I walked on with steps of anger and fear, whispering to myself in time with my feet. Mum. And. Mav. Is. Slap, slap, slap, slap. I hit the road, hard as hard, until I was close in under the shadow of the hill where the sun couldn’t reach any more and it was even colder still. Mum. And. Mav. Is. Mum. And. Mav. Is.
Mum.
I clapped my hands in time with my feet and my words, and soon I was clapping loud and hard. I began to think about all the things I had done wrong in the last few days. There seemed to be a lot of them and I hit my hands, which were sore already; I hit them together extra hard each time I thought of another thing and especially hard when I got to that particular day.
I stopped walking along the road. I just stopped and stood there and thought about that day and how I’d tried to be nice to Miss Weatherbeaten but instead ended up being horrible to her, and I’d been rude to Mr Tait and ignored him when he was talking to me and now I’d run out on Rosie too and I hadn’t said sorry and thank you to Mrs Mags. I wanted very much to say sorry to everyone again. The problem was I wanted to find my mum and Mavis much more than I wanted to do any of that.
My hands hurt and were bleeding again where the glass had been, so while I was standing there with the goose pimples taking hold of my legs, I tried to wipe some of the blood away with the pocket remains of my dress.
When I looked back up at the road, a horse and cart was coming towards me with a man at the front of the cart and huge milk churns at the back. He stopped just before he reached me. He was a big man high up on his cart, with a knitted hat and an old coat. A little triangle of shirt glowed dim in the twilight.
‘You alright?’ he said, as I set off along the road again.
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ I told him, which I wasn’t. I forgot for a moment what a sight I was.
‘Do you mind if I ask where you’re off to?’ he said.
‘I’m going to Clydebank to find my mum and my sister,’ I said, stopping to be polite.
‘Ah, now there’s a place to be going,’ he said and he nodded his head.
I wasn’t sure what he meant.
‘I lost them. We had bombing,’ I said, in case he hadn’t understood me either.
‘Yes, I know,’ he said. ‘I heard it. How were you planning on getting there?’
‘I’m going to walk over that hill. It’s on the other side.’
‘Not of that hill it’s not.’
‘No?’
‘No, that’s just farmland and moor. It goes all the way to the middle of nowhere. You don’t want to go there,’ he said.
‘No,’ I said. I stuck my hand in my pocket for the shoe and looked up the hill I thought I had come down with Mr Tait, Rosie and Miss Weatherbeaten. It was dark and shadowy now and the trees were starting to creak in the wind.
‘The path you want is by the school, by Craigton school, up the burn beside it, about another mile further on,’ he said. ‘But you don’t want to be going over there tonight. It’s going to rain and it’s nearly dark already.’
‘But I do want to be going over there tonight,’ I said.
‘You may want to,’ he said leaning down towards me, ‘but whether you actually can is quite another matter again.’
‘But I have to try,’ I said. ‘What else am I supposed to do?’
I looked at him, up there on his cart. The horse shifted its footing and the whole cart shook, jangling the milk churns. He seemed to be thinking about this problem of mine, but instead of giving me the answer he gave me another question.
‘Where have you come from?’ he said.
‘Back there,’ I said, pointing along the road.
‘Back there?’ he said. ‘Won’t someone back there be worrying about you being out after dark?’
I didn’t answer.
He seemed to be thinking again.
‘Do you know what I think you should do?’ he said. ‘I think you should go back where you came from and plan what you’re going to do about your mum and your sister. You can’t just set off without having a plan. It’s no use going over the hills at this time of night and it’ll be dark over there in Clydebank too. That’s no use either. You need to go back to “back there” and have a good night’s sleep and get on the bus in the morning, if you’ve got any money, or start walking as soon as you’re up and have had a good breakfast.’
‘Do I? Is that what I should do?’ I said.
‘Good breakfast’s very important,’ he said. ‘And when you find your mum and your sister you can bring them to me at that farm over there.’ He pointed at a farm I couldn’t see. ‘I’ll tell them how hard you tried to find them.’
‘Will you?’
‘My name is Tulloch,’ he said. ‘Mr Tulloch. Now, are you going to get up here so I can give you a lift back to “back there” before we freeze to death in this wind or would you like to think about it a bit longer?’
So Mr Tulloch gave me a lift on his horse and cart which was something I’d never done before, sat on a cart with a horse clip-clopping away in front of me. At any other time I would have been excited beyond belief, but I couldn’t be because of Mavis and my mum. He helped me up there with his big rough hand, rougher even than mine, rougher even than my dad’s. I sat beside him on the seat at the front and he flicked his reins just a little and said something like ‘Goan’, which was probably meant to be ‘Go on’, and the big old horse started to move and the milk churns rattled behind us. To be honest it was very uncomfortable and the swaying this way and that, caused by the horse, made me feel as though I was going to cut myself in two about the middle.
But I was warmed up in no time and I felt heat wafting back on us from the horse too, though I may have imagined that. The horse smelled strongly of old grass, and steam was rising from its back. Its big round bottom rolled right in front of us and the ears on its head turned forwards and backwards, listening.
We’d only gone a very short way when through the dark I saw something dive into the bushes beside the road. I knew what . . . who . . . it was instantly.
‘Rosie!’ I said, and I asked Mr Tulloch if we could stop.
Mr Tulloch stopped the cart and I ran to where she was.
‘Come out right now. I know you’re in there!’
She didn’t come out immediately.
‘Sorry,’ she whimpered, eventually stepping out in front of the horse. ‘Sorry. Don’t be angry.’
‘What are you doing here?’ I said, knowing the answer.
‘I want my mum and . . . .’
‘Rosie, your mum’s . . . ,’ but I thought better of it, just in time. This was not the moment.
‘What?’ she said. ‘What about my mum?’
‘Nothing,’ I said.
‘Girls, I’m in a hurry here,’ called Mr Tulloch. ‘The light’s nearly gone.’
‘Coming!’ I said. Then to Rosie I said as quickly as I could, like gunfire, ‘We can’t go over tonight. It’s too dark. We’ll go over tomorrow, I promise. We’ll get Mr Tait to come with us. Tonight we have to go back.’
I could see she wasn’t happy with this.
‘Come on,’ I said and I took the hand that was pulling at her earlobe and led her back to the cart. ‘Look, we’re going on a cart. I bet you haven’t been on a cart before, have you? Isn’t it big?’
She still wasn’t happy but I shoved her up there anyway and put my arm round her on the seat at the front. She was cold and shivery, still taut like a cat and she wouldn’t look at Mr Tulloch.
Mr Tulloch said ‘Goan’ again and the horse and cart creaked forward into the falling darkness. Rosie fidgeted beside me the way she had before she fell asleep the night before. Mr Tulloch started humming to himself, but it was a tune I hadn’t heard before. It came out in time to the horse’s walking and Mr Tulloch rocked his head along with its feet. His shoulder squeezed warm against mine with the rhythm of the tune and he smelled of work and warm milk.
Just before we got to the long low building that was the Halfway House pub, he asked where ‘back there’ was.
‘Here,’ I said. ‘It’s just here.’
‘I’ll leave you at the door then,’ he said.
‘No, not here,’ I said. ‘Back there.’ I pointed with my thumb over my shoulder. I didn’t want to go past the Halfway House pub and be seen by anyone.
‘So “just here” is “back there” is it?’ he said, and he called to the horse and it stopped.
He told us to be careful and not be wandering about after dark. He offered to walk up the hill with us to wherever we were going but I grabbed Rosie’s hand and hurried over the road.
‘Don’t forget the planning,’ he called after me.
‘I won’t,’ I called back. ‘Thanks for the lift!’ And Rosie called too.
Neither of us was sure what to do next. We waited until the noise of the cart had faded before we tried to think. I tried to think. This is what I thought.
I thought Mr Tait was probably alright, even though he had a big stick, but I’d gone right off Miss Weatherbeaten. She was even worse than when she’d been my teacher at school. All the nice stuff had stopped. I figured it was only a matter of time before I got a right good seeing-to from her. I didn’t trust either of them because they said we could go and find my mum and Mavis and we didn’t. They hadn’t even told Rosie she’d lost her family, not properly, not in a way she would understand. I didn’t want to go back to them. We needed somewhere to sleep, a hut with a stove and preferably a tin of beans. A couple of jammy pieces were just not enough for a growing girl, as my gran used to say. In the morning we would have had a good night’s sleep and a good breakfast, just like Mr Tulloch said, and off we would go.
I put my plan to Rosie and she nodded in agreement, but now, faced with the hill to climb and a hut to find, it didn’t seem quite such a good idea, especially in the dark.
Things take shape in the dark, not the things you want to see and not the things you’d expect either, just things that shouldn’t be there. Even things that should be there, like tree branches and huts, seem closer so you pull back thinking they’re going to hit you. But it’s the things that don’t belong there at all that are the worst and it makes no difference whether your eyes are open or shut. You see those things anyway. I saw smoke billowing in the trees and close mouths in the angles of the huts. I saw bricks and debris in the chairs and tables beside them, and arms and legs in the twisted woodpiles at their doors.
I don’t know what Rosie saw but she gripped my hand until there was no blood in it and all the fingers were numb. Many times I wondered whether this was such a good idea after all. Perhaps we should have gone back to Mr Tait and Miss Weatherbeaten. But all I knew was I had to get to Clydebank the next day and this staying on our own seemed to be part of the plan. So up we went one step at a time, gasping and snivelling and sweating in the icy wind which was growing stronger the higher up the hill we climbed. At each hut we stopped and listened, and in each hut we heard voices, and in those we didn’t we felt the chimney or the end wall for the heat of a stove in case there was someone in there, but sleeping.
Finally we found one. It was hidden in the trees so we would have missed it altogether if there hadn’t been white edging round its windows. This hut was different from the one we had been in before, and different from Mrs Mags’s hut too. It had only one door, no overhang from the roof with a space for chairs that weren’t there, and it wasn’t very clean. There were cobwebs everywhere and for a second I thought we couldn’t go in because I was scared of spiders. But I had more important things to be scared of than spiders, so I went on in through the unlocked door pulling Rosie in behind me.
It was absolutely, completely and utterly pitch-black dark.