‘I’m glad we left Rob behind, although I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned up in Windy Close blagging off me and my mum within a week. He’s a fucking nightmare. He worked his way through Gran’s savings just before she died, and he’s borrowed money off me in the past and never paid it back – I was the only one in that place who ever had any bloody money, apart from Gran. I used to work at Surf & Skate six days a week in the holidays – when I was doing my BTEC at the college – and last year I saved up to go to Spain with some mates, but Rob “borrowed” the money, as in borrowed without asking, and he never gave it back, so I never went.’
‘That’s out of order,’ David says. ‘Fucking dick.’
‘He wasn’t a bad person; he was just irresponsible. Never grew up.’
‘Still well out of order, though. What did he want the money for anyway?’
‘Drugs, clothes, train fare to London to see potential “agents”, more drugs. I don’t know. He didn’t have the same mentality as me and my mum. We were used to being poor, and we were pretty good at it. We just didn’t buy luxuries, and we sort of didn’t think we ever would, either. We used to have a Christmas Tin when I was a kid. We used to put spare change in it, and my gran would add to it and stuff, and every Christmas we’d have nice food and everything that we’d lay out on the table for days before, just so we could look at it. The year Rob came to live with us, he invented the IOU system, where you could borrow money from the Christmas Tin as long as you put in an IOU and then replaced the money. At the end of the year there were about forty IOUs in there that added up to about a hundred quid, but no actual money.
‘God, do you know what I’ll remember most about being poor?’ Chantel continues, passing the spliff to David. ‘All the invisible barriers – shops you could never, ever go into because you’d never be able to afford anything in them. Gourmet-food shops, department stores, those big toy shops you see in films about Christmas, and you know even if you knew where to find a toy shop like that you couldn’t go in there because you’d only ever shopped in pikey shops, or the market . . . Even WHSmith was too posh for us. When I started at comprehensive school we were allowed to use biros and my mum got me a load of Argos pens, the free ones, and she thought she’d been really clever to find free pens, but of course everyone at school just called me a pikey and that was that.’
‘I had pens from the betting shop. My granddad got them,’ David says, smiling. ‘He thought he was being original. In fact, I think when I was really little I used to draw in crayon on betting slips, because they were free and paper wasn’t, and I always used to get pissed off because of the lines and writing in the way of my pictures.’
Chantel laughs. ‘Oh, God, and I remember when Top Shop and Miss Selfridge seemed totally posh, and I wasn’t allowed to go in them. I used to get all my clothes and school uniform from Jackson’s Warehouse, where you could get a school jumper for about two quid and skirts for one pound fifty.’
‘I remember Jackson’s Warehouse,’ David says. ‘I got my school uniform there as well.’ He laughs. ‘And I got my first watch from the market – it was a present from my granddad and it cost about three quid. I really loved that watch, though. In my family it was exactly the same – we had no money at all, really – except my old man used to save up and take us to the army-supplies shop every few months, because he thought we’d all become soldiers, even my sister. We all had little army outfits and huge boots and facepaints and penknives and torches and netting, and every Saturday night we used to get a Wimpy, watch The A-Team and then pitch a tent in the front room and play Northern Ireland.’
‘Northern Ireland?’ Charlotte says.
David’s laughing. ‘Yeah. We had two cats. They were the IRA. My mum hated it. My old man spent whole weekends teaching us armed combat – stuff he’d learnt in the marines, like the most efficient way to cut someone’s throat, how to crawl in the undergrowth, how to start a fire with no matches and open a tin of beans with no can-opener; and radio signals and command hierarchies and how to kill yourself if you were imprisoned to avoid them torturing the information out of you . . .’
‘And now you’re doing a law degree,’ Charlotte says.
‘He hates that,’ David says. ‘My mum’s proud but Dad could never work out why I didn’t want to go in the army like he did.’
‘Wasn’t he actually in the army when you were a kid?’ Charlotte asks. ‘I mean, how could he be at home pitching tents with you and stuff? Was that just when he was on leave?’
‘He was paralysed by then,’ David explains. ‘Well, from the waist down. Got shot in the spine. We lived on his pension.’
‘So he couldn’t walk at all?’
‘No. But he still made it down the pub every night to meet his mates.’ David laughs. ‘Electric wheelchair. Used to go where he wanted.’
‘So he was paralysed and still obsessed with the army?’ Charlotte sounds confused.
‘Totally,’ David says. ‘Mum used to have to dress him and bath him but he was still going on about hand-to-hand combat the whole time, like he was still some sort of expert. You should have seen him when the Gulf War was on. He was obsessed with it all, like a commentator, like some sort of Jimmy Hill of war.’
Chantel and Charlotte laugh at that.
‘What did you do on birthdays when you were a kid?’ Chantel asks David.
‘We always used to have Co-Op Black Forest Gateau and I always got an Action Man from my dad and a book token from my granddad. My mum used to let me choose something from the catalogue a couple of weeks before. The day before my birthday she’d always pretend it hadn’t come, but it would always appear, miraculously wrapped up on the kitchen table the next morning. What about you?’
‘A trip to McDonald’s and a video. We weren’t allowed cake in the house because of my mum’s diet.’
‘A trip to McDonald’s?’ says Charlotte.
‘It was the only time we ever went. It was, like, a huge treat. That was until Rob came, of course; then it would be, like, McDonald’s three nights running until there was no money left for the weekend and we’d have to eat out-of-date bread and stuff. Sometimes we couldn’t afford tampons and we had to use homemade ones. See?’ She laughs. ‘That’s how much of a pikey I was. Homemade sodding tampons. Jesus.’
‘I hate the word pikey,’ David says quietly.
‘Yeah, so do I actually,’ Chantel says. ‘I’m just trying to reclaim it. Anyway, where did you grow up, Charlotte?’ she asks.
‘Cambridge. Well, a village just outside Cambridge.’
‘A village,’ says Chantel. The way she says the word makes it sound as exciting and exotic as if she’d said castle, or millionaire’s private island. ‘That would be well wicked, to live in a village.’
‘It wasn’t,’ Charlotte says. ‘It totally sucked.’
‘Why?’ Chantel asks. ‘Wasn’t it pretty?’
‘Yeah, it was pretty, but it was also small and gossipy, and no one could be different and you had to get a bus into town . . . I don’t know. It was just shit.’
‘Did you have a nice house?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Can’t have been that shit, then.’
‘Maybe not,’ says Charlotte.
There’s a junction up ahead. Julie doesn’t know where to go next. ‘Where should I go at this roundabout?’ she asks.
‘Straight over,’ says David, focusing on the map again. ‘Then – oh, shit.’
‘What?’
‘There’s no yellow road after the next roundabout.’
Julie starts to panic. ‘Where am I going to go, then?’
‘You’ll have to go on a red road for about two minutes.’
‘What kind of red road?’
‘It’s just an A-road. It’s not a dual-carriageway or anything.’
‘Oh, shit.’
‘It’ll be OK, babe,’ Charlotte says.
Everyone shuts up while Julie drives around the first roundabout and down a thin roa
d with wet trees and more rain, towards another roundabout with big green signs and white lights.
‘So where’s this A-road?’ Julie says at the roundabout. She’s still worried about the sandwich. What if she’s on a main road when the acid kicks in? In her head, she sees the van spinning out of control, straight into the path of the oncoming traffic. Or what about drunk drivers at this time of night, haring home from the pub on these fast local roads? What if one of them drove into her? Her head feels weird. She knew she was right about the acid. Now she can’t breathe.
‘Calm down, Jules, it’ll be fine,’ Charlotte says.
‘You want to go around to the right,’ David says. ‘The A408 – that’s it, that one. Then look out on your right for a turning onto the B470 towards, um, Datchet or Eton. Make sure you don’t miss it because the next one’s much further down.’
The A-road doesn’t look too much different to some of the B-roads they’ve been on but Julie’s still sweating. She doesn’t want to have a car crash; she doesn’t want to die. She realises she’s doing forty miles an hour and remembers what some guy once told her about having a blow-out at forty or over being potentially fatal. She slows down to about thirty-five.
‘Can’t we go faster?’ Luke says.
Julie’s hands grip the steering wheel tighter. He’s been quiet for ages, drinking more beer through his straw and looking out of the window. He hasn’t asked for anything to be explained to him – not that you can see much out of the windows apart from trees, rain and dark, shadowy industrial estates – and he hasn’t commented at all on the outside world. Now he wants to go faster. What’s the matter with him?
‘Why are we going so slowly?’ he says.
Charlotte turns around and gives him a look.
‘What?’ he says. ‘I just want a bit more excitement, that’s all.’
‘Haven’t you been paying attention, mate?’ David asks.
‘Sorry?’ says Luke.
‘Your friend is doing you a favour. Show her some fucking respect.’
‘Leave it, Dave,’ says Chantel.
Luke’s already retreated back under his blanket.
Chapter 37
‘This country’s fucked,’ David says.
Chantel’s asleep and Luke’s still under his blanket. It’s almost half past four in the morning and Julie’s been trying to get beyond Berkshire and into Wiltshire for the last two hours. The flooding’s terrible here. All she can see now is a wet kaleidoscope of roads, like mirrors smeared with mud, and the reflection of the van’s headlamps in puddles. By now every road looks the same: wet trees, fallen leaves, dead branches, black fields, damp hedges messed up by the wind.
‘Totally fucked,’ he says. ‘No trains. No roads. Fucked.’
Charlotte yawns. ‘I’m knackered,’ she says.
She seemed to get bored with the radio about three hours ago and now the only sounds Julie can hear, apart from the others talking, are the sloshing of the van tyres through the water on the roads, the hum of the windscreen wipers and the car heater.
There’s another huge branch blocking the road up ahead.
‘David,’ Julie says, slowing down. ‘Branch.’
They’ve already got a system going for this. If there’s a way around via another route, they’ll go around. If not, and if it’s small enough, David will move the branch.
He studies the map. ‘Around,’ he says. ‘Turn back, then take the first left you see.’
‘OK.’
It’s not easy turning a VW Camper on B-roads and country lanes. Julie ends up reversing most of the way back down the road until she sees the turning David means. It’s an even smaller road, but at least it’s not so flooded. Well, the first hundred or so yards of it aren’t flooded, then Julie realises it’s because the road goes downhill. At the bottom of the hill Julie realises that the space in front of her is filled with shiny black water, collected in the section where the road, she presumes, stops going down and starts going back up again. Unfortunately the up-again bit is nowhere to be seen and the water looks like it goes on indefinitely.
‘Fuck it,’ David says.
‘Shall I drive through it?’ Julie says.
Charlotte shrugs. ‘What do you reckon?’ she asks David.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘We can’t tell how deep it is, can we? Or where it ends.’
‘How deep could it be?’ Julie asks.
For some reason, she has remained unafraid of all this water everywhere. In fact, in one way she quite likes it: the roads are clearer; no one’s going that fast. The nice thing about water is that if the worst happens, you can always float on it. Irrationally, Julie isn’t at all bothered about the floods. She can swim; what’s the big deal?
‘I’m going to go through it,’ she says.
‘You might fuck the van’s brakes, if it’s deep,’ David says.
‘Or we could get stuck,’ says Charlotte.
Julie starts inching towards the huge puddle of water.
‘I’m not sure about this,’ Charlotte says. ‘What about Luke and Chantel?’
‘What about them?’ Julie says.
‘If we get stuck . . .’
‘Then they’ll have to get out and help push. It won’t be that deep,’ Julie says.
She stops just before the huge stretch of water and looks at it.
‘Low gear,’ David says. ‘And don’t go too fast. But don’t stop. If you stop, you won’t be able to start again. Just keep going through it, once you’re in. In fact, maybe you should reverse back so you can get a bit of momentum going.’
‘OK,’ Julie says, reversing about twenty yards or so. ‘Here goes.’
‘Remember not to let the van stop,’ David says. ‘Second gear.’
‘OK.’ Julie feels like Evel Knievel about to leap over a line of buses. She glances at Sophie’s charm dangling from the rearview mirror, then drives forward, a bit faster than she’d like under these circumstances, and the van eventually sloshes into the water. The incline into the flooded bit of road is a lot steeper than she imagined it would be, and it feels as if the wheels are almost totally immersed.
‘Oh, shit,’ she says.
‘Just don’t stop,’ David says again. ‘Now you’re in, you just have to get out the other side. Just keep driving.’
Keeping her foot steady on the accelerator, Julie keeps driving the van through the water, trying desperately not to do anything to make it stall. The section of flooded road is even longer than she’d thought, and after a minute or so there’s still no end to it. Julie tries to steady her shaking hands and keeps her eyes fixed on the water in front of her. She realises she’s been holding her breath, and starts trying to breathe normally again while keeping the van going forwards.
‘Oh, shit,’ Charlotte says. ‘We’ve driven into a river. I can’t look.’
‘Shut up, Charlotte,’ David says. ‘Keep her steady, Jules.’
Julie’s concentrating so hard their voices seem to come from miles away. She has to get through this, otherwise there’s no way back – or forward. They’d be completely stranded in here. She presses the accelerator a little harder, but it doesn’t make any real difference to the speed of the van. Julie has the feeling that they’re simply going forward by their own momentum now, and the thought gives her a little buzzing feeling – like fear, but nice. This is one of the most exciting things she’s ever done.
‘I don’t like this,’ Charlotte says.
‘It’ll be all right,’ Julie hears herself saying.
Then she realises: Charlotte’s scared of something, and Julie isn’t.
‘Well done,’ David says, when they eventually come out on to the road again. ‘Top driving, Jules.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ says Charlotte. ‘That was fucking terrifying.’
Julie’s shaking but smiling. ‘It was pretty fun, actually,’ she says.
It was fun but she’s stopped the van for a few minutes to have a cigarette anyway. She pierces a new
carton of Ribena with a straw and takes several huge gulps. David passes her the map.
‘Here’s where we are,’ he says, leaning over the driver’s seat and pointing. ‘And this is the only way we can get through now.’ He points to a road leading vaguely in the direction of Swindon. ‘See, there’s where we’ve been stuck, and here’s where we can get back on to that bigger B-road.’
‘Isn’t that the road that was flooded and had that huge branch we couldn’t get past?’ Julie asks.
‘Yeah, but we’ll be joining it higher. See?’
All Julie can see right now are the words Vale of White Horse on the map. And there, almost in the middle: the name of the little village where her mother lives. Julie realises that they must have driven almost right by it already, a while ago, before the huge branch and the flooded road.
‘Yeah, whatever,’ she says, and wonders what her mother’s house is like, and what it looks like, and what she looks like now. Julie has a weird pang of something like homesickness, then puts down her drink and switches the engine back on.
‘OK. Let’s go.’
About a mile or two down the road there’s a roadblock just before a village. Two policemen in fluorescent tops are talking to some men in an RAC rescue van. One of the policemen gestures for Julie to stop.
‘Shit. Old Bill,’ says David, sounding instantly panicked.
‘Hide your gear, Dave,’ says Charlotte.
‘I am,’ he says. ‘Jesus. Bollocks. Down my boxers. There.’