Solace of the Road (7 page)

‘Christ,’ she said. ‘Rotten day.’

‘Too right.’

‘You going to Oxford?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Me too. You studying there?’

I stroked down the wig and smiled. I don’t know what came over me. I said, ‘Yeah.’ Me, Holly Hogan, studying at Oxford? Some joke. Mrs Atkins had despaired of me. Least I
could
read, not like Grace and Trim. They hardly knew their ABC. They used to make me read out the tube adverts to them and their texts were something else.

‘I’m there too.’ The girl was all smiles. ‘I’m at St John’s. Where are you?’

‘St Peter’s?’ I said off the top of my head, and laughed like it was just a joke.

‘Oh, right,’ she said. ‘I don’t know anyone from there. I gather the food’s bad and the bar’s brilliant.’

Like the place actually
existed?

I nodded. ‘Bloody bad. Bloody brilliant.’ My voice had changed over from rough south Londony to grape pips to the power of ten, but this dumbo girl from hoo-haa-sint-johns didn’t seem to realize.

‘You a first year?’ she asked.

‘Yah.’

‘Me too. Liking it?’

‘So-so.’

‘Only so-so?’

‘Yah. You know. The food.’

She laughed. ‘Right. The food. It’s not bad at St John’s.’

‘It’s horrible at St Peter’s,’ I breezed. ‘D’you know what I found in my cream cracker the other day?’

‘No, what?’

‘A maggoty thing. Coming out of one of the holes.’

‘Yikes. Sounds like a weevil. Did you report it?’

‘Nah. Just chucked it.’

‘Don’t think I could face going back to Hall if that had happened to me,’ the girl said.

Hall? Where or what was that?

She opened her bag and got out a worn-out paperback. I made out the word ‘Tacitus’ on the front.

‘Do you mind if I read?’ she asked.

‘Course not.’ I’d never heard anyone ask permission to read before. But as she got into it, I almost wished I had a book too. You know what I said earlier about books being boring? But the fact is, I
do
read sometimes. When no one’s looking. Not old-fashioned stories, with people getting in and out of horse-drawn carriages. That crap bores me solid. But real stories, about
now
, I can handle. Love affairs and sex. Murders. People in trouble.

The week before, at school, Mrs Atkins had organized for this writer to come and visit. She thought maybe he’d get us all wide-eyed and bushytailed, and made out he was some kind of celebrity, and sure enough, when he walked in I thought he was
typical mogit, in love with himself, skinny with shiny glasses shaped like slits in a letterbox.
He’s going to drone on about his ideas and his characters and his publishers
, I thought, yawning. He sat down and stared at us like he didn’t know how to start. Then he went, ‘Does anyone here believe in modern-day miracles?’

The class tittered. Then a few hands went up. Suddenly everyone was talking about the miracles they knew about, how Grandma died of a heart attack and came back to life, how they’d met their best friend out on holiday in Majorca, or how Crystal Palace beat Man U three-nil.

And the guy nodded and said that him being here with his book
The Eleven Lives of Todd Fish
was the biggest modern-day miracle of the lot, because he’d hated school and didn’t learn to read properly until he was thirteen on account of having dyslexia. Which is what Trim says he has. If you ask me it’s just Trim’s excuse for being thick.

‘If you’d put money on me to be a writer one day,’ the guy said, ‘you’d have got odds of ten thousand to one and you’d be rich.’

I sat there and bit my cheek.
The odds of me being a writer
, I thought,
were a
million
to one
. But you know what? When he got us to write some sentences down about whether we believed in miracles, he liked mine so much that he read it out to the class. It made everyone laugh and he said how it was ‘pithy’, whatever that meant. I kept what I wrote. It goes like this:

I don’t believe in miracles. My mam used to say I was a miracle but now I know about babies I know I wasn’t. A miracle is more like when my mate Trim gets the ball off Miko whose the best footballer I ever saw not signed up professnall. Or like when I get pineapple on my pizza as well as ham. Its got nothing to do with god. Its luck. Luck is not the same as a miracle. Luck is what comes round the corner if you wait long enuff like the number 68 bus. Just my luck to be at this school in this class on this day in this minute having to right about miracles for this writer guy who says its a miracle he is here on account of his doing his ds and bs backwards when he was a kid. A miracle for him and not for me. Yo-ho-ho
.

I remember I wrote ‘right’, not ‘write’, deliberately and loads of mistakes, but he didn’t mind, nor me sending him up sky-high.

I must have chuckled out loud remembering because the girl on the bus looked up from her reading. I quickly stared out the window at the motorway hard shoulder and she went back to the book, peering at it like it was a treasure map. I glanced sideways to see what was so great about it but all I could see were words that didn’t make sense.

Then the girl put the book down. ‘Thule was sighted, but only from afar,’ she said.

‘Hey?’

‘Sorry, it’s this book,’ she laughed. ‘It’s amazing. This Roman historian, Tacitus, he’s writing about how Agricola – his father-in-law – sailed round Britain. And when he gets to the frozen north he sees land
and thinks it’s Thule. But they didn’t have time to reach it, or maybe it was too cold, so they sail by. And you know that Agricola must have regretted it for the rest of his life. It’s like his Holy Grail, Thule.’

‘Fool?’ I said.

‘No. Thule.’ She showed me the word in the book,
Thule
.

‘It’s a pretty name,’ I said.

‘D’you have one? A place like Thule?’

‘Hey?’

‘A place where you always wish you could go?’

‘Oh, yeah. Sure. I have a place like that. Ireland.’

‘Ireland?’

‘Yeah. ’S where I was born. Haven’t been back in ages.’

‘I hear it’s gorgeous.’

‘Gorgeous is right. Green, just like they say, fields and grass. What’s your place?’

The girl closed her eyes and smiled. ‘Egypt,’ she said. ‘The Valley of the Kings.’

‘The mummies and all?’

‘Yes. But the place I want to go to isn’t the Valley of the Kings now but in nineteen twenty-two. I’m in the dig with Howard Carter and we’re creeping into the tomb of Tutankhamun for the first time since it was sealed and time’s stopped and we see the glint of gold …’ Her eyes stayed shut and she moved her hand like she was finding her way through a dark passage.

‘That’s some Thule.’

She opened her eyes. ‘You must think I’m mad.
That’s what comes of reading dead languages. What’re you reading?’

‘Jane Eyre,’
I said. Mrs Atkins would have been proud. We’d got to the bit where whiney old Jane’s running away on the high moors because of Mr Rochester having a mad wife stashed away in the attic, and how stupid is that? The girl laughed. ‘I meant
studying
. At Oxford.’

‘Oh.’ I giggled. ‘French.’ It was the only thing that came into my head, which is funny because I hate French even worse than English.

‘French?’

I nodded.

‘You mean Modern Languages?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Don’t you have to do two?’

‘Two?’

‘Two languages.’

‘Oh, yeah, sure thing.’

‘So what’s your other one?’

‘Irish.’

‘Irish?’

‘Yep.’

‘I didn’t know you could study Irish at Oxford.’ Her two brown eyes went wide.

‘Yeah, you can. They just brought it in.’

‘That’s great. I mean,
really
great. Did you have any Irish to begin with?’

‘Yeah. Like I said, I was born there. And my mam’s Irish.’

‘Does she speak it?’

‘Oh, yeah.’ Like she spoke Russian.

‘Give me a sample – go on, I’d love to hear some.’

The coach took a turn and we were off the motorway. The air conditioning had gone off and voices and laughter were everywhere. My ears were hot.

‘In uch san, doonan micall noondee,’ I said.

‘Fab. What does that mean?’

‘It means, “When the hell will we ever get there?”’

The girl laughed. ‘Too right. I’m Chloe, by the way.’

I grinned. ‘I’m Solace.’

‘Solace?’

I nodded.

‘Great name. But that’s not Irish, is it?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It was my father’s idea.’

‘Your father?’

‘Yeah. He’s English. Not like my mam. He’s a writer, see.’

‘Wow. My father’s just a CEO. I’d much rather he was a writer.’

CEO. What was that? Some sort of medal from the queen?

‘So, what’s his name, so I can look out for him?’ Chloe asked.

‘Todd Fish,’ I said.

‘Fish? Is that your other name then?’

God. Solace Fish? I don’t think so
. ‘Oh no,’ I breezed. ‘That’s just his pretend name. The name he puts on the cover.’

‘You mean his
nom de plume?’

‘Not quite,’ I said. ‘ ’S more like – his writing name.’

Maybe it was that I’d forgotten to do the posh voice, but Chloe gave me a strange look. ‘Never knew there was a difference between …’ She paused and shrugged. ‘But hey. You’re the French scholar.’

My cheeks were on fire. Chloe went back to her book of Holy Grails and Thules. The bus hit a roundabout and there was a sign saying
OXFORD,
along with a whole load of places I’d never heard of.

We dropped speed. People shuffled, stirred, yattered. We were coming into town.
Oxford, here we come
, I thought. The bus went down this drab street like it was anywhere place in anywhere town. But then we went round another roundabout and over a bridge and Oxford punched me in the eye. There was a big yellow tower, yellow walls and green leaves and young people walking like they owned the world, mogits before they were old. A couple going arm in arm were all in black and white and had gowns on with bat-wing sleeves.

‘My boyfriend goes there,’ Chloe suddenly said in my ear, jutting her head at some more yellow stone, a big pile. As the bus passed, I glimpsed a flat green lawn through the archway. In the middle a thin black statue with one arm in the air was running through the prettiest fountain I ever saw. I remembered the times Trim sprayed water on Grace and me in the back garden at Templeton House while we ran round in our bikinis. He’d throttle the neck of the hose and the water would fizz everywhere.

‘Neat,’ I said, smiling.

‘Next year he’ll be gone.’

‘Gone?’

‘Yeah. He’s got a job with the World Bank. In Lagos.’

I never knew there was such a thing as a World Bank. I never saw a branch of it anywhere. And I didn’t know where Lagos was either. ‘Cool,’ I said.

Chloe shrugged, closed her book and got her bag out. The bus turned and sped down some streets with concrete bollards and buildings with no windows, then squeezed into a square.

‘Gloucester Green,’ the driver called. He pulled into a bay and turned the engine off. Everyone was standing, grabbing, pushing to get off.

Chloe turned to me, almost smiling. ‘Hey, Solace. See you around.’ She shuffled out the bus.

‘Bye,’ I called. I watched her vanish round a corner. Then I grabbed the lizard, got off and cruised across the square. I was Solace of the road. I had a lorry-load of friends. I was so delirious I nearly got run over by a bus pulling out.

Oxford, here I come
.

Fourteen
The Make-over

I coasted along a street of shops and nearly got mown down by a bicycle. There were bikes everywhere. I felt queasy just looking. It kills me how people ride them. Trim says it’s easy when you get the knack but I’ve never tried. To me it looks like a bad circus act.

My mobile beeped. A message.
DONT FORGET, HOME LATE,
F. Fiona was so out of it, she didn’t know to say L8.

Then I passed this shop full of wild dresses. I hadn’t worn a dress in so long I couldn’t remember. I stuck to jeans and sporty tops on account of being a rebel skater. I wasn’t like Grace with her designer labels. Pink, flowery flounces, tights, skirts and me didn’t go. But I stopped and looked in the window. I was checking the wig, mostly. But I couldn’t help seeing the models in these skimpy dresses with bright colours: orange and ice-blue with chocolate-brown blobs.

The designer had taken one too many Es.

They were Solace-style, to the last stitch.

I only had four pounds left. But I could always steal. I’d done shoplifting once or twice in the small sweetshop the Asians ran near Templeton House. I’d lifted the odd chocolate bar or packet of gums, but I’d never gone for clothes. Most places have magnetic tags on everything that you can’t get off without a special machine. You go through the door and an alarm goes off. You have to lift the clothes over or under the electronic beam or wrap them up in foil, according to Trim. He makes out he does it all the time. Even if the alarm starts up, he says, you scoot up the street quick, and after a block the security guards give up chasing. But I don’t know if he’s making it up, on account of most of what Trim says isn’t true. Trim says he was born on an aeroplane and how likely is that? So I’d never lifted clothes.

On the windows of this shop someone had sprayed
CLOSING DOWN.
I looked over the door. The place was called Swish. I drifted inside and headed for a rack at the back. A shop girl talked on the phone like it was glued to her skull.
‘Yeah, too right. I’d gone clubbing and he didn’t show up on time … Yeah. When they let you in you can’t go out again – they don’t stamp you nor nothing at the Clone Zone … Nah. So. Shan, I was stuck … What? … Yeah. We’re history …
’

I picked out a dress my size. It was wild – cream with mint-green and rose cloud shapes chasing each other all over, sleeveless with thin straps so your bra would show like you’re a supermodel. There was no magnetic tag. I looked at the label. Eighteen pounds reduced from thirty-five.