‘But the sign back there said north,’ Ashok persisted, in that brainlessly gentle way that went so well with his ideology.
‘We’ve been west, we’re turning north, then we’ll be going east in about another hour, if the traffic keeps moving,’ Carole assured him.
‘Why?’ he asked, blue eyes vacant.
‘The mayor pedestrianised the centre of London. You can’t go Through any more. You have to go Round. And if you go In to go Round, everything’s solid anyway. So you have to go Out, then Round.’
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘I can’t imagine that.’
‘We can’t imagine it and we live here,’ Carole said. She had resisted the suggestion of teaming up with the AASS squad from the beginning. The last thing she needed now was to get lost in this crush of selfish, gas-guzzling cars.
Bees were not real animals. She was quite sure of this in her own mind, but not about to say so because ugly things happened to people who spoke out on that kind of issue at Caucus meetings. But bees were definitely insects, and it was only a loophole in the drafting of the ruling articles of the Caucus that allowed them to get involved with them.
Personally, she thought it was time to clarify the Mandate with a few clauses. Personally, Carole felt the Chair’s interpretation of the Mandate was too broad. People thought she was stupid because she had once been a model, but she had learned a great deal and she would show them all soon. They needed to focus more. Stop frittering energy away on insects when there were real animals suffering, thousands of them, every day.
Carole felt tears prickle her eyelids at the mere thought of animals in pain, going hungry or getting cold. All her winsome childhood and her beautiful youth, she had felt like a victim and no one had listened to her. Now she empathised so strongly with any creature that was suffering and could not speak that she sometimes spent all day on the verge of tears. Hunted eyes, bedraggled coats, fur matted with blood – no, no, stop it now. Things without eyes didn’t touch her feelings the same way. Oysters, bees, anything invertebrate – she just couldn’t respond. Besides, bees stung you. Several of them had stung her once during a school sports day, and her foot had swollen up so much she’d had to scratch from the hundred metres hurdles, which everyone had known she was going to win.
‘In LA, if we have to go east, we can just go east,’ Ashok was saying. ‘I mean, we can’t go west anyway, because we’d get to the ocean. Do you have ocean here?’
‘We have sea, mostly.’
‘I suppose that’s kind of like ocean. But why would anybody do that? Stop cars going through the city. I mean, that’s what a city’s for, isn’t it, for people to go around in cars. It was the mayor who did that?’
‘He couldn’t do anything else, I guess. Nobody could get through the centre in a car anyway, unless they took all day. Especially after the last Tube disaster. And the old London authority didn’t have any power or any money or anything. All they could do was fart around with the traffic regulations.’
‘Didn’t people complain?’
‘Oh yes. And one borough, Kensington and Chelsea, tried to secede from the city and become independent.’
‘Oh wow.’
‘They should have let them. They’re all toffs and Arabs down there anyway. So that was when the new Federal London Authority was set up. But taking down all the barriers and resurfacing the streets and everything is so expensive, and they have to spend all their money rebuilding the Underground after the Oxford Circus disaster. So nobody’s doing anything about the pedestrian zone.’
‘Oh my. I didn’t know you still had circuses in England.’
‘It’s not a real circus,’ Carole began, drawing a deep breath for another long explanation. Amazing that people could speak the same language and still not understand each other at all. ‘I mean, I suppose it must have been a circus at some point otherwise why the name, but we banned them years ago.’
‘You should get the name changed,’ Ashok advised generously. ‘Who would want to commemorate something like a circus? It seems so thoughtless.’
‘Yes it does,’ Carole agreed. She could see the possibilities. A renaming campaign. She could go on television. ‘That’s an excellent idea.’
‘Except it’s bollocks,’ said Video Guy, dragged into wakefulness by the idiocy of the conversation next to him. ‘Circus is just Latin for “round”. Oxford Circus was a round street, like two crescents. No implications for animal welfare.’
‘Well,’ Ashok said tartly, ‘how nice of you to wake up and rain on our parade.’
‘It’s raining anyway,’ Video Guy riposted, opening his eyes briefly.
The car ahead had not moved for some while. Somewhere beyond it, through the sheets of rain, a yellow light began to flash. Then another. Then a blue one. Several blue ones. They heard sirens.
‘Do you have drive-by shooting here?’ asked Ashok.
‘Your mother, eh?’ said the girl among Toni’s companions in the pool room of The Pigeon & Pipkin, a chunky lass with a square face on top of a cuboid body, who went by the Goth name of Frenzi Fee. She was racking up the balls for a new game. One of the boys had gone to the bog and not come back. The other was sitting in a chair in the corner, not moving. It was coming up to five, and they’d been drinking steadily since lunchtime. ‘I mean, what is she like? Eh?’
‘Yeah, what is she like?’ Toni agreed. ‘Coming in here.’
‘My mum would never,’ Frenzi Fee asserted, rolling herself off the table and leaving the balls perfectly aligned. ‘She knows I’d kill ’er. She wouldn’t dare.’
‘Uh,’ Toni grunted, agreeing that a mother should be properly intimidated but at the same time feeling criticised. And angry. Flaming cheek, really. Six months ago this bunch of tossers hadn’t had the first idea about being a Goth. She’d taught them everything she knew, from sourcing early Sisters of Mercy cuts to finding the Halls of Cthulu website and playing the strange games that lay therein. And now they were trying to give her lessons and tell her what it was all supposed to be about.
‘Anyway,’ Fee challenged her, lining up her first shot. She was winning, just. Toni needed to get this game. ‘What you gonna do about it? You gonna let’er get away wiv that?’
‘Well, I can’t hardly do that now, can I?’ Toni replied on auto-speak, encouraged to see her opponent’s ball connect at a bad angle and leave the rest of them lying around on the green baize, as useless as a bunch of sheep.
‘Well, wot are you gonna do then?’ This question came exactly as Toni was about to make her shot. At the eleventh nanosecond, Toni changed her mind, stood up and walked thoughtfully around the table. Hah! Pitiful, really, trying to put her off her game like that.
It had been a long, cold, wet winter. The graveyard parties and the beach picnics were long gone, nothing but guttering memories. Hard to believe they had ever happened. Toni had tried to persuade some of her London friends to come up and sample the scene. A couple of them had turned up, done a weekend and gone home mumbling about how it was a long way and the petrol was expensive.
She had spent the last of her money on a new tattoo, a flaming heart with ‘Jesus’ written on it, up on her right thigh. She had designed herself a web page, black with purple text, in the name of Scary Minx. She had just about worn holes in her Cruxshadows CD. She had decided to collect gargoyles, after finding, in a skip, a cement cast of a little demon with one wing slightly chipped. Trouble was, the only other gargoyles she spotted were still attached to churches. And all through the long dreary winter, Toni had been playing pool. She’d got good at it. Much too good to enjoy playing with pond life like Frenzi Fee.
Toni was more bored than she’d ever imagined it was possible to be. Goth had been great when it started, but it had all been too easy. And the winter in the country! It seemed likely that she would shortly go mad. And it was all Bel’s fault. Bel had dragged her to this dump, Bel had stopped giving her money, Bel was blackmailing her about going to college, getting exams, all that crap.
Yup, payback time was on its way. Definitely. She’d do something. Bel would be sorry. Who knew what or how, but she’d do it.
‘I dunno wot I’m gonna do,’ she explained. ‘I gotta think about it. It’s gotta be something that she knows it was me but don’t know it was me, innit?’
Whack! The first ball went down. Yes, Jesus loved her.
Toni strutted around the table corner and looked for her next shot.
‘How’s that?’ Fee asked. When she was puzzled she really did look cross-eyed. If you put someone like that on a TV programme playing some yokel in a country pub, they’d say you were making her up.
‘Think about it,’ Toni advised. She whacked down another ball and felt more energetic. ‘Stormin’,’ she said, to nobody in particular.
‘Stormin’,’ Fee repeated, glad that natural authority was asserting itself. Toni was one cool bitch. It was a real honour to get beaten by her.
For three women who did not normally have to give the elements any consideration, it was a bad time.
The rain. Rain so heavy, so wet, so despair-inducing that the global-warming lobby could have ordered it specially.
The wind. Wind in huge howling gusts that heaved at the side of the car like a drunk rugby team trying to tip it over.
The dark. Darkness that was deeper, blacker and infinite, darkness without stars or moon or streetlights, darkness made worse by the reflections of the car headlights on the wet road, a treacherous kaleidoscope that strained Clare’s eyes as she drove.
The noise. And, when they stopped for petrol, the cold. Cold that ripped through their flimsy urban garments and stabbed at their arms and legs. Cold like knives. Cold that actually made Miranda wish she wasn’t so thin.
They were frightened, and vaguely outraged. They had done everything to deserve comfort and being at the mercy of nature like this was all wrong. There was supposed to be warmth, and light, and stability, and dryness, not cold, dark, danger and wet. This was not the way things were supposed to be at all. Dido was pouting. Clare was getting angry. Miranda felt guilty; she should have checked the weather forecast or the traffic reports or something. It was her fault. This was all happening because Little Miss Perfect had fallen down on the planning.
Somewhere past Newmarket, somewhere bare and alien and rain-lashed, Clare had taken over at the wheel. We’ll share the driving. That had been the deal. Why was the country so goddamn far away?
Driving meant gripping the wheel, trying to stop the car aquaplaning every time they passed another vehicle, peering out through the windscreen to where the beam of the headlights vanished into a curtain of water. Feeling waves of spray surging away from the car tyres, aware that every swipe of the wipers threw a festoon of water into the air. Her eyes were tired, her neck was stiff, her back ached. The foot on the accelerator had cramp.
Crash! Something hit the windscreen.
‘Bloody hell!’ shouted Clare, wrestling with the steering wheel. ‘What was that?’
‘It was only a tree branch,’ Miranda said, shocked into daring to think that her mother needed reassurance.
‘Why the hell was it falling into the road? It’s dangerous!’
‘There’s a storm,’ Dido pointed out. ‘The wind must have broken it off. It must have just blown off a tree.’
‘Well it shouldn’t have blown off a tree. We could have had an accident. Things like that shouldn’t happen.’ Especially, thought Clare, not to me, the CEO of Agraria. Nor to me, the City golden girl, of the past decade. And definitely not to me when I’m trying to keep my only viable offspring on side. ‘Where are we?’ She tried, and failed, not to sound accusing. ‘We must be in Suffolk by now, surely?’
‘Absolutely, I’m sure we’re in Suffolk by now,’ Miranda said, telling them both that she had no idea where they were. ‘Sorry,’ she said.
‘I wish I could read maps,’ said Dido. ‘If I could read a map, I’d know where we were, I’m sure I would. But I always get maps upside down, they just don’t work for me.’
Clare stifled a sigh. If Miranda was starting with the apologies, things were not looking good. And why had she brought Dido along? She hadn’t seen the girl in six or seven years, and she was even more irritating now than she had been. Ditzy, disempowered and dysfunctional; amazing that there still were women like that.
‘Sorry, I should know where we are,’ Miranda said again.
The car was going up again. Up on some bridge thing. A long way up. There was light, orange light, from streetlights. Huge overpass of some kind. Nasty feeling of a whole lot of nothing underneath it. Wind howling louder, rain lashing faster. Twenty miles an hour, that was all you could do. Clare had not imagined that the country would have colossal outcrops of concrete such as this.
‘Darling, is this right?’ Clare asked, her voice as harsh as tearing Velcro. ‘Are we meant to be going over this bridge or whatever?’
‘Sorry, yes, I’m sure it’s right,’ Miranda said, reading her directions again for the hundredth time from the little light in the dashboard magnet that had seemed so neat two hours ago and now seemed like some childish toy. Her directions said nothing about a bridge. Which seemed to be what they were on. ‘We must be on the M14 still. It can’t be far now.’
‘Shall we give the hotel a call?’ Clare suggested, trying not to clench her teeth.
‘Ooh, yes. Good thinking, Mrs Marlow. If we call them, maybe they can talk us in. Or tell us where we are, anyway.’ Dido was scrabbling in her bag for her phone. Her bag was almost an independent life form, made of some multicoloured patchwork of stuff held together with crochet and felt flowers and sequins and buttons, containing an ample space in which her survival pack of possessions could lose themselves.
Miranda’s bag was neat, leather, lots of zips and handy pockets. It was by her feet, and the phone was easy to extract.
‘It’s like we’re a jumbo jet having to make a forced landing,’ Dido was saying as she dumped out her bag on the back seat.
‘No it isn’t. We’re lost, that’s all,’ Clare stated, then realised she’d come on too harsh. ‘I mean, we might be lost. Mightn’t we, darling?’ It was no good, her voice was still coming up from the permafrost. Keep on with the ‘we’. Do not say ‘you’. Do not make your daughter feel that this is her stupid fault, even though it is her stupid fault and she obviously hasn’t a clue where we are. I must not be critical, I must not be critical, I must not be critical.
‘I suppose we should tell the hotel we’re going to be late,’ Miranda conceded. Little Miss Perfect had put the number of the Saxwold Manor Hotel in the speed-dial. She hit the button and said, ‘Hello?’
A man’s voice answered, a wonderfully calm voice, a voice redolent of log fires, stiff drinks, comforting suppers. It made her feel a few degrees less worm-like. ‘Saxwold Manor Hotel – can I help you?’
‘I’m terribly sorry,’ she began. Get yourself together, girl, get this sorted. ‘Um – we have a reservation—’ False name, they were using a false name. Something about privacy, her mother had said, and who did she think she was kidding? False name because she was a politician now and keen to protect her back. The booking was in the false name, but what was it? The traumas of the journey had erased it from her memory. Oh God, she’d have to ask. Clare would just nuke her for forgetting. And it was ten to one Clare wouldn’t know the name either, because the bloody assistant had talked to Miranda about it. ‘Ah – a reservation for the weekend, for a twin room – ah …’
‘Yes, I have it here,’ said the blissfully stress-free voice. ‘You’re going to be late, is that it?’
‘Yes,’ Miranda said gratefully.
‘Any idea when you might be arriving?’
Wonderful man! He was just totally up there with people who didn’t know where they were or what they were doing. ‘Ah … I’m sorry, I don’t really know …’
‘Having a bit of trouble finding the way?’
‘Ah … yes.’ Heavenly, heavenly person. How did he know?
‘Simplest thing, go around Ipswich on the bypass. That’s all you can do, you just follow the road. Over the Orwell Bridge, huge thing, can’t miss it.’
‘Oh! I think we just went over it.’
‘You’ll be about twenty minutes away then. Take the next turning off the bypass, signed Woodbridge, second on the left off that, pass the pub, left again, can’t miss it.’
‘Turning for Woodbridge, second on the left, pass the pub, left again, can’t miss it.’
‘Don’t worry, take your time. Look forward to seeing you.’
Can’t wait, Miranda thought. Oh, to be warm and safe and there, wherever it was, just as long as it wasn’t on this endless road. And with that heavenly, heavenly person. Don’t worry, take your time! Nobody, ever, in Miranda’s entire life as she remembered it, had ever told her not to worry and to take her time.
‘Oh good,’ said Clare. ‘If there’s a pub we can leave you there, Dido.’
‘Couldn’t be more perfect,’ Dido said, shovelling her myriad possessions back in her bag.
In the Saxwold Manor Hotel the concierge, a fifty-eight-year-old man, a man recently retired from his first career as a cruise line purser, a gay man who’d at last felt safe to come out now that his three children were married with children of their own, in short, a man who’d seen it all and done most of it, made a note that the guests who’d booked The Aldeburgh Suite would be arriving late.
In the car, Miranda found herself focused on the bright spot in all this misery, the definite idea that whoever the man in the hotel was, and whatever she might do in his presence, he would look after her. Miranda had always been sure she didn’t want anyone to look after her. If you’d asked her then, she’d have said so. And she would have been wrong.
Clare drove on. The rain hammered on the roof of the car. Dido decided that it would not be rude to put on her headphones now and chill with her new iPod.
They took a turning for Woodbridge. It looked convincingly like the right turning to take. Eventually, there was a second road on the left, after a few things that couldn’t possibly have been actual roads because they were small or awkward or messy or shut off with a gate or a chain, or in some other way not really road-like.
Wild Weekend Page 16
