For almost two years, Clara dragged her backpack across Asia and then Africa, patching the holes with duct tape, believing there was truly no limit to how much she could stuff inside…until the zipper broke on an airport carousel and the pack exploded, leaving everything she owned strewn about for anyone to trod on. Once she’d rescued her things, she had to tie the whole bundle together with yellow twine. She got the zipper repaired by a tailor in Botswana, but nothing was ever the same after that because now she knew what could happen.
She did her best to pack lighter from then on, and the backpack never exploded again; it only got dirtier, marked by mud and rain and sludge picked up on trains and planes the world over, slung up onto various luggage compartments. Its journeys were marked by pins and badges she found along the way, stickers she’d slap across its surface that would eventually peel off, leaving a shadow of adhesive. Clara’s backpack was like her body, mapped with scars and bruises, a survivor of conditions rife with discomfort—mosquitos, heat, and typhoons, not to mention dodgy moments when she’d beendecidedly unsafe. But she’d made it through, and though far from unscathed, she was basically intact—the backpack too, both of them patched and repaired, totally filthy. And then the bag was stolen from King’s Cross station shortly after her arrival in London.
She reported the theft to a police officer patrolling the platform. “But you’re not to leave bags unattended,” said the officer, far more concerned that the wayward backpack would be dumped and then reported as a suspicious package than that all of Clara’s worldly possessions were gone.
The station police began preparing for the report of an imminent bomb threat rather than trying to track down the thief. And what kind of thief would steal a disgusting bag that contained nothing of value and weighed a ton? Twenty minutes earlier, Clara had left the backpack under the table in a café where she’d just had a cup of tea and a stale scone. She realized she might prefer that the bag be stolen rather than having to drag it into a tiny toilet stall one more time. Her first response when she returned to find it gone had actually been relief…and then panic. Those were her books, her clothes, her only footwear other than the filthy rubber boots she was wearing.
“But really nothing of value at all,” Clara tried to explain to the officers who were even more hysterical in their funny hats, as they considered the practicality of pre-emptively evacuating the station to get ahead of the chaos that would ensue when the bag was found. “Mainly sentimental,” she said. None of them were listening and she didn’t blame them. Who carries sixty pounds of sentimental halfway across the world? She’d nearly broken her back doing so and now, thanks to the thief, she was free.
Clara ended up filing a lost-property report and left the station three hours later unencumbered, save for the clothes she was wearing and a tiny cross-body bag stuffed with the essentials that hadn’t been in the backpack: her passport (working-holiday visa stapled inside); her wallet; an almost empty tube of lip balm; an assemblage of hair ties, and small change in various currencies. When she took stock of what she’d miss, it was mainly her correspondence from Jess. Clara had printed her emails whenever she had the opportunity, rereading the messages until the papers were ragged. They were at the bottom of the bag, bound with the same yellow twine that, for a time, had held her life together.
Jess had written actual letters sometimes too, but her handwriting was small and tentative, her ideas constrained by the exercise, formal and awkward. Jess’s letters didn’t sound the way her emails did: easy, conversational, and present. But Clara loved all of it, and she saved the letters along with the emails because she missed her friend with a force that surprised her once she was so far from home.She’d come to depend on Jess during their years together, a fact that drove her to put distance between them just to prove that she could. Clara knew it was bloody-minded, how she did everything the hard way. It was a remnant of her religious upbringing, which had drilled into her the belief that there was virtue to be found in suffering.
And so she’d suffered, but the emails and letters from Jess had been a balm. Now that they were gone, it was the digital that would endure. While Clara ran out of inbox storage on a regular basis, Jess’s messages were never deleted.
It was impossible to know what would last and what wouldn’t. Clara was aware of this from her work, seeing theunlikely objects that had come down through history, the wonders that could be discovered in a hearth or a latrine. It was extraordinary that anything lasted at all when you considered that most things eventually crumbled and disappeared. And yet you could walk around a museum imagining that the process of preservation was nothing special, that it happened all the time, that objects that had lasted through the ages represented the big picture in a meaningful way.
Clara spent the next few days in London with a couple she’d crossed paths with in Korea two years earlier. Both had got their MBAs and worked fourteen-hour days doing something called management consulting, so Clara barely saw them. Her days, on the other hand, were wide open, apart from calls to Lost Articles to see if her backpack had been found. Clara eventually gave up on seeing her bag again; it was really just a bundle of clothing intended for another climate.
Her friends had high-speed internet in the flat—they had high-speed everything, stainless-steel kitchen appliances, their life a vision of the future—and Clara was free to log on to their computer and go through her old messages, rereading Jess’s emails. Clara wrote new messages too, their connection enduring, ever-unfolding, with Jess responding in real time, sending commiserations for the lost bag and trying to be diplomatic when inquiring about Clara’s state of mind. “You know, you can always come home. You have so much support here.”
But Clara couldn’t. She was still on the run from all she’d been through in Tunisia. Going home would mean she’d have to process it, finally coming face to face with herself, all the while trying to avoid getting tangled up in the usual familial drama. She wasn’t ready for any of that. So insteadshe applied, via Tom, for a position in the department of archeology and ancient history at his university in a small city in the Midlands. Tom was also concerned about Clara’s well-being, and while she would have preferred to stride off into the unknown untethered from such connections, she was beginning to realize that there were only so many times a person could begin again. Adult life was meant to be cumulative, and she was already twenty-seven. It was time to start building on her foundations.
She had sent Jess an update on her lost bag, and she waited for the unread message indicator to appear on her inbox now. Email was faster than it had ever been, but Jess was busy managing projects, putting on exhibits, and studying part-time for her Masters in information science. She had actually found a job in the fairy-tale industry, working at the library with the bronze statues of a lion and a griffin at the door, studying those mythical frogs that had been her preoccupation years ago. This, Clara supposed, was the kind of thing that might happen to a person who didn’t treat continents like stepping stones, stupidly jumping from one to another. A person for whom happily-ever-after might be possible.
Jess’s message appeared. “Keep me in the loop, okay? I want to hear how the job works out. And I’ll repay the favour by keeping you abreast of the online dating chronicles. Having a third date this weekend with a fellow who seems promising…”
As had always been the case, Jess’s dating life was cribbed from Jane Austen, all misunderstandings and protocols, everything complicated. Over the years, observing Jess from both near and far, Clara had learned that she enjoyed the drama. Clara’s own romantic life was not without its troubles, of course, but communication tended to be straightforward—no one had ever accused her of behaving like a nineteenth-centuryheroine. Whereas Jess’s forays into online dating had exacerbated her tendency to view the world as a setting for her love plots. She came up with rules, like no kissing on the first date and no sex until the fifth. Such an insistence on formality—Clara saw nothing wrong with rolling into bed with whomever she saw fit.
But maybe this was part of the problem. This was why Clara was sitting here today in someone else’s flat, without a backpack. She was in England now, a land of decorum, restraint, of Jane Austen herself, and she wondered if it might rub off. Could she be a heroine after all? She could look at it all as an adventure, discovering what could happen when a person exercises prudence. She would not have sex with her boss, for example, assuming that Tom’s academic supervisor could set her up with a position. Tom’s supervisor was about ninety-seven years old, so this was a goal that Clara had an actual chance of achieving. And there could be other rules, she supposed, arbitrary as they might seem. Save money, drink less. Exercise, don’t sleep in. Go to bed on time, and so on—what kind of a life was that? But what kind of a life wasthis? Something had to give.
By the time Jess had her third date with the promising fellow—he was some kind of consultant too; it was an epidemic—Clara had left London, her meagre belongings packed in a suitcase she’d bought at Woolworths, a suitcase with wheels that she pulled behind her to a train that took her all the way up to the Midlands, where she disembarked, booked into a backpackers’ hostel, and called Tom’s supervisor from a payphone to confirm their meeting.
Oh yes, he’d been expecting her, he said. Tom had filled him in—and Clara wondered what exactly he’d told him. Itmight have been most convenient for Tom to attach a note to her duffle coat:
Please look after this woman. She has spent the last six months drunk, depressed, and/or hemorrhaging. I tried to save her, but she thwarted my efforts, and I’m tired. I enclose this note in the hope that my care absolves me of any guilt, and in the future I promise not to pursue relationships with employees who are most likely insane.
It was a long note. She’d need a big duffle coat.
The situation was indeed a little bit irregular, admitted Dr. Quincy Falstaff-Beddington, Tom’s supervisor, when they met the following week. Usually research assistant positions were reserved for graduate students, but he could make an arrangement for Clara, since she came highly recommended…although, he warned, if this was going to be a serious pursuit, she’d need to get her Masters. He could offer her a six-month contract, part-time. Some fieldwork.
And Clara took it, because he was doing her a favour, and she had no other option except to take a job in a sandwich shop, which they seemed to have on every corner here. She might end up working at one anyway if she didn’t get enough hours at the university.
There were two computer terminals in the common room of the hostel. Clara dropped a line to her mother confirming that she was still alive, and even employed again. After she sent that note, she read the latest email from Jess about the promising fellow, who had a name now: Adam. Jess wrote, “It’s possible that this might be the real thing.
“But how am I supposed to trust my instincts?” she continued. “I think of all the times I’ve been in love, or thought I was. All the times I was sure thatthis timeit was different, and it turned out to be the same. With Adam, it feels so right, but what if I’m fooling myself? Is it strange to be having doubts about the absence of doubts? Does everybody feel like this?
“It just seems unbelievable that things could work out, that I could find ‘the one’ via a computer program. Adam is really good, not ordinary, I promise—this is the part that makes me think you’re going to like him. I never understood what you meant by ‘ordinary,’ but now I do. Or I think I do. How does a person ever know?”
“Stop overthinking,” Clara typed in response. “Let it happen!” She was feeling humble enough these days to consider that leaving all her choices up to a computer might not be such a terrible idea.
But she had a job now, so that was something to share with Jess. “I’ll be spending my time in library sub-basements, and even getting a chance to do some fieldwork.” Dr. Falstaff-Beddington was running a five-year project excavating a park not far from the city that represented one of the last remaining local examples of wet heathland.
“Heaths are my passion,” he had told her, and Clara tried to summon the requisite enthusiasm for scrubby terrain. She wanted him to take her seriously, even though she lacked a graduate degree. She’d done more fieldwork than she would have accomplished had she taken a more conventional route into archeology, and it was dispiriting to realize that it didn’t count for much. She’d just spent months unearthing fragments of the world’s most ancient civilizations, finds with potential to change the way human beings understand themselves as a species, trying to learn where we’d come from andwhere we were going—though she still didn’t really know. But she wasn’t sure the answer would be found on a heath.
She sent the message to Jess and logged out of her email, distracted by the gaggle of girls who’d turned up in the common room to watchStrictly Come Dancing, all sparkles and bangles, midriffs exposed.
“You’re going out tonight!” Clara exclaimed. They were drinking red wine from disposable cups—she’d forgotten about these rituals. And they assumed she was asking to join them—“You’re welcome to come,” one of them offered. They were all as friendly as they were noisy, but it wasn’t Clara’s scene. She’d thought they were all travelling together, but it turned out they’d only just met. How do people do it, Clara wondered, just create connections like that?
