‘I’m off for the afternoon,’ he said. ‘And I’ve got some business I’ve been putting off ever since I came back home.’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Is it nice business?’
‘I’m not sure any more.’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s in Darlington. Someone I have to see. Look.’ He glanced around almost furtively. ‘Why don’t you come on the bus to Dario with me this afternoon?’
She had maths. A resit lesson. She couldn’t bear it. ‘All right. Where are we going?’
‘I want to have a nice afternoon round the shops and I want a couple of pints first. And then I want to see… the person I’ve got business with.’
Her interest was roused by now. ‘And I’ll be your moral support?’
He smirked. ‘Aye. What time do the buses go?’
‘Twenty-five to and twenty past.’ She knew exactly: those buses were one of the few routes out of Aycliffe for her. ‘Round the back of Kwiksave.’
They sat on a bench to wait. Penny stared thoughtfully at the rest of the bus queue. She recognised a couple of faces from her new street. There you go, she thought, fitting in already. That bloke with the tattoos from the flats. He was there with a bairn in a pushchair. An ugly-looking baby with an old look about it. He stood with an old woman in a fur-collared coat. Her eyebrows were drawn on too heavily. They were arguing about who was going to spend the coming Christmas with whom. Without even looking at the blue-tattooed man, the older woman muttered, ‘I just want a nice quiet do, after all the fuss last year. You’ve all got to come to me and Iris. All of you.’
The man with the tattoos looked doubtful. And then the bus came. As Penny and Vince took their place in the queue, Vince said, ‘I adore eavesdropping. It makes you feel so glad to be alive.’
Penny thought he was staring at the blue man. ‘Do you know him?’
‘Kind of.’
‘Is it him you’ve got business with?’
‘God, no.’
Penny was offered half fare by the driver. ‘But I’m seventeen!’
‘Sorry,’ said the bus driver. She frowned and pushed a button, doubling the fare.
‘Honestly,’ Penny sighed as Vince led them up the grey spiral staircase. ‘First I couldn’t get served in a pub, then they wouldn’t give me fags, and now this!’
Vince sat heavily on the front seat at the top. His favourite place. ‘Hark at Peter Pan,’ he said.
Behind them the old woman was breaking some news to the man with tattoos and they listened in on this as the bus lurched into the grey wind. The rain started up again.
‘Mark, I’ve got to tell you. She asked me to tell you. Sam’s pregnant again.’
A pause. ‘Oh. By him? By that copper?’
‘Who else? She’s been worrying how to tell you…’
There was a longer pause as the bus wound its way through Aycliffe Industrial Estate, where all the buildings were squat and grey and had gleaming silver logos on their fronts. Penny was watching the slag heaps and miles of metal piping glide by and Vince found he was staring at her fingernails as they fiddled with her bus ticket.
‘Do you always paint your nails black?’ he asked. Immediately she curled her fingers round to hide them. ‘They aren’t painted,’ she said quietly. ‘They’re natural.’
He felt a roll of sympathy in the pit of his stomach. ‘Did they get crushed?’
Penny gave a sigh, preparing to give something away. ‘When I was tiny, when I was first born, my dad took me out of the incubator and out of the hospital, into the car park. He held me out to the moon and shouted and cried… and we j were struck by lightning.’
‘Oh .. .’ Vince fell quiet.
Now they were on the outskirts of the industrial estate, coming down Fujitsu Lane.
Behind them the man with the tattoos said to the old woman, ‘Tell Sam I’m pleased for her, Peggy. If another bairn is what she wants.’
Vince rolled his eyes. ‘It’s babies everywhere you turn, some days.’
Then their bus met the motorway, bringing them to the flat stretches of yellow, drizzly fields that stretched out the distance to Darlington.
FOUR
She stared fiercely at herself. The lights on board the bus at night were blue like a butcher’s freezer. They made her reflection turquoise, hollowed out. It slid through the glossy dark all the way home and kept her company. At one point Penny thought miserably, I am my own best company. Then she put a stop to that. Look, she told herself, I’ve had a nice day, a nice time with lovely and interesting people. Now it’s time to go home. This is the last bus home. It’s midnight almost. There’s nothing more to be had out of this night. So why was it she felt so let down? She wasn’t even sure what was making her glare at her own reflection. She felt that someone had got her all stirred up, only to let her drop.
Buses at night made her nervous. Penny bided her time until home and consoled herself that at least the 213 went right to the stop outside her house. At least she wouldn’t need to go traipsing round the streets, still unsure of her own estate’s geography. But if that was the best she could salvage from this evening, then to hell with it. Was that the most she could expect from life — to get home safely?
Don’t knock it, she thought. I’ll settle for safety just now. Voices came from upstairs and further back down the lower deck. Voices raucously enjoying themselves on the last bus home. Whoever they were, whatever they were up to, Penny found them unnerving. She wished she was in a gang. Purposefully she had sat right behind the driver. He had a thick red neck and his bald head was white as a knuckle under the lights. Whenever she looked at him for reassurance — measuring his dependability every time she got a twinge of nervousness
