My Biggest Lie Read Free Page B

like the one she gave me. You couldn’t survive more than a few. She waved. I waved. She mouthed three words to me. ‘I love you.’ Or, ‘Bye bye, Liam.’ I could not be sure and mouthed three words back and she turned and walked away. She turned back once, she turned back twice and I waited for her to turn back again but that was all. Bye bye, Sarah.

Chapter 2
    I had never been on a flight like the one I took to Buenos Aires. There was a stop-over in Madrid for eight hours and I used it to leave the airport, go to a bar in the city, drink ten small but powerful beers and compose a frantic letter to Sarah that during the time I was writing it convinced me I could make everything all right again. I posted the letter, got on the wrong Metro line back to the airport and nearly missed the plane. When I made it just in time I was drunk, but I was not alone. For the duration of the twelve-hour flight it seemed that nearly every passenger remained standing with a beer in their hand, wandering between other groups of upright and talkative Argentines. It was like a giant pub in the sky. I can’t remember if we sat down even for take-off; it wouldn’t surprise me if we hadn’t, or if there had been barbecues sizzling in the aisles. The first half of the trip was a blur. I woke up, four hours in, sprawled across three seats, and immediately had to be sick. No one seemed surprised as I ran to the toilet with my hand over my mouth. Afterwards, I lay back down and hugged myself, crying freely butquietly, until an air hostess from the 1970s shook me and encouraged me into an upright position. We were about to land.
    The taxi driver didn’t understand my painstakingly prepared phrase-book instructions. I was asking for the Avenida de Mayo, which I pronounced like –ayonnaise.
    â€˜ Que? Que? ’
    â€˜De Mayo!’
    â€˜ Que? Que? ’
    I pulled my piece of paper out and showed it to him. He read it and slapped me on the shoulder, spraying spit across the windscreen: ‘ Avenida de Mazcho! ’ And then he was off.
    It was a bright sunny morning I did not belong in. The driver carried on a conversation with the radio as we sped through wide cracked roads lined with grand municipal buildings. It looked like Paris then Madrid then Milan; I couldn’t keep track but I felt like I had been here before. I began to cheer up but when I arrived at my hostel at 7 a.m. they had no idea who I was and explained to me, thankfully in English, that they were full up. That was that, then. I had done my best. I asked them to order me a taxi to the airport because I was going back to England. On hearing this, they rang around and found me a place at a sister hostel and so, another taxi ride later, I arrived at the Tango backpackers hostel in Palermo. I’m not sure how the driver knew it was the right one because I learned later that every hostel in Buenos Aires is called the Tango backpackers hostel. In the foyer was a small young man behind a reception desk. He looked up eagerly as I came through the door then looked disappointed, alook I thought was caused by my not being a woman. I felt sad for him too. Behind him was a wide bar, with fridges full of enormous bottles of lager labelled in the national blue and white. There was a music playing I had never heard before: chilled-out ambient beats and accordion solos. Electronic tango. At the time I found it quite beautiful, but I had been travelling for thirty hours and was delirious with strange emotions. I was to learn that no music but electronic tango played in the bar, for twenty-four hours, every single day of the week.
    There was one private room left, a small white box just off the building’s roof terrace. It had a single bed, a clothes rail and a window almost completely obscured by an air-conditioning unit which didn’t work – a perfect monk’s cell for me to begin my penance.
    I had half of my redundancy money left and