Peter May - Runaway

‘What would be the point?’ Dave said.

‘Of what?’

‘Going tae see your cousin.’

Maurie turned on him. ‘A roof over our heads, food in our bellies. And maybe they can lend us money and help us get back on the road.’

I sensed Maurie’s anger. He had just broken his promise to his cousin for our common good, and maybe he felt the idea deserved a better reception.

I did, too. ‘I think it’s a brilliant idea. And in the absence of a better one, I say we go to Leeds.’

‘Me, too.’ Luke nodded his agreement

Dave shrugged. ‘Suppose so.’ And, as an afterthought, ‘What about Jobby Jeff?’

‘He doesn’t get a say.’ I was adamant about that. ‘We wouldn’t be in this mess if he hadn’t insisted on giving Dennis a lift.’

‘Good.’ Luke rubbed his hands together with renewed enthusiasm. ‘All we have to do now is find the keys for the van and we’ll be on our way. Someone better wake up Jobby Jeff.’

We searched among the gravestones for more than half an hour without success. Great gnarled pines sent long shadows through grass that hadn’t yet been cut after the winter. It gave me a strange feeling to be searching like that among the dead, where people had been laid to rest for eternity. I felt like we were disturbing their peace. Thomas Bowe of Swinside Farm. Henry Herbert Jay and his wife, Jessie. Joseph Tickell of Thornthwaite, who died on 7th March 1901, at the age of seventy. It didn’t seem right to be tramping over their graves, stupid boys on a fool’s errand, naive and unworldly, taken for suckers on their first night away from home.

In the end it was Luke who solved our problem. We were simply searching randomly. Until he called on us to stop. We all raised expectant heads as he stooped to pick up a stone from the path, and weighed it in his palm.

‘This is probably close to the weight of the keys,’ he said. ‘I’ll go out there and throw it from where Dennis was standing. I think I remember roughly what direction he threw them. You lot watch out for where it lands, and we’ll concentrate our search there.’

We watched as he went back out into the turning area, positioning himself where he thought Dennis had been standing, and then throwing the stone just as hard as Dennis had thrown the keys. We watched where it landed, which was quite a bit further in than any of us had been looking. We found the keys nestling in the grass within three feet of the stone in less than two minutes.

Another ten minutes and we were on the road, following the signposts back to Keswick, where we stopped at a café and bought tea and bacon butties. I consulted the Reader’s Digest AA Book of the Road , and plotted a course. And then we were off, heading south out of Keswick on the A591 to Windermere and Kendal.

The first few miles passed in sombre silence, until someone in the back said, ‘It’s different with me and Veronica.’

And we all burst out laughing.

Except for Jeff, who looked both puzzled and aggrieved. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What!’

Which only made us laugh even harder.

Spirits soared then, and we started singing daft rugby songs with vulgar lyrics. It is astonishing how youthful ignorance can put adversity so easily aside to breed baseless optimism. Older, wiser heads might have embarked on this leg of the journey with a little more caution. But when you are seventeen, with the road powering past beneath you, and the sun shining in your eyes, you never imagine for one moment that things could ever go anything but well.

The road wound through mountain passes, tree-covered escarpments rising steeply from deep, dark lakes reflecting mountains like mirrors. Thirlmere, Windermere. If I hadn’t known better I’d have sworn that the Scottish West Highlands had been transplanted right here in the north-west of England.

It was a stunning day. Chilly still, but without a cloud in the sky. It didn’t take us long to reach the crossroads town of Kendal and then on to the A65 cross-country to Leeds itself.

Two things happened on that drive to change our mood. The first was a change in the weather. From that clear, cold, sunny start, the day turned slowly grey. Dark clouds overtook us from the west, low and laden with rain that began to fall around lunchtime. The second was a change of landscape.

From the lakes and mountains of the north-west, we had reached to the rolling farmland and picturesque stone villages of the Yorkshire Dales. But now, as we approached Leeds itself, the darkening sky turned sulphurous yellow, the mills that ringed the city pumping coal smoke into air already thick with it. Stone villages and affluent suburbs gave way to decaying brick terraces. As we drove into it, the city seemed to fold itself around us, drawing us into its crumbling industrial heart.

This was a city in transition, in the process of slum clearance and new build. A city characterized by the chimneys of the mills that pricked the blackening sky, a legacy of nineteenth-century industrialization which, within a quarter of a century, would be decimated by eleven years of Thatcher government. Years that destroyed the industrial base of a nation and sowed the seeds of future financial meltdown.

I had grown up in another industrial city, but Leeds had little of Glasgow’s Victorian grandeur, or the splendid architectural inheritance of the Tobacco Lords. Perhaps it was the rain, and the poisonous sky, but it felt mean as we approached it that afternoon, a city in decline. On another day, in bright sunshine, Leeds might have offered a very different impression of itself. Sunlight so colours our view of the world. But that afternoon it spoke to us only of grim urban deprivation. Our optimism of earlier in the day was crushed by its minacious sky and the creeping return of a brutal sense of reality.

We parked the van in a side street on the south-western edge of the city, bought some cigarettes, and went into a pub crowded with factory workers at the end of their shift. We found seats in an alcove near the back and sent Jeff to get us halves of lager, since he looked older than the rest of us. We sat and smoked, making our own contribution to the pall of pollution that hung in the place, kippering our clothes and stinging our eyes. Maurie used the phone at the bar to call his cousin.

While he was gone, Luke picked up her letter from the table and read it out loud.

Dear Mo,

Wanted you to have my address and number. Just in case. Andy’s not exactly who I thought he was when we met in Glasgow. Funny how you think you know folk when you really don’t. But things are okay. I’m trying to get a job. That would help. I’d like to feel more independent. Anyway, take care. If anything happens, tell my mum and dad I love them, in spite of everything.

Love,

‘Raitch?’ Dave said.

‘Rachel.’ Jeff rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘Lovely-looking girl. Used to fancy her myself.’

‘Before Veronica stole your heart?’ I cocked an eyebrow in his direction.

He gave me a withering look, then flicked his head towards the letter. ‘She doesn’t sound very happy.’

Luke whistled, and we all turned to look at him. His eyes were still fixed on the crumpled sheet of blue notepaper in his hands.

‘Just seen the address.’ He looked up. ‘Quarry Hill Flats.’

I frowned. ‘What, you mean you know it?’

Luke raised his eyes from the letter. ‘It’s pretty famous. Or should I say infamous?’

‘How would you know?’ Dave took a long pull at his beer.

‘We got several classes from Mr Eccleston on twentieth-century social housing. Part of my history of architecture course.’