Wanderlust

I was eight years old when Grandpa got me my first atlas. It was Christmas, yet another grey year with sludge not snow, but with the Christmas tree lit up with white faerie lights and shining baubles, and those teasingly concealed presents stacked underneath it, nothing could spoil it.

I ran downstairs at breakneck speed that magical morning. I cheered over the computer game from mum and dad, ignored the predictable scarf from Auntie June and planned how to spend the money from Grandma as soon as I had it in my hand. I was contented with my haul, ready to find new uses for the toys from friends and beat the games within the day.

Then Grandpa pointed out the large, rectangular gold package at the back, which thus far had gone unnoticed. It was shiny and heavy, and suspiciously book shaped. I tore the paper off, my suspicions rising at the gleam in my grandfather’s eyes. It was a book, but as I flicked though it, my initial disgust faded to captivated interest.

At that moment, a new world presented itself to me in that moment, a world far beyond my small hometown and the cottage we went to in Wales every year. This world had mountains that scraped the sky, animals that could tear a man apart in seconds, jungles filled with yellow-eyed tigers and striped, poison-fanged snakes. It had cities which had stood for thousands of years, pyramids filled with treasure, prairies which stretched, like seas of grass, for hundreds of miles and were populated by only a few tribes of wild, elusive people.

That was the day that began my obsession. That book became my pride and joy, I carried it everywhere, and every time I opened it, I found somewhere new, some other place to discover. My parents were glad that I was reading and learning so readily, but it was so much more to me than that. I wasn’t there with them, in our small front room with the television and battered old sofa, I was up Mount Everest with a seemingly omniscient Sherpa, or on the savannah with the bush men, or walking along the Great Wall of China: the only human building that can be seen from space.

From that book there grew an entire bookshelf of atlases, travel guides and scrapbooks of images. The idea of seeing it all, actually feeling it with my own hands was consuming, intoxicating, though only a fond dream at that point. It was a ‘phase’ as my father called it, which I was expected to grow out of. And as I hit my teens, it did seem that my obsession had waned. The atlas stayed on my shelf, replaced in my school bag by novels and schoolbooks, and I began to spend more time with my friends than with my books.

That didn’t stop me from spending every evening staring out of my window at the horizon. More and more, I was realizing that I had to get out of that small town, with its grey sky and single convenience store.

My life was simple. I knew where I was going, and it was away from here.

Then came Alex, and everything became a little bit more difficult.

He moved in next door when I was fourteen, and the first thing I thought about him was that he was tall. I was tall, then, for a girl, and he towered over me. And seemed to take pleasure in that fact, at every opportunity.

He had ripped up jeans, long dyed hair, and a battered old guitar. His smile was genuine and his eyes were warm brown. I helped him shift his boxes of computer games and videos into his room, surprised by the volume of movies he owned.

From him I learnt of my second hidden world: film. I had watched movies before, of course, my dad’s old war movies, my mum’s romantic comedies. But Alex’s films were different. His collection spanned black and white classics to explosive action to almost-sentimental drama. He had a television in his bedroom, with a video player.

My mum found us, three hours later, watching the end of Labyrinth, curled up on the floor, already the best of friends.

I think she was pleased I finally had a male friend. I had always made friends with girls my own age, the boys at my school being of the loud, sweaty immature variety. Alex was different. He was a month older than me, and already in love with the silver screen.

Next to his guitar, his best friend was his old camcorder. I wasn’t in the drama club, far from it, but somehow narrating and dancing in front of that lens – or directing from behind it - provided a thrill, a possibility and potential, that before had only been found in atlases and travel guides.

A year passed, and I settled into a happy routine. I went to school, hung out with Abigail and Heidi, then walked home and dumped my massive schoolbag, changing out of my hated school uniform, before running next door and spending the afternoon with Alex.

He was my best friend, my confident, and I was his. He told me about his music, played me the songs he wrote for girls at school and about things on telly. I told him about everywhere I was going to go, all the things I was going to see.

We watched films I had never heard of: Some Like It Hot with the greatest ending line ever; War Games with an adolescent Matthew Broderick; Howl’s Moving Castle, which opened my mind to the world of anime.

We collected joint favourites, agreeing that the Muppet Christmas Carol was the single best adaptation ever made, that Red Dwarf was brilliant up to series seven, that Disney was wonderful in its Golden Age.

We disagreed just as often: He believed that the Lord of the Rings was too long winded and boring, but I loved the scope of it, the varied and wonderful cast of characters.

It was in the middle of such a debate that he first kissed me. Out of the blue - one moment, I was arguing that the Breakfast Club was the world’s greatest teen movie, the next, his lips were against mine, all soft and warm.

For my sixteenth birthday he gave me a camcorder of my own. It rivalled my atlas for position as my favourite thing in the world.

We were best friends from the day we met; deep down I’d loved him from the first film we ever watched together. He was intelligent, matured beyond his teenage years. He was musical and creative; he loved me for who I was.

When I was eighteen, the dream I’d held in my heart from the age of eight was finally a reality. I’d passed my A-Levels; I was taking a gap year before going to university. I was finally going to leave my tiny little town and see the world.

Alex was going to university in Manchester.

The single fact – he was staying in England and I was off around the world - caused our first and only separation. He wanted his music and his degree. He was studious and creative and wanted the university experience. He didn’t lust for travel, as I did. He didn’t long for mountains that touched the sky, plains that stretched on forever. He didn’t need to see all those things, as I did.

We parted with a long embrace and a promise to see each other again.

I didn’t come back to England for ten years. I didn’t speak to Alex more than once or twice a year, on my birthday and just before his exams, when he needed a friend who didn’t have that pressure.

I lived a day-to-day existence. I got temp jobs in cities and used the money on the road. I worked in an office in New York and rented an apartment for six months. I learnt bits and pieces of different languages, from holding a three-month shop job in Tokyo to helping out in an orphanage New Deli.

I can’t tell you how I survived all those years, when the original plan was to take up my differed place in Liverpool university and study Geography when I was nineteen. I was twenty-eight when I returned home for the first time, after building up a decent savings pot from making roving travel documentaries and writing a travel column for a small newspaper in New York. My atlas lived in my suitcase with my old camcorder and laptop.

Alex was a teacher, now, at a Manchester high school. He still had his battered old guitar and it lived in his wardrobe. He ran the school band, and half the female students were in love with him.

He had been married to a woman called Laverne, and they’d had twins. They divorced a year later, when they realised they just didn’t work. He called when they married, and I was stuck in Sydney, unable to make my best friend and soulmate’s wedding. He called when they divorced, and he needed someone to talk it over with.

I think I was part of the problem – whenever he had a problem, a really big one, he called me before he told Laverne. What woman in her right mind would put up with that from her husband?

I don’t know what I was doing; I just appeared in the doorway of his classroom, as the bell rang, and when the kids had all rushed past, and the room was settled and quiet, I knocked, once, on the door.

“Hey stranger.” He looked up, a little startled, and for a moment my heart broke when he didn’t recognise me. Then his eyes widened, and his mouth stretched into the widest, happiest grin I had ever seen.

He was out of his seat in a heartbeat, and I laughed as he swept me up into a massive, spinning hug, whisking me off my feet and whirling me around and around. He was laughing, so was I. I hadn’t seen him since we were eighteen and saying goodbye at the airport. No phone conversation, no letter or e-mail, could compare to being in my best friend’s arms again.

Where I belonged. I had travelled all over the world, satisfied a decent part of my wanderlust, just to end up right where my sixteen-year-old self had known she was meant to be: with his arms around me, his voice in my ear, his blood in my veins.

Home.