That first day, I barely came across anyone. A scattering of people – an old man cleaning a car without tyres, his wife at the upstairs window who told him to come inside as soon as she saw me. Everyone I saw seemed to avoid me even more than I avoided them. Soon, even before an hour had passed, one of my knees started clicking. Making the noise a small branch does when it’s thrown in a fire. I wasn’t used to walking long distances. One of my toenails broke against the tip of my shoe. I found the bit that had come off and it was soft. Brittle too, almost like chalk. I rolled it back and forth between my fingers and wondered if all my bones had become like that.
In a field where the grass was long enough to fold around me when I sat down, I stopped to eat one of Kole’s sausages. It had sweated in my pocket. It was softer than before, but it left my lips salty, and that was nice. I lay back for a while – I thought that if I let what I’d eaten go down slower, I would take more from it. I pressed my eyes until I saw tie-dye.
It was nearly dark when I woke up. However hot it was, the sun wasn’t sticking around for long. I touched my tummy and there was dew on my T-shirt, beads of it, that looked like they’d picked up the colour of the material. I put my lip to one. It tasted sour. The sky above me was dark blue, bruised looking. The clouds looked like they were about to buckle. Then the first drop landed.
I ran as fast as I could. Kole’s bag, heavy with the gun, banged against my hip and left a cut there. The drops started, felt more like balls, heavy when they hit my head.
That was when I saw a sign saying HOLIDAYS. Next to it, a child’s swing, chains hanging rusty, the seat missing. Behind them, caravans. I caught my breath under a tree. I held Kole’s bag so it wouldn’t bang against me and make noise. As I got closer to the caravans, glass crunched under my feet, the wind whistled through broken windows. The first one I came to was dark inside and out. Someone had torched it and the plastic almost looked like it had turned to wood. There was a huge hole in the ceiling of a second, from a fallen tree branch, but a third looked okay. My hand found the cold of Kole’s gun. The handle was stiff; it took me a moment to open the door. When I did, I pointed the gun in both ways as quickly as I could then I realised I wasn’t even looking. The sudden quiet, relatively, away from the rain.
The door locked from the inside. I slid the bolt across. A small kitchen sink, full of dust. There was a jam jar next to the tap with four toothbrushes in it – two big, two small. Insects had turned to powder in the lightshade, but you could still see the little lines of their legs. I opened all the cupboards. There were brown coffee cups, handles missing. In a biscuit tin, a yellow plastic pot of rust-red iodine tablets. I turned the tap and no water ran. There was an empty crisp packet on the floor. My fingers scooted around it and scooped up the leftover salt. Deep in the back of one cupboard I found a can of mushy peas.
I ate in the toilet because it felt better to have two doors between me and the outside, and I sat there until the rattling patter of rain on the roof dimmed to a drip, then turned off. By then, it was pitch-black.
I felt my way to bunk beds. I chose the top one so if someone came in the night they wouldn’t see me straight away. I slept with the gun in my hand, my hand tucked under a small pillow that threw up a storm of grey dust whenever I moved my head. My dreams were a mess. You were there, kissing my knees. Then you kissed the inside of my arms. You whispered into my ear that it would all be okay, and then, the way that happens in dreams, your face became Meyer’s face, and then Kole’s, and my eyes snapped open. The dreams only got worse after that.
In the morning, it felt like my skin had shrunk. I made my way to the mirror in the bathroom. My neck was bright, electric red. Sunburn. I peeled off my thin T-shirt, flinching as the seams hit.
All of the ideas my mum would have had to fix it ran through my head. Cold showers, sunflower oil. None of them had ever worked. I didn’t care. All I wanted was for her to be there.
I decided to spend one more day at the caravan park and leave at the crack of dawn the next morning. My toe that had lost the nail was still bleeding, and there were cuts all across the back of my ankles too. I’d worn my shoes in the water and when they’d dried, the salt had turned them rock hard.
I washed my trainers in a stream, and while they were drying, I made food. Under the sink in a different caravan, I’d found a bag of open pasta. There were some bugs inside the top layer, dead now, but I put each piece of pasta in my mouth like a flute and blew them out. One of the cookers still had gas so I dragged the heavy blue bottle back to my place. I found water in one of the kettles. There were lily pads of mould on the surface of the water but I dragged them off with the back of a spoon. The first bowl of pasta I cooked too quickly, the second too long, but I ate the whole bag in almost one go and then vomited white water.
Outside, the day was bright. The sun made stars as it came through the cracks in the window. I found some moisturiser, almost empty, and cut it open to get the last little bit out and put it on my neck, and when my shoes were dry, I walked to try to get a better sense of where I was. Kole’s compass was broken. I could point it the same way, and it would show me N, then E then S.
Somewhere not too far from the caravans, I found berries. Further on, I found a bus, flipped on its side a few hundred metres after a stop. The pole at the bus stop had been turned into a flag with a T-shirt and someone had painted some place names in white paint on the road. None of the names were on Davey’s map.
It was at the furthest point in the walk that I saw Westwood Cross, the old shopping centre, in the distance.