Solace of the Road

by Siobhan Dowd

  I don’t know.

  But Solace was gone, and Holly Hogan, aged fifteen years and one day, was back.

  Forty-seven

  Thule

  I turned away from the railing of the boat and padded down the deck in my bare feet. I forgot to put my trainers back on. To the front, the indistinct horizon had unfurled into rocks and hills and fields, dabs of pink and grey. Rosslare Harbour appeared. There was a green hill with cows walking over it and the water was blue and there was a ribbon of road, skirting the cliff, shining, and it was Ireland, lit soft as a dream.

  But I didn’t join the queue to disembark. I didn’t go down to the hold to find a ride. I stood on the deck, looking at the dock and the people and the cars. I breathed the Irish air.

  Then I turned from the railing and found the purser’s office, where a uniformed man and woman were chatting. I went in and told how I was a stowaway and they laughed like I was making it up. But I didn’t laugh back. I couldn’t even speak. Then they saw I didn’t have any shoes and I must have looked wild and filthy, because they stopped laughing. The man asked who I was and where was my mum. I said my name, Holly Hogan, and my age, fifteen and one day, and then how I had no mum and how Fiona and Ray were fostering me at 22 Mercutia Road, London.

  They said for me to stay on board and sat me in a room with a tiny porthole. The woman brought me a Coke and fish and chips and I gobbled them down. Then I had to go to the bathroom to throw them up again. They sailed me back to Britain and I never even set a toe on Irish soil. I was like the Roman guy who sailed past Thule and didn’t have time to stop. And maybe I was sad or maybe not, because one day I’d sail there again.

  They took me back through Wales and England in a car. I don’t remember much of the ride. I looked out the window but we went by motorway and there wasn’t much to see, so I fell asleep.

  Forty-eight

  Road Dust

  They didn’t send me to the secure unit. Instead they took me to a hospital on a hill in south London for people who have mental problems. And when I saw the sign I nearly did go mental, but a nurse came and said how it would be OK because I’d only be there a short time and being there didn’t mean you were mad and I didn’t have to worry about syringes or strait-jackets, and the other people in my ward were just like me, tired and unhappy and needing to talk things over.

  And it was OK. They didn’t lock you in and the windows were big with sunshine coming through.

  They sent a lady psychologist to see me every day. She sounded a bit like the Gayle woman from the care-babe phoneline, but her name was Mrs Rajit and she was Indian. We sat and chatted about things we liked and didn’t like. Colours, numbers, food. Then I told her about the road and the white dividers and how in the end I’d reached the sky house and what I’d found there.

  I told her about how I’d nearly jumped.

  ‘Why did you take your trainers off, Holly?’ she asked me.

  ‘Dunno. Just did.’

  ‘Were you planning on jumping?’

  ‘Yeah. Guess.’

  ‘Were you planning on dying?’

  ‘Yeah. S’pose. I mean, why jump otherwise? You don’t jump off a big ship like that just for a quick dip, do you?’

  ‘So why did you take your trainers off?’

  She finished me, Mrs Rajit. ‘Dunno. Like I said.’

  But I knew what she was after, so then I said how I wanted to jump but I wanted to swim too. Maybe with my trainers off, I’d have had a chance to live. Maybe another boat would have come and picked me up. But since I didn’t jump, why ask? And Mrs Rajit smiled and moved on to the next question.

  Then Fiona, question-queen herself, was allowed in to see me. I was scared stiff she’d be livid and I trembled as she walked down the aisle of beds.

  ‘Oh, Holly,’ was all she said when she saw me. ‘Holly.’

  She sat on the bed and her eyes filled and I was the last whale harpooned, official.

  She said how Ray and she had been up the wall and down again and how she’d taken to making a patchwork quilt with the worry, which was some joke because she was useless at sewing. And all the time she was stitching the squares together she was thinking, what had she done wrong to make me run? I bit my lip and said about the wig and how the wig and me turned into a mad, bad girl called Solace and how I’d hit the road and chased the white dividers all the way to Wales and how I thought I’d find my mam in Ireland. Then I told her about the iron and Mam burning my hair and all the other things I’d found in the real sky house.

  ‘Oh, Holly,’ she whispered. ‘You do remember.’

  Then she came in every evening, and Ray too.

  Fiona got me grapes and magazines and slices of pizza, which you were allowed to microwave in the kitchen. And Ray bought me an iPod to replace the one I’d lost, loaded with my favourite Storm Alert songs plus a new weirdo band he’d got into called String Theory.

  Then one day, Fiona brought me in my file. It was my right to see my file and I said I wanted to have my right. The police report said how Mammy was on the Game and a User and how Denny Supplied and was a User too. The social services were on to her and had put me on something called a Child Protection Register. Then Mam did a runner and went back to Ireland and disappeared. Only she’d rung social services before she left and said how I was in the flat and would they take me. And the file said how they’d found me with my burned, chopped hair and my ear blistered and foot swollen and how I didn’t talk, only to say ‘Where’s Mam?’ so I knew my memory had come back straight and true.

  It was in the file and in my head, only I’d kept it shut away.

  If she were me, Fiona said, she’d be livid and want to nuke the whole world to get back at that person who was supposed to love you but had gone clean out of your life like that. The thought of Fiona with her save-the-whale eyes nuking the world made me smile.

  Ray got the job up north but turned it down. He told Fiona and me how he wanted to go into cruise-mode with his work and ditch the overtime at weekends and take up the bass guitar. At the case conference he stood up for me. He said I’d been good in the house and given up smoking without even being asked and all three of us wanted to try again. Fiona nodded and cried and I stared at my hands and wished I could have a fag. But they believed Ray and said OK.

  So it was back to 22 Mercutia Road. When I came out of hospital, Ray and Fiona told me how as a surprise birthday present they’d arranged for me to have a dog. That was why Fiona was going to be late the day I ran away. She was going to the kennels to make the arrangements. We had to wait until he was eight weeks old before he could leave his litter, then he came home with us.

  Now we’ve had him over a year and he’s one mad eejit, as Miko would say. He’s the kind that’s like a stretched limousine, the way his belly rubs along the floor, his front and back legs are so far apart. I didn’t call him Rosabel because he’s a he. His name is Thule, like the place you dream about. But we often call him Fool, and sometimes Drool because that’s what he does.

  I went back to school and Karuna and I became mates, official. And sometimes we let mad Max the bell-ringer hang out with us because he’s even more certifiable than we are. Karuna’s gone from being a townie to a goth and, no kidding, she’s making her own coffin in woodwork. Mrs Atkins made me write a long story about how Jane Eyre marries Mr Rochester under false pretences and how it is when she finds out on honeymoon on the French Riviera that he’s married already and he’s tricked her. I made up how she’s furious and steals a rowing boat to escape back to England but is picked up by pirates instead. So she decides to be a pirate too and all the men pirates are in love with her and she rules the roost. And her name is Janie Jewel the Cruel, on account of all the gems she steals. And it was better than the real Jane Eyre any day. Mrs Atkins gave me A-minus and read it out to the class and Karuna never lets me forget it.

  I still see Mrs Rajit once a week. Sometimes the words don’t come, so instead I draw her pictures of the sky house
. Other times I tell her about everyone I met on my travels. I show her the map and describe the good people on it who were like guardian angels because they did something to help me and asked for nothing back.

  Chloe, who told me about Thule.

  Kim, who gave me a sandwich.

  The magnet man.

  The boy on the motorbike whose name I never knew, and Kirk, even, with his truckload of pigs.

  Sian, who said I had a figure like a dancer.

  And Phil with his sad vegan eyes giving me the cake with pretend candles, and God is sitting in him still, I bet you, and he’s taking the scenic routes and chasing the white dividers in his cheese truck, planning his next move.

  As for the Templeton House crew, I never saw them again. I still hear Miko’s voice in my head sometimes. And I see him smiling, looking down at me from the top of a hill, his guitar slung over his back. I hope he’s doing all right. Rachel told me Trim went straight from care into young offending, smooth as an arrow, so he never got the chance to start up his casinos. And Grace left the Home and wouldn’t say where to. So I buy the magazines and I look out for her supermodel face. There are pretty girls in there, all colours of skin. Sometimes there’s one with caramel cheeks and hair in braids and for a second I have to look twice. But whoever it is isn’t a patch on Grace, with her eyes shining like dark coins and her as-if smile. But I keep looking and hoping how one day I’ll find her, walking down a catwalk, wearing jewels and spangles, just like she dreamed. It’s like walking to the sky, Holly, she’s calling from the centre page. Walking up to heaven, Holly, without having to die first.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to the social workers I met in Oxford at the child rights training course in 2004. The stories about their work were inspirational. Pete Treadwell in particular put me straight on a number of things in the realm of children ‘who are being looked after’. I’d also like to thank ChildLine and the Who Cares? Trust, whose publications were invaluable.

  Fiona Dunbar, Oona Emerson, Helen Graves, Sophie Nelson, Alison Ritchie, Linda Sargeant, Anna Theis and Lee Weatherly were also most helpful in various ways. And words can hardly express the debt I owe to my agent, Hilary Delamere, and my quintet of editors, Annie Eaton, Kelly Hurst, Bella Pearson, Ben Sharpe and, in particular, David Fickling. The journey was winding but they never flagged.

  Finally, thanks to Geoff for driving me up and down a certain old trunk road by way of research. It was a sky-jump, as Holly would say.

  I have added the names of Helen Graves, Sophie Nelson and Alison Ritchie to this list because I know Siobhan would have wanted me to.

  DF

  ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made Of This)’, Words & Music by Annie Lennox & Dave Stewart, Copyright © 1983 D’N’A Limited. Universal Music Publishing MGB Limited. Used by permission of Music Sales Limited. All Rights Reserved. International Copyright Secured.

  A DAVID FICKLING BOOK

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2009 by Siobhan Dowd

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by David Fickling Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by David Fickling Books, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of the Random House Group Ltd., London, in 2009.

  David Fickling Books and the colophon are trademarks of David Fickling.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dowd, Siobhan.

  Solace of the road / by Siobhan Dowd. — 1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: While running away from a London foster home just before her

  fifteenth birthday, Holly has ample time to consider her years of

  residential care and her early life with her Irish mother, whom she is now

  trying to reach.

  eISBN: 978-0-375-89365-0

  [1. Runaways—Fiction. 2. Foster home care—Fiction. 3. Hitchhiking—

  Fiction. 4. Voyages and travels—Fiction. 5. Self-actualization (Psychology)—

  Fiction. 6. Great Britain—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.D7538Sol 2009

  [Fic]—dc22

  2008044603

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.0