The next day, she locked us in the room, both locks, and said if there was a fire, we should scream the place down, and worst case, fashion a rope. She came back, hours later, with a look of determination on her face. Determination, excitement – her hair was escaping from her ponytail. She was also a little bit drunk. I could tell because she had shiny-fresh lipgloss on, like she’d put it on outside the door to smarten up. ‘I’ve done it,’ she said. She looked at us. ‘Five. Two. Two,’ she said after that.
We looked back.
‘Five hundred for me, two hundred for each of you.’ She had cash in her hands. She dealt it like cards onto the bed. ‘Upfront, my friends. Just like that.’
‘Ain’t your friend,’ JD said.
‘Well you stay here if you like, then. ’Cos me and Chance are going tomorrow.’
‘Going where?’
‘Does it matter?’ she said. ‘You wanna stay here with that freak Tennis, do you?’
He thought about it for a second, then shook this head.
‘Anyway, I’m trying to tell you,’ she said. ‘I went down to the housing centre and told them everything. That we had one bed between three of us, and a grade A nutter outside the door.’
Surprise, surprise, she said, the council didn’t have anything in all of London, but they sent her across town to a new foundation instead. ‘Non-gov this time. Some Winstable project, that monster your grandad likes, but—’ her but was as big as the sky ‘—they said they could offer us a cash packet instead.’
‘Cash for what?’ JD said. It was all tens and twenties. He held one up to the light.
‘To get gone,’ she said. She said it happily. It sounded like a jingle. ‘The whole system’s been bare bones for ages, so I thought might as well seize the opportunity, carpe the diem.’ She was definitely drunk, the lips and neck of a small bottle were sticking out of her pocket. She told us the payment was based on ‘Reconnection Policies’. That you had to have somewhere to go. ‘So I told them Margate,’ she said. ‘Which is where I had you, anyway.’
She said London was too expensive to be the future. She said it was a fourth world country now. A hotbed, a bomb waiting to go off. That, and an island for rich Russians. She told us she’d always believed in the power of a clean start. ‘Look at all this,’ she said pointing around the room, then she put her fingers over my eyelids, heavy, and held them there, and said, ‘Pfff,’ the sound of a file deleting on her old laptop, ‘just like that, forget it. This is when life begins. From right now. No more waiting.’
When she woke up in the morning, her mouth doing a slow dry-clap from having drunk too much, she let us pack our own bags and I took all the wrong things. I even took one of her bras, one that she didn’t seem to be taking with her, one I’d always liked. Green lace, underwires like smiles.
‘Wasn’t that the worst hotel on the entire planet,’ she ask-told us as we walked. ‘There are nice hotels out there, you know. In the real world, hotel’s a good word. But that place? That place was a paedo per child. Seriously,’ she said, ‘you can tell from the eyes. Every other male in there was on a list.’
When we got to the train station, she and JD helped me jump the barrier. On the platform, she sat in an uncomfortable squat over a low metal bollard, pointy like a pyramid.
‘Oi, stop though,’ JD said. ‘Why you doing that for?’ Even I remember being aware of people looking.
‘They put them to stop people sleeping here. “Urban furniture.” So rude! So I like to sit.’
She took her wallet out from her backpack and opened it up for me when JD was walking back and forth along the platform practising smiling at two girls his age. The wallet was full of the cash she’d been given. ‘Money money money,’ she said, then she DJ’ed with her mouth to turn it into ‘Mo Money Mo Problems’, the I’m – coming – out chorus bit. We got on the first train that came, and she opened the door with a bow, then looked like she might vomit. ‘Hangover,’ she said. ‘Look away, please. Avert your eyes.’
The train didn’t take us far. We’d got on a commuter train, and there were too many people for the carriage. ‘Hold your breath,’ she said to us before we got on. ‘Honestly, lads, ooof, a little bit of deodorant wouldn’t go amiss.’ It was mostly men. Men in dark suits pushed up against each other, their ties the only things that were loose. A couple had their faces covered, eyes peering hard at their phones above masks. Other people were reading the same paper, and the headline said SATURATION POINT. Everyone was double my height. I looked up at them and they looked down at me. I remember their faces, faces that said, Weird little kid, what are you doing here?
I remember half of the journey to Margate exactly, then the other half, I slept across Ma’s lap. We didn’t have a ticket, so we hid in the loo. One of the big ones, for disabled people.
It was JD’s idea of torture, being locked in a small square like that. First, he tried to take apart the smoke detector with his hands, then he spent a long time turning the tap over the sink on again, then off again.
‘Yes, JD,’ she said. ‘We get it. The magic of a tap.’
Still, she tried to make the trip fun. At one point, she used the assistance bar for balance and held one leg up like a ballerina. We washed our hands lots of times so the scent of the soap would stick. She snuck out for three minutes and bought something from the man who was bringing through snacks.
She came back with crisps – I remember them tasting of lemon but that must have been the hand soap mixing with salt – and she said buying the crisps was us paying our way. Even though all of us knew that the man with the snacks had nothing officially to do with the train, he was just a random guy with a scuffed Bag for Life full of multipacks.
Out of the windows, I remember rushing past yellow fields, razor-lines cut through them. I remember silver water, houseboats along its edge – ‘Rochester!’ she said. ‘A number-one dump’ – and that must have been when I fell asleep.
I woke up on a set of wooden seats, with glass behind us and the sea in front – a huge, hard, choppy blanket, blue mixing with orange because of the setting sun. We were about 100 metres away from Margate train station, under a shelter painted white and green. The tiles at our feet were like a red and black chessboard, and the roof of the shelter had a fringe of carved wood, and some bits were broken, which in that moment made me think of someone creating space between their hair to see.
There was a lot to see. In the distance, the gap between the sea and the sky was so blurred that tankers or trawlers looked like they were floating just above the water. Up close, they’d made the metal street light to look like it was held up by the thick, swirly tail of a giant fish. Ma said we should all breathe in deep, that sea air was cleansing and we had to get London out of our nostrils.
‘There’s a tidal pool somewhere down underneath there,’ she said after that, pointing through the promenade’s green railings at the seawater splashing beyond it, ‘and over there, that’s the harbour. When I lived here before, I always thought if you could see it from above, it would look like the arm of a record player going into the sea. And look, Chance,’ she said to me, leaning back, ‘a funfair.’
Not far away, on the seafront still, was the tall concrete sign of Dreamland, a shining square of windows next to it. Behind them I could see the top of the big wheel, folded in half like a taco. She finger-painted in the air for me back to the harbour. ‘See that jaggy white building over there? Like waves crashing back into the sea? That’s the Turner,’ she told me. ‘Art gallery. World class.’
JD did a handstand by the public toilet next to us and walked on his palms, his calves bending down in a curve towards his head for balance. ‘Where are we, though?’ he shouted from upside down, the sound somersaulting to us through the air.
‘Home,’ Ma said.
I was tired, the kind of tired that makes you feel like all the parts of your body are tied to the ground. I tried to nestle into her, the way that young puppies do, or cats, babies. Try to find space for themselves.
‘T. S. Eliot wrote some poems here,’ she said into my scalp. ‘Very famous. Loved the place. A lot of clever people came here. Were born here. Did things. This will be good for us.’ She made her mouth a hot O against my skin and her hand made a basket for my head.
We stayed there until the sun slipped into the water. It was the first time I had seen the sea, and it seemed to be all around us.
‘High these days,’ she said, ‘higher everywhere.’
I was seven years old. She was thirty-two. JD, who was already walking away, calling down to a girl on the beach, had just turned thirteen.
Blue wasn’t born yet – he came afterwards – and you came, too. But the three of us, we would never leave.