by Jo Baker
Howard Street, Oxford
May 6, 1985
BILLIE TAKES HER building society book from the bureau drawer. She has twenty-five pounds in her Junior Saver account. She takes knickers and socks and a clean T-shirt and a spare pair of jeans and by the time she’s rolled it all up together her Smurf bag is so full the seams are pulling themselves apart. There are little holes where the stitching drags against the fabric.
She works her smallest sketchpad in between the bundled clothes, thinking can she manage to bring her other things—her damaged, secret things. Her hare’s skull, staved in at the back like an eggshell. A leaf-skeleton hung with a thread from a twist of driftwood, turning slightly with her displacement of the air. Her dried-out newt, tiny as an insect, coiled like a dragon, its eyes dimpled and parched.
She looks down at her bag. There isn’t space. They’d get crushed. And her mum would notice, in an instant. Walk in the door, see Billie’s bleached-out collection of oddments gone, and know that she’d gone too.
Instead, Billie slips in a 4B pencil and a sharpener. Their shapes are visible through the side of the bag.
She read somewhere—she thinks it might have been C.S. Lewis—that the best way to escape is not to climb out the window in the dead of night, but to saunter, in broad daylight, out of the front door. That way, if someone sees you going they’ll not suspect a thing. If you’re spotted halfway out of a window at three in the morning, chances are it’s going to look suspicious.
Billie has told her mum she’s going to meet up with Jenny and Claire, go shopping, and then see a film. It gives her a good four hours before anybody will even notice that she’s gone.
She knots the cords and slings her Smurf bag over her shoulder and clatters down the stairs and heads for the front door. No-one stops her. But her mum hears her, and leans out round the side of the kitchen door.
Madeline is drying her hands with a tea towel. Her hair is bundled up into a ragged ponytail. She wears a long skirt and flat canvas shoes. She tries to look like it’s all normal, but she’s not fooling anyone.
“Have a nice time.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t forget your key,” she says.
“I’ve got it.”
“Good girl.” Her mum gives her a smile, which makes her skin crumple up like tissue beneath her eyes. You can see that she’s been crying; she’s been crying for weeks. She just won’t admit it.
And this is what’s driving Billie mad. The floorboards are about to crumble, the roof to fly away. The walls will fall out flat like water-lily petals, and they will, all three of them, be entirely exposed to view. And they keep on pretending that everything is normal.
“See you,” she decides on, and clunks the door shut behind her.
She goes to the building society branch on the High Street, where no-one knows her.
“All of it, please,” Billie asks.
The woman has a flicky fringe sprayed into place with lots of hairspray—Billie can see the dried droplets of it hanging off the individual hairs like paint. The woman doesn’t make any comment on Billie’s withdrawal. She just slides a paper slip across the counter, asks Billie to sign.
Billie walks to the station, out at the back of Oxford. Crossing the river on Hythe Bridge Street she is caught there for a moment, watching the drip of weeping willows towards the water, watching upstream the men and women in big sweaters and jeans going about the business of living in their narrow boats. Big black buckets and knotted ropes and strapped-down jerry cans. A mottled hairy dog keeps a grave eye on things. It seems the best way to be here, if you have to be here—to be always ready to be gone.
• • •
The train ticket costs her three pounds and seventy-five pence, which is quite a lot, and she has to wait half an hour for the next train to London, which she does, sitting on her hands, bag resting on the seat beside her, arm still through the cord loops so that no-one can nick it.
A man sits down near her, and lights up a cigarette, and looks at her, and offers her one, but she looks away and pretends not to notice. He says something, and she gets up from her seat, and walks up to the steps, and up and over the footbridge, and down back into the ticket hall, and waits the rest of the half an hour there, keeping quiet on a bench, avoiding catching anybody’s eye in case it’s somebody that she knows, or somebody whom she doesn’t know but who knows her parents and would recognise her. She jumps every time the tannoy bings into life, expecting her train to be announced. Five trains are announced before hers, and on each occasion she feels a faint flicker of relief: it is not too late yet; she could just go back, and be home, and no-one will ever know that she was leaving, and maybe everything will be all right. But then her train is called, and when that happens there’s suddenly no question. She hares off over the footbridge and skitters down the steps and bolts through the nearest door before the platform guard slams it just behind her.
She makes her way down the carriages until she finds an empty seat. The train shunts into movement. There is no getting off now. The city peels away like a curtain, and they gather speed, pass the backs of terraced houses, suburbs, trading parks, and out into the fields. The woman opposite unpacks corned-beef-and-onion sandwiches, then carefully peels a hard-boiled egg, dropping fragments of shell into her clingfilm sandwich wrapping. She takes a bite from the egg, a bite from the sandwich, chews them together. It’s pretty disgusting, what with the smell and the sound of her chewing.
Billie weaves her way to the buffet car to get away from the woman’s lunch. She buys coffee and a four-finger Kit Kat. When she gets back to her seat the woman has finished her meal, and is reading a fat creased paperback. Billie slips the paper sheath off the chocolate bar, runs her thumbnail down the foil.
Granddad has always been on her side. He was when she was little, and he will be still. He made her that green aeroplane with the pedals. And it never mattered to him what she’d done, how cheeky she’d been, whether it was well past bedtime. She could always go to Granddad, and he’d lift her up onto his knee and defend her from all comers.
• • •
In London, she finds her way by the blurred recollection that comes from tagging along at her dad’s heels, hand clamped in his hand, an awareness of crowds and crush and the warm pelt of his moleskin or elephant-cord trousers, and the colourful abstractions of the Tube map, and the black line being the only one that’s needed, and the litany of names, Clapham, Balham, Tooting Bec. Her hands get dirty from nothing in particular.
She sits, swaying on the orange-mottled Tube upholstery, and nods with tiredness. She doesn’t know how she can be so exhausted—it’s as though just being moved from place to place causes wear upon the body—the drag away from home, like sucking your feet out of sticky mud. The gravity of where you’re from that doesn’t want to let you go.
Follow the black line right to the end. Climb up into the daylight and head—she blinks round, looking for a landmark, spots the green corner of the park—that way.
It turns out right. The park, with its tiny straggling river, and then businesses, and then playing fields. She turns up the London Road, and spots the cricket green, and is nearly there. She has flashes of memory: the place where pineapple weed grew between the paving stones, the corner with the scary dog. Like pebbles dropped thoughtlessly and years ago, for her to make her way back now. The pram shop with its yellow translucent blinds and the sweetie shop where they sell the best ice cream, and down Bramcote Avenue, and the cherry blossom is in bloom, and into Denham Crescent, and she’s there.
The house is as it always was. The green square of lawn neatly mown, fat-looking grape hyacinths and fleshy tulips in the borders. The single bow window curtained in swags of net and lace. It is all actually really and truly normal. So normal and unchanging that she reaches out to touch the front gate out of a simple need to connect with it, and it creaks. In the front window the net curtains lift in a sudden dark swoop, and she can’t see whoever’s l
ooking out, just the pink hook of their hand around the bunched lace.
Granddad. Grandma.
She pushes open the gate and runs up the path.
The nets in the front bay window fall back into place. She can hear her granddad’s voice, calling out: “Ruby!”
And he’s there, she doesn’t even have to knock, she can see him through the glass panes of the door, trapped between the rays of the wooden sunrise.
He opens the door. She steps up and into the house and into his arms.
He smells familiar, of Old Spice, and sweetened coffee, and mints.
The hall is as it always was. Wallpaper dizzy with roses. Warm and stuffy. His cream nylon cap; Grandma’s navy coat.
“Billie,” Granddad says. He breathes against her. Her cheek lies on his chest.
“Granddad.”
“Thank God.”
He rubs her hair. Grandma appears in the doorway to the sitting room. She has a duster twisted up in her hand. She has a headscarf on over her grey curls. Billie smiles at her, but her grandma blinks away tears.
“Sweetheart.”
Billie steps away from Granddad and goes to hug her. “What’s wrong, Grandma?”
“You’ve given us all a proper scare.”
She’s looking over Billie’s shoulder at Granddad; Billie can feel it. Some kind of look they’re giving each other.
Then she lets go. Billie ducks down and fusses the wriggling dog. It’s a skinny black and tan mongrel, got from Battersea Dogs Home. It’s the second Sukie since Billie was born, but she knows there were other Sukies before.
“Are you hungry?” Grandma asks.
“I am a bit.”
“I’ve got crispy pancakes,” Grandma says. “I’ve got fondant fancies, and I’ve got these little frozen mousses. Chocolate and raspberry.”
Billie smiles. She rubs at the dog’s head. “Thank you.”
“Come on through,” Grandma says.
In the front room, the chairs sag on either side of the gas fire. Grandma heads on through the arch into the dining room, and then into the kitchen. She makes a rattle with the kettle and the cups. Billie pauses just before the sliding door into the kitchen, glances back for Granddad, but he has stayed in the hall.
“Coffee,” Grandma calls, “or tea?”
There’s a framed photograph on top of the cabinet just by the kitchen door. It’s of the three of them on a boat. Mum is in a cream tunic dress with yellow and brown flowers embroidered round the neckline; her hair is all loose and shiny. Dad has a moustache and an open-necked cheesecloth shirt. The little girl’s wearing dungarees and has her hair cut in a blunt fringe. She’s three years old, maybe. It’s Cornwall, she remembers: she ate too much fudge, and was sick. In the picture they are all smiling.
“Tea,” Billie says. “Thank you.”
Billie hears the click of a lighter. She moves away from the photograph, and steps down into the kitchen. A cigarette spools blue smoke from her grandma’s hand.
“Or milk or water? Or I can send Granddad out for cordial.”
“Tea would be lovely, please, Grandma.”
She can hear him in the hallway—the tock-tock-tock-tock-tock and whizz of a phone number being dialled. She glances back round for him.
“Who’s he calling?”
“Sit down, honey.”
“Is he calling them?” Billie asks.
“You look shattered.”
Billie pulls out one of the chairs, sits down on the creaky vinyl, but tilts herself to look through the open kitchen door and back into the dining room and sitting room and the open hall door. Granddad is standing there—she can even see a strip of him, the fawn back of his trousers—talking on the phone.
“But who’s he on the phone to?”
“Your mum and dad, of course. They’re frantic.”
“But it doesn’t work like that any more.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not mum-and-dad any more. Not like that. Not as a pair.”
Grandma slides open the frosted glass door of the kitchen cupboard, lifts down the cut-glass sugar bowl. She taps her cigarette into a red plastic ashtray.
“We’ll see.”
But she doesn’t know, not really. She gets out a small mug and puts it down in front of Billie. Inside it’s glossy dark brown glaze, outside matte and creamy, decorated with brown-glaze aeroplanes.
They can hear the conversation; Granddad’s end of it. It starts out quiet, urgent—not to worry, yes, yes, she’s turned up here. No, no, she’s fine, yes, he will tell her. Billie knows it’s her mum on the other end. And then it changes, and there’s a big silence, which means her dad has taken over. The call ends abruptly—a brisk signing off from Granddad, then the clatter and ping as the handset is set down.
Granddad comes back in. He and Grandma exchange a glance. They don’t say anything. She thinks she might cry. He’s supposed to be on her side.
“Don’t make me go back there.”
“One thing at a time, honey,” Grandma says.
Billie feels hot. She holds her hands to her cheeks. Grandma pours her a cup of tea, gives her an awkward little smile.
“It’s all right, love. It’ll be all right.”
And Billie shifts her hands across her eyes and cries.
They eat ham-and-cheese Findus Crispy Pancakes and tinned peas, and new potatoes from a tin. Billie helps in the kitchen, opening the tins, pouring contents into aluminium pans. Her eyes are sore but she is keen to show how calm and reasonable and cheerful she really is. The potatoes emerge from the tin white and faintly porous, like deep-sea creatures used to living in the dark.
As they eat, Grandma watches Granddad, Granddad frowns. When he does that, he looks just like her dad. Something serious is going to happen. They are going to want to talk. If she lets them talk, they will tell her that she has to go back.
Grandma gets out the mousses. Billie asks for chocolate. It is still a little frozen in the middle. She digs it out with a spoon. It is frosty on the tongue.
“It was before the war, wasn’t it, Granddad, when you were cycling?”
He looks up at her, blinks. After a moment he smiles. And he starts to tell her again about his racing days. Grandma smiles at his smile, chips in eagerly. Familiar phrases. People would stop him in the street. People would want to shake his hand. Billy Hastings.
Just like her. It’s her name too. Give or take a couple of vowels.
He looks up at her then, blinks his soft blue eyes, and another silence falls.
“And then there was the war,” Billie says.
“Did I tell you about D-Day, about how we were going to sacrifice a gull?”
“Forty years ago now,” Grandma says.
“Forty-one. Nearly.”
He goes quiet. Taps at the side of his mug.
“Go on, Granddad.”
Billie’s heard the story a dozen times already. It doesn’t matter because she’s listening only enough to nod and smile in the right places. Her mind’s searching for the next thing, a new question, a question that will keep this freewheeling on along through warm familiar memories for a while longer. They drink tea. A little later the box is got out. The campaign medals, the war medal stamped with an eagle and a dragon, and the cycling medals. Amateur Pursuit Cycling Champion 1935, one in French from 1935, then a Veteran’s Medal, 1946.
“Veteran as in war veteran?”
“Veteran as in old man.”
“You were an old man in 1946?”
Grandma and Granddad both laugh. “In a manner of speaking,” he says.
She turns its weight round in her hands. William Arthur Hastings engraved on the back.
“We could go out later, Granddad. I could borrow a bike from next door.”
“Roads are so busy these days,” Grandma says briskly, setting a plate of Mr. Kipling’s Fondant Fancies down in the middle of the table. Billie picks up the pink one. The icing sticks to the roof of her mouth. She teases
at it with the tip of her tongue.
“What about this one?” She picks out the French medal, turns it over to peer at the inscription.
Grandma looks at him. An unfathomable look.
“Won that in Paris. At the Vélodrome d’Hiver,” he says.
“The winter—?”
“Cycle track, that’s right. Famous, it is. Infamous—”
“Billy.” Grandma’s voice is warning.
“Why shouldn’t she know? Jesus, if things were not so very different, she wouldn’t be here—”
“Please.”
Granddad gets up. He opens a kitchen cabinet, rattles around. Billie sneaks her hand into Grandma’s. Grandma gives her a wobbly smile. Billie doesn’t understand. He returns with a quarter bottle of something. Rum, Billie supposes, because Granddad is known to be partial to a drop of rum. He doesn’t look at either of them. He slops the liquid into his tea, screws the cap back on, sets the bottle down too hard, making Billie jump. The smell of it is sweet and peppery. No-one says anything. Grandma’s face has fallen into a deep-lined frown; Granddad’s flushed and defiant.
Then the doorbell goes. Granddad looks at Grandma, and Grandma gets up stiffly from her seat. “I’ll get it.”
“Oh,” Billie says. “Oh no.” She knows it’s him.
She hears the briskness of the greeting at the door, a kiss, and then the two of them—her dad and Grandma—coming in through the sitting room and back to the kitchen. Granddad wipes a drip of tea from the side of his mug.
She doesn’t dare look at Dad. He’s there on the edge of her vision, blue jeans and pale top and a loose navy jacket. He’s slumped slightly, favouring that bad leg, sore from the drive. So she has to feel guilty about that now.
“Right, Billie,” Dad says. “Come on. We can talk in the car.”
Granddad looks up. Billie doesn’t shift.
“Don’t mess around, Billie. Get your stuff.”
“I’m not coming.”