Writing On the Wall

by Lynne Reid Banks

  “Are we really the men for the job?” says Connie. “Oh well, after all, Holland is the land of dykes!” And she let out a shout of laughter at her own joke. (I only got it after I asked Vlady. All right. I’m naïve. Can I help it? It’s my upbringing.)

  Connie sloped off then, which left Darryl and me walking in to class together. Everyone hooted and someone yelled out: “Oooh! Where’s Kev?” But Kev was nowhere in sight.

  “Where is Kev?” I asked. “Bunked off again, has he?”

  “Suppose so,” said Darryl. “Listen. You coming to Holland then?”

  I shook my head. His face fell. But he just said, “Well, that’s too bad. Would’ve been nice, the six of us.”

  Cliff and Karen were sitting in the back, heads together. They’d got a map of Holland spread out on the desk. Karen looked up at me.

  “Coming with?” she asked. First time she’d spoken to me since the row we had.

  “No I’m not, so what,” I said. God it hurt when I had to say it to her.

  “Why not?”

  “My dad won’t let me,” I mumbled. I felt like adding, “because he don’t like my friends, for example you.”

  “My dad wouldn’t let me either,” she said, “at first. But I kicked up so rough he backed down. I said I’d leave home.”

  Another one!

  “Why don’t you try that on?” she asked me.

  “I don’t want to, that’s why,” I said back, sharp.

  She shrugged and went back to Cliff and the map. Cliff went on looking up at me for a moment. He gave me this kind of sympathetic look. Huh, I thought. Some best friend, that Karen. She don’t care as much as these two boys who I never even spoke to much, till we started planning this bloody trip I’m not going on.

  Those last days at school! I tell you, I almost felt sorry for the teachers. They’d’ve had to set fire to themselves to keep us looking at them. Most of the boys were lying about on the desk-tops, or sitting with their backs to the front chatting up their mates behind them, or reading comics, or throwing stuff. One of them even lit a fag and sat there puffing it till the teacher, who was fed to the back teeth with the lot of us, came up the aisle and swiped it out of his mouth.

  The same thing was in all our minds – X more days and we’re free! We’d learned all we were going to, this time round anyhow. Outside the windows it was summer . . . how could we listen? Some of the teachers didn’t even try, they let us play games or have silent reading periods. Nothing very silent about them, nor much reading neither. Still.

  That day finished, finally. We sloped out of school. I felt all limp and fed up. What was going to happen to me? If only I had the trip to look forward to, before I had to start thinking seriously about a job. I kept thinking of Mary, lying in bed till the last minute, then dragging herself off to work. Every day she’d come home looking fagged out. If you asked her, “How was it?” she’d curl her lip up and say something like, “Great. I love it. So exciting. So stimulating. I think I’ll go to hell instead. Be more lively anyway.” Mum’d tut at her and she’d say, “Honest, Mum, wailing and gnashing of teeth’d be more interesting than the noise of my cash-register.” Mum’d say, “But it’s better than some jobs, surely? Than a factory? At least you’re seeing lots of different people all day.” But Mary’d say, “Mum, they’re not different. After a bit they’re all exactly the same. And they’re all horrible.”

  Got me scared, Mary talking like that. I always knew I’d never face a factory job. But if shop assistant was no good either, what was left? An office, Dad said. For that I’d need typing. At least. Maybe shorthand as well. You get good money for that straight off. But I didn’t fancy it, somehow. . . . Maybe I could work with Dad, in his shop. As a boss, Dad’d have the advantage of not being sexist (or sexy, come to that). But Sean grumbled every day about lugging the cartons, stamping on the prices, the fussy customers, the boredom. Of course, Sean loves to moan, always did. Still. He didn’t make it sound the job to keep you happy for life, exactly.

  While I was walking slowly along thinking about all this, I found myself crossing what I privately called “Bastard Bridge”. I looked sideways at my paintwork. At first when I saw it by daylight it gave me a nasty feeling. First, feeling guilty because of Kev, and second, feeling guilty about doing it at all, even if I’d written he was an angel. But somehow, now I’d stopped worrying about the message. I couldn’t resist just glancing at it and thinking, I wrote that. Everybody saw it, and noticed it. So far no council workers or anyone had come to take it off so perhaps it’d be there for ever – till after I was dead, even. What chiefly bothered me now was that the writing was so bad, and that, even in that little bit, I’d managed to make a spelling mistake. I’d looked up “bastard” in the dictionary. . . .

  Suddenly I saw Kev. He was sitting on the low wall on the corner of our road. I saw him before he saw me. He was leaning against a brick post having a smoke. He was good-looking – handsome, even. And he was mine, my boyfriend. What if he was a bit rough sometimes? He wasn’t a bastard! No, not Kev! Suddenly I wished the council men would come, I wished they’d come tomorrow, and clean off what I wrote.

  I ran the rest of the way to him.

  “Oh,” he said, “there you are. At last. I been waiting hours. Can I come to your house tonight?”

  “If you like. But what for?”

  “I heard your dad said no. I got a plan. To get him to change his mind.”

  “Some hopes!”

  “You might get a surprise.”

  I did and all.

  I told Dad he was coming, but of course I didn’t say why. Dad always likes to put a clean shirt on if someone’s coming to the house, no matter who it is. Nothing he hates more than being caught out in the shirt he’s worn all day. Even though he wears an overall at the shop. He’s ever so clean, my dad is.

  When the doorbell rang I let Lily answer it so Kev would come in and see me in the front room reading a magazine and looking casual. Don’t ask me why. Mary does that so I do it. “Never seem too eager,” she always says. Why not? Don’t they like it better if you’re pleased to see them and run to the door? But Mary’s my model when it comes to men. She knows it all by instinct.

  So the door opened and in came Kev all right, but he wasn’t alone. I jumped up, feeling all awkward and nervous in front of a stranger.

  “Trace, meet Michael. He’s Darryl’s brother.”

  Well, I could see that, now I looked. He was a lot like him, only his hair was longer and he was taller and more developed. He had Darryl’s snub nose and nice-looking face, without the spots too. He had freckles instead, and darker hair. Not much of a trendy dresser, but the jeans and polo neck suited him.

  “Hallo, Tracy,” he said and we shook hands. Then we both looked at Kev.

  “Your dad home?”

  “Yeah, he’s through in the kitchen.”

  “Can we have a word?”

  “What you up to?”

  “Never you mind. I told you to leave it all to me.”

  I led them to the kitchen. Mum was washing dishes with Lily. Sean and Dad were at the table reading the papers. Well, Dad was reading. Sean was looking at the evening’s programmes.

  “Dad. Kev wants to see you.”

  Dad stood up. Kev introduced Michael. Then they all sat down at the table.

  “Mr Just, I brought Michael round because he’s coming to Holland with us. You see,” he went on, so polite I could hardly believe it, “Darryl, that’s my mate from our class, his parents is like you and Mrs Just, they didn’t want to let Darryl go off by himself, I mean just with other kids his age. But they said, if Michael would go with us, like to keep an eye on us, see we take proper care and don’t get into no trouble and that, well then they wouldn’t object. And what we was wondering was, whether that might make a difference to you too.”

  Mum’d turned round from the sink by now and was staring at Michael. Dad too.

  “How old are you, son?” he asked him.
<
br />   “Nearly nineteen.”

  I knew what was coming next.

  “You have a job of some kind?”

  Dad judges everyone in the world by whether they work and how hard and what at. I held my breath and prayed. Please let him be in work and let it be the kind of work Dad approves of! Because with him, just any old job won’t do. It’s got to be something that he counts as “constructive”. He’d rather him a gardener, for instance, than, say, selling swag in Southall Market or working for a bookie, or flogging magazine subscriptions, even if he was making a bomb at it.

  “I’m a builder’s mate,” he said.

  I looked at Dad, quick. It was exactly what he likes – making things. From his little smile I could see it was well on the right side of whatever line he draws in his mind between what’s useful, and “being a parasite”, as he calls a lot of jobs.

  “You are a regular builder? You put up good buildings, for people to live in and work in?”

  “Well, I’m renovating old ones at present, but my firm does all sorts.”

  “That’s nice,” said Dad. “It is good to build.”

  I breathed again. It was all right. That part, anyway. But that wasn’t the end of it. It’d take more than an honest job to change Dad’s mind about Holland – I knew that.

  “When you go to Holland, will you take with you a girlfriend?”

  Trick question! But that was all right too, because Michael said, “No. I haven’t got one.”

  Sean looked up for the first time. He’s nineteen too. He hasn’t got a girlfriend either. For all his noise and rude jokes at home, he’s too shy. He’s like a great shambling idiot around girls. He gave Michael a look of interest and went back to his TV programmes.

  Dad was asking another question.

  “When you get to Holland, why you won’t want to go off by yourself? Why you won’t be bored to be with a crowd of young kids?”

  I thought to myself, If this is all a put-up job, if they’re making it up about him coming, that’ll do him. But what did he say, quick as anything? “Well, Mum’s helping pay for my trip on condition I stop with them. I never been abroad. I want to go. That’s part of the deal. Anyway my brother Darryl’s okay. He’s not a baby. We get on fine together. I’ll like teaching him camping and that. It won’t be boring, how could it?”

  “You have met the others? That Karen—?”

  Michael shrugged. “Yeah. Karen. Look, Mr Just. I can’t be responsible for all of ’em all the time. If they want to be silly I can’t stop ’em. But if they want to be sensible and see the country and that, I’ll do my best for ’em.” He gave me a quick look. “Your daughter don’t look like a silly girl to me,” he said.

  Dad smiled, reached his arm out and put it round my waist. “Well,” he said, “appearances can mislead. But I hope you are right. Time will tell.” And there was a silence.

  The three of us – Kev, Michael and me – all looked at each other. Mum looked at Dad, and I saw Dad give a little movement, half-shrug, half-nod. And suddenly I felt something like a rocket zoom up inside me and explode in my head.

  “Dad!” I nearly yelled. “I can go!”

  Kev broke out into a great soppy grin. Mum sighed and went back to washing-up. Lily looked like the sky just fell in on her. And I did a little dance round the room and then hugged Dad so hard he nearly fell over, chair and all.

  7 · Ready for the Off

  When you look back on something big, like a trip, you can make a pattern out of it – a picture, kind of, in your mind. It has its own colours. If it’s all yellow and shiny, you’re lucky. The shine can dazzle out any black patches where things went wrong, like spotlights shining in your eyes. But if there’s too many black bits (and specially if they come near the end) they got a way of growing. Afterwards, when you’re remembering, you forget the nice bright parts were ever there. If you’re not careful, that can make the whole thing seem as if it wasn’t worth doing.

  So what I want to do is remember the good bits because there were plenty, really – as well as telling about what went wrong.

  Things started great. There we were, a gang of us, starting off on a great adventure together. We’d been like that ever since school finished and we really started getting ourselves ready to leave.

  Michael did the bookings and that, and each of us had to get the things on our lists. The lists we made together, at a meeting we had. Michael told us most of what we ought to get. You should have heard the yells and groans as that list got longer and longer.

  “But what do we need tents for? I thought we was going to sleep in youth hostels!”

  “Plates – cups – frying pans – I’m not going to do no cooking! Don’t they have take-aways in Holland?”

  “Sleeping-bags – where’ll I get a sleeping-bag for cripes’ sakes?”

  Michael wouldn’t be shaken on any of the stuff he thought we should have, nor on the way he thought we ought to do everything. But it was when Karen asked, “How we going to carry all this clobber?” that Michael really sprung his big surprise.

  “On our backs. And on our bikes.”

  “BIKES!”

  Michael looked round, cool as you like, at us all with our mouths wide open.

  “Yeah, bikes,” he said. “Hadn’t you lot realised this was going to be a biking holiday?”

  Well, then there really was a proper outcry. We could all ride bikes, and most of us had one – of sorts – or could borrow one off somebody. It wasn’t that. It was the idea that we were going to have to pedal-push our way all over bloody Holland when we’d thought – well, I don’t know what we had thought, come to that. I think I’d thought of myself riding about in other people’s comfortable cars.

  But as Michael talked, it began to seem stupid, the idea of hitch-hiking. No car can take on seven at once, we’d have had to split up right away. And the whole idea was to keep together. Michael explained the roads were flat and that most of them had cycle-tracks beside them and that loads of people cycle everywhere in Holland. “Anyhow,” he said, “that’s what we’re doing. We put our bikes on the boat at Harwich, take ’em off at the Hook, tie on our stuff and off we go. I got a campers’ map of the country. We’ll buy nosh in the markets, eat by the roadside, stop wherever we like to look at things and explore or swim or anything you like. It’ll be great, you’ll see, you won’t know yourselves.”

  “He sounds just like a scoutmaster or something,” muttered Karen.

  “Yeah,” said Kev, not muttering. “You’re not taking a bunch of snotty-nosed kids on a day-trip you know. I’m not keen on all this health-and-strength lark. I’m not the athletic type, me! I want to get up to Amsterdam and do the town over with Tracy.”

  “Well, Amsterdam’s a good sixty miles from the Hook,” said Michael. “That’s a lot of distance, however you do it. The Dutch don’t like giving lifts, especially to little English lads with comic hair-cuts. You might spend half your holiday standing on a roadside with your thumb in the air if you’re not careful. Why don’t you stick with us? We’ll go to Rotterdam instead. There’s a terrific tower there, taller than the Post Office tower, you can go up it and see for miles. And we’re going to Madurodam.”

  “What’s that then?”

  “It’s a whole miniature town. No, don’t laugh. I’ve seen pictures of it. Honest, you never saw anything like it. Must be one of the wonders of the world.”

  There was a hoot from the boys. “He thinks we’re bloody kids. Honest to God! He does! Dolly houses—”

  Michael looked put out, and I thought, He’ll leave us to get on with it in a minute. But suddenly Connie, who hadn’t said a word till then, just sat there painting her nails (black), piped up.

  “I saw a miniature village once. It was great. And I fancy seeing Rotterdam. My grandad seen it right after the Germans bombed it flat in the war.”

  We all looked at her. She held up her black nails to admire them. You never saw anybody look less the roughing-it type.

&nb
sp; “What do you think about camping and biking and that, though, Con?”

  “It sounds okay, why not? Long as we don’t have to knock ourselves out. After all, it’s not le Tour de France, is it?”

  “No,” said Kev. “It’s le Tiptour through le Tulips.”

  We all gave a howl. But after that there wasn’t too much argument, somehow. We all just let Michael have his own way.

  *

  I’m going to skip over the preparations. There was panic-stations a couple of times, about equipment and that, but Michael seemed to have a lot of connections – mates he’d been camping with who lent him stuff to fill the holes in our lists, and in the end most of our families came up with bits of cash for extras. Vlady put his racer into good nick and lent it to me (along with two hours of instructions) and bought me saddle-bag things to hang on each side of the back wheels. Sean dug out his old rucksack that he’d got on special offer years ago and never even used, and gave me that as a present. He gave me some instructions too – in fact the whole family had a go at me.

  Sean said, “I don’t see why you should be getting abroad before I do, but if you must go, watch out for these foreigners. They’ll do you up any way they can. Keep your money and passport and that in a bag round your neck. In Italy they snatch it off you in broad daylight if you got it in your hand.”

  “I’m not going to Italy, though, am I?” I threw back at him. I wasn’t ready to believe anything bad could happen, and because of that I threw back most of the warnings I got from the family.

  Mum’s was, “The dear knows why you’d want to go to Holland of all places. You’ll hardly find a good Catholic there in a day’s hard march; Protestants to a man, so they’ve no morals, of course. Be on your guard against the men, don’t let anyone in your tent at night. . . . Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, why do you have to be going off at all? I think your father’s lost his senses altogether!”