The Missing Link (10 page)

Despite the food situation we decided to bypass Stirling and steer due North. But as soon as we were out on the road again, Tina discovered that her shoes were falling apart. Danny and I both had good boots, but Tina’s trainers were cheap rubbish and the soles had started to come away from the uppers. It must have happened during the previous night’s monk-walk, when she was too detached to notice, but now it was clearly a serious problem.

We got out the map again and reconsidered.

‘If it’s shoes we want,’ I said, ‘we’ll have to go to town.’

4

THE SUPERMARKETS IN
Stirling were mobbed, and we didn’t go near them. But the shoe shops were practically empty, and Tina chose a pair of leopard-spotted Doc’s. She walked nine miles high in them, and stopped every ten metres or so to look down and check that they were still there. I was sure she had never had anything like them before, maybe nothing new at all, and I felt proud to have been able to provide them for her, even though the money hadn’t exactly been mine.

Afterwards we bribed our way into a fancy hotel, and for an hour or so we inhabited a different world, eating with the finest silver spread endlessly on starched, white linen. But when the wafer-thin mints were gone, and we were back on the road, the stark reality of who we were returned. Just three young tramps, with a long, long road stretching out ahead of us.

5

WITHIN A MILE,
Tina’s new boots had raised big, watery blisters on her heels. It looked as though our run of good luck had ended, but it hadn’t. We were sitting beside the road, examining Tina’s feet and wondering what to do next when a flashy four-by-four pulled in beside us. A woman was driving, and she opened the window and stared at Tina’s feet.

‘Are you in trouble?’ she said.

She turned off the engine and got out to examine the blisters.

‘I might be able to help you, there,’ she said, opening the rear door of the jeep. The back was stacked high with medical supplies.

‘Hazel Walker. Flying doctor,’ she went on, with a grin. ‘Where are you headed?’

I turned to Danny, realising with a chill that the best indication we had ever got was his wobbly finger, somewhere around Inverness. I wondered if he even knew. If he had heard the doctor’s question, he gave no indication of it. He was gazing at the surroundings, a beatific smile on his face, in some world of his own.

‘What is the address, exactly?’ I asked him.

He turned, looking puzzled.

‘Mother’s address?’ I said, trying to sound casual, trying not to sound like a runaway. ‘I’ve forgotten.’

Danny thought for a minute, then reached into the back pocket of his jeans. He pulled out a very crumpled piece of paper and handed it to me. On it was printed, in capital letters, MAGGIE TYLER, BETTYHILL, HIGHLAND.

‘Bettyhill,’ I said to the doctor.

‘Bettyhill!’ she squawked, her jaw dropping to her lap.

I tried to act nonchalant, but my heart was doing somersaults.

‘You have some travel ahead of you, then,’ she said. ‘I’ll take you as far as I’m going, but it won’t knock much off a journey like that!’

A few minutes later, Tina was patched up and back in her precious boots, and we were all settling into the plush upholstery of the four-by-four. Hazel told us that she had just been into Stirling to collect supplies. She showed me a docket on the dash which exempted her from petrol rationing.

‘I do a lot of home calls,’ she said. ‘And the odd bit of mountain rescue. Essential services.’

She was enchanted with Darling, and stroked her on the head with two fingers.

‘Isn’t he gorgeous?’ she said. ‘I had a pet jackdaw, once. He used to sit at the window and talk to me. Made all sorts of wonderful noises.’

‘Darling makes great noises, too,’ I said. ‘Do a chicken, Darling. Buck buck. Buck buck.’

But Darling just stared at me with a bland, uncomprehending eye, and I zipped her quickly back into my jacket.

Mother had taught her well.

6

HAZEL DROPPED US
in Dalwhinnie, where she had a call to make. From the windows of the jeep we got our first sight of the Cairngorms, looming above us to our right, their snowy peaks stretching up into the low clouds.

‘Stick to the A9 all the way to Inverness,’ she said. But she didn’t let us go without adding a few things to our supplies. She gave us a huge tin of shortbread biscuits that a grateful patient had given her. In a resealable plastic bag she packed a first-aid kit, with dressings for Tina’s blisters, a tube of antiseptic, some butterfly plasters, and a bandage. And as an afterthought, she dug out a foil space-blanket, and told us to use it if anyone got dangerously cold.

‘Just in case,’ she said. But none of us imagined how soon we would come to need it.

The afternoon was bright and clear, and we felt rested after the ride in the jeep. The hedgerows were full of redwings feeding on haws and holly, and Darling flitted among them, noisy and belligerent.

A few cars passed us, and a tractor, and once, to our surprise, a bus. We flagged at it
desperately
, but it was stuffed to the gills, and the driver just shrugged, helplessly. As the afternoon wore on towards evening, dark clouds appeared in the Northwest and gradually spread over the sky, evicting the sun. Soon after that, Darling returned from a scouting trip with snowflakes on her wings and, a moment later, the blizzard was upon us.

Tina squealed with excitement and my head filled up with the promise of snowball fights and sleigh-bells, but our glee didn’t last for long. Darling demanded to be let into my pocket. The cold snow stung our eyes and made Danny gasp, which was dangerous.

‘Take it easy, Danny,’ I said. ‘Try not to huff and puff, OK?’

He did his best. I suppose I thought the shower might just pass over, but before long we were isolated from our surroundings by a gliding grey dome of swirling flakes. In no time at all the road had gathered a coating of slippery white fluff, and it looked as though we were in for the long haul.

‘Maybe we should go back?’ I said.

Danny shook his head, determinedly.

I turned to Tina for support, but she just shrugged, infuriatingly.

‘Don’t you care? What if we get trapped in a blizzard and freeze to death?’ I said.

She shook her head.

‘Oh, come on!’ I said. ‘Danny doesn’t know the difference. He thinks all this is a game.’

Danny laughed delightedly and began to try and gather the thin snow for a snowball.

‘You see?’ I said. But Tina just shrugged again. I could have throttled her.

‘Right, so,’ I said. ‘We’ll freeze to death. See if I care.’

I marched forward through the blizzard, not caring whether Danny could keep up or not. But after a while I couldn’t see them when I looked back, so I slowed up and waited.

A car passed us, its driver leaning forward and peering out behind the rapid action of her windscreen wipers. Within five minutes, the same car came back again, and this time the driver shook her head at us and gave us the thumbs down.

But still we pushed on, past the tyre-marks where the car had turned, and on beyond them, into the storm. Before long we were leaving deep imprints and the trees and hedges beside the road were gathering tiny drifts on their leaves and branches. It was beautiful, I suppose, but it was a sinister, dangerous beauty, and I could not enjoy it. We passed the gateway to a house, and a whiff of smoke reached us with its promise of warmth and safety. I remember a fleeting thought: this is our last chance. But we didn’t stop. We bent our heads against the blinding snow, and fell into a steady, plodding rhythm, and around us the last of the daylight began to fade.

It was almost dark when we came upon the abandoned car. It was covered in snow; blank
and
round as an igloo, but it was the best we were likely to find. We scraped the doors clear and Tina worked her coat hanger magic, then we all clambered in and hunched up together in the back.

It was cold, but the wind couldn’t get at us and it was better than being outside. The inside light was working, and Danny started a game of
I Spy
, which, since he couldn’t read or spell, was hilarious. Soon the whole car was shaking with our laughter. It entertained us for ages, and when we finally got bored of it we were all tired enough to curl up and go to sleep.

It was a miserable night. Cramped and cold, we dozed in fits and starts, but nobody really slept. In the early hours I woke so cold that I unpacked the foil blanket and spread it out over the three of us.

My flounderings in the cramped space disturbed Darling from her roost on the headrest, and she made a raucous, scolding sound. I tried to sleep again, but I was still cold.

‘Darling?’ I said.

‘What?’

‘Who is Father?’

She didn’t answer.

‘And who is Sprog?’ I went on.

‘Don’t call her Sprog. She doesn’t like it.’

‘You did.’

Darling chuckled in the darkness. ‘Not supposed to.’

‘But who is she? And who is the other one? Colin?’

‘Not like us,’ said Darling. ‘Not like you. Danny’s brother and sister.’

‘What?’ I said.

Abruptly, Tina thrust her elbow into my ribs.

‘Ow!’

‘Will you shut up, the pair of you,’ she snapped. ‘Some of us are trying to sleep!’

The space-blanket seemed too light to make any difference, but I noticed that I was already warmer. And the next thing I knew, daylight was leaking around the edges of the drifts which had banked up against the car.

7

THE AIR WAS
fuggy and stale in the car, and I had a headache, but Danny was calm and clearheaded.

‘How far have we got to go?’ he asked.

I rolled down a window and a little drift of snow fell in on top of us. We got out the map and eventually found Bettyhill, right up on the Northern coast.

‘Oh, God,’ I said. ‘It’s a million miles away. We’ll never get there.’

‘We will,’ said Danny. ‘I know we will.’

‘Why are we doing this?’ I asked. ‘Does anybody know?’

‘We’re going to find Mother,’ said Danny.

‘I know that,’ I snapped. ‘But why? Why can’t we just go home and get on with our lives?’

‘Because we’re going to find Mother,’ said Danny.

I wasn’t getting anywhere, and with a hollow feeling inside, I gave up again.

We ate biscuits and peanuts, then wrestled our way out of the drifted-up car. The blizzard had died down, and the fallen snow was clean and smooth, exciting in its untouched vastness. We snowballed our way along the empty A9,
until
Tina knocked Darling out of the sky with a direct hit and gave us all a fright. She was all right, but after that, we conserved our energy for walking.

I fell in beside the others.

‘Have you got a sister?’ I asked Danny. ‘And a brother?’

Danny laughed, and put a heavy, bear-like arm around Tina and me. ‘Brother and sister,’ he said.

The going wasn’t too heavy, and our progress was good, so good that I allowed my hopes to rise. We might even make Aviemore by nightfall, and if not, we were sure to find somewhere to sleep. To our left, the huge cliffs of the Monadhliath mountains loomed over us, but there were houses and farms at the feet of the Cairngorms on the other side, and it seemed a safe enough kind of area. But things didn’t work out as I had hoped. Soon after we had stopped for lunch a new storm closed in, leaving us as blind as before and, if anything, colder.

I don’t know how or when we left the A9. All I know is that at some stage during the late afternoon it suddenly became clear that the road we were following wasn’t it. The A9 was a main trunk road and had a certain dignity about it, but this road didn’t seem to know what it was up to. It jinked and turned in all sorts of directions; sometimes broad, sometimes narrow. The only thing it seemed to be consistent about was its incline. We hadn’t intended it, but we were
climbing
steadily into the mountains, and night was approaching fast.

‘There has to be houses,’ said Tina, expressing the fear that we had all begun to feel. ‘They don’t build roads into nowhere.’

But it felt like nowhere, and I was fast losing confidence in
They
. We couldn’t see much in the daylight. When darkness closed in, we could see nothing. We could have passed within feet of a barn or a cottage without knowing it was there. The blizzard showed no sign of relenting; if anything the snow was falling more heavily than ever. Although I couldn’t see them, I was acutely aware of the presence of those craggy peaks, standing over us like malevolent gods, indifferent to our puny sufferings. A guy who had climbed Everest had come to talk to our school, once. Our teacher introduced him by saying that he had conquered the highest mountain on earth, but he had shaken his head. He said that nobody conquers mountains; the luckiest climbers survived them, that was all. He told us how quickly a person can die in the snow, and now I wished that he hadn’t.

Since we could no longer see, we progressed by feeling our way, zig-zagging between roadside walls and hedges. We struggled on, until even the road seemed to have disappeared, and I was sure that I could feel grass and stones beneath the snow instead of tarmac. Danny was finding the going difficult, and I could hear danger signs in his breathing; a little whimper of anxiety now and then, or a fearful gasp.

‘Don’t be worrying, Danny,’ I said. ‘We’ll find somewhere soon.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Somewhere soon.’ I was touched by his confidence in me. I wished I could persuade myself so easily.

I prayed for a house, a shed, a cave; anything, but if there was anybody there, he wasn’t answering. In the end we settled for the best we could get; a sheer wall of rock which loomed out of nowhere and stretched into the nothingness above our heads.

It wasn’t snow-proof, but it was wind-proof. I let Darling out of my pocket while Tina and I cleared a space in the drifts big enough for us all to camp down. For all her sarcasm and attitude problems, Tina was brilliant in a crisis. We worked together as if we were telepathic, and no one had to be the boss and tell anyone else what to do. I realised that I liked her, despite her annoying manner, and I wondered how long it was since I hadn’t. I couldn’t remember changing my mind. I wished she would like me.