Cover
About the Book
Title Page
Dedication
Getting Away
Pebbles
It’s an Ill Wind . . .
A Short Stay in Purgatory
The Star
Hayley Initiates
The Queen of the Ruck
My Weekend with Gandy
Boxes
Flesh and Blood
Oblivion
A Bright Night in November
About the Author
Also by Alan Durant
Copyright
In these twelve stories, enter teenage purgatory at its most honest, and meet a whole host of characters you’ll quickly recognise: a secret admirer, burning up with jealousy and desire; Karen, confronting her anxiety about pregnancy; Alex, contemplating life after school; or maybe Suze, looking forward to her first sexual experience with mixed feelings.
Ranging in mood from high comedy to deep pathos, Alan Durant’s intense short stories capture the sweet delight and bitter misery of hormone-charged youth . . .
Alan Durant is the author of books for a wide age-range, from picture books such as Mouse Party, and Big Bad Bunny to first fiction like My Little Troll stories to the teen thrillers Publish or Die and The Ring of Truth to series such as Creepe Hall, Leggs United and the forthcoming Bad Boyz. He is the author of the older novels A Short Stay in Purgatory, The Good Book, and Blood for Random House.
SHE’D BEEN STANDING on the hard shoulder for nearly half an hour when it started to rain. A hard, cold, heavy rain – the kind of rain, she thought bitterly, that always seemed to fall on Sunday afternoons in autumn, like this. It wasn’t yet five o’clock but the daylight was almost gone and she found herself staring into a haze of headlights as cars approached and sped by her, showering her with dirty water.
At any moment, Dad will pull up and find me here by the roadside – soaked to the skin, pissed-off, beaten – and she almost hoped he would. But some small voice of defiance inside told her not to give in, to hold up her sign a little more boldly and give it another shot.
When the red pick-up pulled up, she thought it was all over. The great adventure. Dad had come on his red charger to rescue her. But when the door opened she saw, not dad’s familiar, weather-beaten face, but the ginger hair and spectacles of a stranger.
‘Going to see the Queen?’ he asked, jauntily.
‘What?’ she said.
‘London,’ he said.
‘London, yes,’ she said.
‘Hop in then,’ he said.
She hesitated. She’d told herself she’d only accept a lift if there was a woman in the car or, preferably a family – never a man on his own. She wasn’t that stupid. But this was a man on his own. So what now? If she let this lift go, who knows when she’d get another? The longer she stood by the roadside, the greater the chance that Dad or the police would come by and pick her up.
‘I won’t eat you,’ said the man, smiling.
She stood motionless, peering into the pick-up’s invitingly dry interior. He looks harmless enough. But then don’t they all?
A great glob of rain landed on her neck and ran down her back under her clothes and in the end it was this bodily discomfort that decided her. She got into the pick-up and closed the door.
‘Seal weather,’ said the man, as the truck cruised along in the slow lane. ‘That’s what my sister Margy calls it. Flippin’ seal weather. Too cold and wet even for the ducks.’
‘Seal weather,’ he repeated and glanced across at the girl, grinning broadly, as if seeking appreciation for the aptness of the phrase.
She duly obliged with a quick, on-off smile, from the mouth only. For her eyes were filled with disquiet. I shouldn’t have got in, I’m a fool. I might end up murdered in a lay-by somewhere.
He seemed too attentive, too friendly. She wouldn’t take off her wet coat as he suggested, but pulled it around her more tightly as if it were a piece of armour. She said ‘no’ to his offer of wine gums. She kept her hand tensed on the door handle and tried to stay as far from him as possible. She responded in monosyllables only.
‘Sorry about the smell,’ he said suddenly and nodded towards a screwed up bundle of paper on the floor by her feet. ‘I had chicken and chips for my Sunday lunch.’ He pursed his lips and shook his head a little. ‘Don’t like chicken much. Not like that. A nice roast sometimes – Margy does a nice roast. But that stuff’s all grease, isn’t it? Slimy. What I like’s a nice piece of cod.’ He looked across at her as if he expected some sort of reply.
So she said: ‘Yeah.’ This is stupid. I’ll ask him to let me out at the next service station. I should never have got in.
All about them, cars went hurtling past in the wet – everywhere people were on the move, on their way home from weekends away. Families . . .
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Give me a nice big piece of cod any day. Or haddock. Or plaice. Or rock. Rock’s nice. Margy doesn’t like rock, though. It’s the one fish she won’t touch, rock.’
He pulled out to overtake a lorry and for a few moments the windscreen was opaque with spray.
‘You had your lunch?’ he asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. ‘You don’t want to go to London on an empty stomach. Big place, London. Biggest city in the world as the crow flies. Not like Stanborough. Do you know what my sister calls Stanborough?’
A polite, pinched smile. Keep him talking. Show some interest. As long as he goes on happily talking you’ll be all right. You’ll get out of this pick-up unharmed.
‘She calls it the biggest place in the world as the dodo flies.’
He laughed. It was more of a boyish snigger than a real laugh.
Like the sound of boys in school, at the back of the class. Boys laughing at things that weren’t really funny, just to draw attention to themselves.
A picture came into her head of Denzil and Paul and Gofa with his stupid cap, the peak turned round the wrong way. And thinking of these familiar, everyday things filled her suddenly with a rush of relief. Relax, girl. Calm down. He was just a grownup Gofa, this man. A small man from a small town. Boring. He wasn’t going to harm her. She’d be OK. Don’t panic. You’re starting a new life, girl. You’re getting away. In an hour or so you’ll be in the big city, away from all these little people. Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square, Oxford Street . . . Life!
‘As the dodo flies,’ he repeated, enjoying this idea hugely. He glanced across at her once more. ‘Dodos are extinct, you see, so they don’t.’
‘Fly,’ he added. ‘She’s got a sense of humour on her, my sister. She really has. I could tell you some stories.’ He shook his head, grinning.
Oh God. He’s not going to keep on telling me boring stories about his boring sister all the way to London, is he?
But he didn’t start a story. Instead, he turned on the radio. There was a hum and a fizz, then the sound of a familiar jingle came from the back of the pick-up.
‘Five o’clock,’ he said. ‘Top forty. I like listening to the charts. Music’s a load of old rubbish mostly, but it’s an institution, isn’t it? Like Sunday tea. Margy can’t stand it. She says pop music’s an insult to five-year-olds. So I only listen to it when I’m on my own. Suppose you listen to it, don’t you?’
‘Sometimes,’ she said, without enthusiasm. She never listened to the charts – except when she couldn’t help hearing her sister’s radio blaring through the wall. It was a part of the Sunday afternoon routine – a routine she hated. It was no accident that she’d chosen a Sunday afternoon on which to run away. When she got to London, Sunday afternoons would be over – for ever. Life would be one long Saturday.
Sundays really drove her crazy. That long, dull, final dead-end straight of the weekend that began with lunch and stretched through the evening to bed. Dad watching the football or a film or a game-show or anything on TV; Mum pottering about the kitchen, washing-up, baking, ironing, before she too was drawn to the television; Brian, her brother, out in the garage tinkering with his motor bike; Diane in her bedroom with the radio on, supposedly doing her homework, but more likely trying out some hideous new shade of nail varnish or eye shadow . . . And in every house in the street it was the same. The whole place was dead or busy with things that amounted to nothing. Sometimes she thought she’d like to run up and down the street, rattling on the windows like Wee Willie Winkie, shouting, ‘Let’s do something! Why are you all so boring? You’re wasting your lives.’ But she never would. And anyway, she’d get no response. They were all corpses round where she lived. Dead-end people living dead-end lives. That was why she was getting away. Thank God she was getting away.
Her thoughts were interrupted by his singing – nasal, tuneless.
‘I like this one,’ he said, smiling and turned the volume up slightly. When the chorus came he sang along happily, with no inhibitions, as though he were on his own – the way her dad did sometimes when he was in the bathroom, safe behind a locked door. She felt embarrassed for him and wished he’d stop. There was nothing more embarrassing than wrinklies trying to pretend they were with it. Like teachers at school – Miss Young always going on about her favourite bands, what gig she’d been to. As if they could give a monkey’s what she did with her weekends. As if they couldn’t see she was just trying to win them over. Sugar the pill. The only people it took in were dirbrains like Gofa.
‘Sounds brill, Miss Young,’ he’d say – or something equally inane. And she’d say something like, ‘Yeah, it was wicked.’ And all Gofa’s crew would laugh heartily. It made her want to throw up.
All of a sudden she really did feel very sick. Her face went flushed. She needed some air. She wound the window down a little and felt the cold, wet air whoosh in against her skin.
‘You all right?’ he asked. ‘You look a bit iffy.’
She felt too sick to speak.
‘That’s travelling on an empty stomach,’ he said. ‘You want to eat something before you go on a journey. “You won’t get for on an empty tank” – that’s what my sister Margy says.’
It was the last straw. In her nausea and tension his words rubbed on her like a match against a matchbox.
‘I don’t care what your bloody sister says,’ she snapped. ‘Why do you keep going on about your sister all the time. I’m just feeling a bit car sick, okay.’ She turned her flushed face back towards the open window.
He said nothing.
When she looked across again, she saw he was staring straight ahead, his head very still, his eyes seemingly mesmerized by the windscreen wipers. The only thing that moved was his Adam’s apple.
‘I been hurtin’ so long, baby,’ sang a plaintive voice on the radio. But without the sound of the man’s voice, the pick-up seemed strangely, almost eerily silent. Having wished a moment ago that he’d shut up, now she wished he’d speak. She felt very young, very unsure of herself. Rather foolish.
I shouldn’t have lost my temper. He’s doing me a favour. He didn’t have to stop and give me a lift.
‘Look,’ she said, ‘I’m sorry. I really am. I shouldn’t have snapped at you like that. I didn’t mean that about your sister. You know what it’s like when you’re feeling sick, you, well . . . You know.’ She looked at him with a pleading smile. But his eyes were fixed on the road ahead.
‘Yeah,’ he said, but without looking at her, ‘I know. Never get like that myself, but I feel like it sometimes inside. Sometimes I want to shout. Sometimes when Margy . . . when she gets at me, you know. Has one of her moods.’ He laughed a little, nervously. ‘Then I really want to bellow.’
Suddenly, seeing this crack in his bluff exterior, her heart warmed to him. He didn’t seem so old after all – he was approachable, sort of sweet. And there was, she thought, something very touching about his devotion to his sister.
‘I’m always shouting at my sister,’ she said. ‘She drives me crazy – always pinching my things. I shout at her, she shouts at me, we slam a few doors . . . It gets pretty noisy in our house.’ For the first time since she’d left home that afternoon, she found she was smiling.
‘Do you live with your sister?’ she asked.
‘Yeah,’ he said, recovering some of his former heartiness. ‘Like two peas in a pod we are. That’s what Margy says. We’ve always lived together in the same house since we were babies. I was even born there. It’s just the two of us now, since Mum and Dad died. We do everything together.’
‘You must get on really well,’ she said, thinking once more of her own sister, imagining her lying on the bed with the radio blaring, flicking idly through Just Seventeen, blowing now and then on her newly varnished turquoise nails.
‘We went to Venice last year,’ he said. ‘You been there?’
‘No,’ she said. And suddenly it dawned on her.
She won’t be lying on her bed reading, she’ll be downstairs in the front room. They all will. Mum, Brian, Diane. They’ll have read the note and be sitting by the phone waiting. Hoping I’ll ring Dad or the police. Worried stiff. Mum with her arm round Diane. Brian all oily from his bike and Mum too concerned about me to tell him to go and clean himself up like she normally would.
‘ . . . We’d just arrived off the water bus,’ he said, ‘and we were in the hotel reception, and this chap comes down the stairs – American tourist I should think he was – blowing his nose like a fog horn. Margy frowns a bit, then she looks at him and says, “I see you’ve settled in nicely. You’ve unpacked your trunk completely!”’
His pale face turned towards hers again, momentarily – his eyes full of amusement, prompting her to share in the joke. But her stomach suddenly felt too small for the weight it was carrying. Her palms were damp with sweat. For the first time, she wondered: When I get to London, what the hell am I going to do? I don’t know anyone there. I’ve no qualifications. I’m fifteen, I’ve never even been away on holiday on my own before.
‘You can’t beat family,’ he said.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No.’
And she really meant it.
‘You know,’ he said. ‘You remind me a bit of Margy. How she was. As a girl.’
But she was in a world of her own. Back home.
When, a couple of minutes later, she caught sight of the sign warning of approaching Services (half a mile it said), she knew, without even having to think about it, what to do.
‘Look,’ she said. ‘I need to make a phone call, urgently. Would you mind stopping at these next Services? I won’t hold you up, I promise. I . . . well, the thing is, I’ve decided not to go to London after all.’
He was fine about it – very nice. Actually seemed a bit sad she was going, and she thought how ridiculous it was that she’d ever been afraid of him. He drove her right up to the door of the complex, though she said that by the petrol would be fine if he wanted to be on his way quicker. He didn’t ask for an explanation, but she thought he deserved some sort of one.
‘I don’t think I’m quite ready for London yet,’ she said. ‘Maybe in a couple of years.’
‘I’ll give your regards to the Queen, then, shall I?’ he said, as she got out.
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Thanks. Thanks a lot. Not just for the lift, but, well, for helping me see things.’
He nodded. ‘All part of the service,’ he said with a smile.
For a moment, with the artificial light falling on his untidy ginger hair and specs, she had the impression