When I wake up we’ve stopped. My body feels as if somebody has taken a rusty spanner and tightened up all my knee and elbow and hip and shoulder joints while I was asleep, and that feeling is normal if you’ve spent a long time asleep in a car seat which is nicely padded but still a chair. So I know we’ve come a long way. I also know that we’re not there yet, wherever there is, because where we are is a massive car park like you have at the shops, and there’s no way Dad would plan an adventure in a shopping center.
— Where are we? I ask.
Dad straightens up from leaning forward and stretches his good arm out, and I realize that he was probably asleep, too.
— Service station.
— Can we go in? I need the—
— Sure, mumbles Dad. — Of course.
Yes, yes, yes! Excellent! A service station! Fantastic! All my joint-nuts are suddenly incredibly well adjusted and oiled. I ping my seat belt — good-bye snail — and jump out of the car, then realize I’m wearing my pajamas and jump straight back in. But, amazingly, Dad doesn’t mind about clothes today. He just rummages my coat and boots out of his bag and says, — Stick these on. Let’s get something to eat.
— In the . . . service station.
— Yes.
— Do they have real hamburgers in this one?
— I imagine so.
— And can I, can I, can—
— Yes.
Just yes? Not even a for breakfast? Oh yes, yes, yes! Hamburgers in service stations are excellent. Not only because they are quite nicely flat and come in buns full of gunky ketchup, and not just because you normally get a massive milk shake and some excellently thin chips to go with them, but because they come with an actual toy as well. It’s true. I know because I had one once. The toy was in a little plastic bag at the bottom of the big paper bag everything else was in. I didn’t even ask for it: it was just there, a whole tiny red baddy plastic-figure thing, with a gun.
And that’s not the only reason service stations are excellent. There are lots. Like the fact that they have huge cardboard cups of coffee. I don’t drink the coffee, but Mum and Dad do, and when they do it makes them talkatively pleased and very likely to buy some sweets. In a service station! Which is excellent! Because the sweets there don’t come in normal rolls; they come in massive plastic bags instead. You can eat them when you’ve dried your hands after going to the loo in one of the hundreds of loos they have. Not on a towel. In a brilliant wind-tunnel machine called an Airblade. It’s made by the man who makes all the Hoovers, Son. Dyson. Clever bugger. You can actually feel the air drying your hands off! Then, when your hands are clean and dry, and you’ve had some sweets, you can mess about with the massive computer games they have in the dark bit. Not actually play them, no, because they’re a rip-off, Son, but you can sit on that motorbike and push all the buttons you like and watch the racetrack picture come at you like an excellent endless snake.
But sadly today the service station isn’t as good as normal.
We walk across the parking bit in the rain and go in, with Dad looking at his phone most of the way. He’s still looking at it as we queue up to get a burger for breakfast, and he doesn’t like it when I interrupt to tell him it’s the wrong kind of burger place because it’s not a McDonald’s but Burger King.
— Same difference.
— But—
— Don’t start, Son, or you’ll be eating a muesli bar quicker than you can say Soft Mick.
I don’t start. I say Soft Mick in my head a few times, though, hoping that it will help, but it doesn’t: my burger comes on a tray and I can see just by looking at it that there’s no free toy, or even a milk shake, because he’s bought me orange juice instead: the sight of it makes my sore leg throb.
We sit down at a little table to eat, but Dad hasn’t ordered himself any food, just black coffee in a small paper cup. He winces when he takes the first sip. My burger is actually quite nice, but still, I can tell there won’t be any sweets.
Dad stops squinting at his phone to press it against his ear.
— Cicely, he says.
Then he lurches up and nods at me to stay put and walks over to the corner of the restaurant and stands with the phone in his red hand while the good one squeezes the ridge of his nose and runs down tight into his cheeks. Every now and then he shakes his head. I can’t really hear what he’s saying because his voice is leopard low and there is strange music everywhere. He only growls up loud once when he says, — That’s why I’m asking you to tell her.
There’s lots of mayonnaise up my pajama sleeve. I don’t try to clean it off, though, because I’m keeping my eyes on Dad. When an animal is in a corner it might do anything. Dad finishes speaking to Cicely and stares at the phone for quite a long time, then walks over to the rubbish bin and . . . drops it in.
I open my mouth in the middle of a bite and a triangle of lettuce flaps out onto my napkin plate.
Then Dad’s leaning over me saying, — Are you done?
— Not yet.
— Well get a bloody move on. We need to . . .
He trails off, looks round the restaurant like it’s all very new, then suddenly slumps down in his seat to rub at his bristles and slowly shake his head.
— Sorry, Billy, he says eventually. — Take your time. Enjoy your . . . burger thing.
— It has pickles, I tell him.
— Good.
— Why are we here anyway? I ask.
— Why are we here?
— Yes. Why?
— Well.
— Yes?
— It’s an . . . adventure.
— What sort?
Dad looks up at the menu-board thing above the people who find the food in its hutches. I don’t think the adventure ingredients are written up there, Dad. He looks out of the window at the car park. No help there, either. It’s up his sleeve instead, inside the scraggly rim of his plaster cast.
— A safari. We’re having a safari adventure, he says.
— Great.
— Yes, it’ll be fun.
— But where are the animals?
— They’re hiding. We have to find them. It’ll take skill.
— Why?
— Because they mustn’t see us coming.
— Why?
— Because they’re very shy. They’re not just ordinary lions and zebras and whatnots, you see. They’re shyer. If they see us coming they’ll instantly disappear. Because they’re . . . magical.
— Pretend, you mean.
Dad looks at me for a long time when I say this. The onion rings in my burger probably made the cook cry, but it’s okay now, Dad, nobody is going to hit your thumb with a sled hammer. He wipes his face and shakes his head in a very tiny way, then bigger.
— No, Billy. Not pretend.
— But you said—
— Magic.
— But—
— No buts.
— Really?
— Yes.
Dad squeezes the rim of his little coffee cup. The shapes inside it bend. Our moon is actually an oval, too: it just looks round and full of craters. They’re important: like the cracks everywhere else, they let the light in. How else would nocturnal animals see? I finish my burger. There was a crack in its bun, too, but all it let out was mayonnaise.
— Okay, I say.
— Good. Now, to catch sight of these magic animals we’re going to have to be cunning, says Dad.
— Stealthy in our heads.
— Very.
— Okay.
— And we’re going to have to be patient, too. We may only see their shadows. But trust me, they’re out there. And if we keep quiet when I say, and hide ourselves away from time to time, in the right spots, of course, then we may well catch a glimpse of one or two.
— Are there any here?
— Possibly.
I look around very obviously, as if I’m searching for them, but in fact I’m white-lying: I don’t really expect there to be any magical an
imals in the service station because I’m six, not an idiot. It’s ever so slightly embarrassing pretending to look, but Dad’s doing it, too, so I carry on for a bit until I really do have to stop.
— Dad, I say.
— Yes.
— Why did you throw your phone in the bin?
— What? Oh. Because . . . He squeezes his oval empty coffee cup until the rim pinches shut. — Because it gives off a signal, a radio signal, and the animals, these magic animals, well, they can detect radio signals from miles away. We won’t stand a chance of seeing them if we’re carrying a phone. Yes?
If only he’d talked about bats or dolphins I might have believed him. They use echo location. But magic animals? It’s obvious he’s really talking about Butterfly and Giraffe. We don’t want them interrupting our adventure. But somehow I can’t bring them up. It would be like saying are the flames very hot to a person you have put in some flames. Isn’t it obvious?
Instead I do changing-the-subject by saying, — There’s mayonnaise up my pajama sleeve.
— Right. Well, never mind. Come here.
Did you know that it’s impossible to walk straight across a desert? If you try, your uneven legs will defeat you. Not because you jumped in a hot bath. No: one leg is always longer than the other. This means that without a proper landmark for navigation you’ll go round in longer-leg circles and eventually you’ll die without any water.
It’s better to take a camel because they have four normal legs, a hump, and an excellent sensor direction.
Dad’s phone had navigation on it, too, but he threw it away, and that may be why, after we leave the service station and drive for another neon along motorways that all look the same, we actually end up going around in a circle.
Dad doesn’t spot this mistake, but I do, because of Legoland. They have a sign for it next to the motorway. I see the sign once. Then, a long time later, I see it again! I still don’t ask if we can go. But after we’ve eaten some sandwiches in triangle packets which Dad buys from another service station at lunchtime, and the same brown Legoland sign pops up a third time, I think maybe I should suggest a visit. Dad likes Legos, after all, and he’s obviously not enjoying this driving. I know because normally he puts some music on quite loudly and overtakes most things. Out of our way, we’re coming through! Not today, though: today even the lorries go round us spraying up dirt.
— Shall we go to Legoland then? I ask.
His head jerks up. — What’s that?
— Legoland. Jamie went at half-term. He said it was amazing.
— Really.
— We keep nearly going there today. Why don’t we actually go instead?
— No. Not today, Billy.
— Why?
— We’re . . . on safari, remember?
— Oh, yes.
I look out of the window. The white lines are dotting backward. That line of hedge there is the same color as the road. Yes, everything I can see is incredibly boring.
— But we haven’t actually spotted any magical animals and . . .
— And what?
— And I think the car’s wheels aren’t all the same length because we seem to be going in very slow circles.
A coach blares round us: Dad has slowed down even more. He flicks the indicator and trickles us onto the cold shoulder. We stop and sit in roary silence. Every time a big thing tears past, the car rocks to the side interestingly. Dad leans his arm on the headrest and looks back at me with his dandelion-hole eyes. — You’re right. We’ve been dawdling. It’s time to get a move on.
He starts the car rolling while he’s still looking at me, which feels wrong. Then his face snaps to the front again and we swerve out in between some crossly howling lorries. We don’t stay with them, though. Dad soon has us ripping Cheerios out of the fast lane. He even pushes the CD into the letter-box slot. But it’s some of Mum’s flickety-pickety guitar music and when that starts up he turns on the radio instead. Here is the news. An emergency meeting has happened in a cabinet somewhere, to do with the new clear threat. A cabinet is a very small cupboard. The tiny people in it think, in the interests of national security, that there are no options left. I look at Dad and see that he is crying. It makes me stare immediately out of the window again at some crows flapping nowhere in the wind. What they’re doing about the new clear threat is like onions to Dad. Whichever way you cut them it stings. More news: some soldiers have been killed fighting an earthquake in a financial system, but their team is through to the next round anyway. Sport is not the same thing as war, and sometimes it’s best to bite your tongue, Son. I do, for a long, long time.
Poor Dad.
Give up, crows.
There’s no point flying against the wind or arguing about things you can’t change.
I can’t change which way the car is going. Not back to Legoland, that’s for sure: even though we’ve listened to the same sad news three or four times, that sign hasn’t come back. Here’s one about boats, instead. Big boats: it looks like they eat cars. Jonah was a man in a whale in the Bible, but that story wasn’t very realistic: even though most whales don’t eat meat a person wouldn’t survive very long in a whale’s stomach because of the acid. The sign people are serious about the car-eating boats, though: here’s a picture of one again, and again, right over the top of us. Dad does his seat back up a notch as we come off the fast road. His good-hand fingers are white on the steering wheel. The cars in front of us have slowed down, and over the top of them through that gap there, yes, yes, yes, there’s a slice of brownish . . . sea!
— I can see the sea! I say. It’s what we always say when we see the sea, and normally when we say it Mum gives out mints.
There are no mints today. Dad just squints harder at the queue of traffic ahead and says, — Keep quiet, Billy. Please.
— Are we going to the beach?
— No.
— Why n—
— Billy, he growls. — Shhh.
The sea slice disappears as we rumble forward. Then all the car lights go red again. Dragons’ eyes. There’s a big barrier thing ahead, beneath a bridge you drive through past a glass box with a person in it. Even though we’re quite a few cars back, I can see that the lady leaning out is wearing white gloves. Perhaps she’s cold. The car in front opens up a wider gap and Dad’s good hand fiddles something out of his shirt pocket: two small booklets. They’re a darker red than his plaster cast, and each has a golden crown on the front. He turns to a page in one of them but I can’t make out what’s on it because he’s holding it too far away. I can see that the car in front has gone farther off, though. Pay attention, Dad, don’t dawdle, keep up with everyone else, lope! But he’s still staring at the little book, and when he holds it like that the light bounces off a little picture . . . of me!
Not me now. Me when I was vertically four and reasonably useless. Back then we went to Spain which is across the sea near America and before we even got there Dad forgot my booklet and we had to drive back incredibly quickly for it with Dad chewing his lip and Mum half wincing and half smiling and eventually bursting out laughing, saying — Imagine the stick if it had been me!
I liked Spain. They had mosquitoes in the tents there, and I was allowed to peel some dead skin off Dad’s shoulder while he drank beer and Mum put on a yellow dress. Dad said she was stunning. You stun fish to kill them and fishy rice is called paella.
But we’re not going to Spain today. For a minute I think it’s a possibility because of the little me-picture book which is making Dad bite his lip all over again, but the gap between our car and the one in front is just too large. It makes the big white van behind us beep. Dad flinches. Even though the radio is on I can hear him panting. Dogs do it to cool themselves down with their tongue but it’s actually immediately quite cold in our car because Dad has undone his window and is waving the van past. Once it’s gone Dad reverses, turns the car round out of the queue, and drives back along the road out under the big car-eating boat sign.
> He doesn’t go far, though, not back onto the motorway, just into town, very jerky. He seems to have un-learned how to drive the car properly, so he sensibly steers quite sharply into a multistory car park. We’re not on bicycles, that’s the problem, because once you’ve mastered riding a bike, Son, you never forget. Round and round the pillars we squeal, searching in vain for the storyteller. He’s not here, but there are loads of spaces. Dad slams the car into one of them and tells me to jump out.
I’m still in my pajamas. Perhaps I’ll be allowed to stay in them all day: it’s nearly dark again, after all. Dad is scooping all our stuff into his rucksack, putting me in my coat, and slipping my wellies onto my feet gently, because of my leg, muttering all the time about being a pointless fucking idiot. Suddenly he lurches away to the front of the car, leans on the bonnet, and throws up. Sick spatters the wheel quite loudly and for a fairly long time. I don’t know what to do at first, but then I remember Mum leaning over the yellow bucket with me, stroking the back of my neck the last time I threw up, so I go sideways like a crab to Dad and do the same to him. It’s hard to reach. At least I’m wearing wellies. After a while the sick dribbles out of him in smaller doses. Finally he finishes, turns round, and grabs me to his chest. It smells nicely of normal him in bed, with only a bit of yellowness added.
— Sorry, Billy, he growls, shaking his head.
— You won’t be allowed to go to school for two whole days now, I tell him. — It’s the rule.
He grins at me unhappily. — No rules like that on safari. We’ll just soldier on.
What I Did Page 23
