Ostrich Boys (8 page)

“Don’t be so pathetic,” Sim growled.

“How d’you know I’m being pathetic? You can’t say that.”

“Kenny, you sound like a dick.”

“Piss off, Sim! Shut up, okay? You can’t say that. You can’t! How d’you know I don’t mean it?”

But there was no sympathy from Sim. “So just grow up, then.”

Kenny bristled. “I’m older than you.”

“By five months—big wow. But you’re acting like your nappy’s on too tight.”

The train bumped and we stumbled against one another, Kenny and Sim almost banging heads. And Kenny gave Sim a vicious shove, gritting his teeth as he did so.

Against my better judgment, I threw my weight in between them. “Come on, leave it.” I knocked Sim’s fist to one side before he could aim it at Kenny. “It’s happened, it’s done—okay, Kenny? So you’ve been unlucky, now we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do about it. Right, Sim?”

But that ended up being the worst thing I could have done, because then I couldn’t stop myself from getting sucked into the argument too. We were all shouting at each other, bickering like idiots. And nobody saw the conductor coming until it was too late.

“Tickets, please.”

Standing on the platform at York station with our rucksacks at our feet (well, mine and Sim’s, anyway), we watched the train aim north without us. I could imagine myself looking down on the three of us like in one of those weird out-of-body experiences people talk about. We’d appear to be in a silent space all our own, even though we were in the middle of the busy platform, with hurrying people streaming around either side. From above I’d see the invective flying out of Sim’s mouth in daggers and blades, luckily not aimed at anyone in particular, just catching the sun as they spun away. Kenny’s moroseness would be a sodden gray quilt around his shoulders, heavy enough to bend his knees and his back. While my own crestfallen figure was punctured, deflated, my skin creasing and sagging as all my hot air escaped. But the image only lasted a nanosecond or so because when I blinked I
could hear the station’s bustle and see out through my eyes again.

We stood there. Watched the train dissolving with a glint into the sunny distance.

The conductor had had a weird little mustache and a twitchy eye, but he’d been less intimidating than the one on the Cleethorpes train. He’d listened to us as we’d fallen over each other trying to explain our predicament. And even agreed that it was indeed an unfortunate predicament to be in. But he’d still said Kenny couldn’t travel on his train without a ticket.

We’d waved the return part at him, Sim and I had shown our tickets with matching times and dates printed on them, we’d argued hard. Maybe Sim had argued that bit too hard. The upshot was, Kenny had to get off at the next stop and go see someone at the station’s travel center who might be able to issue him with another outward ticket—it wasn’t something the conductor could do himself. We’d tried to explain about our connections, said we were pushed for time. We’d begged. For a second or two I’d thought he might crack, might let us stay on all the way to Newcastle. And then Sim had called him a miserable jobsworth git. And now here we were.

York. A long way from Newcastle. A longer way from Ross. Staring at the place where our train used to be.

Sim’s tirade finally ran dry. He took a deep breath, blew it out. “Right. Okay.” He shook the anger out of him like a
dog shakes water off its coat. He gathered himself, put his sunglasses back on. “When’s the next bastard train?”

York’s a large, good-looking station compared to Cleethorpes. Several long, wide platforms with a huge, arching roof high above them. An ornate footbridge spans the tracks. Some of the shops and cafés are either really old or just made to look that way. It’s a hectic station too. Always a train coming in as another’s going out. Loads of people milling around. Sim strode straight through the crowds; Kenny and I followed, weaving in between them. The massive electronic departures board is on stilts in the middle of the main concourse. The three of us stared up at it.

“There’s another one in just over half an hour,” Sim said, pointing. “Twelve-forty-six to Aberdeen. Stops at Newcastle.”

I nodded. “Let’s hope it gets us there in time.”

Kenny hovered, looking anxious. “What about my ticket?”

“Well, you’d better be quick,” I told him.

“What d’you mean?”

I was looking around. “It’s over there,” I said, pointing.

“What is?”

“The travel center. You’ve got thirty-six minutes.”

“Thirty-five,” Sim corrected me.

Kenny was worried, confused. “But I don’t know…. What if …?”

“Run!”

He leaped away from me, his face stuck somewhere between shock and misery. “But …”

“Run, shithorn!
RUN!
” Sim shouted.

And Kenny ran, edging and dodging through the crowd toward the travel center.

Sim and I watched him go. Then Sim said: “We should’ve left him. Me and you—we should’ve stayed on the train.”

“You reckon?”

“Yeah.”

“But you never would have, would you?”

He sighed. “I’d never drown a puppy either.”

We picked up our rucksacks and followed the way Kenny had gone.

This was meant to have been a straightforward kind of journey, after all. Kind of there-and-back-again before anyone noticed we’d gone. But the problems seemed to be piling up on top of one another, higher and higher, building a big wall of hassle to block our way. I was surprised and then disgusted at myself when I wondered whether it was all going to be worth the effort. I crushed the thought. I remembered I had my dead best friend in the bag over my shoulder.

And for a split second I thought I saw him. Just in front of me, through the crowd. Out the corner of my eye. The back of his head.

It stopped me in my tracks. But when I looked again it
was a much older bloke—just the same color hair, same height, kind of.

Not that this was the first time I’d thought I’d seen him. It threw me to begin with, sent a genuine streak of icy lightning up my spine. Now I reckoned it was something I was just going to have to get used to.

“You okay?” Sim asked.

I nodded. “Yeah. Fine. No worries.” But my smile felt awkward.

Inside the travel center was a long, winding queue with Kenny at the very end of it. I counted and he had twenty-eight people in front of him. Sim rolled his eyes, muttered something about hating waiting and wandered back out the way we’d come. I went to stand with Kenny.

“Is Sim really mad?” Kenny asked, craning his neck to try and follow him.

“Mad insane? Or mad angry?”

But Kenny wouldn’t laugh. He didn’t look at me when he asked, “Are you going to go without me? If the train comes before I get another ticket?”

“It’s tempting,” I admitted. “The problem is, things would’ve been so much simpler if we’d stayed on that train. I had all the times worked out. But if we want to catch up a bit and get to Ross before tonight, it’s gonna be a whole lot easier if we can make that connection at Newcastle.”

“But how much does it matter if we don’t get there tonight?”

“We can easily get there tomorrow,” I said. “That’s not the problem. But the train times just don’t fit for us to get there
and
all the way back to Cleethorpes tomorrow as well. It’s too far. Which means we won’t get home till Monday. And staying out another night is something we definitely can’t afford. Never mind the fact that the longer it is before we go back to Cleethorpes, the deeper the trouble we’re in is gonna get.”

Kenny stared at his feet. “We’re shittered, aren’t we? I’m sorry, you know? Honest, Blake. I didn’t mean …”

I knew he felt embarrassed because of his freak-out on the train. It wasn’t the right time to make him feel worse. “Yeah,” I said. “I know.” The time to really make him squirm would be when he had another ticket and we were on that connection from Newcastle, back on schedule. That was when I was planning on completely ripping the piss out of him.

But I checked my watch, twice. The queue inched forward; we shuffled a couple of steps with it. And I couldn’t help doubting we were going to get any further north than we already were.

At the front of the room was one long counter with at least ten windows where the station staff sat at computers, checking timetables and issuing tickets. The frustrating thing was, only four of the windows had anyone sitting there. I craned my neck to scan the queue, counting everyone in front of us again. There were only twenty-six now.
Weighing them up, I reckoned some people were in pairs, and there was definitely a threesome—three backpackers with bright, shell-like packs. So maybe it wasn’t the full twenty-six in front of us. In reality perhaps there were only twenty, twenty-one. That sounded better. Not brilliant, but better. I checked my watch again. Just under half an hour to go.

Sim appeared behind us. “What’s happening?”

“Not a lot.” The queue moved on another single shuffled step as if to prove it. Twenty-five people in front of us now. “Where did you go?”

“There’s an information kiosk-thing out there. I asked the bloke if he could do anything.”

“And?”

Sim pulled a face. “Kenny needs to see one of them.” He pointed at the staff behind the windows. “I got him to check when this next train gets into Newcastle, though. Three minutes before the one to Carlisle leaves.”

“That’s tight,” I said.

He nodded, turning away from me. I realized he was also counting the people in the queue. “And there’s no way we’re going to make it just standing here,” he said.

An idea popped into my head, but it took me a few seconds to say it out loud. “Maybe we could call Caroline.”

Sim wasn’t amused.

“I’m just saying: we could give her a ring and ask her to drive us.”

“That’s the most stupid—”

I tried to defend myself. “I told you what she was like this morning. I really think she’d help us if she knew.”

“Yeah, but would Ross want her there? Think about that.”

Kenny said, “I reckon all that stuff because of her with his notebook and poems was why Nina finished with him. I’m telling you: that was definitely the start of it.”

I remembered this morning, the way Caroline had hid her face from me when Mr. Fell was asking if Ross had any big problems. I was being truthful when I said no, but I knew Ross and Caroline weren’t talking.

Ross had had this little notebook he always carried around with him, where he wrote down his story ideas and stuff like that. He’d also been writing love poems to Nina. And last week Caroline had stolen his notebook and read the poems out to everyone at lunchtime. There’d been a load of us on the grass behind the dining hall and she’d really gone to town with the amateur dramatics. I think it was meant to be a joke at first, but the way people started ripping into Ross and taking the piss had been vicious. I hate to say it, but I’d been glad I wasn’t him right then. Or Nina. Talk about having to crawl under a rock somewhere …

But when I’d spoken to Ross afterwards he seemed all right about it. He said his sister was just jealous—which was true. She was older, cleverer, much more popular, but he always
got loads of attention because of his stories. He’d just won that big story competition too. Most of the teachers thought he was greater than great because of that; the head made everybody give him a round of applause in assembly. So I could believe Caroline was jealous—she never received that kind of attention when she got yet another A-star in some exam. But I also saw Ross tear up his notebook and throw it away when he thought nobody was watching.

Kenny and Sim were waiting for me to say something. “It was just an idea.”

Sim snorted his derision. “Yeah. A stupid one.” He scanned the queue again; but with a click of his tongue seemed to have an idea of his own.

He took off his sunglasses and tapped the shoulder of the elderly woman in front of us. She was wearing a heavy brown coat despite the June sun outside and seemed squashed with old age. She smiled at us and all her wrinkles bunched up at the corners of her eyes.