The Missing Link (7 page)

‘Where are you headed?’ she asked. We told her, and she squeaked with excitement, as though she could think of nothing more wonderful than a mid-winter trek into the unknown. When our meals arrived, she put loud music on the big juke box, but it only made the place seem even emptier and sadder than it was.

Tina and I finished long before Danny. We were dividing the shopping between our bags when we heard a truck pull in outside.

It was a bit like one of those psycho movies where the impossible suddenly starts to happen. Everything went still. Danny froze with his fork halfway to his mouth. Tina and I turned in our chairs. The chef and the waitress appeared in the doorway to the kitchen and stared. Then there were footsteps on the gravel, and a short, fat, bald man swung in through the door.

It was a bit of a disappointment, to be honest. The Lone Trucker ought to have been lean and swarthy; a worthy hero. I forgot about him and turned back to my packing, but Danny was still watching like a hawk.

‘Mitch!’ said the waitress. ‘You must be the last driver on the road!’

‘Ah, it’s not that bad,’ said Mitch. ‘There are still a few things moving.’

‘Where are you headed?’ said the girl.

‘Home,’ said Mitch. ‘I’m going to unhitch the trailer here if it’s all the same to you. The cab should get me to Preston without it.’

Tina had put down her teacup and started rummaging for something in her bag. She sat back up again with the map in her hand, and nonchalantly spread it out on the table in front of us. We all leant over it. Behind us, Mitch ordered the
Eighteen Wheel Deal
. I could feel his eyes on our backs as we pored over the map. I was amazed by how long Scotland was and how far away from Wales. Somehow I’d had an idea that they shared a border, and that we just had to nip across and we’d be there. I wished I had listened in school.

‘What bit of Scotland are we going to?’ I asked Danny. ‘Do you know?’

Danny grinned and pointed. I followed his finger up, and up, and up. It slowed and wavered somewhere around Inverness, as though it wasn’t sure where to go next.

‘But that’s . . .’ I became aware of Mitch again and dropped my voice to a whisper. ‘That’s a million miles! We’ll never get that far!’

‘We will,’ said Danny.

Tina might as well have been deaf. She had located Preston on the map and was pointing at it. I focused in. It was right, bang on our route.

If
we were going to Scotland.

Tina slipped away from us and over to Mitch.

‘Will you bring us to Preston?’

‘Get lost,’ said Mitch.

‘Please, Mister,’ said Tina. ‘We’ll do anything.’

‘We’ll pay,’ I said, carefully.

‘Will you?’ said Mitch. ‘What’ll you pay?’

‘How much do you want?’ said Tina.

The waitress arrived with a pot of tea and put it on Mitch’s table.

‘Go on, take them,’ she said. ‘They’re from Ireland.’

‘I can hear that,’ said Mitch. ‘What do they want to go to Preston for?’

‘We don’t,’ said Tina. ‘We want to go to Scotland.’

‘Scotland!’ said Mitch. ‘You must be stark, raving bonkers.’

‘Bring us, Mister,’ said Tina, and then she put on a gruesome little girl face and said, ‘Please?’

Mitch sighed hugely. ‘Where’s my flaming dinner?’ he said.

4

HE WAS A
really good sort, that Mitch. I wished the world was full of him. He didn’t bat an eyelid when he discovered that we had a dog, and with a bear’s strength, he manhandled Danny up over the huge wheel-arch and into the cab.

‘What happened to you?’ he asked him, as he started the great engine and swung out on to the road.

‘I had an accident,’ said Danny, grinning broadly.

‘What kind of an accident?’ said Mitch.

‘I don’t remember,’ said Danny.

‘He was born like that,’ I said.

Mitch nodded and turned his attention to his driving. The roads were practically empty and the cab, free of the weight it was designed to pull, hurtled along. Tina stared out at the passing scenery and Oggy slept at her feet.

‘Do you think the petrol will come back soon?’ I asked Mitch.

‘It might and it mightn’t,’ he said.

The big engine wheezed and coughed as we eased up for a bend, then roared off hungrily along the straight.

‘Are you worried about it?’ I asked.

Mitch shrugged. ‘Me, I take what comes. Even three kids and a dog.’

A Land Rover passed in the opposite direction and, a few minutes later, an old banger. Then it started to rain and, mesmerised by the windscreen wipers, I dropped off to sleep.

I dreamt about a vast, empty factory with puddles of rusty water dripping from dead machines. The puddles were joining up and becoming pools, and then the water level was rising and I climbed up the walls into the giant steel girders of the roof, where a thousand black birds were squawking and flapping. Beneath me, Mom and Maurice were floundering in the flood.

5

WE WOULD NEVER
have got on to a train without Mitch. I think he must have known that, because he refused to drop us outside the station and leave us there. Instead he parked the truck and came in with us. The place was like a refugee camp, with people sitting and lying all over the floor. Restless travellers milled around above them, their faces angry or anxious, or simply bewildered.

For Danny the crowds were dangerous. For Tina and me they were suffocating, but Darling was safe among the pigeons in the high roof, and Oggy was in his element, introducing himself to anyone on the floor with licks and kisses, and relieving them of any bits of food that were not safely hidden. I was afraid that he’d make himself sick again, but Tina was terrified of losing him and wouldn’t relax until Mitch gave up his belt as a lead. Oggy was deeply offended but Tina would not relent. As for Mitch, he was left with only one arm to battle with, since the other was needed for holding up his trousers.

But the inconvenience didn’t stop him. He seemed to delight in the challenge and, leaving us to fight our own corner, he ploughed a furrow
through
the congested lobby and disappeared. The rest of us found a few square inches of floor and staked it with Tina’s blanket. We shared a packet of lemon cream biscuits, and Danny started singing his stupid football song again, but this time I didn’t try to stop him. The whole place was bedlam anyway, and if it kept Danny quiet and happy, I could tolerate the odd looks we got.

In the end, Mitch was gone for more than forty minutes. I had begun to wonder if he had given up and gone home when he returned again, beaming with pleasure. He had four tickets; a full fare for Danny and half fares for me, Oggy and Tina.

‘I spun them a yarn,’ he said, proudly. ‘I told them Danny needed to get to Inverness for urgent medical treatment.’

We all whooped with delight, but the rest of the news wasn’t so good.

‘Only as far as Glasgow, I’m afraid. They say they can’t guarantee trains beyond that. You’ll have to see what the story is when you get there.’

That dampened my spirits a bit, but not Danny’s. He gave Mitch a clumsy great bear hug, and Oggy got all gooey and jealous and tried to join in. Mitch was like a beetroot on legs by the time he disentangled himself, but the colour soon faded. His face was grave and his tone was apologetic as he told us he had to go home.

‘You couldn’t have done more for us,’ I found myself saying. ‘We’ll never forget you.’

Mitch nodded, and I thought his eyes got watery. But he turned away quickly and began to push his way through the crowds, and then he was gone. Out of our lives for ever.

PART FOUR

1

BY SLOW DEGREES
we made our way to the Glasgow platform, and waited.

And waited.

When the train finally arrived, an hour and a half late, we discovered that getting a ticket was only half the battle. Now we had to get on. Every carriage was packed to capacity, and the waiting passengers fought so hard to get on that no one was able to get off. The result was dangerous. Uniformed guards shouted instructions and struggled for order, but the crowds were so dense and so desperate that they were overwhelmed.

Above our heads, Darling fluttered anxiously, waiting to dart in with us if we looked like getting aboard. But we found ourselves squashed so tightly that we couldn’t breathe, and I could see that Danny wasn’t going to survive for long in those conditions. By mutual agreement we threw in the towel and squeezed our way back out of the crush. We were rewarded with an empty bench which, although we wouldn’t have guessed it, was to become our home for the next few hours.

We weren’t the only ones who failed to get
aboard
. When the train finally groaned its way out of the station, the exhausted guards found themselves the brunt of everyone’s frustration, and I couldn’t blame them for coming up with some snide responses. One of them dropped on to the end of our bench and wiped his brow with a striped handkerchief.

‘None of this was in my contract,’ he said, disregarding the No Smoking sign above the bench and reaching for a cigarette. He offered the packet to us, and Tina took one. While he lit up, Oggy began to sniff at his jacket pockets.

‘Would you look at that?’ said the guard. ‘Got a sweet tooth, have you, boy?’

He produced a bar of chocolate and broke a piece off for Oggy, who took it with uncharacteristic politeness and swallowed it whole. Then he gazed up at his new friend with eyes full of gratitude and admiration.

The guard rubbed his head and scratched him behind the ears.

‘I swear they’re the most intelligent animals,’ he said. ‘We have an Alsatian at home and she understands every word I say. Every word. I bet this lad would talk to you if he knew how.’

Oggy gave me a look and I tried not to laugh.

‘He would,’ said Tina, dragging in cigarette smoke like a surfacing diver. ‘But he’s going mental, missing our mother.’

Oh, they were a good team, those two. The affinity that existed between them was no
coincidence
. They already had the guard eating out their hands.

‘You stick by me when the next train comes in,’ he said. ‘I’ll get you on to it.’

2

BUT THE NEXT
train didn’t come in, nor did the one after that, and the waiting crowds thickened. From time to time a woman made an announcement over the tannoy, but her accent was so broad and the equipment so crackly that we gave up trying to understand what she said.

The day dragged on and we broke into our provisions again. Tina and I had a row over what we should eat first, and Oggy stole a packet of biscuits and scoffed them all under the bench before we noticed they were missing. I roared at him, Tina went into a huff, and up in the rafters the pigeons began ganging up on Darling. I began to wonder if there wasn’t something catching in the air, like viral aggression or chronic infectious frustration. Luckily, Danny discovered his own way of dealing with the tension. He played trains up and down the platform, pretending to be an engine, chuffing and hooting, stopping beside other groups of passengers and inviting them aboard. It was embarrassing to say the least, but it was better than the trouble that would have ensued if I had tried to stop him.

At least our friendly guard seemed to be
immune
to the crazy atmosphere. He came back to tell us he hadn’t forgotten us, and then went off again, promising to come back as soon as he had news of a train. After that, Danny got tired of being an engine, and he and Oggy went to sleep. Tina was still not talking to me, and I dropped into a well of loneliness.

Compared to all this, home seemed like heaven. Even Maurice didn’t seem so bad, from this perspective. My loneliness brought me to a place within myself that I had never been willing to go to before, and for the first time, I realised that he had tried to be a good father to me. He had done things that my real father, estranged from my mother for most of my life, had never done. He offered to take me to hurling matches. I refused. He took an interest in the computer games I played, and offered to have competitions with me. I ignored him. He brought home the latest videos, which I declined to watch, even though I was dying to see them.

Why?

I knew why, now that I allowed myself to think about it. He had taken some of my mother’s attention; that attention that had been mine and mine alone for as long as I could remember. And like a spoilt brat, I had been unwilling to share it. It wasn’t Maurice’s fault that I hated him. It was mine.

And he was right to be worried about Danny. He was devoted to him; had been for all of his troubled life. A lot of people would have been glad to get rid of him; sent him to an institution
or
home to his mother. But Maurice took it all on, and did his stolid, patient best.

He would be going out of his mind with worry. So would Mom.

I huddled up against Danny on the bench and tried to sleep; to put it all out of my mind. But it wasn’t going to happen. I had to let them know that we were OK.

I didn’t know what I was going to say when I bought a phonecard from a vending machine and joined the queue for the booths. When I eventually got to the phone, the earpiece was warm and greasy from day-long occupation. It made me feel queasy, but I forgot about it the minute Maurice picked up. I still didn’t know what I wanted to say.

‘Christie? Where are you?’

‘We’re OK, Maurice. We’re safe.’

‘You’re not. You’re not safe. We want you here with us.’

It was as though his hand was reaching down the line and clutching at my heart. It was what I had been afraid of.

‘Are you OK, Maurice?’ I said. ‘Is Mom OK?’

He continued as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘Listen to me, Christie. Don’t hang up.’

‘I won’t,’ I said.

‘I’m going to put your mother on. Wait, will you?’

I waited, watching the numbers on the display window of the phone. £4.60. £4.40.

‘Christie?’

I could barely talk past the lump in my throat. £4.20, read the display. £4.00.

‘Hi, Mom.’

I knew now what I wanted to say. I wanted to go home. I wanted them to be here, now, with the warm car, waiting to take us all back to the safe, warm sitting room. I wanted to pig out and watch TV.