Welcome To Wherever You Are (6 page)

Reverend Devereaux bowed to his audience as they hollered, whistled and applauded. And in return, he clapped them and his stage helpers before leaving the podium.

There was only person in the arena who failed to arise and show their appreciation of the miracles that afternoon had witnessed, and Reverend Devereaux was fully aware of this.

He would have stern words with her later, but Savannah Devereaux had no intention of obeying her father.

TODAY

Savannah’s hand trembled as she held the phone to her ear.

After three rings, the call was answered, but nobody spoke. The stalemate lasted for several seconds, before the door behind Savannah opened and Roxy walked in.

‘Hey Savannah, I thought you’d gone,’ she yelled before Savannah could hang up. She breathed quickly and wondered if her call had just opened Pandora’s box.

The pan of water was too large and too heavy for one person to lift alone, especially with a wounded hand, but Tommy attempted it anyway.

When it was clear his bravado was bordering on embarrassing, Nicole stepped in to help before he poured it across the floor.

‘Thanks,’ Tommy murmured.

‘It’s my first night in Los Angeles and you’ve got me chained to the kitchen sink. This doesn’t bode well for our relationship.’

‘Well I can make pasta for one, not for sixty, and certainly not on my own.’

‘So you think all women automatically know to cook? That’s a bit sexist of you.’

‘Oh no, I didn’t mean it like that.’

‘I’m just teasing,’ Nicole replied, scraping burned pasta from Joe’s pan with a wooden spoon. ‘So how did you end up here?’

‘You were with me – Joe was ruining the dinner.’

‘Oh Lord,’ sighed Nicole, ‘I meant how did you end up in LA?’

‘Oh right, sorry,’ Tommy replied. ‘Well I could tell you, but it’s not exactly a barrel of laughs.’

Nicole held her spoon over her the sink. ‘Do you want to do this on your own?’ she smiled.

TWO YEARS EARLIER – NORTHAMPTON, ENGLAND

‘Do you ever turn that damn thing off?’

Lee glared at Tommy’s reflection in the rear-view mirror as he drove. Tommy chose to ignore him and continued to pan the lens of his digital camcorder around the Mini.

‘What are you even filming?’

‘Nothing much, just you two and whatever we go past that looks interesting,’ replied Tommy as the trees outside began to thin and make way for a succession of residential houses and shops. ‘I need a backdrop for this project I’m working on.’

‘Being around you is like living in the Big Brother house,’ continued Lee. ‘Cameras constantly following you about.’

Daniel interrupted from the passenger seat. ‘That new Arctic Monkeys album is out soon, I hope it’s better than last one.’

‘Do you want to hear it? It leaked early so I downloaded it last night,’ asked Tommy enthusiastically. He removed his iPhone from the back pocket of his chinos and scrolled through his playlists, while his video camera continued to record. ‘You should try surfing the Russian websites like I do, there’s so much illegal pre-release stuff online if you know where to look.’

‘Yeah, I’ve heard some of the Russian websites you surf when you think everyone else is asleep,’ Lee smirked.

‘Oh yes,’ teased Daniel, ‘Even Mum’s said she’s heard your bed squeaking to the sounds of online Russian girls groaning in your bedroom for seventy Rubles a minute.’

‘You are such a liar!’ Tommy snapped as his face reddened. Daniel and Lee enjoyed embarrassing their younger sibling, knowing that anything to do with the opposite sex would have the desired effect. Despite the two-and-a-half year gap separating the twins from Tommy, and that Daniel and Lee were in their final few weeks of university, they had remained a close family.

The car slowed down as it reached traffic lights and Tommy continued to hunt through his extensive collection of downloaded music.

‘When you’re done at your lectures can you pick me up from Sean’s house?’ he asked.

‘You can catch the bus back – we’re going out of our way as it is to give you a lift there,’ replied Lee dismissively.

‘That’s not fair, Mum and Dad bought you a car while I have to cycle everywhere like a paperboy.’

‘And they’ll buy you one too if you get into uni. But you’re the one who took a gap year and then did sod all with it,’ continued Lee. ‘You need to get your arse into gear, start looking at courses and get your applications in.’

‘Well I still need a bit of time to decide what I want to do,’ Tommy replied, bored of being lectured by his parents and his brothers.

‘Don’t tell dad that or you’ll be in Afghanistan before you know it,’ added Daniel. ‘If it’s film school you really want to get into then he’ll come round eventually. Just make a decision and go with it. Stop wasting time.’

‘Okay, okay, enough of the pep talk!’ Tommy knew full well that at nineteen, he needed to get his act together. Sean aside, most of his friends were finishing their first year at university, while he’d floundered, working part time on a checkout in Tesco.

With his brothers’ sponsored university places coming to an end, they’d be trainee Marines by Christmas but Tommy had no interest in the family tradition of joining the armed forces. Instead, he preferred to be holed up in his darkened bedroom making mini-movies and editing them on his laptop.

His focus was often landscapes – inner city, coastal and countryside – and exploring new ways of filming them. But with only a hand-held digital camcorder he’d bought himself with his supermarket earnings, his ability to develop his skill was limited. He barely went anywhere without it, constantly uploading clips to YouTube in the faint hope a famous director would see his potential and invite him to work as a trainee cinematographer on the set of a movie. But Martin Scorsese had yet to spot his potential.

‘Plug this in,’ Tommy said, handing Lee his iPhone.

As the green traffic light turned red and the Mini accelerated across a junction, Tommy lost his grip of the phone and it bounced off Lee’s thigh and into the driver’s footwell.

‘Tommy, you dick,’ barked Lee, unclipping his seat belt to fumble around for the phone.

For a split second, Tommy noticed a dark shadow through the lens of his camcorder but it moved too quickly for his eyes to process what it was.

Suddenly the brothers’ world became deafeningly loud and turned to black as the shadow ploughed into the side of their car, forcing it to roll over twice before it settled on its side.

TODAY

‘I’ve been looking for you,’ barked Eric, interrupting Tommy’s recounting of his past and Nicole’s gradual understanding of the vulnerability of the boy standing before her in the kitchen.

‘Sorry, it’s my fault, I asked for Nicole’s help,’ replied Tommy.

‘Could I have a word, Nic?’ Eric glared.

‘Um, sure.’

‘In private?’

Nicole followed Eric from the kitchen and down the corridor before he came to a halt. The smell the beer remained on his skin.

‘I’ve been standing downstairs like a twat waiting for you, but surprise, surprise, you’re up here with him,’ he began heatedly.

‘What’s your problem with Tommy?’ Nicole replied, startled by his outburst.

‘I don’t have a problem with Tommy,’ Eric continued, trying to control his frustration. ‘What I do have a problem with is being left alone while you make a fool of yourself.’

‘Jesus, Eric. I’m getting sick of your mood swings today.’

‘I don’t trust him. He’s probably tried it on with every girl here.’

‘He’s not like that, and what business would it be of yours if he had? I can look after myself.’

‘Yeah, you did a great job with Pete, didn’t you?’

Nicole scowled at Eric, angry that he would bring up such a painful memory to use against her. ‘That’s not fair,’ she replied quietly as Eric instantly regretted his choice of ammunition. He softened his tone accordingly.

‘I’m sorry, that wasn’t fair. But I’m your best friend, Nic, and if it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t have even known Pete was screwing around on you. I’m a good judge of character, so trust me on this, Tommy’s no good. I’m a bloke, we know this kind of thing.’

Nicole said nothing and her eyes sank to the floor.

‘Look, we’re here for a reason,’ he continued. ‘Maybe thousands of pounds worth of reasons. All I’m saying is don’t let some kid you hardly know get in the way of that. Now come here.’

Eric put his arms around Nicole and kissed her on the cheek. She always felt safe when she was with Eric even when he was thoughtless, but she was reluctant to believe Tommy had any agenda. He was right when he told her about travellers wanting to share their lives with others in short spaces of time. But it wasn’t something she could reciprocate.

‘Let me help him out with dinner, and I promise I’ll be down in fifteen minutes,’ Nicole conceded.

Eric nodded his approval and Nicole headed back into the kitchen.

‘Everything okay?’ asked Tommy chirpily.

‘Yes, it’s fine’ replied Nicole, and said very little else during the rest of their fifteen minutes together.

DAY TWO

Matty and Declan left the cooling ocean water in just their underwear and made for the towels they’d left spread across Venice’s sandy beach.

‘I can see your lil’ fella,’ began Matty, pointing to Declan’s boxers, the water having made them transparent.

‘Less of the “lil’”,’ Declan replied, and rubbed his hair with his towel. ‘It was fecking cold in there.’

Their walk from Santa Monica via Venice Beach Boulevard in the blistering heat had been exhausting, especially with two bulging rucksacks strapped to their backs. So their brief respite in the ocean had been a welcome diversion.

Despite not having stepped inside a gym for the best part of a year, Declan was grateful good genetics meant his chest and arms retained their muscular shape. He’d used the last squirt of sun block earlier that morning, and with each passing hour he felt his milky Irish skin reddening further.

‘I’ll kill you if they’re fully booked after days on that stinking fecking thing,’ warned Matty, and took a swig of water.

‘It was your idea to save money and go freight-train hopping.’

‘You’re supposed to be the sensible one and talk me out of crap like that! Besides, we could’ve managed a Holiday Inn if you hadn’t blown our money in Reno trying to be Billy Big Bollocks in front of the showgirls.’

‘Where else am I going to find a bird with firm breasts and feathers stuck to her arse?’

‘A henhouse?’

Their arrival in Los Angeles early that morning was the culmination of a five-day expedition riding the railways from Seattle to Idaho, then the length of Nevada, cross-country to Utah before finally reaching LA. Although strictly illegal, freight train hopping was the cheapest way to travel long distances and witness parts of America that couldn’t be negotiated by car or bus.

An article in a
Reader’s Digest
magazine Matty found in a hospital waiting room in Florida gave him the inspiration to trek by boxcar. The written recollections of former rail-riders got him wondering what it must have been like to travel the country in search of new jobs and new beginnings during America’s Great Depression. In reality, it had proved an ordeal, and much more precarious than his naive imagination had anticipated.

The first hurdle was finding freight yards where trains and their boxcars passed through or were parked up. Then once a slowed-down train was in sight, they had to run to keep up with it, promptly pick a carriage with an open door then hurl themselves and their luggage into it. Twice they’d failed and had been forced to wait ten hours for the next train to pass.

Once inside, their final hurdle was to stay alive, because maneuvering around a fast-moving carriage was awkward and clumsy and would regularly result in them being hurled around like wrestlers in a ring. The sound of the grinding wheels on the steel tracks was often so deafening, they’d insert their in-ear headphones to nullify the noise.

The nights were cold and the carriages stank of the products being transported. For two of their six journeys, they’d picked the wrong boxcars and slept on bags of fertiliser and boxes of bottled bleach. Another was spent in an open carriage, zipped up head to toe in sleeping bags to protect them from the 60 mph winds. Only their last journey was more pleasant, tucked up amongst crate after crate of mattresses, computer games consoles and Blu-ray players.

Matt and Declan learned to avoid other freight train hoppers. Often, they were nomadic souls unwilling to have their space invaded or were suffering addictions to narcotics or alcohol and wanted to rob you at knifepoint. Matty noted the magazine story failed to mention any of those perils.

Only once during a routine check at a station in Utah had an armed security guard discovered them. But experience had taught them they could get away with a lot if they exaggerated their accents and asked Americans if they had any Irish in their heritage. Invariably their interrogator would say yes, and claim to be one tenth Gaelic, to which Matty and Declan would respond that they’d known immediately. Then they’d then be left alone to go about their business by their flattered and gullible distant compatriot. But as uncomfortable and anxious as they’d often felt, it had been the journey of a lifetime, and they’d seen more of America than most of its natives.