Solace of the Road (11 page)

I gathered up my knees to my chin and said nothing.

He picked up the wig. He looked at it, then me. ‘Your hair’s
brown.’

I couldn’t even blink.

‘I don’t go for brown.’

I bit down on my lip.

‘I only do blonde.’

His bleary eye was staring at me like I was an alien.

‘You’re just a kid, aren’t you?’

I stayed curled up tight, cornered.

‘Aren’t you?’ His hand moved as if he was about to hit me. ‘Aren’t you?’

I put my hands in front of my face. ‘Sorry, Tony. Sorry.’

He swore under his breath. Then his hand fell to his side. He lit up another fag and dragged on it. ‘Jeezus. I don’t fancy
kids
. I’m not a bloody perv. How old
are
you?’

That’s when it hit me. It was three in the morning and my birthday. Some birthday present. A one-eyed horror story.

‘Fifteen,’ I said.

He swore again.
‘Fifteen? Christ
. Get out’

‘Out?’

‘Yeah. If my landlord catches you I’ll be finished.’

I got up off the chair.

‘Clear off,’ he said. ‘Go home to Mummy.’

My lip wobbled. ‘I don’t have no home.’

‘Go find a homeless shelter then. Whatever.’

He tugged me off the chair, picked up the wig and threw it at me like it was heaving with maggots. He jerked me towards the door. ‘Beat it.’

‘Please, Tony,’ I said. ‘It’s dark out there. Let me stay. I’ll take my clothes off. If you want. Or I’ll give you my mobile phone. For rent, like. Just let me stay on the sofa till morning. Please—’

He pushed me out and threw my lizard-skin bag after me. ‘Out,’ he hissed.

‘Please—’

‘Shush.’ He shut me out on the landing.

I heard a key fumbling, then turning in a lock. ‘
Tony
…’

I stood with my nose and palms pressed to the door but it didn’t open.

Outside was the night, waiting to swallow me whole.

What the hell was I supposed to do now?

Twenty-one
The Dream on the Stairs

I stood still in the strange dark house. I saw the strip of light under Tony’s door and nothing else. I smelled burned stew and damp and my own fear.

I stood with the wig pressed up to my face.

In a moment my eyes adjusted. I turned round and made out the stairs, the banister, a hall table at the bottom. I crept forward and sat on the top step.

I went halfway down the stairs on my backside and stopped. I listened. There must have been a clock somewhere because I heard it over the thumping of my heart.
Tick-tock-stick-stuck
. I remembered the clock in Mercutia Road but this one wasn’t the same. This one was heavy and slow.

Everything else in the house was silent.

The strip of light under Tony’s door went out. And was I ever glad his girlfriend had given him a shiner. I wished I’d made the other eye shine too. Like having brown hair was a sin? I touched my own hair. After the wig I felt bald almost, and I remembered how Grace was always saying to get a perm or do something to
make it thicker. And I cried; the tears wouldn’t stop.

There wasn’t a sound from Tony’s room. He must have gone to bed, thinking I’d left the house.

My eyes adjusted again. I took the sandals off and rubbed my feet. Then, quietly, I changed into my trainers and put my skater top back on over the dress. I stroked Solace, pale and limp on my lap. The ash-blonde colours glowed in the dark.

The place smelled bad but I’d be safe here for an hour or two if I kept still. ‘Solace,’ I whispered, like the wig was an old friend. ‘Sister Solace.’
Tick-tock-stick-stuck
. Time stopped. My brain slowed and I was floating. I shut my eyes and maybe I was awake or maybe I was asleep but soon the stairs vanished and I was back in the sky house, like I’d got there on a dream cloud …

I’m shooting a movie underwater, looking through a wavering lens.

Mam’s there. Denny too. Their voices echo and it’s spring. Bright light pours in from the balcony and Denny’s tapping the newspaper. He’s off to the races for the day. Mam’s at him to back her a horse. I remember now. It’s the day of the Sister Solace race.

‘I’ve never so much as blown in a nag’s nose,’ Denny’s going, ‘but I know my horses.’ Mam pinches his cheek and flashes a fiver.

‘Shall I put it on for you, Bridge?’ he coaxes, trying to catch it. ‘A fine strapping mare?’

‘Can I choose? Can I?’ That’s me talking. I’m right
in there, pulling at Denny’s tartan cuff on account of I only come up to his elbow.

‘OK, troll. Which one?’ He shows me the racing page.

I put my finger on Sister Solace. ‘That one.’

‘Sister Solace? She’s a long shot.’ He plucks Mam’s fiver from her and she hands him another.

‘Put them both on her,’ Mam says. ‘I like the sound of her name.’

‘It’s form you go for, you daft woman. Not the bloody name.’

Mam’s laughing, ruffling his hair. ‘Do as I say, Denny. Sister Solace.’

‘All right, Bridge. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.’ Then he’s kissing her goodbye and he’s gone and it’s ‘Cut to the Race’.

Mam and I are watching it on TV. The horses pound from the stalls, going for broke, the ground thundering under their hooves. Their necks stretch out and their behinds bulge with brown muscle and you can see the pale gold one, Sister Solace, straggling. Mam’s cursing. Then, from nowhere, she’s there, up at the front. The voice of the man who’s talking over them goes up an octave –
‘And it’s Sister Solace on the outside, it’s Sister Solace
.…’ – and Mam’s standing, her fist pumping the air, and she’s shouting, ‘Go, girl!’ So I stand and shout too and Sister Solace goes flying, pale and smooth, ahead of the rest, and it’s a miracle the way she’s nearing the finish, will she topple or burst, no, she’s there, first past the post. Mam’s jumping, saying it’s champagne tonight, praise
be, I’m her own best girl. And she’s putting on ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)’, her favourite song, and pouring her drink with the clicking ice cubes. ‘To Sister Solace,’ she croons. She jiggles around the sky house and opens the balcony door to let in the breeze.
Travel the world and the seven seas
. It’s so clear you can see the white dome of St Paul’s and I’m wriggling and jiggling alongside Mam, copying her mini palm-dives. She jives and spins and claps and so do I. I don’t know when my heart felt more like a firework, bursting into a thousand golden coins.

‘Is it money enough for Ireland, Mam? Is it?’

‘It is, Holl. More than enough. Enough for a diamond jewel. Enough for a brand-new bed. Whatever. We’re rich.’

‘But will we go to Ireland, now, Mam? Will we?’

‘Yes, course we will, Holl.’

And I’m imagining running in the green fields through the silky rain, breathing in pints of soft fresh air and throwing the sticks in the black river. We’re off to Ireland, we are.

‘Will that man ever come home, so we can see the colour of our money?’ Mam croons, and pours another. The sky-house lifts are whirring, coming up towards us. ‘Is that him now?’ Mam says. ‘Is it?’

Holl. Quick
.

Above me, a board creaked. I jolted awake. The sounds of the sky house vanished and I was back on those strange stairs in the small hours. I was curled higgledy-piggledy, my cheek pressed to the wig. A thin
light was creeping in from the front door. I heard a footstep above me, then another.

Holl. Quick. Get. Out of here
.

A door opened. There was a grunt, whether a man or a woman I wasn’t sure, but in a second they’d turn the light on and I’d be caught.

I grabbed my things and scrambled down the stairs. I banged my knee against the table at the bottom.

‘Hey! You!’

A man’s voice, not Tony’s, someone older.

I was at the front door, fumbling at knobs and handles, getting nowhere. The lights came on.

‘I’ll call the police!’

I got the door open and scrambled out, groaning with the bad knee.

‘Stop! You!’

He was coming down after me. I forgot the knee and ran out blindly, down the path, down the street and out onto a main road, and the knee-bang didn’t hurt I ran so hard. I ran until I was out of breath and then some more, and then I switched to the pavement and walked again and the knee-hurt came back.

When I looked over my shoulder, nobody was following. I got my breath back. It was quiet, half dark, half light. I was by a bus shelter, so I sat down.

Everything was grey. No birds. No cars.

There were grass patches on the sides of the roads. The houses were big and more spread out. The trees didn’t move. Cold air played around my nose.

I thought of the house and the smell and Tony’s
roving hands and the stairs and the man who’d shouted at me and how it was my birthday and nobody knew, and I cried. I cried like I’d been caught, even though I hadn’t.

Somewhere in my head, Mammy was crying right alongside me.
Travel the world and the seven seas
, she sang over her empty glass.
Everybody’s looking for something
.

But Denny didn’t come that day. I remembered now. No champagne, no party, no tickets to Ireland. All I could see through that cracked old movie lens was Mam’s empty glass tipped over by her side and the left-over ice in it melting, and me, putting my own self to bed, crawling under the duvet with Rosabel up by my face, humming ‘Sweet Dreams’ over and over. And no sign of Denny-boy anywhere.

Twenty-two
A Walk Through the Dawn

Was I a mess.

A bird started up in a bush behind me. He was chirping away for all England. I wiped my face on my sleeve.

You can’t go to Ireland in this state
, I told myself.

I brushed out the wig and put it on. Then I got my doll-pink lipstick out, and my little mirror. I saw hair jumbled, my own baby-fine brown showing under the blonde, and my eyes red and small nose shining. I straightened out the wig and brushed it down again. I dusted down the dress. I did the lips and dabbed the face.

Then I remembered the iPod in my bag. I put the earphones in to end the silence.

I sat there nodding to my favourite tracks. I thought of Ryan with his rolling-pin grin, then Tony with his beer-breath. I tried to put him in the trash part of my brain where you recycle things, but he kept popping back with his raunchy face and bleary one eye. And then his face was like the mask face in the
museum, and then like Denny-boy’s. So I turned the music up louder, but no matter how loud I played it, there he was, eye-patch and all.

Was I glad he hadn’t got my dress off.

There’s only one person who I’d let near me in that way and he was nowhere close. And I’m not going to talk about him.

I got myself up and walked on down the road. My back was to the dawn, so I reckoned I was heading west and west was the right way for Ireland. I walked to the soft beat of Storm Alert. It was like everyone in the world was dead except for me.

Then, over the music, I heard a slow car approaching from behind. I tensed up. Maybe the driver was checking me out. A kerb-crawler. The trouble with being an all-time slim-slam glamour girl is it gets you noticed. The car kept crawling and I walked faster. It reminded me of the night I got busted. It was after the bouncer at the club turned me away. Trim said,
Let’s all go hooking
. That way we’d raise money and go gambling and end up millionaires. Grace knew all about sex. She told me her stepdad was her first boyfriend and that’s what had landed her in care-babes-ville. So that night with Trim she picked up a cruiser in a shiny suit and red car straight off. She came out five minutes later with a tenner, only she wouldn’t give it to Trim and he went wild and made me go hooking next. I stood on a corner, hip jutting out, tossing my head like Grace had, and a car slowed. But instead of a sex-hungry man it was the police. They stopped and took me away. They asked who I was with, but I didn’t tell
on Trim and Grace. I said I was working the street alone. And that’s how I got sent to the secure unit and it was one bad time.

It was bad now. This car cruising alongside me wouldn’t shift. I didn’t look over. I started nodding my head to the music and punching the air like a mad person. Mad people and hooking don’t go together, I reckoned. I hopped and poked like crazy. And you know what? It worked. The car zoomed past and away and was I glad.

So if you’re
ever
bothered by a crawler, you know what to do.

Then I kept up a good pace even though my head was thumping it faster than the music. Houses. Grass. Trees. Pavement.
Thud-thud
. My head ached, my eyelids felt like sandpaper. I took the earphones out and kept going. Two cars raced past, like they were chasing. I got to an underpass. Up over a dingy bridge, traffic zoomed by in spurts. I saw a slip road leading up to it and I sat down on a grassy bank near there for a rest. It was damp with dew but I didn’t care.

Grace came and sat next to me, her face and lashes long.

Some bridge, Holly
.

Yeah.

Some height
.

Yeah. So?

You ask me what I’d do if I were you? I’d go up there and jump
.

That was Grace, always going on about topping herself. Sod off, Grace. Lemon-head.

Her long lashes vanished.

I was left on my own. I pictured going up the slip road and onto the bridge, saying goodbye to the world and leaping off. How would that feel, the dropping and the car tyres and the ground zooming up and hitting every bit of me?

My French teacher at school told this story once about this mademoiselle who was heart-broke. She goes up the Arc de Triomphe in the middle of Paris to jump off and end it all. Only she comes down on a big white van and her legs go through and she breaks them both and gets done by the van insurance for the damage and is ruined and crippled for life and not one bit dead. I remember thinking that pills and booze is the way to go if you’ve half a brain. Grace has tried nail scissors and starvation and got nowhere. But she doesn’t even have a quarter-brain.