by Nicci Cloke
I don’t know how long I stood there, staring through the glass, but I wasn’t looking at the screens any more. I thought of Saffy’s gorgeous little face and I thought, Seeing that again will be the best thing I ever see with my eyes ever ever ever. And then the phone started buzzing in my hand again with a text from Quin and I thought, Thank you, God, or anybody who’s listening, thank you, and please let this be the answer, tell me where to go and find her and bring her home and cuddle her for ever. But before I could open the message, the phone started buzzing with a call so I picked it up without looking and said, ‘’Ello-’ello. Where is it? You reckon she’s there?’ But it wasn’t Quinton on the other end of the phone. It was Jelli.
‘Fitz?’ she said, and for some reason my heart sank right into the bottom of my shoes.
‘Jel?’ I said. ‘What’s up?’ I could hear the telly in the background and Jelli walking out of a room and closing a door and all the time my heart was sinking right down through my trainers and into the road.
‘I just spoke to my mum,’ she said, and she was being all careful with her words. ‘After talking to you, I thought I might as well apologise, seeing as the rest of my clothes are there and it’s not that long till my birthday.’
‘Okay,’ I said, and I didn’t see what in the name of arse any of this had to do with me because I was happy for her obviously but I had to get going and I needed to pick my heart up out of the tarmac before I could do that because it was still sinking slowly down.
‘Look,’ she was saying, ‘I’m not sure if I should be telling you this – I don’t even know why I am telling you this – but … they’re putting Saffy back into Happy Blossoms.’ And my heart fell all the way through the road and through the super-hot core of the earth and all the way through the other side to Australia. ‘She doesn’t know,’ she said. ‘She’s staying with our cousin in Liverpool, and she thinks they don’t know where she is. They’re going to collect her tonight and take her straight there. They thought it would upset her less if it was quick like that.’ I could hear all this rushing in my ears and through that I could hear May coming into the room and saying something to her in the background and Jelli said, ‘Look, I’ve got to go, Fitz. I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you. I just thought – well, I guess I thought maybe it would be good if you were there with them. It’s up to you. I’ll text you the address.’ And then she hung up.
I bent over and put my hands on my knees because all of a sudden I thought I might be sick and I let some of the wind blow in my face and let the rushing in my ears stop a bit. And then I held my phone even tighter and waited for the text to come through and while I did that I made a decision in my head. Jelli wanted me to be there to help Saffy know that it was okay for her to go back to hospital. But I was going to be there and I was going to run away with her and I was never going to let anyone take her away from me again ever and they could try all they wanted but I would put her in the front seat of that shitty little car and I would never let anyone in apart from us two and I would keep her safe even if it meant driving around the world three times over and never stopping.
And so I started running, running so my feet hit the ground hard and all the shops turned into a blur and all the time I was clutching my phone and waiting for Jelli to type out those few little letters that made up the rest of my life. And when I got to the car I closed my eyes and let myself imagine what it would be like to get to her first, to hug her tight and put her in the car and not let anyone take her away, because they didn’t understand her but I did, and I would never let anyone take her somewhere she didn’t want to be again. I could even smell her hair as I thought about it, and feel her little arms round my neck, and I banged my head against the steering wheel a couple of times until my phone vibrated in my hand and I sat straight up in my seat, reading the text and I was already flicking through the massive road guide Eddie kept under the seat with the other hand. And then I was off, and I was praying to myself over and over again that things could only get better from here.
Well, let me tell you, things got worse. The car was feeling as knackered and fed up as me, and after about half an hour she started chugging and whining and smoking as soon as I got my foot down, so I ended up having to take the back roads so that I could drive along at slow miles per hour. Being slow made me feel even more worried and even more fidgety, and with just winding road and bushes to look at my head, which is normally quite good at playing itself tunes and asking itself important questions like what is the difference between a raisin and a sultana, and more importantly, what is the difference between a raisin and a currant, kept slipping back to my mum and to Han and Dad and his computer and Charlie Brown and Saf and what I was actually going to do when, if, I ever found her. And so to try and get rid of all that, I spent some time thinking about the best sets I’d ever seen and then after that I thought about the best wins I’d had on the horses and on the fruities, where I was and when it was and how much it was, and then I started to feel a bit calmer.
After a bit of this, I realised I’d driven through the same village three times and I was probably definitely lost and this made me feel very pissed off, so much so that I thought I might just scream out of the window again and again so I pulled into a random car park and smoked my last cig to calm down a bit, which worked, or just enough that I wasn’t seeing little dots everywhere any more and just felt shit-the-bed panicked rather than throw-yourself-off-a-cliff scared. When that was done I thought, Oh, fuck it, and I got on the motorway just so I could get somewhere I could actually see on the map. It was going pretty well; seemed like the cig had perked up the banger too, and she was quite happy trundling along at sixty, which after the last couple of hours felt a lot like whizzing along in a rocket, so I got my sunglasses out my pocket, found a radio station and sang along to Britney, which might seem a bit girly but it made me feel more cheery, as cheery as could be expected anyway. Well, as we’ve seen, luck was not on my side and just when I was starting to feel a bit better, the car started whining again and the pointy thing that tells you the speed was shaking like it’d had too much Red Bull, so I thought, Best slow down but when I pushed the brake nothing happened. Nothing at all. The road kept rushing past and the speed dial kept going up, and I was chugging along with no way of stopping.
It wasn’t a good situation by any standards. I had no feet on pedals but the speed was going slowly up anyway, so I shoved both my feet on the brake and that held the speed at sixty-five but still no sign of slowing down and by then I was beginning to sweat. By the magic of storytelling, let’s have a quick little lookie at the scene. Here’s me with both feet on the brake and a car that’s steaming along the motorway. Luckily there’s no car in front of me and I’m in the inside lane and there’s a sign up ahead that says it’s one mile to the next service station. I’m thinking to myself, What would my dad do? which is what I do when I need to make a sensible decision, and I thought that probably he would try and get to the service station instead of being stuck on the side of the road and by that time I was zooming past the sign with the two lines on it which, it just then struck me, looked like lines of chang, and by the time I’d had a crazy little giggle at that, one of them had gone up Saffy’s nose because I was passing the sign with just one line on it and whoosh that was up her nozzer as well, and in my head my dad looked up from his computer peering over his specs and his beaky nose and said, ‘Take the car out of gear and turn the engine off,’ so I didn’t ask questions I just did it and I steered the car into the lorry bit of the car park just as it rolled to a stop.
I sat in the car in the middle of the car park with a couple of lorries dotted about and had a little sigh and a shake and then I got out. I was trying to be like I was all hard and cool, like John McClane or someone else Bruce Willis has played, except for the bloke from The Sixth Sense, but really I felt like my legs had turned to jelly and I still might cry. The stink of burning tyres was awful and there was these little things inside the
wheels that were glowing bright orange and I knew they must be the brake thingies so I sat down on the gravel and had another little sigh and a shake.
After a bit I heard someone coming up behind me so I stood up and rubbed the gravel off my hands and arse and turned round. It was a cheery chap who looked like he should be on a fishing-boat somewhere in his big jumper and his fuzzy grey-brown beard puffing out round his face.
‘All right there, mate?’ he said, and he had twinkly eyes and a flaky red nose when he got up close.
‘I think so,’ I said. ‘Car’s fucked, though,’ and then I went oops inside at swearing but he didn’t seem to notice. ‘The accelerator’s stuck or something,’ I said, and he sniffed the burning-rubber smell and glanced at the glowy brakes.
‘Let’s take a look, shall we?’ he goes, and he flipped up the bonnet and disappeared inside. ‘Right you are. The coil’s stuck. Hang on there,’ he said, popping his head back up, ‘Let me just grab something.’ And he jogged off to his lorry, pulling up his baggy-arsed jeans, and came back waving some little spring thing. ‘This oughta hold it, pal, just for fifty miles or so, though. And you can’t drive for a few hours, not till your brake pads have cooled down. They’ll need changing as well when you get chance. In a hurry, are ya?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Sort of.’ Which was the biggest understatement anyone had ever made in the history of the world and my toes were already tapping in my trainers and I was fidgeting inside my clothes.
‘Well,’ he goes, ‘cool your jets, sunshine. But that oughta get you there.’
‘Thanks,’ I said, and I got a note out of my pocket, but he waved it away and goes, ‘Oh no, mate, no worries,’ and then we shook hands.
‘Take care of yerself,’ he goes, and walked away whistling and I don’t know why but I watched him leave and wished he’d stayed.
I went into the service station and got a burger, which cost six quid and was horrible. I actually tapped one of the bun bits on the table and it made a noise, and then I wandered round the arcade probably a bit too long, like till people might’ve thought I was a kiddie-fiddler. Two little kids who were maybe brother and sister were sat in the race-car game just about reaching the steering wheels and having a whale of time, even though they’d not put any money in and the screen was doing the demo thing over and over, and I thought about me and Han playing on the Megadrive for hours and hours and I was Sonic and she was Tails and Mum used to bring us lemonade and sometimes those biscuits with the cows on them. A couple of spotty kids were having a snog up against the Slushy machine and their mates were all peeping out from behind the machine that gives you change and chuckling, and I thought, Well, I don’t miss being young and awkward like that but at the same time wasn’t it nice when all that was on your mind was touching a boob and your transfers on Champ Man?
I sat on the edge of the air-hockey table with nobody playing on it, and looked out at people walking past. There was a little old couple sat on the two metal seats outside the arcade eating a sandwich and drinking a flask of tea and gazing out cheerfully like it was a nice picnic spot they were looking at and not the bogs and the 50p massage chairs. I thought about how Saffy once told me that when she was little she used to play at being invisible and do naughty little pixie things like moving cups or books about and her mum and dad would play along and be like ‘Ooh, I’m sure my cup wasn’t there before! However did it get there?’ and she would giggle away but then after a while she worked out they weren’t playing along any more they’d just forgotten about her.
After a bit I realised that I couldn’t keep staring at the two little old people while they were munching on their lunch, and the two kids who’d been snogging before wanted to use the air-hockey table so I hopped off and wandered out into the car park because there was nowhere else to go. I went over to the car with a little bit of hope in my heart, but you could still smell the burning rubber smell and the brake pads still looked scorchio. I felt really panicky again as I thought about Saf just chilling out, thinking nothing of anything and having no idea that her mum and dad were probably on their way right now to cart her off to the place she’d rather be dead than go back to, and what if she did decide to be dead instead? And that thought made me feel like I was going to be sick and scream all at once and I thought, I’ve gotta sort myself out, I can’t be like this. Because I knew I was no good to Saffy in this state whether I was there or in the stupid services’ car park, no use at all. So I unlocked the car and leant in and got my tin with the weed and all its accessories out from under the seat and then I went over to the grassy hill that went round the edge of the services and I sat down and felt the grass all wet through my jeans. I thought I’d only smoke a little bit of it, just enough to calm myself down so I could think straight and make sense in my own head even if I didn’t make sense in anyone else’s. As I rolled a spliff I tried to imagine how long it would take Saffy’s parents to get to her and how they wouldn’t have set out yet, and to tell myself that it was all okay. I got the lighter out of my pocket and lit the joint and I had a couple of long slow pulls on it and then I lay back with all the wet grass mixed in with my hair and let the spliff burn out with a quiet little sizzle. I took nice deep breaths and my head did start to clear but the panicky upset was still there at the back of everything. It was horrible not being able to set off, just being stuck, and I just wanted to jump in the car and drive as fast as I could even if I had to run the last bit or crawl it on my hands and knees but I knew really deep down in the sensible part of me where my dad gave me advice from like a control centre in the back of my brain, I knew that I really wasn’t any use to Saffy at all if I was squashed in a crashed car on the M6. And I looked at the time on my phone and it was still early and Jelli had said her parents were coming tonight and it wasn’t tonight yet. I still had time. I still had time. I looked up at the clouds and kept telling myself that over and over. Plenty of time. It’s all right. Plenty of time. It’s all right.
‘All right?’
I jumped half out of my skin and looked to the left where the voice had come from and there was a bloke standing there looking at me smiling. ‘Sorry,’ he said, ‘didn’t mean to scare you. Just checking you weren’t dead. Hard to tell from the car park.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I’m alive, ta. Just killing some time.’
He plonked himself down next to me. ‘Same here, mate. Jack,’ he said, sticking his hand out.
‘Fitz.’ I shook it. He had curly ginger hair and loads of ginger stubble and he was pretty tanned. He had a big backpack, which he was fishing around in now for a bottle of Coke which he had a swig of and then offered to me. I said I was all right but then I changed my mind and had a bit and it tasted brilliant after the spliff, all cold and sweet.
‘So what you hanging about for?’ he asked.
‘My car,’ I said. ‘Fucked the brakes and I’ve gotta wait for them to cool down or something.’
He nodded. ‘Ah.’
‘What about you?’ I said, because even though my head was still whirling with thoughts and fears a bit too much to think about making sentences, I figured that making small talk with a stranger might help the time go a tiny bit faster.
‘Just waiting for a lift,’ he goes. ‘I’ve got a mate who’s a lorry driver who dropped me this far, now waiting for my sister to pick me up.’
‘Where you been?’ I said, because he’d obviously been on hols with a bag that big.
‘Where haven’t I been, mate? Been away for two years. India, Nepal, Malaysia, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. Stopped off in Bangkok for a bit and then did a bit of Oz.’
‘Wow,’ I said, and it was one of those wows you don’t mean to do it just comes out because the thing you’re saying wow about really is wow. I’d not even heard of three of the places he’d said.
‘Yep,’ he goes. ‘It was top.’
We sat in silence for a bit and he swigged some more of his Coke. It was like we were just waiting at a bus stop except one tha
t was made of grass and mud instead of metal and glass. ‘So,’ he said. ‘You heading home or away?’
Good question, I thought. ‘Neither,’ I said after a minute. ‘I’m going to pick up my girlfriend.’
He nodded. ‘Very good of you. Brownie points in the bank for you then.’ I smiled but it was very small smile that made my cheeks hurt.
‘That a joint you got there?’
I’d forgotten the spliff still between my fingers. ‘Yeah,’ I said, handing it to him with the lighter. ‘Help yourself.’
He lit it and took a deep toke. ‘Not bad,’ he said, and he offered it back to me.
I took it and pulled on it. All the feelings of darkness and despair were piling back in so I blew the smoke out extra hard and hoped they’d all go with it. Jack was fidgeting with his shoe so I said, ‘What was the best place you went? Out of all of them?’ and he thought about it for a while with his head on one side and I passed him back the spliff and he took a drag and thought some more and then he said, ‘India, I think. Pretty amazing. And it was the first place I went so it was a bit special. Wouldn’t mind living there one day you know.’
I nodded but seeing as I’d never been there I didn’t have much to offer back in the way of a conversation so it just stayed put at the full stop. He had a newspaper rolled up and sticking out of his bag and all I could see was the word ‘FOUND’ in big black letters. ‘Pretty mental, isn’t it?’ I said, pointing at the paper.
‘You got that right,’ he said. ‘But you gotta admire her. If she’s gotta point to make I mean,’ he said, lying back in the grass. ‘If she was just fobbing her dad off for cash that’s a bit dickish.’
I nodded and then I lay back too. ‘So you off again anytime soon?’