Num8ers (16 page)

“It’s pretty grim, isn’t it?” Spider asked eventually. I just nodded. “I think we should risk using the phone. Get a taxi.”

“No way. They’ll trace it. It’ll be the end, Spider.”

“What else can we do? We’re stuck in the middle of nowhere here.”

“I dunno — but they’ll be waiting for us to use the phone, won’t they?”

He dropped the cigarette butt and ground it under his foot. “I’m hungry, Jem. I’m cold.”

“I know. Me, too.”

We lit another smoke and passed it back and forth, a small comfort in an otherwise bleak world. After a couple of minutes, we heard a car crunching down the drive behind us. We looked at each other. No time to move on, no point, really. A massive four-wheel drive thing came ’round the corner. They hit the brakes when they saw us, then drove around us. I could see the driver as the car went past — a woman, early thirties maybe, quite polished, hair pulled back into a ponytail, and a bit of toast held in her mouth like a beak. There were a couple of kids in the back. They looked like dolls strapped into that massive car.

The woman looked at us — surprised, wary, a bit angry, maybe — then drove up to the junction and turned left out onto the road. A few feet down, she stopped and reversed until she was level with us. The front passenger window went down and she took the toast out of her mouth and leaned across.

“Are you waiting for someone?” The voice was sharp, like she was accusing us of something. The crime of being strangers. The crime of being young.

Spider held his hand up. “We just need a lift. Into town.” He was busking it now — neither of us knew if there was a town nearby, or where it might be.

She looked at us doubtfully, her mouth a thin, tight line.

“Right. I’m sorry, I can’t help you.” The window went up again and the car set off.

“Bitch,” I said. Spider nodded and took another drag.

Ten feet along the road the car stopped again and reversed. This time another car was coming up behind, and its horn blasted as it overtook her. The window came down.

“You’d better get in,” she said briskly. “I’m going into town. Put your bags in the back. One of you will have to go in the back, in the middle.”

Spider and I exchanged glances, then he opened the trunk and slung in the bags. I pulled open the back passenger door. The kids were staring wide-eyed, like their mum had lost her marbles. I tried not to look them in the eye — I can’t stand that, seeing kids’ numbers. Gets to me. They were in posh
uniforms — blazers, shirts, and ties, you know the sort of thing — and they were looking at me like I was some sort of alien.

“Um…’scuse me…can I just…?”

The boy, sitting nearest to me, swiveled his legs to the side and leaned back into his seat. I clambered past him and settled in the middle. The little girl, on the other side, shrank away from me.

Spider had closed the trunk and was up front now. “Thanks, thanks, really appreciate it. It’s cool, it’s cool. Nice car. Great. Cool. Cool.” His head was nodding in appreciation. I wanted him to shut up, not to sound too crazy. “This is really good of you. It’s fucking freezing out there.”

I heard a sharp intake of breath from the boy. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him, eyes like saucers, mouth open. The woman spoke very slowly, carefully.

“Listen, I’m happy to give you a lift, but not if you’re going to swear. We don’t do that in this car.”

Spider clapped his hand to his mouth. “Jesus, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. No offense, lady. Alright, kids?” He turned around, flashing them a smile. “It’s not cool to use those words, is it? Not cool.”

I thought I heard a little squeak from the girl. I glanced at her. She was absolutely terrified. Quite possibly wetting herself. She’d probably never even seen a black man, let alone a six-foot-four, foulmouthed black dosser. I guess you could find
him intimidating at the best of times, but after a couple of days on the run and sleeping rough, he was a bit of a sight.

Spider’s nerves were getting the better of him. He just couldn’t stop. “It’s very good of you. To stop for us. Very good.”

“That’s all right.” You could tell now she was regretting her reckless impulse, would never do it again. “Where are you heading?”

My stomach flipped as I realized we hadn’t agreed on a story. After two days on our own, we’d suddenly plunged back into the real world. Spider just plowed ahead, ad-libbing. “We’re heading to Bristol, going to stay with my aunt. She’s in Bristol, yeah.”

“How did you end up at Whiteways?”

“Um, we’ve just been hitching. Got dropped by the main road. Been walking for a couple of days.”

As he was talking, I noticed the lady’s half-eaten bit of toast. She’d put it down by the gear stick and forgotten about it. Saliva jetted into my mouth. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. Oh. My. God. I couldn’t help myself — I leaned forward, stretched my hand out, and picked it up, then sat back and crammed it straight into my mouth, folding it up so it all went in. It was cold and a bit soggy, and the best thing I’ve ever tasted. The salty butter made more saliva gush out, and some dribble ran down my chin as I chewed.

This was all too much for the boy. “Mummy,” he squealed. “He’s eaten your toast!”

He?

“Oh,” came her reaction. “Never mind, Freddy. I’d finished, really.”

I wiped my chin with my sleeve, reluctantly swallowed; I could have kept it in my mouth forever. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I was just…hungry.”

“That’s quite all right,” she said evenly. The little girl started crying, quietly whimpering next to me. “It’s all right, children. We’re nearly there. Nearly there.” She didn’t need to say “Thank God” — we all knew she was thinking it.

We were on the outskirts of a town now. I can’t tell you how good it was to see houses, to know there were shops and cafés only a few minutes away.

She pulled up at the side of the road. “School’s off that way. I’ll drop you here. It’s only five minutes’ walk to the town center. And there’s a station, too.”

“Right, thanks, thanks. You’ve been very kind.” I climbed out, past Freddy, who was holding himself so flat against his seat that he was almost two-dimensional. We got the bags out of the back and stood on the pavement as the car moved off into the traffic.

“How lucky was that?” Spider said.

“Mm, think we’ll be the last hitchhikers they ever pick up.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing. I don’t think we were their kind of people.”

“Yeah,” he laughed. “And I think they thought you was a boy. Need their eyes tested.”

“Spider, do you think they knew who we were?”

“Nah, she wouldn’t have picked us up if she did, would she?”

With the traffic streaming past us, I was starting to feel more exposed than when we’d been walking across the fields. We’d been cut off from civilization for two days. What had everyone been hearing about us? What had they seen on the TV or read in the papers? In one of those cars going past, was someone reaching for their phone right now, calling the police? I felt edgy, really edgy.

“We should find a shop and then disappear, Spider. We can’t hang about.”

“Yeah, I know.”

He grabbed the bags and set off down the road, long legs striding along. I had to jog to keep up. We’d got to the first few shops, keeping an eye out for a corner shop or a little food shop or something, when we saw a signboard on one side of the street:
R
ITA’S
C
AFÉ —
A
LL-
D
AY
B
REAKFASTS
C
OOKED TO
O
RDER.

Spider had stopped. He was staring at the board, licking his lips. I could read his mind — I knew what he was going to say before he said it.

“I know we shouldn’t hang around, but, Christ, Jem, I’m hungry. What do you think?”

We both knew we should stick to Plan A — go into a corner shop, buy some sandwiches, water, cereal bars, all that stuff, and then find a shed or a garage or somewhere and have another picnic — but there was no way either of us could walk past that place.

“Sod it,” I said. “Even a condemned man has a last meal, don’t he?”

That big grin broke out again, and I swear a bit of drool trickled down his chin.

“That’s my girl,” he said, and he picked up our stuff and headed into Rita’s.

I’ve never been to Africa and seen a hyena ripping into the carcass of an antelope, but I bet it would be pretty similar to the sight of Spider devouring a cooked breakfast. He used his fork like a shovel, didn’t stop to breathe or anything like that, just continuously scooped it up and in, up and in. He looked up at me. I hadn’t even touched mine.

“What’s up with you? You’re not telling me you’re not hungry.” A bubble of egg yolk oozed out of the corner of his mouth.

“No, I’m just enjoying the sight of it — it’s awesome.” And it was. After all that time out in the wild, eating chips, cookies, and chocolate, it was almost too good to look at: a couple of plump sausages glistening with grease; the perfect fried egg, pure white and pure yellow; strips of bacon fried into crispy waves; a pool of beans, the juice slowly spreading across the plate.

He snorted, and his egg bubble grew and turned into a drip. “You’re mental. Dig in.” He waved a fork in the direction of the woman behind the counter, who I guess was Rita, and called out, “Hey, could we get some French toast with this?”

“Coming up!” she replied cheerily, clearly a woman who liked to see people enjoying her food.

I cut the end off one of the sausages, let out an involuntary groan of satisfaction as the first mouthful hit home, and then steadily worked my way through the plateful. Rita waddled out from behind the counter, bringing a plate of French toast. She was one of those people who almost look wider than they are tall, her enormous chest — barely contained by a man’s checkered shirt — bulging out from behind her apron. Her legs were bare under a square-shaped denim skirt, and she had on fluffy slippers, the pink fake fur globbed together in places where the bacon fat had spattered.

“Shall I top those off?” she asked, nodding at our mugs of tea.

“Cheers,” said Spider, moving his mug nearer the edge of the table. She shuffled over to the counter and fetched the big silver-colored teapot. The brown liquid steamed as it arced into our mugs. The café was empty apart from us, and she didn’t seem in any hurry to get back behind the counter.

“Been sleeping rough?” she asked. It wasn’t an accusation, just a friendly question, the way she said it.

“Yeah,” we both said together.

She eased herself down into a chair at the table opposite ours.

“Do you need to phone anyone, kids? You can use the phone here, free of charge.”

Spider rested his fork on the edge of the plate. “It’s OK. We’ve got mobiles.”

I couldn’t help thinking of Val, perched on her stool in the kitchen, her ashtray piling up with cigarette butts, and the look in her eyes as we drove away.

“If there’s someone, somewhere, waiting for news about you, you should give them a ring. Just let them know you’re OK. Take it from me, lovey. I know what it’s like to sit looking at that phone, willing it to ring. Breaks your heart, it does.” She wasn’t looking at Spider and me anymore; her eyes were directed at one of the pictures on the wall, but I could tell she wasn’t seeing it. She was somewhere else, somewhere painful.

I kept quiet, pretended to be reading the newspaper that was lying on the table next to me. I didn’t want to hear anyone else’s sob story. Spider was too busy wiping a piece of French toast across his plate and posting it into his big gob to ask, but she took our silence as encouragement to go on.

“Happened to me, you see. My Shaunie. We used to have spats — everyone does, don’t they? He used to go off for a few hours, come home when he’d cooled down. I never thought he’d leave for good.” Her face was shining damply, from the heat of the kitchen, maybe, or the effort of telling us about her son. She wiped her forehead with the bottom of her apron. “Anyway, that’s just what he did. We fell out one day, can’t even remember what it was about, and off he went. I wasn’t too bothered, thought he’d turn up later. I got his dinner ready and put it in the oven to keep it warm. It was still there the next morning, dried up and stuck to the plate. Shepherd’s pie and veggies. That’s what I’d cooked him. Always liked a bit of
shepherd’s pie. I rang the police. They weren’t really concerned. Seventeen, you see. You can do what you like at seventeen. I rang his mates, all the places he might go. Nothing. He just disappeared. Never seen him again. I don’t know if he’s alive or dead.” Her voice wobbled, and she stopped talking and sat there taking deep breaths in and out.

Embarrassed for her, I kept my eyes on the table, on that newspaper, and for the first time the words in the headline came into focus.

And underneath, a grainy security camera picture of people standing in line in a shop. The camera must have been near the ceiling, because you were looking at them from above, couldn’t see their faces, except for one person who was glancing up, looking straight at the camera. It was me, of course. In that service station. On the front page of the paper.

Spider had put the last piece of French toast down on his plate.

“That’s terrible,” he said. “I’m so sorry.”

Rita nodded, acknowledging his sympathy.

“Here.” He held a grubby tissue out to her.

“S’alright, I’ve got a hankie somewhere.” She dug in her apron pocket, fished out a big, white, man’s hankie, and blew her nose noisily.

“Changes your life, something like that,” she said quietly. “You don’t like to go out, just in case the phone rings. You stop sleeping properly, always listening for that key in the lock. Think you’re going mad sometimes, when you see someone that looks just like him from the back, or hear someone behind you laughing just like he used to, and you turn ’round and it isn’t him.” Sweat was beading on her forehead again, and she lifted up her apron, completely covering her face for a second, and mopped it away. “You got someone, somewhere, going through what I’m going through — you give them a ring.”