Peter May - Runaway

Luke intervened. ‘Okay, enough! Enough! We’re going to London, right?’

There was a silent, huffy acknowledgement around the table, and Jeff said, ‘But not without me.’

It was more a question than a statement, though not one that anyone chose to answer.

Luke said, ‘We need to save our money. So we should hitch. But not all together. In ones and twos. It’s not that far. About fifteen miles. We should make it by lunchtime and we can all meet up at the station.’

‘I’ll go with Rachel,’ Maurie said, and he looked at me in a way that dared me to contradict him.

Which, of course, I did. ‘No, I will.’

He glared. ‘Well, maybe we should ask Rachel.’

All eyes turned towards her. She glanced at both of us and I willed her to choose me.

Finally her gaze met mine, conveying a confusion of unspoken messages. ‘I’ll go with Jack.’

And Dave said, ‘Aye, and if Jeff’s the last there, we’ll just get the train without him.’

It was no surprise, then, that Jeff somehow contrived to be first.

Rachel and I got a lift almost immediately. I made myself inconspicuous as she stood at the side of the road. A white delivery van driven by a young man in his twenties pulled up within the first few minutes. He looked seriously disappointed when I appeared behind Rachel to climb up into the front beside her. But by then it was too late. Grudgingly he slid my guitar into the back of the van and took us all the way to Station Road in York, dropping us right in front of the historic, yellow-brick station building.

However, he’d had to stop to make several deliveries en route, and Jeff was standing under the clock waiting for us when we got there. He had cadged a lift on a motorbike, riding pillion without a helmet, and his hair looked like he’d been pulled through a hedge backwards. He was pleased as punch to have got there ahead of us.

By ten thirty we were all assembled in the station. By eleven we had six one-way, off-peak tickets to London and were standing on the platform waiting for our train. Within half an hour we had a second-class compartment to ourselves. We were oddly subdued as, finally, the Deltic, Class 55, diesel-powered train pulled out of the station on its two-and-a-half-hour journey to the capital.

At long, long last we were on our way to the Big Smoke, and not one of us had a word to say about it.

It was Jack’s idea to retrace their footsteps of all those years before, as if in doing so they might find something they had lost on the way.

The night before, Ricky had left the M6 shortly after Carlisle, then navigated them cross-country using the GPS on his iPhone. They had found a lay-by with toilets somewhere in the Northumberland National Park, and pulled in to spend the night.

Maurie had slept most of the way, and only got out of the car once they stopped for the night. He threw up and emptied his bladder, took his painkillers and was asleep again in minutes.

Dave was still barely on speaking terms with Jack for lobbing his cans of beer out of the car on the motorway. He had hunched himself up in his coat and turned his face to the window, a small patch of condensation forming where his slow, laboured breath burst against it.

Ricky, too, was in a huff with his grandfather, reclining his seat as far as possible, then closing his eyes.

Which had left Jack as the sole occupant of the car for whom sleep would simply not come. He listened to the snorts and grunts of his sleeping companions in the back, and the gentle snoring of his grandson in the seat beside him. The night folded itself around them, the foggy constellation of the Milky Way as visible as he had ever seen it above the tops of the trees. Like smoke. And as it always did, any contemplation of the vastness of the universe made him feel infinitely small.

Just like fifty years before, he had found his mind full of doubts about the wisdom of what they were doing. And full of trepidation about what lay ahead. But these were such tiny concerns in the grand scheme of things, that come daybreak they burned off with the rising of the sun, like morning mist.

He had wakened the others at first light to slunge sleepy faces in icy water, and the GPS had taken them down the A66, then the A1, before turning them off on to the A64 towards Leeds.

It was only as they passed a sign on their right to Thorner that Jack suddenly sat up. ‘Hey, remember that place!’

‘What?’ Dave lifted his eyes from some sightless reverie.

Jack turned in his seat, looking back as they passed it. ‘Thorner Lane. That’s where we very nearly had the head-on with the police car.’

Maurie seemed to wake up fully for the first time. ‘Where we crashed the van?’

‘Where Jeff crashed the van,’ Dave corrected him.

‘Yeah, in Thorner itself,’ Jack said. ‘Stop, Rick. Let’s go back.’

Ricky slowed up and the car behind peeped its horn. He glanced in the mirror. ‘What for?’

‘Just turn round and I’ll tell you.’

Ricky sighed and turned into a lay-by at the opening to a field. When the road was clear he made a U-turn, and they headed back towards the turn-off to Thorner while Jack provided his grandson with a potted version of what had happened that night. Ricky listened with a growing sense of astonishment, his mouth gaping as his eyes widened on the road ahead.

Thorner Lane ran long and straight with fallow fields stretching away into the hazy morning on either side. It was all that Jack could recall about the road. It had been so dark, and wet, that the only remaining memory he had of it was the black, shiny ribbon of tarmac stretching off to infinity, and Rachel sitting on the engine cowling beside him, her feet up on the dash.

Thorner itself was just coming to life, people setting off on their commute to Leeds. A coach was parked opposite the Mexborough Arms, a knot of elderly men standing on the pavement, shuffling and stamping their feet in the early chill. At the foot of the hill, the sun caught the honeyed stone of the church tower, and Jack half expected to see their old van, crumpled and broken, where it had ploughed into the gate.

‘Go left, Rick,’ he said, and they turned down by the side of the pub, past the bowling green and the farm buildings, to where Station Lane cut right, and Thorner Victory Hall stood up on the left. They had only ever been here in the dark, and yet somehow it seemed as if nothing had changed. The railway bridge and cutting were still there. Manor Farm. The sweet smell of manure. Ricky pulled into the side of the road, and Jack and Dave got stiffly out of the car to help Maurie from the back and on to his feet, supporting him on each side as they stood looking up the embankment to where the station had once stood. It was long gone. A modern house built in its place. Although the bridge still existed, the line of the track beyond it had been developed into a small cul-de-sac of private homes.

Jack glanced at Maurie and saw the intensity of sad recollection in his face, a face so grey and pale that it was almost as if he didn’t exist. And it occurred to Jack that none of them did. At least, not in this place. Here they were just ghosts haunting their own past, a past long gone and as insubstantial as themselves.

But somewhere up there, where someone had since built a home — lived, raised a family, perhaps died — Rachel had first kissed him. No matter how lost it was now in time and space, nothing could take away the memory of that moment.

And suddenly, Jack realized why he was here. Why he had ever agreed to go with Maurie and Dave back to London. Deep in his sub-conscious, where the thought had refused to coagulate, he had been harbouring the hopeless fantasy that somehow, somewhere he might find her again.