and began to brainstorm.
Things to Torture the Terrible Tour Guide:
My head swam. I dropped my pen, placed my hot face against the cold window, and went to sleep.
We had been driving through the Yorkshire moors, though I had not been conscious enough to enjoy the stark and wild delights
they offered. My comatose state, however, did nothing to protect me from being bodily hoisted from the cozy bus bench and
dragged around the moors after the group, like a dying mouse clutched tight in the jaws of a wandering tomcat.
Oh, but they were beautiful, and after an hour’s hike at the speed of banana slugs in winter, we stopped atop a rock to have a break and look over the vista.
It swept out from us in an unfathomable expanse of heather-covered rock and barren crag: untamed and unforgiving. The wind
chapped our cheeks and whipped the hair about our heads like banshees. It was so easy to imagine how Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre had sprouted and grown from this soil. Simply to sit here in silence and look out in any direction was to be consumed whole
by the drama of the place.
After a time, a Scottish voice broke the reverent silence, and competed with the wind so as not to be swept away altogether.
“Charlotte Bront? wrote: ‘My sister Emily loved the moors. Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed from the blackest heath
for her. Out of sullen hollow in a livid hillside, her mind could make an Eden. She found in the bleak solitude many and dear
delights, and best loved was liberty.’”
His talk on the Bront? sisters was interesting and inspiring and had more than a slight feminist slant, which, if offered
by any other human, would have won me over to their endearments. It was a shame that this particular human was entirely devoid
of endearments. Resting against the rocks, we all weighed in on which sister and which novels we liked best and why, and speculated
what life would have been like for the Victorian woman in so rural a setting.
We meandered back to the bus in silence, each one of us lost in our own little world, feeling at once solitary in the universe
and yet intrinsically connected to it. The effect was quite sobering and led my mental state firmly by the hand from hungover
unconsciousness to pensive introspection, with a dash of melancholia.
I stared out the window and watched Britain rush by as I thought about my place here, and my place in the world at large. I felt like an untethered balloon set loose on the wind with no direction or purpose and no power to influence my course, while I watched my friends and colleagues succeed and win every milestone and accomplishment I had wanted for myself.
Being untethered was not freeing or inspiring or liberating, like Emily Bront? on the endless expanse of the moors. The result
had been vertigo: terrifying and paralyzing, and so very alone.
Percy, who occasionally left Doris’s side to visit his other friends, trotted over to my bench and wagged his tail. I patted
the cushion next to me and he hopped up, curled at my side, and put his head on my lap. I wrapped us both up in a woolly blanket,
and as I stroked his head, I felt a little bit less alone. How did dogs always know?
Percy licked my hand, and I smiled softly down at him. An hour on the moors, and I had become as morose as a Bront? character.