She had clicked open the kitchen door and slipped around it like a cat furring past a table leg. Quiet-quiet. But cold! It had made her gasp out and take a sharp breath in. Quick-quick! There was no time to faint or falter—she must leave right away before anyone woke. There was no moment to be frightened; none spare for second thoughts. She had grabbed her bike from the wall and snuck it away, silent and slow on the grass, until it was safe to jump aboard and pedal—Go! Go!—down the crunching gravel of the track.
Now on the train to London, tucked into a window seat with her headphones clamped on her ears, she felt not vivace or tremolo but placido. The hard part was over.
At break in the early days of school Eliza used to lock herself into one of the toilet cubicles with her feet tucked up on the seat so that no one could see her. Someone had written on the back of one of the doors—
Eliza Barkes
Eats Her Farts
—which was a good reminder of why she had to lock herself in. When the door to the corridor had banged open her heart had thudded in her chest so loud she had thought it would give her away. Sometimes she had forgotten to breathe when there were other people in there, and by the time the door slammed behind them she was nearly dead from not breathing.
It was bad enough if they came in to talk because talking could take ages, but the worst was if they came to talk about her. This had happened a few times and once she had not gone back into class after the bell but run out of the cubicle, out of the building, across the playground, out of the school and all the way home—not up to the front door but into the bin shelter where the snails lived and from where she could look up at the window of the flat.
Crouched by the stinking bins Eliza had peered through the glass at her mother. Martha had been sitting at her desk, typing, and then she had taken off her headphones to answer the telephone. It would be the school, Eliza guessed, ringing to say they had lost her. Now Martha was standing and had turned to face the window. Now a hand went up to her mouth and a frightened expression broke over her face as if the news had not been, “Eliza’s run away,” but, “Eliza’s dropped down dead.”
At that moment Eliza had felt so sorry for her mother that she had stepped out of her hiding place and into view. Martha, looking down on her, had placed a hand on the glass between them and spoken into the phone. Then she had hung up and come out of the front door with that expression still on her face like a stain.
Eliza had trembled up the front steps one by one with her own face washed with tears. When she reached her mother’s legs she put her arms around them and held on.
Alone on the train to London, Eliza thought of her mother and how she had looked at that moment. She would look the same this morning, Eliza knew, when the empty bed was discovered. She felt a ripple of guilt which made her wobble, and then she shut the image from her mind. There were other things to worry about.
Being found out, for example. She planned to lock herself into the toilet if anyone looked at her or spoke to her in a suspicious way. This might include axe murderers, ticket collectors, the trolley woman, nosy old ladies or nasty children. It was a last resort (because the train toilet stunk even worse than the ones at her school) but it might be necessary and so she held it in reserve.
Getting out her diary she crossed out what she had achieved so far this morning:
Wake up!!
Money
Ticket
Train 0742
Still not crossed out was:
London 0954
Bus
Walk
Knock on door!!
She put the lid on her pen and looked out of the window, wondering whether this was the hardest thing she had ever done in her life. Hugging her rucksack to her chest she thought of other hard things, like learning to dive or the first rehearsal for Oliver! when she had thought she might be singled out or spoken to.
There was one thing which would always come top when it came to “Hardest Thing Ever”: the playground. She had hated the playground more than anywhere else in the world—at the beginning she had dreaded it so much that she used to puke up her breakfast. Still she had gone there every day and crossed it alone like a limping wildebeest.
Today’s trip she had done many times (with Mum or Dad or both) and it had always been easy and most often pleasant—it had never made her sick. The only different thing on this particular day was that she was alone, but Eliza did not feel more brave to be alone. In fact, she felt safer: she had experienced the treachery of friends and the brutality of strangers at school. Now she had discovered that parents could be treacherous and brutal too.
Taking the lid off her pen she wrote Worst Things, underlined it, and then thought about what to put.
When it had first started at school—the bad stuff—her mother had asked her, “What are they doing to you? Tell me, please—then we can make it stop.”
Eliza had known this was not true and that there was nothing to be done. “Don’t tell” was the most important lesson she had learned at school. “Nothing,” she had replied. “There isn’t anything.” Then she had buttoned her lip and picked at her fingers instead.
Now she was afraid again and although it was not of the playground it was the same fear: that what was bad today would be worse tomorrow.
She wrote down—
Worst Things
No more Eliot
No more piano
—and then stopped. There was something else, but she could not bring herself to write the word: divorce.
The idea of divorce had only occurred to her quite recently. When first her grandparents and then Tom and Kathy had split up, the separations had been couched in terms of geography: “Grumpeter wants to live in France,” and “Tom’s got a job in a different hospital.” Eliza saw now that while both those statements had been true they had only been partial truths. Peter and Tom had moved because their relationships had ended, not because they wanted to live somewhere new. Eliza had been deceived—how stupid she had been! Just a silly little girl, to believe what she was told. At that time her concerns had been as little as herself: Would Gravel still have a Chocolate Orange? Would she still see Stan and Jack at Christmas? Now that she was older and knew more about people in general, and her parents in particular, she carried the word “divorce” around with her like a furled umbrella on a cloudy day. Just in case. She did not want to be surprised by rain; she wanted to be prepared.
What would divorce mean for her? Two homes. Her heart pinned to each and stretched between them. Dad living somewhere else and maybe—if Mum got a real all-day job—a new flat for her too. That would mean another school and another fucking playground. The savage word roared in Eliza’s head. She hated her parents. This was a rotten future in which nothing would be certain and all of her questions would be met with “I don’t know.”
It was when she thought of no more home that she felt as if she were the umbrella and that a gust of wind had blown her inside out to face a pelting rain. No one bothered to mend umbrellas—she had seen them dumped in rubbish bins on stormy days—because unless they stayed up they were useless.
Perched in the toilet cubicle on those dreaded, desperate days, Eliza had told herself that every second which passed, however bad it was, brought her nearer to going home. That was the way she had completed each day: one second after another, each one closer to the final bell. She had tucked her feet up on the plastic seat, bringing her knees to her chest, until she was curled like an anxious hedgehog or shut like a human clam. Nothing—no one—could prize her apart and get inside. Behind the locked door she had bent her head and pressed her closed eyes against her knees until her eyeballs hurt and she saw red and black in flashes. Behind the warm, rough smell of her skirt and her tights—home—she had smelled the sharp cut of disinfectant from the floor. That smell would make her tough, she had thought. If she breathed it in for long enough, it would harden her insides.
There had been no crying—not there, locked up safe with
her feet off the floor—but only sitting, waiting, and dreaming of being at home.
Last night they had all—apart from her mother who had gone to get drunk in the pub—watched a program on television called The Ultimate Fate of Our Universe. Afterwards, Eliza had gone to her room and her father had come to talk to her. Once he had gone away again she got out of bed, opened the window and looked out.
It had been brought to her attention by the television program that being a planet was a lonely business. Each was confined, by the laws of its own orbit, to a solitary life. They might all be called “planet,” but they were not related. There was no communication: if Saturn fell in the river and Jupiter went to the pub, Mars would have nothing to say on the matter at all.
Above the house a starlit sky had glittered behind scraps of blowing cloud. Eliza had leaned out of the window, trying to see as far as possible into the universe. She had squinted at the stars and into the spaces between them.
Then it had occurred to her that “space” began right here, at her open window: there was nothing but a shred of cloud between the end of her nose and the edge of the universe. Her eyes had widened and all the breath had puffed out of her in surprise. I’m spinning away. She had become a spider turning slow, astonished circles down the drain; a sheet of paper drifting, helpless, into the yawn of the Underground tunnel. There was no “up” or “down” in space but only further and further away; she was tumbling, head over heels, into the limitless gap, and where she was going could not be called “somewhere” or a “place.” It was just a vacant, empty plot: deep space.
The ring of her cousins’ voices had broken into her thoughts—
“Give me the torch!”
“No!”
“Give it!”
“No!”
—and Eliza had blinked: she was back on the earth, and back at the window. Garden, grass, tree and tent were all laid out below where she had left them. Torchlight had jumped and flickered through the walls of the tent and into the thick night air, sheltered to a soft and mellow stillness.
Those badgery boys knew nothing of these fears, and Eliza had wished she was ignorant too. Snuffling out there in the garden on the grass—with their torch and their funny rocking voices, question and answer like owls in the wood—they were not troubled by such terrors because they had each other. Eliza envied them. They spoke to one another as if one mind, shared between them, spoke with two companionable voices.
That was how she felt when she was with Eliot: as if they were side by side at the piano and playing with one hand each. Eliza would play the part of the right hand and Eliot the part of the left.
At that moment—leaning her cheek against the cool pane of glass, feeling the breath of the night and hearing her cousins speak in canon and fugue—two voices had seemed to strike up a dialogue in Eliza’s own head. One had told her, Go! and the other, But you can’t. Looking out of the bedroom window she had begun a spirited argument with herself that had ended when she crept into the kitchen and looked up the time of the morning train: 0742.
What if home were no safer than the playground, or than outer space? Was this the very worst thing that could happen? The train pummeled on. Eliza held her pen over the page, not quite touching it. What if writing these words made them true?
All of a sudden she was tired—so tired she was not just drowsy but almost asleep and dreaming. She put the lid on her pen, leaned her rucksack on the window and let her head flop against it. Beyond the glass the blur of land and sky had grown pale: London. The cottage lay in country that was rumpled curves and burrows—a sleeping toy in an unmade bed—but London was edge and surface. Everything was exposed. Even leaves, blown into the playground from the street, were forced to dance in public circles by the wind.
Martha was white, sitting up on her bed in her clothes. What? Gone? Where? Oh God—
“Car keys,” Clive said, “please, now. I’ll go. You—”
“Go where?” She got off the bed and searched for the car keys in yesterday’s jacket. “Where has she gone? We’re all here, for God’s sake! Who would she—?”
She would not say the name—and nor would he—but they both knew where and who.
“Stay here,” he ruled, snatching the keys from her outstretched hand, “and phone the stations. And the police. Find her bike. Get them to look on the CCTV. And phone my mother—I’ll never beat the train—get her to go to Paddington and wait.”
“But—”
The door flew shut behind him, and she heard his feet go thumping down the stairs.
Tom telephoned Val who said, “I’m not surprised, if you want to know the truth.”
“Save it, Mum,” said Tom. “Just get to Paddington, will you?”
“She’s a very angry little girl,” said Val. “And with good reason.”
“Why are you telling me? I agree with you. Now can you get there?”
“Of course I can,” she said. “There’s plenty of time. Aren’t I always telling you how close I am to central London?”
On the train Eliza was snapped awake by the sound of a voice that carried the flat, attention-calling resonance of a handclap.
“Right, everybody! Tickets, please!”
Eliza unzipped her rucksack and held hers in her fist, trying to even out her heartbeat by thinking of minims rather than quavers.
She could tell from the sound of the ticket inspector’s voice that he was a man who loved his job. As he approached he spoke to each passenger: “Hello there, thank you. Now, where are we off to? Lovely, thanks, there you are. Yes, madam, we are on time.”
Closer and closer he came. Why could she not have got one of those moody, silent ones? Today was a Sunday, and quiet. So far no one had said a word to her, and she had not needed to speak. She had operated two machines—one for cash and one for the ticket—but no living, breathing person had paid her any attention at all.
She knew the iPod would give her no cover and nor would it be any use to pretend to be asleep. The inspector would stand there—she had seen this happen to other people—repeating, “Excuse me,” until she opened her eyes. Now he was here and it was her turn; she licked her lips like a bad dog.
“Hello, miss,” said the man. He looked at her, first over his spectacles and then through them.
Eliza made a bared-teeth smile and held out her ticket.
“Thanks very much.” The man held the orange rectangle in his hand and seemed to read every single word as if he had never seen one quite like this before. “Where are we off to? London? On your own?”
Eliza did not trust herself to speak so she nodded.
“Aren’t you grown-up.”
Was it a question? He seemed to expect a reply. Eliza cleared her throat and said, “Yes I am.”
The man gave her back the ticket and she took one end, but to her terrible fright he kept hold of the other. Now she was stuck, frozen in place. “Someone meeting you the other end, are they?” he said. His voice was kind but still it was the worst question in the world.
“Yes,” she gulped. “My mum.”
“Very good, well done. I wish my little girl was as responsible as you are.” He let go.
For an awful moment Eliza thought she might start crying. Tears pricked her eyes and an enormous lump, as big as if she’d swallowed a whole loaf of bread, sat in her chest. She smiled—mainly to crinkle up her eyes and stop the tears popping out—and looked down at her rucksack. She took a lot of trouble over putting her ticket away and opening and closing all the zips.
The conductor looked at her for three and a half more seconds—which she counted—and then turned to the next person and went on down the carriage: “Hello, hello, here we are, tickets please…” Eliza thought that everyone must be looking at her. She stared out of the window until the red-hot feeling went away.
At last the train began to slow down and it passed an on-the-top Underground station. When she saw that round red-and-blue sign it was so familiar that Eliza felt as safe as
if she really were being met off the train—as if Eliot had come from Hampstead in her little car to stand at the barrier and wave. Even though this was not the end of her journey Eliza felt like cheering and running up and down the aisle with her shirt over her head, like the boys did when they scored at football. Instead she joggled in her seat and grinned at her reflection in the window pane. She made the face of a triumphant tiger at the swoop and dip of the neighboring tracks which were slowing down and turning from a formless gray mash into a neat threaded pattern of ribbons and streamers.
Everything that had come out of her rucksack was zipped back into its pocket. She fished out her Oyster card and gripped it in her hand, so hard that its edges marked her palm. She struggled to contain her elation. She wanted to shout and boast to everyone on the train and to chant under her breath something that would accompany the clatter and swallow of the train’s wheels over the points: Eliot Fox, Eliot Fox, Eliot Fox.
Eliot was not at the barrier but someone else, someone whom Eliza knew and loved, was there instead: her grandmother. Val was standing in a familiar pose—hands clasped in front of her and handbag tucked under one elbow—but she was looking older than usual. Eliza spent a moment staring—Was it her? Could it be?—before recognition spread like melted butter.
When she knew for sure that it was Val she wanted to laugh, cry and shout out her name. She slowed right down, faltering, and then speeded up and ran the rest of the way, saying, “Gravel! Gravel!” under her breath.
Her grandmother caught sight of her and right away looked ten years younger, as if she had swallowed a miracle drink. She broke into a smile, stepped forward and met Eliza’s running—flying—body with open arms. They both hung on.
Never Mind Miss Fox Page 17