by Siobhan Dowd
Clapham Common. Loads of people got on. Was I glad.
Clapham North. I’d been this way with Fiona the time we went shopping for clothes up town, and before, from Templeton House, when I rode the tubes with Trim and Grace. We’d buy drinks and fags and swagger about the platforms. Trim would act being a corporal in the army and stand to attention. He’d get a stick and bash the overhead lights like they were privates under his command. Grace would slump over the benches like a drug addict on the point of death. I’d read the small print on the adverts that said things like you could lose all your money as well as double it. In other words, ignore the big print if you’ve got a brain, typical mogit crap. We were bored as hell. Maybe we’d get off somewhere we’d never been before, like Dagenham Heathway. I’d picture daggers and commons and robbers and brambles but it would be roads and lorries. The daylight would make your head hurt so we’d go down and ride another tube.
Waterloo. After Waterloo you go under the river. The thought of the heavy dirty water swirling overhead made my throat tighten. What if it burst through and blew the fuse and the train exploded, and everyone drowned or fried or both? I shut my eyes. I made believe I had bubblegum. But however hard I chewed, it didn’t work. I thought I’d pass out. I opened my eyes. The tattoo man was staring again. I had to get out. Now. I grabbed the lizard-skin bag and pushed to the door.
The tattoo guy was still cursing to himself.
I had arms and bodies and people breathing on me all around.
Embankment. The doors opened and I sprang out onto the platform. I wriggled through the crowds and rode the escalators. I got outside and breathed the air.
I was right by a flower stall.
‘You all right?’ the flower man said.
I jumped. ‘Yeah, ta. Never better.’ I pointed at some tall purple flowers with yellow centres. ‘How much?’
‘The irises? For you, love, two quid.’
‘Another time maybe.’ I waved my hand like I was a member of the royal family and walked away. I made it look like I knew where I was going, but I didn’t. I felt the flower man’s eyes needling my back, so I scurried down a path to the right, out of sight.
Which is how I found myself in this fancy garden I’d never even known existed. It was like going from the pits to paradise in ten metres. And isn’t that London for you.
Twelve
London on a Plate
The garden was a secret. There were deckchairs with nobody sitting in them, beds of yellow, blue and red flowers and a sprinkler on the lawn and nobody out strolling, just me.
Maybe I’d dropped out of the real world. Maybe this was a dream garden. But then I found a café with white plastic seats and people scattered. Raspberry ice tea, I thought. I went in and bought it, and a millionaire bar as well. They’re chocolate caramel shortcakes, the kind of thing Grace would throw up after eating on account of her supermodel dream.
Outside, I chose a table far away from any mogits. I slugged half the drink down and gobbled the bar. I sat back, eyes shut. A ball of sun floated behind my eyelids. A bird chirped. The cars zoomed along the riverbank. London churned with a million funny things. I smiled.
What next?
Maybe I could cruise back over the river on a bus to see Grace. Maybe she’d have bunked off and want to make up. Then we could check out the shops around Oxford Circus together or the action in Covent Garden. A day like this, the buskers would clean up. Maybe we could bottle for them, Grace and I. We’d collect so much money, they’d give us a fat percentage. The folks on the balcony would make paper planes from five-pound notes and fly them down at us with hoots and cat-calls. Grace the Gorgeous and Solace the Unstoppable. The buskers would adopt us as lucky mascots and soon we’d be trooping round the capitals of Europe with them and next thing I’d be wiggling my hips at the Eiffel Tower.
Then Big Ben started up and I was back in London. Dong, dong, dong. One, two, three.
Sometimes, when the wind was right, Mam and I could hear Big Ben strike from the sky house. Together we’d count the hour. Mam would be out on the balcony, sipping her drink. Four, five. Mam’s dressing gown fluttered like a bride’s veil, only black, not white, and under it you could see her salmon-pink slip. ‘All I ever wanted,’ she’d say, ‘is London on a plate.’ She laughed like she’d just made up the first line of a song. ‘London on a bloody plate.’
Six, seven, eight. From the sky-house balcony, London was a faraway hum, a million and one other lives. Mam pointed to where the sun went down. ‘That’s the way to Ireland, Holl. Imagine it. The air. The greenness. The laughs. There’s room to breathe there, Holl. Some day we’ll go back. You and me together. Maybe we’ll look up some old friends and start a whole new life. We’ll have a dog. And a bungalow, all our own. And a view to die for. Not like this desolation. Some day, Holl. It’s a promise.’
Nine, ten, eleven. Big Ben stopped donging. Eleven o’clock. I opened my eyes. I was in the park, the sun beating down, my raspberry tea half drunk, and I was no further west than I’d been to start with.
What next? I thought.
I took out the road map and saw how I was in the middle of a giant, whole-page blob, packed with red, yellow, black and brown roads you couldn’t tell apart.
Was this for real?
If they caught me they’d take me away and put me back in the secure unit. Where the walls stare and nobody answers and the rooms are bare and it smells bad. Where there’s nobody to say goodnight to and you dream of falling and drawers with scary things inside open in your brain. And you hear nothing – just the voice of the guy who locked you in going, ‘You ain’t going nowhere, sunshine, cry all you like.’
So, I decided, this is for real and no way will they catch me. I had the wig and I had my travelcard and I was leaving.
On the map, I found the A40 and traced it back towards London. It went through Oxford, then it turned into a thick line of blue, a motorway. And that went all the way into a place called Shepherd’s Bush. Shepherd’s Bush, I knew from my travels with Grace and Trim, was on the tube. It wouldn’t be green and lush with sheep and shepherds, it would be roads and fumes. In my head, I was already standing at the start of the motorway and sticking out my thumb.
I didn’t fancy another tube ride, but it was the only way.
I tore out all the pages of the map with the A40 on it. I folded them into the lizard and got to my feet. Next I threw the rest of Ray’s map in a litterbin. I felt like somebody shedding a murder weapon. I left the park fast, went down the tube and got on a Circle Line going west. I didn’t think of axe murderers or flood disasters, I just spaced out to Storm Alert on full blast. At Notting Hill Gate I had to get the Central Line for Shepherd’s Bush, but I needed a fag badly. The shop at the top was a mad crush so I went outside to find a newsagent’s.
The sun had gone and it was spitting rain.
I put the lizard over my head to keep the wig dry. I watched the cars zoom past, and I thought of Mercutia Road and my apricot bedroom and my TV, blank, waiting to be turned on. In one more minute I’d have been down that tube riding back to Tooting Bec, end of story. But something amazing happened. A miracle. A tall, long red two-decker bus pulled up at a bus stop, with OXFORD TUBE written along the side.
‘Does this bus really go to Oxford?’ I asked a mogit woman at the end of the queue.
‘I certainly hope so,’ she said. ‘That’s where I’m going.’ She spoke like she had grape pips up her nose.
I got in after her.
‘One to Oxford,’ I said to the driver. I didn’t ask for ‘a child ticket’. I didn’t want to get caught for being unaccompanied.
He didn’t even look. ‘Single or return?’
Would my money cover it? ‘Single.’
‘Thirteen pounds,’ he said.
Was I glad I hadn’t bought any fags. I paid and he gave me a ticket. I climbed up to the top deck and found some empty seats at the back. I patted the wig dry and wiggled my slim-slam hips. Solace, you are
one mad, bad girl, I thought. Rain bucketed outside. Ireland was one step closer. The engine started and the bus took off down a tree-lined avenue, leaving London behind us.
Thirteen
The Girl on the Bus
The bus lurched off the road and drew up near a tube station called Hillingdon. We’d come to the edge of the city. The streets had broken down to flyways and factories. It was a wilderness out there. It reminded me of how when I was little I’d stare out of the sky-house window and see the black old towers like ugly markers and I’d put my hand on the windowpane and think how I was on one side of the glass and the world on the other and what would it be like if I swapped over? The bus stopped and a moment later, a girl came up the stairs with a neat backpack and short brown curls. She walked towards me. I looked out the window hard on account of I didn’t want anyone sitting by me, but the girl stopped right beside me.
‘Is anyone sitting here?’ she said. Another one with a snooty accent.
‘Nah.’
‘Do you mind?’
‘Nah.’
‘Thanks.’
She peeled off her bag and sat down. Rain dripped off her curls and her feet were the smallest things I ever saw, laced up in black loafers, the sort a nun would wear.
‘Christ,’ she said. ‘Rotten day.’
‘Too right.’
‘You going to Oxford?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Me too. You studying there?’
I stroked down the wig and smiled. I don’t know what came over me. I said, ‘Yeah.’ Me, Holly Hogan, studying at Oxford? Some joke. Mrs Atkins had despaired of me. Least I could read, not like Grace and Trim. They hardly knew their ABC. They used to make me read out the tube adverts to them and their texts were something else.
‘I’m there too.’ The girl was all smiles. ‘I’m at St John’s. Where are you?’
‘St Peter’s?’ I said off the top of my head, and laughed like it was just a joke.
‘Oh, right,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anyone from there. I gather the food’s bad and the bar’s brilliant.’
Like the place actually existed?
I nodded. ‘Bloody bad. Bloody brilliant.’ My voice had changed over from rough south Londony to grape pips to the power of ten, but this dumbo girl from hoo-haa-sint-johns didn’t seem to realize.
‘You a first year?’ she asked.
‘Yah.’
‘Me too. Liking it?’
‘So-so.’
‘Only so-so?’
‘Yah. You know. The food.’
She laughed. ‘Right. The food. It’s not bad at St John’s.’
‘It’s horrible at St Peter’s,’ I breezed. ‘D’you know what I found in my cream cracker the other day?’
‘No, what?’
‘A maggoty thing. Coming out of one of the holes.’
‘Yikes. Sounds like a weevil. Did you report it?’
‘Nah. Just chucked it.’
‘Don’t think I could face going back to Hall if that had happened to me,’ the girl said.
Hall? Where or what was that?
She opened her bag and got out a worn-out paperback. I made out the word ‘Tacitus’ on the front.
‘Do you mind if I read?’ she asked.
‘Course not.’ I’d never heard anyone ask permission to read before. But as she got into it, I almost wished I had a book too. You know what I said earlier about books being boring? But the fact is, I do read sometimes. When no one’s looking. Not old-fashioned stories, with people getting in and out of horse-drawn carriages. That crap bores me solid. But real stories, about now, I can handle. Love affairs and sex. Murders. People in trouble.
The week before, at school, Mrs Atkins had organized for this writer to come and visit. She thought maybe he’d get us all wide-eyed and bushytailed, and made out he was some kind of celebrity, and sure enough, when he walked in I thought he was typical mogit, in love with himself, skinny with shiny glasses shaped like slits in a letterbox. He’s going to drone on about his ideas and his characters and his publishers, I thought, yawning. He sat down and stared at us like he didn’t know how to start. Then he went, ‘Does anyone here believe in modern-day miracles?’
The class tittered. Then a few hands went up. Suddenly everyone was talking about the miracles they knew about, how Grandma died of a heart attack and came back to life, how they’d met their best friend out on holiday in Majorca, or how Crystal Palace beat Man U three-nil.
And the guy nodded and said that him being here with his book The Eleven Lives of Todd Fish was the biggest modern-day miracle of the lot, because he’d hated school and didn’t learn to read properly until he was thirteen on account of having dyslexia. Which is what Trim says he has. If you ask me it’s just Trim’s excuse for being thick.
‘If you’d put money on me to be a writer one day,’ the guy said, ‘you’d have got odds of ten thousand to one and you’d be rich.’
I sat there and bit my cheek. The odds of me being a writer, I thought, were a million to one. But you know what? When he got us to write some sentences down about whether we believed in miracles, he liked mine so much that he read it out to the class. It made everyone laugh and he said how it was ‘pithy’, whatever that meant. I kept what I wrote. It goes like this:
I don’t believe in miracles. My mam used to say I was a miracle but now I know about babies I know I wasn’t. A miracle is more like when my mate Trim gets the ball off Miko whose the best footballer I ever saw not signed up professnall. Or like when I get pineapple on my pizza as well as ham. Its got nothing to do with god. Its luck. Luck is not the same as a miracle. Luck is what comes round the corner if you wait long enuff like the number 68 bus. Just my luck to be at this school in this class on this day in this minute having to right about miracles for this writer guy who says its a miracle he is here on account of his doing his ds and bs backwards when he was a kid. A miracle for him and not for me. Yo-ho-ho.
I remember I wrote ‘right’, not ‘write’, deliberately and loads of mistakes, but he didn’t mind, nor me sending him up sky-high.
I must have chuckled out loud remembering because the girl on the bus looked up from her reading. I quickly stared out the window at the motorway hard shoulder and she went back to the book, peering at it like it was a treasure map. I glanced sideways to see what was so great about it but all I could see were words that didn’t make sense.
Then the girl put the book down. ‘Thule was sighted, but only from afar,’ she said.
‘Hey?’
‘Sorry, it’s this book,’ she laughed. ‘It’s amazing. This Roman historian, Tacitus, he’s writing about how Agricola – his father-in-law – sailed round Britain. And when he gets to the frozen north he sees land and thinks it’s Thule. But they didn’t have time to reach it, or maybe it was too cold, so they sail by. And you know that Agricola must have regretted it for the rest of his life. It’s like his Holy Grail, Thule.’
‘Fool?’ I said.
‘No. Thule.’ She showed me the word in the book, Thule.
‘It’s a pretty name,’ I said.
‘D’you have one? A place like Thule?’
‘Hey?’
‘A place where you always wish you could go?’
‘Oh, yeah. Sure. I have a place like that. Ireland.’
‘Ireland?’
‘Yeah. ’S where I was born. Haven’t been back in ages.’
‘I hear it’s gorgeous.’
‘Gorgeous is right. Green, just like they say, fields and grass. What’s your place?’
The girl closed her eyes and smiled. ‘Egypt,’ she said. ‘The Valley of the Kings.’
‘The mummies and all?’
‘Yes. But the place I want to go to isn’t the Valley of the Kings now but in nineteen twenty-two. I’m in the dig with Howard Carter and we’re creeping into the tomb of Tutankhamun for the first time since it was sealed and time’s stopped and we see the glint of gold …’ Her eyes stayed shut and she moved her han
d like she was finding her way through a dark passage.
‘That’s some Thule.’
She opened her eyes. ‘You must think I’m mad. That’s what comes of reading dead languages. What’re you reading?’
‘Jane Eyre,’ I said. Mrs Atkins would have been proud. We’d got to the bit where whiney old Jane’s running away on the high moors because of Mr Rochester having a mad wife stashed away in the attic, and how stupid is that? The girl laughed. ‘I meant studying. At Oxford.’
‘Oh.’ I giggled. ‘French.’ It was the only thing that came into my head, which is funny because I hate French even worse than English.
‘French?’
I nodded.
‘You mean Modern Languages?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Don’t you have to do two?’
‘Two?’
‘Two languages.’
‘Oh, yeah, sure thing.’
‘So what’s your other one?’
‘Irish.’
‘Irish?’
‘Yep.’
‘I didn’t know you could study Irish at Oxford.’ Her two brown eyes went wide.
‘Yeah, you can. They just brought it in.’
