out of this place.
The boy glances over his shoulder and calls into a little office behind the counter. Another man in a red T-shirt appears and swiftly crosses the floor in front of us. When he’s in position between us and the door, the boy speaks again. His eyes gleam like wet plums.
’Scuse me, madam, these premises are protected by surveillance cameras. I have to inform you that you and your car-
What? What’s the matter?
He pats a few computer keys and his machine makes some pucking and scratching noises.
I have to inform you that you have been recorded on the company’s CCTV security equipment getting fuel. Pump number 8, right? That’s twenty-six pounds eighty-seven, please. The company operates a strict zero tolerance policy with regard to non-payment. Cash or card, madam?
I simply forgot. It’s an honest error made in a moment of absentmindedness, brought on, no doubt, by the strain of events. In my past life, if such a thing was ever to happen, that’s what I would have been assumed to be: honest and absentminded. Now I look like a thief. They think I’m a thief, and suddenly I feel like one, so how can I do otherwise than act like one? I thrust the money over as if I were paying a fine. I don’t say anything; if I try to explain I just made a mistake I’ll sound like a liar, then they’ll think I’m a liar as well as a thief. But saying nothing makes me seem stealthy and even more guilty; it’s confusing me, being both exposed like this and wrongly accused, and my confusion, too, looks like guilt. I try an apologetic smile but that must look guilty, too, because the boy’s glare shifts from me only long enough to exchange a knowing look with his colleague. Arthur is shaking.
We make it out the door and back to the car. As we drive away it strikes me I’ve made another mistake. We’ll have to stop again. I should have bought food there. If I had, I wouldn’t have been able to forget about paying for the fuel. Now we’ve got next to nothing to eat and I can’t let Arthur starve. I am more unnerved than I can say; the thought of braving such a place again fills me with absolute dread.
We drive for many hours. At around three o’clock in the morning we leave the motorway, and immediately the rushing in my brain eases. Arthur’s head is lolling back, and as I turn up the slip road and steer around the roundabout, it tips and rolls and he wakes up. Just off the junction there’s a long lay-by with a couple of parked lorries and at the very end a food van, lit and open. I pull over and stop. Arthur staggers out and pees against a tree while I buy four of everything: burgers, sausages, bacon rolls, kebabs, chips-enough to keep us going for a while, appetizing or not, stone cold or not.
For the rest of the journey we are travelling into the light. Arthur is cheerful now. He fishes out various maps and points all over them with a pen from the glove compartment, though he isn’t saying much. Somehow he has three pairs of spectacles in his pockets and tries them all, finally using two pairs by wearing one and holding the other halfway between his eyes and the page on his lap.
Ruth, he says, making a face, the old B596 is no more. I’m rerouting us west of Bakewell, we can’t be doing with all this bypass nonsense.
His words are muffled, as if he is chewing on a mouthful of wet paper, but I obey his directions and he settles back and says, Isn’t this nice?
I agree it is. He beams and places a hand on my arm. Oh, isn’t it nice? Going back?
It’s lovely.
Going back together, he says with satisfaction, and we drive on until I have to start singing to keep myself awake. I wind the window down to let in some cold air. We’re climbing higher; the rushing wind has lost the oily tang of the main roads and has the magical pricking sweetness of cut fields and a heavy, early autumn dew. Arthur laughs and joins in with “Green Grow the Rushes-o” and when we finish that he starts up at once with “Jerusalem,” as if he knows a hundred songs and can pick one without thinking. The words come easily, and give him delight.
Remember, Ruth?
Just in time, I do.
Fourteenth of June, 1972, I say, and he smiles at me and squeezes my hand on the steering wheel.
But still I can’t stay awake, and although it’s very nearly light and it can’t be far now, I pull off the road into the opening of a rutted track. Across it just a few feet back from the road there’s a barrier of barbed wire and baler twine, stretched between fence posts set in old concrete-filled paint cans. An electrified livestock fence is drawn across a couple of yards behind that. Beyond it, at the horizon, the sky is solidifying to a pale solid gold, like cooling beeswax. I tip the seat back and close my eyes. Arthur sighs and settles beside me and takes my hand. Except for the occasional soft buffeting of air as a vehicle roars past us, it is quiet and still.
The sun on my face wakes me up. There’s a tight ache around my ribs. The day is already garish but when I get out of the car to stretch my body, I discover it’s also windy and cold. By the side of the track, sparse and stemmy weeds dusky with exhaust fumes wave back and forth, and here and there in the ditch the meagre yellow stars of a wildflower dip among cigarette packets, bottles, and shreds of paper and buckled cans. Miles above us, a few birds fleck a giant, chaotic sky.
Arthur wakes in a bad mood. Of course, he says, peevish and flatulent, he will remember the turnoff out of Netherbarn Cross for Overdale, but we drive three miles too far before he admits in an injured voice that I have missed it. His stomach is upset; he wriggles and scratches and fidgets with the window. I turn the car around and we crawl back the way we came but still he can’t find the turnoff because, he says, he can’t be expected to recognize it approaching from the wrong direction. We persevere, but after more studying of the maps and the tattered hand-drawn directions from nearly forty years ago, twice he chooses the wrong track. One takes us into a farmyard; the other ends at a barred and padlocked brick building stuck with aerials and antennae, property of the electricity company, sitting at the base of a pylon.
It’s not as if you, Arthur says sniffily, as I reverse the car and we start to bump our way back to the road, were ever a natural at map-reading.
I’m too exasperated to reply so we drive on saying nothing for a while, back in the direction of Netherbarn Cross. We pass the same small garage we’ve seen half a dozen times; the situation is getting so desperate that I am steeling myself, if we have to drive past it again, to go in and ask for directions.
Still, he says, I suppose you’d better take a look.
I park at a disused turning that looks as if it might once have led to a hopeless golf course that never prospered. It’s a derelict little place that we’ve passed and repassed in the last hour, but while I’m peering at the map Arthur is staring hard out the window.
Those trees are new, he says eventually.
It seems we’re here. We’ve found it by accident. It’s the trees that threw him, a line of conifers on each side behind low, curving brick walls that also, he says, never used to be here. The old Overdale track has been transformed into an entrance, and the entrance is now in disrepair; in front of each of the two trees nearest the road stands a pair of upright, rusting metal struts, buckled and stricken. One set is quite bare and from the other hang the stiff plywood shreds of a sign long ago ripped away.
And another thing, Arthur grumbles, waving a hand behind him: How could I be expected to find it when everything else is so different? The garage never used to be there, either. And they’ve widened the road and stuck those things in the middle.
There are barriers between the two traffic lanes and a long white-hatched space in the road where coaches can wait before turning. His memory of the old hazardous junction is useless, and the old directions no longer make sense.
They’ve flattened out the bend, he says, aggrieved. No wonder I missed it. After all, you missed it, too, didn’t you?
I start the car again and we set off up the track. The posts of the brick entrance have fallen away and lie crumbled and biscuity on the ground, and across the walls zigzag fissures in the mortar skew the brickwork. There are gaps in the rows of white copestones. Where the conifers end, the way reverts to a country track through fields. A tall green line of weeds grows down the centre of it and swishes the underside of the car. Every few yards we drive over ruts that have been filled with stones or patches of tar, but not recently; thistles and dock sprout through puddles and cracks. I have to stop and get out to move a coil of wire and a sheet of corrugated iron
