Crossing the Line (4 page)

God, what I have to put up with.

All I could do was follow, but she was small and quick and most of all she was angry. Ducking and swerving, she
could nip through crowds of shoppers where I could only barge, shove and mutter belated apologies I didn't mean. I was jogging now but I could barely keep her in sight, let alone catch her.

A gang of Reservoir Puppies swaggered across her path, but they were distracted by the burgers they were shoving in their faces and they let her through with a few remarks I'm glad I couldn't hear. When they caught sight of me, their heads came up and their shoulders hunched forward, like something out of Big Ape Diary. Eyeballs swivelled to each other and to me, wondering if it was worth it, but I eyed them hard, then cut my eyes away deliberately, hands in pockets, forward momentum maintained. I'm not looking for trouble but I'll give you some if you ask nicely.

They thought about blocking my way, then changed their minds. Didn't get out of the way, as such, but they rearranged their choreography, slick and unconcerned, and somehow a path opened through so I wouldn't have to shoulder any of them and they wouldn't have to respond. We all have our pride. And you have to be in the mood to look for trouble. And anyway, it was lunchtime.

Allie had a terrific start on me now but I knew most of her evasive ploys and I knew she'd most likely head for the retail estate. It was on the edge of the town and she liked that; she didn't like hanging around the streets. The streets of town meant more people. But beyond the retail warehouses and the railway line and the wasteland of
billboards, the town petered out, turning into something you couldn't quite call the countryside: broken fences, fields full of ragwort and willowherb, rusting car bodies and coils of discarded wire. A thin burn leaked through it, its edges marked by beige scum and torn plastic bags. Hardly the stuff of poetry but it suited Allie. No buildings, apart from one derelict shack and a filthy caravan tipped over on one wheel. Dad would have liked it here too. No people. No trouble.

I couldn't blame her for liking it, but I wished she'd go the long way round to get there. I wished she wouldn't clamber along the sides of the railway cutting, where weeds grew thick, where you couldn't see rusting barbed wire or broken posts that might trip you and send you tumbling down the slope on to the tracks. I wished she'd slog down to the level crossing half a mile away like everybody else, but Allie didn't ever take the long way round. She didn't like the road. Houses backed on to it on one side, their long gardens blocked from the road by high fences. On the other side was the railway itself, sunk into a cutting, the rails emerging from a dark tunnel and converging far in the distance at the level crossing. The road was dingy and quiet, and in winter it was staggeringly ill-lit. I wasn't keen on it myself.

Halting now at the tunnel mouth and the cutting, I knew Allie had come this way again. A new swathe had been cut through the undergrowth, zigzagging down to the line, the stems broken, cotton-fluff seeds drifting in
air. I started to clamber, hesitantly and sideways, the gradient jolting my knees. The ground beneath my feet was treacherous sand and stone, litter-strewn and weed-choked beneath the scrub. It took me longer than Allie to get to the foot of the slope. Always did, which was another reason she came this way. I felt like a coward but I wasn't going any faster.

I stopped three-quarters of the way to the bottom of the embankment and squinted up the line. Shimmering with distance, the little white sticks that were the level-crossing barriers sighed into place to block the road. No point going any further, then. I was not crossing the tracks, not now. I slumped among the tangled stalks and waited for the song.

It must have been something about the long gradual curve of the tunnel, or maybe the depth of the cutting. It muffled the song to a soft hum that was more a feeling than a sound, a sensation in your bones and nerves. More the nerves in my case.

Idly I pulled the white fluff off a dying stalk, let it drift in the windless day towards the rails. I thought the wisps hovered and trembled, but it might have been my imagination. I glanced up at the level crossing again, so far away, too far for a lazy girl to walk. Railways make everything distant. You look along them like you're looking into another world and one you'll never reach. It's something to do with those parallel shining lines, converging, converging and never meeting. Infinity. Eternity.

Too big to get your head around, anyway. I lay back on my elbows. Anyone watching would have thought I was relaxing, cool as anything, but I was lying back so that there was more of me in contact with the earth, so that my fingers could curl round the coarse grass weeds and anchor me to the world. The singing was louder now, and soon the bass roar of the train would harmonise with its own echo, drown its own song …

Soon? Now.
Then.

It came howling out of the tunnel mouth like a demon. I blinked fast so I could catch instants of lives behind my eyelids. An infant at the window, mother's hands on its waist; a lanky girl gazing into a laptop; men, women, balanced like dancers, bums against seatbacks and folded papers in one hand. But the instants were only that, and they were gone.

Honestly, there are people who do not understand how fast they are. It's not like taking your life in your hands and running across a motorway, say. That's fast but it's not
this
fast. That would be stupid, but this would be suicidal. It would be taking your life in your hands and chucking it on to the tracks and leaving it there. All broken.

I've always been afraid of the trains. Maybe it comes from watching them when I was very little, and thinking they were some kind of gods. Almost the first thing I read, when I learned to read, was the sign that said
Beware of Trains.
So I took the sign for a sign. I took it at
its word. And I have never stopped being wary of the trains.

Allie had never been frightened of the trains, which was stupid of her, but at least she treated them with a healthy respect. After all, she too listened for the song. I could only trust that she'd never cross the tracks in the cutting when she heard the singing begin.

I waited till the song had faded, and that was a long time. It had to fade away to nothing, because I wouldn't move till I knew there wasn't another voice singing behind it, harmonising in a treacherous hum so you wouldn't hear it till it broke into its own roar and hit you. I waited till the silence was more than silence, till it was a whole vacuum of sensation and sound, then sidestepped down the embankment once more. It did occur to me to trudge all the way down to the level crossing, but the little white sticks had lifted, and cars were trundling over. Besides, when I checked my watch I knew I was in enough trouble already.

I bolted across the tracks, trying to forget my phobia about catching a foot between the rails or under a sleeper, and scrambled up the other side. Allie wasn't far away; in fact, when I got to the top of the embankment she was just on the other side, halfway down the shallow hill, arms hunched round her knees, fidgeting guiltily as I slumped at her side.

‘I'm sorry, Nick,' she said, before I could get an angry word in edgeways.

I sighed. ‘Allie …'

‘It was wrong, what I did. I'm sorry.'

‘Which bit?' I said bitterly.

She didn't answer me for a while. In the ragged field below us, a pale sun glinted on a boggy patch that marked the feeble burn. Dirty twigs bare of leaves hung limply over its banks, garlanded with plastic bags and streamers of God-knew-what. It was pretty in a way.

‘I couldn't go to school,' said Allie, ‘because it's the anniversary and the teachers were talking about some kind of ceremony, and I couldn't stand it. But Aidan was angry with me. So I went out robbing things to annoy him.'

Something unpleasant walked up my spine, like a spider under my skin.

‘But I'm sorry I came across the railway. I shouldn't've done that. I knew you were after me and once I got here I was worried about you. You did wait for the train?'

‘Course I did,' I said. ‘You didn't.'

‘It wasn't singing when I came.'

‘Allie,' I said. I rubbed my arms to make them feel warmer. ‘Allie, if you heard the trains singing. And if you were running. And if Aidan said, well, run anyway, run and you'll make it before the train comes …'

‘Yeah?'

‘Well, Allie, would you just run? Would you run across if Aidan told you to?'

She smiled at me. The faintest breeze wisped a blunt
lock of hair across her face and I used my forefinger to push it back behind her ear. Then I picked willowherb fluff out of her hair. She was still smiling when I did all this and I wished she'd just stop smiling and answer me.

‘Nick,' she said at last. ‘Nick, Aidan would never tell me to do that.'

‘But if he did?'

She pushed my hand gently away from her hair, and rearranged it herself, and then she tipped her head back to smile at the invisible boy leaning against her shoulder.

‘Aidan would never do anything to hurt me,' she said. ‘Would you, Aidan?'

She wouldn't go back to school with me, and I didn't feel I could leave her, so that was it: I was for it. I tried not to think about it; at least I tried to think only about Allie, who would not get into much trouble. If I explained, I might not either. It was just that I felt too tired and too ground down and too hacked off with the world to bother explaining myself. So I just took Allie home (and Aidan now that she'd found him), and later that afternoon I went back to the seventh circle of hell to retrieve my stuff from my locker, hoping I wouldn't be noticed.

I am never Not Noticed, I'm too big and ugly. And sod's law being what it is, McCluskey was standing right there in the corridor outside his office as I sloped in. I did the eye-contact trick with the big fascist, hoping that like a
one-man hostile gang he'd let me pass, but it was a non-starter.

‘Oy,
Geddes
.'

I thought about pretending I'd gone deaf, but he'd only snarl at me in sign language. I wondered how he'd sign an obscenity, an earful of sarcasm and another final warning. Be interesting to find out, but instead I let him bawl me into the deputy head's office.

He was quieter with the door shut. ‘Would you care to explain yourself, Geddes?'

Oh, he was going to be elaborately polite. That was a bad sign.

‘I don't understand you. You don't have to be here.'

Oh, aye, and leave Allie to the hyenas? It was bad enough with me around, and I didn't plan to find out how it would go for her if I wasn't.

I couldn't be bothered explaining this to McCluskey, so I gave him the Withering Look of Dumb Insolence.

‘Oh, you're past this crap, aren't you, Geddes?' His weary sigh of boredom made my stomach twist and jerk. The shame was unexpected and a little painful. I didn't let it bother me.

‘Sixth year, Geddes. That makes you almost a grownup.' There was a sneer in his voice. ‘Sixth years are in school of their own free will,
boy.
If your free will can't be bothered to turn up, get another life. Go flip a burger.'

A bit more along those lines, and he let me go. I got the impression he was trying to needle me into a reaction,
but I was better than that. All I had to do was stomach a year. All I had to do was protect my sister. Oh, and turn around my whole life and my educational prospects. Piece of piss. I didn't have to be liked. Not by McCluskey and not by anybody else.

Just as well, really.

Slouching home, miserable and furious, I wished I'd dragged Allie back to school to share the bollocking. But then, nobody yelled at Allie. Even if I'd hauled her back by the hair – even tomorrow, if she deigned to turn up – nobody would. They'd probably offer the brat more counselling.

At times like this, the only company I could bear was Lola Nan's. I reckon that was because Lola Nan's world made no sense at all, and sometimes mine didn't either. She and I used to connect; we liked each other a lot. Perhaps, on some level, we still did.

Or maybe I was kidding myself, but as I creaked open the rusting gate of our house I felt a desperate longing to see her, to bask for a while in her irrational, largely silent company. Lola Nan didn't ask awkward questions (apart from, occasionally, ‘Where's Geoffrey?' – Granda having retired to his crematorium urn twenty years ago).

When I was little, Lola Nan used to half sing, half hum to me to calm me down and stop me crying. Nowadays there was no singing but often she still hummed, tunelessly and for hours on end, and I found that just as comforting as I always had.

Anyway, I'd had such a bad day I didn't deserve for it to get any worse. But it went right ahead and did, because when I got home and slammed the door and went into the sitting room, Lola Nan wasn't there.

But Aidan's mother was.

There was nothing imaginary about Aidan's mother. Often it seemed she was on the verge of being imaginary, even to herself. But not yet. Not yet.

She and Mum were sitting opposite one another, Mum in Lola Nan's stained armchair and Aidan's mother in the best one. They held cups of tea, a biscuit perched on each saucer. Neither biscuit had been touched, so each was melting in a little crescent of chocolate against the hot china. Lola Nan must have been banished upstairs for the duration.

The two women turned simultaneously as I pushed open the door, Mum with an expression of faint panic that wasn't quite hidden by her sensible counsellor-of-the-heart exterior. Aidan's mum wore her regular smile.

She had a broad, bright and pretty face and she smiled a lot. She wasn't just brittle, she was already broken and
she looked like she was held together only by an act of will. You got the feeling that if she stopped concentrating for a single second she'd disintegrate like some clever special effect, that we'd have to hoover the bits off the carpet like so much shattered china.