‘Do we need this many sandwiches?’ Julie says.
‘I didn’t know what Luke wanted,’ Chantel says. ‘And David wanted loads.’
‘Munchies, innit,’ David explains.
The girl behind the counter sort of grins at him.
‘What kind of torch do you want?’ Charlotte calls over from the torch display.
‘A big one,’ Julie says. ‘Just hurry up.’
‘Just get the most pretty one,’ Chantel says.
Charlotte makes a face and then picks one, seemingly at random. She brings it over to the counter.
‘That’s £51.98,’ the girl says, after she’s scanned the torch.
‘Jesus Christ,’ says Chantel. ‘Who can spend fifty-two quid at a garage? We haven’t even got petrol yet.’ She hands over her debit card anyway.
Outside, it’s still raining.
‘We’d better get back for Luke,’ Julie says. ‘He might be worried.’
‘Why?’ David says.
‘We were in there for, like, forty minutes,’ Chantel says, giggling.
‘Fucking hell,’ says David. ‘You’re right. It’s eleven o’clock.’
Chantel’s holding up her long skirt so it doesn’t drag in the glittering orange puddles. Charlotte’s walking next to Julie.
‘You OK?’ she asks.
‘Yeah. I didn’t realise it was so late.’
‘We’ll get there. It’ll be cool. Don’t worry.’
‘I’m not.’ But Julie can still feel tears welling in her eyes.
Luke doesn’t say anything when they get back to the van. He’s still under the blanket. David and Chantel get in the back and Chantel pokes at Luke’s blanket a bit and offers him a choice of sandwiches and drinks, but he doesn’t say anything. Eventually she gives up and gets some beer out of her bag. Julie wonders if she should go and check to see if Luke’s OK but everyone’s in the van now, and they want to go. It’s getting so late. She takes a bite of her cheese-and-pickle sandwich – she doesn’t usually buy sandwiches, but felt daring tonight – but then, in her mind, she sees a familiar image of some sandwich maker with blue plastic gloves pressing the slices of bread together in a huge factory with dead flies and dirt and people who are paid so little they probably wipe their arses with the blue gloves.
She stops chewing the mouthful of sandwich. This is why she doesn’t buy sandwiches. What if some fucked-off worker put acid in it? Acid’s only about £1.50 now. Oh, shit, Julie’s got to get this dirty poisoned stuff out of her mouth. She opens the door and gets out of the van, spits out into the gutter and throws away the rest of the sandwich. Back inside, she rinses her mouth with Ribena and lights a cigarette.
‘What are you doing?’ Charlotte asks.
‘Nothing. I was just chucking the wrapper away.’
‘Aren’t you going to eat anything, then?’ Charlotte says.
‘No. Maybe later. I’m not as hungry as I thought I was,’ Julie says.
‘No wonder you’re so thin,’ says David.
‘Where am I going now?’ asks Julie.
For the next half an hour or so she just concentrates as David directs her through Radlett towards Watford while he and Chantel eat about three packets of sandwiches each and Charlotte plays with the radio. Luke doesn’t say anything and for some reason this makes Julie want to cry.
‘Skin up,’ says David to Charlotte, as they go through Watford.
Charlotte settles on a local station and reaches for her embroidered bag.
‘I thought you were skinning up,’ she moans. ‘I don’t even want to smoke any more. I’m stoned already from that fucking spliff you gave me back at Epping. Dope totally fucks with my head. I’ve so got to give up.’
‘I’ve run out,’ David says. ‘You’re all right fucking caners.’
‘I’ll skin up,’ says Chantel. ‘As long as someone holds my beer.’
There’s a rustling sound from the back of the van. Luke is sitting up.
‘I’ll hold it,’ he says. ‘As long as I can finish it.’ He laughs in a weird way.
‘Hey, mate,’ David says, reaching over and slapping him on the back. ‘We were all a bit worried about you. Glad to see you back in full effect.’
Chantel gives Luke her beer. He reaches in his bag for the straws Julie brought for him so he could drink through the helmet, then he sticks one of them in the can and starts sucking furiously. ‘That feels a bit better,’ he says, when he’s finished. ‘Hey, Chan, weren’t you skinning up?’
‘I, uh . . . Yeah,’ she says. ‘I was, wasn’t I?’
‘Luke?’ Julie says. He doesn’t reply. ‘Luke?’ she says again.
‘I so want to get wasted,’ he says to Chantel and David.
Charlotte looks at Julie and raises her eyebrows. Julie just shrugs sadly. She doesn’t know what’s going on any more. Why is Luke being like this? Why is he ignoring her? Why is he using words like ‘wasted’? And why is the van full of sickly sweet smoke and an oniony, beery smell? Why the hell is Julie driving it, and where the fuck are they all going?
On the radio people working late in the Watford area are phoning in asking for requests. At some point, someone from a fire station asks for ‘The Look of Love’ by ABC.
‘I fucking love this,’ Charlotte says, turning it up.
Pretty soon everyone except Julie is singing along.
‘I haven’t heard this for ages,’ Chantel says. ‘They used to play it in the shop I worked in. It’s really old, isn’t it?’
‘I remember it being on Top of the Pops,’ says Charlotte. ‘Which is depressing.’
‘They had it on that tape they used to play all the time in The Edge, didn’t they?’ David says to Julie.
‘I think they have it on tapes in all shops,’ she says.
‘What shop did you work in?’ David asks Chantel.
‘Surf & Skate in Basildon,’ she says. ‘Why?’
‘I suppose you weren’t a millionaire then.’
She laughs. ‘No. I was a total pikey. I lived in a shack with a goat.’
‘Oh yeah, Leanne said something about that,’ David says. ‘What’s the story?’
Chantel’s twisting a roach for the spliff. ‘I dunno. It was my gran’s place from just after the war. Me, my mum and her boyfriend, Rob, all lived there with Gran, in this tiny place. Rob was a total speed-head but thought he was going to make it as a songwriter, so he didn’t really feel like he had to get a job, and my mum used to work in the pet shop by the market. But then it shut down and she got a bit depressed. Rob was always caning her dole cheque as well as his, and she never even had enough money to go for job interviews. If she did go, there’d always be someone younger who they could pay less so they’d get it.
‘So basically they were both unemployed, and my mum used to get fucked off with Rob and try to make him leave and then he’d go and stay at some mate’s place for a few days and Gran would be happy – she didn’t like Rob – but then Mum would start eating Mars bars constantly and hand-washing everything in the place and crying about the state of the garden, the house and her life and how she’d let Gran down because she couldn’t even keep her house nice for her, and how we’d have to move out of there soon – although at that point Gran was really ill and we couldn’t leave her – until Rob came back. Then they’d “start again”. He never saw anything wrong with the way we lived but Mum used to read Hello! magazine and Homes & Gardens and dream of having a decent life, and she was always doing things like trying to learn flower arranging or knitting from a library book. But Rob would always just end up treading on the knitting when he was pissed, and Billy would eat any flowers you left lying around.
‘I’m glad we left Rob behind, although I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned up in Windy Close blagging off me and my mum within a week. He’s a fucking nightmare. He worked his way through Gran’s savings just before she died, and he’s borrowed money off me in the past and never paid it back – I was the only one in that place who ever had any bloody money, apart from Gran. I used to work at Surf & Skate six days a week in the holidays – when I was doing my BTEC at the college – and last year I saved up to go to Spain with some mates, but Rob “borrowed” the money, as in borrowed without asking, and he never gave it back, so I never went.’
‘That’s out of order,’ David says. ‘Fucking dick.’
‘He wasn’t a bad person; he was just irresponsible. Never grew up.’
‘Still well out of order, though. What did he want the money for anyway?’
‘Drugs, clothes, train fare to London to see potential “agents”, more drugs. I don’t know. He didn’t have the same mentality as me and my mum. We were used to being poor, and we were pretty good at it. We just didn’t buy luxuries, and we sort of didn’t think we ever would, either. We used to have a Christmas Tin when I was a kid. We used to put spare change in it, and my gran would add to it and stuff, and every Christmas we’d have nice food and everything that we’d lay out on the table for days before, just so we could look at it. The year Rob came to live with us, he invented the IOU system, where you could borrow money from the Christmas Tin as long as you put in an IOU and then replaced the money. At the end of the year there were about forty IOUs in there that added up to about a hundred quid, but no actual money.
‘God, do you know what I’ll remember most about being poor?’ Chantel continues, passing the spliff to David. ‘All the invisible barriers – shops you could never, ever go into because you’d never be able to afford anything in them. Gourmet-food shops, department stores, those big toy shops you see in films about Christmas, and you know even if you knew where to find a toy shop like that you couldn’t go in there because you’d only ever shopped in pikey shops, or the market . . . Even WHSmith was too posh for us. When I started at comprehensive school we were allowed to use biros and my mum got me a load of Argos pens, the free ones, and she thought she’d been really clever to find free pens, but of course everyone at school just called me a pikey and that was that.’
‘I had pens from the betting shop. My granddad got them,’ David says, smiling. ‘He thought he was being original. In fact, I think when I was really little I used to draw in crayon on betting slips, because they were free and paper wasn’t, and I always used to get pissed off because of the lines and writing in the way of my pictures.’
Chantel laughs. ‘Oh, God, and I remember when Top Shop and Miss Selfridge seemed totally posh, and I wasn’t allowed to go in them. I used to get all my clothes and school uniform from Jackson’s Warehouse, where you could get a school jumper for about two quid and skirts for one pound fifty.’
‘I remember Jackson’s Warehouse,’ David says. ‘I got my school uniform there as well.’ He laughs. ‘And I got my first watch from the market – it was a present from my granddad and it cost about three quid. I really loved that watch, though. In my family it was exactly the same – we had no money at all, really – except my old man used to save up and take us to the army-supplies shop every few months, because he thought we’d all become soldiers, even my sister. We all had little army outfits and huge boots and facepaints and penknives and torches and netting, and every Saturday night we used to get a Wimpy, watch The A-Team and then pitch a tent in the front room and play Northern Ireland.’
‘Northern Ireland?’ Charlotte says.
David’s laughing. ‘Yeah. We had two cats. They were the IRA. My mum hated it. My old man spent whole weekends teaching us armed combat – stuff he’d learnt in the marines, like the most efficient way to cut someone’s throat, how to crawl in the undergrowth, how to start a fire with no matches and open a tin of beans with no can-opener; and radio signals and command hierarchies and how to kill yourself if you were imprisoned to avoid them torturing the information out of you . . .’
‘And now you’re doing a law degree,’ Charlotte says.
‘He hates that,’ David says. ‘My mum’s proud but Dad could never work out why I didn’t want to go in the army like he did.’
‘Wasn’t he actually in the army when you were a kid?’ Charlotte asks. ‘I mean, how could he be at home pitching tents with you and stuff? Was that just when he was on leave?’
‘He was paralysed by then,’ David explains. ‘Well, from the waist down. Got shot in the spine. We lived on his pension.’
‘So he couldn’t walk at all?’
‘No. But he still made it down the pub every night to meet his mates.’ David laughs. ‘Electric wheelchair. Used to go where he wanted.’
‘So he was paralysed and still obsessed with the army?’ Charlotte sounds confused.
‘Totally,’ David says. ‘Mum used to have to dress him and bath him but he was still going on about hand-to-hand combat the whole time, like he was still some sort of expert. You should have seen him when the Gulf War was on. He was obsessed with it all, like a commentator, like some sort of Jimmy Hill of war.’
Chantel and Charlotte laugh at that.
‘What did you do on birthdays when you were a kid?’ Chantel asks David.
‘We always used to have Co-Op Black Forest Gateau and I always got an Action Man from my dad and a book token from my granddad. My mum used to let me choose something from the catalogue a couple of weeks before. The day before my birthday she’d always pretend it hadn’t come, but it would always appear, miraculously wrapped up on the kitchen table the next morning. What about you?’
‘A trip to McDonald’s and a video. We weren’t allowed cake in the house because of my mum’s diet.’
‘A trip to McDonald’s?’ says Charlotte.
‘It was the only time we ever went. It was, like, a huge treat. That was until Rob came, of course; then it would be, like, McDonald’s three nights running until there was no money left for the weekend and we’d have to eat out-of-date bread and stuff. Sometimes we couldn’t afford tampons and we had to use homemade ones. See?’ She laughs. ‘That’s how much of a pikey I was. Homemade sodding tampons. Jesus.’
‘I hate the word pikey,’ David says quietly.
‘Yeah, so do I actually,’ Chantel says. ‘I’m just trying to reclaim it. Anyway, where did you grow up, Charlotte?’ she asks.
‘Cambridge. Well, a village just outside Cambridge.’
‘A village,’ says Chantel. The way she says the word makes it sound as exciting and exotic as if she’d said castle, or millionaire’s private island. ‘That would be well wicked, to live in a village.’
‘It wasn’t,’ Charlotte says. ‘It totally sucked.’
‘Why?’ Chantel asks. ‘Wasn’t it pretty?’
‘Yeah, it was pretty, but it was also small and gossipy, and no one could be different and you had to get a bus into town . . . I don’t know. It was just shit.’
‘Did you have a nice house?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Can’t have been that shit, then.’
‘Maybe not,’ says Charlotte.
There’s a junction up ahead. Julie doesn’t know where to go next. ‘Where should I go at this roundabout?’ she asks.
‘Straight over,’ says David, focusing on the map again. ‘Then – oh, shit.’
‘What?’
‘There’s no yellow road after the next roundabout.’
Julie starts to panic. ‘Where am I going to go, then?’
‘You’ll have to go on a red road for about two minutes.’
‘What kind of red road?’
‘It’s just an A-road. It’s not a dual-carriageway or anything.’
‘Oh, shit.’
‘It’ll be OK, babe,’ Charlotte says.
Everyone shuts up while Julie drives around the first roundabout and down a thin road with wet trees and more rain, towards another roundabout with big green signs and white lights.
‘So where’s this A-road?’ Julie says at the roundabout. She’s still worried about the sandwich. What if she’s on a main road when the acid kicks in? In her head, she sees the van spinning out of control, straight into the path of the oncoming traffic. Or what about drunk drivers at this time of night, haring home from the pub on these fast local roads? What if one of them drove into her? Her head feels weird. She knew she was right about the acid. Now she can’t breathe.
‘Calm down, Jules, it’ll be fine,’ Charlotte says.
‘You want to go around to the right,’ David says. ‘The A408 – that’s it, that one. Then look out on your right for a turning onto the B470 towards, um, Datchet or Eton. Make sure you don’t miss it because the next one’s much further down.’
The A-road doesn’t look too much different to some of the B-roads they’ve been on but Julie’s still sweating. She doesn’t want to have a car crash; she doesn’t want to die. She realises she’s doing forty miles an hour and remembers what some guy once told her about having a blow-out at forty or over being potentially fatal. She slows down to about thirty-five.
‘Can’t we go faster?’ Luke says.
Julie’s hands grip the steering wheel tighter. He’s been quiet for ages, drinking more beer through his straw and looking out of the window. He hasn’t asked for anything to be explained to him – not that you can see much out of the windows apart from trees, rain and dark, shadowy industrial estates – and he hasn’t commented at all on the outside world. Now he wants to go faster. What’s the matter with him?
‘Why are we going so slowly?’ he says.
Charlotte turns around and gives him a look.
‘What?’ he says. ‘I just want a bit more excitement, that’s all.’
‘Haven’t you been paying attention, mate?’ David asks.
‘Sorry?’ says Luke.
‘Your friend is doing you a favour. Show her some fucking respect.’
‘Leave it, Dave,’ says Chantel.
Luke’s already retreated back under his blanket.