Tall Story - Candy Gourlay [1]
Well, London isn’t the Philippines, Mum.
The two tummies are practically holding me up in the carriage. I could fall asleep and remain vertical. Hopefully it won’t be this bad on the return trip with Bernardo and his luggage.
Bernardo!
I can’t believe I’m minutes away from becoming someone’s little sister.
If he’s tall like Mum says, he’s guaranteed to love Michael Jordan. She says everyone in the Philippines is mad about basketball and I’m Michael Jordan’s biggest fan. And maybe with another teenager in the house, we can listen to normal music instead of selections from Mum and Dad’s pre-Jurassic collection. And now there will be someone else to ignore the bad Dad-jokes that for some reason make Mum go hysterical.
I’m tired of being the Only Child.
And then suddenly the train is screeching to a stop at Heathrow and Mum’s dragging me out from between the two tummies. It’s miles to walk through all those long, long tunnels to Terminal 3. Then we have to wait an hour before Bernardo’s plane number shows on the arrival boards. Then it’s another half-hour before they say ‘Baggage in Hall’. Now Mum’s staring at luggage tags to see which people emerging from the gate were on the plane from the Philippines. ‘Look, look!’ she screams (and it’s no use telling Mum she’s loud: she was born with no volume control).
And then she stands there for ages holding the welcome banner up high, hopping a little on one leg like she really, really needs to go to the toilet.
Dad puts his arm around Mum’s shoulders and whispers in her ear some more. But her eyes are glazed. She’s beyond help.
And then she screams so sharply that people nearby stop kissing and hugging to stare.
‘THERE HE IS! OH, NARDO! OH, NARDO! OH! OH! OH!’
And I squint past all the huggers and kissers in the Arrivals hall, through the tiny panes of glass on the double doors, and all I can see is some geek’s necktie. But Mum’s already dropped her banner and she’s CRAWLING under the barrier and rushing towards the necktie, all the while squealing something in Tagalog. Dad’s got the banner now; he’s holding it up and grinning so broadly you can see that he’s missing a canine.
Then I finally get why Mum goes on and on about Bernardo being tall.
Rocky, the captain of my basketball team, is TALL.
Michael Jordan is TALL.
But Bernardo is no way tall like Rocky or Michael Jordan.
Bernardo is a GIANT.
Part One
Be Careful What You Wish For
1
Bernardo
I have a mother. And a younger sister. And a stepfather named William.
But they live in London, on the other side of the world. And I live here, with my uncle and aunt, in the village of San Andres, a barrio so small it is barely a mosquito bite on the mountains of Montalban in the Philippines.
For years I’ve been waiting for the day when the British Home Office will see fit to write me the letter saying, Yes please, Bernardo, come to London and be with your family. But it’s been years and years and I’m sixteen now anyway and the letter has not come, and sometimes I think it will never come, which is just as well because the way things are, leaving San Andres is not an easy thing.
We are a village usually noticed not for what we have but for what we don’t: we have no square, no supermarket, no bar, no church – the nearest confessional being over the next hill in the barrio of San Isidro. The houses don’t have much either: no clay-tiled roofs, not much paint left on the old planked walls, no tidy pavements outside each rusty garden gate.
Bernardo was my dead father’s name, the only thing that once belonged to him that I claim as my own. This I explain to anyone who will listen. But nobody ever does.
Your name is Bernardo? God be praised! Bernardo Carpio!
Bernardo Carpio?