Graham Swift - Wish You Were Here

She’d driven blindly hither and thither at first, sometimes literally blindly, given the assaults of the rain, and because much of the time her eyes were swimming with tears. How could Jack have said that? But then how could she have said what she’d said, and how could she possibly, actually act upon it? Then the thought of her mother had loomed, even more powerfully, once more. Shanklin. Forget Newport. Forget Newport police station. That had just been a terrible, crazy piece of blather. Shanklin. And now, after all, might really be the time.

Hello Mum, here I am at last, and look what a mess I’m in. Any advice? What now? What next?

And if no answer were forthcoming, then at least she might say: Thank you, Mum, thank you anyway. I’m here at least to say that. Thank you for deserting me and Dad all those years ago. Thank you for leaving me to him, and to the cows. And the cow disease. Thank you for being a cow yourself, but for coming right in the end, even if you never knew it. Thank you for giving me and Jack — remember him, Jack Luxton? — these last ten years. Which now look like they’re coming to an end.

And thank you, if it comes to it, for offering me your example.

Rolled up in the back of the car is one of the oversized umbrellas they’d had made for use around the site and to sell in the shop. Yellow-gold segments alternating with black ones displaying a white lighthouse logo — meant to represent the vanished beacon — and the word LOOKOUT at the rim. The umbrellas matched the T-shirts and the baseball caps and the car stickers — all things that (like the name ‘Lookout’ itself) had been her ideas.

It would have gone with Jack, she realised, on his journey. She suddenly hoped it hadn’t rained on him. What a fool he’d have looked putting it up at a funeral. Let alone at a military parade. But driving madly just minutes ago through the blinding rain, Ellie had seen herself clutching that same wind-tugged Lookout umbrella as she stood by her mother’s rain-soaked remains.

Hello Mum. What a day for it, eh?

But what a fool she’d look. And what a miserable exercise it would be. Picking her way through some wretched cemetery, through the puddles and mud. In these shoes. All to find some little, drenched square of marble, while a seaside brolly tried to yank her into the air. Jesus Christ.

And as for that advice, that example, did she really need to stoop, cocking an ear, by her mother’s grave? It was stored up, anyway, in her memory, like an emergency formula for some future — rainy — day. She could hear her mother’s forgotten voice. Skedaddle, Ellie. Just skedaddle, like I did. Cut loose. While you’ve got the car and while you can. With just the clothes you’re in and what’s in your handbag. Now or never. Cut loose.

Somewhere near Ventnor, with a strange little yelp at herself, she’d turned round and driven back along the coast road, into the teeth of the oncoming gale, only to find herself immobilised now, fifty yards — across a sodden verge, a wind-rippled hedge and a strip of field — from the edge of Holn Cliffs.

Everyone has their limits, Ellie thinks, and her mother must have reached hers, for her to have left a husband and a daughter who’d only just turned sixteen — even with a mystery man on hand. And her own limits must have outstretched her mother’s — but then she hadn’t had a mystery man, she had Jack — for her to have stuck it out with her dad for another twelve years. To have stuck it out with him, as it happened, to the very end. Even being with him, holding and squeezing his hand, in that hospital in Barnstaple just a few hours before he died. And she’d have been with him at the end, if she’d known and if it hadn’t been at two in the morning.

How could Jack have said what he said?

Everyone has their limits, and it seems to Ellie that she might have reached her limits now with Jack — or whoever that man was up there in that invisible cottage. She might be about to turn her back on him, as she’d never, in fact, turned her back on her father. Or, before now, on Jack.

But here she sits, pulled up in this lay-by, not going anywhere, within a mile and (on any normal day) within sight of home. And it wasn’t the perilous weather that had made her stop, or even the pursuing ghost of her unvisited mother, but the sudden, clear, looming ghost of herself, driving madly once before, through the still, golden sunshine of a late-September afternoon.

*

Barely sixteen, but she knew how to handle a Land Rover. Even if she wasn’t allowed and was even forbidden by law to drive it on the road. Nonetheless, on the third day after her mother’s departure and while her father seemed to have taken resolutely to the bottle for the day, Ellie had gone out with the keys to the ancient vehicle in the Westcott yard, got in and driven it, for the first time in her life, right up the Westcott track to the gate and the road, and beyond. With no real intention of returning.

It wasn’t a planned escape. She’d taken nothing with her, but it had evolved, in the very fact of motion, in the familiar quirks of the gear stick beside her and the mud-plastered pedals beneath her, into a frantic bid for freedom. In any case, there was the sudden sheer, wild glee of taking the thing out onto the road and seeing what it could do. Swerving to miss traffic, taking arbitrary turns, and, in the narrow lanes, finding out that she was entirely adept, even aggressive, in dealing with an oncoming vehicle in that one-to-one situation when either they or you have to find the passing-spot. If she could manage this Land Rover in a muddy field, do natty reverse-work in the yard or buck along a rutted track, she could do all this on a solid road now.

The early-autumn sun had filled the air and drenched the berried hedges. The window was down, her hair flew. There was petrol in the tank. Ellie can see, now, her bare teenage knees as she pumped the pedals, her little smoky-blue, thick-corduroy skirt, no more than a band of ribbed fabric — this was 1983.

She began to laugh, to sing — selections from Duran Duran. Was her face also shiny with tears? Had this old Land Rover ever been given such a ride? As she drove, a sort of plan, a purpose had come to her. Wherever she was going (if she was going anywhere) she couldn’t go there alone. Or she couldn’t leave her mates behind without letting them at least know she was on the run and offering them the option too. There was room in the back.

She thought of going to get Linda Fairchild and Susie Mitchelmore in Marleston itself, Jackie White in Polstowe and Michelle Hannaford at Leke Hill. Liberating them all. A skidding halt, a loud blast on the horn. Quick! It’s me, Ellie! Come on! She thought of going to that bus shelter near Abbot’s Green, where much was thought of and discussed and giggled over but not so much done, and scrawling a last, filthy, farewell message on its wall. She thought of scooping up the whole Abbot’s Green School bunch and saying, ‘Right! Here we go!’ The chances of a police car round here were a hundred to one. And, to hell with it, she could even go and pick up Bob Ireton’s mopy sister Gillian — Bob who was set on becoming a cop.

All this was like some glorious net — a freeing net — flung out from her racing mind. She’d scoop up anyone who was game for it. Boys too, yes, any boys. But at some point in the great rush of her thoughts — she was actually swooping down Polstowe Hill — she calmed down (relatively) and knew what she had to do.

Could it really be anything else? And it wouldn’t be just an act of liberation. It would be a test. A test of herself. Could she? Would she? She stopped and reversed, swiftly, with a pleasing belch of exhaust smoke, at a farm gate. All the farm gates, all the bloody farm gates. Someone blared a horn at her. She blared back. She raced again through Polstowe. People couldn’t have helped noticing by now. This was at least the third time. That was Jimmy Merrick’s Land Rover, wasn’t it? But that wasn’t Jimmy, surely, at the wheel.