Writing On the Wall

by Lynne Reid Banks

  “What’s up with you then?” Michael said. “Been living it up too much, eh?”

  “Looks like it,” I said. “Seems hard to pedal somehow.”

  Michael inspected my tyres. “No wonder,” he said. “Looks like you got a slow puncture. You better pump it up for now and we’ll try and mend it when we get there.”

  That was when I found out my pump had gone missing.

  “How’d you manage that?” asked Michael.

  “Dunno. Must’ve been nicked in Amsterdam.”

  He pumped up my tyre for me, which I could’ve done for myself. Karen stood there with her eyebrows in the air, looking at me over Michael’s back as he bent down pumping. Got me narked, so I said, “What you smirking like that for?”

  “Just we were getting a lecture yesterday. Weren’t we, Michael, eh?”

  Michael grunted.

  “About how if women want equal rights they can’t expect men to spoil ’em no more, doing little things for ’em as if they was incapable. Eh, Michael? Is poor old Tracy incapable, Michael, eh, Michael?”

  Cliff laughed, a great hoot, and even Con smiled. But Darryl said, “Shut up, he’s just pumping her tyre, that’s all! I done Con’s yesterday and come to that, who mended your chain for you last night?”

  That shut Cliff up, but not Karen. She said, “Yeah, but he wasn’t sounding off about women’s lib, was he? So get stuffed.”

  We rode on in not such a good mood as before.

  Still, it all blew away soon enough. It was good, being back on the road with the others, though it felt funny without Kev. Con came alongside me and seemed to read my thoughts.

  “Where’d you ditch Kev then?”

  “Amsterdam.”

  “That’s not very nice.”

  “Nice! If you want to know, he run out on me last night.” And I told her about it.

  “What a rotten sod,” she said. “Pity you didn’t push him in a canal.”

  We rode along for a bit, looking at the fields. Then she said, “You want to tell me?”

  “What?”

  “You know.”

  “Nothing happened,” I said. I told her how we’d spent those two nights, getting kicked out of the hotel and that.

  “Poor Trace,” she said. Nice. The way she understood and didn’t laugh.

  17 · After the Little Town

  Maybe one day I’ll be a travel writer. If I ever get my spelling right. If I am, I’ll start with a whole book about Madurodam.

  This isn’t it, though, so I must keep it short. But it’s a smashing place. I always was mad for miniature things. I never had a dolls’ house but Lily’s got one, and if you want to know, Mary and me played with it more than Lil ever did; in fact we used to give her hell if she came along and mucked up our arrangements. Hours we spent, doing the rooms, putting up new wall-paper and that, and we never, not for years, gave poor Lily anything for Christmas or birthdays except miniature furniture and stuff for us to play with. She got so fed up one year, she give us each a set of dolls’ furniture from Woolies. Mary was sixteen by then and she wasn’t half livid. Lily said, “Serve you right, now you can start giving me stuff for my Sindy doll.”

  So It was Mary I was missing more than Kev as I wandered round this fantastic little town. There was a whole small park-full of it. You couldn’t even see it all at once unless you climbed up the banks that were round it. It was just like a real town, with everything in it – even smoke coming out of some of the chimneys. And things moved. You could put coins into little slots (or wait till someone else did) and see town bands playing and choirs marching into cathedrals, with lights shining through the stained-glass windows and real singing from inside. There were harbours with boats and ships coming and going, and one of them – that was what Darryl liked best – on fire; I mean real flames, with the little toy firemen playing a hose with real water to put it out. Then after a bit it’d start burning again.

  Of course after that it was no surprise to see cars dashing along the roads and a cable-car going up a mountain and planes moving along runways and a fair (that was my favourite) with the ferris wheel going round. Some of the buildings were amazing. Just amazing. So real! Town halls and blocks of offices and little rows of houses and shops, and castles and palaces and churches – you name it, they had it, the tallest of them not higher than your waist.

  I could’ve stopped there all day, or what was left of it, but Michael wasn’t having any. We’d only one more day left, and he was getting jumpy– he hadn’t seen a half nor a quarter of what it had in his guide-book. So after about two hours he dragged us away.

  Him and Darryl wanted to go to the Hague – “After all, it is the capital”. But the rest of us were knackered and wanted a rest. The sky was clouding over again, and Michael said we’d be better off indoors, but we knew what that meant – some museum or public building where he could get stuck in his book or gape at the architecture and we could go bananas.

  So we split up, after arranging where to meet – we were camping that night by the sea. Michael and Darryl took off for the city while we pointed ourselves at the coast, and pretty soon we came to a seaside town called Swimagain, or something like that. It was pretty much like Brighton, except it had a sandy beach, but that was okay by us; we were ready for a few souvenir shops and cafés and that, not to mention a smashing pier with four sprouts on legs at the far end – and a tower.

  “I’m going up that,” I said, straight off. I love towers, and I’d missed the Euromast. But Karen and Cliff wanted to eat and buy stuff, so Con and me trailed along, and after watching them for a bit it struck me I hadn’t bought anything for the family yet, so I got stuck in to a bit of shopping too.

  I got one of those little blue and white dishes for Mum, with a Dutch scene painted on it (yeah, with a windmill – well, after all, she’d expect it, wouldn’t she?). For Mary I got a headscarf with Dutch girls all over it, and for Lily a little pair of clogs, just about right for her Sindy doll. The men were harder to choose things for, like always, but in the end I got a miniature bottle of that yellow custard stuff for Sean (it’s called advocaat) and for Dad a box of liqueur chocolates and a Dutch cigar.

  Vlady was the big problem. He doesn’t smoke or drink. When I think of him I just think of books. So in the end I got him a tiny silver book with a hook fastening. When you opened it, a sort of concertina of little pictures of Holland dropped out.

  Con followed me about but she didn’t buy anything.

  “Aren’t you getting nothing for your family?” I asked her. Not that she’s got much, there’s only her and her mum and dad.

  “I’ll buy ’em a cheese just before we get on the boat,” she said. “I got a real old-fashioned Dutch pipe for Grandad already.”

  “What about souvenirs?”

  “What for? I won’t forget. Besides, I got my diary.”

  “You been writing about us on the sly?” I asked her.

  “I been keeping it for four years now.”

  “Get away,” I said. “What sorts of things do you write?”

  “Everything, pretty near.”

  “When do you do it? Must take hours.”

  “I got a kind of shorthand I made up myself. I don’t write every day. When we was camping I couldn’t, so I just made notes, and when we got to the Youth Hostel and I had a table and that, I wrote up three days at once.”

  “Can I read it?”

  She gave a laugh. “When it’s published.”

  “There’ll be some red faces then, I bet! Am I in it?”

  “Course you are. But your face won’t be red, don’t worry.”

  The others had disappeared – probably necking somewhere. It had come on to rain again. We chained up our bikes to one of the bike-stands they have everywhere, and walked out along the pier.

  “Have you changed much since you started your diary?”

  “Course. I wasn’t a punk then, was I.”

  I looked at her. She hadn’t put on make-up for ne
arly a week. Her face was tanned and her hair was all blown back and curly from the sea air. You could see the roots weren’t black.

  “You’re not one now if you ask me.”

  “Yes I am, I’m a real one, not like Kev and Cliff. Or you.”

  “What you mean?”

  “You lot don’t know what punk’s all about. It’s protest, isn’t it. But what’ve you lot got to protest about? Families that you like, homes that you want to stay in. Rules you don’t mind sticking to. . . . Darryl, now, he’d make a good punk, maybe, if he could get the hang of it, with a lush for mother and no Dad. But he’s no rebel, not Darryl. He copies Michael, and Michael’s a conformer. He likes society, likes the way it’s run, more or less; he’s prepared to fit in. Get a job, work hard, save money, buy a house, raise a family, do it all better than your parents – that’s his idea. But it’s not mine.”

  “What’s yours then?”

  She shrugged. “I want to change things. I dunno how, yet. All I know is, I look around and I don’t like what I see. People’s either well-off and settled, and smug and shut in to themselves, not caring for anyone so long as they can keep what they got – or else they’re down and miserable and got nothing to hope for and no chance of getting it if they had. Both ways is dead boring and rotten and I’m not going to get stuck with either of ’em. So me, I’m going to be different. Just now the way to be different is to dye your hair and wear a lot of kinky gear that makes the smug lot feel sick and maybe makes the sad sort sit up a bit and even have a laugh and think life’s not so – I dunno, so fixed as they thought, not if people can dress up mad and swear on telly and shock people, and sing protest songs, and have punch-ups and break all the rules. . . . It don’t hurt no one, but it stops some people thinking they know the score about everything. They like to know which pigeon-hole everybody’s in, but they’ve had to make a new one for the punks. They’d’ve labelled it ‘Rubbish’ or ‘the Dregs’ if we hadn’t give it a worse label first. So now we’re in all the papers, so they got to think about us, they got to listen to our message. If only because we scare ’em shitless. Which is no more than most of ’em deserve, seeing they don’t give a monkey’s about anyone but themselves.”

  I never heard Con go on like that. I couldn’t think of a thing to say. So I said, “Let’s go up the tower.”

  So we went up the tower, all 140 feet of it, and stood at the top looking down at the harbour and the big ships and the little ships, and the huge hotels and the stone breakwaters, and the horizon lost in the rain.

  At last I said, “Black’s for violence.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what you said once. When I asked why you go for all black gear. You said ‘Black’s for violence’.”

  “That’s right.”

  “But you’re not for violence. When you were a prefect, you stopped fights and that. You was on the side of law and order in school.”

  She didn’t say anything for a while, just looked out at the sea.

  “I’ve had enough of this tower,” she said suddenly. “And the pier. Let’s go back to the beach. I might want to swim.”

  “Swim? In the rain?”

  “It’s lovely and warm in the rain.”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “I know. Coming?”

  Well, I wasn’t in the mood to be on my own so I stuck with her and we walked back along the pier. Half-way, she started.

  “Listen, Trace,” she said. “I’m in a talking mood, so I’ll tell you something, only keep it to yourself. Remember that night we went to the Music Mill. You was surprised, wasn’t you, that Mum let me go. When you rung the doorbell that night I’d just been watching the start of a row between my mum and dad. Last time he went for her like that, she wound up at that place in Chiswick, that home for battered wives. That was two years ago. Dad talked her round and made promises and I got at her too, told her I was scared to be home alone with him, though he never laid a hand on me, but I wanted her back so bad I lied to her. So she come back and it’s been like living on a volcano ever since. Sometimes it starts rumbling and I start sweating, thinking what happened that time, with me standing there watching, too shit-scared to do anything to help her. . . . So that night you come, the volcano was rumbling. They was starting on each other. And I couldn’t stand it, I wanted out. And she wanted me out. She never liked me seeing it, she says me being there makes him worse. In the end nothing happened; I mean she had no marks on her next morning, so he must’ve held his temper. That time. But I’ve lived with violence. I know where it’s at. That’s why I jumped on it at school. I wear all that black gear because of other people’s violence, not mine. You seen how they avoid me in the street. That’s what I like. They’re scared of me. They keep away. That way they’ll never find out how scared I am of them.”

  I gave a shaky little laugh. I felt so sorry for her, I had to make light of it somehow. “Call yourself a punk!” I said.

  “I’ll fight my own way,” she said. “Punch-ups and angry Rock and that’s okay for some, it’s one way. I got other ways.”

  “Maybe you’ll write for the papers.”

  She gave me a surprised look.

  “No,” she said. “Just living my own way. Seeing how I can manage. Breaking rules, making new ones, to fit me. It’s fun. Life’s got to be fun, hasn’t it? Or where’s the sense? I don’t live my life to please no one but me.”

  “Why didn’t you do a bunk, then, leave Michael, like you said, and sleep in barns and that?”

  “Didn’t want to in the end, did I? I’d’ve gone if I’d wanted, but I didn’t want to, so I stuck.”

  “Because of Darryl?”

  “No. Darryl’s okay, he’s got more to him than I ever thought, but I don’t really fancy him. I never really fancied a bloke yet, if you must know. I like girls more, so far.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re gay!” I joked.

  “I might be. I wouldn’t care. Nothing wrong with gays. People find what they’re looking for. Trouble is, most of ’em don’t bother looking, they just stand there and let it all wash over them. Me, I’m going to swim right out into the middle of it!”

  And with that, she suddenly did one of her nutties. We were back on the prom now. She jumped down the steps onto the beach and started running towards the sea. As she ran, she tore her clothes off – she did – right down to her pants, and she ran straight into the water in the rain.

  I stood there, gaping at her. There weren’t many people about because of the weather, but the ones there were had a good look, you can bet – she’s got a nice figure, Con has. Not that she gave them long to look. She just belly-dived straight into a wave and started swimming like mad in the direction of England, leaving a trail up the beach – bra, jeans, top, cagoule, shoes, rucksack – honest, she’s crazy.

  After I got over the surprise, I climbed down and just walked to the water’s edge, picking up her things and stuffing them into her rucksack so they wouldn’t get rained on. I had a stupid idea she really would just swim and swim and I’d never see her again, and to be honest it did seem like an hour before I saw her coming back.

  The mad mood was off her and I saw she wasn’t keen to come out topless, so I flung her T-shirt to her and she pulled it on under water. Then she stood up in the grey waves and walked out with her shirt clinging to her, all goosebumps and with her nipples sticking out like Raquel Welch in that 007 film. I didn’t know where to look. But a couple of Dutch boys who’d seen her go in, and been standing there waiting, they knew where to look all right.

  She took no notice, of course. She just came up to me and took her things off me, unrolled her jeans, and pulled them on her wet legs. The rain was stopping, luckily. The sun suddenly popped out, low down near the horizon under the dark clouds, making a red path down the sea towards us and turning the sand golden. Con got out a towel and started rubbing her hair till it all stuck up on end. The Dutch boys were coming nearer from behind, ogling us – well, Con – and talk
ing to each other out the sides of their mouths. I didn’t think Con had noticed them, but when they were close enough to hear her without her speaking loud, she just said, in her best prefect’s voice, “Piss off, you two,” still rubbing her head and not looking round. They did.

  “Come on,” she said to me, cool as can be, “let’s go and get some tea.”

  *

  The weather came up a treat that evening. The camping site was right on the front and we made a fire again and had a proper party. When it got dark some of us went in swimming and there were a lot of dares, to go in in the raw and that, but it was moonlight so I didn’t. I did take my bathing suit off in the water just to see how it felt, and it felt fantastic, all sort of soft, specially where you’re usually covered. But I kept it in my hand and struggled into it again before I came out.

  We finished up with a sing-song. Very romantic, sitting by the fire, all glowing from sea and back-to nature somehow. . . . I sat next to Michael. I didn’t decide to, or put myself forward, it just happened. I was dressed again and feeling nice and warm, but I didn’t say anything against him putting a rug round my shoulders and warning me about catching cold after my swim. Karen and Cliff only sat with the rest of us for a bit, then they sort of crept away into their tent. Con was by herself on the other side of the fire. Darryl was moving about, getting wood and that, and helping make some hot coffee. I pulled his jeans’ leg as he went past.

  “Why don’t you go sit with Con? She’s lonely,” I whispered.

  He looked across the fire at her, and hesitated.

  “No she’s not.”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I know her by now. She’d rather be on her tod.”

  Pity, though. Darryl was getting nicer all the time. And he really fancied Con, you could see that with one eye shut.

  I felt sleepy. It’d been a long day. The singing was kind of quiet and dreamy and I began to nod off. I felt my head bump against Michael’s shoulder and I jerked up straight.