Tamar (26 page)

Yoyo had spent the night at our house so we could get an early start. After dinner Mum got me clearing away and washing up while she took Yoyo into the living room for “a little chat.” When he’d come back to the kitchen, he’d crossed his eyes and pulled his mouth down at the corners. His ears were bright pink, as if they’d been freshly slapped.

“So come on, what did she say?”

“She gave me a big talk about safe driving and the condition of the car.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“The car? Nothing, absolutely. I told her.”

“What else?”

The rosy tint returned to his ears. He grinned, a bit sheepishly. “We had a most serious discussion about your birthday.”

“What do you mean? My birthday isn’t for ages yet.”

“That is the exact point Sonia made several times. That you are not sixteen until September.”

“Oh, right.” I probably blushed, although I’d prefer to think I didn’t.

After a pause Yoyo said, “I told her not to worry, because I am gay.”

“You what? You didn’t, did you? Is that what you told her?”

“Of course.”

“You liar,” I said, giggling. “You never.”

“No, you’re right. I should have said it, but I did not think of it until later.”

“That’s a shame,” I said, then clammed up, thinking he might take it the wrong way. Or even the right way.

“Do you know what else? Your mother already made phone calls to places in Devon and Cornwall.”

“What do you mean? What places?”

“The kind of places we might stay. Not hotels, these bed and breakfasts. She checked out the prices. She said to me, ‘Johannes, the average price per room at this time of the year is about thirty pounds or less. So the money Tamar has got is plenty for two rooms each night.’ She gave me this look she does, know what I mean?”

I knew.

“When we get back, she wants to see the . . .” He lifted his left hand from the wheel and clicked his fingers, searching for the word. “The reckonings.”

“The bills?”

“Exactly. The bills. To make sure we have two rooms every time.”

“That’s cool. She can have the bloody bills,” I said, hating her.

I didn’t know then that we’d blow it the very first night.

I’d been a city girl all my life. Long car journeys were something I knew nothing about. I had Yoyo’s road atlas on my lap, and the straightish blue lines of the motorways didn’t look that long. The map took us a page or two west to Bristol, a page farther south to Exeter, another to Plymouth. I had a very shaky idea of scale. The only map I really knew was the one of the London Underground, so my idea of a really long journey was from my nearest tube, Ravenscourt Park, to somewhere like Walthamstow, at the far side of the universe. The maps Grandad had left me showed hills, moors, forests, rivers that twisted like snakes. Stupidly I thought we’d start to see such exotic things quite early in our journey west — like just after Reading, maybe. I was deeply disappointed. The countryside looked hammered flat and colourless by the heat, and seemed to drift by incredibly slowly. At Bristol we crawled in dense traffic over the Avonmouth Bridge. The river below swilled like grey treacle between huge banks of cracked and crumpled mud. On the far side we ground to a halt again, locked in a mass of vehicles and traffic cones.

The Saab turned into an oven, and we sat there and roasted. When I was something like medium-rare, I fell asleep. I woke up when I felt the car jerk and turn. I opened my eyes and saw what could have been anywhere: a busy roundabout, billboards, an industrial estate, a high grass bank scattered with plastic bags and scraps of paper. It took me a minute to get my voice to work. My mouth felt and tasted as though a hamster had hibernated in it.

“Where are we?”

“Exeter, thank God,” Yoyo said. “Motorway services. If I don’t pee I will explode. And I’m starving, also.”

The car park was packed with coaches, camper vans, cars towing boats, cars towing caravans, cars with racks of mountain bikes on the back, cars with surfboards on their roofs. Inside, the place was heaving and the atmosphere hit us in the face like a wave of used bathwater. We queued a lifetime for food. The Muzak was a greasy orchestral version of “Summer Holiday.”

Yoyo said, “If there is a canteen in hell, it is like this.”

When we slid our trays along to the till, the exhausted-looking boy in the silly paper hat punched buttons and said, “Eleven pounds sixty, please.”

“Incredible,” I muttered, groping in my bag.

When I pulled out the wad of Grandad’s cash, Yoyo murmured, “You know, it’s not a good idea keeping it all in your bag like this. Someone might pinch it. Nineteen hundred and forty-five pounds is a lot of money to lose.”

I stared up at him. “What? What did you say, Yoyo?”

“I just said —”

“Eleven pounds sixty, please,” the boy repeated.

A melting fat man in the queue behind us said, “Come on, love, let’s move it.”

We found a space at the end of a table. Our neighbours were four surf boys, all with straggled bottle-blond hair, half a dozen hippy necklaces apiece, and huge patchy shorts.

Yoyo got busy squirting sachets of mayonnaise onto his chips.

“I’m thick,” I said, “really thick.”

He looked up, licking his fingers. “What?”

“You said ‘nineteen hundred and forty-five pounds.’”

He looked confused. “That’s right, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. But didn’t you wonder why it was such a weird amount? Like, why not one thousand five hundred? Or two thousand?”

Yoyo’s reply was something like
“Ugh urgh-urgh”
because his mouth was full of double cheeseburger.

“It’s because it’s not the amount that’s important,” I said, “it’s the number. It’s a date. Nineteen forty-five.”

Yoyo swallowed burger-pulp. It took a while to slide down his long thin gullet; it was like watching a cartoon of an ostrich swallowing a brick.

“Of course,” he said. “Nineteen forty-five. I am as thick as you. Thicker!”

The surf boys were watching us now, grinning like bleached monkeys.

“All right, all right, it’s not exactly a competition. But that’s it, don’t you think? The money is another, well, clue, if you like.”

“Yes, I think so. And are you going to tell me what it means, Sherlock Holmes?”

“I dunno. Nineteen forty-five was the year the war ended, obviously. The year Gran and Grandad escaped and came to England, according to what was in the paper. So I s’pose this, this thing we’re doing, this . . .”

“Adventure?” Yoyo suggested.

And I thought what a ridiculous old-fashioned word that was. Typical Yoyo. It was about right, though, no denying it.

“It must be to do with something that happened in that year.”

“Brilliant,” Yoyo said.

The surf boys were all ears now, leaning towards us. I turned and glowered at them. They did a sort of
“Ooh, baby”
thing and looked away, smirking.

Then I turned my death-glare onto Yoyo. “Don’t take the piss unless you’ve got a better idea, okay?”

He stuck a mayo-coated chip in his mouth to hide what I hoped was embarrassment. “Cool,” he said. “By the way, you look very sexy when you are —”

“Shut up,” I said.

Not long after Exeter the motorway ended and the road split into two. Our bit, the Plymouth bit, climbed up a long hill. At the top the road levelled out and took us through a long patch of trees, and when we came out of it, we could see forever. We both said “Wow” at the same time, because it was like being in a plane. Ahead and below us there were curving webs of fields and hedges between overlapping layers of blue-green hills. Far beyond it all the jagged horizon was like motionless purple smoke. I’d never seen so much landscape in one go before.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Yoyo said.

Well, yes, it was. But what I felt was fear. No, not fear exactly; that’s too strong. Anxiety, perhaps. I’d been so tangled up in working out what Grandad was telling — or asking — me that I’d hardly given a thought to what it would actually be like, this adventure, as Yoyo had called it. And what I felt when we had that brief glimpse of huge distance was . . . unsafe. What made my breathing stumble was the knowledge that in all that vast countryside there wasn’t a soul who knew me. I had to fight back the urge to say, “Right, we’ve seen it. Let’s go home.”

So I was glad when we hit the outskirts of Plymouth, which looked pretty much like the outskirts of anywhere else.

At the nineteenth set of lights, Yoyo said, “Tamar, can we stop for the night here? I don’t want to drive any more.”

“Okay,” I said, as coolly as I could. As if the words “stop for the night” caused me no problems at all. “I’ve no idea where to go, though.”

Yoyo pulled over and stopped in a lay-by that had
BUSES ONLY
painted on it. He took the road atlas from me and flicked through to the back pages, where there was a small map of the centre of Plymouth. He studied it for a minute and then craned his neck round.

“Ah,” he said, “there, see? The sign says Hoe and Barbican.”

“What does that mean?”

“I don’t know exactly. Strange words. But look, this Hoe is green on the map and close to the sea. I would like to look at the sea.”

After some ill-tempered encounters with other drivers, we found a sign saying
HOE PARKING
. We fed the greedy ticket machine, then climbed up steps and a slope to what looked like a park. There were people lying about with half their clothes missing, and dogs panting in the shade of trees. When we got to the top of the rise, we stood there gawping. It was as if we had walked into a child’s drawing, the colours of everything were so bright and simple. The green grass levelled and then fell away between beds of cartoon-coloured flowers towards the sea, which was intensely — impossibly — blue. The child artist had sketched in an island and a couple of ships for extra interest. Slap in the middle of the scene was a lighthouse painted in nice fat red and white stripes like a stick of rock. After a whole day of hot driving, it was so unreal that it was ages before I could turn to look at Yoyo. He was gazing at the sea and grinning his face in half.

“Fantastic.”

“Yeah. So what do we do now?”

He looked at me as if I were an alien or something. “Do?” he said. “Do? We sit and look and thank God we are not in the car still. And because I have been driving all day, you can go and find two cold drinks. Please.”

Which seemed fair enough, but it took me a while. When I came back with the cans and two packets of crisps, Yoyo was flat on his back and apparently asleep. I snapped a Pepsi open and drank in the view. I saw now that the island was straight-sided and seemed to be made out of brown concrete, and that the ships parked out on the deep blue sea were warships, grey and bristling with guns and aerials.

I nudged Yoyo. “Drink? I got some crisps too. By your elbow.”

He wriggled his nose and mumbled but didn’t move or open his eyes. By the time I finished the Pepsi, his breathing was deep and steady again. I picked his pocket for the car keys and fetched map 108 from the bag in the boot.

With the map spread out on the grass, I could see that the mouth of the Tamar was some way off, to the west of the city. It flowed into a wide stretch of water with the strange, Japanese-looking name Hamoaze. I felt edgy, restless. I looked at my watch; unbelievably, it was almost five o’clock. It was ridiculous that we had come all this way, taken an entire day, only to stop just a few miles from the Tamar, almost in sight of it. At the same time, I still felt the urge to go home, to abandon the whole thing. Now that we were on the map, the scale of everything seemed huge and impossible to deal with. I felt lonely.

“Wake up, Yoyo. Yoyo? Come on, wake up. You’ll get sunburnt if you lie there much longer.”

We followed a different footpath back to the car park and found ourselves looking down onto a terrace of guesthouses, each with a dinky little awning over the door. The third one from the end was called The Tamar. It had a sign up saying
NO VACANCIES
. So did all the others, except for one called Avalon, so we went in there. The decor had a King Arthur theme; there was even a small suit of armour made of gold plastic at the foot of the stairs. We stood alone at the reception desk for a bit, and then Yoyo reached past me and shook a little brass bell that sat on the counter. When no one came, he did it again and then wandered back down the hall to a rack full of tourist leaflets.

I hissed at him to come back, and when I turned round again, a woman had magically appeared behind the desk. There must have been a secret door. She was fortyish and had sunglasses pushed up into her dark hair. Her white blouse was mostly unbuttoned and I could see the top of a turquoise bikini. She gave off a strong whiff of coconut.

“Can I help you?” She had a European accent of some sort.
Help
came out as
’alp
.

“Er, yes. Hello. I was wondering, do you have two rooms for tonight?”

“For?” she asked.

I thought she’d said
four
. “No, two,” I said.

She stared at me, and then her eyes slid past me towards the hall. She couldn’t have seen Yoyo from her angle.

“For who? For your family?”

“Oh. No, for me and my friend. Actually, he’s not my friend; he’s my cousin. Sort of.”

“Cousin?”

I felt my neck getting warm and realized I was blushing. I was furious with myself, and that made it worse. I turned and hissed “Yoyo!” again. She leaned forward for a better view of the hall and immediately pulled back startled as Yoyo appeared, looming over her with his hand outstretched. She took it cautiously, and Yoyo shook it as if she was an old friend.

“Hello! Pleased to meet you,” he said, all smile and twinkle. “Yes, this is my cousin. We are here to investigate the Tamar River, which is also my cousin’s name. We have come from London. I am from Holland, actually. Johannes van Zant, how do you do? As she said, we are looking for two rooms. This seems a very nice place. I like the gold soldier just here. How much is it?”

She had retreated from this barrage of words as far as the little office would let her. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. I didn’t know whether to laugh or die.