It’s one of those things you know before you know.
A cold hand grips your intestines and chills them. You feel slightly sick before you have even consciously had time to acknowledge what has happened to you.
You reach for the bag on the seat beside you, and it is not there. And it is never going to be there again. Or anywhere else useful. Anything attractive within it will have been emptied out, and the bag, with all its other precious, personal stuff, will be put in a skip by a person I cheerfully hope is run over on his way back into the street.
And I know exactly who it was. A too-healthy looking beggar who came up to my table at the bar in Buenos Aires and asked for money. I wish I’d gripped my backpack and told him to piss off out of my life. Because then I might have seen his mate behind me removing my pack.
It doesn’t help that it’s day 2 of a twelve day solo work trip in a new continent. It doesn’t help that it has got days worth of research notes in a note book, or a marked up book of Latin American birds, or the binoculars that my parents gave me for my 21st birthday, or adaptor plugs and recharging cables, and all the other detritus of modern travel.
For a second, I do the ‘what if’ scenario. What if I hadn’t bought a new money belt for the trip, and put the essential stuff in it? What if I hadn’t taken out the camera, torch, reading glasses, and other note books at breakfast to lighten the load? What if I had left my phone in its back pocket? But the ‘what ifs’ turn out to be annoying, like when your girl friend dumps you and someone tells you that there are plenty more fish in the sea. I am in a strange city, and I have been violated. That’s all that matters. I’m allowed to be irrationally hurt.
For an instant, the bar keeper is all sympathy. But as soon as he establishes that I can still pay my bill, his face blanks to my misfortune, and he can’t get me and my embarrassing little incident out of his crappy bar quick enough, once he has taken my money. ‘Va!’ He says. Piss off out of my life. ‘Police are that way!’, and he points up the road. I’ve seen more sympathy on Donald Trump’s face than on his. He has the air of a man who has learned his customer service at the Ryanair training centre.
So I am ushered out into the hot, crowded street, and I have this urge to get away. After all, what will the police do? Shrug their shoulders and give me a crime number if I’m lucky? It wasn’t the value, other than the binoculars, it was the weeks’ worth of work and writing, and no crime number on earth is going to sort that. On the back of my receipt, I write down what was in it each time I remember something. A shirt and a tee-shirt; a book on cricket in case I felt homesick. The rucksack itself, which I have had on my travels for a decade. You know, crappy little things that only I mind about.
I buy a coffee in a Starbucks, strangely reassured by the familiarity of the name. Slowly, I calm down, until I am triangulated between emotions: anger at myself for being so stupid as to let it happen, self-sympathy for having been robbed, and resentment at a city that allows a twat like that to operate freely. I feel slightly ashamed, too, as if my being an idiot has made the world an easier place for people like that pretend beggar to operate. Irrationally, I have a powerful need to talk to someone I know, and get it out of my system.
Deep down, though, what really hurts is that I could have, should have, stopped it. I like to think I am a relatively seasoned traveler. Every continent. 60 countries, and all that. They even used to let me carry a gun around some of them in the old days: that was how reliable and organised I was. You don’t give a high velocity 7.62 mm weapon to the kind of person who leaves a backpack unattended.
The world moves on and, in a sense, I know that I have just dodged a bullet. Violated, but not done in. Inconvenienced, but not derailed. Shat on, but not covered in it. But my enthusiasm for the day has disappeared with my rucksack, and I head back to my hotel, partly to try and sort it all out, but mainly to feel safe. For a while, I feel my big adventure has been compromised, and I just want to understand my own feelings.
Suddenly, in a city of 12 million people, I feel very alone.
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