DIG
an excerpt

Susie looks up as someone enters the room. It’s the strange guy from the dorm next door. He looks like he just got out of bed. His hair is a muss, his eyes bruised with fatigue, and he slouches past the other diners in the room in a way that somehow suggests scurrying, although he moves slowly, intentionally, with careful nonchalance. He doesn’t make eye contact, and he’s hunched into himself in a way that makes him seem shorter than he is.

Other backpackers barely glance at him, their gazes slide over him in the same way they cannot see beggars or street-people. His pants are unfashionable. Something he might have picked up in an op-shop, a bit retro, but not in a funky way. More like his dad’s old pants from the seventies. And he’s wearing a cardigan. It’s not the office nerd type of thin woollen cardigan, so he doesn’t quite look like a public servant (not that he would anyway). It’s thicker wool, with a zip down the front. On someone else it could actually look cool, if it was worn as a fashion statement, not like a cast-off as it does on him.

Susie notices him, because she has always noticed such people, those who live under the radar of other people’s awareness. But she thinks he’s odd, and strange. She wonders what he is doing here, in this bright backpacker’s hostel, full of laughter and the jostle of several different languages. He looks like he should he hunched in a gutter somewhere, watching pigeons and clicking an empty can with his toe.

He has a junkie energy about him, although she can’t quite decide why. He’s an anomaly and she’s interested in him.

He disappears down the stairs with a backpack slung over his shoulder. It is reasonably new in comparison to the rest of him.

She wonders where he is from. He had no look about him that suggested any particular country. And she hasn’t heard him speak. Infact this is the first time she’s seen him in the communal areas.

Susie turns back to her guidebook. Perhaps she’ll go to the Picasso Museum. It’s almost two, Siesta should be over soon. She’ll buy some stamps and send her postcards and a letter to Maria. She finishes her cup of tea, and is about to pack her guidebook away when someone sits beside her heavily.

“Hey, can I have a quick look at your book?”

The accent is North American. The man beside her is tall, bronzed and athletic looking, with messy surfer hair that has a wiryness that suggests there are still salt crystals encrusted in the strands.

He’s good-looking and knows it.

She smiles at him. “Sure.”

“You’re Australian?”

“Yes.”

“Great surfing, I hear. I’d love to visit. Maybe I should get your number, in case I come down.”

It was the usual back-packer’s currency. She had the address of a beautiful Mexican girl who left the day before. In the off chance she might ever go to Latin America.

“So, what are you doing today?” he says, riffling through the guidebook, but not really paying too much attention.

“Thought I’d visit the Picasso Museum.”

“That sounds awesome. Mind if I come along?”

A part of her wanted to say she’d rather go alone, but actually she’d probably enjoy hanging out with someone else. She’d spent the whole day alone yesterday, wandering up La Rambla, and trying to find Gaudi’s Modernista Architecture. She’d gone banking, bought herself a new pair of shoes, since her old ones had suddenly decided to come apart at the seams. She didn’t mind being alone, but perhaps another person could help her to see things she might have missed on her own.