Eggshell Days (29 page)

Cathal interrupted. “No. You're wrong. It hasn't ever occurred to me, I swear. Really. It was just as much a bolt from the blue for me as it was for you. I saw her picture and I saw me lookin' back. That was it.”

“Is that all you have to go on?”

“No.” He looked ashamed.

“Then what?”

“I've got dates. I've checked.”

Emmy made a noise somewhere between contempt and assent.

“I can't ignore it. It wouldn't be right.” He was facing her now.

“Right for who?” she shouted as loudly as she dared. It was too loud as it happened, because downstairs, doing nothing very much, Niall stopped in his tracks and looked at the ceiling. Was that Cathal's voice?

“I'm thinking about no one else, I assure you.”

“Liar!”

“Okay, we'll leave it there before someone hears. But I'm not going back until we talk about this properly, like civil adults, until we have some kind of view of the future.”

“We?”

“
I
, then.”

“You keep saying you want this and you want that, but you never actually come out with it, do you? What
do
you want?” It was a terrible risk. He might say he wanted Maya.

“I want it all to be out in the open.”

“Don't be so…” Emmy grabbed her cigarettes and pulled open the door.

Cathal was on her heels. “Come for a drive. We need to talk.”

“No.
You
need to talk, so get a fucking therapist. I'm fine if we never speak again.”

As they went down the stairs, Niall came up. He stood to one side, looking at them rush by, not knowing what he was seeing.

16

Mog looked at Jonathan's tidy jeans sticking out from under the bus and, as the baby in her womb shifted, she wondered if it was true what people said about parental adrenaline being so strong it could lift juggernauts off trapped children.

Jonathan slid out and stood up. He'd never been under anything bigger than a car, but he could tell a broken sump pump when he saw one.

Black grease had smeared itself all over his bottom and up the arms of his all-weather fleece. It was in the back of his hair, under his nails, down the side of his cheeks. Mog forgave herself for thinking he'd daubed himself on purpose under there, like he was in the mechanics division of the Territorial Army or something. She recognized his overwhelmingly middle-class neatness, but what she didn't know was just how neat he used to be.

“There's not just a crack, there's a hole in the aluminium big enough to fit your finger through,” he said.

Dean tugged at a tuft of his beard and Jonathan smoothed his cleanly shaven jaw.

“Well, we need either a brand new bus or a scrapyard, then,” Mog said. “What'll it be?”

“Do you know where one is?” Jonathan asked.

“Yeah, it's about half an hour from here.”

“I don't mind taking you there.”

“That's all right, mate. I could take the blat,” Dean said.

“If it had petrol in it you could,” Mog said. “We never got any, did we?”

“The what?” Jonathan asked.

Mog held her hands in a hammock under her pregnant belly. “That thing.” She nodded at a motorbike fixed to the side of the bus. “I don't know why he calls it a blat. Why do you, Dean?”

“It's what everyone called them at the camp.”

“Why?”

“Dunno. A blat is anyfin' you use to get around, like a pushbike or a car or a bike, like. Saves you usin' your big vehicle, although some tossers would take a bus like this downtown just to pick up some fags, wouldn't they, Mog?”

“You used to live in a camp?”

“Yeah, until about six weeks ago.”

“Why did you leave?”

Jonathan had accepted the offer of tea this time. It was the first time Mog and Dean had invited him past the water tanks and the gas bottles and the pipes that led in and out of the holes crudely cut into the pressed steel.

“It was the brew crew,” said Mog. “They started outnumbering us, and it got a bit pointless in the end, being with people that were so pissed all day they had nothing better to do than shoot at empty beer cans.”

“Special Brew. Carlsberg.” Dean nodded knowingly, his dreadlocks flicking with the movement. “A quick way to get shit-faced.”

Jonathan had seen cans of it on the beach.

“I started feeling embarrassed when we went into town together,” Mog said. “We all got painted with the same brush.”

“Do you think I've done the engine in, then?” Dean asked, offering Jonathan a worn green plastic tobacco pouch.

“It depends how far you drove without oil. No, thanks.” Being taken, even for a moment, for someone who might be able to roll their own made him think briefly again of something that often kept him awake at night, about first impressions and other people's perceptions of you. About how wrong you could be.

“I dunno. Ten miles?”

“Let's think about fitting a secondhand sump first, then we'll worry about the engine later.”

Dean hopped up into the driver's cab and started to unclip a carpeted hump. Jonathan remembered how the girls on his school bus used to take turns to sit on it and how the bus driver used to put his hand on their bare legs and no one thought it was odd, and he was back with other people's perceptions again.

“How do you get to the rest of it?”

“By taking the grille off the front.”

Dean climbed across a couple of old water drums and turned the engine over, but Jonathan was none the wiser. He shrugged helplessly as Dean put his hand down the neck of his filthy knitted striped sweater to put his tobacco back.

Mog put her face to the slight breeze that was coming in through the door, and the wispy bits of hair around her cheeks that were once a fringe revealed her tiny studded ears. Miniature pieces of blue glass glinted in the sun. For a split second, she looked far too young to be a girlfriend, let alone an expectant mother.

He could smell the food that they had either just eaten or were still in the process of cooking, bringing to his tastebuds a vision of an earthy casserole of curried root vegetables, or chickpea soup. In fact, it was Dean's second Pot Noodle of the day.

Mog saw his eyes wander away from the engine and try to see round the door that cut off the driver's cabin from the rest of the bus.

“Would you like to see inside?”

“No, no, I'm sorry,” he apologized, reddening. “I'm just curious. It looks intriguing.”

“Please, I'd like to show you.” He could see that she meant it. It was her home, and she was proud of it.

“Well, if you're sure I wouldn't be intruding…”

“I'm sure. Come and have a look.”

She took her boots off, leaving them this side of the door, and he did the same.

“Thanks,” she said. “It's just that if mud or sand gets in there, it's impossible to get it out.”

He followed her into the main body of the coach, and even though he'd known that the rows of seats and the metal aisle and the mesh luggage racks and the notices about not smoking or opening the windows would be long gone, it was a surprise to find himself in a small but perfectly formed sitting room.

“Can you flick the lights on, Dean?” Mog called.

He turned them on from the dashboard and a mini-runway of half-shell lamps illuminated a faded red carpeted ceiling, broken up by two huge skylights. The metal trim where the bell would once have been was still there, too.

From the wood-paneled wall to the long, narrow window, it was no more than seven feet wide. There was a rug on the floor, cushions, photos in frames, books on shelves—
The Continuum Concept, The Magus
. He saw a row of orange-spined Penguin Classics and imagined her embryonic schoolgirl signature inside.

“Mog, this is amazing.”

She smiled shyly. “It's not really. There's plenty of horribleness here. It's just all covered up.” She lifted the edge of an embroidered indigo throw and revealed the arm of a tacky gold velour sofa with its back to the cab. “We got that from the trash. They didn't charge us for it because they knew no one else would be stupid enough to take it, but it's fine. It's quite comfy, actually. That one's even worse,” she said, pointing to a second sofa beneath the long window. “It's just beat-up old foam mainly. I made the cover from a pair of curtains we bought at a jumble sale.”

Jonathan thought about the number of rooms they had at Bodinnick. He thought of the number of rolls of fabric Emmy kept buying and doing nothing with, and he thought of the number of books they had left behind in London which no one had got around to reading.

Mog slid back a narrow half-light that ran along the top and let in a couple of inches of sunshine, knocking her shin on a fire extinguisher which had been converted into a crude wood burner. Its top had been cut off, and a length of flexible steel pipe from it led up through the roof. It stood on a sheet of metal on two bricks, and a little door had been cut into the wider part of its base. Inside, a wedge of mesh provided the grate.

There was a portable television on a painted shelf, part of an elaborate wall unit which also sported a CD player. Jonathan felt as though he was in a living museum.

“A television? How on earth do you do that?” he asked.

“Batteries. We've got three, one for the engine, one for the music and telly, and one for spare. We try and charge them every morning for about an hour—you know, just leave the engine running—and we store them in the belly boxes, those panels on the side of the bus. Dean's wired up the telly straight into one.”

“Do you have to be careful how much you use?”

“Not really,” Mog said. “Telly and music use bugger-all batteries really. They can last about a fortnight.” Swearing sounded a conscious thing for her. “Come and have a look at the kitchen.”

A floor-to-roof ply screen cut the galley kitchen off from the sitting area. He recognized the Lilliputian appliances from his caravanning holidays as a child and a forgotten, soulless wet week in Dorset came back to him.

A small cooker was being used as a food cupboard. He could see half a loaf of sliced bread and what he guessed was a block of village shop cheese in a white paper bag. There was a box of tea bags, a bag of sugar, a jar of rice and a few others of dried beans and lentils. A spotless grill pan was hanging from a wall. Neatly placed in the work surface was a caravan sink, complete with blue plastic pump and one of those curved caravan taps.

“You just work it, like this.” Mog showed him, putting a cup under the tap to catch the short gush.

“Is it fresh?”

“Of course. Is yours?”

“Good point.”

“It's sophisticated stuff nowadays. Some buses have Agas on them, you know. I'd love an Aga.” She sighed wistfully, disappearing behind another partition.

“Grief, this is like the Tardis.”

“It's actually a Bedford Twin Steer, I think from about 1967.”

“Older than you, then? Good God!” he said. “A shower?”

“Well, this is a bit of a cheat. It was like this when we got it. The people who owned it first about, I don't know, twenty years ago—”

“Before you were born.”

“Yeah, yeah, before I was born,” she said good-naturedly. “They did it up as a camper van for their family, and they used to take it to Europe and live in it for a few weeks, but because they weren't proper travelers they had to have all the trappings, like the cooker and that, and they put this in. It's cool, isn't it?”

He looked at the Heath Robinson workings. A bin of water sat on a substantial shelf at head level. “How does it fill?” he asked.

“Well, that's the downside. You have to fill it yourself, with warm water, so it takes a bit of planning, but it's bliss once you're under it. When we bought it, all the other travelers on the camp used to queue up to use it. That was another reason we left.”

“Couldn't you just say no?”

“That wouldn't be in the spirit of things.”

“You've got to be quick, though, I expect.”

“Very.” Mog laughed. “But it's such a luxury!”

“How come you ended up with such a smart pad?”

“I had some money,” she said, reddening. “And Dean traded in his ambulance.”

“Ambulance?”

“Don't ask. It was a complete hovel.”

He caught a glimpse of the bedroom, a lower chamber at the very back of the bus.

“That's where we sleep. It's really cozy.”

“What more could you want?”

“A loo?”

“Well, I didn't like to mention it.”

“You dig a pit,” she said quickly. “Or you use public ones. I could write a book about where to find the best ones.”

“You should.”

Mog put up her hands as if to say not me.

“Where do you get your water from?” he asked.

She picked up the kettle. “It depends. Mostly, we figure out where the natural springs are. You can find out by looking at an Ordnance Survey map, and we take it from there. You can be almost sure it's going to be a hundred times cleaner than anything from a tap, but here”—she waved the kettle toward the car park—“we get it from the bogs and boil it.”

Jonathan nodded. As they walked back through the bus he thought of her parents, wondered whether they woke every morning feeling sick with worry at the thought of her empty bed, or whether it was possible that they no longer noticed.

Outside, Dean was still thinking about sumps.

“How much, then?” he asked.

“That's academic,” Mog said, emerging and taking her very pregnant body carefully down the steps. “It doesn't matter if it's fifty or five hundred, we still can't afford it.” She put her arms round his wiry frame. “Shall we have another cup of tea?”