Twenty Questions for Gloria

by Martyn Bedford

“What if we pack up the tent and some gear and food, and just take off somewhere? To hell with permission. To hell with school tomorrow.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  Uman let the silence answer for him. We were side by side on our backs, gazing at the roof of the tent, its green-and-brown swirls diluted by the first flush of daylight. I rolled toward him, propped up on one elbow to study his expression.

  “Are you serious?”

  He just did his crooked-grin thing.

  “Uman.”

  “Ms. Inexcelsis, I am entirely serious to the point of utter seriousness.”

  I laughed. “But that’s crazy—we can’t just take off like that.”

  “What’s stopping us?”

  —

  “It was Uman’s idea, then?” DI Ryan says. “You suggested sleeping in the tent again, but he was the one who—”

  “No, it was both of us.”

  “But you just told us—”

  “That’s the thing—the moment he said it, I knew it was what I wanted as well.”

  “He planted the idea in your mind, though? Of actually doing it.”

  I shake my head. “The idea was already there. He just showed it to me.”

  Mum does one of her tuts.

  “Seriously, Mum, it was like the words were in my thoughts and Uman was just speaking them out loud for me. If it had been up to me, we’d have set off straightaway. It was about eight a.m., I don’t know—but once he’d said it, I was ready to go right there and then.”

  “Why didn’t you?” DI Ryan asks.

  “Because—”

  “Unthinking spontaneity” was the behavior of an amoeba, according to Uman. We had to prepare, make a list of what we’d need. I’d have to sneak home and get my sleeping bag and rucksack, for a start. He was going through all the other things we’d have to do when I cut in.

  “You’re saying we have to prepare to be spontaneous?”

  “We do this properly, Gloria. We do it with panache and a certain degree of élan.”

  “But where are we going to buy élan on a Sunday?”

  “And, of course, we do it with humor.” Uman frowned. “That was humor, wasn’t it?”

  We had a tickle fight just then. But there’s no need for DI Ryan and Mum to know about it. Or that I won.

  When we were done wrestling around the tent—and Uman had finished the coughing fit it brought on—we fixed some breakfast from leftover crackers and Nutella and drew up a list. Several lists: camping gear, clothes, bedding, toiletries, food, and other stuff. We helped ourselves to most of what we needed from his grandmother’s house, or from mine. Sneaking in and out of my place was easy. Mum was out (on her bike, no doubt), and Dad shouted “hi” and “bye” from the dining room (the coffee-and-Sunday-papers ritual, no doubt) without even showing his face to see what I was doing or who I was with, or to ask how I was or where I was going.

  Once we’d run out of free supplies, we hit an ATM to pay for the rest. Both savings accounts, I stress—not just mine—although it occurs to me that the police must already know this from the ATM records. They’ll have seen the CCTV footage of us withdrawing the money, as well, and trailing in and out of the shops in Litchbury that morning.

  By the time we returned to Uman’s grandmother’s, we had way more gear than we could fit into the rucksacks or physically carry. It took us a lot of experimentation, and haggling about the difference between essential and nonessential items, to realize it. We packed and repacked our rucksacks, attached and detached and reattached the camping equipment, set aside things we decided we really didn’t need only to decide that we really couldn’t do without them.

  “Do you even know how to use a compass?” I asked at one stage.

  “Of course I do.” Uman sounded indignant. “And I can sail a boat.”

  “That’ll come in handy, given how far inland we are.”

  “Anyway,” he said, gesturing at my overflowing pack, “do you really need three changes of clothing?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  “And the hair straighteners?”

  “I don’t have any hair straighteners. I have never owned a set of—”

  “The full-length cheval mirror?” Uman said. “The boxing gloves, the desktop PC, the ten-kilo sack of guinea-pig bedding, the English-Spanish dictionary, the complete set of Enid Blyton’s Famous Five novels, the bridle and saddle for your Shetland pony, the Shetland pony, the ice skates, the bonsai kit, and a Halloween pumpkin complete with burning candle?” He paused for breath. “And you have the audacity to suggest my compass is superfluous to requirements.”

  “I think you mean surplus.”

  “Yes, I do. Thank you. I do mean surplus. Damn, my whole argument falls apart.”

  “Does that mean I can take the pony?”

  “Yes, all right, you can take the pony.” He sighed. “I suppose we can always eat it if we run out of food.”

  Looking back, I realize just how careless I was about all this. So caught up in the fun that the fact of what we were about to do—and the effect it would have on my parents—hadn’t properly dawned on me. Not just then. It was way too crazy to be real. We were the mad people. We didn’t yawn or say a commonplace thing. We were desirous of everything at the same time.

  We were ready to burn, burn, burn.

  QUESTION 10: Where shall we go?

  “Where shall we go?” Uman asked.

  “Oh, right, yeah—I suppose we should decide that.”

  “We need a destination. And a mode of transport. Any suggestions?”

  “New York. By helicopter.”

  Uman nodded. “That was surprisingly straightforward.”

  He stood up, hoisted a rucksack onto his back, and headed for the gate at the side of the house. Fatima, maybe thinking she was about to be taken for a walk, yapped loudly, ran around in a circle, and bit her own tail.

  Turning to look back, Uman said, “Gloria, you coming?”

  “Slight snag—we don’t have a helicopter.”

  “Bring me solutions, not problems.” He rejoined me at the picnic table, pretending to be cross. By now, Fatima was standing at the gate, looking puzzled by the fact that Uman was sitting down again. “Right,” Uman said, “the cards shall decide.”

  “The cards?”

  He pulled a deck of playing cards from a side pocket of his rucksack. “Transport options. I’m suggesting train or bus. Any others?”

  I watched him shuffle, still not sure how the cards could decide anything. I said the first two things that came into my head. “Walking and, er, hitchhiking.”

  “Perfect, one for each suit. So, train is hearts, bus is diamonds, hitchhiking is spades, and walking is clubs. Yeah?”

  “I think hitchhiking should be hearts. They both begin with h.”

  Uman just looked at me.

  “These are important decisions,” I said. “I have a right to contribute to them.”

  “I seem to recall you were responsible for the helicopter fiasco.”

  “It’s because I’m a girl, isn’t it?”

  He exhaled. “All right—hitchhiking is hearts, train is spades. Happy now?”

  “Thank you.”

  Uman shuffled the cards again.

  “Are we sure about diamonds for bus?” I asked.

  “Gloria.”

  “Sorry.”

  He held my gaze for a moment, both of us desperately trying not to laugh, then placed the deck on the table. “Cut,” he said.

  I cut the cards. Queen of spades. Train.

  —

  At the station, we used the cards again to select our destination. Litchbury is at the end of a line that runs into Leeds and Bradford, so we nominated red for Bradford, black for Leeds. The cards said red. Then we turned eight cards over—one for each stop on that route; whichever place got the highest card, that was where we’d go.

  “Shipley?” Uman said. He’d clearly never heard of the place.

  “I think we should re-deal
.”

  He shook his head. “You don’t tamper with fate, Gloria.”

  —

  We discussed the concept of fate on the journey: were we fated to travel by train to Shipley that morning, or was it just random chance? I said chance, Uman said fate.

  “If you’d shuffled the cards differently,” I said, “or if I’d cut them differently—”

  “Ah, but we didn’t. That’s the point.”

  “What’s the point?”

  “Destiny. Predetermination.” Each syllable seemed to be jerked from his mouth by the jolting of the train. On the seats beside us, our rucksacks threatened to topple to the floor.

  “But if I hadn’t gotten you to switch hearts and spades,” I said, “we’d have been hitchhiking now—and headed somewhere else, probably.”

  “Then that would have been our fate. But it wasn’t.”

  “Hang on, though. I thought you believed in free will. That’s what you said last night when we were talking about all my possible futures.”

  “Did I?”

  “Yeah, you said our lives turn out according to the choices we make.”

  “Gloria, I am a tangled knot of complexity and contradiction. What can I say?”

  “You could say: Yes, Gloria, you’re right—it is random chance, and nothing whatsoever to do with fate, that we’re on a train to Shipley.”

  “Yes, but fate’s a much better story.”

  I couldn’t argue with that. We’d left Litchbury and were passing through rough pasture beneath a ridge of open moorland. The slopes shone so green in the sunshine they might have been spray-painted. Above them, the sky stretched wide and blue over everywhere we could go, everything we could do, like a blank screen waiting for us to type our own script.

  None of it seemed real. And yet it was—we were actually doing it. Taking off.

  I should’ve been more apprehensive—worried about what we were getting into, or landing ourselves in trouble, or what my “disappearance” would do to Mum and Dad, and to my brother. But it was only for one night, I told myself. How much harm could one night do? Anyway, I would message Mum to let her know I was okay; later, once we’d found somewhere to pitch the tent. Gone camping with Uman, I’d say. See you tomorrow. Don’t worry. Or something. She would worry, of course. I was enjoying myself too much just then, though, to let myself think about that. Selfish, I know. Self-indulgent. Yet even now, with all that’s taken place, I look back at that train ride and can’t help the smiley joy that bubbles up inside me, as if it’s happening all over again.

  Outside Shipley station, Uman took one look and said, “We should’ve redealt.”

  “Actually, I know a good spot near here. If I can figure out the way.”

  I couldn’t figure out the way. Not at first. I’d been there a few times with my family—but not for ages, and only by car. Nothing looked familiar. Then, after we’d wandered up and down a couple of busy, stinky roads, I saw a sign for Salt’s Mill, directing us through a modern business park to the town’s Victorian quarter.

  “They used to make wool here,” I said as we approached the honey-colored block of the restored mill, with its towering chimney. “But it’s shops and cafés now, and an art gallery.”

  “It’s important for fugitives to find time for culture,” Uman said. “For example, right after he shot JFK, Lee Harvey Oswald hid in a cinema.”

  “Fugitives. Is that what we are, then?”

  “I like to think so. Not quite on Oswald’s scale, obviously.”

  Culture wasn’t why I’d brought us to Salt’s Mill. (Although we did mooch around the bookshop, and look at the Hockney paintings, and share a scarily expensive slab of walnut cake.) The destination I had in mind lay farther on—along the path that follows the canal just there.

  “The Drop-Bear Woods,” I said. “Mum and Dad used to take us there on ‘family walks’—which was basically them walking while me and my brother grumbled about walking.”

  “Drop-Bear?” Uman asked.

  “When me and Ivan were little, Dad liked to scare us by saying wild bears lived in the trees—called drop-bears because they hid in the branches and dropped on you as you walked underneath.” I snarled, miming bear paws.

  “Aw, I bet you were sweet when you were little.”

  “I was.” I let out an exaggerated sigh. “Where did all that sweetness go?”

  Uman laughed. Then he swung his shoulder so his rucksack bashed against mine, nearly knocking me off balance. I did the same to him. We went on doing that for a while.

  Ten minutes from Salt’s Mill, we left the path and crossed the canal by one of the locks; the entrance to the woods was just there, beyond a small car park. It had been busy along the canal—walkers, cyclists, joggers, families on a Sunday-afternoon stroll—but once we entered the trees we had the tracks more or less to ourselves. A few dog-walkers, that was all.

  “There used to be a brilliant rope swing,” I said. “I don’t know if it’s still here.”

  We found it. At least, I think so. It wasn’t quite where I remembered it, and I was sure it had an old tire at the bottom, not a bit of broken-off branch; but, even if it was a different rope from the one my brother and I used to swing on, it worked well enough.

  “I haven’t been on one of these in years,” Uman said, dumping his rucksack at the base of the tree the rope was suspended from and launching himself with a loud “Woo-hoo!” that sent a pair of wood pigeons clattering out of the branches above us.

  We took turns, pushing each other harder and harder, swinging in wild loops, daring each other to dismount at ever-higher points. It was like being ten years old again. If Uman hadn’t been wiped out by the mother of all coughing fits, we might’ve swung on that rope for hours. We sat under the tree while he recovered, eating the sandwiches we’d made at his grandmother’s.

  He massaged his ankles. “Take my advice, Gloria, don’t ever drop from the roof of a burning building. Unless it’s a bungalow, of course.”

  “I’ll try to remember that.”

  I wasn’t sure we should be joking about it, but if he was okay with it, then so was I.

  I vaguely remembered hearing about the fire. Not that I read the newspapers or watch the TV news that often. But when Uman had told me what happened, it felt familiar. Sitting in Drop-Bear Woods with him, though, I wondered why the story hadn’t come up when I Googled him that time at school. Why his name hadn’t produced a single link.

  So I asked him straight out.

  “Uman Padeem’s not my original name,” he said after a moment. “I changed it when I moved up here, so the media wouldn’t find me.”

  They’d pestered him ever since the fire, he told me. Even though he was only fifteen and the court had ordered that his privacy should be protected, the story of that terrible night, and of Uman’s survival, was too good for the journalists to leave him alone.

  “So what’s your real name, then?” I asked.

  “Legally, this is my real name now,” he said. “I left that other boy behind.”

  —

  We stowed the rucksacks in undergrowth and tramped the woods looking for a site away from any of the trails.

  Eventually, we found a clearing among thick scrub, where the ground was dryish and level. The only snag was, we got lost trying to find the place where we’d left our gear and, when we did find it, we got lost again retracing our steps to the clearing. By that time, dusk was settling. The tent was a pop-up, though, so it didn’t take us long to pitch it. I say “us,” but really, Uman erected it by himself while I handed him stuff and made incredibly helpful comments like Isn’t that bit the wrong way up? or Have you noticed how the pegs look like kebab skewers?

  “You haven’t camped in a while, have you?” Uman said.

  We sat in the opening of the tent, eating biscuits and watching night fall and listening to the scurrying of unseen small animals that almost certainly weren’t drop-bears.

  “You’re very chill about all this
fugitivery,” Uman said.

  “Fugitivery. I’m not sure that’s a word.”

  “Why not? It has letters and syllables. Anyway, you are. Chill, I mean.”

  “Probably because you are. It’s…the way you are, it’s as though this is a totally normal thing to be doing.” Like Tierney giving up her seat for him, I thought. Or the theater employee letting us into an R-rated movie. “What is it about you?” I asked.

  “What is it about me, what?”

  “The way you get people to do things.”

  “Confidence,” he said simply. “If you’re totally sure of yourself, people trust in you.”

  “What if you’re not sure of yourself?”

  “Then it’s even more important to act like you are.”

  “So it’s not hypnosis, then?”

  “No,” he said. “And when I count to three, you’ll forget you ever asked that question.”

  “What question?”

  He smiled. Raised his water bottle. “To fugitivery.”

  “To fugitivery,” I said, clunking my bottle against his. “You’ll have to teach me how to put the tent up, though. I don’t like being useless.”

  “You are not useless. These woods were your idea, remember—and they’re perfect.”

  I liked him for saying that. For thinking it. It didn’t occur to me, at the time, that if I was asking for a pop-up tent lesson, I’d already started to anticipate a second night on the run.

  While he went off with a flashlight to find somewhere well away from the tent to “fertilize the woods,” as he called it, I switched on my phone for the first time since we’d set off.

  It was just after ten p.m. I’d meant to message home before now, but it had gone clean out of my mind with all we’d been doing. There were texts and voice mails from Mum—several of them—and some from Tierney. My parents would almost certainly have found out by now that I hadn’t been with Tierney at all. They’d be angry. Also, sick with worry. As for Tier—my best friend would know I’d used her as a cover story. We’d always told each other everything but now she didn’t have a clue where I was, or who with, or what I was doing. I stared at the in-box.

  A part of me thought that if I read or listened to the messages it would spoil everything.