Chapter 32
ERIN
Erin woke to the excited voice of Martha. She had been in a deep and comfortable sleep and felt as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders but she was wide awake now, watching Martha shoving everything she had with her into her backpack.
‘I’ve found us a few hours’ work and it will pay for our bus tickets over to the island,’ she said.
Erin sat up and let her thoughts reorganise themselves from dream state to reality, and snippets of their conversation about Clare came back to her. She had been honest with her grandmother about how she felt and it seemed that Martha was okay with that. Of course she was. Her nana loved her.
‘Work where?’ Erin asked, glancing at the bedside clock – six thirty.
‘There’s a restaurant that has a first service at midday. We can clean this morning and they’ll give us lunch before we get on the bus at three. Result, hey? I’ve also messaged Noah on the tracker so he knows where we are.’
‘Yeah, I guess,’ Erin said. ‘How did you manage to arrange it?’
‘I was speaking to the woman on reception downstairs about what two women with limited funds could do in Moncton for the morning and she said work. It’s a friend of hers who owns the restaurant and she called him to see if he could offer us a few hours.
It will be washing the tables and floors out front and also the toilets.
It won’t be glamorous but it will get us onto the bus without dipping into our funds. ’
Erin eased herself out of bed and tried to get excited about a cleaning job.
‘We need to move though,’ Martha said.
They walked to the family-run restaurant with Noah trailing after them. Erin knew that she and Martha would never have had the conversation they’d had last night if Noah had been around and she wondered if that mis-booking at the hostel had been a divine intervention somehow.
The restaurant had a nice feel to it and they were met by the owner.
He was a middle-aged man called Phillip.
His family had owned the seafood place for years and he was obviously proud of it.
After setting them up with what needed to be done, he took Noah off to film as much of the place as he could.
This exercise was clearly beneficial to all of them.
Erin and her grandmother were being careful with each other this morning as if they were both nursing a hangover of grief.
Erin offered to clean the toilets so Martha wouldn’t have to and left her with the tables and floor in the restaurant.
Erin pulled on the gloves offered to her and got to work.
For a couple of hours she scrubbed the toilets and sinks and then the tiles on the walls and lastly, the floor.
She was surprised at how satisfied she felt after she had finished.
Martha had also finished in the restaurant and the two of them met by the doors to the kitchen.
‘I think we’re being set up,’ Martha said.
‘What? Set up how?’
‘I just heard Noah suggesting it would be good for the viewers to see us working in the kitchen as well. Phillip wants us to prep some seafood.’
This was something Erin had never done before but once Phillip had given them aprons and their hands and utensils were scrupulously clean, Noah filmed them as Phillip laid an octopus down in front of each of them.
‘I’m not sure about this,’ Erin said, lifting up the edge of one tentacle tentatively, before laying it down and stepping back.
Martha lifted the whole thing up and it looked like an alien. ‘You don’t have to do it if you don’t want to,’ she said, but Erin could see Noah lift an eyebrow.
‘I’ll do it,’ she said and stepped back to the counter.
‘Right,’ Phillip said and began to talk them through the process.
The first step involved decapitating it right above the eyes, which seemed to stare at Erin as she moved the knife.
‘Then make another cut below the eyes, pull out the hard beak from the middle of the tentacles and then we turn the head inside out and pull out anything we don’t want.
A good wash and then we slow cook. Delicious. ’
Erin had completely lost her appetite and when they were finished and Phillip offered them some lunch, she made some noises about becoming a vegetarian. But she was also hungry and didn’t complain when two steaming bowls of seafood pasta and garlic bread arrived.
And after that, they were paid and off to the bus station.
‘I always feel nervous on the last leg of each journey,’ Erin said as they waited for the bus to arrive. ‘It’s almost worse when there are no other contestants with us. They could all be anywhere.’
‘I know what you mean,’ Martha said. ‘I feel twitchy too.’
It was at that very moment that the doors to the bus station opened and in walked both Femi and Liz. Martha laughed.
‘For goodness’ sake,’ she said good-naturedly. ‘I thought we had really pushed ourselves and must be out in front. Wrong again.’
‘We must have pushed ourselves harder,’ Femi said.
He sat down heavily in the seat beside Erin and let his bag fall to the floor.
‘No matter how hard we move ourselves, there always seems to be someone just in front,’ he said.
‘But we expected it of you two this time as you had an hour’s head start. ’
‘It just seems to prove that when there are several different options for travel, we will still all end up on the same boat, or bus, or train,’ Erin said.
‘But really, it’s not that surprising when they run these boats, buses and trains only a few times a week,’ said Liz.
There was also something a little comforting about meeting up with the others en route.
It somehow reinforced the idea that they hadn’t made a poor choice.
Erin had her eyes glued to the door in the hope that Sam and Harrison would walk through it but at three, when they were loaded onto the bus, there was no sign of them, or of Priya and Tara.
Erin pushed down her disappointment. They would be in Charlottetown by just after five.
And after that, they just had to wait and see.
The Confederation Bridge was an interesting way to get to Prince Edward Island.
There was a point in the middle for a while where each slip of land was only just visible.
It was much longer than any bridge Erin had travelled across before.
She made some notes in her journal. Ticking off her list of things she’d never considered but had now done was giving her a new-found strength.
She liked herself a little more every day of this trip.
Maybe by the end she might even love herself a bit.
Maybe. Being honest with Martha had been a huge step in that direction, that was for sure.
The bus rumbled to a stop and as soon as it did they heard both theirs and Femi and Liz’s trackers beginning to beep.
Erin dragged it out of her bag while Martha scrambled to get off the bus.
And there it was again; they were back in race mode.
Having the other two with them made it all the more stressful.
Proceed to the Anne of Green Gables museum
‘Where the heck is that?’ Erin asked, but Martha was smiling.
‘It was one of your mother’s favourite books when she was a child,’ she said wistfully and then seemed to catch herself, which gave Erin a jolt of sadness.
‘That’s lovely,’ she said gently, touching her grandmother’s arm. ‘Where is it?’
‘I have no idea. Let’s ask someone,’ Martha said and pulled Erin away from the bus station and along the pavement as if she knew where she was going.
‘I don’t want Femi and Liz to know what we’re doing,’ Martha said.
‘And what are we doing?’ Erin asked her.
‘I don’t know that yet, either.’
They were on a main road with huge car dealerships lining one side.
They’d come into town past pretty, pastel-painted boarded houses but this seemed to be the business end of things.
There was a drive-through called Tim Hortons on the other side of the road and they crossed over and into its car park.
There was a mother with a young child coming out of the building and Erin walked over to her.
‘Hi, can I please ask you where we might find the Anne of Green Gables museum?’
‘Sure, it’s about a forty-five-minute drive.’
‘I think we should try and get a taxi,’ Martha said. ‘I don’t want to waste time waiting for a bus.’
‘We’re in a race,’ Erin explained to the woman.
‘In that case, a taxi is your best bet,’ the woman said. ‘You won’t get a bus all the way anyway, so you’ll need a taxi.’
‘Thank you,’ Erin called as she and Martha ran back across the road. ‘So, we’re spending, are we?’
‘I don’t think we have any choice. If we’d been here alone I might have spent some time finding out about ferry prices to Newfoundland, but now we have Femi and Liz on our tails, I just want to get there.’
‘But we know whatever happens, we’ll be back here at the bus station trying to find out information.
Wouldn’t it be best to find out now, and then we’ll have the upper hand on the next leg?
Even if we get to Anne’s museum before them, it won’t be by much.
We need to think smart, not fast. There’s only one more leg to go. ’
Martha turned to her granddaughter and grinned.
‘When did you get so wise? You’re right, of course. We should find out now.’
They walked quickly back to the bus station and spoke to the man serving behind the counter about ferry fares. He looked for a moment as if he wasn’t going to help them. Why would he, after all? They weren’t looking to buy bus tickets.
‘Let me check for you,’ he said and then began tapping onto his keyboard.
Erin walked over to the window and watched as Femi and Liz got into a car. From where she was, she couldn’t tell if it was a taxi or not.
‘Okay,’ the man said. ‘Here are the statistics. You need to get to North Sydney, which is here.’
He stopped and took the map from Martha, opened it up and refolded it to the correct part.
‘I’d take the ferry from here to Caribou in Nova Scotia. It’s a seventy-five-minute crossing but it’s only eleven dollars fifty per person. You won’t do it for that in a taxi. Then you need to get to North Sydney.’
He traced a finger over the route as he spoke.
‘Then you have a couple of options. You can get the ferry to Port aux Basques and drive across to St John’s, or you can get a ferry to Argentia, which will take longer but is closer to your destination.’
‘What’s the difference in time and cost?’ Erin asked, hoping she wasn’t pushing her luck, but he smiled and kept tapping.
‘To Port aux Basques, you’re looking at seven hours. Two crossings a day, 11.45 or 23.15 and that’s $21.92.’
‘That’s not too bad,’ Martha said.
‘Yeah, but you’ve got a nine-hour drive overland to get to where you need to be,’ he said. ‘And that’s not a hugely populated route. There is a bus but it’s once a day, fifteen hours and about a hundred and eighty dollars. Each.’
‘Wow,’ Erin said. ‘And to the other ferry port? The one nearer St John’s?’
‘Argentia? Well, that’s a sixteen-hour crossing, leaving three times a week at 17.30 and will cost you sixty dollars each,’ he said.
‘Great,’ she said.
‘You’ll have a final run of about an hour and forty minutes’ drive to get from the port to St John’s. Want me to look up taxis?’
‘Would you? I feel as if we’ve taken enough of your precious time,’ Martha said sweetly.
‘It looks like a lot,’ he said, glancing at his screen again. ‘Three hundred dollars.’
Erin whistled through her teeth.
‘You’d be better asking on the ferry for a lift. Is that thing on?’ he said pointing at Noah’s camera.
‘Yes, sorry, we should have asked,’ Erin said.
‘No problem,’ he said. ‘You can express your thanks by making sure I feature on your show.’
‘What’s your name?’ Noah asked.
‘Ralph,’ he said.
‘Then I’ll make sure of it.’
‘Ralph, can I push my luck and ask where we can get a taxi around here?’ Martha asked him.
He rolled his eyes good-naturedly and took his personal phone from his pocket.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Two ladies to the Green Gables museum. The bus station, Mount Edward Road. As soon as you can.’
After many thanks from both Martha and Erin they were back out onto the street.
They had been ten minutes with Ralph but they both agreed it had been ten minutes well spent.
Then after only five minutes more, the taxi appeared on the kerb beside them and they learned it would cost a $120 to get them to the checkpoint.
‘I hope we can afford it,’ Erin said.
‘I hope so too, or we’ll be finding more cleaning jobs to get us off this island,’ said Martha.
‘As long as I don’t have to decapitate any more sea creatures, then I don’t care,’ Erin said. ‘I will have nightmares about that.’
She settled on the back seat next to Noah. ‘After racing hard for days and all the uncomfortable buses we’ve been on and our one-hour head start, we’re still going to be last, aren’t we?’
‘Couldn’t possibly say.’
Try, she wanted to tell him. Just let me know if Sam is there.
In some mad way she hoped he’d win. It’s what you would want for friends and loved ones, wasn’t it?
Martha was happily chatting away to the driver, about the race, about their Canadian experiences, and about how Anne of Green Gables was her daughter’s favourite book.
Erin sighed inwardly. This was going to be emotional for Martha, of course it would be.
She felt so much better for talking so honestly to her grandmother.
It had seemed like an experiment to open an emotional wound, one Erin had tried so hard to keep closed.
But open it she had and she had survived.
More importantly, her relationship with her nana hadn’t been affected as she worried it might be.
She should have trusted more in that bond they shared.
Martha had basically told her it was unshakable and Erin decided to believe her.