Mountains of the Moon (30 page)

The moon is starting to shiver and shake. In a garden, sides the graveyard, is a sailing boat, on a trailer next to the house. I duck low through the gravestones and go over for a proper look. The boat has got a blue plastic sheet over it, to stop it leaking, I spects. Too cold for scared. I has to get in. I hop the wall. Climbs up, one, two, three, and slips in underneath, listens for someone to shout, or come out of the house. There int no sound, just my hearts bashing. I feel my way inside and creep long, wonders if the trailer will tip but it don’t.

Surprises me I’m on a boat with a tiny ship’s steering wheel. It’s all hogany wood. I keep the blanket wrapped around me and peek out the curtain. Now there is two cars parked, right next to where I was sleep and a light on in the hall. It’s coming daytime, birds getting up. I look quiet in the cupboards see what there is. Just tools and paintbrushes and tins of paint and cans for gas and ropes and sailing things. I find some scissors, that’s how come I cut all my hair off, short like a boy. Don’t know what to do with it so I leave it curled up in the sink, case they thinks it’s a cat. I eat one slice of bread and fill me up with water then I slides out nice and quiet, frightens a thrush out of the hedge.

On the lane there’s a bungalow with grass around it and fields behind. I run through their garden and jump the back fence. The sun is coming up, turning the low mist golden colors. Far way on a hill can see a tower, standing up, taller than a castle or a palice or something. I try to keep it
in my eyes, so I know I is going somewhere. After while the running don’t hurt, it gets like normal, running so smooth and easy as breathing. Reckon the tower has got a bell, can hear it ding-dinging in the wind, in the rushing of the leaves in the trees.

Ding
—takes time to swing.

Ding
—like calling people in.

Ding.

Sometimes I lose the tower, villages and houses and hills get in the way, but I always find it gain. I run through trees sides the road, saying the names. Beech. Beech. Beech. I pushes my legs faster, til everything burns and blurs. I listen for the sweet sound of the bell.

Ding
—calling me.

Ding
—calling me the way.

Gwen’s car is outside the house. A container lorry is reversing, trying to park in a gap that don’t look big enough. Surprises me, Heath is driving it. Sticks his tongue out, tips his head, then bends the lorry inch-perfect into the space. I stand on the pavement with my hands in my coat pockets and my shoes hooked under my thumbs. He jumps down from the cab.

“What happened?” he says. “Gwen and I were out all night looking for you.”

“I went for a walk. There was a robbery at the casino yesterday.”

“I know,” he says. “I was there, remember. Are you impressed?”

He means with the lorry.

“What’s in it?” I arsts.

“Washing machines,” he says. “You haven’t taken it personally, have you, last night?”

Last night I slept in a tree at Ashton Court.

“Night before last,” he says. “Morning after the night before last. It was just a game. That’s your trouble, you don’t play the game, nothing about you plays the game.”

“Ah,” I say. “I didn’t know there was a game going on.”

“I meant what I said, though; don’t take me for a total cunt. If the truth be told I actually
like
you more than Gwen, but it’s her I want to be seen with, it’s her I want to fuck. What you have to understand is this: there’s nothing like a bit of upper-crust to make a man feel less like a peasant.”

Makes me laugh. All the way to the front door. Stead of waiting for me to open it with my key, he bashes hard three times with the knocker. Panda is yapping and stripping paint with her claws. Every day kisses bye-bye to the deposit on this house.

“Heathee! Heathee!” Gwen canters to open the door.

I look at Heath. He looks at me. He’s smiling utterly toffed. But Gwen’s elocution drops off, with an afternoon bottle of Scotch. And her knickers.

“Heathee!” she says.

Then she sees me.

“Oh.” Queen-sized contempt. “Where have you two been? What is so funny, pray tell?”

“Hello, Gwen,” Heath says. “How’s about a Rubber Duck?”

“Talk sense, boy,” she says.

“Ten Four to Rubber Duck, we got us a convoy!” He rapids off some kind of hillbilly dialogue from a film, I spects.

I go down the hall. Dog shit slalom, leave Gwen and the dog riding Heath’s thighs.

“Where the Dickens to?” Gwen says. “In a lorry? Don’t be ridiculous. Well, of course not. Why would I conceivably want to spend eighteen hours sitting in a lorry? Just be a good boy and come and see me when you get back. Isn’t it?” she says.

I put the kettle on. Cold treacherous coffee for three and the white lilac sprig in a jar are still on the tray sides the sink.
In your dreams.

“Fair enough,” Heath says. “You don’t want to come; I haven’t got a problem with that.”

Given the choice of two evils I don’t know how come I got
both
of them. No tea or coffee in the cupboard, there int any milk, there int any money til payday. Loads of Indian takeway cartons and empty bottles though. I take a glass of hot water to my room and close the door, lies
down on zebra skin. Hole in my chest like someone shot me, took out a double handful of heart. I get up to look at my bit lip. The girl in the mirror don’t know me, looks away mistaken, she’s total deaf to the sirens and the loudness of the drumming.

Listen.

Emergency. Emergency. Get out of here. Get out of here. Go anywhere. Go anywhere.
I haven’t got any money. I haven’t got anywhere to go.
Go anywhere.
It’s a fervent fucking prayer like demented bells ringing and it makes me cry. My bedroom door opens; Heath comes in.

“Knock, knock, knock,” he says. “I couldn’t interest you in a drive to Scotland, could I?”

“But you simply can’t.” Gwen’s hot on my heels down the hall. “What about work?” she yells on the doorstep. “What about me?” she screams up at the lorry. “What about me?” She swings on his wing mirror.

“See, that’s what I find sexy. Her spirit,” Heath says.

He means gin. The bottle was in the kitchen. She bought it and the takeaway with money I left for the rent and horse food.

Heath reckons this Scania is the Rolls-Royce of lorries and the last one of the fleet of ten he had. He got his sales training at the top of IBM, youngest highest earner in the history of the company.

“I was married to Leanne then,” he says. “I meant it when I married her, I was eighteen, I’d got my first three Scannies, was driving one of them myself, but do you know what ended that marriage? It only lasted four months. One day I turned a lorry over on a roundabout and she was in the passenger seat, somehow in the shake-up and fall, the fat cow landed on my head, nearly suffocated me to death. The minute they got me out of the wreckage I went and phoned a solicitor. It was only at that precise moment I noticed how fucking fat she was. And what did she get? Half.”

The second marriage lasts as long as Birmingham to Manchester, long as two toddlers and ten Scanias and a forged banker’s draft for a yacht.

And the last Scania rolls on. Acrimony. I minds myself to look it up.

“It didn’t help that her father was head of the CID,” he says. “It cut me up; I don’t mind admitting I was in pieces. It still hurts but it is easier now. Now I’m walking in the light of the Lord.”

Makes me laugh. Bit too loud. But his eyes is rapt by the motorway lanes and the contraflow. His crucifix swings in his ear, silver in wing-mirrored light of the Lord and fast-lane traffic.

“How do you balance armed robbery with your Christian beliefs?” I arsts him as we passes Liverpool.

He stares at me so long and hard he swerves the lorry out of the lane, a car horn blasts, furious. “All right—you pillock,” he says and turns back to me. “I think you’re…”

“Dead?” I suggest.

“Guessing,” he says.

My magination. Makes me smile. But the girl in the wing mirror don’t smile, can hear the drumming, think I see me running in trees sides the road. Double handful of pain wrings out my chest. I plan to die, first chance I get, and closes my eyes, giddy with relief.

“Where did you go the other morning anyway?” Heath says. “Where did you go last night?”

I close my eyes.

“Gwen seems to think you’re a prime candidate for a disappearance, she said nobody would notice you were missing.”

Cept her, when her car won’t start.

“She was pretty sure you had nowhere to go.” He looks at me. “You got yourself a fat lip somewhere.”

Spinning with my eyes closed, I open them. Hang on a telegraph wire. Crows like notes on the stave. Murder. I put my feet down off the dashboard, sit forward and light a cigarette.

“Gwen said once you cut your wrist with a razor blade; the bath was full of blood.”

I flip back both of my fluted cuffs, hold my hands up.

“You’re telling me Gwen is a liar,” he says. “She says she’s got nine O levels and three A levels, is that true?”

“Probably.”

“Has she got a horse?”

“Yes.”

“I know it,” he says. “She’s a classy woman.”

He means Welsh slapper. Flashes another lorry in ahead of us.

“Did you know that Gwen’s mother tried to drown her when she was six?” he says.

Didn’t try hard enough. In the kitchen sink; in the washing-up water.

We pass a buzzard sitting on a post. Once I went to Swansea with Gwen and met her mother. The double sink and the draining board were gleaming polished metal, saw my face in one tap and Gwen’s in the other.

“I don’t want to come between you and Gwen, I mean, up until two days ago you were best friends.”

Her mother made us all a fillet steak with pâté on it and wrapped it up in flaky pastry. Kept saying how nice it was to have young girls in the place. She couldn’t get over the size and shape of me, twirled me around in the kitchen, had me walk to the door and back. Turned out Gwen’s dad got crushed when a lorry skidded off the road and plowed him into a wall. The insurance money bought the bungalow with the marshy paddock behind it, bought elocution lessons, a private education and a horse that Gwen couldn’t manage. Spects she thought Gwen might bag herself a Lord. A doctor, Gwen told me once, a solicitor would do. I look at Heath Crow, mesmerized by the dusk lights.

Has to close my eyes.

“So where did you get the split lip?”

Rewind.

At the far side of the park where he picked me up, Peter Eden stops the van, turns the engine off. It judders, the cup and saucer we stole from the Swallow Hotel rattles deep under the seat. High up in the van, we can see over the park wall.

“I live with a woman,” he says, pitter-patter. “I’ve got a daughter who’s three.”

The bluebell posy dies in my hands.

“I won’t ever leave them,” he says.

I lean over to kiss him good-bye and he turns his lips away.

“I kiss my daughter with those,” he says.

I didn’t quite hear. I didn’t quite hear.

Gear change of motion wakes me up fast-forward. Roundabout? Dark A-road? Doomed hills. Died and gone to somewhere unpleasant.

“Cumbria,” Heath says. “It’s Oh–three hundred hours, what does the Oh stand for—Oh my God it’s fucking early! Light me another one of your cigarettes. How long is it since you last went fishing?”

Fact I’m still alive knocks all the wind out of the death of me. It hurts to breathe, to keep breathing.

“With a rod?” I say. “Never.”

The lorry is parked in a hot lay-by. We snap through a copse with clouds of wild garlic and gnats. Midges. Mosquitoes. Call them what you like.

“Bastards,” I say with my mouth closed.

Heath knows this place, this darkness; moves like he’s got night vision. Skin prickles. Gnats nip. No free hands to slap. He’s got the fishing box and the rods and a manky quilt over his shoulder. I’ve got his holdall bag, and a fire-blackened pan and an empty army jerrycan. Somewhere I spects is a fucking great sign says: Private Keep Out.

We int sactly sleek.

Even though I’m burning up, hot on the decision to die, I stop to do up my beautiful coat case the shantung lining gets ripped. Eyes adjust to flat shine of night water through the trees. Can hear running water to the left of us.

“Spring,” he says.

Then we come to cross it and stop to fill the jerrycan. At the bottom of the slope we come out into a cove. Tread careful cross the tabletops of rusted rocks to a sheltered drop and a gravel beach and a small fire pit. Can’t see the moon but the lake can. Heath’s skin is so white, the lake light bouncing flickers on it. Tiredness, wiredness, prizes our eyes and
mouths open, concentration of seeing and breathing. Ears filled with blood drumming.

Da-doom.

Man makes fire with two sticks, even though there’s a lighter in my pocket. Heath’s eyes burn on the friction, as if they can scorch, as if he can breathe a flame into being. The kindling flares up sudden, flames in each of his eyes.

“I’m wasted,” he says. “I’m totally fucking wasted.”

Makes him smile. I know how it is to be calm, sailing straight past caring. The lake takes us off. Listening. Doom. Da-doom. Da-doom.