Scotland: When travel eases the hardest pill to swallow

Lossiemouth Beach. Photo / Getty Images

Award-winning writer Raphael van Workum's story of chance meetings and
dubious connections far from home

Here I am, Lossiemouth beach. The most northern point in the world I have been. It is further north for someone born and raised in New Zealand than for most.

I got here a lot of ways, but most recently by car. From Edinburgh to Elgin I drove, the first car I have hired. The first time driving with signs that read miles. What a glorious day trip it was, driving through the back roads: Scotland reminds me of home, just colder.

But yesterday was pleasant and I stopped to climb Kinnoull Hill. I danced on the picnic table at the top, then stood on the edge of the cliff looking down. I thought about jumping, but I didn't have my licence on me so they wouldn't know I want to be a donor. I'm not sure I can even be a donor here.

I saw an old Gaelic church and graveyard. I love talking to spirits, so I stopped for a cuppa. They were in a good mood. The sun was shining and most seemed at peace. I can always feel tension around graves of the young or tortured. There were few here. People had lived good lives. What an appealing deathstyle.

Now I am here on this beach. I made it. A woman and her daughter walk arm in arm down the beach. I wave them over and ask for a picture.

"Where are you from, lass?"

"New Zealand."

"Oh wow, you've come a long way, 'aven't ya?"

"Haha, yeah, you could say that."

"And what brings you to Scotland of all places?"

"For views like this."

The daughter looks into my eyes for the first time and asks: "Do you like it here?"

"Yeah. It's very beautiful."

"And the people?"

"Some are nice, like you and your mother," I respond with a smile.

"So you're out here all on your own, lass?" The mother observes me with worry behind her eyes.

"Yeah, I am travelling the world alone."

She asks me many questions about my safety and methods of travel. She asks where I sleep and how I get food. She asks me how old I am and what I was doing before travelling. I answer everything truthfully except when she asks: "So you have been completely safe, then?"

At the end of it all she turns to her daughter: "Well lass, don't be getting any ideas from this lass here. You'd be much safer to stay with me, I think."

When they are half a kilometre away, I cry for the first time since the morning after. Since I woke up in the morning and looked into his eyes. I tell myself life is long and that I am lucky to be still living it. To have a breakdown — on my own, in a foreign country, on a beach the farthest I have ever been from home — that I can't explain. Maybe I needed to break to be fixed. To fix myself. He tried to help fix me, but what can an almost-stranger do? He didn't see it happen, he hasn't experienced it before. No one knows who the person was who did it or why.

I can still feel the kiss, it was soft. Not my first kiss from a female, I don't remember what she looked like. That was not the first time I have tried to make myself throw up. I thought it would work because I had had a lot to drink. I don't remember much after that. But what I will always remember was the little pill, from her mouth to mine, a secret I didn't even know about.

The easiest pill to swallow, the hardest pill to swallow.

I looked around the crowd and recognised the strangers in front of me: they were the friends I came with. I grabbed one and whispered something to him. When he asked me to repeat it, I couldn't remember what I said.

I heard myself say: "A girl in the bathroom put a pill inside me."

"What? She gave you one, and you took it?"

"No, she put it in my tummy, she wouldn't let me choose." I cried with my whole body.

He hugged me and chanted: "We have to go, we have to go, we have to go."

Down the road in a kebab store, two almost strangers sat across from each other. The guy watched the girl as she sloppily shovelled food into her mouth, repeating herself and getting distracted.

From the outside it would look like a couple who had drunk too much. But we weren't. We were accidental lovers from the past who had met up for one last night of fun that had resulted in something neither of us had counted on.

I asked him what time it was. I was shocked that it was 4am. To me it had been as if we were in the club for 20 minutes.

I dig my toes in the sand. I put my hands over my head. Brace position — bracing myself against my life.

When I open my eyes and lift my head I am a little surprised. Nothing has changed around me. But I feel different within me.

"I am alive...I am alive...I am alive," I begin chanting in my head. My personal incantation. I then whisper it, then say it, then shout it.

I am stronger now, I tell myself. I will keep saying it until I believe it.

But it's just as well the water was so cold, just as well I left my licence in the car. The ocean has a way of swallowing problems, of swallowing people.

• Raphael van Workum won the G-Adventures Award for the Best New Travel Writer at the 2017 Cathay Pacific Travcom Awards.

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