Landed (16 page)

Owen ushers the children out.

‘Nice to see someone get off here,' the man says.

 

They walk through suburban streets, which after a while begin to widen, houses set back from the verge. A road sign says 40,
and the traffic that passes them speeds up. They walk past a mansion with a huge empty car park around it; its roof is charred and the windows have been replaced by metal sheets.

A boarded-up filling station, a warehouse behind locked gates.

They are not yet clear of the city. They could be stopped at any moment.

T
he road climbs gradually, towards fields, trees. At the top of the rise they look around: the city spreads itself out as far as the eye can see, south, north, east, west. They are still surrounded. To the south-east is the centre, towers rise like the stalks of flowers about to bloom. Smoke rises from somewhere north-west. West Bromwich. Wolverhampton.

Holly looks nothing like her mother. She walks, intoning a tuneless song to herself. Her features – pert pinched little nose, cupped jaw, thin-lipped mouth, eyes like blue buttons – are petite. Mel has wide cheekbones, full lips, almond eyes. Yet Holly does resemble the girl in the school photograph of Mel at five years old. The code for her physical destiny buried deep in her genes, instructions to be issued in adolescence, a transformation. As would have happened to Sara.

Will happen to Holly.

 

They stumble along the verge, a grassy bank on the left-hand side of the road.

‘Where are we going?' Josh asks.

‘It's a surprise,' Owen says. ‘An adventure.'

‘What about Nana?'

‘I'm hungry,' Holly complains.

It must be lunchtime, at school. ‘We'll eat soon,' Owen assures her, holding her right hand. Few cars pass. He puts out
his hook as he walks, turning when he hears an engine, in time to catch a glimpse of a driver's glance at this suspicious trio. Immigrants, tinkers, New Age travellers, the man holding out not a thumb but a claw. Who would stop for them? The breeze that precedes rain unsettles the air. The earth trembles like skin, trees shiver. Josh hugs his jacket self-protectively. ‘I'm cold,' says Holly. Owen keeps walking, towing her forward.

 

A white car slows down. It is a low vehicle and the verge is high above the road, so that they cannot see the driver and it's as if the car itself is inquisitive, sidling along beside them.

The passenger window slides calmly down. Owen, Josh and Holly stand still as if on command, and the car, though barely moving forward now, stops with a visible lurch. Owen bends down. The driver, a woman, the vehicle's only occupant, turns towards him. ‘Get in,' she says.

‘Thank you,' he says.

The car is warm. It smells of mints, and plastic, and a faintly cloying perfume.

Such is the relief to be cruising along an open road, it's a minute or two before Owen remembers to introduce himself and the children. The woman says, ‘I'm Claire.'

Owen tries not to look at her. Conversation gives him the opportunity to. ‘No school?' she asks.

‘Doesn't hurt to take them out once in a while, like.'

She has short, dark hair, sallowish skin. She is almost good-looking, Owen thinks. Each of her features is a little exaggerated, she's not plain.

‘You shouldn't pick up hitchers,' the woman says. ‘But I used to hitch myself. Spain. Greece.'

‘Good of you,' Owen says. ‘Appreciate it.'

‘Heading south?' she asks, glancing in the rear-view mirror.

‘Taking them to see their grandmother,' Owen says.

‘I'm going to Devon,' Claire tells him.

Owen studies her surreptitiously. No earrings, but you can see where her earlobe, and her left nostril, have been pierced. A scar above her eyebrow. No make-up, only the thick perfume. Brown eyes. Her nose naturally imperfect, or perhaps once broken. It's hard to tell how tall a seated person is, but her legs look long. She wears a black T-shirt, skirt, tights, black pumps. She stares at the road ahead, glancing in the mirror whenever she says something. ‘I'll be looking to stop for something to eat soon.'

She is forced to slow down for a tractor trundling like a toy along the road; overtakes it when the way is clear.

‘We'll be hungry,' Owen says.

 

The road runs straight, curves around a scarp or chasm, runs straight again. Past an almost empty field: one horse, poised, patient as an athlete. A convoy of motorbikes comes the other way: old chromey beasts, ridden by portly men.

‘Harley-D's,' says Josh with authority. They pass, one after another, each with a throaty burp. After they've gone it seems almost silent, the white car's engine rendered quieter than before. Rain is falling in the fields.

 

The motorway is chock-full with traffic, stuttering south. In two lanes container lorries, one behind another, like the carriages of an endless train, dwarfing the occasional car sandwiched between them. Josh opens the window. The terrible urgent roar of tyres on tarmac. He closes it again.

Josh invites his sister to spot a particular shape or make of car – ‘Red Mini: that's five – two to me' – widening criteria to keep well ahead of her.

White caravans towed by saloon cars occupied by white-haired couples sucking Everton Mints and barley sugar. Top-of-the-range vehicles in the outside lanes, stopping and starting with everyone else: motionless across the carriageway, a blockage, then everything shunting on again.

Heavy eyelids, heads droop. The children drift in and out of sleep. The slurred consciousness of travel.

 

‘How about here?' the woman says. SERVICES. She presses the indicator lever attached to the steering wheel, a green light on the dashboard blinks, they pull off the motorway.

The cars in the car park are so similar they might be at a factory: mass production, row upon row, line after line. Perhaps they're brought from the factory to this car park beside the motorway, to be collected and delivered to garages across the country. The white car joins them as the woman steers it into a snug parking space. Only the company symbols on the backs of the cars are different, identified by Josh as they walk towards the service station: Vauxhall, Honda, Citroën . . . The woman locks the car behind her. She presses her thumb hard on the remote key fob, muscle flexing right up her arm, an almost punitive gesture.

At the entrance to the service station Owen and the children pass men and women in different uniforms, selling membership of motoring organisations. They wander through the crowded, bright emporium.

Holly holds her father's hand. ‘Look,' she says, dragging Owen towards a poster of the menu in one of the cafeterias, a photograph of each dish on offer. Holly touches the poster on a picture of sausage and bacon, eggs, waffles and baked beans, shinily succulent. ‘Dinner,' she says.

The food when it arrives is less glossy than depicted. Owen
expects the children to be disappointed, but they tuck in with enthusiasm. Everything is extraordinarily expensive, as if this place were located at the end of some coastal peninsula and not on a major artery of the road network. He calculates that he cannot afford to buy food for himself if he's not to run out of money on the journey, but sips an expensive cup of tea while Claire and the childen eat.

 

Claire goes to the toilets, saying she'll be back in a minute. ‘She said south,' Josh tells his father. ‘Nana lives east. I know that.'

‘Don't worry about Nana,' Owen tells him.

‘Why not?'

‘I'll explain later. I promise.'

Josh's eyes narrow. He nods at something behind Owen. ‘There's games,' he says. ‘Holly and me could go on them.'

‘We can't afford to play games,' Owen says. ‘Sorry, Josh.'

Josh gazes around. Unlike an adult, who would glance here and there, he stares at one particular person, then another, mesmerised. At length, looking at a counter with half a dozen computers, he says, ‘We'll go on the Internet over there. It says there's free sites. Come on.' Holly gets up and follows.

 

The S-shaped central avenue of the service station gives on to various franchised cafes, retail outlets, toilets. Owen can see the entrance, as well as the children. He glances at them every few moments; sometimes one or other of them is checking on him.

Pale orange, green and grey plastic chairs and tables, many empty, some occupied by casually dressed pensioners. They look as if they'd been slobbing around at home and were called here unexpectedly. They wear floppy cardigans, sloppy tracksuit trousers. They sit in couples, saying little, their fallen
faces suggesting a disappointment to which they are almost resigned.

There are no other children here on this weekday. Owen knows his own must look suspicious. Will someone alert social services, the police? They rejoin him now, Josh letting out a dolorous sigh. ‘They're rubbish,' he says. ‘Only free sites are ones for you to buy stuff.'

‘Yeh,' Holly concurs.

‘Come on,' Josh says, and she follows him once more.

‘Where are you going?' Owen asks.

‘Look around,' Josh says, over his shoulder.

‘Keep in sight.'

‘Course.'

‘Just a look,' Holly explains. ‘That's all.'

 

Owen watches the children move towards a room of fruit machines. He is alert, tense, seeing everything. He sees Josh move stealthily from one machine to the next, slipping his fingers into the coin trays. Holly kneels, her head on the floor, peering underneath the machines. Each evidently comes up with pickings, for they become animated: put money into a machine which blinks and flashes back at them in multicoloured gratitude.

The coffee machine hisses and snorts like a horse. Ambient pop music plays, just loud enough to swim in and out of Owen's awareness. He finds himself humming a familiar tune inside his head without noticing it had got in there. The smell of cooked eggs.

Businessmen in suits and ties pay for their food and carry their trays to a carousel, where they help themselves to cutlery, serviettes, small sachets of ketchup, mayonnaise, pepper and salt. They sit in pairs, converse excitedly, then hunch towards each other, furtive, wary of being overheard here, this anonymous
meeting place. One will open a laptop, the other move around the table to join him, and stare at the screen together. One of them catches Owen's eye. Owen wonders if the man is comparing his face with a photo on the screen.

 

In their early days together Mel called Owen her beachcomber of the city. He couldn't pass a builder's skip without leaning in to poke about, pull out some piece of broken furniture or child's toy, weigh it in his hand. She understood he was mentally stripping it down, taking it apart, assessing the potential reordering of its component parts. ‘I've got a use for this,' he'd say, as if he'd been searching the past half-year for precisely such an object. It endeared him to her, this talent for envisioning utility for something cast aside. Benches made from floorboards, pallets for bed frames; plant pots were parts of chimneys, pipes. Most of their furniture inside the flat came free. Once he took a bicycle apart, borrowed some bloke's welding gear, laboured in the backyard. Mel came home and he led her through to the kitchen with her eyes closed, put his hand on her head and tilted it towards the floor so that when she opened her eyes and Owen said, ‘See what I made,' it took her a moment scanning the room before she raised her gaze and saw gifts hanging: from hooks on bicycle wheels hung pots and pans; in the lounge the frame had become a candelabra, with eight candles burning.

Their dinner service was a medley amassed from charity shops. Owen trawled them in rotation, alone then with Sara, then Josh, when they were babies, toddlers, on Saturdays. The children's clothes were cast-offs, their toys second-hand. He took them blackberry picking along the railway line, apple scrumping in the nature reserve, crayfishing in the river by the bridge.

Mel found it charming. Except that Owen had little discernment, a subtle failing that became evident with time, as the house filled up. ‘It 's like living in a car boot sale,' she told him, smiling at first.

He was nonplussed.

‘I'm ashamed to bring people back here,' she said in time. ‘It's a family home, not a junk shop.'

She was changing her mind, Owen understood now, about the man she'd fallen for, even before the accident. He wondered if he could have known this would happen, what he should have done.

‘Sorry to take so long.'

Owen turns. Claire is standing beside him. ‘I had to make some calls.' She holds two fresh mugs of coffee. ‘Need one for the road. Keep the driver alert. Then we can go.' Claire sits and texts. Owen drinks coffee from the mug in his left hand, his hook resting on his lap.

 

A young cleaner calmly pushes her trolley from one abandoned table to another. She scrapes leftover food into a bin, stacks dirty plates, pours cutlery into trays which makes a sound like water through shells. She has a canister of pink detergent in a holster on her belt, its trigger attached to a twisted length of hose: she unclips the trigger and sprays each table top, then slowly wipes it with a balled-up wad of kitchen roll.

The cleaner scrapes waste into her bin. Chips, baked beans, vegetables, toast, so much food ordered then left behind. Owen gets to a table before her, calmly carries a plate with a halfeaten fry-up back to his place.

He watches the children move into another room. Successful gamblers, they are using fruit-machine winnings on computer games. Josh is waving a large gun, shooting at a screen. Owen
can read the words, THE HOUSE OF THE DEAD. Holly is driving a virtual car along a racetrack in some Nintendo game.