Solace of the Road

by Siobhan Dowd

Softly, like it’s a kiss, he puts the iron down on her hair so it frizzles, just a little.

  ‘Serves you,’ he says. He laughs, steps back. Sweet dreams are made of this, sweet dreams are made of this … ‘Only joking, Bridge.’

  She’s holding her hair, her mouth open like an O. And Denny’s handed her back the iron and he’s pushing past me into the bedroom. A boot’s being thrown against a wall. Then he’s passing back through the lounge and his face is like the mask in the museum, empty and thin, with the dark curls framing it, and his hand’s waving. ‘Bye, all,’ he goes, but he’s not looking back.

  The front door slams.

  ‘Denny-boy,’ Mam whimpers. ‘Come back, Denny. Come back.’

  But he’s gone and I’m glad. He must have used the stairs because there’s no sound of the lift whirring.

  The Denny figurine’s fallen off the edge. One down, two left. Mammy and me.

  ‘Mam?’ I’m saying. The music’s still playing. She’s on her knees, hunched over the toppled ironing board, making sick animal sounds, and her dressing gown’s splayed out on the carpet.

  I go up and touch her hair. ‘Mam?’

  ‘Denny,’ she moans.

  She looks up and sees me and her eyes go like slits.

  ‘You. ’S your fault, Holl.’ She yanks me up close to her face by my pyjama sleeve. She’s shaking me. ‘Why d’you have to tell him where the money was? You monkey, you. That was my money, mine.’

  Now it’s me against the wall. And it’s the silver flatness and the little holes for steam coming towards me and Mammy’s red hand and bony wrist holding it, and I’m kicking her but she’s holding me fast with her arm pinned across my neck and I’m biting her and she curses and the iron crash-lands on my head. The smell of the hair is like sparklers after they’ve died. My head’s exploding and the hot metal’s on my ear and I’m kicking and screaming and the iron drops hard-bang on my foot. I screech.

  ‘Whisht up, Holl.’ She hits me round the face. ‘The neighbours will be onto us.’

  So my face scrunches up and my shoulders go up and down but no sound comes out.

  Me and Mam. Stuck in that moment.

  Mam staggers back, shivering.

  ‘Holl,’ she whispers. ‘You hurt, Holl?’

  Now she’s got me on the sofa and she’s crouched on the floor by my head, putting the red blouse under me like a pillow, and she’s more like my own mam again. She’s doing it in a dream and her eyes are drifting in and out of focus. ‘You all right, Holl?’

  ‘Yes, Mam.’

  ‘You hurt bad?’

  ‘No, Mam.’

  ‘I’m going now, Holl.’

  ‘OK, Mam.’

  She crawls over to her bedroom like a baby. She shuts the door behind. I hear a chair fall, a glass break. I hear a drawer being dragged open. Then she comes out, dressed in her best white coat with the grey fur collar. She has her white handbag with the thongs and fringes on her shoulder.

  ‘Gotta run, Holl.’ She’s shaking like a wind-up toy. ‘You stay there on the sofa. I have to find that Denny-boy and get the money. The money for us, Holl. For us and Ireland.’

  ‘When will you be back, Mam?’

  ‘Soon, Holl. Soo-oo-oon.’ She’s at the amber ring, pulling it. ‘Take this, Holl. Keep it safe. They’d chop your finger off for a ring like that.’ She’s working it off her finger, pressing it into my palm. ‘Keep it safe.’ Her words are rattling together like the ice cubes in her see-through drinks.

  Her heels are click-clicking away and she’s swaying like she’s in a ship’s corridor as she goes.

  ‘Bye, Mam.’

  The front door bangs and the music ends. I hear the lift coming up with its whirring grind. A pause. Then it’s falling, taking Mam down, and only the faraway hum of London is left.

  ‘Mammy,’ I say. ‘Mammy?’ But I whisper it quiet, whisht quiet, because we don’t want the neighbours talking and Mammy will be back soon and she didn’t mean to hurt me. I stroke the amber ring and my head is hammering. My foot throbs hot and hard like an engine turning.

  Forty-four

  Back in the Hold

  Mam’s heels clicked in my head, going, going, gone. I had my knuckles pressed up to my eyes, like my brain was a blackboard and I was trying to scrub out the pictures on it.

  My left foot was under me, throbbing with pins and needles.

  I could smell the ship’s engines combusting like burned hair.

  But the picture of me, the little figurine left over, wouldn’t go.

  Your fault, Holl. You monkey, you. Scram.

  I was the girl on the tiger-skin sofa with the red blouse under her head.

  And Mam was looking past me to something else she wanted more.

  You can’t think all your memories at once or your head will burst. So you put them in a drawer in the back bit of your brain and close them away. Denny and Mam, that day in the sky house, they’d been hidden away for years. And I’d forgotten how the pieces fitted together. I’d fooled myself how it was all Denny’s fault and how Mam had to run away from him to Ireland and how she was waiting for me to find her over there.

  It was a dream, I knew that now. The truth was, Mammy burned my hair, then ran away to try to catch Denny, not escape him. The person she’d been running from wasn’t him, but me.

  Now, in the dim light, I saw what had really happened.

  Denny leaving with the money.

  Mam with the iron.

  And me left over.

  The boat sailed on. It was dark and rolling where I was, and I’d found the beginning of my journey, but it wasn’t leaving Templeton House or finding the wig. The beginning was in the real sky house, not the pretend one. The last place I wanted to go.

  I lay back in the mogits’ car and saw the wig on the floor. I picked it up and let it sit on my fist. I’d lost my brush so I ran my fingers through it instead, sorting out the strands.

  ‘Solace,’ I whispered. ‘Where did you go, Solace? Why did you leave me?’

  And I put it on.

  Nothing happened. Solace didn’t rush into me like a puff of magic air. She didn’t laugh or act the clown or blow smoke rings at the world of mogits. She didn’t show off her slim-slam hips. She sat there quiet and sad inside me, and she was me and everything we’d done together was me, all me. The nightclub, the thumbing, the backchat, the phoning, the walking, the dreaming, the laughing, the crying. Me on my own. Alone.

  Then my own voice sounded out loud in the silent car.

  ‘Oh, Holly.’

  Time went by.

  Then the boat lurched rougher than before. My stomach somersaulted. I gripped onto the thing next to me and realized it was something I hadn’t taken in before.

  There’s a child seat there, next to you. A child seat, Holl. Remember? A child seat equals a child. And those grey-haired mogits had said something about grandchildren.

  Then I remembered how, in the minivan we took down to Devon, Miko put the little ones in the back because there were child locks on the back doors and not on the front. Child locks are there so that children can’t fall out. You can only open child-locked doors from the outside, never the inside.

  Maybe, I thought, if I tried the front door, it would open. Just maybe.

  I was so scared of being disappointed I didn’t move.

  Go on, Holl. Get to it.

  I slunk forward through the seats and wriggled over the handbrake and got to Mrs Mogit’s seat. I bit my lip. And I pressed the handle, and did I hold my breath and was my heart pounding …

  Forty-five

  The Star of Killorglin

  …. and did the door click open, like magic.

  I staggered out, stiff and sore and sick. I breathed. I closed the door behind me. I couldn’t lock it again. Mr and Mrs Mogit would think they’d forgotten, that was all. I smelled the oil and metal of the hold and crept up between the cars, terrified someone would spot me. But there was nobody. The whole place was deserted. It was like a
multi-storey car park on the move.

  I found a door with a sign saying TO UPPER DECKS. I opened it and stepped over the bit at the bottom that looked like its only purpose was to bash your shin. On the other side was a staircase. I climbed the steps, up and up.

  Then I was walking through lounges and past fruit machines, and all the talk buzzed in my ears. Daylight came through the portholes but you couldn’t see much for the thickness of the glass. People were sleeping on chairs, drinking from plastic cups. In a corner I spotted Mr and Mrs Mogit. She was reading a magazine with a frown on her face. ‘Just you listen to this,’ Mrs Mogit said. ‘It’s shocking.’ But I didn’t wait to hear. I drifted past them and up the steps and down a corridor and past the portholes. A man lurched past me as if the boat was in a storm but it wasn’t, he was drunk. Flat-out. His cheeks were red and his eyes dim and I knew he had a blank hole inside him, like I had, and maybe that’s what it had been like inside Mam, and Denny too.

  I passed another row of fruit machines with nobody playing them, only a small boy. I paused to watch him. He was only just big enough to reach the lever. When no money came out, he kicked the machine and his face turned to crazy paving.

  ‘Hey, boy,’ I said. ‘Cheer up. Have this.’

  I’d remembered the last of Phil’s money, stashed in my skater-top pocket. I held the coins out to him. The little boy squinted up like I was a freak.

  I smiled. ‘Go on. Take them. I don’t want them.’

  He reminded me of the little ones at the Home. They didn’t trust you as far as they could throw you. Slowly his hand came out and took the coins. When he spoke, it was in the strongest accent I’d ever heard.

  ‘That yoke. ’S bad.’

  ‘The fruit machine?’

  ‘Yus. ’S false.’

  ‘Try the next one up.’

  He shuffled up. I waited to see how he’d do, but he glared round to let me know I was putting him off. I took a step back and put my two hands together like a prayer and he smiled. Then he pulled and a good trickle of money came down the shoot. He yelped and hee-hawed like an insane donkey.

  ‘Nice one,’ I said.

  ‘D’you want a cut?’ he asked, only it sounded like coort.

  ‘Nah. It’s yours.’

  ‘Sure?’ He held out a ten-pence piece.

  ‘Certain.’ I remembered Junior Einstein in the museum with his aliens and meteorites. How would it be if those two boys changed places in the world? I wondered.

  ‘Sure you’re sure?’

  ‘You keep it. Have another go.’

  He tried but nothing happened so he kicked the machine and went back to the first machine and put another coin in and this time he got another trickle back.

  ‘You’re one lucky boy,’ I told him. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Joseph Ward. What’s yours?’

  ‘Holly Hogan.’ I smiled.

  ‘Me da’s sister’s a Hogan,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘Maybe you’s a Traveller too?’

  ‘Yeah, sure I am,’ I said. ‘I travel the world and the seven seas.’

  He frowned. ‘This is the Irish Sea.’

  ‘It counts, I guess. Where are you headed?’

  ‘Dunno. We get off the boat and drive and Da gets a lay-by and there’s home and Mam makes the tea.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘An’ I’m on my holidays and I’m not going to school. Not ever. Da says.’

  ‘You are lucky.’

  ‘Where’re you going?’ he said.

  ‘Home too.’

  He grinned. ‘D’you want a go?’ he said, holding out another coin.

  ‘Nah.’ Then I remembered how the Irish say goodbye. ‘Good luck.’

  ‘Good luck,’ he said, and turned back to the slot machine.

  I walked away, cash-free.

  I pushed a door open against a hard wind.

  Right away I had to grab onto the wig to stop it flying. I walked out onto the open decks. There were life buoys, red and white, and on them was written THE STAR OF KILLORGLIN, which was how I knew the name of the boat.

  One side of the deck was windy and the other still. Everyone sat on the still side, so I stayed on the windy side. I kept one hand on the wig. The boat slapped up against the waves. Another drawer slid open in my brain. It was me at the Kavanaghs’ house, waking up early after a bad dream, and seeing Mam in the picture I kept by my bed. Her lips were parted and her eyes slanted off to one side. Her hair blew off from her cheeks and she tilted her face like the wind was a lover. And that’s how it was. She was always looking past me like I didn’t count, filing her nails, doing her foundation, trying on her new shoes, choosing her bag, and telling me to scram. She was always going, with the lift fading away to silence and me being left alone.

  And that morning at the Kavanaghs’, I remembered the real Mam in the real sky house. The lips that didn’t smile, ripped. The eyes like slits, ripped. The bits of paper falling on the bedcover. Then I’d slept again. When I woke and found the bits torn up it was like someone else had done it, in someone else’s dream.

  I looked out to sea. The ocean was beautiful, white, bright water and cream foam, like it’d come to boiling point. It was cold and true like my memory and hard and clear like my choice.

  Chloe on the coach to Oxford smiled at me. Thule was sighted, but only from afar. A place where you always wish you could go.

  There was land ahead, dark purple, like a bruise. Ireland. I smiled because now I knew what Chloe meant and I hadn’t understood before.

  Grace’s gentle eyes stared up at me from the foam. Trim was laughing like he’d never stop. I don’t believe in modern-day miracles, I said to the writer man who came to our school that time. Maybe they happen to other people, but not to me.

  I remembered now the long waiting in the sky house after Mam ran off. How night came and I turned on all the lights. How morning came and I didn’t go to school because I knew I had to stay and wait. Me and the walls and the silence, quiet. I crept around like I was nobody so as not to disturb the neighbours.

  I went into Mam’s bedroom and sat at her dressing table and saw my ear blistered and my hair mangled and burned. I got the scissors and cut off the burned hair in hunks, close to the scalp. Then I played with Mam’s lipsticks and in a drawer found the picture of her on the beach and put it with the amber ring she’d given me and kept them safe.

  And had my Krispies fizzed up in Coke, because the milk was off.

  And played Snap by myself with my animal card pack, only half the cards were missing.

  I don’t know how long I was in the sky house on my own, waiting. But sometime a doorbell rang, and then there was knocking and a woman calling my name through the letterbox. I hid under my bed with the ring and the picture. I remember the dust and the old shoes and the hard prickle of carpet. Then somebody pulling me out by the arms, out of the sky house for ever.

  The boat crept closer towards the coast. My dream shattered. The cows wandering over the green hill, the dogs on their bellies laughing, a dream. Mammy smiling a welcome in her halter-neck dress, a dream. The soft pints of air, a dream. The rain like silk, a dream.

  Miko had my bulging file in his hand. She left you, Holly. And how does that feel?

  He gave me one last look and turned away.

  Fiona was gazing sadly at me in my bedroom at Templeton House the first time we met. I wasn’t the child she’d wanted but someone else.

  Ray was looking at the sky and the letters H – O – L – L – Y were drifting apart, vanishing like they’d never been.

  I crouched down out of the wind and unlaced my trainers.

  Miko, Grace, Trim, Fiona, Ray. Going, gone, clean out of my life. Only it was me leaving them now, not them leaving me.

  The sun slanted down from a cloud and the waves danced.

  Go, girl, Solace whispered. You and me, for ever.

  My throat was sore like it’d forgotten how to swallow.

 
; Don’t be afraid, girl. Go.

  I stepped out of the trainers.

  Before you change your mind. Quick.

  I clung to the edge as the boat ran smooth. Below was a trail of foam, bubbling and playing all the way back to England. There was light on the water. You can meet God on the road, Holly. God on the road, God on the road. Phil was driving his truck through the top of the forest and looking down on the wide Severn. Do it. Voices from the past, the good and the bad, the ones who cared and the ones who didn’t. The girl on the Titanic was laughing, her hair swept up by the wind, a goddess leading the way.

  Now, girl. Jump.

  There was shouting and laughing and tugging and pulling. The squares on the dance floor flashed. Bodies twisted and came together and parted again. Somebody’s arms swooped past me. The Solace in me screamed, hard and fierce. Go! The boat lunged, the wave slapped. My ash-blonde locks streamed upwards and outwards, as if they were reaching for the sky.

  Forty-six

  Solace Soars

  But something happened before I jumped. A squall of wind hit me and the wig blew off. I tried to catch it but it went too fast. It skimmed overboard and danced in the air, its locks looping like kite tails. It soared up and the strands spun silver like a Catherine wheel, as if the invisible person wearing it was spinning for joy. Then it swooped down and away from me. My own hair rippled over my face, brown and fierce, and Fiona’s voice came strong in my head. My hair grew back, Holly. Only differently. I touched the thin brown strands and they were mine. They were strong and straight and the smell of the burning had gone.

  The wig dropped with a final flash of blonde into the creamy foam and vanished.

  And I didn’t hurry after it. I stopped right there.

  It was as if Fiona was reaching for my shoulder. She was walking down the Broadway Market, calling, coming towards me, not walking away. And the shoppers turned round and called me too, and there in the middle was Miko, tall as a door, shouting, Wait, wait, Holly Hogan. Wait.

  And so the wig that had reminded Fiona of a bad, sick time was washed far away into the white water. Maybe it floated out to the open ocean and it’s travelling the seven seas. Or maybe it sank and drifted to the bottom and fishes are swimming through those ash-blonde strands and it’s crusted over with shells. Or maybe it reached Ireland. Maybe it washed up on the beach with the wood and the seaweed and it’s rocking there on the sand with the tides. And a seagull has plucked out its hairs for her nest and plump feathery baby birds are keeping it warm and dry.