A Change To Bear (A BBW Shifter Romance) (Last of the Shapeshifters) (3 page)

T
he air smelled like crap, and that wasn’t in the least bit surprising to Terry. At the front of her train carriage were two pigs, two sheep, what looked like a young buffalo, and a dog. She wrinkled her nose, and turned to her neighbor. She was an old Chinese woman, her life spelled out in the bend of her spine, with lines carved so deeply into her face she looked like she might be a thousand years old.

“Yuck,” Terry said, gesturing with her head at the animals populating the front half of the carriage. She made a face, then smiled. The old woman’s expression didn’t change one iota. She simply looked away, disinterested.

Great
, Terry thought, shifting sideways so that she could look out of the window. The train carriage, nothing more than a wooden box on the verge of falling apart, was narrow, and only three people could stand shoulder to shoulder comfortably across its width. There were no seats to speak of, but lining each side were benches made out of rotting planks of wood, and supported on uneven logs of wood with rusty metal brackets securing them to the floor.

The train was filled to bursting with people (and livestock), and Terry sighed, wondering why on earth they were crammed in the same carriage. Being one of the first to climb aboard, she had managed to secure herself a space on one of the benches, but it meant that her back was against the window and she was staring into the crotch of a man she guessed was a farmer. He looked a little less ancient than her neighbor, but seemed to only consist of skin and bones, and she wondered how he even managed to lift the wicker basket at his feet filled to the top with unusually large turnips.

The man looked down at her occasionally, she had noticed, as though she were an odd smell that he continued to sniff. It wasn’t a curious look, or even a judgmental one. It was just a look, vacant eyes every now and then meeting the top of her head, flicking briefly down to her face, before returning to their previous position, looking out of the window.

Terry grew used to it as the minutes rolled by. She was, after all, a foreigner, and one who stood out at that. Her carriage was full of local people only, and she wondered if she’d missed some kind of first-class carriage that all the other backpackers and travelers were riding in. She fumbled for her train ticket, but saw no indications that she had paid for anything special.

It was about twenty minutes into the two hour journey that Terry decided it would be better if she could look out of the window. It would at least offer more interesting scenery than the sea of waistlines in front of her. But the window was behind her, and though she could get up and stand, leaning over her bit of the bench, it wasn’t ideal, and she had the distinct impression from a couple of people eyeing her that if she did, they’d squeeze in beneath her and knick her seat.

Aha, Terry thought, coming up with a great idea. She reached down in between her legs, and picked up, with some difficulty, her large backpack. Sidling off her bench, she put her backpack where her bum was, and then swiveled on the spot so that she was facing out the window. Green whipped by in a blur while she struggled to get her knees onto the bench, straddling the backpack.

It was awkward work, and she felt a little embarrassed doing it, but swatted that silly feeling away. She was stuck in a train carriage in the middle of rural Guangxi, southern China, jammed in with about a hundred people, not to mention a collection of farm animals. Any sting she felt about her behavior, or by simply being a tourist doing something a little unorthodox, was worth it.

“Mei guan xi,” she said, knowing that her Mandarin tones were probably awful. It directly translated to ‘no problem’, but apparently could also pass for ‘excuse me’. At least, that was what her travel guidebook told her. “Excuse me,” she said in English automatically as she shifted her right knee a little, digging it into the old woman beside her. After a bit more shuffling, scooting, wriggling, and writhing, she accomplished what she had set out to do. With her backpack on the bench, she was straddling it, leg on either side, knees pressed up against the wall of the carriage, and her head out of the window, the wind roaring past her ears. She got her elbows up and over the half open window, forced it down a bit into its sheath so that she could lean on the edge of the dirty glass comfortably. She lay her head down, cradled in the nook of her arm, and watched the countryside and farmland whizz by.

Grinning and feeling rather pleased with herself, her quiet moment of victory was nullified by a distant wondering of what the rest of the passengers were thinking about her. Were they thinking that she was ill-mannered? Well, judging by her experiences so far in rural southern China, she wasn’t particularly convinced that manners mattered all that much.

A stray thought, rogue and evil, flitted through her mind, and Terry grew cross with herself. Were they contemplating her size? When she had landed in Hong Kong, her first ever visit to China (though people had been quick to point out that though Hong Kong was technically part of China, they were entirely different culturally, and she had blamed her guidebook), she had become extremely aware of how slight everybody was, especially the women. Terry was a big girl, even by standards back home, and standing at nearly five feet and eight inches, she was also a couple of notches past the ‘healthy’ range of the BMI chart. She reconciled that particular factoid with the knowledge that the BMI chart put body builders in the unhealthy range, too. Still, drunken lads had called her names while they sped by in their cars many times before, and her memories of school were not as fond as she would have liked.

Terry reprimanded herself internally for letting such a harmless little worry prick her like that. She was a confident woman, and ninety-nine percent of the time she didn’t suffer from self-esteem issues. But even then, sometimes her mental toughness wavered. Nobody was tough
all
the time. Everybody had a little downtime.

Forget it, she thought to herself. For years now she had been perfectly at ease, and very comfortable with herself. She felt sexy, and knew that men found her sexy, too. She summoned up that self-confidence she knew she had, even though it had been weakened the last few days.

Arriving in Hong Kong, and seeing that she wasn’t actually much shorter at all than the average guy, and almost certainly bigger and heavier than the average girl, had done a number on her self-esteem, and all that confidence she had molded simply didn’t fit into the slot presented anymore. She found it hard, at first, to plug that hole, to stop
worrying
so much because of the sudden change in relativity. It was a ridiculous comparison to make, too. Ethnic genetic differences alone meant that it couldn’t possibly be apples to apples, it couldn’t be useful in any meaningful way.

Those dark clouds of insecurity had faded quickly, though. If there was one thing Terry was proud of, it was her resilience. She was strong mentally, and she had to be, growing up with crazy parents, crazier brothers, getting a crazy job with an even crazier boss. Yeah, it hadn’t been all peaches and cream back home in London.

But even being as strong as she was, even having the mental fortitude to beat her inner demons most of the time, it didn’t always immunize her against that waifish, random thought, the one that somehow made it past all her psychological defenses, snuck past the mental barricades, and flitted its way right into the center of her consciousness where it then proceeded to chirp and screech and call attention to itself. Those were the kind of doubts and worries that were the hardest to eliminate.

Terry sighed. This was a hurdle that she was going to have to clear – and the sooner the better – if she was going to spend any considerable time in Asia. She laughed for a moment, considering the thought.
Asia
. That giant continent full of dozens of countries, and yet, until she had arrived in Hong Kong, it had all sort of seemed the same to her.

Her encounter with a man quick to tell her that Hong Kong was not the same as China had been the first time Terry had really come to grips with the idea that within Asia – heck, even within China – the cultures were diverse, different, individual in their own ways, and, most importantly, proud. The last thing she wanted to do was leave a trail of people offended by her ignorance as she traveled from place to place. She didn’t want to be
that
kind of tourist. It mattered to her, not because she was easily harmed by the barbed words of others, but because she held herself to a high standard. Tourists were often ignorant of the complex culture back home, and they always came across worse off for it.

Terry awoke from her brief moment of reverie, looking up the front of the train. It was rattling on its rails, only five carriages long, each one sounding as barebones as hers. The engine car was huffing out great, leathery plumes of smoke, and there was enough of a crosswind to pull them to the side, so that they did not spoil the view on her side.

The weather had changed overnight, from grumbling clouds and annoying intermittent showers to clear skies, humid heat, and harsh sunshine. Far off in the distance, back toward the city of Nanning, she could see the city’s gray smog hanging in the air, and it looked like a murky plastic bag floating on the surface of the sea when seen from beneath.

Terry grinned when she remembered that she had thought that the train ride would be like ones she had seen photos of in India, with mountains of people holding on for dear life on the sides and tops of the cars as the train sped loudly along its way. But that again had been just another assumption, something she was quite glad to be wrong about, especially since the train wasn’t stable at all. People would be falling off left and right. It would just be a total disaster.

In front of her, four windows up, she saw a hand poke through the gap. She desperately hoped that the person wasn’t going to open the window. But the person did. The hand shot down as the window slid into its recess (but not without making a creaking complaint), and Terry’s nostrils were flooded with the smell of manure again.

“Fuck,” she said quietly to herself. Oh well, it was better than having her head inside the train. A small farm shot by, and Terry got a brief glimpse of a young girl picking vegetables out of the ground. She couldn’t have been more than seven years old. Having spent the last two days in cities, she hadn’t really been confronted by the staggering poverty in China yet, though it was unlikely she would ever get an accurate sense of its scale. Hong Kong had been rich, prosperous, civilized, and easy. Guangzhou, a little less so, but the city planning had done a good job of hiding the impoverished, relegating them to the outskirts. Nanning was a little direr, a little less glossy, but was still nothing like the bleak image of a child picking vegetables when she should really be in school.

It made her reflect on her own fairly well-off upbringing. Growing up in the same small townhouse just outside London, she’d never before even seen a proper vegetable farm, let alone a child worker. With no relatives in the country, Terry and her family were oddly provincial, in their own little suburban way. She hadn’t even really left the city, except for school field trips to the potteries and things like that. Her family had been pretty good earners, too. It was a two car household, and her and her brothers had all gone to quite good schools.

When people talked about culture shock, they often mentioned food, religion, and in some cases, hygiene. But this was something that Terry had been unprepared for. The reality that she had it so much better off than so much of the world, and that, for most of her life – heck, even all of it – she had taken it for granted, was a little crushing. And it didn’t help that the smell of animal shit seemed to envelop the entire train carriage!

“Ugh,” she griped, pulling her head back inside the window. She climbed down as gracefully as she could – she was climbing down backward – off the bench, picked up her backpack, mildly grunting with exertion as she did so, and began to push her way through the throng of people toward the door at the end of the carriage. She figured there would be somewhere to stand outside where the two carriages were joined, and she could at least be out of the crap-current.

“Excuse me,” she said, remembering then that probably nobody understood her. “Mei guan xi, mei guan xi.” She pushed her arms in between bodies and pried them apart so that she could get through. It was sort of amusing at first, until she realized that she was going to have to get through about thirty people, standing so close they could all probably smell each other’s breath. Terry couldn’t help but laugh. And she thought the tube was bad!

“Sorry.”

“Excuse me.”

“Mei guan xi.”

Eventually she made it to the door, exhaling with relief. She twisted the handle, pulled the door, and heard a dull metal thud. Shit.

“No, you’ve got to be joking,” Terry said, twisting the handle again and rattling the door in its frame. “Why would they lock it?” She could feel the frustration welling inside her, and in a momentary outburst of irritation, shook the door again. This time it slid open, and she looked to her side to see that somebody standing nearby had pulled a latch which had unlocked the door.

“Thank you,” she said, blood rushing to her face. “Xie xie.” She hoped she had said it right in Mandarin, and quickly slid the door shut behind her. All of the people looking at her were blocked out of sight, and she felt immeasurably better.

“Thank God,” she muttered. She reluctantly conceded that her ultimate getaway, her great escape, wasn’t going as fantastically as she had planned. But it was only the beginning.

In front of her, across a small bridge with no handrails, was the door to the next compartment. Though it had no window in it, she was fairly certain that the carriage was just as crowded as hers had been, and probably contained just as many animals, too. Instead, she moved toward the side, along the small ledge that protruded, as though the carriage was sticking its tongue out, and where there was a railing. Moving toward the edge, she poked her head out from in between the two carriages, felt the sudden rush of wind against her face, the roar of it drowning out even the sounds of her own breathing.