Tuesday, 24 April 2035
Things I Want To Do Before I Die:
Open a dog sanctuary in Mexico.
Read more.
Get better at Spanish.
Get fitter.
Find my own taste in music.
Join a women’s football team.
Find my soulmate.
Get to know Rafael.
Get to know my brother.
I had never been farther than Tenerife on a plane before, and I always had my mum with me.
Now it was just me. Just me talking to the air steward responding to what drink I wanted.
Just me asking for a blanket. Just me asking if the turbulence was anything to worry about.
Just me running for my connecting flight to Mexico City. Just me. Just me. Just me.
Well, me and Jon Hamm.
A new worry had entered my mind during the second flight – the Thompson-Pierces knew where I’d gone and could easily inform the authorities.
I’d blown Rafael’s cover – he’d have to leave.
Move country even. Luckily I hadn’t given them the address or anything and Mexico was a big place but still, I’d compromised them.
I hoped Rafael wouldn’t be angry with me.
We came in to land at Mexico City airport at around 4:30 p.m. local time.
It was only then I became certain that nobody was going to march me off the plane and send me straight back to the Australians so I started to relax, feeling the pinch in my shoulder blades melt away.
Every sign was in Spanish and I could read them.
My heart thumped again as adrenaline kicked in – I could do this.
Only one more flight and a half-hour taxi ride and I’d be with them: my family. I could barely breathe for excitement.
At Rocas Airport, the first cab off the rank was half green, half white and sparklingly clean.
I stood on the kerb, after weaving my way through jostling, sweaty crowds and heaps of luggage, hoovering through a bag of limon Sabritas, a mandarin Chaparitas drink and some vegetarian gummies to keep my energy up.
I hadn’t slept on either flight, so by the time I got into the taxi to Hiedra y Leo, jetlag was catching up with me.
‘A dónde quieres ir?’ asked the driver.
I checked my map again. ‘Erm … por favor llévame entre Miguel Hidalgo y Morelos. Erm … Distrito de Arte? Formerly called Salome?’
‘Ah sí en el distrito del arte. I take you. Get in.’
The restaurant was situated in the town itself, a side street away from the beautiful stretch of golden beach in an area known as the art district but which in recent years had given way to a load of art-themed restaurants and cafés, one of which Rafael owned.
He’d inherited his aunt Salome’s art gallery and turned it into Hiedra y Leo about a year ago.
The driver told me the town’s name Rocas Calientes meant Hot Rocks in English.
‘I know,’ I said as we got underway, settling the hoverboard box beside me. ‘I’ve read about it.’
‘You read about it?’ he said, eyeing me in his rearview mirror.
‘Yes,’ I replied, clutching my bag with one hand and the hoverboard box with the other. I didn’t like how he looked at me in the mirror. Something about it got my spidey senses tingling.
Rhiannon’s evil look swooshed to the forefront of my mind.
The freeway towards the coast was long and barren, bordered by deserted plains full of scratchy-looking shrubland.
The taxi wasn’t air-conditioned and the searing heat billowed in through the tiny crack in the window I’d been afforded in the back seat.
I silently praised hour-ago me for going to the toilet, even though I wasn’t desperate because the drive was taking longer than I expected.
I checked the route we were going on Google Maps, just to be sure.
He was taking me to the right place, even if he was going slower than necessary.
I needed to get there now and all would be well.
But the driver kept looking back at me, every few moments. Kept making conversation too in broken English. My stomach rolled over.
‘First time?’
‘Huh?’ I said, using the hem of my last season Arsenal shirt to soak up the sweat from my forehead.
‘First time in Mexico?’
‘Yeah.’
‘You like what you see?’
‘It’s beautiful here. The people have been friendly too, up until now …’
‘You like football?’ he said, referring to my Arsenal shirt.
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘Me too. We play game together, yes?’
‘Haha,’ I said. I didn’t know where to go with that one.
‘You like cake?’
‘Er, yes?’
‘There is very good panaderia in Rocas Calientes. They have orejas, coyotas, sopapillas, churros …’
‘Oh, churros, yes, I love them.’ I clutched my little ashes bottle, silently begging Dad to guide me; to save me from doing what my mum would want me to do about this.
I looked for him in the desert, in the bright blue sky outside, in the passing cars, but there was nothing. Only my own reflection in the window.
My phone finally connected to a local provider and a flurry of messages came through – Heather asking if I’d arrived, Rafael asking the same, Leo asking where I was, what time I was arriving, if I’d brought him a gift. That was some relief. I sent the same back to all of them:
Arrived safely. All is well. xxx
The driver – Victor – went silent for a while, thankfully, and I found the sound of the engine and the hot breeze lulling me in and out of sleep.
Maybe I was reading too much into his interactions.
Maybe he was just being friendly. I was new here, after all.
I rested my head against my balled-up hoody on the side of the car and tried to lose myself.
We were still going in the right direction – ten minutes away now.
Ten minutes from my family. It would be okay. It was all in my mind.
But then Victor decided to have another go at a conversation.
‘You like creampie?’ he asked.
My heart thundered into a new, desperate rhythm. My spidey senses had been right; I knew he wasn’t talking about pastries this time because of the lascivious grin he radiated in the rearview and the shock of black teeth he was now showing. I was suddenly very awake and my adrenalin was coursing.
‘No.’ I didn’t give him any more than that.
Despite myself, I could hear Rhiannon’s voice so clearly in my mind right then. You might need that inner Sweetpea someday when you least expect it so don’t deny her sunlight.
But still he beckoned me with forked tongue. ‘You will like my creampie, I think. You look like that kind of chica.’
Let her break soil. Without warning, Victor swung the car off the road into the desert, parking haphazardly in a space between thickets of spiky trees. He switched off the engine.
‘Why have we stopped?’ I asked, heart thundering, barely able to catch my breath.
He turned around in his seat and smiled. ‘I thought we could get to know each other better, chica. You like me, right? We friends?’
I shook my head.
‘Aw come on. I’m not going to hurt you. We are only …’ He checked the clock on the dash, ‘ten minutes from your beach. Plenty of time for fun.’
‘Take me where I’ve asked to go,’ I said, slowly, so as to stamp the quiver from my voice.
‘What if I wanna take you somewhere else first, perra? I take you to paradise.’
I swallowed hard and repeated myself, even slower. ‘Start the car and take me where I’ve asked to go.’
He shook his head. ‘Lie down on your back, chica. I do the rest.’
And with that he stepped out of the car and adjusted his jeans, glancing round at the road, this way and that, presumably looking for witnesses. I had no choice. I had to do this. No help was coming.
I scrambled out the other side of the car and stood on the side of the dusty road, the heat of the day beating down on me, waiting for him.
‘Come on now, chica, back in the car. Where you think you’re going? I’m the one with the cab, remember? You can’t run away – you die in the heat. No one coming to save you. If you want to go beach today, you pay the fare.’
There wasn’t an atom in my body that wanted to do what I did next but there was no other way out of this.
I was between a rock and a hard place and the rock was closing in.
I had to. I swallowed a rising tide of nausea and without another thought, slid my hands down into the front of my knickers and rubbed around, then pulled them out and held them up before me for him to see. He immediately jolted backwards.
‘The fuck you do?!’
I hadn’t been advised what the next part of the threat should be, I realised, so I had to improvise. I breathed out and with it came the rage I’d been holding down. ‘Yo soy la Reina de la Sangre!’ I shouted at the top of my voice. ‘Y yo me doy un festín con las pelotas de los hombrecitos!’
[I am the Blood Queen and I feast on little men’s balls!]
Victor stepped back again and sort of laughed, sort of didn’t. I caught the words pinche and puta and knew I was in deep trouble now. His eyes flashed with anger as I breathed in a mouthful of desert air and blew it out at him fully, like I was a dragon.
‘RAAAAAAAAAAWWWWRRRRR!’ I yelled, stamping towards him and again doing jazz hands with my period blood. He stumbled back, further into the gorse, and laughed.
‘You crazy, chica, the fuck you do?!’
Another wave of nausea crashed against my shore as I bent over to throw up in the sand but as I did, I saw a large hand-size rock in the dirt – the biggest rock I could find – and lobbed it directly at his head.
‘AY!’ he cried out.
But I kept going, continued pelting him two, three, four, five times with as many missiles as I could grab – bigger, harder, hitting him where it hurt. Hitting his face. His body. His face again.
He yelled at me, in Spanish, too fast for me to understand, as I pushed him further back into the scrubby brush with my rocks and my bloody hands.
And then the killer shot – one of the rocks caught him on the side of his head, lobotomy area, I’d seen it on a horror film – and he dropped to the ground like a Halloween decoration fallen from a hook.