Num8ers (11 page)

I came to with a start. I hadn’t been asleep, just thinking sodeep I wasn’t there for a while.

“Pigs.”

“You seen some?” He craned behind quickly, throwing the car into a steep swerve.

“No. Keep your eyes on the road! You’ll kill us both. Anyway, not that sort of pig — real ones, well, storybook ones, oh, never mind….”

There was a signpost with a picnic table on it. We turned off the road and found a big rest stop, well hidden. There was a
tractor trailer parked there, and we pulled up behind it and both had a swig of Coke and some chocolate biscuits. A bloke appeared from the side and walked ’round the back of the truck. He stopped to light a cigarette, then checked that the fastenings on his rig were done up. All the while, I could see he was looking at us. He was pretending he wasn’t, but you know, don’t you, when someone’s staring at one thing but looking out of the corner of their eye at something else? Instinctively, I slouched down in my seat as I watched him walk ’round to the cab door and haul himself up.

“Can you see him?”

Spider picked a bit of biscuit out of his teeth. “What, that driver?”

“Yeah, can you see him in his cab?”

“Just in his sideview mirror. Why?”

“What’s he doing?”

“He’s smoking a cigarette and he’s talking into a little radio thing.”

My skin was pricking all over. “He’s spotted us, Spider. He’s calling the police.”

“Nah, don’t be daft. These truck drivers talk to each other all the time.”

“But what if he is? What do we do?”

“We need to dump this car, get another one. Let’s get out of here, anyway.” He started the engine and shifted easily through the gears as he accelerated away and back onto the main road — he was getting the hang of driving.

I looked behind. Way back, the tractor trailer was lumbering along, following us.

When you looked, there were trucks everywhere — one a couple of vehicles ahead of us, and, every minute or so, one coming the other way. If the first driver had spotted us and had told all his mates, we were completely stuffed. They’d be able to trace our every movement. A truck was heading toward us, and as I looked into the cab, the driver met my eyes — just for a moment — then looked away. He had a headset on, and was talking as he passed us.

“Spider, we’ve gotta get out. They’re on to us. That truck just now, he looked at me. Did you see?”

“Nah, man, I’m keeping my eyes on the road, like you said.”

“Watch the next one.”

Another couple of minutes and another truck approached. The driver definitely clocked us. Spider saw it, too.

He cursed and swung into the next side road, steaming along a narrow lane. I was holding on to the door with one hand and the dashboard with the other, praying we wouldn’t meet something coming the other way. He slowed down and eventually pulled up at a place where a little lane, not wide enough for a car, met our road.

There was a signpost, a green one, saying
F
OOTPATH
.
My heart sank.

“Gather up the stuff, we’re going to have to leg it.”

“No way. Where to? How…?”

“We’ll just take our stuff, go up this track, walk a few miles, find somewhere to kip down, and I’ll get some more wheels as soon as I can. Nick something from a farm. Come on, get the stuff together.”

We bundled everything we could into some plastic bags. I frantically flicked through the map book, and tore out the pages showing where we were now and all the places between us and Weston.

“Yeah, good thinking, thatta girl.” Again, you could tell Spider was buzzing with adrenaline. I guess I was, too, but it was like two sides of the same coin. He was excited, enjoying the adventure; I was eaten up with fear — they were closing in on us.

We couldn’t get everything in the bags. I put the coat on, easier than carrying it, and Spider draped a blanket ’round his shoulders; then, with a backward glance to the car, we started up the lane. God knows what we looked like — a pair of dossers, I suppose. We weren’t like hikers with backpacks and walking boots, just ordinary kids with plastic bags, and a touch of the charity shop about us.

The bags were a bloody nuisance. One of them kept bumping my leg, no matter what I did. I tried turning it ’round, swapping hands, nothing worked.
Bump, bump, bump.
The plastic cut into my hands, a cruel, nagging pain. And my feet and legs were all over the place. The track was so uneven; there were two deep ruts made up of stones, big ones and small ones, and a hump of grass in the middle, but all different levels.
I started off walking in one of the dips, but my ankle kept turning over on the stones, so I switched to the grassy strip. That was OK, until it suddenly decided to slope or there was a hole or whatever, and then my ankle would go again. And all the time,
bump, bump, bump,
the bloody shopping bag. I got so sensitive to it, it felt like a sledgehammer hitting the side of my knee.

After going on like this for half the morning, I stopped and dropped both bags. I turned my hands over to look at the palms: They were bright red, crisscrossed with fat white lines where the bags had cut in. Spider carried on, oblivious. It was like he was listening to music; he was walking along to his own rhythm, nodding his head, his legs kind of springy — but, of course, it was just in his own head. After a few seconds, he realized I wasn’t following and turned ’round.

“What’s up?”

“I can’t go on any farther. I’ve had it. Can we stop for a rest?”

He looked at his watch. “We’ve been walking for six minutes. If you went back to that bend, you’d still be able to see the car.”

I kicked one of the bags. “I can’t do it! I don’t like walking!”

“We walk miles in London, along the canal and the streets. Miles, man. You can do this.”

“Yeah, but that’s London, civilization. They’ve got pavement and tarmac there. This is crap! My ankles hurt. And
these stupid bags keep banging against my leg, and look at my hands!” I held them up toward him.

“Look,” he said patiently, “we need to get as far away from that car as we can, find somewhere to hide out. Why don’t we follow this path for an hour and see where we get to?”

“You’re not listening to me! I CAN’T DO IT!” I let out a scream of frustration; I may even have stamped my feet. Then I picked up one of the bags with both hands and flung it. It sailed gracefully through the air and lodged in the top of a hedge, about six feet up.

Spider lurched over to me and put his hand over my mouth. “Shh! You’ll have them all running here, you divvy.” There was light dancing in his eyes, a broad grin on his face. He was laughing at me.

He was laughing.

At.

Me.

I went ballistic, lashing out with fists and feet, screeching and grunting. “Don’t you ever laugh at me! Don’t you ever…!”

Instead of backing away or hitting back, he got his arms and legs ’round me, and kind of wrapped me up, and squeezed. My arms were held down by my side, my legs had nowhere to go. I was held in close, my face pressed into the smelly place under his arms, and he sort of sapped the fury out of me. I could feel it going, feel my body relaxing. His chin was resting on the top of my head, and we stood there for a bit, just breathing.

“You alright now?” he said after a while.

“No.” But I was, or at least I was better.

Spider released me and went to fish the bag out of the hedge. “Let’s have a bit of chocolate and press on. I’ll carry your bags.”

I couldn’t let him do that — I mean, I have got some pride. “Piss off, I can carry my own bags.”

“Yeah, right.”

In the end we compromised and he carried the awkward one, and we set off again, up the track, as a soft yellow light filtered through the branches and leaves above us, and the sound of sirens drifted over from the main road.

The lane ended with a gate and a stile. We put our bags down, leaned on the gate, and peered over. The path seemed to go straight on, through the middle of a field. It dipped down, so you couldn’t see the other side, but rising up beyond it were more and more fields, as far as you could see. I had never seen such a godforsaken picture of nothingness.

“Where the hell are we going?” I asked.

Spider shrugged. “Away from the car we just dumped. Anywhere.”

“We can’t go across there.” I nodded my head toward the rural wasteland.

“Why not?”

“Look at it, soft git! There’s no trees, no hedges. Everyone for fifty miles around will be able to see us.”

“D’you wanna go back? Sit in the car ‘til they find us, haul us out, and spread-eagle us on the floor with a gun in the back of our necks?”

“What do you mean, a gun…?”

“They think we’re terrorists.”

I leaned my head on my arms and shut my eyes. I didn’t know what I’d imagined being a runaway would be like, but this wasn’t it. I felt so tired, an aching tiredness creeping through my arms and legs.

“Can’t we just stay here for a while?” I said, my head still down, my voice muffled by my sleeves.

Spider shook his head. “It’s too close to the car. We’ve got to get farther away.” He paused. “Look, there’s a clump of trees at the top there. We could get over to that, and then hide out until it starts to get dark.”

I looked up. There was a dark smudge hugging the curve of a hill that must have been about twenty miles away.

“What, that? Way over there?”

He nodded. “Yeah, take us an hour, tops. We can do it.” He got hold of all the bags and lifted them over the stile, then stepped over himself, his long legs making short work of it.

I sighed and followed. The wooden step wobbled when I put my weight on it, and I let out a squeal. Spider laughed and put his hand out to steady me. I grabbed hold and swung my leg over, then let go, swiveled ’round, and gripped the top of a wooden fence post as I brought my other leg over. With my butt in the air, the bloody step felt like it was going to give way, and there was something squishy on my hand. I let go of the post and realized I’d put my hand on some bird shit.

“Bloody hell!” I could hear Spider laughing out loud behind me. “It’s not funny, I’ve got shit on me now!” I reached down
with one leg, feeling for the ground with my foot. When I was finally on solid ground, I turned ’round to see Spider doubled over, laughing his guts out. “What?”

“I’ve never seen anything so funny in my life! You’re brilliant.”

“Piss off!” I made to wipe my hand on him, but he ducked away. I chased him around the bags for a bit, before he managed to grab my wrist and pull me down to the ground to forcibly rub my hand on a clump of grass. Most of the stuff came off, and I wiped the rest on my pants. We sat apart from each other. My chest was heaving from the exertion, my lungs sucking in the air in great gulps, until gradually my body calmed down and my breathing got back to normal.

Spider rooted in one of the bags and swigged at a bottle of Coke, then passed it to me. It was warm, and a bit flat, but it tasted like nectar. Then we gathered up the bags and set off along the path, out into no-man’s-land.

You wouldn’t believe how uncomfortable I felt walking into that field. After all Spider’s talk of guns, I kept thinking of the space between my shoulder blades, just waiting for a sniper to put a bullet there. The farther we walked away from the stile, the more exposed I felt. I couldn’t have felt more vulnerable if I’d been walking along that path stark naked. There was nothing around us, just grass and sky, more sky than I’d ever seen before, an obscene amount of sky. You don’t realize in a city how much space buildings take up. When you take
them away, there’s just sky, huge and empty. There’s nothing between the top of your head and deep space, and it’s only gravity stopping you from drifting up and up, away from the earth. I was thoroughly freaked out. The only way I could tackle it was to look down at the path and put one foot in front of the other.

In front of me, Spider loped along with his familiar springy stride. I found myself studying the way he moved, his long legs going all the way up to his skinny arse. He’d always seemed so restless at school and around the housing projects, like it was difficult to contain his energy within those walls, those streets and buildings. Here, his legs seemed to eat up the miles. This tall black guy from London looked almost at home here. It was the right scale for him.

Not like me. Where he sprang along, I plodded, my head full of
I can’t…I don’t want to…I hate this.
As soon as we’d reached the top of one slope and I thought we were near the cover Spider had spotted, another hill rose up. They were like waves, stretching back as far as you could see.

Eventually we were walking along the edge of one field, with thick trees lining the other side of the path. There was the sound of water. Spider stopped and put his bags down.

“Wait here a minute,” he said, took a quick head start, and vaulted over the barbed-wire fence.

“What are you doing?” I shouted, but he didn’t reply, so I was left standing there like a prat. I sat down, facing the way
we’d just come. If I saw people following us, what would I do? I didn’t have time to think of an answer because Spider was soon back, looking smug.

“There’s a slope and then a river, Jem. This is good news for us. We just need to wade along it for a bit, and then if they’ve got dogs they won’t find us. They’ll lose the scent. I’ve seen it in the movies.”

Well, I’d seen it in the movies, too, but did that mean anything? There was no stopping him, though.

“Here, chuck those bags over, and then I’ll help you.” I heaved them over to him, and then looked at the fence.

“I don’t know…,” I said dubiously.

“Come here, put one foot on the wire, and your hand on the fence post, and then spring up. I’ll get you.”

With no better idea, I just did as I was told. The wire bent under my weight, but I thought,
What the hell,
and tried to climb up. At that moment, Spider reached over and grabbed me under my arms and lifted me clean over, plonking me down safely on the other side. We smiled and high-fived each other. Then we gathered up the bags and set off through the trees.