Peter May - Runaway

‘I don’t like him,’ I said. ‘We can navigate ourselves “off-piste” for tonight.’

‘I’m with Jack,’ Luke said, and we looked at Dave and Maurie.

Their joint indecision was paralysing.

‘This is just rude,’ Jeff said. ‘We’re insulting the bloke now. And we don’t have time to argue about it. It’s my van. I say we go with him.’ He looked at each of us in turn, almost daring us to say no. And when no one came up with a better plan, he turned and waved to Dennis. ‘We’re on.’

Dennis smiled and lifted his bomber jacket. ‘Good call, boys. You’ll not regret it.’

But I had a bad feeling that we might.

To my chagrin it was still my fate to sit up on the engine cowling. Maurie had moved into the back to share the settee with Luke and Dave, and had been replaced in the front by the cool Dennis who, as if to underscore his image, chain-smoked an American brand of menthol cigarettes called Kool.

There had been a strange, unspoken shift in the hierarchical structure of our little group. I had been the prime mover in the decision to run away, along with Luke, and up until then had been silently accepted, if not actually acknowledged, as the leader. But now I had been displaced by Dennis. He was three or four years older than us, and beside him we just seemed like the schoolkids we were. And Jeff, the only one of us not still at school, had become his lieutenant. I felt control of our situation slipping away from us, but was powerless to do anything about it.

The A74 took us on a tortuous tour of the southern uplands of Scotland before levelling off into the flood plains of the Solway Firth and the River Esk. I saw a signpost caught fleetingly in our headlights for a place called Metal Bridge, and shortly after that we saw a sign at the side of the road for ENGLAND , and I left Scotland for the first time in my life. Odd how straight away it felt different, as if I had passed into a foreign land. And those differences were immediately apparent in the change from stone-built to brick-built houses and farm buildings. I felt the chill of uncertainty creep over me. I was well out of my comfort zone now.

Carlisle was like a ghost town, alien and strange. Empty streets simmering in darkness beneath feeble street lamps. We stopped at an all-night filling station for petrol, and drove out of town on the A6.

The tension in the van was very nearly tangible. No one actually voiced the thought, but it seemed likely now that Maurie’s dad and mine could not be very far behind. I could see Jeff constantly checking his side mirrors and tensing every time we were overtaken.

The only one of us completely at ease with the situation was Dennis. He lit another Kool as we passed a road sign for Penrith. It was just ten miles away.

‘Won’t be long now,’ he said.

I could hear him grin in the dark, and saw his smoke rings flattening out against the windscreen in the lights of an on-coming vehicle.

And then we were off the A6, heading west towards Keswick on the A594, and it was like a huge weight had lifted off us all. We had made the turn-off before the dads caught up, and now we were home free, as if the invisible umbilical that had somehow kept us attached to everyone and everything we had known since birth had finally, irrevocably, been severed. We were into the uncharted territory of our new lives.

Dave, it turned out, had cans of stout planked in his rucksack. He passed them around, and we smoked our Player’s No. 6 and speculated about how much longer it would take us to get to London, and what we were going to do when we got there.

The road wound its way through undulating, open country peppered with darker areas of forest, and a three-quarter moon shone its colourless light across the land. We passed through tiny villages, houses huddled in darkness, and became aware of the land starting to rise up around us again as we drove into the Cumbrian mountains.

Moonlight cascaded across black water below us as we drove down into a larger town beyond the village of Threlkeld. Its street lamps twinkled in the night, light pollution masking the great canopy of the cosmos whose jewelled sky had, until then, sparkled above our flight path.

‘This is Keswick,’ Dennis said. ‘And Derwent Water.

Jeff changed down the gears as we descended into the town, past slate stone villas sitting proud above steep gardens, and a red-sandstone police station on the bend at the foot of the hill.

As we turned into the main street Dennis said, ‘Stop here.’

Jeff pulled up sharply. Dennis swung the door open and jumped down on to the pavement. Cigarette smoke from the van billowed out and cold air rushed in.

‘Going to call the missus, just to let her know I’ll be arriving with a few fellas. If you’re lucky, she might do you a fry-up.’

He grinned and pulled open the door of the red telephone box that stood on the corner, swinging himself into the light inside and fishing in his pocket for some coins.

I pulled the passenger door shut and said, ‘We don’t need him any more, and we’ve got him almost home. We could just drive off.’

Jeff swung himself round in the driver’s seat and glared at me. ‘Are you mad? The bloke’s just saved our hide. And do you really want to spend the night in the van?’

‘I don’t like him,’ I said.

‘Neither do I.’ Luke’s voice came from the back, and I felt bolstered by his support.

But Dave said, ‘He seems alright to me.’

And Jeff clamped his hands firmly on the wheel. ‘Well, I’m driving, and I’m not leaving him here. End of argument.’

And it was.

Dennis climbed back in, bringing the chill of the cold night air with him. ‘It’s all set. My good lady’s cracking eggs into the pan as we speak. Bet you fellas are hungry.’

‘Sure are,’ Dave piped up from the back.

Luke said nothing, and Maurie, who had been ominously non-committal about the whole thing, remained silent.

Jeff glared at me. ‘I could eat a scabby dug,’ he said, and crunched the column shift back into gear.

The van lurched off through Keswick, gathering speed until we emerged from its leafy suburbs on to a road signposted to Braithwaite. We were there in a matter of minutes, slowing to wind our way through narrow streets crowded by stone cottages, then out again into vivid moonlight that washed across a valley floor of fallow fields and phosphorescent streams.

Tree-covered hills folded in around us. We passed a cottage called Sour Riggs crouched behind high hedges, and the entrance to a place called Ladstock Hall. But we couldn’t see the house itself.

‘Take a right just up ahead here,’ Dennis told Jeff. His earlier, relaxed demeanour had gone, and he seemed alert now, a little on edge, sitting forward in his seat and peering ahead through the windscreen.

Jeff had to slow almost to a halt to make the turn into what was little more than a lane. I saw a wooden signpost pointing the way to Thornthwaite Church.

‘You live in a church?’ I said sceptically.

Dennis glanced at me. It was clear he knew I didn’t like him.

But still he smiled. ‘Haha, no. Irreligious, me. The missus, too. Haven’t been in a church for years.’ He paused. ‘The cottage is just beyond it.’

Jeff had reduced the speed of the van to little more than walking pace to guide it between the hedgerows, the bowed heads of thousands of daffodils smothering overgrown verges and glowing virulent yellow in the headlights. We came round the bend at the foot of the slope and saw the church brooding darkly behind a high stone wall and surrounded by the headstones of the dead, big and small, and canted at odd angles. A farm gate closed off access to a muddy track from a small parking area, and a car sat, half-reversed into a path that disappeared into dark pasture beyond a small, fast-running stream.