“Jaysus, no!” he shouted, thumping his fist against the tinny roof.
Feeling himself cave in under his own stupidity and fatigue, he put his forehead against the rim of the open door and groaned. He didn’t want to have to think about what to do next. He wanted to stay there until someone came and told him to move—or, better still, moved him themselves. He banged his head a couple of times and groaned again. The forecourt attendant looked at him through her safety glass with disdain.
Then, as he leaned inside to get his credit cards to pay through the nose for the tank full of fuel that would now screw the engine and render it useless, the old Motorola phone that had been lying in its death throes on his passenger seat bleeped.
“What bloody now?” he sighed, fumbling with the buttons. There was one bar left on the battery. Message. Read Now? OK. The machine didn’t do anything as useful as display caller identity, of course.
“AM COMING ON MY OWN TO LONDON TO GET U. DON’T TELL MUM. TRAIN GETS IN AT 6. C U AT YR FLAT. LUV MAYA. XXXXXXX.”
“No, I’m not there,” he shouted in the emptiness of the van. “You stupid girl, I’m not there.”
The car behind him sounded its horn and he stuck his head out to scowl. When he stuck it back in, the phone screen had gone blank. He switched it on again, swearing heavily, and it made the feeblest of noises before shutting down a second time. The battery had used the last drop of its power on getting Maya’s message through to him, and he knew exactly where he had last seen his recharger: it was on the Welsh dresser at Bodinnick. Of course it bloody was.
The van wouldn’t move, not even off the forecourt, so after paying up, he pushed it single-handedly over to the air and water and went to find a telephone.
“It’s out of order,” the girl in the red polo shirt unpacking crisps told him after five minutes of watching him try.
“Can I borrow yours, then? This is urgent.”
“What number do you want?” she sighed.
Which was when he realized he didn’t know. He had no idea which phone Maya had used but in any case all the numbers he needed were in the address book in his mobile, which was flat. Of course it bloody was. Bodinnick, he thought, call Bodinnick, tell Emmy. But as he pressed the numbers, he remembered with a piercing ache behind his eyes that Maya had asked him not to. She had given him her trust. “Don’t tell Mum,” she’d said. So he couldn’t. He didn’t have enough of her trust at the moment to fritter it away.
Back at the van, not caring that he was both behaving and looking like a madman, he pulled out his bike and started searching in the boxes and cases for his helmet. But he couldn’t find it, could he? And nor would he. It was still on a fence post in the rest area at Boxtree. Well, of course it bloody was.
Under normal circumstances, he would have given up. He would have decided to write the day off and start again tomorrow. He would have gone and had a pint somewhere to think about it. But the thought of Maya setting off to get him and arriving at an empty flat didn’t make him feel normal or thirsty or resigned at all, so he walked out onto the road, stuck out his thumb and looked so desperate for help that the next truck that passed actually stopped and gave him a lift to the nearest station.
* * *
At Bodinnick, Emmy was trying not to let her new sense of achievement be smothered by her old creeping sense of failure. The house felt almost tragically empty. No Kat, no Cathal, no Mog or Dean or Nathan, no Niall, and now she couldn’t find Maya. The place was so quiet. No newborn squeals, no music from Niall’s room, no children fighting.
“Is anyone inside?” she shouted, her voice echoing around the new kitchen. Slate absorbed nothing. Perhaps that was why Toby chose the lino in the first place, to stop himself feeling so alone. Perhaps if she ended up living here on her own, she would start laying the lino back. There was usually a reason behind a reason behind a reason, she knew that now.
“Maya?”
She wasn’t downstairs, but then nor should she be on a day like this.
Emmy found herself walking to the pond, a bubble of panic rising just slightly inside her, but this time the boat was on its side by the bullrushes where Maya had left it and the surface of the water was perfectly still, like glass. Cathal’s footprints were visible in the dark, damp earth and she put her own foot in one, just for the hell of it. She looked at the brown expanse, noticed a few new waterlilies and could hardly believe that the unraveling of her secret was only a week ago.
It was too beautiful to go inside, so she walked over to the chapel, across the daisies and the buttercups and the clover, noting that the track Jonathan had worn was disappearing again. She opened the door and heard it scrape the floor one more time. It smelled fresh and happy in there, as if it was relieved to be left to its own devices again, now that it was in better shape.
On the way back, she looked in the rhododendron bushes, behind the crumbling brick walls, in the farmer’s empty barn and up the track, in all the dens and concealed corners where she knew her daughter had been spending too much time hiding lately.
In the top field, next to the bonfire remains, she saw Sita and Jonathan with their children, flying a kite, and she wandered over.
“Have you seen Maya?”
“I thought she was with you.”
As she went back in through the front door, she looked at the patch of oil on the gravel drive and smiled to think of Culworthy-King’s apoplectic face. She wouldn’t have sold Bodinnick to people like the ones in his car, anyway. They looked the sort who might favor carriage lamps, or even put up a real conservatory.
“Maya?” she called half-heartedly up the stairs. “Maya?”
At least the emptiness wasn’t inside her anymore. The overwhelming relief at Cathal’s retreat had killed that, like the lancing of some ghastly boil.
We must be bloody mad not to make a go of this, she thought, admiring her newly exposed hall floor for the umpteenth time. From the table where the phone she had once been so frightened of ringing now sat silently, she picked up the glossy property particulars. Jay had defaced them already, crossing out words like “elegant” and “well-presented” and putting ones like “drafty” and “damp” in their place. Even without his added noughts, the price was ridiculous. Not half as ridiculous as we’ll all feel back in London, she thought.
“Maya?” she called again as she walked up the stairs. “Where are you?”
She walked past Niall’s space, and thought she could smell the faintest whiff of Camel cigarette smoke. I’ll go and throw out that packet of Silk Cut on my dressing table, she decided. Then I’ll suggest a barbecue on the beach and we’ll go and have a look at some surfboards. It was a good plan. It could have been perfect. But thirty seconds after that, she found Maya’s note.
* * *
“Has Niall called you at all?” Cathal asked his mother over the phone from Bristol.
“No, why? Should he have?”
“No, I just wondered.”
“Wondered what?”
“Oh, just wondered.”
“I may be old, Cathal,” she said, “but I’m not stupid yet. Best you tell me.”
“Are you sure you want to hear it?”
“If I don’t hear it, I’ll imagine it.”
So she heard it, from start to finish.
“Who are you concerned for? Your brother or your daughter?” his mother asked without admonishment.
“My brother,” he mumbled, knowing it was the answer she wanted to hear.
“Then get on with it. Find him and put it right.”
“How?”
“You’ll find a way. Start with London. Make him talk to you. Tell him I say he has to.”
“Should I not leave him to calm down for a while?”
“No,” Mary O’Connor said emphatically. “You don’t let the sun go down on this one, Cathal. Remember what I said. The thing is, we all think we have the time.”
* * *
The moment of discovery came just as Maya was
putting the last chocolate in her mouth, but she was nearer London than she had hoped, so it didn’t matter that she lost it somewhere in the bedclothes.
“Maya! God, don’t do that to me.”
Mog was standing in the doorway to the pit with Nathan attached to her left breast, his head covered by her stripy long-sleeved T-shirt. She had negotiated the walk down the length of the bus well, only having knocked her baby-free side once on the kitchen partition.
“Sorry.”
“Did you fall asleep?”
“No. I tried but it was too hot.” Maya was beaming, pleased to have someone to talk to after so long, but Mog looked worried, embarrassed, a bit disconcerted.
“Didn’t you feel us moving? We’ve been traveling for hours.”
“Yes, but…”
“Don’t worry, don’t worry, it’s okay. We can easily turn round. We’re not in a hurry.”
“No.” Maya climbed out, steadying herself against the wooden doorframe as the bus turned a corner. “You don’t understand. I meant to come with you. I’m a stowaway.”
“You are?” Mog didn’t know how to tell her she couldn’t be. She didn’t want to be rude, not after all the help Maya’s family had offered.
“Only as far as a train station. I’m going to London.”
“You are?”
“If that’s not too much trouble.”
“Does Emmy know?” Mog asked, but she knew damn well Emmy did not.
“Not exactly,” Maya said cautiously.
“So you’ve run away?”
“Not exactly.”
Mog looked at her out of the corner of one eye. She saw a glimpse of herself in the child, a lack of fear and a self-taught independence. As she opened one of the two cartons of value orange juice left over from the send-off and poured juice into a chipped mug, she asked, “And what else is ‘not exactly’?”
* * *
Cathal was so used to seeing ten-year-old girls in the street and imagining that they were Maya that when the ten-year-old girl in Niall’s street really was Maya, he barely reacted.
He was sitting in his car, which was parked illegally on double yellows outside his brother’s former council flat near Tower Bridge, wondering how much longer he should wait before he gave it up as a bad job.
He didn’t immediately recognize Maya’s orange and purple hat, the one he had last seen lying in a puddle in the bottom of a yellow dinghy, but why should he? He had been placing her in Cornwall, in the garden, on her bike. In fact, it wasn’t until he watched her press the intercom and put her mouth close to it that he came to.
“Hiya, Maya,” he said, out of breath. He’d made the same joke a few times in Cornwall. That they might be friends was about the best he could hope for.
She looked at him blankly at first. The tube from Waterloo had been busier than she remembered and the smell and noise were horrible. She could feel the fumes going up her nose and staying there. Everyone looked different. They all had gray or spotty skin and no one looked at you. She’d been beginning to wonder if she had shrunk in Cornwall, because London hadn’t been this big when she lived here. And she’d begun to feel even smaller when Niall hadn’t answered her ring.
“Cathal!” she said, dropping her bag at her feet.
There was no triangular formation this time, just a nice simple straight line.
“Are you all right, darling?” The parental concern was out before he could stop it.
“Fine, thanks.” Well, she was now.
“What are you doing here?” Did she know?
“I’ve come to get Niall.”
“So have I.”
“Is he expecting you?”
“No. Is he expecting you?”
“I don’t know. I sent him a message but he hasn’t replied.”
“Bit of a last-minute thing, was it?”
“Bit.”
“You’ve come to get him? Where are you taking him?” He put his finger on the intercom too.
“Back to Cornwall.”
“You came here on your own?” The penny was beginning to drop.
“Yes.”
“Good journey?”
“Fine, thanks.” She jiggled around, holding her legs together. “I wish he’d hurry up and answer. I’m bursting to go to the loo.”
Cathal looked around. “Why don’t we go over the road and get a pizza? You could go in there, and we can see from the window if he turns up.”
“I’m not hungry. I’ve been eating those chocolate ladybirds you gave me all day.”
“You kept them a long time.”
“I know. I kept them for emergencies.”
“And this is an emergency, is it?”
“You tell me,” she said. She sounded so old.
“I think it probably is,” he said truthfully.
They started to walk, but Cathal suddenly realized they had to do something else first. He had just seen it all from another point of view.
“Let’s just tell your mum you’re here, that you bumped into me, yeah? I’ve got my phone in the car. It’s all charged up. It won’t take a minute.”
“I’ve spoken to her already.”
“When?”
“On the train. She called me. I’ve got her phone.”
“She ought to know you’re here, with me.”
“No, I don’t think so,” Maya said, shaking her head.
“I think we should.”
“It’ll just make her worry more. She’ll think we arranged it.”
“Well, we’ll just have to tell her we didn’t, won’t we? We can’t all carry on like this. It’s mad.”
“I know.”
“She needs to know you’re safe. I need her to know you’re safe.”
“Can we do it from the restaurant? Otherwise I’m going to pee all over the pavement.”
* * *
Emmy asked the guard why the train was going so slowly.
“Track repairs,” he said, not lifting his eyes from punching her ticket.
“What, still?”
“It’s not my fault. You want a safe network, don’t you?”
She of all people did. She remembered a long-ago nightmare, of Jonathan shouting, “Carriage C, Carriage C,” and of her and Maya dying in the wreckage to the sound of mobile phones and being matched in the emergency morgue by their identical crooked little fingers. She thought of the question they all used to ask themselves: If this was our time, would we have died happy?
“Yes, I do,” she told the guard. “Tell the driver to go as slow as he needs.”
“That’s very kind of you,” he replied sarcastically. “I’m sure he’ll appreciate your permission.”
Emmy wished she had thought of changing from the clothes she had worn for Mog and Dean’s send-off, a ridiculously upbeat mix of a tight green silk camisole top, a pink ruffle-neck jersey cardigan, and cut-off jeans she had trimmed with a length of silver-beaded fringe. It had been a conscious display of effort, wanting to show everyone that she was making tracks to get back on course, ready to make the most of what they had left. But now she felt ludicrous. She fiddled with her cardigan, trying to pull it surreptitiously across to cover her breasts. She put her ticket back in her sheepskin backpack and had the last slug of Rescue Remedy. Maya’s note was in there, too.
She tried to stop imagining walking the streets of London with a photograph of Maya in her hand, accosting tramps and policemen to ask if they had seen her, to stop seeing her daughter’s face on the front page of the Evening Standard and on the television news. It was willful self-torture, not least because she already knew Maya was safe. God bless mobiles!
Maya had been absolutely in control. “I’m on a train,” she’d said. “I know how to get to Niall’s, and I’ll phone you when I get there.” Which should be about now. According to Mog, her daughter could only be about two hours ahead.
Poor Mog had been so apologetic when she’d phoned Bodinnick. “I’m sorry. She wouldn’t let me call until she
was on the train.”
“At least you’ve kept your promise to her. That’s more than most of us have done. Did she say anything about why she’s gone?” Emmy asked.
“Well, just that she wanted Niall.”
“That’s all?”
“I got the impression that was enough.” She left out the rest. It was too complicated to simplify, and anyway Mog thought she owed it to Emmy to let her hear it firsthand.
The train chugged out of the tunnel and meandered along the Devon coast. Emmy had no choice. She would just have to put her faith in a ten-year-old. She looked at Sita’s mobile. Any minute now it might leap into life and tell her all was well. As soon as it did that, it wouldn’t matter how slowly the bloody train went. In the meantime, she just had to trust Maya to get it right. It wasn’t as if she was Asha. She had negotiated the tube on her own to Niall’s a few times before. She had defiance, she had money, she had her own two feet. But still Emmy imagined the tramps. Lesser fates never occurred to her.
She sat back, rested her head against the window, and looked out at the orange cliffs and the fishing boats on the murky green sea, wishing she had the peace of mind to enjoy them.
* * *
“Do you like olives?” Maya asked Cathal.
Neither of them had looked across the road for ages. They had forgotten why they were there. It was nothing to do with eating pizza or needing the loo or seeking sanctuary from the rain. It was as if whatever they had been waiting for had arrived, even though they had only just got hold of the menu.
“I love them. Do you?”
“Yes, but only the black ones.”
“Oh, the green ones are horrible.”
“Yuck! Do you like pepperoni?”
Eggshell Days Page 29