FCE 閱讀與英語運用 Part 5
長文四選一

Gate 14

My mother likes to say I begged to go to Canada that summer, which is not exactly a lie, but it isn't the whole truth either. What I actually said, three months before the flight, was that I didn't see why I had to go, and I said it so many times, so loudly, that my parents eventually decided I must want it very badly indeed. There is a particular kind of arguing that is really just asking to be overruled, and I am ashamed to say I am extremely good at it.

So there I was in October, sixteen years old, standing at Gate 14 in Taoyuan Airport with a suitcase that weighed exactly 1.2 kilograms less than the limit, because I had checked four times, and a boarding pass for a flight to Vancouver that I would be taking entirely by myself. My aunt Wen-hsin, who I had met perhaps six times in my life and mostly through a phone screen, would be waiting at the other end. My parents would not.

I had pictured this moment for weeks, and in my imagination I was someone else entirely — a girl who travelled alone the way other people ordered coffee, without a second thought. The real version of me stood very still by the window, gripping my passport so tightly that the corners left small red marks on my palm, and watched the plane that would take me away being loaded with luggage by men in orange vests who seemed to know exactly what they were doing, which was more than I could say for myself.

When my boarding pass failed to scan at the gate — twice — I felt the particular humiliation of holding up a line of strangers, all of whom were, I was fairly sure, silently reclassifying me as a child who had wandered off from her parents. It was an older woman two places behind me, travelling with nothing but a small green backpack, who leaned over and said, without any fuss at all, that the machine usually needed the pass held flatter, and that I should try again. I did, and it worked, and she gave me a small nod, as if this sort of thing happened to everyone and was hardly worth mentioning. I have thought about that nod more than is probably reasonable.

For the first hour in the air I was, if I am honest, close to regretting the entire summer. I had a window seat and nothing in it but grey ocean, and every time the plane dipped slightly I became convinced that this was the beginning of some catastrophe that only I had noticed. But somewhere over what I later worked out was the middle of the Pacific, with the cabin lights dimmed and most of the other passengers asleep, something in me simply stopped bracing. I cannot explain it better than that. I was still exactly as alone as I had been an hour earlier — more alone, if anything, with the ocean now on every side — and yet the feeling had quietly changed from something like dread into something closer to privacy.

I would like to report that I landed in Vancouver a transformed person, brave and self-possessed, the girl from my daydreams at last. I did not. I cried a little at customs for reasons I still can't fully account for, and I called my mother the moment I found the airport WiFi, mostly just to hear her complain that I hadn't texted from the layover. But somewhere over the Pacific I had learned something small and useless-sounding, which is that I did not, in fact, need anyone beside me to stop being afraid. I have not needed quite the same amount of company since.

Lane Four

For three years the plan was simple, in the way that plans are always simple until you are the one inside them. I would swim the 200-metre butterfly faster than I had ever swum anything, faster than I had any right to at fifteen, and in doing so I would qualify for the regional squad, and the regional squad would lead, eventually, to somewhere larger that I had not quite let myself picture in detail. My coach, Mr O'Sullivan, had a whiteboard in his office with my name on it and a number beside it, and every Tuesday he would rub out the old number and write a slightly smaller one, and for three years this felt like the most important document in my life.

On the day itself, I did not swim faster than I had ever swum. I swam the second-fastest race of my life, which under different circumstances I would have been thrilled with, and which under these particular circumstances missed the qualifying time by four-tenths of a second — roughly, my father calculated afterwards with the terrible precision of a man trying to be helpful, the time it takes to blink twice. I want to say I cried, because that would at least be a proper reaction to the moment, but what I actually did was climb out of the pool, shake the hand of the girl in Lane Five who had beaten me into the qualifying place, and ask her, with what I am told was a completely normal expression on my face, whether she thought the water had felt slow to her too.

It had not, of course. Nothing about that water had been slow for anyone except me.

My mother tells people now that I ‘took it very well,’ and I have never corrected her, mostly because I am not sure what the true version would even sound like. I did not stop swimming. I went to training the following Tuesday, and the Tuesday after that, and Mr O'Sullivan did not write any number on the whiteboard at all, which I noticed and appreciated more than I let on. What I did do, quietly and without announcing it to anyone, was stop watching the clock at the end of the pool the way I used to — that small obsessive glance after every turn — and start noticing, instead, things I had apparently been swimming past for three years: the particular blue the water goes under the morning lights, the sound of my own breathing when I finally let it get loud, the way the black line on the pool floor wavers and steadies as you get closer to it.

I am aware that this is the part of the story where I am supposed to report that missing that race by four-tenths of a second was the best thing that ever happened to me, that it taught me what really mattered, and so on. I am reluctant to claim that, because I think it flatters the four-tenths of a second rather more than it deserves. I would still, given the choice, take the qualifying time. But I have noticed that I no longer entirely recognise the girl on that whiteboard, the one with the shrinking number next to her name, and I am not in a hurry to go looking for her. Lane Four, it turns out, was not nothing. It was just not Lane Five.