Peter May - Runaway

She nodded and laid her head against my chest. ‘Me, too. But once you start along that road, Jack... It’s a gentle slope on the way down, but Everest climbing back up.’

‘So let me be your Sherpa.’

Which made her laugh, and I think it was the first time I ever heard her do that.

The moment was broken by the sound of a car engine turning over at low rev and slowly approaching through the night. Then came the sound of acceleration, and headlights tipping up into the sky, before levelling off and shining among the wet branches of the trees that grew along the near embankment. The car had pulled up outside the station.

We ran quickly inside to waken the others, but they were already on their feet. The sound of a car door opening seemed inordinately loud in the still of the night.

Jeff peered out through a gap in the boards that blanked out one of the windows. ‘Jobbies, it’s the cops!’

His whisper conveyed his panic, and there were no words required to choreograph our flight. Splinters of light came through all the gaps in the boarding, like cracks in the dark, as someone on the outside shone a torch on the building. In hurried silence we collected our stuff and moved quickly out on to the platform. The sound of footsteps on gravel accompanied the beam of the torch as it flashed around the gate off to our right, and we jumped down on to the track and began running north, across the bridge we had seen from Station Lane. Houses and pasture shimmered below us on either side of the embankment, a stream bubbling in reflected moonlight, and I felt how totally exposed we were before we reached the shadowed shelter of the trees.

I didn’t look back until the track began to curve away to the left, and I saw the beams of two torches playing around the station platform before disappearing inside the building itself. Of course, we had left traces. Cigarette ends. The scattered remains of Rachel’s abortive attempt to reclaim oblivion. They would know we had been there, but not how long since we had left, nor which direction we had taken. It only remained for us to put as much distance as possible between them and ourselves before daybreak.

And so we pressed on. It was not easy to make good speed walking on uneven ballast, which was all that remained of the track after the lifting of the rails and sleepers. Nature was already reclaiming it, with weeds and grasses poking up between the stones, and growth from the embankments on either side encroaching on what had once been clear and well-maintained track.

We were, intermittently, raised up above the land, or plunged into the shadow of steep embankments rising up into the night. Sometimes exposed to the world, and at other times lost beneath overhanging branches, wading through long grass and briars.

There was not much to be said as we trudged through the darkness, tired and dispirited, each of us wondering perhaps how it had all come to this. How quickly we had transitioned from predictable suburban existence, school and group, exams and dances, to the chaos of the last thirty-odd hours. How easily we had completely lost control of our lives. And I suppose that only now were we starting to come to terms with how lost and foolish and naive we really were.

Dawn arrived almost without us noticing. A grey light that gradually brought definition to the world around us, before the first shallow rays of angled sunlight played through the branches of the trees. The birdsong was very nearly deafening.

Tangled, tree-covered embankments rose steeply on either side, and ahead we saw the tall arches of a bridge that carried a road across the old line perhaps thirty feet above us. A car passed unseen across it, behind high brick walls. Sunlight fell in broken patches all around us, and I felt the chill of the night slowly start to dissipate.

I had no idea how far we had come, but Luke suggested it was perhaps time to get off the track and back on to the road, and there was not one of us who was going to take issue with him.

It was a hard climb, with bags and guitars, up the sodden, overgrown embankment, brambles and branches catching and tugging at our clothes. But the reward was sunshine and smooth tarmac beneath our feet. I glanced at Rachel. Her pallor was almost deathly, and she seemed to have shrunk during the course of the night, her eyes even larger in her skull.

‘You alright?’ I asked her in a low voice.

She nodded, but she didn’t look it.

We walked, then, for fifteen or twenty minutes along the narrow country road that the bridge had carried across the railway until we reached the main A58 road to Wetherby. It was another ten minutes before we successfully flagged down a farmer in a tractor pulling an empty animal trailer. Luke did an amazing job of persuading him that our van had broken down on the road and that we needed to get to the nearest town to phone for help. All those years, I thought, spent on doorsteps with his parents, smiling and feigning vulnerability, drawing the pity or sympathy of otherwise hostile householders.

The farmer chuckled and said, ‘Well, if you don’t mind squatting down in the straw and shit in the trailer, I’m going to the market at Wetherby, and I can take you that far.’

And so that’s what we did. A kind of final indignity. But in truth, by then we were past caring.

In a café in Wetherby we got egg rolls and mugs of steaming hot tea, and began to feel almost human again. I watched Rachel eat hungrily, as if she had not fed herself properly in weeks. She caught me looking at her, then quickly averted her eyes, embarrassed. We lit cigarettes, and through a fug of smoke drew up our battle plan.

Maurie had crossed the street to a newsagent’s shop to bring back a map so that we could see where we were. He stabbed a finger at Wetherby, then traced a line along the B1224 to York.

‘Bound to be able to catch a train to London from there,’ he said.

Luke nodded. ‘It’s on the main east-coast line from Edinburgh.’ He glanced at Dave. ‘We got enough money for that?’

Dave patted his middle. ‘More than.’ Then he glanced at Jeff. ‘But maybe we should be looking for a new drummer. It would save us money.’

‘Hey!’ Jeff protested

But it was Maurie who shut him up. ‘You don’t even get a say in this. We were running away from home, that’s what we were doing. Being accessories to theft wasn’t part of the deal. The least you could have done was tell us.’

Jeff adopted a wounded look. ‘We’d never have got on the road at all if I hadn’t got us a van.’

And I began to think that maybe that would have been the best outcome of all.

There was a silent stand-off before Jeff said, ‘Aw, come on, you’re not serious.’

Dave leaned across the table, his voice low and dangerous. ‘I’d dump you in a heartbeat, pal.’

It was Rachel who surprised us all. ‘Maybe you should just go home, the lot of you.’

Twenty-four hours earlier there would have been an instant chorus of NO! The fact that no one said anything spoke volumes.

I looked at Rachel. ‘What about you?’

‘I’m going to London.’ Her quiet certainty left none of us in doubt that she meant it.

‘I’m going with Rachel,’ I said.

‘Never in doubt for me,’ Luke said. ‘The day I left home was the first day of the rest of my life. And that doesn’t include going back. Ever.’

‘Well, I’m going with you guys.’ Maurie looked at his cousin. ‘Someone’s got to look out for Rachel.’

She glared at him. ‘I can look after myself.’

‘Oh, really? You haven’t done such a great job of it so far.’

I felt a spike of anger and pushed my hand into Maurie’s chest, shoving him back in his seat. ‘Lay off her.’