Triskellion (2 page)

The cat in the basket mewled and the lady looked up, catching Rachel watching her. They exchanged another prim smile.

“He has been to the veterinary surgeon to have his stitches removed,” the lady said. She pronounced every vowel sound and consonant with great care, as though she were practising her English.

“Oh. Right,” Rachel replied, really none the wiser.

“I have six cats,” the old lady continued. “This is Danny Boy, like the song, then there’s Ozymandias, Marmalade, Mr Kipps, Orlando, and Rum Tum Tugger. You know, from the T. S. Eliot…?”

Rachel smiled and nodded, confused by the list and its mysterious associations.

“We can’t have cats. It’s against the rules of our building.”

The old lady nodded, equally uncertain of Rachel’s
meaning, and cast her eyes back to her knitting.

The ice had been broken, but the heat in the carriage was becoming almost unbearable. The air blowing in through the open wedge of window felt like a hairdryer. Adam pulled out his earphones and lifted his cap to reveal a mop of thick brown hair plastered to his head with sweat. Rachel smirked, causing him to urgently ruffle his hair into a semblance of its normal, shaggy style – simultaneously pushing out his lower lip with his tongue as a rebuke to Rachel.

“It’s terribly close…”

Adam almost jumped. The lady was speaking to him and had turned her pointed nose in his direction, catching him pulling faces.

“Excuse me?”

“It’s terribly close,” she repeated, dabbing at her cheeks with a tiny lace handkerchief.

Adam was stumped. What was close? Their destination? Christmas? He looked at Rachel, who immediately developed a keen interest in grazing sheep and looked out of the window, containing a smile.

“Is it?” Adam asked the old lady.

“It is.” The lady nodded to him and returned to her knitting. Adam felt the need to reply. He thought he ought to be polite to this old-fashioned person who spoke like the queen.

“Um. Thank you.”

The lady nodded and her needles clicked on in time to the clatter of the train wheels over the track. Sensing the
conversation to be over, Adam plugged his earphones back in, back to his world where a thrashing guitar quickly lulled him to sleep in the afternoon heat.

For the second time, Rachel was shaken awake by the crash of the carriage door. Looking across, she saw that Adam had dropped off too, but knew it would take something a lot louder than that to wake her brother.

The old lady and her cat had gone. This must have been her stop.

Rachel looked out of the window at an empty platform and craned her neck to see the name of the station. A little way down the platform a red, enamelled sign announced itself.

Rachel’s heart lurched. The name had so much resonance. A place their mother had spoken of since they were old enough to understand. The place where their mother was born, the place she had left, but a place that Rachel and Adam had never seen.

She leaned across and began to shake her brother awake.

A
dam heaved his backpack on to his shoulder and stood blinking in the afternoon sun, eyes still puffy from sleep. Rachel watched the small train rattle off into the distance, then turned and looked along the empty platform. There was no sign of the old lady with the cat, or anyone else for that matter. Someone must have been there to pick the old lady up. So, would anyone be…?

“No one meeting us?” grunted Adam, reading Rachel’s thoughts, as he often did.

“Let’s try the parking lot,” Rachel said. “Gran
must
have arranged
something
.” She shouldered her bag and they walked along the platform towards the sign that said
Way Out
.

“Way out,” Adam read, putting on a drawling Californian accent, extracting as much meaning from the two words as possible.

They walked past a red-brick waiting room with clapboard walls and thick, burgundy and cream paintwork. The etched
glass windows and doors were detailed with an odd-looking symbol of some sort. Rachel thought it was an unlikely logo for a rail company. She decided it was probably a crest, or whatever one of those things was called; maybe the coat of arms for some local aristocratic family. She knew that kind of thing still went on in England, with whole estates, towns even, belonging to a single duke or lord or Sir Whatever.

“Everything’s so clean…” Rachel looked at the spotless platform and the gleaming brass of the unoccupied ticket desk.

“Could always tag it.” Adam took a thick, black marker from the pocket of his backpack and waved it at Rachel.

“Don’t even—”

“Just kidding.” Adam waggled his pen between finger and thumb like a cigar.

They turned the corner into a gravel car park with enough parking spaces for three cars, all vacant. They dropped their bags and stood there, silent in the heat, neither keen to admit their disappointment, their confusion, and the fact that they hadn’t the faintest idea what they should do next. Rachel stared out beyond the car park at the lane, at the canopy of trees that hung over it and the lush hill beyond, still green despite the months of sun. She stood on tiptoe, willing a taxi, or a tractor, or
anything
to come.

“You got Gran’s number?” Adam said. “Let’s call her.”

Rachel took her phone from her backpack and switched it on. Waited. “No signal,” she said.

“Great.” Adam studied the scuffed toe of his Vans, wishing he’d brought his skateboard after all. He kicked the gravel, scuffing the toe a little more and felt a fraction better.

He looked at his sister staring into the middle distance, chewing her lower lip as she always did when she was nervous. Rachel’s slight overbite stopped short of making her look goofy – of course, she’d worn braces, but her teeth were still not completely regular. In fact, Adam thought they made her look pretty, though he’d never tell her that. With her heavy ringlets of dark chestnut hair and freckles, Adam thought how old-fashioned his sister looked. She didn’t seem out of place in this environment, and although, as her twin, he shared some of the same characteristics, he imagined that somehow they conspired in him to look more … well, modern.

Rachel sensed her brother’s gaze and turned to face him, looking into his eyes, reading
his
thoughts, which, despite their inevitable rows, was always a great comfort to her. As one, they turned and walked back towards the station house, then immediately stopped in their tracks again. Propped against the front of the station wall was a pair of old-fashioned bicycles, and pinned to the noticeboard above them was a large, brown envelope.

On it was written:
Rachel and Adam Newman
.

Rachel tore down the envelope. “At least we’re expected. And the good news is we have transportation.”

“Bad news is … this is it,” Adam said. “Check out the
dorky baskets on the front,” he moaned, testing the rusty handlebars of the old bike.

Rachel unfolded a piece of paper from the envelope. “We’ve got a map. Everything’s going to be OK.”

Rachel studied the hand-drawn directions. In large letters across the bottom was written “Triskellion”. Above it, along with various other landmarks, a simple route was drawn from the station to their grandmother’s house, Root Cottage, which had been marked on the map with a bold, red “X”.

Rachel and Adam’s spirits lifted. Things were definitely looking up.

Ten minutes later, they were forcing the heavy bikes up the last metre to the brow of the hill above Triskellion. Panting and pouring with sweat, they stopped for a moment to get their breath and survey the village below. It was exactly as described on the map and, from Rachel and Adam’s viewpoint, it appeared on almost the same scale: the church there, above the village green; the big house on the opposite hill; the plain, dotted with scrub and dry-stone walls; the woods; and the moorland stretching into the far distance beyond.

The lane was completely quiet, save for the faint buzzing of bees. Rachel took a swig from what was now a bottle of warm spring water. She screwed up her nose and offered it to her brother who, rather than drink it, poured the remainder over his head, shaking his hair at her like a wet dog.

They looked down at the lane below, where the trees
overhung the road to such a degree that they almost formed a tunnel down into the village. Shafts of sunlight sliced through the gaps in the foliage and cut through the shade like lasers.

Rachel studied the map for a few seconds then looked up and pointed. “Gran’s place is down there on the other side of the village,” she said. “You ready?”

Adam, his face dripping with water, stood high on his pedals and edged the bike forward until gravity took over and forced it over the brow of the hill. The old machine gathered speed quickly and Adam freewheeled into the cool, green tunnel.

“Geronimooooo…”

It was exactly what their dad would have said, Rachel thought.

She grabbed tight on to the handlebars, and followed her brother down the hill into the cool darkness.

T
hey cycled slowly past a sign asking drivers to take care, past another that
told
them to, and a third welcoming them warmly to Triskellion, and announcing that the village was twinned with somewhere unpronounceable in Germany.

“We should come back later with a camera,” Adam shouted. “Get someone to take a picture of us under the part that says ‘twinned’.”

They came into the village alongside the green, a lush expanse of closely cut grass that must have been five hundred metres across. Geraniums and pansies crowded the beds at intervals on every side, and hanging baskets overflowing with flowers hung outside each shop on the narrow High Street, and from every one of the old-fashioned lampposts.

“Someone’s got green fingers,” Rachel said.

They pedalled sedately past a butcher’s shop, an ironmonger’s and a small general store. They stared into the
window of the post office as they went by, and the greengrocer’s, before slowing to a virtual stop when they arrived at a dead end at the bottom of the High Street.

They freewheeled in circles for a few seconds, looking at each other, both thinking the same thing; thinking that it was so incredibly weird, and both equally afraid to say it.

It was only ten minutes, but still in the time since they’d first ridden into the village, they hadn’t seen anyone. Not one single soul.

Triskellion was deserted.

“Maybe it’s lunchtime,” Adam suggested.

“Or teatime. Or something.”

“Don’t they have half-day closing? Maybe that’s it.”

“You’re right.” Rachel nodded in an effort to convince herself as much as Adam. “That’s probably it.”

The day seemed to be growing hotter by the minute and by the time they leant the bikes up against a bench on the edge of the village green and dumped their backpacks, the sweat was pouring from both of them.

“I need a drink,” Adam said. He pointed towards the butcher’s shop and began to walk towards it. “Maybe I can get a Coke in there.”

“Duh! They sell meat,” Rachel said.

Adam shrugged. “You drink Coke with a burger, right?”