The No Name Diary

Our big and mostly empty bus pulled into Chinchiná, Caldas, Colombia at about 1am in the morning the day after Christmas in 2011. There I was with Alex, a guy I’d met a few days before in a Panamanian port, invited as a guest to spend Christmas holidays with his family. The rain was hammering down on the roofs of the derelict train station buildings beside us, remnants of the failed Colombian national rail project. We were met by Alex’s mum’s boyfriend, who hurriedly helped us unload the large crates of an energy drink Alex had bought at a knock-down price in the Colón free trade zone, and then brought many miles across the border.

His mum’s place was just round the corner, three rooms, the first one set up to sell fruit and vegetables, the second a bedroom/living room, the third at the back a kitchen with a small bathroom which came off it. We got a hot meal of fried pork belly and arepa (corn patty), then at about 2am his mum told us to get into bed and rest, weary as we were after days at sea. I only realised upon awakening in the morning, that his mum, her partner and his young son, Alex’s brother and wife, had all slept on the floor all night.

I met Aleja outside a strip of bars and discos the next evening. She was the best friend of Sofia, the girlfriend of another of Alex’s brothers. She’d been roped in to the outing because she spoke some English. She had deep brown eyes, and long flowing dark hair, a pretty face, first embarrassed, then friendly but with distance. I liked her immediately. In a bar with moving lights, Latin rhythms and dry ice on the dance floor, we all drank our way through a bottle of rum as I tried to communicate in broken Spanish and struggled to perform Salsa and Bachata moves when we got up to dance. There was Alex, the once quiet and geeky boy who had returned after years abroad; now a man built from the gym, wearing a nice pair of jeans, a black leather jacket and smart watch. Next his big brother Eduardo, a police officer, ex-soldier who’d fought guerillas in the jungle, watched friends killed from exploding grenades and all sorts of other dark things (this which Alex shared with me weeks later in a low voice over a beer). Sat at his side was Eduardo’s wife Jenny, who had just about the biggest most rounded buttocks I’d ever seen, she didn’t say much but was from the capital and definitely about 10% plastic. Then at that round table of reflective metal was Sofia, the younger brother’s girlfriend, a good looking short girl, high as hell. Her recent backstory was the highly likely contracted killing of her father’s lover by her mother (I later learned Chinchiná was a place where it wasn’t hard to find a hitman, and that her parents were still together). Finally there was Aleja, sat next to me. She was 18, a philosophy student at university who liked skateboarding, and who made my heart melt when she smiled. I got her number that night; and remember lying in bed picturing her face later on, this time in an unfinished home that Alex had set us up in, with no electricity but water, and little inside it but for a bed and some mattresses on the floor.

That was the start of half a year which I spent in that small town. Going out on dates with Aleja, teaching myself Spanish in the local library, selling all of Alex’s energy drinks with him in the fair of a neighbouring city, teaching English and hearing story after story of Colombian lives so different from my own. That was where it all started for us, one night in a bar called San Blas which would shape the course of our lives.

And here I am fifteen years later at the start of another adventure, once again opening up The No Name Diary:

Laif lay on her back looking at the starry night sky. She was tired of riding and needed to rest. The land had slowly changed from rising and falling green pasture to desert scrub, mountains now loomed in the distance. The horse lay looking at her as she fell asleep in the quiet.

A dream; mist and through it her own figure rushing towards her. Flowing locks and the flashing blade of a sword suddenly swung and then impacting on her raised armoured forearm as she shielded herself. Another vicious blow attacking the other side of her body, she blocked it at her hip with her other arm, the place where the blade made contact with her armour flashing in different hues of luminescent blues and greens. Suddenly her own face came into sharp relief; contorted in anger, a blood-chilling stare half covered by wild swishing hair. Another raise of the sword and in a moment they were both gripping it by the hilt, wrestling for control, then falling to the ground. Laif felt the long blade edging closer and closer to her exposed neck, then a high piercing voice:

“WHERE IS YOUR SWORD?!”

She awoke with a gasp, involuntarily sitting up then reaching for her neck. All was calm, a tumbleweed bounced by. Her horse now stood in the place where it had been lying. The day was just starting to dawn, cold, grey light across the dusty ground and rocks. Laif sat up, and thought again of all those lives she’d seen at sea, all the conflicts. Then, in the total silence she reflected on the terrifying image of her face for a long time.Finally she got up, now decided that if she were to fight, it was going to be against that hate.

Questions echoed in her mind long after she had brushed herself off and prepared to continue onwards somewhere. Where was her sword? What was to be her weapon? Then she continued into the beyond; simply surviving the seemingly ever-extending landscape…