All around were people, pushing, pressing, crowding round the train departure screens, running for the platforms, hauling luggage and children after them, shoving people out of the way. The tension made the air thick, harder to breathe. Harder to think. Queues snaked around the concourse and back on themselves.
‘Keep hold of my hand, Billie. Don’t let go.’
I was dizzy. Everything was too bright, too loud.
I started to push through the crowd, back towards the entrance to the station, needing to get back outside to the air, the rain. It was impossible to breathe now and the noise all around was almost drowned out by the roar in my head. But I couldn’t fight through and the bulk of the rucksack on my back slowed me down and kept knocking into people around me. A woman carrying a baby in a sling swore at me and I might have apologized or yelled at her but my throat felt too tight to do either. Eventually I reached a wall by a sandwich shop, its shelves picked clean, and leaned my head against the cool of the stone.
‘Clem?’ Billie’s voice was far away. I tried to speak but I couldn’t.
I couldn’t do this.
I couldn’t be here.
I couldn’t leave Dad.
We had to get out of the station.
But then what? There was nowhere else to go.
The crowd noise pulsated, loud, quiet, close then far away, like a tide. I breathed and counted like one of the post-Mum shrinks had taught me to. In for six, out for eight. In for six—
‘You all right?’
A tall woman with beaded braids was peering at me through thick glasses.
I nodded, still unable to speak.
‘Here.’ She held out a bottle of water. I tried to nod or smile or something. She watched me fail to open the bottle and gently took it back, returning it open. I managed to gulp the water, felt the cold of it inside me. I was real. I was here. I breathed in and out. Took another gulp. Wiped my mouth.
‘Better?’ she said.
I nodded.
‘Here,’ she said. ‘Take this.’
She handed me a plastic pot of pallid fruit salad and a cellophane-wrapped square of cake.
‘No,’ I managed to say. ‘I’m fine. Really.’
She pressed it into my hand. ‘The sugar will help,’ she said and smiled at me before turning and disappearing into the crowd.
‘Thank you,’ I tried to call after her, but she was gone.
The hours before we could get on a train blurred, till they were only the ache in my hips and back from standing for so long, the throb inside my head of the endless loop of threatening tannoy announcements, the readiness always for the surge and crush of people when the barriers opened. The constant effort of keeping the panic inside me. Every so often people would be searched, hauled away. I found myself looking away in case their bad luck was catching and because I couldn’t help wondering who they were, if they’d actually done anything wrong, if people they loved would be waiting for them somewhere and worrying when they didn’t show up. I hated myself for looking away. I felt sick and shaky as we got near the barrier, but in the end no one asked for ID and we were through and time sped up.
Trying now to run down the platform past carriage after carriage packed full of people, slowed by the weight on my back, Billie’s hand holding mine, as the whistle blew…
Desperately cramming into the damp heat of the last, packed carriage just before the doors locked shut and at last the train moved slowly out of the station, the people who hadn’t got on sliding backwards, away from us, out of sight…
Breathing. Breathing.
I was so relieved to be on the train that it wasn’t until long after we’d left the station and trundled out through the graffiti-covered bridges, past the empty, glass-walled offices, the tower blocks of the city, and then the lawns and trampolines and washing lines of the suburbs, not until there was nothing but fields and sky, that I realized our home was gone. I’d missed it as we’d trundled onwards. I’d let it slip away without noticing, without saying goodbye. That was the first time I wondered whether I’d ever see it again.
Then there were more hours spent at a grey, non-descript station on the edge of a grey, non-descript town, busy but not as bad as London, before finally, in the early evening, getting on another slow, meandering train that would eventually get us to Grandpa’s.
This train was almost empty and we sat at a table. Billie stretched out on the seats opposite, her head on my rolled-up coat, and slept. I wished I could call Dad or message him to tell him we’d made it; we were on the train.
I wished I knew whether he was safe too.
Wherever he was, our train was creaking and jolting through the night taking us far away from him. The darkness all around felt overwhelmingly huge, stretching out for ever in all directions, and we were lost in it. I had a flash of an out-of-place memory of visiting the Science Museum with Mum and Dad when I was a little kid. I could only have been five at most, but I don’t have many memories of the three of us on days out together so I suppose that’s why it stuck. Dad couldn’t wait to show me all the old rockets and space modules. Some of them really did look like something you’d make at primary school, a lemonade bottle wrapped in tin foil, just bigger, a tin can, with bits bolted onto it like Meccano. Then Mum and Dad had a row, which had started on the Tube on the way there, continued in the café, and came to a head in Space.
Dad went outside to smoke because he was angry and I sat with Mum among the weird-looking rockets. She became more interested in them once Dad had gone.
‘Imagine it,’ Mum said. ‘Going to space. In that. Not knowing if you’d make it there, let alone back again.’
I did imagine it. It made me feel a bit sick.
‘I’d do it in a heartbeat, wouldn’t you?’ Mum said.
My heart beat. It beat again. I wasn’t like Mum. I wanted to be, but the thought of the astronauts, with all of space and time around them and no gravity to hold them down, made me feel like I needed to hold on to something.
‘What if you just floated off, into nothing?’ I said to her.
‘I know.’ Mum’s eyes went all faraway, as though the idea was just that tiny bit tempting.
That’s how I feel now: small, cut loose, lost in something too big.
Stop with the melodrama, I told myself. You’re on a train going to Grandpa’s. Just like you used to.
But I hadn’t spoken to Grandpa in months. I remembered the times he’d waited for me on the platform, waving, smiling, in bright scarf, woolly hat and garish jacket in winter, Hawaiian shorts and sandals with stripy socks in summer. This time Grandpa didn’t even know I was coming. This time he wouldn’t be waiting. This time Granny wouldn’t be there. I tried to imagine Grandpa without her and failed.
The last time I’d been to the village was for Granny’s funeral, two years ago. It seemed like in another life. Dad had driven us. I’d felt sick all the way there, at the loss of Granny. But more than that, secretly, I was wondering if Mum would be at the funeral. I’d tried not to be distracted by the thought. But I was shaking as I walked into the crematorium, at the thought of seeing her again. I needn’t have worried. She was just as not there as ever. I cried silently all through the service. Grandpa didn’t cry. He just looked confused, as though he’d walked into a room and then couldn’t remember why. I’d held his hand, which was shaking. That had made me sadder even than Granny.
Someone in the village had organized a wake at the pub afterwards but we couldn’t stay because Dad needed to get back. ‘Will he be okay?’ I eventually managed to ask Dad when we stopped at a service station for coffee. Dad sighed. ‘Maybe not for a while. But he’s lucky being in the village. He’s got people around to look out for him. Friends and neighbours. They’ll see he’s all right. And you can go and visit him soon.’
But I hadn’t gone. Grandpa had made excuses when I suggested it. ‘Give him time,’ Dad said. But he never wanted to chat when I called. And then he stopped replying to my messages and my calls.
Grandpa had always been my rescuer, always picked up the pieces, made sense of things. He’d done that a lot after Mum had left. Could he do it now? It didn’t seem possible.
I shivered. The carriage was empty now except for an older woman who was reading and had a cat in a carrier. Would she think we looked suspicious? I was so exhausted I felt danger could be anywhere, everywhere. But the woman didn’t even look at us, just made soothing noises to her cat and read her book. I tried to stay awake, to stay on guard, but I felt my eyelids drooping, snapping awake as my head nodded forward. I drifted into darkness and patchy dreams. I was in space, alone, floating. I looked for stars but there weren’t any. Just darkness and me, floating… No! Not floating. Falling. I tried to grab hold of something but there was nothing to save me, just nothing and more nothing—
And now there were shapes in the darkness. A different fear settled on my skin, on my blind eyes. This dark place wasn’t somewhere vast and full of nothing. It was somewhere small and full of shadows, the air warm and damp like breath. Not in space at all. Underground. Trapped. And what else was here with me in the dark—
‘Clem,’ Billie said. ‘Clem!’
‘Billie,’ I tried to say, foggy with sleep, forcing my eyes open.
She was sitting up in her seat. ‘You were asleep,’ she said accusingly over the table in between us. ‘You shouldn’t sleep.’
‘Right.’
But it wasn’t right. I looked out of the window and I didn’t know where we were. It was still dark. Not night dark. Tunnel dark. It was closed in around us, noisy and black.
‘Hold my hand,’ I said to Billie, my voice slow and slurring, but the noise of the train in the tunnel drowned me out. I reached out to her but instead of hands there were feathers. She had wings and I was falling again, with a feather in my hand, holding it as tight as I could—
‘Oh,’ I thought in my dream. ‘It’s still a dream.’
I forced my eyes open again. I saw Billie stretched out, asleep on the seats opposite, her head on my folded coat. I breathed, in and out, gripping the cold edges of the table, till my heartbeat slowed to the rhythm of the trundling train.
‘It was just a dream,’ I said.
The woman with the cat looked up at me for a moment but then went back to her book.
Billie didn’t stir.
I told myself it was the wind making my eyes sting as we stood in the midnight stillness outside the station. It was colder here than in London and so quiet that the silence seemed loud. Back home, I was so used to the constant background hum of traffic and police sirens and planes that I didn’t notice it. Now its absence made my skin prickle. There was no one around. No one at the ticket office. No one stumbling out of the pub or driving home from whatever it is that people do in the evening in places like this. Had it always been like this or were there curfews here too? I realized I’d been expecting nothing to have changed here, away from the city, but now I wondered.
Dad had said, ‘Don’t draw attention to yourself, you know what villages are like, all those nosy parkers twitching their net curtains. They could teach Toby Knight a thing or two about Community Surveillance – they invented it.’
Mischa had asked me once what it was like in Granny and Grandpa’s village.
‘Imagine if Narnia and the place where hobbits live had a baby. That’s what it’s like,’ I told her. ‘You know how Americans imagine any bit of England that isn’t London? It’s exactly that.’
Mischa nodded. ‘So, cute cottages and pointless feuds and general bigotry?’
‘No!’ I was shocked. ‘It’s not like that. It’s just pretty. The people are nice. It’s quiet.’
‘It is like that,’ Mischa said. ‘Believe me. Those places exist everywhere. My grandparents’ village is like that too.’
Was that where Mischa was now? Please let her be there. Let her be moaning about the lack of WiFi and coffee shops. Let her be alive.
I shivered.
‘Come on,’ I said to Billie, trying to sound brisk and like a proper grown-up. But my voice just sounded small, swallowed up by the night. ‘We’ll warm up once we’re walking.’ I was anxious to get moving. There might be curfew patrols, even here. The quicker we got to Grandpa’s the better.
I looked at the map Dad had put in a pocket of the rucksack. Grandpa’s village was the next one over, forest and farmland between. A single road joined them, the road Grandpa usually drove us along in his ancient Mini, always with the roof down because it was the only time I got to ride in a convertible, always playing jazz really loud because the CD had got stuck in the player sometime in the last millennium and (Grandpa claimed) the volume control was broken. When Grandpa drove it it had seemed no distance at all. But now, walking, I realized I had no real idea of how far it was. I knew it would be much quicker if we cut through the forest. I’d done that walk with Grandpa before, in the daytime, in summer, with a picnic. The thought of the forest at this time of night was very different. We’d stick to the road.
I wrestled the weight of the rucksack to sit more comfortably on my back, my breath puffing out in front of me.
‘Come on,’ I said to Billie. ‘The sooner we get going, the sooner we’ll be there.’
We walked down the High Street, still eerily quiet, but we tried to keep to the shadows anyway. We followed the road to where the new houses straggled on the edge of the village and then on to where the road got darker. It was hard to see anything once the street lights ended. I stopped and felt around in the rucksack, praying Dad had packed a torch. He had. We started walking again.
The moon was hidden behind thick cloud. Billie lagged behind. Her feet hurt. Her hands were cold. It was too far.
‘Are we nearly there?’
‘No, of course not,’ I said, trying not to sound impatient.
‘But I’m tiiiired.’
‘I know,’ I snapped. ‘You know how I know? Because I’m tired too. Also, because you keep whining on about it.’ I felt bad about snapping then. I didn’t look at Billie. My heels had blistered and the pain had become agonizing as the skin peeled off. Each step made it worse.
‘I felt a raindrop,’ Billie said.
‘No you didn’t.’
‘I did. And another one.’
Fat, undeniable raindrops started to fall, multiplying till the air was filled with them.
Seriously? We were wearing jackets but they weren’t waterproof and the rain was so heavy that in a few seconds we’d be soaked. There were raincoats in the rucksack but if I tried to get them out here they’d be wet before we even got them on.
As I was thinking this I heard a car engine coming towards us fast. The glare of its headlights turned the streaks of rain silver for a second and we had to jump sideways into the thorny hedge to get out of the way.
I was breathing hard as the car disappeared.
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s get off the road. We’ll go through the forest.’
Billie looked at me through the rain.
‘Won’t it be dark?’
‘I mean, yes. But it’ll be dry. Drier than here.’
‘But there might be wolves.’
‘There are no wolves in this country,’ I said.
‘There might be witches.’
‘Billie,’ I said, ‘there won’t be witches.’
‘How do you know?’
I sighed. ‘There might be owls.’
She said nothing.
‘Come on. It’ll be an adventure,’ I said, trying to sound like someone who likes adventures. I did my best to push thoughts of axe murderers and evil forest spirits and witches out of my mind.
Polly watches me closely as I tell her about our journey.
She isn’t sure about my story now. I can see it in her eyes, although her face still shows the same kind, attentive expression it always does when she’s listening to me. Her eyes say: What aren’t you telling me? What are you telling me that I shouldn’t believe?
Does she know? Can she guess?
I don’t know.
But I’m good at stories.
Stories build cities and grow forests and make people appear from empty air.
They’re a good place to hide.
But Polly knows this. Coming, ready or not.
‘Carry on, Clem,’ she says. ‘We have time. Tell me more.’