by Siobhan Dowd
‘Sounds great. Do you dance too?’
‘Nah.’
‘Shame. You’ve got the figure for it.’
‘D’you really think so?’
‘Yeah. A dancer if ever I saw one. But you’d best get home, Solace. It’s late.’
I said goodbye, closed the door and smiled. You’ve got the figure for it. I felt my slim-slam hips and thought of Grace saying I should lose ten pounds and how my neck was too thick, not like hers, which looked like somebody’d stretched it. Not to mention my miserable hair.
Sian drove off, waving. Her little car bucked as it drove down the street. I waved back. So long, Sian. It was like she heard, the way she hooted a reply.
The simplest lift of all time. I hadn’t even had to hitch, and what can be safer than a ride with a nurse, even one that might run you over with her drugs trolley?
Thirty-seven
Carmarthen
Sian’s car vanished and I pictured Mam in a green garden, neck and legs long, a shirt flapping on the washing line and her dancing with it like it was a partner.
‘Mind out the way,’ a bloke said, knocking into me as he hurried by. I looked at where I was. A dump-hole was right. I was in a dismal square with bus stops and cracked glass and stray people wandering around like the undead. I walked along, but Mam wouldn’t leave my head. Her eyes were sad and she was stripping –not her clothes, just the amber ring. She was moving it up and down her finger, again and again, then holding it out to me.
I found a place to buy chips and curry sauce and bolted them down. It was Phil’s money I used, or most of it. The change I stuffed in my skater-top pocket. I felt bad. Phil wasn’t your usual truck driver, he was a vegan in whom God had taken up residence. But I’d have starved otherwise.
I got a drink from a dirty tap in the public toilet and changed back into the heels. Bad move. I staggered down a hill with damp paving stones and nearly went flying. So I sat down on a wall near a car park and put the trainers on again. Was I sick of those high heels. Maybe it was how I’d stolen them from charity made them bite back. I kicked them away into the gutter.
The first streetlamp came on and made me look up. That’s when I saw the police station, right opposite.
Bet there’s a police report out now, with a full description.
I wondered if maybe going in there would be better than sitting on that wall in that wind in the dark in Carmarthen, with the undead wandering around.
Then I thought I needed a police cell like I needed a broken jaw.
No one was looking. I took out the wig and put it on so I could go back to being brave, unstoppable Solace. I gave it a good brush down and stroked the fringe tidy and walked back the way I’d come.
Then I found another phone box. I went in and arranged the lizard on the shelf and picked the receiver up and put it to my ear while people chased by, and I opened and shut my mouth like I was having an all-time hilarious phone-festival with my best mate. I talked and laughed up a storm even though there was nobody on the other end.
First I yattered away to Miko, then Grace, then Trim. Then Karuna. I even said ‘Hi’ to mad Max the bell-ringer. Then I thought I’d say a quick hello to Fiona.
‘Hi there, Fee.’
Holly – is that you? (Fiona, frantic.)
‘Yeah. Hi ’n’ all. Been a while.’
Holly! Where’ve you been? We’ve been out of our minds.
‘Dunno. Just cruising, having a ball. You know what it’s like.’
Holly. Come on home. Please, Holly. We’re missing you. Ray and me. Missing you, missing …
Yeah, in my dreams. I stared at the receiver. By now Fiona and Ray would have given up on me. Ray would have got his job up north and they’d be packing their bags. I shivered. I stroked the smooth fake skin of the lizard on the phone shelf and I remembered Fiona buying it that time in the market, down Tooting Broadway. It wasn’t from Harrods, like I told Sian, and it wasn’t from Mam. It was a gift from Fiona. I’d been trailing behind her as she pushed through the crowds on Tooting Broadway, shopping, and I’d stopped by the handbag stall, my favourite. I was doting on the bags shaped like animals – kangaroos, and cats, even a curled snake – and the ones with bright flowers sewn on and a lime-green one that made my hands itch. Fiona turned round and saw me looking. She smiled. She walked back towards me. The sun was on her face. She popped her sunglasses up onto her head.
‘You always stop here, Holly,’ she said. ‘Every time.’
‘Yeah.’
‘You like that one?’
‘Yeah.’ I moved my hand from the lime-green to feel a bag that was hairy like a coconut. ‘Mam used to say you could tell a well-dressed lady by the bag on her arm,’ I said.
‘Really?’ Fiona looked over her shoulder at the battered black backpack she used for shopping. ‘That counts me out.’
Next I stroked a bag made from fake tiger skin.
‘Maybe you prefer that one?’ Fiona said.
It reminded me of how our sofa looked in the sky house and I nearly said yes. Then I remembered how Denny-boy used to loll on it, his lip plopping in his sleep.
‘Nah. I like that one best.’ I pointed up to where the lizard was hanging, dangling and catching the light. I’d had my eye on it all along. It was a class act: silver-green with back straps and three zips with leather pulls like forked tongues and the skin crinkled and cracked like a real lizard.
Fiona grinned. ‘It’s wild,’ she said. ‘Original.’
She reached and unhooked it and the stall lady said it was nine pounds, but we could have it for eight.
I knew Grace would have killed for that bag on account of she adored reptiles of all kinds and dreamed of having a pet snake draped round her neck. I got out my purse and looked to see how much I had, but Fiona put her hand over mine.
‘Holly,’ she said. ‘My treat.’
‘But my birthday’s ages away.’
‘We’ll call it an un-birthday present then.’ She handed over the money and the stall lady passed the bag to me and I took it and hitched it on my shoulder and put my purse inside it safe. The lizard slid into place like it belonged.
‘It looks great,’ Fiona said. ‘Striking.’
It felt like Christmas on that busy street with the teeming pavements. I grabbed the strap and did up a zip. ‘Ta, Fee,’ I said. ‘Ta a load.’ Fee was what Ray called her. I’d never called her that before, it just came out.
Fiona’s lips went in between her teeth and she looked away. Her hand skirted my arm, then dropped to her side. She smiled and stepped back into the passing crowd. ‘Let’s get on with the shopping, Holl,’ she said. I walked behind her, stroking the lizard and thinking of all the different compartments and what I could put in them. I forgot to be angry that Fiona’d called me Holl. I was walking on air all down Tooting Broadway.
The phone receiver sat in my hand with no Fiona at the end of it. I slammed it down. The lizard was sprawled on the shelf, looking tired. The zip fasteners had frayed a little and the sheen had been dampened down some in the rain. Outside all the streetlamps had come on, and the crowds rushed past like time had speeded up. Fiona was going, going, gone. It wasn’t Tooting out there, but Carmarthen, Wales’s oldest town.
Thirty-eight
The Station Platform
I nearly went back to the police station then. I imagined myself going in and saying to the sergeant on the desk how I was a runaway and I had chaotic high support needs and could they take me in please and send me home. Only there’d be a case conference and everyone would say how I’d broken my promise not to run away again and I’d get twenty-eight days renewable, like Trim, and I’d rather have died.
It’s for your own good, Holly. Everyone said that except Miko, who always used to be on my side, whatever. Miko raved on about how he was wild in his youth, worse than us lot. Once he spent a night in jail for being drunk. When the police made him take everything out of his pockets, he turned out twelve conkers that he’d colle
cted after drinking a bottle of whisky. He said how he’d given up the booze five years ago just before his liver packed up, but he still had to go to meetings and promise to stay sober.
To get out of the secure unit I’d had to make promises too. Not to run away. Not to go hooking on the streets. I was so desperate to get out I’d have sworn to become a nun. I had to make my words real by writing them down. Then they let me out. And now, because I’d broken that promise, I could make ten promises and they’d never believe me again. I was finished.
I walked on into the crowd and past the pubs and the empty shops and under a clock with a face lit up cheerful. I wanted to smash it like I’d wanted to smash the windows on Mercutia Road the day I left. I saw a bottle in the gutter and picked it up.
Then the minute hand clicked to eleven o’clock. The clock whirred and started chiming. Dong-dong. Less loud than Big Ben, louder than Fiona and Ray’s tick-tock-no-luck carriage clock. I smashed the bottle on the kerb instead and kicked the shards onto the road.
Just what are you so angry about, Holly? It was Miko’s voice, so loud in my thoughts I nearly jumped.
Dunno, Miko, I replied in my head. Different stuff.
If you ask me, it’s the same old thing, over and over, Holly, the same old story …
I went on down dark streets, walking in circles, and my anger turned scared and sad.
’S dark, I thought.
’S cold.
Gotta find somewhere to hole up.
Homeless people wrap themselves up in cardboard and curl up under bridges and pee against the walls like dogs. I didn’t fancy it.
I thought of better places. I made a list in my head.
Churches
Cinemas
Sheds
Houses where the curtains aren’t drawn, showing how the owners are on holiday
Churches get locked up at night, like the one I’d tried earlier. Cinemas chuck you out after the last show. Sheds are good but you have to break into them. Same goes for houses where the people are gone. Knowing my luck, I’d get caught breaking in by the people returning right at the wrong time.
Then I turned a corner and saw a sign for the train station.
The train station. That’s it.
Miko had told me about sleeping rough in stations when he was on the road and cash-free, as he put it. He said how he’d snuggled into his sleeping bag on the concourse along with the homeless and raving weirdos, and how the trains left and arrived in the night and a woman kept calling out the stops, and nobody hassled him. I washed and brushed up the next morning in the gents, Holly. I pretended it was the Ritz.
I smiled, thinking of Miko shaving his chin in the grimy mirror, acting like he was out of the top drawer. I followed the sign and found the station. The ticket office was shut and nobody was around. You could just walk through to the platforms. I stood looking at the train timetables like a serious traveller planning my next move. That’s how I found out about the late-night train. What I saw was:
CARMARTHEN 00.47
FISHGUARD HARBOUR 01.40
For a minute I thought it was a midday train. Then I saw how it had to mean 47 minutes after midnight. Then I thought it must just be a Saturday or Sunday train. Then I thought maybe it was an old timetable and no train would really come at a time like that when I was the only one on the platform and there was no guard to check my ticket. Then I thought I didn’t know what platform it would stop at. And 00.47 was ages away.
But inside my skin, I’d livened up something serious. That train is your fate, I told myself. Fishguard is your birthday present.
I crossed over and walked up along the other platform, where I’d spotted an electronic sign. The amber message said the next train was the 00.47 to Fishguard Harbour. Told you. A train with your name on it. I sat on a cold bench and did my lips. I had one hour and thirty-nine minutes to wait. I put Storm Alert on and hugged myself and stamped my feet while Drew sang in my ear: ‘Somebody’s Working Late’. I’d never caught on to this track before, but now I did. I played it three times over. Then I thought of Ray, in his office, working late into the night, north of the river. He was hunched over his desk with the reading lamp on and Fiona was chafing at home, waiting. I skipped to the next track.
The cold got into my bones. I took out the earphones. My nose was dripping. Part of me was on that bench, and part of me was back down the road I came. I had to keep pinching myself so I didn’t drop off the seat and then I’d look down the dark track and think, I’m gonna be here for ev-er. I’m gonna be here for ev-er. For ev-er.
I could get down and lie on that track on those things they call sleepers, I thought. And I could sleep on the sleepers. Sleeping slipping on the sleepers sleeeeeep-slipslip—
I started in a fright and pinched myself. I’d been looking down on the track, almost falling onto it. The train would’ve come and gone over me and I’d have been scrambled eggs, only I wouldn’t have known it. I wouldn’t have known anything ever again.
I kept pacing the platform.
Then a rumble came in the distance. At first I thought it was thunder. Then I thought of the old trains in movies, how steam rises around the wheels. I listened. The noise stopped and I thought I’d imagined it.
No. There it is again.
A light went from red to green. Electricity hissed down the rails. I peered into the dark and saw lozenges of light coming round a bend, getting closer.
It won’t stop, I thought.
A carriage whizzed past. It was first class, with fancy lamps and curtains and a woman reading. It didn’t look like stopping. Then the brakes screeched. Another carriage passed, then another. The train slowed and stopped with a jerk and a shiver.
I heard a door slam somewhere up the front but I didn’t see anyone. I was down the other end, facing right up to a big metal door handle, as if it had stopped there especially for me, my birthday present. I pressed it down. The heavy door opened.
Inside it was dim and damp. Warm air curled round me, pulling me in. I stepped up and closed the door behind me. A second later, the train glided and the station platform fell away.
Thirty-nine
On the Dream Train
I huddled in the corridor, thinking, If I get caught, that’s it. The time I’d run away on a train before, I’d only got as far as East Croydon, then I’d had to turn myself in because the raving drunk men on the train scared me. Drunken men are prone to lurching around the corridors of trains, it’s a fact. But on this train there was nobody. It was just the engine and the hiss of the wheels and the dark shadows running over the floor and walls and ceiling. Maybe I was the only person on the train. Maybe there wasn’t a driver, even. Me and the dream train, hurtling off the face of the earth.
Then a man with a baseball cap approached. I froze. You could tell he was Irish, straight off. I remembered from long ago, those early years in Ireland, how the faces on the street were, men lounging on the bridge, women pushing buggies. It felt far off, but the faces were like his and it was home. The man nodded as he walked towards me. His eyes were red. He was no raving drunk, just a fellow needing sleep, same as I did. He broke the spell.
‘Is it free?’ he said.
I thought he meant the train ride. ‘Free?’ ‘The toilet?’ His accent! Fray. Tye-lit. He pointed and I saw I was standing by a toilet door that said VACANT.
I smiled. ‘Yeah. Sure.’
I moved aside and he went in. I went along the way he’d come and stepped over the wonky bit between the carriages. The doors slid apart and I was in a long compartment. There were people scattered, not many. Two murmuring. One snoring. Empty coffee cups. A woman had her arm around a small boy whose head was tucked in her armpit, and even though he was only six or so, he was as Irish as the man I’d just seen. He was sleeping with his mouth open and he had freckles on his nose. His mam was reading and yawning and she shifted, careful so he wouldn’t wake. She blew on his hair so the fringe lifted and she smiled, like he was her own priva
te treasure. She didn’t see me walk by. She was in a whole other world.
It was like I didn’t exist the way nobody looked at me.
Trim used to say how joy-riding the trains is easy-ville. You dodge the ticket man by moving around, and if you get nervous you lock yourself in the bog. Trim said how he’d been all over England, up to Newcastle where his younger brother was in a foster home, and down to Gravesend where his real dad was and where it’s even worse than it sounds, he said. He’d never paid a penny. First you get through the ticket barrier by saying you’ve been separated from your mum and you pretend to panic. Then you get on the train and do the dodging. Then you get off and say your mum’s already gone through the barrier with all the tickets, and you point to a woman who’s walking away with a brood of kids. They always believe you, according to Trim. But then you can’t trust Trim, Mr I-Was-Born-on-an-Aeroplane.
I kept walking, nervous, expecting the ticket man to pounce.
Up the next corridor I saw a man lurking who looked like a guard maybe, so I dashed back the way I’d come. Somebody had opened the window a crack and it was cold. I shivered. Then I saw that the toilet said VACANT again so I locked myself in.
I breathed. I looked in the mirror. Apart from my lipstick mirror, I’d not seen myself in ages.
Do you know what I saw?
It was enough to make a willow weep, big time.
The glamour girl had gone. I looked more like a crackhead who’d just been dragged backwards through a hedge. I was all blotchy cheeks, smudges, hair mish-mashed clumps of blonde and brown and mud stains on my collar. My eyes and nose were red and itching and I’d bitten my lips so much they were bleeding. My hand shook as I got the brush out. I took the wig off. First I brushed my own hair, then I cupped the wig over my fist and brushed it. I washed my face. I took out my toothbrush but realized I had no toothpaste. I tried to wipe my collar, only the mud smudged. Then I sat on the toilet seat and cried. The tears made my eyes worse, but I couldn’t stop.
