Solace of the Road (20 page)

The cold got into my bones. I took out the earphones. My nose was dripping. Part of me was on that
bench, and part of me was back down the road I came. I had to keep pinching myself so I didn’t drop off the seat and then I’d look down the dark track and think,
I’m gonna be here for ev-er. I’m gonna be here for ev-er. For ev-er
.

I could get down and lie on that track on those things they call sleepers
, I thought.
And I could sleep on the sleepers. Sleeping slipping on the sleepers sleeeeeep-slipslip—

I started in a fright and pinched myself. I’d been looking down on the track, almost falling onto it. The train would’ve come and gone over me and I’d have been scrambled eggs, only I wouldn’t have known it. I wouldn’t have known anything ever again.

I kept pacing the platform.

Then a rumble came in the distance. At first I thought it was thunder. Then I thought of the old trains in movies, how steam rises around the wheels. I listened. The noise stopped and I thought I’d imagined it.

No. There it is again
.

A light went from red to green. Electricity hissed down the rails. I peered into the dark and saw lozenges of light coming round a bend, getting closer.

It won’t stop
, I thought.

A carriage whizzed past. It was first class, with fancy lamps and curtains and a woman reading. It didn’t look like stopping. Then the brakes screeched. Another carriage passed, then another. The train slowed and stopped with a jerk and a shiver.

I heard a door slam somewhere up the front but I
didn’t see anyone. I was down the other end, facing right up to a big metal door handle, as if it had stopped there especially for me, my birthday present. I pressed it down. The heavy door opened.

Inside it was dim and damp. Warm air curled round me, pulling me in. I stepped up and closed the door behind me. A second later, the train glided and the station platform fell away.

Thirty-nine
On the Dream Train

I huddled in the corridor, thinking,
If I get caught, that’s it
. The time I’d run away on a train before, I’d only got as far as East Croydon, then I’d had to turn myself in because the raving drunk men on the train scared me. Drunken men are prone to lurching around the corridors of trains, it’s a fact. But on this train there was nobody. It was just the engine and the hiss of the wheels and the dark shadows running over the floor and walls and ceiling. Maybe I was the only person on the train. Maybe there wasn’t a driver, even. Me and the dream train, hurtling off the face of the earth.

Then a man with a baseball cap approached. I froze. You could tell he was Irish, straight off. I remembered from long ago, those early years in Ireland, how the faces on the street were, men lounging on the bridge, women pushing buggies. It felt far off, but the faces were like his and it was home. The man nodded as he walked towards me. His eyes were red. He was no raving drunk, just a fellow needing sleep, same as I did. He broke the spell.

‘Is it free?’ he said.

I thought he meant the train ride. ‘Free?’ ‘The toilet?’ His accent!
Fray. Tye-lit
. He pointed and I saw I was standing by a toilet door that said
VACANT
.

I smiled. ‘Yeah. Sure.’

I moved aside and he went in. I went along the way he’d come and stepped over the wonky bit between the carriages. The doors slid apart and I was in a long compartment. There were people scattered, not many. Two murmuring. One snoring. Empty coffee cups. A woman had her arm around a small boy whose head was tucked in her armpit, and even though he was only six or so, he was as Irish as the man I’d just seen. He was sleeping with his mouth open and he had freckles on his nose. His mam was reading and yawning and she shifted, careful so he wouldn’t wake. She blew on his hair so the fringe lifted and she smiled, like he was her own private treasure. She didn’t see me walk by. She was in a whole other world.

It was like I didn’t exist the way nobody looked at me.

Trim used to say how joy-riding the trains is easy-ville. You dodge the ticket man by moving around, and if you get nervous you lock yourself in the bog. Trim said how he’d been all over England, up to Newcastle where his younger brother was in a foster home, and down to Gravesend where his real dad was and where it’s even worse than it sounds, he said. He’d never paid a penny. First you get through the ticket barrier by saying you’ve been separated from your mum and you
pretend to panic. Then you get on the train and do the dodging. Then you get off and say your mum’s already gone through the barrier with all the tickets, and you point to a woman who’s walking away with a brood of kids. They always believe you, according to Trim. But then you can’t trust Trim, Mr I-Was-Born-on-an-Aeroplane.

I kept walking, nervous, expecting the ticket man to pounce.

Up the next corridor I saw a man lurking who looked like a guard maybe, so I dashed back the way I’d come. Somebody had opened the window a crack and it was cold. I shivered. Then I saw that the toilet said
VACANT
again so I locked myself in.

I breathed. I looked in the mirror. Apart from my lipstick mirror, I’d not seen myself in ages.

Do you know what I saw?

It was enough to make a willow weep, big time.

The glamour girl had gone. I looked more like a crackhead who’d just been dragged backwards through a hedge. I was all blotchy cheeks, smudges, hair mish-mashed clumps of blonde and brown and mud stains on my collar. My eyes and nose were red and itching and I’d bitten my lips so much they were bleeding. My hand shook as I got the brush out. I took the wig off. First I brushed my own hair, then I cupped the wig over my fist and brushed it. I washed my face. I took out my toothbrush but realized I had no toothpaste. I tried to wipe my collar, only the mud smudged. Then I sat on the toilet seat and cried. The tears made my eyes worse, but I couldn’t stop.

Miko was beside me like he used to be at the Home when I’d had an almighty smash-up.
Cry all you like, Holly. Because when you stop crying the world will be a different place. A better place. Promise, Holly
.

But this time Miko was wrong. If I stopped crying, nothing would change. The light in the toilet would still be sick-green, and the girl in the mirror sick-green too. She looked at me, and suddenly I saw little Holly again, way back when in the sky house with the falling-down socks and the gold stars from school. A whistle blew and the train swerved and I hung onto the sink edge to stop from falling.
Help
, the girl in the mirror called to me.
Help me. Somebody. Please
. I put a hand out and touched her, and it was as if together we were being dragged back into the sky house, for real this time.

The paint’s peeling. A bad smell is coming off the walls. I’m creeping along the hall towards the voices. Mammy and Denny, arguing again. I can hear Mam wailing, ‘You spent all our winnings, what more do you want?’ Up a level, then down, like the sound of the lifts, but coming from the kitchen. I stand at the doorway. Mam has egg and bacon going in the pan, shaking it round, perched up on the bar stool Denny’s got us from a skip. It’s like she’s too tired to stand. She has her see-through drink in one hand and the spatula in the other, and she’s wearing her black dressing gown and her salmon-pink slip and she’s scowling.

‘I’d rather a liquid dinner,’ Denny grumbles, knocking her arm.

‘Gerroff,’ Mam snaps. ‘I’ve gone and broken the yolk.’

‘Can’t stand it when the yolk’s broke, Bridge.’ Denny turns and looks at me. He raises his eyes to heaven. ‘She’s the worst cook ever to come out of County Cork. Isn’t she, H?’ That’s what he calls me now. Not Doll or Troll, just H. He pronounces it ‘Haitch’, the Irish way.

‘Go brush your teeth, Holl. Scram.’ That’s Mam speaking. She hands Denny a plate. ‘Get away, the pair of you. I’ve got to iron my blouse.’

Iron my blouse. Iron my blouse
. The train speeds up and Mam’s words whirl around with the wheels. Then Denny’s shouting.
Money. Bitch. Liar. Out
. A clapping sound, a chair falling. I’m in the sky-house bathroom now, hunched up over the sink, and I’m scared. The voices have never been this loud before. Never. I squeeze out the toothpaste but the tube’s gone flat and none comes out. So I take it through to Mam again, back up the hall. She’s in the lounge now, at the ironing, tottering on her high heels, doing the blouse, the one I like. It’s red with yellow embroidery on the collar and cuffs, and on the back there’s a dragon and at the front tiny buttons sweep from left to right. She’s jabbing the iron round and ignoring Denny, who’s still yelling. He stands with the plate askew and the chair’s fallen over with its legs in the air and the egg yolk on his plate oozes to the edge.

‘Mammy.’ They turn and stare at me. ‘The toothpaste’s gone.’ I hold out the tube.

‘Go squeeze it some more,’ Mam snaps. Then she
laughs like a madwoman. ‘Straighten the old thinga-majig out. Go to the bottom, Holl, and work slowly up. Get to it.’

She doubles over and Denny roars like we’re in a pantomime.

‘Jeez, Bridge,’ he wheezes. ‘Social services will get you, talking smut to your daughter like that.’

They’re shrieking with laughter and I don’t know why.

‘Get lost, Holl. Bed now,’ Mam snorts.

She’s telling me to go, so I do. I’m staggering out of the train toilet, back into the corridor. I’m at the open window, breathing the cold air, but I can still hear the voices from the sky house, rising and rising. The train loops and then another one comes
bang up
against us, flying lines of bright metal, and am I dead? No, I’m not. The lights of the other train whisk by, nearer, then further – we’re lurching like drunks, and there’s Mam’s face across the rails in a compartment in the other train. I can see her plainly now. She’s looking over my shoulder to something else she’s wanting more. And Denny’s beside her and they’re pointing, wavering, splitting their sides laughing, and the yolk’s dripping off the plate and I’m gripping the wig and then the last of the other train goes
swoosh
, and gone, they’re all gone.

Forty
Hurry, Hurry, Holly Hogan

The train slowed and the sky house vanished. From somewhere down the corridor a guard’s voice called, ‘Have your tickets ready, please.’ I bolted back into the toilet. I stared in the mirror and the face I saw was chalk-white. I ran some hot water and dabbed it on. The reflection misted over and drops of water scuttled down the glass.

‘Mammy?’ I whispered. ‘That wasn’t you, was it?’

The train swerved and braked.

My face appeared through the mist, crooked in the water drops.

I got a paper towel and cleaned the mirror. The breeze from the open window had skewed the wig so I put it straight. I saw the amber ring glinting as I smoothed the ash-blonde locks.
Wrong. Mam’s face. She’s not like that. Not. Cross it out
. I tried to scratch a cross on the mirror with the ring. But it didn’t work. Nothing I could do would send that memory-picture of Denny and Mam away to the place where forgotten things belong. I sat on the toilet seat and kneaded the ring.

Take it, Holly. Keep it safe
.

My heart slowed down and I breathed.
That
was my mam’s voice. Not the other, mocking one.
Safe. Safe
. Somebody fiddled with the toilet door, but I didn’t care. Then the train stopped. It was silent. No doors slammed so I knew it wasn’t a station, just a stop in the middle of nowhere. I took the amber ring off and stared at the mark it left on my finger.
They’d chop your finger off for a ring like that
. I dropped it back into the front lizard pocket, safe. ‘There, Mam,’ I whispered, zipping it in. ‘It’s safe again.’

A voice came over a speaker:
‘We will shortly be arriving at Fishguard Harbour. Please ensure you have all your belongings when leaving the train.’
With a groan the train started again. I picked up the lizard, opened the toilet door and looked out. People had gathered in the corridor, standing with cases and backpacks strewn around their feet. I stepped over a holdall to find a free bit of space and put the lizard down. The train speeded up, then slowed, and finally we jerked to a stop on a silent platform.

A man put his arm out the window and released the outside handle. One by one we shuffled out. I was last. The air was cool to the cheek. Somewhere above my head came a mournful cry – a seagull who’d forgotten to go to sleep.

You could smell the sea but you couldn’t hear it.

Fishguard
, I thought.
Is this real?
I drifted down the platform and nobody stopped me. Along a ramp. Around a corner. Down a corridor. I came to a queue to board the boat. That’s where every last one of us
was heading. The boat. Every step brought us closer.
Soon
, I thought.
We’ll be sailing away into a dream. Soon
.

Then I came bang up against a guard checking the tickets. I froze.
Point to a woman with kids ahead of you
, Trim’s voice told me.
Say you’re with her
. But there wasn’t any woman. The woman I’d seen with the small boy sleeping earlier was nowhere. Anyway, I didn’t look like a kid myself, not with the wig on. I was too grown up for that trick.

‘Ticket?’ said the guard.

I looked at him like I didn’t understand.

‘Your ticket? Where is it?’

I stared at him staring at me and thought,
That’s it
.

‘Your ticket, love. I – need – to – see – it,’ the guard said like I was stupid.

Slowly I went to get the lizard off my shoulder. Maybe I could just open up all the compartments and pretend how I’d lost the ticket. Maybe – my hand groped my shoulder and the familiar strap wasn’t there. The lizard had gone. It wasn’t on the ground by my feet. It was nowhere.

‘My bag!’ I gasped. ‘It’s gone.’

The guard sighed like he’d seen it all before. ‘Did you leave it on the train? Up on the rack, maybe?’