by Patrick Gale
Twelve o’clock came and she slipped away the cruellest way, with not even a veiled explanation or goodbye, under cover of going to the lavatory while Roxana was helping brew coffee with the boys who ran a bookshop. She would write to her, she decided, once she knew she wasn’t coming back. She had tried to leave once before – using the cover of feigned shock when they had first slept together – but hunger, lack of impetus and a disarming curiosity had driven her back after a day or two.
She jumped on the first bus that came and rode it along Rue d’Archimède to the European Commission, then caught the Metro to De Brouckere, which felt horribly close to home. She then jumped on another bus, an 87, which took her way out to beyond Berchem-ste-Agathe and a particularly horrible shopping mall near the ring road. There she had to wait on the windswept fringes of the lorry park for nearly two hours before someone pulled over who didn’t want a prostitute. Sundays were quiet and she suspected there was a bylaw limiting goods vehicle access to the city.
It was a rule of hers to trust in fate when hitching, especially when all that mattered was to leave a place. Italy. Germany. Holland. She took care to have no preference in her mind when he wound down his window but swiftly racked her mental dictionary for a shrugging Flemish ‘wherever?’ in case he was one of the rare, cussed ones who wouldn’t speak French. Ik ben gemakkelijk? Or was that sexual? Ik geef niet?
He was Scottish, headed to Dunkirk for the boat crossing to Ramsgate then on up to Dundee. His lorry announced a firm specializing in logistics, which left her none the wiser as to its load. She had heard that lorry drivers engaged in smuggling, especially the smuggling of people, were always happy to have a properly passported woman passenger join them in the cab as women were thought to convey an air of the wholesome.
So England it was, then. For the first time since she had fled Hedley’s and Oliver’s house two years ago.
The driver was fifty-something, a recent ex-smoker – that she was a non-smoker too was a condition of his giving her a lift – huge and pasty-skinned with sandy hair cut convict-short. With well-trained eyes she took in the wife and child snaps tucked into a vent in the dashboard and the little fire extinguisher she could use to cosh him if they were no more than a cover. He talked incessantly, showing no curiosity, which was a blessing, largely about people in his home village. He talked well, even amusingly, and she was beginning to think that, since she had never been north of Edinburgh, now might be the time, when he abruptly started saying how his wife had allowed him no sex for nearly a year, despite his long absences, and how he was wondering if she had turned lesbian and, if she had, did Morwenna think it would be within his human rights to ask at least to be allowed to watch.
So she deflected his enquiry amiably enough until they were safely through passport control and on to the boat, then she bought him a pie and a pint and locked herself in the ladies and read a discarded magazine until drivers were summoned back to the vehicle decks.
There were queues of cars at the other end, and lorries. She had no plans at all beyond her itch to keep travelling and could equally have hitched a lift back to the Continent or walked inland to Canterbury but then, as she began to cross the road to follow the few foot passengers struggling with their shopping into Ramsgate, a lorry parked outside the customs offices made her stop. T. H. Thomas, bulbs, seeds and nursery sundries, Madron, Cornwall its flank proclaimed, and there was the dialling code of her childhood. Being virtually an island, the west of Cornwall seemed to contain nothing but Cornish culture, Cornish lorries, Cornish people, Cornish names and numbers when you were there but they were so deeply diluted as you moved away to even halfway up the county that coming across the 01736 code or someone called Penberthy in Brussels or even London caught her attention like a waving flag. As ever she was trapped between a sharp swell of infantilizing homesickness and a keen desire to deny the familiar and walk stiffly past. The lorry was blue with sunshine-yellow, unfancy lettering. There was a painting in the same innocent yellow turning a stylized Cornish map into a cornucopia from which a bunch of daffodils was spilling.
‘Where are you headed?’
Seeing her staring, the driver had wound down his window. He looked about twenty, barely old enough to have charge of his own lorry, but perhaps it was his father’s.
‘Oh,’ she said, instantly exhausted. ‘I don’t know. Nowhere really. This reminds me of home. I grew up in Penzance.’
She had not been back there for over ten years. Had the time come finally? She felt breathless with indecision. Was this how it was supposed to happen?
‘Well we’re setting off as soon as the wife’s got the paperwork sorted in there. We’ve room for a third.’
‘Are you sure?’
As answer he opened the passenger door.
‘I … I might not go all the way there,’ she began but he was already deep back in the cab, out of hearing. She hesitated but then the wife appeared, who was even younger than him, with furry boots and a pierced nose and was so sweet and encouraging Morwenna joined them.
Having invited her to ride with them they were oddly shy of involving her in their quiet conversation. She tried to stay awake, it had always seemed a common courtesy as well as a safety measure to stay conscious when being given a lift, but the setting sun was warm on her face and bright in her eyes and the cab air was thick with the scents of dog and air freshener. She fell into a shameless sleep.
She woke a couple of times to find they had pulled into a motorway service station. The second time, the wife returned with a bacon roll for her and a cup of tea. Morwenna thanked her; unable to tell her she had not touched meat in years. The bacon was delicious, salty and slightly burnt, just as she remembered it. Fed, she fell asleep again – it was night now – and didn’t wake again until the woman, girl really, tapped her on the forearm to say they had passed Whitecross and were nearly at the turning for home.
‘Are you going to be OK from here?’
‘Of course,’ Morwenna said. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve been so rude. All I’ve done is sleep.’
‘That’s OK,’ the girl said. ‘Paul’s brother’s been on the road for a couple of years now, so it’s good to do what we can. Might bring him back, you know? Karma and that.’
She thinks I’m homeless, Morwenna thought. I suppose I am. ‘You’re very kind,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ And she repeated, ‘Thank you,’ to the young husband. As she opened the door and climbed down into the lay-by where there had always been a man selling ‘fresh’ mackerel from the back of his car, she shivered. The night air was sharp.
‘Here.’ The girl handed her down the remainder of a packet of flapjacks.
‘But I … No.’
‘All right? See you.’
The lorry pulled away with a toot of its horn and she was alone. Stilling fear with food, she tugged the little plastic tray out of the cake packet and found the couple had tucked a ten-pound note inside where a flapjack would have been. Morwenna tucked it into her pitiful wallet, ate a flapjack then began to walk.
She was just above the roundabout from where roads led off to Marazion, Helston and Penzance. Walking on the verge of a road designed only for cars, she took the Penzance route. It was half-past three in the morning, not an hour to go banging on doors and frightening people. But now that she was walking, the night was less cold and familiar sights began to draw her on. At the next roundabout she took the turning into town and again at the third so that she was soon on the pavement above the train tracks, where the miraculous fig tree had grown up from the embankment rock. Finding little changed, she walked on, following the seafront past the car park and the inner harbour – nowadays the only harbour – over the Ross Bridge, past the Scillonian and the lighthouse museum, past the lido, past the older houses clustered below St Mary’s. And there, all too soon, now that the promenade to Newlyn stretched ahead of her beneath its chains of white lights, she was at the turning for her parents’ house.
She could have woken them. Afte
r such a long absence of course she could, or simply slept in the garden or even searched in the old hiding place for a latch key, because theirs was a door that was never double-locked. But she found she was walking on above the quietly breaking waves and now she knew what she had come to do.
She walked on along the deserted road to Newlyn, where there were already signs and sounds of activity towards the harbour and fish market. The quick route now would be to turn inland as if for St Just, then to turn left at the junction with the Land’s End road – the network of roads remained bright in her mind as a diagram in a child’s textbook – but she knew she had to take the route he was taking so she went towards Sancreed the long way, up the steep hill towards Paul and then inland along the narrow lane through Chyenhal.
As the road plunged down into a valley, trees reared over it – big trees for that part of the world, their branches black against the starry sky. She walked past the spot at first, because she was too busy admiring the branches and marvelling how much you could see in the real country darkness once you got used to it. She had become too used to the never-quite-night of Brussels and had forgotten the velvety quality of true darkness and its unexpected gradations. She had forgotten how moonlight could cast a shadow.
She realized she had passed the spot when she reached the steep curve in the road which Spencer had taken so fast they nearly rolled over. She turned back. It was all more recognizable going in that direction: the oak tree and the old concrete shelf where milk churns used to be left out for collection. She touched the tree. If she had a torch she knew she would find the frowning face formed by patterns in its bark. She touched the concrete shelf. Then she sat and then lay on the concrete, just where he had ended, though huddled up for warmth unlike him. She cushioned her head in the crook of her arms and closed her eyes.
She breathed deeply and focused on the silence that was never quite silent once you listened to it. She exerted again the discipline learned in girlhood, imagining a light somewhere above her, a warm, sweet-smelling light like the kind thrown out by the finest beeswax candles only more searching and insistent. First she held Roxana in the light, imagining her soothed and healed and comforted. Then, for the first time in years, she dared to hold Petroc there.
This was far harder. Like so many woodlice disturbed at the lifting of a log, the old if-only’s skittered through her consciousness. If only I had paid more attention to what he was telling me. If only we had offered him a lift. If only I had acted my age and not been such a stupid little slut. And behind the if-only’s came the still unanswerable questions. Was I wrong to testify against them? Was it really honesty that made me say no, he’s lying because I was there with him and yes we were drunk and yes we were out of our tiny minds … Or was it simply vengefulness spurred on by shame?
She heard again Rachel’s devastating rejection of her, delivered in a toxic little hiss on the station platform so that no one else would hear or judge her.
And then, just when she was breaking under the effort, the warmth reached her as she held him in it, and quietened her and without even noticing it she slipped into sleep and dreamed of things too long unregarded.
She was woken by a pick-up speeding past with dogs barking in its open rear. The sun was up but hadn’t roused her because she’d ended up asleep with her face buried in the crook of one arm. She ached all over and was shocked to find how she had seized up from moving so little. And yet, sitting up with her legs dangling off the churn stand, combing her hair back off her face with her fingernails, she felt almost refreshed and certainly in better spirits than she had been for weeks.
It seemed she had refound a sense of purpose, if only temporarily. She breakfasted on the last flapjack and apple then sat on for a few minutes concentrating on the image she had formed of the young lorry driver and his wife and holding them in the light. But her blessing lacked the radiance it had achieved the night before; she was already preoccupied by the task ahead.
She stood, shook the crumbs and leaves off her clothes, stamped the feeling back into her feet and performed some yoga stretches, smiling serenely at a startled driver who rounded the corner and passed her, staring. Hedgerow sleepers were not the commonplace they had been once.
Then she set out again in the same direction she had been going the night before, away from Chyenhal, past one of the inland views beloved of Newlyn School painters and up to the junction with the main road at Drift. From there it was a twenty-minute walk up the Sancreed lane behind Drift which skirted the reservoir, then down a steep track into the neighbouring valley with Bosviggan’s fields on either side.
Approached from the rear like this, the farmhouse was hidden by trees but even before she could see it clearly, a violent change was evident. When they had all spent so much time there years ago, this had still been a working farm. Both Spencer and his older brother had dropped out of school to take it on from their father, who some degenerative illness had incapacitated. The business had not been thriving before – it was said that the family were stranded gypsies, not born to the land, more used to seasonal labour than the relentless slog and responsibilities of agriculture. (This had amused Hedley, who said that Troy and Spencer had television names which didn’t work in their favour locally either.) Under the sons, who had seemed so streetwise to her then but of course had been little more than teenagers showing off, the farm stumbled from crisis to crisis, propped up by the generosity of the father’s friends one month, hobbled by Troy’s latest get-rich-quick scheme the next.
The yard was invariably ankle-deep or deeper in filth from the cattle sheds and lent a lurid soapy fragrance whenever the washing machine was used on account of a burst waste pipe. There were always cars being repaired or customized – one of Spencer’s sidelines – always a few whose owners appeared to have abandoned them to the rust and brambles and cat life and always pieces of half-dead farm machinery held together with fibreglass tape as much as ingenuity. There were always half-crazed, useless dogs, occasionally ferrets and, for one memorable summer, a buzzard with a broken wing. It was an appalling mess and the place every teenager with pretensions to cool wanted to be. The brothers were godless, as good as parent-less, had limitless space for casual guests and, because they were friends with at least one drug-dealing fisherman, threw anarchic parties with a reputation for sin.
They were every parent’s nightmare so, for a couple of heady years both she and Hedley had fallen under their spell. Even as the bit of her that slaved for exams and paid rigorous attention in class knew, as Spencer didn’t, that he was just a phase she would soon leave behind for better, more adult things, the soft, inexperienced part of her needed him to stamp her with credentials school and the Quakers couldn’t. Life beyond Penzance secretly scared her and Spencer helped her overcome that, not least because she knew she was using him.
Shockingly the mess had all gone now and with it, any trace of the brothers and their crippled father in his caravan. The wrecked cars had gone and the ruinous farm machinery, the semi-feral chickens and the dogs. In their place were a handful of clean, new cars on smart gravel where all the muck had lain. There were window boxes and tubs all neatly planted out and a kind of wishing well where there had used to be a treacherously leaky manhole over the dairy’s old urine pit. The barns and pig shed had all been converted. Pretty sash windows were dressed with blue gingham curtains and little slate signs indicated the entrances to Bosviggan Farmhouse, The Barton, The Old Dairy, Mowhay Cottage and The Byre respectively. Sure enough, a little way up the drive she came upon a smart notice, in a heritage-blue to match the gingham, announcing Bosviggan Holiday Cottages and giving a St Ives phone number.
She felt she must turn back at the sign and stare a while to convince herself the huge change had really happened. Had the father died and the boys escaped at last? Had Troy finally got rich quick? It was all far more tasteful and tidy than anything she could imagine them achieving on their own so perhaps they had been obliged to move out? Perhaps th
e bank had finally heard one feeble excuse too many and forced a sale?
She was startled by a deep, rumbling bark and the appearance at her side of a thickset brown dog, like a fat Rottweiler or a cross-bred Labrador.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Hello.’ She was not used to dogs, rarely comfortable around them, and hoped it would move on. But it crouched beside her, panting merrily and began to take long, deliberate licks at her calves and feet. ‘No,’ she said and made to walk on in the direction from which the dog had come. She was in jeans – bare legs would have been worse – but something in the animal’s interest was oppressive and she feared its worship might turn without warning to something nastier. Its panting had revealed stacked teeth like a shark’s and, sure enough, when she moved it sort of bounced at her and made a playful snapping movement at her jeans’ trailing hems.
‘No!’ she said more firmly.
‘Keeper!’ someone shouted. ‘Here! Keeper!’ It was a boy, at that unreadably leggy age between twelve and fifteen. ‘Sorry,’ he told her, gruff with embarrassment. ‘He don’t often meet strangers. Sorry. Keeper!’
He had been walking on a path she hadn’t noticed, off the track and under the trees and now plunged off it towards her, all outsized trainer and overstretched leg. He ducked his head as he fumbled to get a collar and lead fastened on the dog, which had now decided to play and was bouncing its meaty paws in a circle with Morwenna as the tree in the middle.
‘Someone doesn’t want to come,’ she said, relaxing now.
‘Telling me,’ he muttered. ‘Bloody animal. We were meant to be going the other way, weren’t we?’ He had on a baseball cap over a thatch of red-brown hair, and baggy shorts worn low on his hips but his stab at cool was let down by his cruelly skinny arms. As he succeeded in catching the dog at last, she stole a glimpse of his face under the brim of his hat.