by Siobhan Dowd
‘That’s great. I mean, really great. Did you have any Irish to begin with?’
‘Yeah. Like I said, I was born there. And my mam’s Irish.’
‘Does she speak it?’
‘Oh, yeah.’ Like she spoke Russian.
‘Give me a sample – go on, I’d love to hear some.’
The coach took a turn and we were off the motorway. The air conditioning had gone off and voices and laughter were everywhere. My ears were hot.
‘In uch san, doonan micall noondee,’ I said.
‘Fab. What does that mean?’
‘It means, “When the hell will we ever get there?”’
The girl laughed. ‘Too right. I’m Chloe, by the way.’
I grinned. ‘I’m Solace.’
‘Solace?’
I nodded.
‘Great name. But that’s not Irish, is it?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It was my father’s idea.’
‘Your father?’
‘Yeah. He’s English. Not like my mam. He’s a writer, see.’
‘Wow. My father’s just a CEO. I’d much rather he was a writer.’
CEO. What was that? Some sort of medal from the queen?
‘So, what’s his name, so I can look out for him?’ Chloe asked.
‘Todd Fish,’ I said.
‘Fish? Is that your other name then?’
God. Solace Fish? I don’t think so. ‘Oh no,’ I breezed. ‘That’s just his pretend name. The name he puts on the cover.’
‘You mean his nom de plume?’
‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘ ’S more like – his writing name.’
Maybe it was that I’d forgotten to do the posh voice, but Chloe gave me a strange look. ‘Never knew there was a difference between …’ She paused and shrugged. ‘But hey. You’re the French scholar.’
My cheeks were on fire. Chloe went back to her book of Holy Grails and Thules. The bus hit a roundabout and there was a sign saying OXFORD, along with a whole load of places I’d never heard of.
We dropped speed. People shuffled, stirred, yattered. We were coming into town. Oxford, here we come, I thought. The bus went down this drab street like it was anywhere place in anywhere town. But then we went round another roundabout and over a bridge and Oxford punched me in the eye. There was a big yellow tower, yellow walls and green leaves and young people walking like they owned the world, mogits before they were old. A couple going arm in arm were all in black and white and had gowns on with bat-wing sleeves.
‘My boyfriend goes there,’ Chloe suddenly said in my ear, jutting her head at some more yellow stone, a big pile. As the bus passed, I glimpsed a flat green lawn through the archway. In the middle a thin black statue with one arm in the air was running through the prettiest fountain I ever saw. I remembered the times Trim sprayed water on Grace and me in the back garden at Templeton House while we ran round in our bikinis. He’d throttle the neck of the hose and the water would fizz everywhere.
‘Neat,’ I said, smiling.
‘Next year he’ll be gone.’
‘Gone?’
‘Yeah. He’s got a job with the World Bank. In Lagos.’
I never knew there was such a thing as a World Bank. I never saw a branch of it anywhere. And I didn’t know where Lagos was either. ‘Cool,’ I said.
Chloe shrugged, closed her book and got her bag out. The bus turned and sped down some streets with concrete bollards and buildings with no windows, then squeezed into a square.
‘Gloucester Green,’ the driver called. He pulled into a bay and turned the engine off. Everyone was standing, grabbing, pushing to get off.
Chloe turned to me, almost smiling. ‘Hey, Solace. See you around.’ She shuffled out the bus.
‘Bye,’ I called. I watched her vanish round a corner. Then I grabbed the lizard, got off and cruised across the square. I was Solace of the road. I had a lorry-load of friends. I was so delirious I nearly got run over by a bus pulling out.
Oxford, here I come.
Fourteen
The Make-over
I coasted along a street of shops and nearly got mown down by a bicycle. There were bikes everywhere. I felt queasy just looking. It kills me how people ride them. Trim says it’s easy when you get the knack but I’ve never tried. To me it looks like a bad circus act.
My mobile beeped. A message. DONT FORGET, HOME LATE, F. Fiona was so out of it, she didn’t know to say L8.
Then I passed this shop full of wild dresses. I hadn’t worn a dress in so long I couldn’t remember. I stuck to jeans and sporty tops on account of being a rebel skater. I wasn’t like Grace with her designer labels. Pink, flowery flounces, tights, skirts and me didn’t go. But I stopped and looked in the window. I was checking the wig, mostly. But I couldn’t help seeing the models in these skimpy dresses with bright colours: orange and ice-blue with chocolate-brown blobs.
The designer had taken one too many Es.
They were Solace-style, to the last stitch.
I only had four pounds left. But I could always steal. I’d done shoplifting once or twice in the small sweetshop the Asians ran near Templeton House. I’d lifted the odd chocolate bar or packet of gums, but I’d never gone for clothes. Most places have magnetic tags on everything that you can’t get off without a special machine. You go through the door and an alarm goes off. You have to lift the clothes over or under the electronic beam or wrap them up in foil, according to Trim. He makes out he does it all the time. Even if the alarm starts up, he says, you scoot up the street quick, and after a block the security guards give up chasing. But I don’t know if he’s making it up, on account of most of what Trim says isn’t true. Trim says he was born on an aeroplane and how likely is that? So I’d never lifted clothes.
On the windows of this shop someone had sprayed CLOSING DOWN. I looked over the door. The place was called Swish. I drifted inside and headed for a rack at the back. A shop girl talked on the phone like it was glued to her skull. ‘Yeah, too right. I’d gone clubbing and he didn’t show up on time … Yeah. When they let you in you can’t go out again – they don’t stamp you nor nothing at the Clone Zone … Nah. So. Shan, I was stuck … What? … Yeah. We’re history …’
I picked out a dress my size. It was wild – cream with mint-green and rose cloud shapes chasing each other all over, sleeveless with thin straps so your bra would show like you’re a supermodel. There was no magnetic tag. I looked at the label. Eighteen pounds reduced from thirty-five.
It was off the hanger and in my lizard-skin bag, easy goes.
‘… He’s a right scumbag and if he wants me back he’s gonna have to … Yeah, the works – know what I mean? … Chuck him over? Too bloody …’
I was out of there and up the street, laughing like a chimpanzee. I still had money in my pocket, I had a new dress that had cost me nothing and Swish was down eighteen pounds. All because a girl’s boyfriend didn’t show.
Next thing I knew, I was outside a big department store. I went in and up the escalators to put the dress on in the toilets. I had to wriggle to get the zip up at the back. The place stank and the lights made you look like the undead. Miko used to say that guilt follows you around like a bad smell, but I didn’t smell guilt in there, just old-lady perfume. And when I looked in the mirror I didn’t look half bad. Sorry, Solace didn’t look half bad. The colours went with the blonde wig and you could see her slim-slam hips. I folded the jeans and top into the lizard. You’re dead, Holly Hogan, I said to the mirror. They can look for Holly Hogan up and down the country and they won’t find her because she doesn’t exist any more. You can call me Solace from now on, I said to my reflection.
But the dress didn’t look right with trainers and socks. So I got this crazy see-through lift down to the ground floor again. I stood with my nose to where the doors open, and when it started my stomach nearly got left behind, like it used to in the sky-house lifts, and I couldn’t breathe. I swear I could feel Mam gripping my shoulder. Jeez, Holl. In the sky house we were
on the top floor, number twelve. There were two lifts, one to the even floors and one to the odd. So when the even was busy you got the odd one to floor eleven and walked the last flight. And the lifts were metal and stank of pee and Mam hated them. I’d rather be in my own coffin than this contraption, Holl, she’d say.
I nearly fell out when the see-through lift landed with a jerk, I was that glad to be back on solid ground. I went out and prowled around the Oxford streets some more and found a charity shop.
Grace says people who shop in charity shops are goons and look like tents. Which would make Fiona a big top, because she can’t pass a charity shop without going in. Grace only likes things brand new. But I go in charity places when no one’s looking and sometimes I buy a two-quid T-shirt. I didn’t mean to steal this time. Not from a charity shop. Even care-babes have standards. But I went in and found black sandals my size. The heels were big chunks, three inches. And they were a fiver. One quid more than I had. I looked about. These two old mogits who ran the place were nattering on about the tennis soon starting up. Hwim-ball-dorn-lorn-tinnis, they said. So I ambled over to the door with the sandals in my hand like I was checking out the weather. I stood by a book-stand, pretending to read the titles. I switched the sandals from one hand to the other, so they couldn’t see them from the counter. Then I drifted out the door.
‘Bye,’ one of the mogit ladies called.
I waved with my free hand and breezed down the street, swinging the sandals by their straps.
But now the bad smell Miko said about was following me round big time on account of having stolen from charity. So I crossed fast through these big yellow buildings and found a lawn by a church and it had a stone bench. I sat down and changed my shoes. I stood up and nearly fell over. I took a few steps, taller than I’d ever been before. Maybe one day I’d grow some more inches and with the heels on I’d be able to look Miko straight in the eye. Then I remembered he’d gone for good, over the river. I sat back on the bench. I still had my money and I was starving. We’d just read in class how Jane Eyre’s too proud to beg and eats cold porridge out of a pig’s trough. How sad is that. I’d enough for a Big Mac and some, and after I’d eaten that I’d find a bus. I’d get out of town, and I’d be heading west in my fancy new clothes.
I bought my burger and fries and ate them on a different bench, this weirdo one on the main street – you were half sitting, half leaning on it. Some freak had come up with the design just to be different. Definitely too many Es. It made your back ache.
Then the sky clouded over and it started spitting. The last fry was gone and I was still hungry and I was being jostled by people rushing past, putting up umbrellas.
Oh, God. I had nowhere to go. I had no idea where the A40 was. And I only had two quid and some change left. It wasn’t even enough to buy an umbrella.
This town with the bikes and bat-wings was doing me in.
Everyone rushed past without seeing me.
The next thing I could feel a dribble of water on my mouth and I knew it wasn’t rain because it tasted salty. Get a grip, I told myself. I got off the freako bench and staggered up the street in the heels. I thought of going back to that church place because I reckoned you could at least go and sit inside and they wouldn’t charge you. But I must have turned wrong because I kept walking and couldn’t find it. There was just this long road with huge trees. The drizzle got harder. Then a big building with frilly windows loomed up, set back from the road across a lawn. A notice said it was a museum and free.
Museums and me don’t go. All that junk in glass cases gives me a headache, big time. But the rain was hammering down now, and the wig would be ruined if I didn’t shelter. So I stumbled over and went inside.
Fifteen
The Place of Dead Things
A heavy wooden door opened into a big bright hall with white light and dinosaurs. Way overhead there was a pointed roof of metal and glass. It was hot and hushed. School kids scooted in the aisles.
I groaned. There were dead things in cases everywhere. Owls. An ostrich. A fox. Somebody had killed and stuffed them and it’s mean. They should let dead things rot in the ground like they’re supposed to. An otter with big dark eyes pattered across a pretend backdrop of undergrowth and water, like he was still alive. I imagined him rootling round, snuffing out his grub and taking a dip, and then somebody’d come up and coshed him on the head like they do seals in the Arctic. It’s cruel.
I stopped in front of some dead old dinosaur. It was massive and had a thumb spike to kill its enemies. What would the world be like, I thought, if humans had lethal thumb spikes like that? Probably everyone would kill off everyone else and the last person would die of old age with nobody to have kids with. Then maybe the otters and seals would scamper to their heart’s content and not get coshed and the world would be a better place.
Next I saw a booth with a curtain for a door. FLUORESCENT MINERALS, the sign said. Behind the curtain it was dark, with a load of rocks, and you pressed buttons to make a light come on. The rocks were dead, like everything else in the museum, but they were pretty as jewels, and jewels are things I love. Milk-white. Mauve. Silver. And amber, like my mam’s ring. I thought how you’d dig them out of the ground and make million-dollar pendants out of them and walk around wowing the world, especially if you were Gorgeous Grace. I could have stared at those rocks for hours, only just after I went in, a bunch of kids shoved in behind me. They didn’t bother with the rocks, though, they just kept ducking in and out, playing with the lights. All except this one serious-looking boy with round glasses. He came up as high as my elbow and had his nose glued to the glass case, reading. The other kids soon got bored and vanished, but he stayed put. We peered at the rocks together.
‘They’re cool, these rocks,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘They look like they’re from outer space,’ he said. He was eight maybe, and already he had the same accent as Chloe and those mogits at the charity shop.
‘Oh yeah?’ I said. ‘Says here, this one’s from Iceland.’
‘Maybe it came down on a meteorite.’
‘Never.’
‘Yes.’ He turned his specs to me and his eyes were magnified through the glass. ‘We’re all from outer space originally,’ he went. ‘Every last atom inside us. We came out of a Big Bang.’
I grinned. ‘Too right we did.’
‘There’s no such thing as aliens,’ he said. ‘Because, you see, we’re all alien.’ He sounded like he was lecturing a room of students with his posh, almost grown-up voice.
‘If we’re all alien, then there is such a thing as aliens,’ I said.
His chin cocked like his thoughts were too big for his brain. ‘Either everything’s alien or nothing’s alien,’ he said. ‘And if everything’s alien then there’s nothing for it to be alien against.’
‘Cor.’ In ten years he’d be bat-winging across Oxford, winning genius prizes by the truck-load. ‘Say, I get you,’ I said. ‘That’s wows-ville.’ Wows-ville is Trim’s word for when something’s A-1.
The boy looked up and gave me a big smile. ‘Do you really think so?’ he said.
Then Junior Einstein went all shy on me again, like he’d just remembered he wasn’t meant to talk to strangers, and he peered through the glass like his life depended on it. So I left him to it and went out of the cubicle, half grinning, half thinking that was one sweet boy, only he needed serious rescuing from mogitdom.
The daylight hurt my eyes. I walked past an elephant skeleton to another doorway. There was this whole other part behind, dark and crammed in with things. I went round half floating, like I do at school. You look but don’t look. You switch off your thoughts and stare and think of nothing, just airwaves and bubbles. It gets right up the pit-miseries’ noses. But however hard I tried, I couldn’t help seeing into the cases – the spiky writing on the labels and things that looked like they belonged in the dump. One cabinet had old rope in it, no kidding. A museum where they display rope is sad.<
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There were totem poles, masks and mummy cases. And under the displays, the cabinets had drawers, and some you could open. I found a case with magic stuff in it, only it all looked battered and mouldering. I opened a drawer and inside was a brown beeswax model of a naked man with pins sticking out of his eyes. Yikes. Voodoo. How sick is that. I thought I’d throw up. I wouldn’t do that to my worst enemy. Not even the Kavanagh kid that tore up Mam’s picture. Nobody. I slammed the drawer shut, fast.
Then I came face to face with the mask. It had big empty eyes and thin cheeks. Around the edge it had curly black pretend hair, all frizzled up like some crazed doll. It was the spitting image of Denny-boy. I staggered back the way I’d come, through all the cabinets. I was dizzy, with dots fizzing round me like the air was made of lemonade. White streaks flashed across my eyelids.
Throbbing.
People.
Echoes.
Skulls.
I found a sign for the ladies and locked myself in. I sat down and took the wig off. I doubled over with a bad belly. I pressed my knuckles up to my eyes but all I could see was the mask face with the crazy doll-hair. It had come alive and turned into Denny-boy, the nightmare man, coming and going in the sky house, spelling trouble in both directions.
And I remembered him like it was yesterday. How his head forever knocked the paper-globe lampshade overhead. How he’d have his cut-off denim shorts on and a thick tartan shirt, like it was summer from the waist down and winter above. His hair was like a thousand corkscrews, coal-black, and his eyes bright ink-blue. He’d stand, not sit, and horse his way through a cereal bowl with the Krispies and Shreddies mixed up, shovelling them down like there was a gun to his head. Then he’d line up two thin white papers on the table and put the inside of a cigarette along it like a snake. Maybe he’d catch me looking at him and wink. ‘Hey there, Holl,’ he’d go. ‘What are you today? Doll or troll?’ I’d stare. But coming up behind me, from her bedroom, I could hear Mam’s voice, laughing. ‘Definitely troll today, Denny. No doll anywhere. Scram, Holl. Chop-chop. Tell Colette’s mam downstairs to take you to school. I’m a wrecked woman.’
