The Missing Link (12 page)

‘Come on let’s have it,’ he went on. ‘New regulations. Essential journeys only.’

I was sure that our bus ride wasn’t going to happen after all, but Tina was still on the ball.

‘We’re all in boarding school in Ireland,’ she said.

‘Boarding school in Ireland?’ The conductor laughed, and so did the driver. ‘What are they teaching you there? Hod carrying?’

My blood boiled. I was suddenly determined to get on that bus, even though I didn’t want to. ‘I’ll have you know,’ I said, ‘that the Irish education system . . .’

‘All right, all right,’ said the conductor. ‘I don’t believe it for a minute, but you get ten out of ten for the story.’

He issued our tickets, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet. As I handed him the money, I said, ‘Ireland’s main export these days is brains.’

‘I’m sure of it,’ he said, sorting out my change. ‘All ground up and made into sausages.’

I was still fuming as we went down the aisle and filled the back seats, but we were aboard, and that was what mattered.

5

AND IN INVERNESS
, we got our own back. When we got off the bus with Oggy in full view beside us, it was the conductor’s turn to go red in the face.

‘Hey,’ he spluttered. ‘Who said you could bring that dog on the bus!’

‘But it’s off we’re bringing him, surr,’ I said, in my best stage-Irish brogue.

And Tina said, ‘Bejasus it’s the dog. ’Twas the pig I thought I was hiding!’

We tumbled on to the footpath and Danny’s toneless laughter made everyone stare, which made us crease up even harder. We laughed until our ribs ached and our eyes ran. But it was the last laugh we were to have for quite a while.

Because Inverness was a nightmare.

There were soldiers in the streets, hugging their rifles to their chests like precious toys. Young men in small groups hurled abuse at them in accents too thick for me to understand. It reminded me of Belfast during the Troubles, except that this was worse, because it wasn’t all safely on television. I was like Chauncey Gardener in
Being There
. I wanted to point my remote and switch them all off. But these
soldiers
were real and their guns were not new and shiny, but worn and well-used.

To my horror, Tina showed her usual disregard for authority. She marched up to a young soldier who was leaning against a wall and said, ‘What’s going on?’

When he didn’t answer she turned on the charm, showing him her empty hands and making ‘help me’ faces.

‘Civil unrest,’ he said at last, turning away from her. ‘Peace-keeping duties. Now clear off.’

We cleared off and, foolishly, followed the signs for the City Centre. I think we had an idea that we might find a café or a supermarket. But all we found was trouble.

The first crowd we came across were queuing for bread. Above the assembled heads we could see the high sides of a pantechnicon. It was plastered with notices saying:
ONLY ONE LOAF PER HEAD
and
ONE POUND PER LOAF
. Ahead of us we saw a small child drop a pound coin and scramble for it among the milling feet. Quicker than a flash, Darling darted in and retrieved it, and Tina dropped it into the astonished child’s hand.

Despite our lack of provisions, we quickly ruled out joining the bread queue. We decided to retrace our steps to the bus station, and took a side street leading away from the crowds. But halfway down it we ran into more trouble. A soldier was harassing a woman who had somehow managed to get hold of several of the rationed loaves. We were watching in a kind of
shocked
stupor when a group of lads came to her rescue and began pelting the soldier with stones. He lowered his rifle. Danny clutched my arm, and Oggy dived into another side street. We followed, Tina and I, crouching instinctively and drawing Danny down with us.

There was no firing, but we didn’t turn back. Instead we kept going, away from the centre and the bus station, heading for anywhere that might be free of mobs and soldiers. But in no time at all we ran into more trouble.

6

DARLING, KEEPING A
lookout from the air, dropped down to warn us.

‘Looks bad,’ she whispered. ‘Big crowds approaching.’

‘From where?’ I said.

‘From everywhere,’ she said. ‘I can’t see any way out.’

‘More bread queues?’ I asked. But it wasn’t. A moment later, we were in the middle of it. Angry multitudes were marching on the town centre behind banners which read:
SCOTLAND IS STARVING
and
WE DEMAND RESPONSIBLE GOVERNMENT
.

A television crew with a hand-held camera hopped backwards ahead of the marchers and nearly collided with us as we glued ourselves to the wall. As they squeezed past us, people trod on our feet and kicked our ankles, and Oggy got dribbled along like a football for several metres before he managed to break free and weave his way back.

I was worried about Danny, but he didn’t seem to be bothered by the crowds. He was smiling at everyone he met and offering them handshakes. Some people steered clear, put off
by
his strange appearance. But others smiled back and shook his offered hand heartily.

Tina grabbed a woman by the elbow and asked her what was happening.

‘It’s those fat slobs in Edinburgh,’ she said, pointing down at the ground as though the fat slobs were already being roasted in fire and brimstone. ‘They call themselves a government but they couldn’t run a dog show. There are mountains of food in the South, but the Highlands and Islands are starving!’ She was being jostled by the people behind her and her last words were called out to us as she reversed away.

‘Look at the soldiers! We might as well still be ruled by Westminster!’

Then her words were drowned, as a great roar went up somewhere behind us. I guessed that the mob had run into the bread queues and I could only imagine what the result might have been. All I knew for certain was that I wanted to be out of there. The protesters were slowing down as the head of the march came to a stop, and the crush was becoming dangerous. I grabbed Danny’s’s coat and, clinging to the wall, began to forge a slow escape.

It was as tiring as swimming through mud. When I ran out of steam, Tina took over, and whether the crowds were thinner by then or whether she just used her elbows more viciously, I don’t know. But we certainly made faster progress. Eventually, bruised and weary, we succeeded in reaching the back of the march.

We plonked ourselves down on the kerb.
Above
the rooftops a helicopter swung back and forth, surveying the crowd.

‘There’s always fuel for those things,’ said Tina, scowling up at it. ‘Any chance of a lift, Mister? Go flag him down, Darling!’

But none of us felt like laughing.

‘We should have stayed at the bus depot,’ I said. ‘We should have waited till we could get a bus going south.’

‘South?’ said Tina. ‘I thought we were going north.’

‘We were,’ I said. ‘But there’s no point, is there? You heard what that woman said. There’s no food.’

‘We have food,’ said Danny, optimistic as a small child, and, I realised, as innocent.

‘These are sweets, not food,’ I said, waving my plastic bag. ‘You know, there really isn’t any alternative. We’ll have to go back.’

‘I’m never going back,’ said Tina.

‘Never going back,’ parroted Danny.

‘But you nearly died already!’ I barked at Tina. ‘Do you want to try again? Up there in the middle of nowhere? Is that what you want?’

Tina just shrugged, and Oggy, infuriatingly, licked her face approvingly. I turned to Danny instead.

‘I don’t know why you want to go, anyway. You had everything you wanted at home. Everyone bent over backwards for you, What do you think your mother can do for you that Mom or Maurice can’t? Eh?’

Danny looked me straight in the eye, and what
he
said seemed to come from a clear place deep within; a place where he wasn’t an innocent child, but a suffering young man approaching adulthood.

‘Mother’s going to show me what I am,’ he said.

I was so frustrated that I wanted to tell him what he was: a top-heavy shambling freak, whose only worthwhile quality was a weird skill at holding his breath. But I couldn’t summon the cruelty to do it, and instead I got up and walked towards a block of phone boxes I had spotted at the end of the street.

I would have done it. I would have told them where we were, got them to pick us up or set the police on us, even the army. But the blasted line was dead. I tried another box, then another. They were all dead. Maybe there was a communications blackout because of the trouble. Or maybe it was worse. Maybe there would never be any phones again.

PART SEVEN

1

THIS TIME THERE
would be no hiding for Danny; no turning away and pretending it wasn’t there. It was broad daylight, now, and the sea was vast and bright.

We were barely out of Inverness when it came into view. Danny stopped dead in his tracks and stared. I stopped beside him and put a hand on his arm. His entire attention was taken, and his face registered acute anxiety. For a long, long time he stood there, and I was afraid to break his mesmerised state in case I nudged him the wrong way, over into a wobbler. But in the end I had to do something.

‘Come on, Danny,’ I said. ‘It’s just the sea. Let’s get on, shall we?’

I mightn’t have been there, for all the notice he took of me. He continued to stare, and I saw, or maybe I just sensed, that every one of his nerve-ends was taut and trembling.

A car passed and Tina tried to thumb it, without success. Danny didn’t even see it. The breeze was fresh and kept changing its mind about where it was going, so the waves were hitting the shore with an irregular sloshing sound.

‘Just the waves,’ I said to Danny. ‘Hear them? Whoosh, whoosh.’

‘They can’t get you,’ said Tina. ‘They’re stuck on the beach, see?’

Abruptly, Danny’s trance broke. He took a few faltering steps, then shied away violently and began to run along the edge of the road, making a distressed keening sound. I was certain he was about to loop the loop in a major way, but his attention was beyond my reach and there was nothing I could do but follow. He turned back, bumbling along the other way, and Tina and I followed again, calling uselessly after him. Again he turned, running along the road but looking the other way; out to sea.

I caught up with him. ‘What is it, Danny?’ I said.

He stopped, finally, and looked at me. His expression was full of anguish, like nothing I’d ever seen on his face before.

‘The big sea, Christie,’ he said. ‘People can’t live in it.’

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Not for long, anyway. But it can’t hurt you, Danny. It can’t come out of its bed.’

I don’t know if he heard me. ‘Can’t live in it,’ he repeated, apprehensively. ‘Can’t live in it.’

2

FOR FOUR DAYS
we trudged northwards. Few cars passed us and no buses. Not going our way, anyway. It soon became clear that the majority of traffic was headed south, and that we were swimming against the tide.

The sweets and biscuits gave us little bursts of energy but minimal nourishment, and by the end of the third day, even they were gone. Our bodies began drawing upon their reserves and produced a kind of deep, urgent hunger that I had never experienced before. Danny was the least affected, since he had more fat to live off. But I had no idea where Tina was getting the strength to continue.

In desperation, we took to begging at houses along the way. All we got in return for our humiliation was more of it; suspicion, rejection and hostility. No one had food to spare.

In the afternoon of the fourth day, a fine drizzle began which soaked us to the bone. When we spotted a house standing back off the road, we made a bee-line for it.

It was Tina’s turn to knock. We waited, but no one answered. Tina knocked again, a bit harder.
There
was still no reply, but Oggy brought news from around the back.

‘There’s no one there,’ he said. ‘But there’s a stack of wood in the shed.’

‘That’s useful,’ said Tina, caustically.

‘It is,’ said Oggy. ‘And you never know what we might find inside.’

At that moment Darling appeared around the side of the house. She had something in her bill, which she dropped carefully into my hand. It was a key.

My protestations about illegal entry were quickly overruled, and a minute later we were inside. The cottage was damp and musty, as though it had been empty for a long time, but there was a fire already set in the fireplace, waiting for the occupants to return.

Our matches were damp, but I found a lighter on the mantelpiece and set the fire-lighters blazing. Meanwhile, Tina and Oggy were searching through the kitchen cupboards, looking for something to eat. But there was nothing. Nothing at all. Whoever lived here had taken everything with them when they left.

‘At least we’ll get warm,’ I said. But my heart was in my boots as I said it. We needed more than heat if we were to survive.

We made the most of the fire, spreading out our gear to dry and airing the damp blankets we found in a cupboard. But our spirits were low and we couldn’t find anything to talk about. As
soon
as it was dark, we took ourselves up to the little, wood-walled bedrooms and settled down to sleep.

3

I WAS WOKEN
at first light by Oggy licking my face.

‘Get up, Christie,’ he whispered.

‘Why?’ I said.

‘We have to get food. You have to help me.’

I slipped out of the bed I was sharing with Danny and got dressed without waking him. As we crept downstairs, Oggy told me to go to the kitchen and fetch a sharp knife.

‘What for?’ I said.

But he just said, ‘Shh!’ and went on ahead of me to the back door.

‘I don’t like this,’ I said to him. ‘What’s the knife for, Oggy?’

He made me let him out before he answered, and then his words made my skin crawl.

‘These are jungle days, Christie,’ he said. ‘We can sit down and wait for our deaths or we can go out and profit from someone else’s.’