Eggshell Days (37 page)

Maya slunk upstairs again to pack.

*   *   *

I'm a stowaway, she thought an hour later, as she felt the bus's exhaust rumble into action beneath her. To celebrate, she allowed herself a wriggle under the covers of Mog and Dean's “pit.”

Her loose hair was sticking to the edges of her face and she was re-inhaling her own warm breath. She badly wanted to do more than wriggle. She wanted to crawl right out, not only because she was hot but because the milky-sweet smell of the bedclothes mingled with the petrol fumes, making her feel a bit sick. Or was it the saffron cake mingling with pasties and orange juice in her tummy?

She took her mind off it by imagining what would happen when everyone at Bodinnick realized she had gone. She could hear the phone conversation in her head.
Niall, is she there yet? Yes, she's just arrived. I'm coming back with her. Okay, see you both soon.
She hugged herself. It was going to work out fine after all. Direct action, Jay called it.

As the Bedford Twin Steer poked its flat nose out between the granite posts and turned left, brushing the hedgerows of tight young cow parsley and new foxgloves, she felt the back end swing and knew they were on the open road.

Pulling off the Indian throw and blankets, she blinked in the half-light. Her heart was still thumping, but the rumble of locomotion had already found a confident rhythm and she allowed herself a peep out of the small section of back window that hadn't been boarded up.

“Bye, Mum,” she whispered as the lane slipped by. “Love you.”

And then after she'd blown a kiss, she smiled. She was really doing it. One minute, she had been an apparently innocent member of the farewell party, giving Mog the card she'd made and kissing Nathan, and the next, she was running the length of the bus, diving for cover under the blankets. She'd fully expected to be dragged back out again, but it hadn't happened. The bus had started moving instead. She was really doing it. She was going to get Niall.

She breathed out, glad to be able to release herself from the darkness. From the back pocket of her jeans, she took the sheet of paper on which she had written her itinerary. 1. Hide in bus. 2. Get train to London. 3. Get tube to Tower Bridge. 4. Walk to Niall's. 5. Come home.

In her purse in her silver and fluorescent green backpack was a wad of notes she had taken from her millennium time capsule that morning. Forty-five pounds. In the top pocket of her denim jacket was another seven, in coins. She had taken three from the dressing table in Emmy's room, along with the mobile phone, and she'd left the note in their place.

In neat red ballpoint, it said,
I have gone to get Niall. I won't be gone long. Don't worry. I'll phone you when I get there. Love you lots, from Maya
. She had bordered it with kisses and propped it against a stack of Nytol and Silk Cut, knowing they were no longer needed.

She sighed. She wondered how far Mog and Dean would get before they discovered her and which train station they would drop her off at. She plaited a long strand of hair either side of her face. She played a game with her fingers, jumping from mirror bead to mirror bead on the throw.

Then she dug around in her backpack to find an apple but came across a tube of foil-wrapped ladybirds which Cathal had brought her. She hadn't eaten any of them before because it seemed disloyal, enjoying his presents when Niall was so sad, but it was different now. Needs must. Anyway, she ought to keep her energy levels up.

As she unwrapped it, she thought about the letter she had written to Cathal in her head. She told him she knew he was her dad, and she was getting used to it but, if it was okay with him, she would come and see him when she was older. Or when Niall was older. Or Emmy. That was what she wanted really, to put it all on hold. But she knew that grown-ups didn't like ignoring things, or if they did they weren't very good at it. Spot-pickers, they were. Squeezers. Pokers and prodders. You'll make it worse, she felt like telling them. And they always did.

20

At the very moment when Niall thought things could surely get no worse, they did.

Having finally found a tiny reserve of motivation to get himself back to London, he was now in Devon, at a filling station just over the county border. With Cornwall behind him, he had half expected to start feeling better. Distance had the same sort of healing properties as time, which was why in the past he had been so good at running away. It had worked miracles after his father died, and in the desperate months after Emmy's abortion.

He knew how to cut ties or make clean breaks in a way Cathal didn't, or couldn't. This time, though, the tie seemed made of extra-stretch elastic. He could feel it pulling him, ready to ping him right back to square one the moment he stopped. Now that he was finally moving, he needed to keep on moving, which was why vehicle-hire companies were currently top of his hate list. They always gave you the keys with an empty tank, the bastards. His hair needed a wash and it was sticking to his unshaven face. His eyes, swollen from self-pity and drink, stung when he tried to read the rapid green movement of the numbers on the pump's digital display. His fingers hardly had the energy to press the trigger on the handle. He was so tired he could barely stand up. He put in a full tank of Premium Unleaded, not caring that the price was daylight robbery. And then, as he was screwing the petrol cap back on his hired transit van, he remembered with one of those vein-stripping realizations that it was in fact a diesel engine.

“Jaysus, no!” he shouted, thumping his fist against the tinny roof.

Feeling himself cave in under his own stupidity and fatigue, he put his forehead against the rim of the open door and groaned. He didn't want to have to think about what to do next. He wanted to stay there until someone came and told him to move—or, better still, moved him themselves. He banged his head a couple of times and groaned again. The forecourt attendant looked at him through her safety glass with disdain.

Then, as he leaned inside to get his credit cards to pay through the nose for the tank full of fuel that would now screw the engine and render it useless, the old Motorola phone that had been lying in its death throes on his passenger seat bleeped.

“What bloody now?” he sighed, fumbling with the buttons. There was one bar left on the battery. Message. Read Now? OK. The machine didn't do anything as useful as display caller identity, of course.

“
AM COMING ON MY OWN TO LONDON TO GET U. DON'T TELL MUM. TRAIN GETS IN AT
6.
C U AT YR FLAT. LUV MAYA. XXXXXXX
.”

“No, I'm not there,” he shouted in the emptiness of the van. “You stupid girl, I'm not there.”

The car behind him sounded its horn and he stuck his head out to scowl. When he stuck it back in, the phone screen had gone blank. He switched it on again, swearing heavily, and it made the feeblest of noises before shutting down a second time. The battery had used the last drop of its power on getting Maya's message through to him, and he knew exactly where he had last seen his recharger: it was on the Welsh dresser at Bodinnick. Of course it bloody was.

The van wouldn't move, not even off the forecourt, so after paying up, he pushed it single-handedly over to the air and water and went to find a telephone.

“It's out of order,” the girl in the red polo shirt unpacking crisps told him after five minutes of watching him try.

“Can I borrow yours, then? This is urgent.”

“What number do you want?” she sighed.

Which was when he realized he didn't know. He had no idea which phone Maya had used but in any case all the numbers he needed were in the address book in his mobile, which was flat. Of course it bloody was. Bodinnick, he thought, call Bodinnick, tell Emmy. But as he pressed the numbers, he remembered with a piercing ache behind his eyes that Maya had asked him not to. She had given him her trust. “Don't tell Mum,” she'd said. So he couldn't. He didn't have enough of her trust at the moment to fritter it away.

Back at the van, not caring that he was both behaving and looking like a madman, he pulled out his bike and started searching in the boxes and cases for his helmet. But he couldn't find it, could he? And nor would he. It was still on a fence post in the rest area at Boxtree. Well, of course it bloody was.

Under normal circumstances, he would have given up. He would have decided to write the day off and start again tomorrow. He would have gone and had a pint somewhere to think about it. But the thought of Maya setting off to get him and arriving at an empty flat didn't make him feel normal or thirsty or resigned at all, so he walked out onto the road, stuck out his thumb and looked so desperate for help that the next truck that passed actually stopped and gave him a lift to the nearest station.

*   *   *

At Bodinnick, Emmy was trying not to let her new sense of achievement be smothered by her old creeping sense of failure. The house felt almost tragically empty. No Kat, no Cathal, no Mog or Dean or Nathan, no Niall, and now she couldn't find Maya. The place was so quiet. No newborn squeals, no music from Niall's room, no children fighting.

“Is anyone inside?” she shouted, her voice echoing around the new kitchen. Slate absorbed nothing. Perhaps that was why Toby chose the lino in the first place, to stop himself feeling so alone. Perhaps if she ended up living here on her own, she would start laying the lino back. There was usually a reason behind a reason behind a reason, she knew that now.

“Maya?”

She wasn't downstairs, but then nor should she be on a day like this.

Emmy found herself walking to the pond, a bubble of panic rising just slightly inside her, but this time the boat was on its side by the bullrushes where Maya had left it and the surface of the water was perfectly still, like glass. Cathal's footprints were visible in the dark, damp earth and she put her own foot in one, just for the hell of it. She looked at the brown expanse, noticed a few new waterlilies and could hardly believe that the unraveling of her secret was only a week ago.

It was too beautiful to go inside, so she walked over to the chapel, across the daisies and the buttercups and the clover, noting that the track Jonathan had worn was disappearing again. She opened the door and heard it scrape the floor one more time. It smelled fresh and happy in there, as if it was relieved to be left to its own devices again, now that it was in better shape.

On the way back, she looked in the rhododendron bushes, behind the crumbling brick walls, in the farmer's empty barn and up the track, in all the dens and concealed corners where she knew her daughter had been spending too much time hiding lately.

In the top field, next to the bonfire remains, she saw Sita and Jonathan with their children, flying a kite, and she wandered over.

“Have you seen Maya?”

“I thought she was with you.”

As she went back in through the front door, she looked at the patch of oil on the gravel drive and smiled to think of Culworthy-King's apoplectic face. She wouldn't have sold Bodinnick to people like the ones in his car, anyway. They looked the sort who might favor carriage lamps, or even put up a real conservatory.

“Maya?” she called half-heartedly up the stairs. “Maya?”

At least the emptiness wasn't inside her anymore. The overwhelming relief at Cathal's retreat had killed that, like the lancing of some ghastly boil.

We must be bloody mad not to make a go of this, she thought, admiring her newly exposed hall floor for the umpteenth time. From the table where the phone she had once been so frightened of ringing now sat silently, she picked up the glossy property particulars. Jay had defaced them already, crossing out words like “elegant” and “well-presented” and putting ones like “drafty” and “damp” in their place. Even without his added noughts, the price was ridiculous. Not half as ridiculous as we'll all feel back in London, she thought.

“Maya?” she called again as she walked up the stairs. “Where are you?”

She walked past Niall's space, and thought she could smell the faintest whiff of Camel cigarette smoke. I'll go and throw out that packet of Silk Cut on my dressing table, she decided. Then I'll suggest a barbecue on the beach and we'll go and have a look at some surfboards. It was a good plan. It could have been perfect. But thirty seconds after that, she found Maya's note.

*   *   *

“Has Niall called you at all?” Cathal asked his mother over the phone from Bristol.

“No, why? Should he have?”

“No, I just wondered.”

“Wondered what?”

“Oh, just wondered.”

“I may be old, Cathal,” she said, “but I'm not stupid yet. Best you tell me.”

“Are you sure you want to hear it?”

“If I don't hear it, I'll imagine it.”

So she heard it, from start to finish.

“Who are you concerned for? Your brother or your daughter?” his mother asked without admonishment.

“My brother,” he mumbled, knowing it was the answer she wanted to hear.

“Then get on with it. Find him and put it right.”

“How?”

“You'll find a way. Start with London. Make him talk to you. Tell him I say he has to.”

“Should I not leave him to calm down for a while?”

“No,” Mary O'Connor said emphatically. “You don't let the sun go down on this one, Cathal. Remember what I said. The thing is, we all think we have the time.”

*   *   *

The moment of discovery came just as Maya was putting the last chocolate in her mouth, but she was nearer London than she had hoped, so it didn't matter that she lost it somewhere in the bedclothes.

“Maya! God, don't do that to me.”

Mog was standing in the doorway to the pit with Nathan attached to her left breast, his head covered by her stripy long-sleeved T-shirt. She had negotiated the walk down the length of the bus well, only having knocked her baby-free side once on the kitchen partition.