Davey flushed. The policeman sat down beside him.
“Need any help? Got trouble with them at home?”
Davey wondered what incarnation of them the policeman was picturing. An alcoholic mother. An unemployed father with a drug habit. A violent girlfriend.
“I’m f-fine,” he said. His stammer peeking out from beneath its stone. Would the policeman read anything into it? “But, erm, th-thanks.”
The policeman looked thoughtfully at the rucksack.
“Running away’s bloody hard, you know. You might think it solves everything, but it mostly makes it worse.”
“I’m n-n-n-not erm—” Davey suddenly discovered he was a terrible liar, even to strangers. “How—”
The policeman gave him a penetrating stare.
“Look, you’re not causing any aggro, so I’ll leave you alone if you want. But you’d do better to sort it. If you’re getting hit, we’ll help, but you have to ask. All right?”
Horrified, Davey stood up. The ground rocked treacherously beneath his feet.
“Where are you going?” The policeman had hold of his elbow, his grip firm and impersonal.
“Train station,” said Davey, indistinctly.
“Yeah? Where you headed?”
Over the policeman’s shoulder, a paper bag danced in the breeze. West Cornwall Pasty Company.
“Cornwall,” said Davey, after a slight pause. “I’m g-g-going to visit my aunt.”
“Your aunt in Cornwall? What’s her name?”
“Dorothy,” said Davey, desperate. “My Aunt Dorothy. I’m g-g-going to stay with her for a bit. G-g-get my head together. You know?”
“You’ve got money for the ticket?”
Just let me go.
“Yes, yes, plenty.” Davey showed his wallet. “See?”
“You sure there isn’t anything you want to tell me? ’Cos they’ll do it again, you know. They always do.”
“Not if I’m n-n-not there,” said Davey, and grabbed his rucksack.
“All right, son,” said the policeman, resigned. “Off you go. Good luck.”
A blink, and he was on the Tube. How had he got here? He remembered a barrier, a platform, a ticket machine, a handful of change, but couldn’t string them together into a coherent narrative. But he was going to Cornwall. Guided by a paper bag. Well, why not? He had to go somewhere. His contempt for himself had his stepfather’s voice. Only cowards run away, real men stick around and sort it out. He drowned it with vodka, and felt a giant wave of collective disapproval break over his head.
Above his head, the adverts were moving. A girl on a poster winked at him. She was pretty and confident, and had saved up to one hundred and fifty pounds on her car insurance because she was a lady driver. Davey’s stepfather had tried to force him into driving lessons, but so far he’d managed to resist. Two panels down, a man dressed as Nelson had also saved money on his car insurance. Was that because he was an Admiral? The parrot’s gaze was knowing and sly.
The lines of the Tube map made him feel sick. Lying on the floor was a newspaper, open to the showbiz pages. An iconic British actress had walked off a film set because her husband was sleeping with the actress playing her daughter; a battered California starlet had wrecked her car and checked into rehab. Their faces stared accusingly up at him, as if these events were his fault. Regurgitated vodka crept up his throat. Was he going to be sick? He picked up the newspaper in anticipation. The woman next to him edged away.
Another blink, and he stood at the foot of an escalator. The platform swayed beneath his feet. If he was on a ship, would the ground feel stable? Was this why sailors drank? The handrail’s speed was treacherously slower than the escalator and he had to keep letting go and grabbing on again, convinced each time that he would fall backwards into the chaos below. Staggering off the top step, he fell into a man in a suit.
“Jesus Christ, just fuck off, will you?” he snarled. Davey clung to the man’s shoulder, trying to re-orient himself. “Let go of me or I’ll fucking deck you.” His expensive aftershave was like a scented cloud. “Are you drunk? Police, police, I’ve got a lunatic here, police!” A privileged voice, used to be being obeyed.
“No, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—” Davey let go and stumbled away. The crowd parted, then refused to re-form around him, leaving him for the policemen to find. He began to run, realised how stupid this was, forced himself to stop again. High-vis jackets over black uniforms appeared at the bottom of the escalator. The crowd rustled with excitement.
“I haven’t got fucking time for this,” said the man in the suit, and gave Davey a spiteful shove. “Piss off, you disgusting little shit.” He straightened his jacket and marched away.
As if his departure proved that Davey was not, after all, a lunatic or a terrorist, everyone returned to their business. The police arrived, looked around, saw nothing, swore, began to ask questions. A woman with henna-red hair pointed them in the direction of the man who had called them.
Reprieved, Davey crept along the wall of the tunnel. His forehead was dewy with sweat. Was it against the law to throw up at a Tube station? He began following a woman with a large suitcase, hoping she would lead him to the railway.
They crossed a huge white concourse, Davey’s stomach clenching, the woman’s sensible low heels clicking. Would more vodka settle his nausea? The phrase hair of the dog floated across his mind, but the thought of hairy dogs – stinking and drooling and wet – made him gag. The woman with the suitcase was climbing some steps now. Where was she going?
Clinging to the rail for support, he broke through the surface to open air.
Another blink, the smell of diesel, everyone with suitcases, whistles shrieking like birds. Was this the train station? A giant board filled with letters and numbers. Just when he’d got a fix on them, the display refreshed and he had to start all over again. Fast-food smells coiled around his nostrils. Gulping desperately, he found the gents, scrabbling in his pocket for change to get through the turnstile.
The steel toilet bowl looked dirtier than ceramic, even though it was probably more hygienic. The vodka tasted even worse coming back up than it had done going down.
By the basins, he took another deep swig from the bottle to cleanse his palate, aware of the basic stupidity of the action, but reluctant to disobey the stern signs over the taps: NOT DRINKING WATER.
“Where are you travelling to?”
A ticket-selling woman behind a glass screen, her voice coming to him via an intercom. There was a slight delay between the movements of her mouth and the arrival of the words.
Buy ticket. Get on train. Run.
“Cornwall,” said Davey.
“Which station?”
“W-w-w—” His stammer loving the vodka. Was this why he’d never really liked to drink? “Which ones are there?”
“Information centre’s over there,” she said wearily. “Come back when you’ve chosen.”
Davey found a touch-screen kiosk, but you could only operate it if you already knew where you wanted to go. Behind him, a woman sighed and said loudly, “You can’t work it because you’re drunk—” and Davey, ashamed, slunk away to a row of chairs. The carpet’s pattern looked like germs swarming. He wondered if he was going to be sick again.
After a few minutes, the man next to him left. On his chair was a tourist leaflet.
A spreading ripple of movement and rearrangement, everyone sitting up, paying attention. Davey opened his eyes. Strangers opposite him; stranger beside him. Wide glass windows. The sensation of speed. He was on a train. Which train? A huge ogre squeezing his way towards him.
“Tickets, please.” The guard was enormously tall and fat, barely able to fit between the seats. Why had he chosen a job he was so obviously not designed for? Or had he been thin when he got it, then gradually grown into his present size?
“Ticket,” repeated the ogre, holding out his hand. Davey groped desperately back through the blankness of sleep. Did he have a ticket? Could he hav
e got on the train without one? He remembered the ticket office, he remembered queueing, he remembered not knowing where he wanted to go. He found his wallet; there was a lot less money in it than he remembered. The other passengers watched with interest.
Panicking now, Davey began to rummage through his rucksack. On the very top was a bottle of Glenfiddich whisky, half empty. Had he drunk that? He remembered vodka, not whisky. Then something flickered in his brain, just a couple of neurons mindlessly firing up, and he reached into his jacket pocket and found a rectangle of cardboard.
Together, they inspected it dubiously.
“Railcard,” said the guard at last.
Davey rummaged some more, found a holder with a laminated card. He held it out and waited miserably for the guard to pronounce his fate. The guard looked at it for a long time.
“So you’re old enough to be drinking,” he said. “I was going to confiscate that bottle, son. If you give me any trouble, I’ll have you put off the train.”
“Okay,” Davey agreed meekly.
The guard was looking at the bruises.
“Change at Truro.”
The carriage contained nothing but staring eyes. Davey slumped down into his jacket. Outside, the world unspooled like a roll of film.
“Where are you headed?”
The woman next to him was speaking. Davey, head reeling from the inch of Glenfiddich he’d gulped down in the toilet, tried to focus on his ticket. Where was he going? Was this still the train with the fat guard? Alcohol had turned his memory into a swamp; no clues on the surface, hideous monsters lurking below.
You’ve made a complete mess of your life.
It’s for your own good.
I’m trying to help you.
He shivered, and stared downwards. The letters on his ticket flickered and danced and refused to turn into words.
“Can I see?” She took his ticket from him. “You need to change at the next station.”
“Thank you.”
“No problem.”
He studied her in shy glimpses. She reminded him of Giles’s mother. Small and soft, fair wispy hair. The train was slowing.
“Okay,” she said briskly. “This is me. And you. Up you get.” She chivvied him out of his seat, handed him his ticket, saw him off the train.
“Thanks,” he mumbled again, not daring to meet her eyes. He was terrified of needing help or asking for anything. Since he was three years old, getting in the way had been the unforgiveable crime.
“I’ve got a son your age,” she said vaguely, and he stared at her in astonishment.
“Are you Giles’s mum?” he called out as she disappeared across the platform; but she was already gone.
A sudden jerking stop, a sign right outside the window. Another platform to negotiate. His rucksack caught in the closing doors. The stillness of the ground was too much, and he was painfully, shamefully sick in a bin. He could hear the sound of judgement being passed, and blood singing in his ears. As he straightened up, he heard seagulls.
He stood in a steep street, a finger of tarmac leading straight down to the quayside. There were no barriers. How good would it feel to ride a skateboard down, down, down and off into the oily water? Did he have a skateboard?
He rummaged hopefully in the rucksack, but was distracted by the Glenfiddich. His mouth tasted like a drained pond. As he unscrewed the cap, he suddenly remembered the terror of stealing it, less than twelve hours ago.
On the other side of the harbour, a rose-coloured house stood by itself. In a high window, a tiny light hung like a red star.
A worm of memory wriggled at the back of his sodden brain.
“Steady there,” said a man, helping Davey aboard the boat. Dazed and mystified, whisky swimming in his blood, Davey sat down on an iron park bench screwed tight to the wooden deck.
Where was he going now? On the quay was a shelter with walls of cool, cream-coloured concrete. He would have liked to rest his hot cheek against the wall and close his eyes, but instead he was on a rickety ferry that smelled of diesel fumes and sweaty humanity, going - somewhere. No one else shared his bench. Did he now look so wild and unkempt that nobody dared sit next to him?
He realised he was starving, and looked in his rucksack again. Why on earth had he ignored the contents of the fridge and cupboards, but packed six pairs of black socks, a battered photograph album, a stolen newspaper and Alice in Wonderland? How could that have seemed like a good idea?
You’re a total fuck-up from start to finish.
I don’t know why I even bother any more.
The seagulls sounded like crying children. He was crying too, no tears, just a contortion of his face and a keening sound that escaped in gulps and bursts. The sea spray had the approximate taste of tears but with more complex afternotes, like a good wine.
The boat sat alarmingly low in the water. Was it safe? Were there people who checked these things? The man in the wheelhouse smoked a cigarette and stared across the water. His expression reminded Davey of long-distance lorry drivers at service stations; a professional surrounded by amateurs, inhabiting a different world.
The bump and scrape of wood against stone, ropes thrown and tied up. The same man who had helped him onto the boat now helped him off again. Davey marvelled at the un-self-conscious way he touched Davey’s hand and elbow. At school, physical contact was governed by unbreakable rules. Shoulders and upper arms were all right, as long as you slapped hard. Legs were for kicking. Heads were for capturing in a headlock and thumping. Penises, bizarrely, were acceptable, in certain situations. Hands and forearms were too close to holding hands, therefore a shortcut to social death. He tried to remember the last time he’d been touched gently by someone who wasn’t his mother, and remembered a nurse bandaging his arm one night in casualty. “How did this happen?” she’d asked him, and when he’d stammered out something about a broken glass, she’d smiled cynically and shaken her head. He still had a jagged, silvery line to remind him.
He was exhausted, but something in him was forcing him on. He climbed a steep, narrow street – barely wide enough for a single car – and opened the whisky bottle, now nearly empty. A woman walking her dog glanced at him in disgust. He tried to apologise, but his mouth was too dry. The double yellow lines were like those on the floor of the hospital, guiding bewildered patients around the labyrinth.
I’ve got to get up high.
He was clammy with sweat and his head and his legs were agony. The sun had filled the harbour with molten gold. He could smell himself, a vile blend of vomit, sweat and alcohol; but he could also smell the coconut of the gorse bushes.
Stumbling into the hedge, his hand slipped between the greenery and found granite. It was a dry stone wall, covered with plants. How long did that even take to happen? He’d seen dry stone walls in Yorkshire; the most they could manage was a bit of lichen, which the Geography master had told them grew by about one centimetre a century. The wall they’d crouched behind to smoke was six hundred years old. Dreamily, he dug his fingers into the wall and began to climb.
At the top was another gorse bush. He flung himself recklessly over, relying on his clothes to protect him, getting scratched as he tumbled down the other side. Then he was behind the wall, looking across a vast expanse of scrubby moorland towards a pink-walled house that stood alone on a ridge. His head cleared and he thought, Yes! That’s where I was going, that house, that light—
He was desperately thirsty. He hadn’t pissed for hours, he wasn’t sure if he even could, every drop of water had been leached out of him. If he died right now, he wouldn’t rot, he’d desiccate, just a sack of leather with clothes on. Stopping to rest, he put his hand down on a sheep’s skull. It was oddly beautiful, clean and white, the huge ridged yellow teeth fallen from the sockets. He held it for a while, then put it carefully in his rucksack.
Instead of getting closer, the house merely got bigger, disclosing a whole private landscape surrounding it. He thought of the word grounds, and th
en the word acres. The sun was almost out of the picture now, and his body had achieved the clever but uncomfortable trick of being both sweaty and freezing. He wondered what else was out here with him in the twilight, and made his feet move faster.
Surrounding the rosy house was a rosy wall. It was high and smooth, and even if he wasn’t starving, dehydrated and drunk, he’d never climb it. Still, it almost felt like enough, to have got this far, to have made this strange, difficult journey to another place, another world, another life. Keeping his hand against it, he began to skirt the perimeter of the grounds.
Why had it been built so high and so strong when the house was already so isolated? Periodically, the house hid behind trees, but the wall was his faithful companion, guiding him onwards and onwards. The dew began to settle, and he knelt and licked unashamedly at a clump of grass.
Then he was suddenly clinging to a tall pillar. Its identical twin was perhaps twenty feet away. Between them, a gravel driveway shot through with primroses led to a wide wooden door with a deep, tiled porch before it.
Oh, thought Davey, blinking. Oh. Yes. That’s what, that’s where I was going, that’s exactly where I was thinking of - my God, I made it, I actually made it—!
He journeyed up the driveway on his hands and knees, barely conscious of the stones bruising his hands. His entire self was focused on the doorway, which he thought perhaps he had seen in a book, or a dream, or a photograph; it looked welcoming and familiar, planted long ago in a secret part of his heart, and waiting for all of the nineteen years of his life for him to arrive.
The porch floor was inlaid with black-and-white tiles in a diamond pattern. He lay down with his head on his rucksack and ran his fingers over them. He didn’t want to knock on the door and present whoever lived here with his stinking, drink-sodden, disgusting self, but to his weary bewilderment the door was moving, light was spilling out, and someone with cool hands was kneeling beside him and touching his face gently.
The Winter's Child Page 32
