Solace of the Road (3 page)

But it wasn’t like he’d given me his personal mobile number or anything.

I shivered on those steps that morning in the snow in Tooting Bec.

‘You all right, Holly?’ said Rachel.

‘Yeah. Fine. ’S cold.’

‘I know.’ She touched my arm, then stamped her feet on the top step.

The door opened. Fiona was there, nodding like one of those daft dogs they have in the back of cars. ‘Come on in. It’s perishing.’

I walked over the doormat and I felt Fiona’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Holly,’ she went. ‘You’re welcome here, you know. Truly.’ The way she looked at me, she made me feel like I was her new toy. Then her voice went up a notch, to include Rachel. ‘Tea’s made.’

Rachel left soon after and Fiona cleared up the kitchen, humming, like it was normal to have a delinquent care-babe with a cracked-up past in her home. I stared at the wooden table and the mats on it and how the varnish looked brand new. The memory of the table back at the Home, with all the rings from hot drinks and scuffs and biro marks, made a heavy pain in my stomach. I thought of the wind-ups and Trim going ballistic and Miko juggling and Grace flicking her peas around the table instead of eating them.
Why did I agree to come here?

Five
The Wig

Days passed. New school. New place. New people. New everything. The house on Mercutia Road was graveyard quiet. Outside, snow came and went, day in and day out.

Fiona kept starting conversations. I could never think what to say. Trouble was, she always got round to asking a question, so I had to say
something
. It was like she was trying to nose me out. I wasn’t a buried bone, for God’s sake. I tried not to be in the same room with her.

My favourite place was the stairs. I’d counted sixty-three, including the ones outside. I’d sit on the second landing, where the stairs bent round on themselves and there was a tiny window. I’d watch the snow fall and the sky go empty. Some days Rosabel’d sit in my lap, others she’d lie low on my bed.

When Fiona wasn’t looking, I’d go rooting around. I’d be in the drawers and cupboards, checking the place over, sniffing for anything that might start a new thought. But I only found boring stuff.
Sheets, towels, sachets of lavender. Everything just so.

Then, after a week in the new house, I found the wig.

It was in the bottom drawer of a chest at the very top of the sixty-three stairs in a plastic bag so skinny I nearly didn’t bother looking inside. But I dipped my hand in for a mystery feel and touched thin strands, all scrunched and soft. So I had to look in. It was pretend hair, some almost grey, some gold, but overall blonde, with muted highlights. I took it out and fingered its layers and fringes. Inside, a net with a brown tape for keeping it on. When you held it over your fist, the white of your own skin shone through where the parting was, like scalp.

A wig, ash-blonde, drop-dead gorgeous.

‘Holly!’ came Fiona’s voice from downstairs. ‘Holly – lunch!’

I stuffed the wig back and shut the drawer. I promised myself when Fiona left the house to go shopping that afternoon, I’d try it on.

Downstairs, Fiona was looking like the last whale had been harpooned. It was Saturday and Ray’d gone to work, which he shouldn’t have. I sat down at the kitchen table and picked at my food, but I wasn’t hungry. That wig had really got to me. I tapped my toes on the floor. Then Fiona and I had our first row, a real wang-dammer.

When I got wound up in the Home and it got to be too much, it was like Miko said, a nail bomb went off. Anything near me went on a real hard flying lesson. Cushions. Chairs. Trainers. And Miko would
come and clamp me down and my arms would be windmills and I’d swear and kick and it felt good. Then he’d say, ‘Do the mattress trick, Holly.’ I’d run from the room, go upstairs, yank my mattress off the bed, and kick it as hard as I could. He said to do it every morning and evening, even when I wasn’t angry. I’d hammer the springs with my trainer soles and then collapse, sweat pouring. And the others couldn’t wind me up so easily.

But that lunch with Fiona, I forgot the mattress trick. And anyway, my bed on Mercutia Road had a mattress too thick for lifting unless you were King Kong. I just wanted Fiona to hurry up and go out, so I could try the wig on.

‘Sure you don’t want to come shopping?’ she was going. ‘You could choose your pizzas.’

‘Nah. Rather stay here. Honest.’

‘Sure?’

‘Yeah. It’s wet.’

‘There are such things as umbrellas, you know. You haven’t been out in two days.’

I pushed a tomato slice across the plate. ‘It’s cold.’

‘You don’t like the cold?’

‘Nah.’

‘D’you prefer the summer?’

See what I mean about the questions? ‘Yeah. S’pose.’

Fiona reached over to the bread board for another slice. ‘Call me odd, but I love the winter. January’s my favourite month.’

Would she
never
go?

‘Wish you’d try my bread, Holly, love.’

Now I can’t stand it when people call you ‘love’ when they hardly know you. For me that’s a wind-up to end all wind-ups.

‘It’s home made,’ she said. ‘Honest-to-God flour. Wholemeal.’

I put a finger down my mouth. ‘Ick.’

‘Don’t do that, Holly, please.’

I did it again.

‘Don’t! I make all this food, but you just eat rubbish, pure rubbish, instead. It’s a wonder your insides haven’t seized up with all that refined artificial stuff you put down yourself.’

‘With all that refeened arty-farty stuff you put down
yourself,’
I said, and pretended to throw up over the loaf.

Fiona snatched it away, leaving the bread knife behind, and went over to the kitchen worktop. She rattled at the bread bin.

‘Refeened, arty-farty,’ I said, wagging a finger at where the loaf had been.

‘Come on, Holly. Leave off. I’ve a good mind to call Rachel. Perhaps we need a talk.’

The nail bomb burst. I picked up the bread knife and hurled it at the kitchen window. It missed and clattered into the sink. So I stood up, grabbed my chair and slammed the far leg into a kitchen cupboard.

‘Fucking bread, fucking kitchen,’ I screamed. ‘Go on, say it. You want me gone, Ray wants me gone, you hate the sight of me. And I hate your fucking fancy
bread and I hate you too. I’m not your child. I don’t want to be your child. I’m Mammy’s child, not yours.’

Fiona came over and put her hands on my shoulders. ‘Holly! Calm down.’

I hated her touching me with her mad hot fingers. I shoved her out the way and ran from the room.

I went upstairs. I slammed my bedroom door and locked it. She came and knocked a few minutes later.

‘Holly?’

‘Go away, Mrs Empty-Ovary.’

Silence.

Then Fiona again. ‘What was that you just called me?’

‘Nothing.’

‘No. It wasn’t nothing, Holly. What did you say?’

I didn’t answer.

She went away again. Ten minutes later she was back.

‘I’m going out to the shops,’ she called through the door. Her voice was wavy like it had tears in it. ‘When I get back I hope you’ll be ready to apologize.’

There was silence. Then I heard her go away.

Soon as I heard that front door slam downstairs, I unlocked my door and went straight up to the top of the house to get the wig.

Six
Call Me Solace

I reached the top landing, took the wig out of the drawer and rushed back to my room. All the time it felt like someone was watching me. A ghost, a bad ghost, out to get me.

I locked my door behind me to try to shut it out, but it followed me right under the crack.

I sat at the mirror with my head down and breathed out. Then I pulled on the wig.

I raised my head and stared in the glass. The room seemed to get darker. Outside, the rain had turned to snow. The hair of the wig and my own baby-fine brown hair were muddled round the edges. It was half Holly Hogan and half a crazy stranger.
Stay cool, girl
, I told myself.
Tidy up
.

My heart thumping, I tucked in the stray dark bits. Then I brushed down the magic ash-blonde strands, combing them forward, then back, straightening the parting.

When I’d finished, I put down the brush and took another breath. I switched on the bedside lamp, so
that the shadows fell back to the room’s edges. Then I looked back in the glass.

And there she was.

The new girl on the block.

She was three years older than Holly Hogan, dead smart, a real cool glamour girl.

Grace told me all about glamour girls. They have slim-slam hips, she said, and they blow smoke rings at all the mogits. They have the whole world at their feet.

In this girl’s eyes was a bit of Mam. She was halfway between Holly and Mrs Bridget Hogan. But she was soaring above us both on the way to a different life. She was the kind of girl you can only watch, you can never be.

Her eyes blinked. Her mouth opened. I picked up the hairbrush again. I reached for the shell box and put on Mam’s old amber ring. It was big for my ring finger, so I put it on the next one up. Mam’s voice was in my head, talking to me, the way she used to when I was brushing her hair, back in the sky house. I was brushing and staring through the mirror to the other side, where the clouds bumped up against the window, way above the ground. Mam smiled back in her halter-neck dress, the one that showed off her cream shoulders and hugged her above the knees. Her hair was shiny curls but her eyebrows were dark, like frowns. She had her see-through drink in one hand and her lipstick in the other. She was getting ready to go out to her dancing job and I was brushing away.

‘What shall we call her, Holl?’ asked Mam.

We looked at the new girl on the block.

‘Dunno. Something fancy.’

We thought.

Then Mammy had it. ‘D’you remember the horse? The horse you chose that time? That Denny put the money on?’

I saw a ragged row of chestnut and muscle, horses with necks stretched out like giraffes. The most beautiful horse in the world was straining at the front, different from the others, pale gold, palomino. ‘Sister Solace,’ I whispered. ‘I remember her, Mam.’

‘This girl here – same shade, right?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And fast?’

‘A winner.’

‘So we’ll call her Solace, Holl. After the horse.’

‘Solace?’ The locks kissed my cheeks. ‘Yeah. After the horse, Mam. ’S perfect. That’s who I am. I’m a girl called Solace. And I’m on the move. And nobody tells me what to do.’

‘That’s right, Holl. You’ve got the picture.’ She put a hand on mine. ‘Don’t stop brushing, Holl, for love nor money.’

I kept brushing for love and for money. ‘Solace,’ I said with every stroke. ‘Call me Solace.’ And I was Solace, Solace of the road, walking into a night sky, thumb out and fag in hand. I was off to Ireland, where Mammy was and where the grass was green. I wasn’t sure what town she was in, but I’d find her. I would. I’d cross the Irish Sea and walk up the Irish hills in the fine, soft rain, drinking in the fresh air by the pint, just
like Mammy promised. Nobody was going to stop me and I was going, going—

Downstairs a door slammed.

The sky house vanished. Ireland vanished. It was Tooting Snooting again with the snow floating down outside and the silence inside.

Fiona, back from the shops already. I smiled a Solace smile, a halo-light slanting round my smooth crown. I looked good, but I was a real mad, bad girl.

‘Holly,’ Fiona called from the hall below. ‘Come and see what I got.’

I took off the wig and hid it under my pillow with Rosabel sitting on top. ‘Back soon,’ I promised.

I unlocked the door and went downstairs, my hand skimming the banister.

I went and lounged against the kitchen door. ‘Hi, Fiona.’

She’d got ham and pineapple pizza.

‘My fave. Thanks.’ I was so hungry I could have eaten it there and then.

‘Let’s forget about earlier, shall we, Holly?’

Fiona looked straight at me. I couldn’t look away. ‘Yeah, Fiona,’ I said. ‘OK.’

‘As long as you don’t call me that name again.’

I stood at the kitchen door, fingering the zip on my top.

‘You won’t, will you, Holly? Please?’

‘No, Fiona.’ Then I said something Miko used to say. ‘I hear you.’

Fiona smiled. ‘Thanks. You see, it’s a sore spot that I can’t have children.’ She reached into the shopping
and took out a bag of clementines and offered me one. ‘A few years back I had cancer.’

I took a clementine, forgetting how I hated peeling them. ‘Cancer?’

‘No worries now. The doctors say I’m all clear. But I had to have chemotherapy. Do you know what that is?’

I tossed the clementine from one hand to the other like it was a ball. ‘Uh-uh.’

‘It’s when they give you these drugs and your hair falls out and you feel sick. Sometimes afterwards it means you can’t have children.’

I stared at the dimples on the orange skin. ‘Ick,’ I managed.

‘A small price to pay to be alive but it wasn’t what Ray or I wanted. So don’t call me that name again, Holly. Please.’

‘OK,’ I said.

Fiona nodded and started unpacking the rest of the shopping. I watched her. Then I put the clementine down and picked a bag up and took out the tins of tomatoes. I put them in the cupboard where I thought they went.

‘That time …’ Fiona went on, opening the freezer door. She stuffed in some frozen fish. ‘The longest eighteen weeks of my life. I wore this wig to cover up the hair-loss.’

‘A wig?’

‘Yes, ash-blonde. I hated it. It made my cheeks look red, but not healthy red, more blotchy. I tried scarves but then you might as well tattoo
CANCER VICTIM
on your forehead. The whole thing was like a nightmare happening to someone else, Holly. Know the feeling?’

‘Telling me,’ I said.

‘At the time I put on a brave face. Then, after it was over, I was a mess. Now, when I look back, I get the creeps. I thought my hair would never grow back, but it did. Only differently.’ She picked up a strand of her wavy hair, smiling at me from across the kitchen. ‘It was straight before. Now look at it. What was the worst time in your life?’