Galway Review 8 - April 2020

teeth. He turned to a page at the back and his mood
lifted at the sight of the list. He’d felt very alone when he
woke that morning but now he couldn’t help smiling;
seeing the page was like coming face to face with an old
friend. Twenty-eight of the thirty items, written in his own
blocky handwriting, had been marked off but he counted
them all the same. Running through the entries and the
red ticks was like leafing through a photo album in his
head but before he reached the half-way point, the cries
of the woman in 5C intruded on his memories.
‘Christ on a bicycle,’ she exclaimed, slapping her
companion with her book. ‘You said you’d read the
important parts, all of them! So what, you skipped the
travel fact list because the “Risks & Rascals” page was
all your pea-brain could handle? Or did you think flying
on a Category 2 airline would be a laugh?’ She thumped
him again and demanded to know why he had
memorised the paragraph about robberies instead of
organising different transportation.
‘Leave off. I didn’t see that bit. I swear!’ While squirming
to make himself a smaller target, the man dropped his
water bottle but was too busy to notice. It rolled under
his seat and came to a stop by Leo’s feet.
Ignoring the bottle and the quarrelsome couple, Leo
went back to his list and found comfort in the familiar
names. Abu Simbel, Samarkand, Palmyra, Machu
Picchu, Petra, Easter Island…. The pictures in his
mental photo album expanded into a mini-film as he
lingered over the memory of dancing on the beach with
Ginnie while the famous stone Moai, majestic in the
moonlight, stood guard. Hundreds of nights had passed
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