Solace of the Road (19 page)

Sian laughed. ‘First time I ever heard Carmarthen described like that,’ she said. ‘If you ask me, it’s a dump-hole. Whatever the light.’

‘That’s what Mam says. She says it’s worse than a Holy Day of Obligation.’

‘What’s a Holy Day of Obligation?’

‘It’s a Catholic thing. Irish. It’s a day when if you don’t go to church, you go to hell.’

‘Sounds bad.’

‘Yeah. Mam says that about all the things she doesn’t like. Elevators. Thunder and lightning. London. And her old boyfriends.’

‘I must tell my own fellow that next time he plays up.’ Sian giggled and I joined in. And suddenly we couldn’t stop laughing. It was like Mam was in the back seat with her flowery perfume and we were all in a getaway car, Solace and Sian and Mrs Bridget Hogan.

I could have driven all night and day in that car with Sian but soon we pulled up at the bus station.

‘You know your way?’ she called as I climbed out.

‘Yeah, Sian. Ta.’

Sian smiled, then yawned. ‘Tired before I start. Great.’

‘You gotta work through the night?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Night duty pays better.’

‘That’s what Mam used to say.’

‘Oh?’

‘She did night duty too.’

‘Nursing, was it?’

‘No. Dancing.’

Sian’s eyes went impressed. ‘Really?’

‘She’s retired now. From the stage.’ I twisted the strap of the lizard. ‘She just dances in the garden these days. Around the lawn. Under the washing line. When no one’s looking.’

‘Ballet or modern?’

‘Modern mostly. Exotic.’

‘Exotic? Like in a nightclub?’

‘Yeah. But only posh nightclubs. Knightsbridge, mostly. That’s why we lived near Harrods. Nothing seedy.’

‘Sounds great. Do you dance too?’

‘Nah.’

‘Shame. You’ve got the figure for it.’

‘D’you really think so?’

‘Yeah. A dancer if ever I saw one. But you’d best get home, Solace. It’s late.’

I said goodbye, closed the door and smiled.
You’ve got the figure for it
. I felt my slim-slam hips and thought of Grace saying I should lose ten pounds and how my neck was too thick, not like hers, which looked like somebody’d stretched it. Not to mention my miserable hair.

Sian drove off, waving. Her little car bucked as it drove down the street. I waved back.
So long, Sian
. It was like she heard, the way she hooted a reply.

The simplest lift of all time. I hadn’t even had to hitch, and what can be safer than a ride with a nurse, even one that might run you over with her drugs trolley?

Thirty-seven
Carmarthen

Sian’s car vanished and I pictured Mam in a green garden, neck and legs long, a shirt flapping on the washing line and her dancing with it like it was a partner.

‘Mind out the way,’ a bloke said, knocking into me as he hurried by. I looked at where I was. A dump-hole was right. I was in a dismal square with bus stops and cracked glass and stray people wandering around like the undead. I walked along, but Mam wouldn’t leave my head. Her eyes were sad and she was stripping –not her clothes, just the amber ring. She was moving it up and down her finger, again and again, then holding it out to me.

I found a place to buy chips and curry sauce and bolted them down. It was Phil’s money I used, or most of it. The change I stuffed in my skater-top pocket. I felt bad. Phil wasn’t your usual truck driver, he was a vegan in whom God had taken up residence. But I’d have starved otherwise.

I got a drink from a dirty tap in the public toilet
and changed back into the heels. Bad move. I staggered down a hill with damp paving stones and nearly went flying. So I sat down on a wall near a car park and put the trainers on again. Was I sick of those high heels. Maybe it was how I’d stolen them from charity made them bite back. I kicked them away into the gutter.

The first streetlamp came on and made me look up. That’s when I saw the police station, right opposite.

Bet there’s a police report out now, with a full description
.

I wondered if maybe going in there would be better than sitting on that wall in that wind in the dark in Carmarthen, with the undead wandering around.

Then I thought I needed a police cell like I needed a broken jaw.

No one was looking. I took out the wig and put it on so I could go back to being brave, unstoppable Solace. I gave it a good brush down and stroked the fringe tidy and walked back the way I’d come.

Then I found another phone box. I went in and arranged the lizard on the shelf and picked the receiver up and put it to my ear while people chased by, and I opened and shut my mouth like I was having an all-time hilarious phone-festival with my best mate. I talked and laughed up a storm even though there was nobody on the other end.

First I yattered away to Miko, then Grace, then Trim. Then Karuna. I even said ‘Hi’ to mad Max the bell-ringer. Then I thought I’d say a quick hello to Fiona.

‘Hi there, Fee.’

Holly – is that you?
(Fiona, frantic.)

‘Yeah. Hi ’n’ all. Been a while.’

Holly! Where’ve you been? We’ve been out of our minds
.

‘Dunno. Just cruising, having a ball. You know what it’s like.’

Holly. Come on home. Please, Holly. We’re missing you. Ray and me. Missing you, missing …

Yeah, in my dreams. I stared at the receiver. By now Fiona and Ray would have given up on me. Ray would have got his job up north and they’d be packing their bags. I shivered. I stroked the smooth fake skin of the lizard on the phone shelf and I remembered Fiona buying it that time in the market, down Tooting Broadway. It wasn’t from Harrods, like I told Sian, and it wasn’t from Mam. It was a gift from Fiona. I’d been trailing behind her as she pushed through the crowds on Tooting Broadway, shopping, and I’d stopped by the handbag stall, my favourite. I was doting on the bags shaped like animals – kangaroos, and cats, even a curled snake – and the ones with bright flowers sewn on and a lime-green one that made my hands itch. Fiona turned round and saw me looking. She smiled. She walked back towards me. The sun was on her face. She popped her sunglasses up onto her head.

‘You always stop here, Holly,’ she said. ‘Every time.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You like that one?’

‘Yeah.’ I moved my hand from the lime-green to
feel a bag that was hairy like a coconut. ‘Mam used to say you could tell a well-dressed lady by the bag on her arm,’ I said.

‘Really?’ Fiona looked over her shoulder at the battered black backpack she used for shopping. ‘That counts me out.’

Next I stroked a bag made from fake tiger skin.

‘Maybe you prefer that one?’ Fiona said.

It reminded me of how our sofa looked in the sky house and I nearly said yes. Then I remembered how Denny-boy used to loll on it, his lip plopping in his sleep.

‘Nah. I like that one best.’ I pointed up to where the lizard was hanging, dangling and catching the light. I’d had my eye on it all along. It was a class act: silver-green with back straps and three zips with leather pulls like forked tongues and the skin crinkled and cracked like a real lizard.

Fiona grinned. ‘It’s wild,’ she said. ‘Original.’

She reached and unhooked it and the stall lady said it was nine pounds, but we could have it for eight.

I knew Grace would have killed for that bag on account of she adored reptiles of all kinds and dreamed of having a pet snake draped round her neck. I got out my purse and looked to see how much I had, but Fiona put her hand over mine.

‘Holly,’ she said. ‘My treat.’

‘But my birthday’s ages away.’

‘We’ll call it an un-birthday present then.’ She handed over the money and the stall lady passed the bag to me and I took it and hitched it on my shoulder
and put my purse inside it safe. The lizard slid into place like it belonged.

‘It looks great,’ Fiona said. ‘Striking.’

It felt like Christmas on that busy street with the teeming pavements. I grabbed the strap and did up a zip. ‘Ta, Fee,’ I said. ‘Ta a load.’ Fee was what Ray called her. I’d never called her that before, it just came out.

Fiona’s lips went in between her teeth and she looked away. Her hand skirted my arm, then dropped to her side. She smiled and stepped back into the passing crowd. ‘Let’s get on with the shopping, Holl,’ she said. I walked behind her, stroking the lizard and thinking of all the different compartments and what I could put in them. I forgot to be angry that Fiona’d called me Holl. I was walking on air all down Tooting Broadway.

The phone receiver sat in my hand with no Fiona at the end of it. I slammed it down. The lizard was sprawled on the shelf, looking tired. The zip fasteners had frayed a little and the sheen had been dampened down some in the rain. Outside all the streetlamps had come on, and the crowds rushed past like time had speeded up. Fiona was going, going, gone. It wasn’t Tooting out there, but Carmarthen, Wales’s oldest town.

Thirty-eight
The Station Platform

I nearly went back to the police station then. I imagined myself going in and saying to the sergeant on the desk how I was a runaway and I had chaotic high support needs and could they take me in please and send me home. Only there’d be a case conference and everyone would say how I’d broken my promise not to run away again and I’d get twenty-eight days renewable, like Trim, and I’d rather have died.

It’s for your own good, Holly
. Everyone said that except Miko, who always used to be on my side, whatever. Miko raved on about how he was wild in his youth, worse than us lot. Once he spent a night in jail for being drunk. When the police made him take everything out of his pockets, he turned out twelve conkers that he’d collected after drinking a bottle of whisky. He said how he’d given up the booze five years ago just before his liver packed up, but he still had to go to meetings and promise to stay sober.

To get out of the secure unit I’d had to make promises too. Not to run away. Not to go hooking on
the streets. I was so desperate to get out I’d have sworn to become a nun. I had to make my words real by writing them down. Then they let me out. And now, because I’d broken that promise, I could make ten promises and they’d never believe me again. I was finished.

I walked on into the crowd and past the pubs and the empty shops and under a clock with a face lit up cheerful. I wanted to smash it like I’d wanted to smash the windows on Mercutia Road the day I left. I saw a bottle in the gutter and picked it up.

Then the minute hand clicked to eleven o’clock. The clock whirred and started chiming.
Dong-dong
. Less loud than Big Ben, louder than Fiona and Ray’s tick-tock-no-luck carriage clock. I smashed the bottle on the kerb instead and kicked the shards onto the road.

Just what are you so angry about, Holly?
It was Miko’s voice, so loud in my thoughts I nearly jumped.

Dunno, Miko
, I replied in my head.
Different stuff
.

If you ask me, it’s the same old thing, over and over, Holly, the same old story …

I went on down dark streets, walking in circles, and my anger turned scared and sad.

’
S dark
, I thought.

’
S cold
.

Gotta find somewhere to hole up
.

Homeless people wrap themselves up in cardboard and curl up under bridges and pee against the walls like dogs. I didn’t fancy it.

I thought of better places. I made a list in my head.

Churches

Cinemas

Sheds

Houses where the curtains aren’t drawn, showing how the owners are on holiday

Churches get locked up at night, like the one I’d tried earlier. Cinemas chuck you out after the last show. Sheds are good but you have to break into them. Same goes for houses where the people are gone. Knowing my luck, I’d get caught breaking in by the people returning right at the wrong time.

Then I turned a corner and saw a sign for the train station.

The train station. That’s it
.

Miko had told me about sleeping rough in stations when he was on the road and cash-free, as he put it. He said how he’d snuggled into his sleeping bag on the concourse along with the homeless and raving weirdos, and how the trains left and arrived in the night and a woman kept calling out the stops, and nobody hassled him.
I washed and brushed up the next morning in the gents, Holly. I pretended it was the Ritz
.

I smiled, thinking of Miko shaving his chin in the grimy mirror, acting like he was out of the top drawer. I followed the sign and found the station. The ticket office was shut and nobody was around. You could just walk through to the platforms. I stood looking at the train timetables like a serious traveller planning my next move. That’s how I found out about the late-night train. What I saw was:

CARMARTHEN 00.47
FISHGUARD HARBOUR 01.40

For a minute I thought it was a midday train. Then I saw how it had to mean 47 minutes after midnight. Then I thought it must just be a Saturday or Sunday train. Then I thought maybe it was an old timetable and no train would really come at a time like that when I was the only one on the platform and there was no guard to check my ticket. Then I thought I didn’t know what platform it would stop at. And 00.47 was ages away.

But inside my skin, I’d livened up something serious.
That train is your fate
, I told myself.
Fishguard is your birthday present
.

I crossed over and walked up along the other platform, where I’d spotted an electronic sign. The amber message said the next train was the 00.47 to Fishguard Harbour.
Told you. A train with your name on it
. I sat on a cold bench and did my lips. I had one hour and thirty-nine minutes to wait. I put Storm Alert on and hugged myself and stamped my feet while Drew sang in my ear: ‘Somebody’s Working Late’. I’d never caught on to this track before, but now I did. I played it three times over. Then I thought of Ray, in his office, working late into the night, north of the river. He was hunched over his desk with the reading lamp on and Fiona was chafing at home, waiting. I skipped to the next track.