Peter May - Runaway

Jack said grimly, ‘Dave has a wee problem.’

‘Pfffff.’ He heard the air escape from Ricky’s lips. ‘That’s all we need.’

Jack turned round in his seat to fix Dave in his gaze. ‘You promised.’

Dave was uncomfortable, but unapologetic. ‘It’s only a few beers.’

Jack grabbed for the bag. ‘Give me it.’

Dave turned it away from him. ‘No.’

‘For God’s sake!’ Ricky said, trying to keep his focus on the road.

Jack lunged back over his seat, reaching for the rucksack, this time seizing it and prising it from Dave’s grasp. He swung it into the front of the car.

‘Aw, Jack, come on! That’s not fair.’

Jack opened the rucksack on his knees and found the six-pack of beer wrapped in a nightshirt. He rolled down the window and checked in the wing mirror before chucking the cans out into the night, one by one. He saw them explode as they hit the road, bursts of phosphorescent foam glowing briefly pink in the rear sidelights of the car.

He heard Dave groaning in the dark.

When all the cans were gone and Jack had closed the window, Dave’s voice came leaden and bitter from behind him. ‘See what I said tae you at the hospital, aboot Donnie and that? I take it all back.’

The thick silence that settled in the aftermath of the moment was invaded by a buzz of electronic music punctuated by the repeating vocal refrain: Turn down for what .

‘What on earth’s that?’ Jack said.

‘My phone.’ Ricky’s voice came back at him out of the dark. ‘It’s a cool ringtone. From a single by DJ Snake and Lil Jon. It’s in my jacket pocket. You could get it out for me.’

Jack delved into Ricky’s pocket and felt the phone vibrating in his hand as he pulled it out.

‘It should say who’s calling.’

Jack looked at the display and felt a mixer start up in his stomach. ‘It’s your dad.’

‘Oh shit. What time is it?’

‘Just after ten. Where did you say you were going tonight?’

‘To the pictures.’

‘So you’d be mid-movie right now. Why would he be calling?’

‘He must have found the note. Don’t answer it.’

‘Don’t worry, I wasn’t about to.’

They sat in tense silence until the phone stopped shouting turn down for what at them. Then the silence deepened as they waited expectantly for the tone which would announce that Ricky’s father had left a message. It came after nearly thirty interminable seconds. Ricky snatched the phone from his grandfather. Flicking his eyes between the road and the screen, he activated the message to play on speaker.

Malcolm’s voice was tight with tension. ‘Ricky, you silly bloody idiot! What do you think you’re doing? How could you let that old fart talk you into doing something this stupid?’

Jack bristled.

They could almost hear Ricky’s father trying to control his breathing. ‘But it’s alright, son. I don’t blame you. There’ll be hell to pay right enough, but it’s your grandfather who’ll be paying it.’

‘See?’ Jack said, glancing at his grandson. ‘Told you I’d get the blame.’

Ricky’s face was whale-blubber white, but his eyes were fixed on the road. ‘And so you should. It’s all your fault.’

His father’s voice crackled over the messaging service. ‘I’m on the road right now. And you know I’ll catch up with you eventually. So pull into the first service station you come to, and call me back.’

‘Don’t you dare!’ Jack said.

Ricky swallowed with difficulty. ‘What are we going to do?’

Jack thought about it. ‘Well, he’s right. The Mondeo’s going to outrun the Micra in time. But we’ve got an hour’s head start. We’ll just keep going. Down the M6 till we can turn off the motorway and go cross-country to Leeds. We can pick up the M1 south from there.’

Dave’s voice came chuckling out of the back. He had forgotten his beer for the moment. ‘Just like we did back then, eh?’

Jack glanced across at Ricky and saw the tension in his grandson’s hands, knuckles almost glowing white in the dark, and he had a sickening sense of déjà vu.

‘Jobbies!’

No one was paying much attention to Jeff, or the road. We were, all of us, lost in our own thoughts. Coming to terms with just what it was we had done, and were doing, and the realization that there was no going back. These were dark moments of doubt and regret, yet at the same time seductive and exciting. Like those first pioneers who had crossed the North American continent, we were setting out on a journey without the least idea of where it would take us and when, or if, we would ever be back. It was a journey into our collective future. A voyage into the unknown.

‘What’s wrong?’ I said. I was still perched uncomfortably on the engine cowling, Maurie in the passenger seat, and Luke and Dave on the settee in the back. I hoped I wasn’t going to spend the entire trip with a 1703cc engine thrumming away beneath my arse. It makes me shudder now to think that none of us wore seat belts. There weren’t any in the van, and in 1965 we simply never gave it a second thought. But if we’d had a collision, or even made an emergency stop, I’d have been head first through that windscreen.

‘I’ve missed the turn-off,’ Jeff said. We had come up through Busby and East Kilbride New Town. As a kid I had thought there was something almost futuristic about East Kilbride. Clusters of skyscraper apartments that I could see on the skyline across the fields. There was nothing like that where we lived, and I thought they looked exotic, like a page from a sci-fi comic pasted on the horizon. Of course, I had no idea then what soulless places new towns really were.

‘What road should we be on?’

‘The A776 to Hamilton, and then on to the A74.’

‘Well, what road are we on?’

‘The A726 to Strathaven,’ Jeff said. (Which is pronounced ‘Straven’, even though there’s an ‘ath’ in it. I’ve never known why.) ‘There’s an AA Book of the Road in the glove compartment. Get it out and tell me how we get on to the A74.’

I dug a big Reader’s Digest AA book out of the glove compartment and by the light of the courtesy lamp flicked through pages of maps until I found us. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘We go straight through Strathaven and stay on the A726 till we see a turn-off for Lesmahagow. That’s the most direct route for getting on to the A74 now.’ Which is how I became our navigator for the journey. By accident and default.

We got safely on to the main road south in the end, and ploughed off into the dark of the night. I was aware of the shadows of treeless hills rising up around us, the old van labouring up inclines, and then gaining speed on the descent. Jeff seemed to be doing his best to run over the rabbits that kept darting across our path, as if it were some kind of a game.

There was a long, slow climb up and over Beattock Summit. I could feel the wind up there buffeting the high sides of our van, and saw Jeff fighting the wheel to keep us in our lane. No one spoke much during those first couple of hours. It was a time of reflection, of ugly reality setting in.

Then Dave’s voice piped up from the back. ‘Gonnae have tae stop for a pee soon.’

It was another fifteen minutes before we saw the lights of a transport café up ahead in the darkness, like an island of light floating in the black of the night. When I think of that night, I wonder what the odds were of our stopping at that café, at that moment. But I have since learned that fate, and Dave’s bladder, work in the strangest ways.

Tall, four-headed lamp posts spilled their yellow light on to a wide gravel parking area as we pulled off the road. There were several lorries, drawn up side by side, a van and a couple of private cars. We all climbed stiffly out into the cold wind that swept down from the hills above us, stamping the blood back into sleeping limbs, and went into the smoky warmth of the café. Some lorry drivers who clearly knew one another sat around a couple of Formica-topped tables that were marked with coffee rings and cigarette burns, and sticky with spilled sugar. A couple of other tables were occupied by solitary travellers, and an elderly woman behind the counter asked us in a velvety-rich smoker’s voice what we would like. We ordered coffees and Tunnock’s Tea Cakes, and took it in turns to use the toilet.