Down to the Valley

The light down Hannah’s hall was off.

The amazing thing about Holly Grove is that all of the lights are motion sensitive, so when there is no hall activity for a certain period of time, the lights go off to save electricity. No one had been down Hannah’s hallway for what was probably ten minutes.

Sunday morning has fallen into a routine that never varies. Hannah wears the same outfit, and I wear one of two variations of the same outfit, and we meet in the corridor connecting our two hallways at exactly 10.00, so we can walk to Saint Bridgid’s together. This morning, I had been running late, and it was 10.05 when I stepped out of my room and realised that Hannah was not waiting for me, as she usually was. Had she overslept?

Frowning, I pulled my cell phone out of my purse and started to text her. Just as I was about to hit Send, I heard a door creaking, and the lights in her hallway switched on.

“I have a cold,” she said by way of greeting. Her face was paler than usual, and she looked tired; I wondered if our little dinner party last night had kept her up late. I couldn’t think of a tactful way to ask. Besides, I reasoned, Hannah’s been feeling a cold coming on for a few days now; she would have tried to go to bed early. All the same, it wasn’t such a big deal. Hannah has colds all the time, and colds tended to make one irritable, and tired, and pale.

It had rained that night, and the world outside was still damp, the air full of a lingering warmth. “It’s so nice out!” I cried, throwing my arms out and spinning in a circle.

Hannah laughed at me. I shook my head, and pointed up at the sky, which had no traces of rain left in it. The sky was a beautiful shade of summer blue, and the clouds were white and perfect. “See?” I said, “The sky looks beautiful. None of those rainy grays today.”

“Yeah,” Hannah mused, lost in her own thoughts. I entertained her by talking about my high school’s homecoming, which was last night, and plotting out where we would go shopping, making a mental list of things that we needed for the coming week.

Inside Saint Bridgid’s, a guitar was playing, with faint traces of a flute following behind. The chorus was rehearsing. Hannah grinned. “They’re actually going to play music this week!” she cried, “And it’s a song I know!”

The church started to fill up, and soon the chorus members filed out to the front of the church. Last week’s priest, the tall one with the accent difficult for me to understand, came in, and the church erupted into song. I sang along under my breath.

Saint Bridgid’s has an intricate wood structure overhead, with slim beams supporting each other, which I like to look at. The wood gleams in the artificial light in a way that the bricked walls do not, and I often imagine Jesus as the carpenter he would have been when Joseph was alive, working on something as beautiful and intricate as this. When I’m not staring off into space, I look at the cross above the altar, which is a small white one that I find simplistic, especially compared to the altar at my parish back home, or the Felician Motherhouse’s in Livonia. The cross is less like a cross than a shamrock-cross, with a dark, mossy green colouring to it.

I spent a lot of time staring at the cross today, while the lector was reading. He was an old, old man, with a voice that used to be strong but was now weak, and it was hard to understand him, too hard for me to try to listen. I would try to pick up the string of his words, but I would lose him in the midst of his words, tripping over a pronunciation, and by the time I untangled the thread he had wound on, and on, and was finished. So I stared up at the cross, trying to make out the corpse of our Christ, but could see nothing but mossy green. This itched, somewhere I could not reach, but I pushed the feeling away and tried to pay attention to the priest as he did the readings and then began the homily.

The homily was not much better than the lecturer’s words, not because I could not understand, but because I did not want to understand. “Jesus references the word ‘Hell’ three times in today’s scripture,” the priest told us solemnly, looking out over his congregation, “but it is not what you or I would think of as hell. The word ‘hell’ that He uses is a translation of the Hebrew word—” and here I whispered it to myself along with the priest--, “Gehenna. And the Gehenna that He spoke of is not the spiritual place you and I think it to be; it was, very much, a real, physical location.”

My skin started to prickle again, and I couldn’t get it to stop.

“Gehenna means ‘The Valley of Hinnom,’ and it was a place where the old gods had reigned. It had been a place of evil, a place of corruption—a place of human sacrifice.”

I closed my eyes, but found there only images of the dead, of the crumpled white body of an unidentified man at the Ulster Museum, and of his female counterpart in the next room, the black-skinned mummy, her white teeth peeping out over her lips. I remembered the stories of the Aztecs standing at Tenochtitlan, their priests painted black and red and blue, feathers in their black hair, digging into a prisoner’s ribcage and pulling out a steal-beating heart.

“The Jews knew this, and they remembered it, so it was valueless land. And as Jerusalem grew into the city it was at the time of Jesus, Hinnom had become the rubbish dump. But it was not a rubbish dump like ours, black bin, green bin, blue bin, everything in its proper place. Everything was thrown into the waste; dead animals, even unclaimed human bodies. Insects and gnats flew in the air, and there would be, as there often are in such places, fires that never went out, but burned black smoke out into the sky.

“So when Jesus spoke of Gehenna, He was speaking of the Valley of Hinnom. What He was saying was not that sinners would go to the world we think of as Hell today, of fire and brimstone, but that we would go to a forsaken, dead place, and there we would stand, thoroughly alone.”

I closed my eyes, and forced myself to think of something else, something different. I told myself God wouldn’t mind if I stopped listening—I had studied the Bible verse, where Jesus tells His followers to cut off their hand, or foot, or gouge out their eye if it leads them to sin, and I knew the discussions that have come from it; I knew already of Origin, who castrated himself to follow Jesus’ words, and later regretted his rash action, and renounced those who would take the Bible so literally. I slipped out of the service, disappearing into my own thoughts, almost missing completely the priest consecrating the bread and the wine, of our standard reply, “Blessed be God forever,” following my mind to safer places.

It was Hannah who brought me back.

I was kneeling, staring off into space, about where the Tabernacle rests, when out of the corner of my eye I saw movement, and the whispering of a winter jacket. I turned, and saw Hannah slipping sideways, falling, her eyes still open blankly.

“Hannah,” I gasped, reaching out for her, thinking to grab her, but she had already fallen, right onto the shoes of the man sitting next to her.

Immediately the woman next to me stepped over me and knelt over me; she may have said, “I’m a nurse,” or perhaps she didn’t. Perhaps that was only what I expected her to say. That’s what one says, isn’t it, when they go to someone lying on the ground?

Get her off of the ground, I wanted to say. Everyone around us was standing, and two men had also come to see what had happened to the girl who had slipped so quietly to the floor. I’m her friend, is she all right? Is she all right?

I peered over the woman’s shoulder. Hannah’s face had gone terribly pale, and her eyes were just open, but her eyes were black and empty. She couldn’t see anything.

Oh, God, I thought; I should be praying, but I don’t know what to pray. I can’t think of anything just now—Oh, God, what do I pray, what do I do? What do I say to You?

Her eyes closed again, and the men and the woman conferred, but I couldn’t hear what they were saying. Is she all right? Is she all right? We didn’t have any doctors, or know any, I didn’t even know where the nearest hospital was—we were American exchange students, she’d just had a cold, she hadn’t told me she was feeling poorly.

I wanted my Rosary, but was afraid of the disturbance that would cause. Her eyes were open now, still black and empty and sightless.

What was I going to tell her mother?

Hail Mary, I tried, Our Father, but none of the words would follow after. The prayers fell flat in my mind.

“Does anyone have any sweets?” one of the men asked. He was white, maybe fifty at most. The other was younger, thirty, of Asian descent.

Hannah finally moved her head, and opened her eyes, and this time her eyes were hazel, and I felt she was seeing, and registering what she saw. “Let’s get her up,” the woman said, and slowly they got her up, and then escorted her out of the chapel, into the little atrium in front of it. I followed, grabbing our jackets and purses.

Someone got water, and the Asian man handed it to her, along with a little packet of pig-shaped gummies. The white man appeared again, with two kit-kats, and made jokes that made us smile. Hannah was still pale, and she drank her water slowly, the kit-kats just as slowly.

“Do you feel better?” the man asked.

Hannah nodded.

“Where do you live? Where’s your mother and father?”

“They’re not here,” Hannah said, “We’re from Elms Village, we’re Queen’s students.”

“Well, you can’t walk back, that’s for certain. I’ll get my mother, and we’ll drive you back. Ehm—are you two together?” he looked at me for the first time.

I nodded. “We’re friends.”

He went back into the church, and I looked at Hannah. “Do you feel all right?” I asked.

She nodded. “I’m feeling better.”

“That’s good.”

“I’m going to miss the Eucharist,” she said, slowly.

“Do you want me to get it for you? I could try. I don’t know if they’ll just give it to me, if all I have is my hands, but it’s worth a short.”

Hannah held up the kit-kat wrapper. “I’ve eaten.”

I shrugged. “You tell me what you want.”

“I can’t believe I had to faint before the Eucharist.”

“I’m sure God will excuse you. You did faint.”

“You should get into line,” Hannah said, but I didn’t want to leave her.

Mass was over shortly. The priest came out, in a green just lighter than the hideous mossy green cross. I wondered if he would come over to us, and say, “I saw what happened, are you all right?” but he barely glanced at us.

Raymond—that was the man’s name—came back over with his mum, and they led us to their car, and drove us back to Elms. Elms is only a five minute walk, but he dropped us off, and cautioned Hannah to sleep, and rest easy, and eat.

So we sat in the common room, and we watched The Man Who Knew Too Much, and Big Bang Theory all afternoon, and I shopped for both of us and made Hannah chicken soup for lunch and some Wellness Tea. It’ll be dinnertime soon, but I’m not quite hungry yet, even though it’s 7.00 p.m. here. It’s been—an Alfred Hitchcock sort of day, I suppose, one that twists your mind and your stomach.

When Frances suggested I name this blog Scandal in Belfast, I really didn’t think we would have much to create scandal about. But as the days pass, I realise that two Americans abroad can get into a lot of trouble, if they have the mind to do so. We’re already known by the Irish in our building as the “Quirky Americans,” because no one can predict what we’ll do or say next. I like being considered “quirky,” and I actually like not knowing what tomorrow will bring. At the same time, these scares are shaving years off of my life.

I wonder what trouble we’ll get into tomorrow…?

First Week of Classes!

This week heralded the beginning of classes, which for me includes Anthropology 1001, Creative Writing, and 18^th Century Romantic Literature. Two of these classes I had planned on taking, but one of them was an addition—the Romantic Literature module.

Three modules in Northern Ireland—as classes are called here—equal a full load of five classes back home. Each module is roughly an hour long, and includes a tutorial, which is run by either a student or a teacher with fewer qualifications than the professor, who guide us through the lecture material. The idea is that we will sit in a lecture hall for an hour, carefully soaking up every word our professor says like sponges, and then report to a tutorial to discuss with a small group of classmates the material. In America, these two concepts are blended—we listen to our professor, occasionally interjecting our own comments, and then disperse into small groups when our professor tells us to.

So far I think that I like my lectures, and my professors, but the tutorials will take some getting used to. As this was the first week, I did not have an Anthropology tutorial, and Creative Writing does not have a tutorial (probably because there are only eleven of us in that particular module), but I did have my Romantics tutorial this afternoon, in the School of English. Two of my classes take place in the School of English, which is basically one large building next to the official Queen’s campus. Outside, it doesn’t look like much, but the inside is a maze. It took me a long time to find my classroom.

This morning the skies were clear, but when I stepped outside after the Romantics tutorial there was an enormous gray cloud hanging low in the sky, just over the townhouses. Just as I passed the Student Union, the rain started to pour down.

How different from yesterday, I thought, remembering the cheerful mass of people that had been hanging around the Student Union, listening to music and accepting fliers from famous clubs. Yesterday had been the club fair at the Student Union, so all of Queen’s clubs had come to present their cases and vie for new members, pressing their causes on Hannah and I as we passed.

Hannah and I had emerged from the club fair onto the street laughing and weighted down with information, and as we did so, someone pressed another pamphlet upon Hannah which contained a condom—for Thursday night only, it read.

Thursday is to Northern Ireland what Friday is to America, which was probably why the condoms were flowing. Hannah stared at the package in horror, and I took it from her. “Is this what I think it is?” I asked.

“It’s exactly what you think it is.”

 We had put the condom where it belonged (the rubbish tin), and Hannah went to class. I went forth to see what else Belfast had to offer that day and ended up combing all of the bookstores in South Belfast for Ciaran Carson books. I hadn’t found any, but I did find Daphne du Maurier’s Jamaica Inn—perfect, I thought, for this rainy, dark weather.

Ciaran Carson. Even soaking wet, wandering through the now-abandoned streets like a drowning kitten, the thought of him made me smile.

“You’re smitten,” Hannah had said on Wednesday, as we got ready for the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead performance being hosted by the school drama club, and I babbled on and on to her about my Creative Writing professor. “If smitten is the right word.”

Smitten, I later looked up in the Oxford English Dictionary. Past participle of ‘smite,’ a verb meaning: 1. Strike with a firm blow; 2. Defeat or conquer; 3. Attack or affect severely; 4. Be smitten. Be strongly attracted to something. To Hannah, I simply said, “If you leave off the romantic notions attached to the word, then yes, I’m smitten.” Smitten kitten, as Chelsea, one of our Irish flatmates, would say.

Ciaran Carson had arrived to our Creative Writing class late. He was wearing a pinstripe jacket, with a handkerchief in the pocket—dressed to the nines, I think the expression goes. He wore large glasses, like the kind my grandfather used to wear, the ones that precursed Joe Jonas’ “nerd glasses,” large and square, covering the entire eye. In fact, he reminded me a great deal of my grandfather; their facial structure was the same, and he was quirky; he ‘contain(s) multitudes,’ as Walt Whitman would have said.

He told us that, as a child, he read 4-5 books each week, and said for our homework we must read a contemporary book. “It’s wonderful that you all like to read the classics,” he said, “but what’s the use if you don’t read the books being published today? What do you learn of style? The reading is as important as the writing, or more so. Literature is supposed to influence you. It’s supposed to change your mind.

“There are these people I meet, who say that they hate to read, because it influences their style. But what style do you have if you don’t know what styles are out there? So it’s good to read the old books, but you must read the books of today, to know where literature is going.”

Then he set us to our assignment, telling us to write, just write, and that he would be back later to tell us what to do next. “I’m not going to tell you what to write. But don’t think I don’t know what you’re feeling. Even now, as a published author, I still sit down at a blank page, and I have no idea what to write. I have no idea where to begin. What I will be teaching you is the terror of the blank page, and you are afraid, that it will be nonsense. And, you know what? It probably is. But you have to learn the cope, with the embarrassment of your writing.”

He left the room then, to let us work on our assignment, and I stared at the space where he had been. The embarrassment of your own writing. No one had ever explained it quite so accurately before, that feeling when you look up and realize you’ve been writing for hours and hours, and it’s all---shyte, as the Irish would say. It’s all shyte, and you know it, and I know it; but you have to cope. You must keep calm and carry on.

I wrote, but with a troubled conscience. I knew the terror of the blank page, but I felt even more keenly the terror of handing in shyte to Ciaran Carson. It was as if I had just met God, and the scales had fallen from my eyes; as if I had run into Anne Lamott quite by accident at the mall. How on Earth could I possibly hope to impress Ciaran Carson? He certainly wouldn’t let me get away with drivel, as so many other teachers back home have done.

 Thankfully,  Professor Carson didn’t make us read when he came back in, and I was spared that particular torture, but he did play the tin whistle for us, which was amazing.  

“He’s a bit of an eccentric, isn’t he?” Ann Marie whispered to me as we left the School of English. I nodded, but held my tongue. It’s odd how often genius and eccentrics walk hand in hand, and how often the two are confused.

Since that first class on Tuesday, I’ve googled him, and made the trek to the public library, where it took two librarians until I could find any of his books. I’m reading one of them, The Pen Friend, right now, and I have a book of his collected poems on my bedside table. I’ve learned that he is a renowned poet, the winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, and that his first language was Irish, and besides being a prolific writer, he is an accomplished musician, translator, art critic, and amazing human being. I am counting down the days until Tuesday afternoon, just to see what he’ll do next.

I made it to the Spar store by Elms, and I bought milk for my hot chocolate, some bread, and a bar of chocolate to indulge myself.  

The rain had stopped when I left the store. I slopped my way back to the dorms, my shoes making and alarming squishing sound. I was thinking of Ciaran Carson, and my anthropology lecture; of how everyone in Michigan was just waking up as I was returning home after a long day of classes.

I was thinking that it was nice to be in Belfast, even in the rain and cold.

Timeline of Events

Monday:

11.00-12.00: Anthropology lecture

12.00-1.00: Lunch with Hannah in the McClay library.

1.00-3.00:18^th Century Romantics lecture (cancelled)

3.00-late: Read “Vertue Rewarded” for Romantics class.

Tuesday:

Sleep until late. Laze around.

3.00-5.00: Creative Writing class with Ciaran Carson.

Wednesday:

11.00-1.00: Walk to Public library. Locate Ciaran Carson books. Walk back.

1.00-2.30: Walk to Tesco with Victoria and Hannah.

2.30-6.45-Read Ciaran Carson.

6.45-9.00: Rosencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead.

9.00-10.00: Try and explain plot to Mel.

Thursday:

11.00-12.00: Tour clubs.

12.00-1.00: Free lunch at Fisherwick Presbyterian church.

1.00-3.00: Wander around bookstores.

3.00-5.00: Hang out in Hannah’s room.

5.00-7.00: Cook hamburgers and chips for Hannah and Victoria. First real meal cooked by myself for other people.

7.00-11.30: Hang out with people. End up singing pop songs in the common room with Hannah, Mel, Fiona, and Drilla.

Friday:

11.00-12.00: Anthropology Lecture

12.00-1.00: Anthropology Tutorial (cancelled for first week)

1.00-2.00: Romantics tutorial

6.00-8.00: Weekenders Club meeting with pizza

Left Behind: An Adventure in Titanic Quarter

Sunday means mass at Saint Bridgid’s, and I was awake early and half-dressed when I heard a quiet voice calling my name through the door. “Rebekah…Rebekah…”

Maybe if I ignore it, it’ll go away, I thought. I had only been up for a half hour and was not ready to receive visitors in my room—or anywhere, really, based on my appearance. The mirror in front of me showed a girl with pale skin and still-dripping hair.

“Rebekah…Rebekah…”

Knock, I thought wearily, opening the door. Mel stood there, fully dressed, and looking as if she had been awake for hours.

Mel is my next-door neighbor, living on the room to my right. I can hear her Skype her friends and family back home when I am still asleep in bed, and often I can hear her shouting when I wake up in the mornings. The noise doesn’t bother me too much, as I find it comforting to know a friendly face is on the other side of the wall, but when someone wants to interact with me at nine in the morning, I get a little irritated.

Especially when I’m not fully dressed.

“Good morning,” Mel said cheerily.

“Hiya,” I said.

“I was wondering if you wanted to compare schedules…?”

Tomorrow is our first day of classes, and Mel had wanted to see my schedule all week, as she wants to sit in on my classes—which makes me highly uncomfortable, especially because my classes are ones she’s not at all familiar with. I’d been telling her we could compare our schedules all week but really putting it off, and now she had caught me at my weakest moment. “Gimme a minute,” I mumbled.

“Oh. Okay. Sorry.”

I ran a comb through my hair and found a pair of flip-flops, located my room key, and joined her out in the hall. After going over every single mark on my planner for her, and explaining the things she did not understand, I realized mass was in half an hour and I was only in leggings and a black camisole.

“Hey, Mel, I gotta get going…I’m still not ready for church…”

This sparked another controversy, as Mel wanted to know if I was going to Fisherwick. Fisherwick was hosting brunch after their services today, as Cosmin had told us yesterday, and I knew a lot of the weekenders (the people who stay in the dorms on the weekend) would be there for a free meal.

“No, Mel. I’m going to Saint Bridgid’s.”

“So I will see you there?”

“No. I’m going to a different church.”

“But you will go to the lunch?”

“No, I can’t. The times collide.”

“Then I will go with you, to the church, together?”

I sighed and leaned against the wall for support, wondering if my voice was still too husky with sleep to be clearly understood by a non-native English speaker. “Mel, I have to go, and I’m not dressed…”

She looked me over and said, “I think you look very nice,” and I blinked at her, then went inside and found a nice sweater to wear.

Saint Bridgid’s was about the same as last week. There was a different priest today, his accent harder for me to understand, but the mass was still the same disorganized mess. I spent more time than I care to admit people-watching. In front of me was an adorable little boy and his father, and he kept looking around and asking his dad, “Where’s God?”

He never found God, but Hannah says he was watching me, especially during the Creed. I hope that I interested him as much as he interested me.

After mass, we hurried back and changed into street wear, and went to the Student Union for the Titanic tour. Belfast built the museum last year to celebrate the Titanic’s anniversary, and the International Centre at Queen’s was going to take us there and back. We met Mehgan, Jolien, Anem, and Mel there; Mel still wondering why we had not gone to Fisherwick, and why we had to go to a certain church.

“Can’t you skip one week?” she asked, perturbed.

“No,” Hannah and I said, shaking our heads.

“Oh. But if I do not go to church one week, is that bad?”

Hannah and I looked at each other, torn between the easy answer (no) and the long, theological answer (yes). Eventually we steered the conversation into clearer waters (I am, obviously, not cut out to be a missionary) and then went to board the bus. Mel grabbed my shoulder and pointed to one of the guys who works for the ISPC, or the International Support and Postgraduate Centre, with short blonde hair and a deep blue shirt. “I no like him,” she said firmly.

There was nothing wrong with him as far as I could see. He had freckles that I thought were cute, and I thought he had kind eyes. “Why not?”

“I just don’t like him. Do you like him?”

I shrugged. “I don’t really know him.” This was a placating answer; I really thought he was the same cute-freckled guy who I might have liked to know at some time or other.

Now I wish I had listened to Mel more closely.

The Titanic Museum is an architectural wonder. It’s built on the docks right in front of the station where the Titanic herself was built, and designed to look both like the ship and as a tribute to the White Star Line company that built her. There are five steel gray corners, each built like the prow of a ship, and when you get closer you see that the architect made little pools of water surround it, so that the building really looks like a docked ship. In front of the entrance is a bronze woman curved like a mermaid; she is supposedly a tribute to Kate Winslet in the famous 1997 James Cameron movie, Titanic.

Inside is the gift shop and restaurants, and escalators going up. The walls looked like rusted metal, and the ceiling shone with stars. On the floor was a beautiful compass rose, with a shipyard song carved around the edges. An employee handed out what he called a “memory ticket,” telling us with a forced smile (believing, no doubt, that we were all semi-illiterate) that these tickets could not be redeemed for anything, so please do not try. Then he led us up the escalator to the first floor, and said, “This is a self-guided tour, so please go at your own pace.”

So we did.

Everything about the Titanic Museum is a marvel. I can’t imagine all of the hours and workers it must have taken to build it; from the architecture, to the layout, to the historians and graphic designers needed to make it the success that it is. We followed the lives of several men and women aboard the Titanic, starting from the Titanic’s commission, to the two years it took to simply build the dock used to built the Titanic, to the actual process of building it. One room had an amazing projector, half interactive, that showed us the layout and plans of the ship. There was an amusement ride, that showed us the steps necessary to rivet the metal together, and what life was like for the men who built the unsinkable ship. Then, slowly, we moved on to the day the Titanic was released into the sea, still missing most of its appliances and furnishings, and from there to what the Titanic would have looked like fully furnished. One room was a marvel of graphic design that took us through each floor of the Titanic, digitally remastered to look as it would have before it set sail, complete with music, and so dizzyingly real that Hannah had to take a moment to sit down and catch her breath.

And then, of course, came the sinking.

The walls were lined with poetry here, with lights making the floor look like we were standing at the bottom of the sea. The walls showed us a video of what the Titanic must have looked like, being swallowed by the sea, and voices of survivors spoke above our heads, recounting those last moments. The people we had followed throughout the museum appeared at the end, with captions on whether they lived or died, and how they had died. One man, Artie Frost, had designed the Titanic, and when news came to his daughters that he was “lost,” they ran around London looking for him. Another man, Bruce Ismay, survived the Titanic, and was publically ridiculed to the point that, during the investigation following the Titanic’s sinking, had to be escorted to the courtroom by policemen for his own protection. It was heartbreaking. I wanted to go back in time and see all of their faces, and see the Titanic in all of its glory; I wanted to rescue every last person aboard.

The next room was a short video of the Titanic underwater, showing us the remains of women’s shoes, of chamber pots and frying pans, along with an interactive computer screen showing us the massive bed of Titanic relics that rest on the ocean floor, and their locations. After this came the legacy; all of the movies, songs, and books written about the Titanic, as well as the end of the Titanic’s two sister ships, the Britannica and the Olympia. Both had been turned into war ships, ferrying American soldiers to Europe or being used as hospitals, and experts surmise that had the Titanic survived its maiden voyage, it would have ended thus as well.

We had been about two hours, maybe two and a half hours at most, when we emerged at the end of the tour, and from the window ledge Hannah and Mehgan spotted what we thought was our bus. Hurrying, we ran outside, but it was gone when we emerged. The wind had started up, and it was ferocious and cold.

At a loss, we went back inside, and met Anem and Jolien too. Mel, I knew, was still looking at the Titanic’s legacy and would be out in a moment. Anem went to talk to one of the employees, asking if they had seen any other Queen’s students. I went and gathered Mel. At first news looked grim; we thought that we had been left, all six of us, in the Titanic Quarter of Belfast. But then another employee said, “Oh, no, they’re on the third level, watching the movie; they’ll be down shortly, or you could go join them.”

We sat down. Anem and Jolien got something to eat at the café. Mel, fiercely independent being that she is, wandered off. Mehgan and Hannah and I tried to pick out people in the gift shop that we thought were with us.

“There were fifty of us,” Mehgan kept saying reasonably, “And if six of us are missing, that’s three rows on the bus. They’d count. They can’t lose six of us, they’d notice…”

The restaurant was slowly being closed; chairs were being put up. Even the café where Anem and Jolien were sitting was emptying. The employees were gathering and gossiping, all clear indicators that the museum was closing.

And the others in our group, and the Irish lad from the ISPC in the blue shirt, were nowhere to be found.

“We’ve been left behind,” we all realized. All six of us had been left in a museum in East Belfast, across the River Lagan.

I found Mel again, and all six of us gathered together. Arem called for a taxi on a phone conveniently placed inside of the museum for this purpose, and we sat together, pondering.

Outside was the first taxi (as most taxis only hold three passengers at most, although there are some that can hold up to six), and Anem, Jolien, and Mehgan started to get in. Just as they did so, a man in a green sweater started asking if we needed a taxi.

“No, thank you, we’re with Value Taxi,” we said, “we ordered two, and we’ll be fine.”

We sent the first group off, and Hannah, Mel and I stood outside in the cold. Mel was snapping pictures, and eventually she wandered back over and said, “Now we walk?”

“No, we’re waiting for our taxi.”

“I’d rather walk.”

“Mel, that’s a two hour walk. We’d have to cross a bridge and a highway. I don’t want to do that, do you?”

My knee was already starting to throb. It’s started to do that, now that the blister on my foot is healed; if it’s not one thing, it’s another. I didn’t fancy a two hour walk—for it would, I was certain, be at least a two hour walk, perhaps longer, since we had no idea how to get back. I have only ever walked as far as Cathedral Quarter, which is just north of the City Centre. (You might have to google a map to understand this one.)

As we waited, the man in the green sweater came back up to us and started to pick a fight of sorts. “Did they tell you to pick Value Cabs?” he asked.

They had, actually, telling us the other competitors would rip us off. Anem had asked the prices while on the phone and we knew it was going to be about seven pounds to get a lift home. We didn’t feel like getting ripped off even more. “No,” I said, getting all tangled into politics I know nothing of.

“It’s illegal, what they’re doing! We have a right to be here! It’s illegal, and I want proof of it—”

“We ordered two taxis,” Hannah said firmly, “and we ordered what we ordered, and the other one is on its way now.”

Luckily, another girl needed a lift home, and he left us alone to drive her back. We sat there a little longer, and then a red cab appeared. The driver rolled down the window and said our party name, and we nodded and got inside.

Our driver was a psychopath.

It was bad enough that I was already imagining dreadful things, all thanks to BBC Sherlock. In the pilot for BBC Sherlock, “A Study in Pink,” a cab driver is picking off victims and kills them by forcing them to commit suicide. I sat in the car, trying to convince myself that everything was going to be okay and keeping an eye on our total, which kept going up in increments of ten pence for what looked like every minute, and praying we wouldn’t hit any red lights. I needn’t have worried about the red lights. Our cabbie was practically a race car driver.

He tried to engage us in conversation about the museum, but being Americans, Hannah and I only responded vaguely: “It was very nice.” Mel ignored him completely, and was busy playing with her camera.

The next thing I know, we are speeding through Belfast, and crashing into a red light. He stops, and then says in a heavy, foreign accent, “I am like a race car driver; I just want to go through red light!” He went on like this a bit longer, and from what I could understand, he might have been asking our permission to run red lights.

“Please don’t,” Hannah said, slightly faintly.

“This Audi, she run fast. It’s like an insult not to drive her fast, you know?” and then he started to make revving engine noises, as if he or we were children again. Hannah and I laughed (myself more hysterically, I believe; I am the type of person when, confronted with bad news and calamity, will laugh before she cries) and Mel was looking at me like, Is this normal?

The green light came on, and we shot back off. Silence reigned in the little car, and then he turned on a CD, saying, “This is corny, lame stuff; it’s so bad, it’s cheap,” and then he started skipping tracks. “Not this one, not this one, I have the perfect song; oh, no! Wrong CD!” he pretended to slap his head. I was beginning to feel like banging my head against the window. Then, suddenly, after skipping at least ten songs (how many songs were there on this CD?) he cried, “Got it!”

And James Brown’s “Sex Machine,” filled the car.

Luckily after that all attempts at conversation fizzled out, because the cabbie was content to just smile and nod his head and go, “Eh? Eh?” when he caught our eyes, and we would smile and nod and say, “Yeah, yeah.”

He dropped us off at Elms Village, charged us 6.50, and then turned around, honking and waving and shouting merrily. Mehgan, Jolien, and Anem looked at us, and then him, strangely.

“He’s not from here,” I said.

The rest nodded; they’d guessed for themselves.

“What—what exactly was that song he was playing?” Anem asked tentatively.

“Sex Machine.”

“Oh.” She shook her head, clearing her thoughts. “Anyway, I’m going to the ISPC tomorrow to complain. Shall we all meet there at ten tomorrow morning? Do any of you have class?”

None of us had class then, so we all agreed to meet, complain, and demand a refund. In total, for the two taxis, we had spent 13.50 pounds, all because we had been left.

“They didn’t tell us what time to be back,” we all said, “how could we know? How could they not count and see six of us were missing?”

We parted ways then, each of us having plans. My knee was starting to throb painfully, but Hannah and I had plans to meet Victoria and go to the SuperTesco so I could buy a frying pan. We had planned on leaving at least an hour sooner, but in waiting for our imaginary bus, we had lost a great deal of time.

To get to SuperTesco, one needs to take at least two buses, but in the interest of money, Victoria thought we could meet the bus at the second station. This is a wonderful idea in theory, but the buses stop at 8:30, and it was already about seven. We booked it, myself lagging behind, but by the time we made it to the City Centre and the bus stop, it seemed we had the wrong stop. No bus arrived, at least. With a sigh, we decided to go to the smaller Tesco on Lisbon Road, and we limped there, only to find that one closed.

By this time I was starving, and my knee hurt. We crawled back home, after stopping to get Victoria desperately needed supplies at the 24 hour gas station nearby. Then Hannah and I returned to Holly Grove and made a pizza for dinner.

And very good pizza it was, too.