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?”
“Let me go and get it,” Jonathan said, putting his hand out for the kettle. She looked closer to the full term than he had realized.
“No, I need the exercise. Anyway, you’re not allowed in the ladies.”
“Let him get it from the blokes, then.”
“Dean, there’s roughing it and then there’s roughing it.”
“It’s all the bloody same. Still gone through at least seven different livers by the time you drink it. And you’re too bloody posh, you are.” He smiled at her and she put her face up for his kiss.
Over a second cup of tea, since Jonathan was in no hurry, they talked about the baby.
“We think it’s due in a fortnight. I was a bit slow on the uptake,” Mog said. “I didn’t realize I was pregnant for quite a long time.”
“Which is the understatement of the fuckin’ year,” Dean said, picking tobacco from the end of a new roll-up.
“We’ll have to get some petrol for the motorbike. We’ve timed it. It takes eight minutes to get to the bus stop, one comes on the hour every hour and it takes forty minutes to get to the hospital, so if we leave the minute I get my first contraction, we should be okay.”
“We don’t want to leave too early,” Dean said. “If we get there too early, they’ll be swarming round us like flies, telling us what to do, how to do it, probably even what to call the poor little sod. We don’t want all that crap.”
“The way we see it, childbirth has been going on for all time, so, you know, we want our baby to come into the world without all those bright lights and people in green masks staring at her and pumping her full of drugs or whatever.”
“Him,” Dean corrected.
“Her,” Mog replied.
It was an innocent argument, delivered in a way that made Jonathan realize they thought they were the first to have it.
“What are your plans if something goes wrong?” he asked, feeling obliged to put it up for discussion.
“Like what?”
“Like a bus not coming?”
“We’ll go on the motorbike.”
“Or the motorbike not starting.” He looked at it and tried to imagine it carrying a woman in labor.
“It will,” Dean said. “It always does.”
“Or Mog going into labor in the middle of the night?”
“I’ve got the number of a twenty-four-hour taxi firm.”
“Have you got a phone?”
“There’s one in the village.”
“There’s not much to go wrong, is there?” Mog added. “We’ll be fine.”
They looked so full of confidence that Jonathan didn’t want to frighten them with the list of possibilities.
* * *
Niall was also trying to draw up a list of possibilities—any possibilities, all possibilities—since the most likely possibility was too impossible to even contemplate. There was almost half a pint of Guinness still in his glass on the bar which he’d gingerly been taking sips from since he’d heard what Roy Mundy had to say.
It was the first round at the Cott he’d been included in that hadn’t been in return for one he’d bought earlier—a milestone in local acceptance—but the stout wasn’t going down like it should. Something else was going down instead.
“Don’t miss a trick, I don’t,” the spherical Roy Mundy kept chuckling.
Niall wanted the plumber to shut up, but Roy was in full flight. The more he teased, the higher he tugged up his trouser leg. Perched on a high bar stool like a portly gnome, he was now exposing a good six inches of mottled shin. Under normal circumstances, Niall would have had a laugh about it.
“But you don’t have to tell us, does ’e, Dave?”
“No,” said the landlord, “’cos if ’e don’t, someone else always will.”
“That’s right, my boy,” Roy cackled. “So, save for the odd bleddy cloak-and-dagger meeting in a rest area, how’s it going up the road?”
“It’s what you could call work in progress,” Niall said, trying to ignore the cracks about the rest area. Roy and Dave were adamant they had seen him and Emmy in a clandestine rendezvous somewhere called Boxtree. “We’ve not quite found our feet yet.”
“They’ll be on the end of your legs,” Roy said. His V-neck navy sweater, which reminded Niall of his old school uniform, was at least a size too small for his magnificent beer belly. “That’s where I generally find mine.”
Niall wondered if he ever got to see them. Perhaps if he did, he wouldn’t wear those dodgy black lace-up shoes and nylon gray socks. He had another go at steering the conversation back to something less unsettling. Aga parts would do.
“I drove halfway round the bloody world looking for this place, and it turned out to be a lock-up in some dying factory with vegetation growing out of the middle of the road, with a note on the door saying ‘Gone Surfing.’ Is that normal?”
“Depends how many feet you’ve got,” Roy said.
“Feet of surf,” Dave explained with a pained expression.
As Roy hooted at his own joke, Niall heard Cathal’s voice in his head again, muffled words coming from inside the sewing room that he couldn’t piece together. “This isn’t about Niall, Emmy. This is the one thing in your life that isn’t about Niall.”
By the time he came to again, Roy Mundy had changed the subject. “Well, then, I knew old Mr. Hart quite well. He was a case, w’un ’e? He was an old bugger, ’e was. I ’spect you’ve heard that, ’ave you?”
“Funnily enough…”
“I don’t care, I don’t. People can do what they like, can’t they?” Roy sipped his beer. “What is it, some sort of hippy commune you’ve got up there?”
“Nudist hippy commune,” Niall said. “I’m only wearing clothes now because I’m here. Usually we all walk around naked. Especially the women.” His banter sounded hopelessly flimsy. He could hear Emmy in her sewing room with Cathal. “Right for who?” she was shouting.
“Nudist, is it? ’Ell! What’s it you say is wrong with your Aga? Maybe I could fit it in this afternoon, hey, Dave?” He took a long sip, draining the last three inches of ale. “That’s what they all think in the village, mind.”
“Better not spoil their fun by telling them the truth then.”
“Old bleddy Mrs. Partridge up there thinks you’m all on the wacky baccy.”
“Jaysus, what a joke.”
“We all think it is. We’re all having a great laugh.”
“Good. It’s nice to know you’re giving something back to the community.”
Roy cackled some more and the two of them realized they liked each other. Niall wished he was in the mood to show it.
“Emmy is Mr. Hart’s niece,” he said, the Guinness still sitting unhappily in his stomach on top of the rest area conversation. “He left her the house in his will, and—”
“We know that,” Roy interrupted impatiently. “And we know you’ve had Culworthy’s up to have a look, and the colored maid who’s taken over from Dr. Rawe at the surgery went home apparently sick the other day and then recovered enough to buy a pasty from Cott Stores and start eating it before she even got in the bleddy car. I tell you, we don’t miss a trick, we don’t.”
“So you keep telling me. Anyway, Sita needs to eat, she’s still breastfeeding.”
“Spare me the details, boy. No, as I said, I don’t mind. I like everyone, me.” He tapped the bar with his empty glass.
“I’ll get that,” Niall said, nodding at the landlord.
“You’re a funny lot, though, in’ you? You’ve got all this space up there, and you have to drive a couple of miles up the road in separate cars just so you can talk in a bit of privacy.”
“It wasn’t me.”
“Yes, ’twas.”
Roy put a five-pound note on a pump, and Niall took it off again, pointing to himself as Dave Kemp filled the empty glass with a pint of Wreckers.
“You’re a worse gossip than Eileen Partridge, you are,” the landlord said.
“Get on! I seen ’im and his flash bleddy car in the rest area with Mr. Hart’s niece, I know I did. Wos’ think I am? Stupid?”
“That would be one word.” Dave laughed.
“I’ll tell you one more time,” Niall said, trying to sound as if he was enjoying the wind-up. “It wasn’t me. Prove otherwise and I’ll buy you a beer every day for the rest of your life.”
“That’ll be till a week on Tuesday, looking at ’im,” Dave said.
“Your twin, was it?” Roy asked.
“My brother, I expect.”
“Your brother? I love to see a grown man squirm, I do.”
“Was the hood up?” Niall asked.
“T’wadn’t the hood that was up, boy.”
“What was the other car? A blue Golf?”
“Course it bleddy was. You were there. All right, Jim?”
Jim Best, the electrician, came over to the bar. Same crowd every lunchtime.
“All right, Roy?”
“I’m just telling Mr. O’Connor here, the Boxtree rest area idn’t as private as ’e thinks ’tis.”
“It’s your car there, is it? Partridge’ll ’ave your guts for garters, boy. ’Ee can’t get his car through the gate.”
“I’ll go and shift it,” Niall said.
“I thought you said t’wadn’t yours?”
“It isn’t, it’s Emmy’s.” He was relieved to have an excuse to leave after admitting that. He forced the last of his stout down. “Haven’t you two got work to do? Like fixing my Aga, for a start?”
“I’ll be there d’rec’ly,” Roy said.
“And I’ll be there just after that,” Jim said, his face as straight as a poker.
As he shut the low white door that led from the public bar onto the road, he could hear the three of them coughing and laughing through their Superkings like a coven of witches.
He started his bike with a more aggressive kick than it needed, and pulled away from the pub, wondering where the hell Boxtree rest area was and why every hole in the hedge needed to have a name around here.
He took the first right, heading in the vague direction of Bodinnick but not down a lane he knew. Then he took a left, and at a junction of no fewer than five roads known locally, but not to him, as Star Cross, he took another right. It was like a labyrinth out to trick him. Every road had the same landmarks. Five-bar gates leading to timber companies, driveways to farms, private lanes to big houses.
Just when he thought he had completely lost his bearings, he saw it. Emmy’s car, abandoned in the middle of a long, narrow rest area in front of some privately owned woodland. Tracks in the leafy mulch suggested the recent arrival and departure of another car. Well, he could be more specific than that if he chose to be. He could say the arrival and departure of a blue Italian front-wheel-drive with a throaty roar, which belonged to his brother Cathal.
He pulled in and took off his helmet with fumbling fingers. His mind searched for a more palatable scenario. Perhaps she had broken down, and phoned home for help. Perhaps Cathal had been the one to answer. Perhaps he had been hearing things when they were in the sewing room. Perhaps Maya hadn’t really thought Emmy was refusing to come out because of Cathal. Perhaps he hadn’t really seen them on the stairs, seen their faces.
He tried the door of her car and looked inside. Her bag was on the passenger floor and one of Maya’s sweaters was on the back seat, the very thinly striped hand-knitted one he’d bought her at Greenwich Market that had stretched so much it now reached her knees. The hood was still warm.
He leaned against the front of the car, trying to work out why he felt so sick. Why not Cathal? He could see why she would find him attractive. But if they were together, how? And when? There were some pieces of the jigsaw that seemed to fit and others that didn’t. He tried this way and that way to find the whole picture, picking up the same few bits again and again, turning them to the left, the right, upside down, forcing them. But he just couldn’t see it clearly. Stuff was missing.
My God, he thought. What the fuck am I doing here? What am I doing acting like some crazed Peeping Tom? What will I say if they find me?
He heard traffic and panicked. As he turned his bike back toward the road, Cathal’s car came over the brow of the hill. He saw Emmy in the passenger seat but her head was bowed. Cathal didn’t look exactly full of the joys of spring, either. With white-hot panic boiling in his head, he opened up the throttle, bareheaded, his crash helmet still hanging on the fence. He didn’t know how to get out of there fast enough.