A Small Free Kiss in the Dark (8 page)
We decided not to go in a VFT, which stands for Very Fast Train, because we wanted to enjoy the scenery, and everything goes past in a blur when you’re on a VFT. There were people already in some of the carriages. We walked to the locomotive, where the engine-driver sits, and Billy slid his pocketknife in a crack and made the door come open. We let Max drive. I looked out the windows and saw white cows with black spots. When we got to the tunnel, Billy lifted Max up so he could pull the lever that sounded the whistle. We got out at the station near Gulliver’s Meadows. Billy opened all the tins and we found we had yellow peaches set in jelly, dog food, beetroot and some sweet, sticky stuff called condensed milk. I thought about Pablo Picasso’s dog, when we opened the dog food, and wished I could have saved it until I got a dog of my own. We sat in a paddock full of green grass and ate the peaches and the beautiful silver sardines, and dipped our fingers in the condensed milk and licked them, and then I drew some cows on the platform for Max and a sausage dog for me, before we caught the train home again.
I never had anyone to pretend with before. My dad never pretended. Even though I only did it for Max, our make-believe train ride had been fun. It stopped me wondering about things like weapons of max destruction and where we were going to sleep and why Max’s mother hadn’t come and what would happen to us all next.
We followed Billy down to the guard’s van. ‘We’ll sleep in here tonight,’ he said.
Max looked up at him. ‘Aren’t we going to the library?’
‘It’s too dark to go back now,’ Billy said.
Max looked at me and I felt bad. I’d told him we were only coming for a visit, but deep down I’d guessed that this was what Billy would do. I got myself ready for Max to throw another tantrum, but he looked at his mittens for a while and nothing happened. I guessed he was thinking about what Cecily said. I took the books out of my suitcase and Billy and me made a bed in it for Max, and zipped the cover up halfway so he could breathe and keep warm at the same time. I lay down on the bench beside him and Billy sat in a corner with his back against the wall. I closed my eyes and thought about the four storeys of books that we’d left behind, and wondered how many pages that would be and how many paragraphs and sentences and words and letters.
It was quiet in the guard’s van except for the faraway stutter of machine-gun fire, but after a while something made me think Max was crying. I reached out in the dark and took the handle of my suitcase on wheels and I rocked it backwards and forwards beside me, the way I’d seen mothers do with babies in prams. Then I heard Billy’s harmonica sounding sweet and sad and blue all at the same time, like a train whistle in the night. The music soaked into my skin and bones and I felt myself falling down and down and down into the velvet dark.
That night I dreamt of Cecily. She was flying around a church steeple. I couldn’t see her face, but I knew it was her because of the coffee tin under one wing. She was chucking biscuits everywhere and soldiers were firing machine guns at her. I screamed, trying to make her fly away, but she said, ‘I promised Max I’d look out for his mother.’ When the bullets hit her, she didn’t fall down, she exploded into billions of stars.
Then Billy was there, shaking me, and I knew something had happened.
‘Wake up, Skip. It’s morning.’
I knew it was more than that. Everything was vibrating, the carriage doors rattled and there was a rumbling sound like a huge train was going to smash through the subway wall. We woke Max and shoved the books and blankets in my case, then we all hurried up the stairs to see what was going on. Most people were going the other way, rushing towards the underground. The platform at ground level was almost deserted, except for the subway people, and even they looked like they were getting ready to move on to someplace else.
‘Keep off the streets,’ the fire-eater said when he saw us. ‘The place is swarmin’ with tanks.’
‘I was there, man, I seen it all,’ someone else said, ‘and I swear to God it wasn’t random bombing, it was pinpoint precision.’
‘What was the target?’ asked Billy.
‘State Library, man. There ain’t one brick left standin’ on another.’
Precision is the opposite of random, and random is the same as hit-and-miss. I couldn’t think of a reason why anyone would want to bomb the State Library. Was this my fault? Was this how God had answered my prayer? I held Max’s hand tight and squeezed my eyelids shut.
‘If youse are leavin’ town, the safest way is to follow the railway tracks,’ the fire-eater told Billy. ‘There’s roadblocks everywhere and it’ll only get worse.’
We sat on a red couch in the travellers’ lounge and opened up Max’s book like a travel brochure. Max turned the pages. He pointed to a photograph. ‘That’s Disneyland. We could go there,’ he said.
‘It’s a bit far away,’ said Billy.
‘What about here, then,’ said Max flipping through the pages. ‘Is this too far?’
‘Dreamland,’ said Billy looking at the postcard in Max’s book. ‘Great choice, Max. It’s near the beach.’
Dreamland was a fun park. The entrance looked like a man’s head, with a wide-open mouth full of big, white teeth. There were palm trees and blue skies in the picture and a Ferris wheel. It looked like somewhere you might go for a holiday.
Billy looked up at the clock on the wall as though we were going to catch a train. It was eight-thirty. ‘I’ve walked there before,’ he said. ‘We could probably make it in a few hours.’
The first part of our journey was underground. There were stacks of other people walking in the same direction as us. It wasn’t light enough to see them properly. I imagined we were an army; an army of old people, of mothers and fathers, of children and babies and of people who didn’t belong. The Army of the Third Side, unarmed because we didn’t believe in war.
I wondered if all the others were going to Dreamland, and I listened, but they only talked about what had already happened. At the end of the underground the metal tracks stretched out in front of us, dead electricity wires striped the pigeon-grey sky and rain dribbled down on us.
‘Is this the way to Dreamland?’ Max asked Billy.
‘Yes.’
‘Have you been there before?’
‘Yes, I told you.’
‘How many times?’
‘Lots of times.’
‘How far is it?’
‘A long way.’
In the beginning we went fast because we wanted to get to Dreamland. The rain made the metal tracks slippery, so we walked on the stones beside them. When Max got tired I let him sit on top of my case, but bits of rock kept jamming the wheels, and even though Billy was slow I kept getting further and further behind. All the other people on the track had passed us a long time back. I guess we’d been walking for at least a couple of hours when the rain started pelting down. Billy turned around and shouted to us. I couldn’t hear what he said, but he was pointing up ahead. He waited till Max and me caught up.
‘There’s a tunnel a bit further along,’ he said. ‘We’ll take a break when we get there.’
Orange flames flickered in the gloom. ‘A fire,’ I said. ‘Maybe someone’s already in there.’
Billy made us wait and went ahead. After a few seconds he waved to Max and me, and we knew it was safe.
‘Got any smokes?’ asked the man in the tunnel when we were all inside. Billy only had one cigarette left, so they took it in turns. We crouched around the old man’s fire while the rain poured down outside. Steam came off our coats and out of our mouths, and I thought about peace pipes and American Indians and Chief Seattle.
‘Most folks don’t stop,’ the man said when they got down to the brown part of the cigarette. ‘They’re all in a hurry to get where they’re goin’. I hear they’re headin’ north. They reckon there’s a place for people wiv nowhere else to go. You headed that way?’
‘Maybe.’
‘Where you from?’
‘City, Queen’s Elbows.’
‘Yeah? Queen’s Elbows. Been there meself a few times. Nice place.’
‘Not any more,’ said Billy. ‘They flattened it.’
‘Yeah? So where you stayin’ now?’
‘Here and there,’ said Billy.
‘Like me eh? Don’t like to stay in one place too long, ’specially not now. Must be tough with the little bloke, though.’
He leant his head towards Max and Max did something I didn’t expect. He said, ‘I’m Max and I’m six and this is Billy and Skip.’
I looked at Billy, but it was too late. Max had made a mistake but it wasn’t his fault; he didn’t know we never told strangers our names, even my running-away name.
‘Billy, Skip and Max, pleased to meet youse all,’ the man said. ‘And I’m Albert, Albert Park.’ Then he laughed and he looked like the picture of Dreamland on Max’s postcard, except he didn’t have as many teeth and they were yellowish-brown, not white. As he laughed I realised Albert Park wasn’t his name at all, it was the name of a suburb. He must have thought our names were made-up too, so it didn’t matter about Max’s mistake.
‘Fancy a cuppa?’ Albert pulled a dirty rag out of his pocket and wrapped it around his hand, then he reached over the fire and picked up a can of boiling water like he was invincible or something. We shared the rest of yesterday’s muesli bars with Albert and he shared his one tea bag with us. He only had two tin mugs, so we took it in turns and in between he squeezed the tea bag and put it in his pocket.
‘What’s in the case, lad?’ Albert asked me.
‘Books,’ I said. ‘About famous painters.’
‘Skip’s an artist,’ said Billy. ‘He draws beautiful pictures. Why don’t you draw something on Mr Park’s tunnel for him, Skip?’
Billy and Albert talked quietly while I stared at the sooty walls through the dancing flames. I heard Billy say something about Dreamland and Albert talked about some other place called No-Man’s-Land. Then I heard nothing as I began to draw the wild creatures I saw in my head. I drew buffalo and elk and caribou and wolves, and then I drew God’s red children, which is what Chief Seattle called his people even though they were really a brownish colour. I gave them horses to ride and headdresses made of eagles’ feathers to wear. I gave their horses a prairie, and I put gallop in their legs, wind in their manes and breath in their nostrils. I gave their riders bows and arrows to hunt with. They were precision weapons, because God’s red children only took what they needed. Then I drew red hearts inside all the bodies: in the men and in the animals. The last thing I did was put my hand against the wall and draw around it. That’s like a signature. When I took my eyes away from my drawing I felt surprised I was in a railway tunnel. I don’t know if Albert liked my picture, because it was
primitive
. That’s what ancient drawings are sometimes called, especially when they’re found on the walls of caves. A railway tunnel isn’t much different from a cave, except it’s open at both ends and most caves are not.
I could tell that Max liked my picture. ‘Can I draw around my hand?’ he asked and I gave him a piece of chalk. He traced the outline of his hand and wrote his name underneath in big crooked letters. Then he put black stripes across his cheeks with the soot from his fingers, and I promised to look for an eagle’s feather for him.
After the rain stopped a few people walked by and Billy asked Albert what the time was. Albert peered at his watch. ‘Gettin’ on for eleven-thirty,’ he said.
‘We’d better get a move on, then.’
‘Remember; you take the left spur to dodge No-Man’s-Land.’
I didn’t hear what Billy said because Max ran outside and started making Indian war cries and I had to run after him. The people on the tracks ahead of us turned around.
‘You’ve gotta be quiet, Max,’ I said, ‘the enemy might be hiding just over the horizon.’
I said it like it was a game, so Max would play along. I didn’t want him to know how scared I was that my words would come true.
We came to a fork where the rails curved away in different directions. There were no signposts, only numbers. The people in front of us all went left, but Billy led us the other way, through a deep concrete cutting smothered with graffiti. We walked between the walls, like ants between the pages of a comic. If there’d been no war and we weren’t trying to find someplace safe to stay, I would have stopped and looked at the graffiti, the way people stare at art in galleries.
The longer we walked the more distant the sounds of fighting became. I couldn’t hear much at all; no voices, no cars, nothing except stones clattering down the steep embankments beside the tracks, and my suitcase wheels bumping over the sleepers. I thought we’d never get to Dreamland. I couldn’t stop thinking Billy might have made a mistake. Maybe we should have gone the way the other people had. Would it be better to turn around and go back? I didn’t dare say anything to Billy. Every time Max asked him a question, he got grumpier and quieter.
Sometimes we’d pass a ladder bolted to the wall. I wanted to climb up and have a look. I hated the silence. I wanted to shout, ‘Who’s there?’ I wanted to fill our ears with sound.
‘Let’s sing something,’ I said to Max.
‘What do you want to sing?’