The Summer We All Ran Away (25 page)

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The Underground was like something out of a Bosch painting; long echoing tunnels, vertiginous escalators, people pushing impatiently past him, knowing where they were going, and what they would do when they got there. He hung around and watched in fascination as an endless stream of people walked confidently up to the machines in the wall, manipulated the information they found there, received their tickets. The sense of adventure was still on him, he could still feel the schoolboy fizz of excitement in his belly; but he was also a middle-aged
man who had seen more strange people in the last six hours than he had seen in the previous thirty years, and his feet were tired.

At the foot of a white-tiled pillar, a woman sat quietly, her hands in her lap, her head bowed, radiating the word
despair
. The crowds brushed past her as if she did not exist.

Why was she sitting there? She must be homeless
.

My God
, he thought in sudden horror.
So am I
.

But no there was one crucial difference. He had money and a destination, and she had neither.

He put his hand to his right pocket, and realised the envelope was gone.

Davey wanted to stay asleep, but his body wouldn't let him. He could feel oblivion retreating like an ebbing tide, leaving him to face the pain. When he opened his eyes, the light hurt them. He whimpered, then cringed. How could such a pathetic sound come out of him? No wonder James hated him.

What had happened? James must have beaten him again, that much was clear, but why? What had he done this time? And where was his mother? It was hard to stay focused. The thought frightened him. Had James done something really serious to him this time?

He thought he could hear music.

“Okay, so who's missing?” Mr Jones ran a finger down the register. “Alisha?” He looked around. “Alisha, come and sit back down in your own seat, please.”

“I've changed seats,” said Alisha, looking demure. In the seat beside her, Shaun snickered. One hand rested ostentatiously on the desk. The other was out of sight. They were sitting very close to each other. A few strands of Alisha's hair, silky and meticulously straightened, trailed across Shaun's shoulder.

“No, you haven't,” said Mr Jones. “Move back.”

“Fucking fascist,” Alisha muttered, quietly enough so that
he could ignore it. She stood up, pulling her skirt down. Shaun brought his hand back out onto the desk. Mr Jones grimaced, and prayed he wouldn't have to watch Shaun sniffing his fingers for the rest of the lesson.

“Katie?”

“She's off sick, sir.”

“Okay. Priss? Has anyone seen Priss?”

“She's not here, sir.”

“No sh- No, I can see that,” he said. “Anyone got anything more than
she's not here?”

There was no question about it; his right-hand pocket was empty. Had he dropped it? Or had one of the myriad strangers he had brushed against stolen it from him? He clutched blindly at his left-hand pocket, and heaved a sigh of relief. He still had the tickets, at least. The tickets, and a handful of change, enough to buy, enough for - he stopped in perplexity. How much could he buy with this strange handful of metal shapes, this crumpled sliver of paper?

He leaned against a cool, tiled wall and examined each coin in careful detail, knowing how strange he must look, not caring. The note was worth five pounds. The thick round coins with the milled edges were worth one pound each. When had pound notes disappeared? He shook his head in bafflement. The fifty pence was unchanged, familiar. Its miniature double was a twenty-pence piece; a sensible innovation, he thought, and found himself nodding approvingly. Did they still make ten-pence pieces? If so, he didn't have one. Instead he had this miserable dot of nickel, so small he was tempted to try and pick it up with a moistened finger, that was, apparently worth five pence. What had happened to one-pence pieces, he wondered? Did they still exist? Had they shrunk down so small that he'd be unable to find them?

Someone jostled his elbow, sending his precious hoard flying. He scrabbled madly to collect it up again. His adventure was turning sour on him.

No
, he thought stubbornly. He was still out, on the other side of the wall, and free. He'd make out somehow. Nothing worth having was easy.

What
was
that music? Davey sat up, flinching at the pain in his head and his ribs and his stomach and his back and his left leg, then warily climbed to his feet. Blackness crept around the edges of his vision, then receded again. He limped over to the window. The sunshine streamed heartlessly in, oblivious to the shooting pain it set off in Davey's head.

Outside in the street, two men knelt on the pavement. They were perhaps a few years older than him, one fair, one redheaded, dressed in the coolly shabby kind of clothes that Davey automatically associated with art students. They were sketching something on the pavement in chalk. He had seen people do this before; usually the result was a strange, ghostly copy of an Old Master, immaculately rendered but with all the colours a little too pale, a little too thin. The man with red hair was adjusting a set of portable iPod speakers.

“What do you fancy?” he asked. His companion shrugged agreeably.

“You pick.”

“Something from the master, I think.” A flick of the wheel and a complex, haunting tune spiralled up from the speakers, climbing the heavy air and insinuating itself in through the bottom of Davey's sash window.

Davey closed his eyes. He had learned long ago that, when the pain from one injury became too unbearable, he could distract himself by focusing on another instead; it was as if his brain could only process a certain amount of pain at one time, and which pain he processed was within his gift to choose. Crammed awkwardly into the window frame, he began making a slow tour of his injuries.
Head. Ribs. Stomach - ow
, ow,
bad one, don't go back there. Back. Leg. Head. Ribs. Sto - no, Back. Leg. Head. Ribs. Back. Leg. Head. Ribs. Back
.

As night fell, the words
novelty
and
adventure
began to dissolve, to be replaced with a darker and more frightening vocabulary.
Alone. Homeless. Vulnerable. Hungry. Tired
. He fought them as well as he could, but they stalked his footsteps as he hopelessly roamed the crowded streets. Did nobody sleep in London? Were these the same people he'd seen earlier, or was there some sort of shift system? Eventually he was too exhausted to continue, and squatted hopelessly in a doorway. When a woman around his age touched his elbow, he stared at her in dumb terror.

“It's alright,” she said, very gently. “I'm Jane, I'm an outreach worker. I know most of the faces around here. You're new, aren't you?”

Priss knew exactly why the driver had stopped – even with her hair plastered to her skull and her huge baggy anorak on, she knew how she looked – but that was okay. It was getting late and it was pissing with rain, he had a nice car and he was going in the right direction. He held the door open, making elaborate efforts not to invade her personal space and put the heater on to try and dry her out.

Priss' new driver turned out to be called Neil, which was pretty much the name she would have given him if she had to pick. He was about thirty-five, maybe a bit older. He was sort of ugly, boringly dressed, a bit skinny, the should-have-gone-to-Specsavers type. He told her he worked in IT, and was on his way to a conference on the security implications of cloud computing. She could imagine him playing World Of Warcraft in his spare time. He was formal and polite, asking conventional questions about where she was going, why she was going there, what she did.

She began with two truths, one lie. She was headed for London, she was going there to meet a friend, and she didn't do anything, she was still at school. When she told him her age, she felt the car twitch and slow as he involuntarily took his foot off the accelerator and clutched the steering wheel a
little tighter.

“Erm - ” he was stammering a little. “I um, I hope you don't think I'm, I mean - ”

You mean you hope I don't think you're a disgusting old pervert for wanting to get my knickers off
, Priss thought cynically. She smiled, and looked at him shyly from underneath her eyelashes.

“I know hitching is really dangerous,” she said, breathless and girlish. “But I've really got to get to London. My mate – Aleesha, she's called – her boyfriend's been hitting her and I've got to get her back home.”

After that, she knew it would be easy. As the road grew dark, she yawned a couple of times – easy to conjure, the warmth and comfort of the car making her sleepy – and he hesitantly asked her where she was planning to stay the night. She loitered nearby as he checked in at the desk, and heard him ask in a voice that was noticeably louder than it needed to be if he could change from a double to a twin.
A real knight in shining armour
, she thought to herself, which was a damn shame given what she was about to do to him.

Inside the room, Neil elaborately nominated one of the beds as
hers
, then disappeared into the bathroom for ten minutes. When he came out he had changed into ironed jeans and a black shirt. He had a taxi-sharing friend in the lobby to meet and a pre-conference dinner to go to, he said as he took forty pounds in cash and two credit cards out of his wallet, but of course she must order room service for herself. She quite enjoyed the way he fussed around her, as if she was a brand new rescue kitten he'd just adopted, who might leave at any moment.

She took a long, hot shower and finally felt warm for the first time in three days. Then she ordered herself two burgers with fries and two large cokes and spent a contented forty-five minutes devouring every last morsel.

Then she went to the drawer where he'd left his car keys and wallet, took out the remaining cash – there was a decent
amount, nearly two hundred pounds – grabbed her rucksack, ran down the back staircase and out to the car park, and stole his car.

Before they'd let him in the shelter, Tom had to promise he wasn't carrying any drugs or alcohol and agree that if he did turn out to have lied about this, they would be entitled to evict him. If he hadn't been so exhausted, he would have found that pretty funny – where did they imagine he was hiding it? – but he supposed it must just be standard procedure. Jane gave him a plate of eggs and bacon and a mug of tea.

“Want to share your story?” she asked him. “You don't have to if you don't want to. But some clients find it helps.” She hesitated. “Or is there anyone you'd like us to call?”

“Do you meet a lot of people with someone to call?” he asked, curious.

“Oh, yes. More than you'd think. Especially the new ones. Like you.”

He opened his mouth to ask how she was so certain he was new to the streets. Then he remembered the night Jack had turned up at the door of the monastery, and his instinctive opinion:
too clean to be homeless
. For now, he was still visible, still capable of attracting help, still looking as if help was possible. How long did he have before the street closed over his head?

“I've done what you're doing, you know,” he said suddenly. “Taking people in, I mean. Helping them. It's really strange to see it from the other side.”

“We all spend a night sleeping rough as part of our training.”

“It's not the same, though, is it?”

“No,” she said. “It's not the same.”

He drained the mug of tea, surprised by how thirsty he was. He wondered what he would do for water, where homeless people went to drink. You could survive without food for weeks, but lack of water would kill you in days.

“You never answered my question,” said Jane, gentle but persistent. “If there's someone you'd like me to call, let me know and I'll see what I can do.”

“No. Yes. No. There's a man I know, Jack. But I don't have a number, I've only got an address.”

“Is it family?”

“A friend.” He bit his lip. “Well, sort of. I mean, we don't know each other all that well, but, no, I can't, it's not fair to ask him. I need to make my own way - ”

“It's up to you,” said Jane. “But in my experience, it's best to make the call. Whatever you've done – even if you're running from the law – you'd be better off in the long run. It's not too late to go back. Are you alright?”

Out of nowhere, Tom found himself in the grip of a fragment of memory. He was standing in a crowd in an over-filled hall, Eleanor wedged closely alongside him. The room smelled of hair gel, sweat, and fanatical devotion. The audience had been screaming earlier, but now they were rapt and silent, almost afraid to breathe in case they missed a word of the song. The performance was acoustic, just the singer and his guitar; the backing group had melted away into the shadows. And the words:

It's too late to go back

But there's still something to do

It's hard but it's simple

The only way out is through

Had he been unconscious again? Or had he just been asleep? He grabbed onto the windowsill and pulled himself painfully upwards. The morning sun lit up the dust hanging in the expensive city air. It couldn't even be ten o'clock yet. His watch – an ugly Patek Philippe James had bought him for his eighteenth birthday – had stopped working. The face was cracked. It must have happened when James threw him to the floor. James had broken it, but it would be Davey's fault. It
always was.

The men outside had left, perhaps because so few passers-by had stopped to admire their work. Davey wondered briefly why they had chosen this quiet and expensive residential street to work on, where the most likely reaction would be demands that they wash it all off again.

They had drawn a picture of a large country house, standing on high ground. The walls were a soft rosy colour, either because it was painted that way or because of the warm, sleepy light of the setting sun. A single light burned in one small window. Across the top right-hand corner of the picture, written in flat white lettering, was the word
LANDMARK
.