Solace of the Road

by Siobhan Dowd

‘What shall we call her, Holl?’ asked Mam.

  We looked at the new girl on the block.

  ‘Dunno. Something fancy.’

  We thought.

  Then Mammy had it. ‘D’you remember the horse? The horse you chose that time? That Denny put the money on?’

  I saw a ragged row of chestnut and muscle, horses with necks stretched out like giraffes. The most beautiful horse in the world was straining at the front, different from the others, pale gold, palomino. ‘Sister Solace,’ I whispered. ‘I remember her, Mam.’

  ‘This girl here – same shade, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And fast?’

  ‘A winner.’

  ‘So we’ll call her Solace, Holl. After the horse.’

  ‘Solace?’ The locks kissed my cheeks. ‘Yeah. After the horse, Mam. ’S perfect. That’s who I am. I’m a girl called Solace. And I’m on the move. And nobody tells me what to do.’

  ‘That’s right, Holl. You’ve got the picture.’ She put a hand on mine. ‘Don’t stop brushing, Holl, for love nor money.’

  I kept brushing for love and for money. ‘Solace,’ I said with every stroke. ‘Call me Solace.’ And I was Solace, Solace of the road, walking into a night sky, thumb out and fag in hand. I was off to Ireland, where Mammy was and where the grass was green. I wasn’t sure what town she was in, but I’d find her. I would. I’d cross the Irish Sea and walk up the Irish hills in the fine, soft rain, drinking in the fresh air by the pint, just like Mammy promised. Nobody was going to stop me and I was going, going—

  Downstairs a door slammed.

  The sky house vanished. Ireland vanished. It was Tooting Snooting again with the snow floating down outside and the silence inside.

  Fiona, back from the shops already. I smiled a Solace smile, a halo-light slanting round my smooth crown. I looked good, but I was a real mad, bad girl.

  ‘Holly,’ Fiona called from the hall below. ‘Come and see what I got.’

  I took off the wig and hid it under my pillow with Rosabel sitting on top. ‘Back soon,’ I promised.

  I unlocked the door and went downstairs, my hand skimming the banister.

  I went and lounged against the kitchen door. ‘Hi, Fiona.’

  She’d got ham and pineapple pizza.

  ‘My fave. Thanks.’ I was so hungry I could have eaten it there and then.

  ‘Let’s forget about earlier, shall we, Holly?’

  Fiona looked straight at me. I couldn’t look away. ‘Yeah, Fiona,’ I said. ‘OK.’

  ‘As long as you don’t call me that name again.’

  I stood at the kitchen door, fingering the zip on my top.

  ‘You won’t, will you, Holly? Please?’

  ‘No, Fiona.’ Then I said something Miko used to say. ‘I hear you.’

  Fiona smiled. ‘Thanks. You see, it’s a sore spot that I can’t have children.’ She reached into the shopping and took out a bag of clementines and offered me one. ‘A few years back I had cancer.’

  I took a clementine, forgetting how I hated peeling them. ‘Cancer?’

  ‘No worries now. The doctors say I’m all clear. But I had to have chemotherapy. Do you know what that is?’

  I tossed the clementine from one hand to the other like it was a ball. ‘Uh-uh.’

  ‘It’s when they give you these drugs and your hair falls out and you feel sick. Sometimes afterwards it means you can’t have children.’

  I stared at the dimples on the orange skin. ‘Ick,’ I managed.

  ‘A small price to pay to be alive but it wasn’t what Ray or I wanted. So don’t call me that name again, Holly. Please.’

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  Fiona nodded and started unpacking the rest of the shopping. I watched her. Then I put the clementine down and picked a bag up and took out the tins of tomatoes. I put them in the cupboard where I thought they went.

  ‘That time …’ Fiona went on, opening the freezer door. She stuffed in some frozen fish. ‘The longest eighteen weeks of my life. I wore this wig to cover up the hair-loss.’

  ‘A wig?’

  ‘Yes, ash-blonde. I hated it. It made my cheeks look red, but not healthy red, more blotchy. I tried scarves but then you might as well tattoo CANCER VICTIM on your forehead. The whole thing was like a nightmare happening to someone else, Holly. Know the feeling?’

  ‘Telling me,’ I said.

  ‘At the time I put on a brave face. Then, after it was over, I was a mess. Now, when I look back, I get the creeps. I thought my hair would never grow back, but it did. Only differently.’ She picked up a strand of her wavy hair, smiling at me from across the kitchen. ‘It was straight before. Now look at it. What was the worst time in your life?’

  I was halfway up to the cupboard with a bag of brown rice. I froze, staring at the strand of Fiona’s light-brown hair, not unlike my own. The secure unit. The night out with Grace and Trim when the police collared me. Being stuck on that train with the raving drunks that time I ran away. The memories crashed around in my head. That other time, with Mam and Denny in the sky house …

  I couldn’t speak. Fiona smoothed her hair back behind her ear. I put the rice on the worktop and walked past her fast.

  Didn’t say anything, as if she hadn’t asked anything.

  ‘Holly?’ Fiona called after me. Then something about how I’d forgotten my clementine. But I was already halfway up the stairs.

  I thought I’d just go take another look at Solace, up there under my pillow.

  Seven

  More Snooting Heck

  The winter months passed and I was frozen solid while everyone else rushed by. I knew time moved only because of the tick-tock-no-luck carriage clock on the Aldridges’ mantelpiece, a fancy gold affair that chimed the hours and puttered on like life was muffled up in cotton wool.

  Fiona kept on at her job, three days a week. She taught reading to backward kids and was always going on about books and why didn’t I have any. She had that in common with Miko. Sometimes Miko would wring his hands and say, ‘Go read a book or something, lads,’ and it was like asking us to fly to Mars. To Fiona I said that I had my mags and they were better than books because books were boring. Fiona had them creeping up every wall, shelves of them. I’d never seen so many. They freaked me out because they reminded me of school.

  School was the pits. The teachers were pit-miseries, every last one. Mrs Atkins, the English teacher, was the worst. I’d arrived just as the class was starting Jane Eyre and finishing up the war poets – this stuff by long-gone soldiers who thought war was a waste of space. They banged on about wires and gas attacks and mates who copped it. ‘Holly,’ Mrs Atkins said one class. ‘Are you listening?’

  ‘Yeah, miss.’ English class had an odd number in it and the desks were arranged in pairs, so Little Miss New Girl was marooned off to the side.

  ‘What did I just say?’

  ‘How the war poets are great ’n’ all.’

  ‘But what precisely did I say, Holly?’

  I screwed up my face. ‘Oh, yeah. How the great thing about the war poets is they’re dead, miss.’

  The class laughed. Mrs Atkins looked like I’d stabbed her in the eye.

  ‘Very funny. Hilarious. Turn to our new book, Jane Eyre, Holly. The author of that is dead too, you’ll no doubt be thrilled to hear. Please read from the beginning.’

  I picked up this paperback with a woman in an old-fashioned long dress walking under trees, thinking, Jeez, not another pile of old dead crap. There was this long introduction and the class tittered while I fumbled through the pages to find the start. ‘There weren’t no possibility taking a walk that day,’ I read out in my most bored, Cockney accent. That killed the class. So I kept droning on about the rain and the window seat and the bird book, and it was the biggest pile of jaw-dropping junk you ever heard, and when I got to the bit where the bad cousin John throws a book at her I was glad. She was such a whiner, that Jane. Then Mrs Atkins said to stop because her ears were about
to fall off and the whole class laughed and I wanted to throw the bloody book at Mrs Atkins but the bell went, so I didn’t.

  Later that morning, the class toughie, a townie called Karuna, had a go at me. She stood on a chair and read from the book the wrong way up and did my Cockney accent and then jumped to the ground saying her ears were falling off and the whole class laughed again. She grabbed my dinner money cheque that I happened to be holding and read it out loud. I tried to snatch it back, but too late. She’d found out I wasn’t normal. It had my name, Hogan, written on one side, and Fiona’s – Aldridge – signed on the other. She shouted out to the whole class that I was a bastard. I got her by the neck and yanked her thick fair hair and she screamed and Mr Preston came in and I nearly got excluded. He sent me to the head and the head said another time it would be curtains. When I got back to class, Mr Preston made me say sorry to Karuna in front of everyone.

  ‘Sorry, Karuna,’ I went. I made my voice go all velvety syrup: Sooorrry, Karrrooona. We glared at each other and it was Takes one to know one. I couldn’t help it: I smiled and she grinned back. We were two cats on a case. At break time she gave me a fag and we swapped mobile numbers. Then the next day she ignored me, on account of her mate Luke coming back from Tenerife. Least that’s what he made out, but he didn’t have a tan. So I was back to being Little Miss New Girl. An unending Holy Bloody Day of Obligation, as Mam used to say.

  Evenings, I got home and lay down on the sofa with the TV remote and my pizza. I asked Fiona if I could have a TV for my room and she said no.

  ‘Everyone at school’s got a TV in their room,’ I said.

  ‘We’re not everyone.’

  Empty-Ovary, I thought. ‘But—’

  ‘OK, OK, I’ll think about it.’ Maybe she phoned Rachel or something, but the next day she said I could have a small one. I had to pay towards it from my pocket money every week and turn it off by eleven and I agreed.

  I’d never had a TV in my room before. Nor such a snappy mobile. It was only pay as you go, but it folded small and light. Fiona got it for me because my last one was broken. I sent a text to Trim and Grace straight off, so they’d know my new number. HRU. GR8 HERE. LUV H.

  Only it wasn’t GR8 here.

  You’d think I’d have died and gone to heaven with the room, the mobile, the TV. What more could a care-babe want? But it was wrong somehow. I was an odd-ball in that house, a crackhead in a yoga class.

  Take the fags for instance.

  I didn’t tell Fiona and Ray I smoked. They were too squeaky-clean. So I’d puff a fag out my bedroom window.

  One Saturday, Ray found one of my butts.

  ‘Hey, Holly,’ he called. He was in the back garden and my window was ajar. I stuck my nose out. There was a flutter in the air like something new in the breeze. He smiled up at me. It was the kind of smile people put on when they didn’t mean to catch your eye.

  ‘What?’

  He held up a butt, camel-coloured, and twizzelled it round like a cocktail umbrella. ‘This yours?’ he said.

  ‘Nah. Nothing to do with me.’

  ‘Maybe the wind dropped it there?’

  ‘Yeah, Ray,’ I said. ‘That must have been it. The wind. A great big puff.’

  He shook his head like the world was a sad case and tossed it in the bin with the garden rubbish. ‘I used to smoke, you know,’ he said, picking up the hedge clippers.

  ‘That so?’

  ‘Yeah. But I realized it’s a mug’s game. So I cut it out.’ He started at the hedge.

  Clip-clop went Ray’s shears all afternoon. I shut the window and drew the curtains to be more private. I could have murdered a fag. But so much of my pocket money was going on the TV, I didn’t have a penny to get any. So I lit a pretend fag and played at being the great glamour girl herself, Solace. I painted my nails hot red and jiggled in front of the mirror with the wig on plus my bikini top and shortest skirt. My mam used to dance in all the top clubs in Mayfair and she made a packet. She had a slinky body-suit with spangles and ostrich feathers, the works. And for sure, I thought, she’s up there now in Ireland in some posh joint, breaking hearts, and that’s where I’m headed too, back to Ireland, where Mam and I started, and I’m joining her up on that stage and we’ll be a double act.

  Ask me if I remember Ireland and it’s like a painting that’s still wet, running in the rain. I was five when we left on the boat for England. All I remember is flashes. A fly buzzing round a yellow lampshade, laughter coming from another room, a tall spire, and down the street a bridge where I dropped sticks into a black river.

  And that’s where Mam lived now. She was there and I was here and it was a mistake. She’d had to leave England in a hurry and meant to send for me, but before she could, the social services came and took me away, and now she didn’t know where to find me. My big plan was to go back under my own steam and find her myself. I’d find her on a billboard in her slinky dance gear, back in Cork, the town we came from first. Dancing with the wig on, making me older, it was like getting a step closer. I’m coming, Mam. Jiggle, jiggle, slim-slam. Wherever you are, I’ll find you.

  Clip-clop went Ray’s shears below. Then the light changed and the wig seemed to change colour too. A freak hail shower rattled the windowpane behind the curtain.

  I smiled. The hail was a sign.

  Imagine the wind on your face, girl, I thought to myself. Imagine the looks from the men. Imagine the cars and the wheels fizzing on the roads and the fields, the green hills and the small towns passing. Imagine Ireland and the daft dogs and shiny pavements and people dancing the night away in the bars, going cracked with the music and the jokes.

  Imagine freedom, Holly. Imagine.

  Eight

  Coasters

  Rachel called over soon after to check out the placement. We all sat in the living room on two fat sofas under this fancy light creation that hung over the coffee table. It had eight twisted arms with tiny naked lights at the end, like some freaky octopus. The carriage clock tick-tocked. Fiona, Ray and Rachel drank tea, with their cups all neat on these raffia mats that Fiona called coasters. I had Coke, ditto. Fiona chatted brightly as if we were one happy house of coves. She didn’t say anything about the time I called her that name.

  ‘Are you happy, Holly?’ Rachel said.

  ‘Yeah. Fine,’ I said.

  ‘Do you miss the Home?’ she said.

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Miko’s gone now. Did you know?’

  I shouldn’t have been surprised but I was. ‘Gone?’

  ‘He’s got this new job with young offenders. He’s gone north over the river, Finchley way.’

  I thought of Miko, crossing the river, and pfuff! going, gone, because of the rules saying it was the end of all contact. All the yarns about his mad Irish family in County Mayo, ‘so help me God’, and a million and one first cousins, and the time he hitched from one end of France to another, gone. His missing front tooth and shaved head and the way he could dribble a football round Trim, gone. He’d be juggling and crooning away to a load of dimwit delinquents who’d smash in his face the first chance they got.

  ‘Do you want me to give him a message?’ Rachel said.

  ‘A message?’

  ‘Like “Good luck in your new job” or something? You were friends, you and Miko, weren’t you?’

  ‘S’pose.’

  ‘So you must have a message for him?’

  I shrugged. Fiona asked if I wanted another Coke. I said yes. She went out to the kitchen to get it. Silence. Ray asked Rachel if she was from around here. I sucked in a cheek and drew a spiral with the tip of my trainer on the swanky cream rug. Templeton House was shrinking smaller with every circle. Grace, Trim and Miko were three fuzzy dots and the years there a dream that had never been. I saw Miko going north, crossing the bridge over the river with Big Ben donging away. Then Grace, practising her dainty walking so she could be a supermodel. And Trim, with his plans to become a millionaire from the chain of casinos he was going t
o open. Grace and Trim, scheming together and not ever texting me. And Miko, not even writing a card to say goodbye. Fiona came back with my drink. I got up and cruised past her, saying nothing.

  In my room, I put Solace on. I brushed her down and Mam was in the mirror again, telling me to brush away for all Ireland, and I swear I could hear the lift in the sky house coming to take her away to her night job, droning as it rose flight by flight.

  ‘Holly?’

  It was Fiona, knocking on my door.

  ‘Rachel’s gone,’ she called. ‘She said to say goodbye. Are you OK?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You’re very quiet.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Can I come in?’

  I stashed the wig away under my pillow and lay on the bed with Rosabel scrunched to my belly. ‘S’pose.’

  Her face came round the door, pale and smiling. ‘You’re very snug.’

  ‘Yeah. Ta.’

  ‘Are you all right, Holly? Are you really all right?’

  ‘ ’M fine.’

  ‘Only you look like you’ve been crying.’

  I fiddled with Rosabel’s ears.

  ‘Ray and I were wondering. Do you want to pop over to Templeton House? Ray said he’d drive you. Next weekend, maybe?’

  I shrugged, like it was all in a day. Then I thought, seeing Grace and Trim again, it’d be like old times. I thought about what Grace would say about my new zip-up skater top. She’d say I needed to drop the zip three inches. And Trim would practise his tae kwon do on me.

  ‘OK. If you like, Fiona.’

  She grinned. ‘Great, Holl. I’ll tell Ray.’ She shut the door behind her.

  Holl?

  Only Mammy called me that.

  I threw Rosabel hard against the door panel where Fiona’s face had been.

  But the next weekend she remembered the promise and Ray drove me to Templeton House.

  It was the same, only different. Same smell, different people. It felt empty without Miko. Grace fluttered her eyelashes and stroked her supermodel neck and talked about her new mate, Ash. It was Ash this, Ash that. Her voice was vague and she’d laugh for no reason and I figured she’d done some skunk, which she’d got into just before I left.