Deviant (5 page)

“Take it,” Abigail insisted.

“Why?”

“I don’t want it. Save your mum’s life. And your own. Use it to be happy and free, whatever that means.”

Camelia shook her head. Abigail didn’t prod. Finally, Camelia tore her gaze back to the worn leather upholstery and ran her finger along the top bundle of money. Looking up at Abigail, she smiled. “Thank you,” she choked out. She reached to place her hand on Abigail’s hand. “Thank you so—”

Abigail withdrew on instinct. She couldn’t hug this girl. There was no point. Swallowing, she turned and opened her own window. She stuck her head out as the taxi made its way along the overpass that cut the grey city in half. She felt the Scottish wind on her face—for the last time, she hoped. She sighed at the River Clyde and the new monstrosities that had been built alongside it, designed to rejuvenate, but just adding to the city’s blemishes. Glasgow was just like Billy. Unhealthy, angry, unhappy, scarred with wounds from lip to ear.

She breathed in the stale air as they hurtled along the motorway, passing nothing notable along the way, lots and lots and lots more of non-notable nothing.

“Good riddance, Glasgow!” Abigail yelled from her taxi window. “Good riddance, shitehole of the world! Good fucking riddance!”

Abigail had never been inside an airport before. It felt like a hospital, but for happy, healthy people. A holding zone somewhere in between the real world and nothingness. And everyone except her was completely unimpressed with it, Camelia included. They’d all done it before, too, it seemed. Businessmen tapped at their cell phones; parents hustled toddlers away from chocolate displays; nobody looked where they were going. It was a big institution with rules she knew nothing about. She shifted on her feet as Camelia checked in for her 9
P.M
. flight, feeling not unlike she did that first day in the care room at Dunoon.

“This is my mobile number and my email address,” Camelia whispered once she had her boarding pass. She scribbled on a baggage address card, its little white string dancing as she wrote. “And this is my address in Romania. Please keep in touch. If there’s ever anything I can do for you … anything, ever—”

“I will,” Abigail interrupted. She shoved the piece of cardboard in her back pocket. “Now, get out of here!”

Camelia smiled at her. She leaned forward, as if to hug. Abigail said good-bye the only way she knew how. She turned and ran off.

T
HE QUEUE AT THE
American Airlines counter was long and slow. Eight thirty
P.M
. by the time she was served. Only ninety minutes till takeoff. Luckily there were seats left on her flight, but only in first class, which meant Abigail had to fork out £2,111 for a one-way ticket to LA in the name of Alina Beklea. The woman at the desk was so flustered she hardly even looked at the phony passport. She shoved it into the scanner. There were no problems.
The power of cash
, Abigail thought to herself, feeling queasy. No questions asked, happy cab drivers, compliant sex traffickers. Amazing what you can get away with if you’re hideously ugly and have enough money to buy a first-class ticket to America.

As Abigail moved away from the desk, her head began to spin. The crowd, the bright lights, the cavernous echo … 
It’s all too fast
, she thought again. She couldn’t snap into robot mode. Forty-eight hours ago she’d been Abigail Thom, Unloved Nobody. Now she was Abigail Thom, heiress of a small cash fortune, with a father and sister waiting in America. She had to fight to breathe.
Los Angeles
. Was she really going there? To live? Was she really heading toward the international departure gate? Side-by-side with suits destined for hotels and affairs, with spoiled kiddies destined for theme parks?

Abigail’s view of Los Angeles was based on the comedy channel.
Two and a Half Men
and
Entourage
, mainly. She imagined
large beachside houses full of happily dysfunctional families. She imagined blue skies, oversized breakfasts, enthusiastic shop assistants, gorgeous posses of loyal friends eating salads while laughing loudly. Maybe she’d be doing that tomorrow. Laughing loudly in the sun over salad. Or maybe she’d simply wake up.

Just get on the plane
.

Unfortunately, there was another, scarier queue to tackle. This involved a full-body scanning machine, like the kind they had in some young offender’s facilities she’d seen. Officials with gadgets padded people down if they beeped. Uniformed men stared at a computer screen as bags moved along a conveyor belt. Abigail realized she was trembling. Once, she’d been searched in a police cell on suspicion of shoplifting in a supermarket. (She hadn’t done it.) She hadn’t just felt terrified, she’d felt violated. She could feel suspicious eyes boring down on her as she placed her backpack on the belt.

Just as she’d feared, a piercing beep erupted as she walked through the scanner.

A woman ushered her to stand on a black mat, where she waved a gadget over her body and frisked either side of her torso and legs.

“It’s just your belt,” the woman said. “You should take it off before you come through next time.”

Abigail could only manage a nod.

The man at the scanning machine was unzipping her backpack and searching through it. Shit. Maybe Billy had sabotaged her, stuffed some drugs in while she wasn’t looking.

“You have liquids in your bag.” He held out the hair putty and toothpaste accusingly.

“Oh, is that bad?”

“Yes. It is. No liquids over 100 milliliters. This’ll have to go.” Before she could respond, he had tossed her Fibre Putty in the huge bin behind him. She couldn’t help but notice that the bin was bursting with shampoo, conditioner, and skin lotion. There was even a bottle of wine.
They must divvy it out at the end of the day
, she thought to herself. A perk of the job.

“You can keep the toothpaste, but next time put it in the airport-issued plastic bag. Right?”

“Right. Ta.” God, if there was ever a next time, there was a lot to remember. She shoved the toothpaste in her bag and zipped it up again.

Gate 43 was a ten-minute walk through brightly lit shops and featureless corridors with moving walkways. She took her seat in what looked like a doctor’s waiting room. Peering out the huge windows into the night, she noticed the American Airlines plane attached to the gate. It was enormous. So high off the ground. She found herself scanning the body of the plane for faults. How would she even recognize a fault? She’d only watched one episode of
Air Crash Investigation
, and that particular plane had crashed due to weird insects nesting in some vital equipment.

“Flight 3845 to Los Angeles has been delayed,” the air hostess at the gate desk announced over a loud speaker, “and will now depart at ten fifty-five
P.M.”

There was a collective sigh.

Bugger
. Even longer to wait. As Abigail squirmed, she felt like a drug smuggler. A wrong move or a drop of sweat would bring in the sniffer dogs and police; any minute someone would discover she was not Alina Beklea and escort her back to No Life Hostel.

She tried to read her
Funny Physics
book, but couldn’t concentrate. She tried to snooze; too nervous. Eventually, she looked at the clock and noticed there were only thirty-nine more minutes till takeoff. They’d have to board the plane any second now.

Two men in suits approached Gate 43 and seemed to be looking at her. Or maybe they weren’t. She couldn’t look back. She needed to do something to look normal.

An Internet point was located twenty feet along the corridor. She walked toward it as calmly as she could without looking at the men in suits. It cost a pound a minute, but Abigail used each second wisely.

In the Google search engine, she typed: “Grahame Johnstone.”

Scrolling past a Grahame Johnstone on UK LinkedIn, a teenager on Bebo, a managing director of a Scottish roofing company, and a plumber from Cornwall, Abigail quickly adjusted her search to include “Los Angeles.”

Hmm, perhaps he was the Polaroid artist who was plastered all over the Internet. That’d be interesting, if he was an artist. Perhaps he was the commune type. Cool. All the posts were about the same man, but when she searched images, she realized his picture didn’t fit. He was only around thirty, this
photographer guy. With limited time remaining, Abigail added “Becky Johnstone” to her father’s name and location. Nothing, so she changed
Becky
to
Rebecca
.

The article flashed on screen only for a few seconds, but long enough for Abigail to discover that her father, ex-naval officer Grahame Johnston—married to actress Melanie Gallagher—was the managing director of a prebiotics company in Los Angeles. Long enough, also, for Abigail to zero in on the words she’d been searching for:
Daughter, Rebecca Johnstone, Age: 18
. The 3-D–throbbed in her eyes. Rebecca Johnstone: the daughter of an ex-naval officer. Rebecca Johnstone: just two years older than she was.

My sister
.

She did exist. And Abigail had a letter and twenty-five thousand pounds to give her.

T
HE PLANE WAS BOARDING
. First class passengers boarded first. She had a window seat: 9A. Abigail wondered if this lump of metal would really fly. How could it possibly? A camp American of around twenty was seated next to her. He had dark blond hair, a little over-groomed in a mock-distressed kind of way, brown eyes, and an easy smile. “You been to LA before?” he asked, perhaps noticing her twitchiness.

“I’ve never been anywhere.”

“You’ll miss Scotland.” The guy seemed nostalgic as he stared past her out the window.

She laughed. “I don’t think so.”

Abigail only relaxed her grip on the wide plastic arm rest
after the plane seemed to level off. Glasgow looked equally depressing from the air. Yellow lights, thick, dark un-majestic river, oppressive hood of ever-present cloud pushing down, down. And just like that, it was gone. She was
in
the clouds now. And above. On her way to this new life, whatever it would be. Over the next hour she wondered about the ground below her. Was she passing over Dunoon, where she grew up? As she wondered, she found herself humming a song Billy Connolly and the Humblebums wrote after the American navy left the town:

So he was an ex-naval officer, her father. Abigail assumed he must have been stationed at Holy Loch in Dunoon, where the US nuclear submarines were based for thirty years. Perhaps her mother had been in the commune there at the time. Was it a Romeo/Juliet romance, perhaps? Forbidden, impossible? Hmm, romantic. The Americans eventually left Dunoon and the town collapsed too, its energy and livelihood gone with the submarines. That’s where Abigail grew up: in a balloon with no air, in a dead seaside town, the
only place on earth with more rain and less going for it than Glasgow.

Why had her father never known about her? Had he left before her mother knew she was pregnant? Did she ever try and tell him? Why had he taken two-year-old Becky?

Maybe tomorrow Abigail would ask her father all these questions. Or maybe she’d be so happy she wouldn’t care. Maybe she would be thankful to know nothing about her past.

She pushed down the television screen in front of her. According to the map, they were flying over ocean, lots of it: a digital blue mass. Dunoon gone. Glasgow gone. Scotland gone. Ha, gone. She let out a big sigh.
My mother got me out of there
, she thought.
Thank you, Sophie Thom. Thank you, Mum
.

“You leaving someone behind?” the camp guy asked.

“Yeah,” Abigail heard herself answer. She didn’t bother to add that this someone was dead and that she hadn’t even known her. It had struck her unexpectedly, the realization that she would never know her mother. Throughout her life, she had carried around with her the dream that her mother was out there somewhere; that even though Mum was a bitch from hell for abandoning her infant daughter, she existed. That dream had sometimes made her angry, sometimes sad, sometimes hopeful. Now it was gone.

“Here, what’s your favorite drink?” the guy asked. He reached up and clicked the light for the stewardess to come. “We’ll drink to our loved ones.”

“Pineapple juice.”

“Sure you don’t want a gin and tonic? I hate drinking alone.”

There are benefits to being a thirty-two-year-old Romanian called Alina
, Abigail realized.

Moments later she found herself clinking glasses with her new friend, Bren (“short for Brendan, but call me that and I
will
kill you. Last name McDowell.”). She sipped an icy lime-wedged first-class drink of gin and tonic.

“What have you done to your hair, girl?” Bren asked, after a few sips.

“Long story.”

Before she knew it, Abigail found herself confessing. The truth, stripped down: dead mother, father and sister she never knew, the money, Billy and Camelia—the whole sordid lot. Abigail never usually opened up, especially not to boys. But Bren was utterly non-threatening. He hung on her every word.
He was easy on the eyes too
, she thought with a sigh, as so many gay men are: well dressed, pretty, approachable, perfect, and impossible. Besides, would she ever see him again? Probably not.