Runaway (11 page)

Maurie turned sad brown eyes on him, so large now in his shrunken face, and Jack saw the determination that still burned in them. ‘Not a chance!’

Back out in the hall, Maurie slumped almost semi-conscious into the wheelchair, and they set off again towards the lifts, anxious to be out of there just as quickly as they could. But as the lift doors closed behind them, they heard a nurse’s shrill cry from the far end of the corridor.

‘Mr Cohen! For God’s sake, where’s Mr Cohen?’

It seemed to take the lift an eternity to descend to the ground floor, and the palpable silence in it was thick enough to slice. Not one of them dared to meet the others’ eyes. When, finally, the doors slid open it was only to reveal the acres of lobby that had to be crossed before they could escape into the night, and a uniformed security man standing by the doorway.

Jack tried to swallow as his tongue stuck to the roof of a very dry mouth. ‘Don’t rush it,’ he said under his breath. ‘Just take your time.’

But Ricky was off as if the flag had just been raised on pole position at a Grand Prix. Jack and Dave struggled to keep up with him.

They were halfway across the hall when a wall-mounted phone beside the security guard rang, and he lifted the receiver. He listened for a moment, then his eyes raked the lobby as he spoke, settling on Ricky and the wheelchair before he hung up. Jack saw a tiny trickle of sweat run down Ricky’s neck from behind his ear.

The guard glanced at his watch, then raised a hand to stop them. ‘Excuse me, doctor,’ he said.

For a moment Jack thought Ricky was going to faint, but from somewhere he managed a mumbled, ‘Yes?’

‘You got the time on you? My watch seems to have given up the ghost.’

Ricky’s relief almost robbed him of the ability to stand up, and he very nearly staggered as he let go of one handle of the wheelchair to look at his watch. ‘Quarter to eight,’ he said.

‘Thanks, doc.’ The security man held the door open for them. ‘Better wrap up warm, it’s bloody cold out there.’

By the time they got to the top of the hill they were all wishing they had been able to find a parking space at the bottom of it. It took all three of them to get Maurie up the steep incline, past the Langside Library and the shops below the tenement flats that climbed the rest of the way to the roundabout.

When they reached the car, Ricky said, ‘I can’t let go. There are no brakes on this thing.’

Jack tutted. ‘I thought you were supposed to be the genius, son. Turn it sideways.’

‘Oh. Aye.’ Ricky seemed chastened.

He unlocked the car, and the three of them helped Maurie into the back seat.

Then Ricky said, ‘What are we going to do with the wheelchair? Even folded up we’re not going to get it into the boot.’

And they turned in time to see its front wheels swivel, setting it on a course back down the hill.

Dave cackled. ‘Aye, well, that solves the problem.’

‘Jesus!’ Ricky started after it. But it was gathering pace quickly, and he realized almost immediately that he was neither fit enough nor fast enough to catch it.

The three of them stood by the car, watching as the empty wheelchair went careening down the hill, bouncing jauntily off parked cars and walls as if it were revelling in undreamed-of speed and freedom. Until it smacked into a pillar box on the corner of Sinclair Drive and came skidding to a halt on its side, half wrapped around the pole of a
Give Way
sign. Just as two uniformed police officers on foot patrol turned the corner.

‘Holy shit!’ Dave said, which was their cue to get into the Micra as quickly as they could. Like schoolboys fleeing the scene of the crime.

Ricky fumbled with the keys and started her up, pulling out into the traffic without indicating or looking. A large van blasted its horn at them.

‘Nothing like an inconspicuous escape,’ Jack muttered, turning a dark look towards his grandson.

But Ricky was oblivious. He accelerated away, across the roundabout and down Langside Avenue towards Shawlands Cross, tiny beads of cold sweat gathering across his forehead.

Without taking his eyes from the road he said quietly, ‘I’ll never forgive you for this, Grampa. Never!’

_IV

Ricky took the road through East Kilbride on to the dual carriageway that linked up with the M74. The southbound lanes of the motorway were quiet, and by ten they were long past Crawford and heading into the bleak, rolling wastes of South Lanarkshire. Darkness had crept up on them like a mist, sombre and silent, like the mood in the car itself.

The adrenaline-pumping moments at the infirmary were behind them, and now that they were on the road the cold reality of this madness on which they had embarked sat among them like a fifth presence. White lines caught in the headlights passed beneath them with hypnotic regularity, and the constant whining pitch of the little car’s motor filled their collective consciousness.

Maurie was asleep in the back, his head fallen on to Dave’s shoulder. Dave sat upright, with glassy eyes, his rucksack resting on his knees.

Jack glanced back at him, struck by a sudden thought. ‘What have you got in the rucksack, Dave?’

Dave folded his arms possessively around it. ‘Nothing.’

‘It must have something in it.’

‘Just my toilet bag and some underwear.’

‘Seemed kind of heavy for a toilet bag and underwear.’

Jack had lifted the rucksack off the back seat while they were manoeuvring Maurie into the car. The weight of it had registered then, but he had forgotten until now.

Dave shrugged, silently defensive.

‘Have you got booze in there?’

‘No.’ His denial came too quickly.

Ricky glanced across at his grandfather. ‘What if he has?’

Jack said grimly, ‘Dave has a wee problem.’

‘Pfffff.’ He heard the air escape from Ricky’s lips. ‘That’s all we need.’

Jack turned round in his seat to fix Dave in his gaze. ‘You promised.’

Dave was uncomfortable, but unapologetic. ‘It’s only a few beers.’

Jack grabbed for the bag. ‘Give me it.’

Dave turned it away from him. ‘No.’

‘For God’s sake!’ Ricky said, trying to keep his focus on the road.

Jack lunged back over his seat, reaching for the rucksack, this time seizing it and prising it from Dave’s grasp. He swung it into the front of the car.

‘Aw, Jack, come on! That’s not fair.’

Jack opened the rucksack on his knees and found the six-pack of beer wrapped in a nightshirt. He rolled down the window and checked in the wing mirror before chucking the cans out into the night, one by one. He saw them explode as they hit the road, bursts of phosphorescent foam glowing briefly pink in the rear sidelights of the car.

He heard Dave groaning in the dark.

When all the cans were gone and Jack had closed the window, Dave’s voice came leaden and bitter from behind him. ‘See what I said tae you at the hospital, aboot Donnie and that? I take it all back.’

The thick silence that settled in the aftermath of the moment was invaded by a buzz of electronic music punctuated by the repeating vocal refrain:
Turn down for what
.

‘What on earth’s that?’ Jack said.

‘My phone.’ Ricky’s voice came back at him out of the dark. ‘It’s a cool ringtone. From a single by DJ Snake and Lil Jon. It’s in my jacket pocket. You could get it out for me.’

Jack delved into Ricky’s pocket and felt the phone vibrating in his hand as he pulled it out.

‘It should say who’s calling.’

Jack looked at the display and felt a mixer start up in his stomach. ‘It’s your dad.’

‘Oh shit. What time is it?’

‘Just after ten. Where did you say you were going tonight?’

‘To the pictures.’

‘So you’d be mid-movie right now. Why would he be calling?’

‘He must have found the note. Don’t answer it.’

‘Don’t worry, I wasn’t about to.’

They sat in tense silence until the phone stopped shouting
turn down for what
at them. Then the silence deepened as they waited expectantly for the tone which would announce that Ricky’s father had left a message. It came after nearly thirty interminable seconds. Ricky snatched the phone from his grandfather. Flicking his eyes between the road and the screen, he activated the message to play on speaker.

Malcolm’s voice was tight with tension. ‘Ricky, you silly bloody idiot! What do you think you’re doing? How could you let that old fart talk you into doing something this stupid?’

Jack bristled.

They could almost hear Ricky’s father trying to control his breathing. ‘But it’s alright, son. I don’t blame you. There’ll be hell to pay right enough, but it’s your grandfather who’ll be paying it.’

‘See?’ Jack said, glancing at his grandson. ‘Told you I’d get the blame.’

Ricky’s face was whale-blubber white, but his eyes were fixed on the road. ‘And so you should. It’s all your fault.’

His father’s voice crackled over the messaging service. ‘I’m on the road right now. And you know I’ll catch up with you eventually. So pull into the first service station you come to, and call me back.’

‘Don’t you dare!’ Jack said.

Ricky swallowed with difficulty. ‘What are we going to do?’

Jack thought about it. ‘Well, he’s right. The Mondeo’s going to outrun the Micra in time. But we’ve got an hour’s head start. We’ll just keep going. Down the M6 till we can turn off the motorway and go cross-country to Leeds. We can pick up the M1 south from there.’

Dave’s voice came chuckling out of the back. He had forgotten his beer for the moment. ‘Just like we did back then, eh?’

Jack glanced across at Ricky and saw the tension in his grandson’s hands, knuckles almost glowing white in the dark, and he had a sickening sense of déjà vu.

1965

CHAPTER FIVE

_I

‘Jobbies!’

No one was paying much attention to Jeff, or the road. We were, all of us, lost in our own thoughts. Coming to terms with just what it was we had done, and were doing, and the realization that there was no going back. These were dark moments of doubt and regret, yet at the same time seductive and exciting. Like those first pioneers who had crossed the North American continent, we were setting out on a journey without the least idea of where it would take us and when, or if, we would ever be back. It was a journey into our collective future. A voyage into the unknown.

‘What’s wrong?’ I said. I was still perched uncomfortably on the engine cowling, Maurie in the passenger seat, and Luke and Dave on the settee in the back. I hoped I wasn’t going to spend the entire trip with a 1703cc engine thrumming away beneath my arse. It makes me shudder now to think that none of us wore seat belts. There weren’t any in the van, and in 1965 we simply never gave it a second thought. But if we’d had a collision, or even made an emergency stop, I’d have been head first through that windscreen.

‘I’ve missed the turn-off,’ Jeff said. We had come up through Busby and East Kilbride New Town. As a kid I had thought there was something almost futuristic about East Kilbride. Clusters of skyscraper apartments that I could see on the skyline across the fields. There was nothing like that where we lived, and I thought they looked exotic, like a page from a sci-fi comic pasted on the horizon. Of course, I had no idea then what soulless places new towns really were.

‘What road should we be on?’

‘The A776 to Hamilton, and then on to the A74.’

‘Well, what road
are
we on?’

‘The A726 to Strathaven,’ Jeff said. (Which is pronounced ‘Straven’, even though there’s an ‘ath’ in it. I’ve never known why.) ‘There’s an
AA Book of the Road
in the glove compartment. Get it out and tell me how we get on to the A74.’