Solace of the Road Read online

  After the introductions were over, there didn’t seem much to say.

  Then Fiona asked me when my birthday was.

  ‘What d’you think, name like Holly?’ I said.

  Fiona smiled. ‘It’s a nice name. I suppose you came along around Christmas?’

  ‘That’s what everyone says. Only my birthday’s in June.’

  ‘June? That’s a good time. The holly’s green all year round, isn’t it?’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes, I think so.’

  ‘What about the berries?’

  ‘The berries? They only come in winter, I suppose.’

  Great, I thought. So I’m a holly with no berries, just the prickles. Guess that’s when I decided she was another mogit, whatever about the smiles and nods and sitting next to me on the bed.

  I don’t know why but I picked Rosabel up from my pillow and said how she was my pet dog from Ireland and was she allowed into their house too? Then I made a pretend bark. ‘Grrr-rap!’ And Fiona laughed and said she certainly was, any time.

  And I don’t know why I did this either, but I asked why they didn’t have kids. What I really wanted to know was why they wanted me to come home with them. But Fiona said in a sad voice that she couldn’t, and she didn’t talk about it any more.

  They said some more about how their house was by a common and how they had a room ready for me. Then they both shook my hand like I was a business prospect, and left.

  After they’d gone, Miko came and asked what I thought.

  ‘Mogits,’ I said. ‘Both of them. One hundred per cent.’

  ‘Aw, Holly,’ Miko said. ‘Is that all you can say?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Do you want to pursue this or not?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  Then he started up again about how it was time I moved on, I’d be better off out of Templeton House, things were getting way too hairy here, and on and on. I scratched my head like I had nits, pretending not to follow. Then he dropped his voice. ‘Holly, I’ve just heard. I’ve got an interview. For that job. I’m on my way.’

  I stared. A cold-bath feeling came down on me. I’d been thinking how maybe Miko wouldn’t get the job, end of story, how he’d go on being my key worker and how the Aldridges could take a sky-jump.

  The shift work. It’s ruining my relationship.

  ‘An interview?’ I said. I picked up Rosabel and twirled her by the ear. I thought how maybe the people at the new job wouldn’t like him. And then how everybody liked Miko. The job would be his, sure as sunset.

  Miko got up. ‘Yeah. Next Monday. So think about it, Holly. I’ve got a feeling about Fiona and Ray. They’re a chance in a million for you. You could go for a trial weekend.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘Yes, Holly. What do you think?’

  I lay back on the bed and examined Rosabel’s brown front paw, imagining I was taking a stone out from her toe-pads. ‘Grrr-rap!’ I said again. Miko leaned against the doorframe with his head tilted, like he was waiting. So I held Rosabel up and said in a gruff doggy voice, ‘OK. We’ll give the mogits a go. Grrr-rap.’

  ‘You serious, Holly?’

  ‘Yeah. Whatever.’

  Miko’s face lit up like Ireland had won the World Cup.

  And that’s when I knew I didn’t really have a choice.

  Four

  Hello, Mercutia Road

  The day of the trial weekend at Fiona and Ray’s, Grace, Trim and I stood in a three-way knot, arms and legs muddled. I felt Grace’s smooth cheek and Trim’s rude-boy elbows. Miko lounged against the front door of Templeton House and waved. ‘Knock ’em dead, Holly,’ he called.

  As if.

  It was Rachel’s job to take me on the tube to the Aldridges’ house. They lived on a street called Mercutia Road. The trees along it had yellow leaves. It was posh, with big tall houses in old yellow brick, and the kind of windows called sash. They looked down on you, all smug. The purple-grey roofs were the same colour as the sky. The doors were painted different colours. They had fancy door-knockers and slits for mail and seven steps up to them.

  ‘This is it,’ Rachel said. ‘Number twenty-two.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘How’re you feeling, Holly?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Not nervous?’

  ‘Nah.’

  That first weekend I did everything Fiona said. She suggested I go to bed, I did. I didn’t put my earphones in when she was talking to me. I tried not to mind her making conversation all day long like some kind of recorded announcement on the Underground. That’s what her voice was like, the woman who tells you to alight here and mind the gap between the train and the platform edge. Posh and phoney.

  Like the house. There was wood everywhere, even in the toilet. And everywhere was neat and tidy and just so. I swear I tried not to breathe from Friday to Sunday night.

  At least Fiona and Ray had no kids. I’d be free of little brats here, not like in that placement at the Kavanaghs’. The brat there had given me a hard time. The worst thing was how he tore up the only photo I had of my mam. That was like being stabbed in the eye and his mother refused to believe he’d done it.

  Here I had my own room and could keep everything private. I had a big bed with an apricot duvet, soft as they come, a chest of drawers with a key and a wardrobe with a long mirror. From the ceiling a lamp with glass pendants hung low, catching the colours in the room. By the window was a glass-topped desk and you could sit and look out over the garden to an ivy wall. Beyond the wall was more yellow brick and smug windows and beyond that the common. Tooting Bec. Snooting Heck.

  ‘Do you like it?’ Fiona said. ‘We’ve just had it decorated.’

  I thought how at the Home, Miko’d draped the gold lamé curtains I’d chosen, all elegant over the window.

  ‘ ’S fine,’ I said. I’d brought Rosabel with me and put her on the pillow for a nap.

  Fiona asked me what I liked to eat. I told her how I hated eggs. OK, she said. No eggs. Then I said pizza was my favourite and she got it for me.

  The second weekend was the same. I went back to the Home on the Sunday night. Ray dropped me. He’d drive the car and say ‘Nearly there now’ every time he turned a corner. That’s how I knew the fostering was Fiona’s idea, not his. He couldn’t wait to see the back of me.

  Come Christmas, Miko and Rachel told me they had a surprise present for me. The Aldridges were ready for me to live there, a proper placement. They liked me fine, Rachel said, and thought I’d fit in.

  Yeah, I thought, like a heavy metal singer in a ballet class. ‘How long do they want me for?’

  ‘Open ended, Holly. Isn’t that great? They’re really keen,’ Rachel said.

  ‘Open ended? So they can send me back whenever?’

  Miko waved a hand. ‘Why would they do that, Holly? You’re going to go straight, hey?’

  Like I was some big-time crook. ‘Dunno, Miko. Being delinquent’s awful fun.’

  Miko raised a brow.

  ‘OK, OK, I’ll try,’ I said. ‘But if they send me back, it’s not my fault. It means they don’t want to know.’

  ‘It’s open ended on both sides, Holly. You can decide you’ve had enough too.’ Rachel grinned. She was OK, Rachel. Only fifty per cent mogit. Some people, like Grace, have social workers that hardly ever come near you, and when they do they talk like you’re trash. Rachel wasn’t like that.

  So in January, just before school started up, she took me to Mercutia Road on a Friday and left me, maybe for good. She knocked on the door and I dropped back to the fifth step so I could breathe. Snow was coming down like feathers and I thought of Trim and Grace and our three-way knot. But mostly I thought of Miko and the last hug he’d given me that morning. In my mind I was hugging him back again and again and thinking maybe it wasn’t the end after all, maybe he’d break the rules and send me a letter sometime, or I’d walk down the street one day and there he’d be, smiling.

  ‘Holly,’ he’d
said. ‘You’ll be fine. I know.’

  ‘Yeah, Miko. Fine.’

  ‘Just remember. The mattress trick. And cracking each day open—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, like a nut.’

  ‘That’s it, Holly. You’re a class act.’

  But it wasn’t like he’d given me his personal mobile number or anything.

  I shivered on those steps that morning in the snow in Tooting Bec.

  ‘You all right, Holly?’ said Rachel.

  ‘Yeah. Fine. ’S cold.’

  ‘I know.’ She touched my arm, then stamped her feet on the top step.

  The door opened. Fiona was there, nodding like one of those daft dogs they have in the back of cars. ‘Come on in. It’s perishing.’

  I walked over the doormat and I felt Fiona’s hand on my shoulder. ‘Holly,’ she went. ‘You’re welcome here, you know. Truly.’ The way she looked at me, she made me feel like I was her new toy. Then her voice went up a notch, to include Rachel. ‘Tea’s made.’

  Rachel left soon after and Fiona cleared up the kitchen, humming, like it was normal to have a delinquent care-babe with a cracked-up past in her home. I stared at the wooden table and the mats on it and how the varnish looked brand new. The memory of the table back at the Home, with all the rings from hot drinks and scuffs and biro marks, made a heavy pain in my stomach. I thought of the wind-ups and Trim going ballistic and Miko juggling and Grace flicking her peas around the table instead of eating them. Why did I agree to come here?

  Five

  The Wig

  Days passed. New school. New place. New people. New everything. The house on Mercutia Road was graveyard quiet. Outside, snow came and went, day in and day out.

  Fiona kept starting conversations. I could never think what to say. Trouble was, she always got round to asking a question, so I had to say something. It was like she was trying to nose me out. I wasn’t a buried bone, for God’s sake. I tried not to be in the same room with her.

  My favourite place was the stairs. I’d counted sixty-three, including the ones outside. I’d sit on the second landing, where the stairs bent round on themselves and there was a tiny window. I’d watch the snow fall and the sky go empty. Some days Rosabel’d sit in my lap, others she’d lie low on my bed.

  When Fiona wasn’t looking, I’d go rooting around. I’d be in the drawers and cupboards, checking the place over, sniffing for anything that might start a new thought. But I only found boring stuff. Sheets, towels, sachets of lavender. Everything just so.

  Then, after a week in the new house, I found the wig.

  It was in the bottom drawer of a chest at the very top of the sixty-three stairs in a plastic bag so skinny I nearly didn’t bother looking inside. But I dipped my hand in for a mystery feel and touched thin strands, all scrunched and soft. So I had to look in. It was pretend hair, some almost grey, some gold, but overall blonde, with muted highlights. I took it out and fingered its layers and fringes. Inside, a net with a brown tape for keeping it on. When you held it over your fist, the white of your own skin shone through where the parting was, like scalp.

  A wig, ash-blonde, drop-dead gorgeous.

  ‘Holly!’ came Fiona’s voice from downstairs. ‘Holly – lunch!’

  I stuffed the wig back and shut the drawer. I promised myself when Fiona left the house to go shopping that afternoon, I’d try it on.

  Downstairs, Fiona was looking like the last whale had been harpooned. It was Saturday and Ray’d gone to work, which he shouldn’t have. I sat down at the kitchen table and picked at my food, but I wasn’t hungry. That wig had really got to me. I tapped my toes on the floor. Then Fiona and I had our first row, a real wang-dammer.

  When I got wound up in the Home and it got to be too much, it was like Miko said, a nail bomb went off. Anything near me went on a real hard flying lesson. Cushions. Chairs. Trainers. And Miko would come and clamp me down and my arms would be windmills and I’d swear and kick and it felt good. Then he’d say, ‘Do the mattress trick, Holly.’ I’d run from the room, go upstairs, yank my mattress off the bed, and kick it as hard as I could. He said to do it every morning and evening, even when I wasn’t angry. I’d hammer the springs with my trainer soles and then collapse, sweat pouring. And the others couldn’t wind me up so easily.

  But that lunch with Fiona, I forgot the mattress trick. And anyway, my bed on Mercutia Road had a mattress too thick for lifting unless you were King Kong. I just wanted Fiona to hurry up and go out, so I could try the wig on.

  ‘Sure you don’t want to come shopping?’ she was going. ‘You could choose your pizzas.’

  ‘Nah. Rather stay here. Honest.’

  ‘Sure?’

  ‘Yeah. It’s wet.’

  ‘There are such things as umbrellas, you know. You haven’t been out in two days.’

  I pushed a tomato slice across the plate. ‘It’s cold.’

  ‘You don’t like the cold?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘D’you prefer the summer?’

  See what I mean about the questions? ‘Yeah. S’pose.’

  Fiona reached over to the bread board for another slice. ‘Call me odd, but I love the winter. January’s my favourite month.’

  Would she never go?

  ‘Wish you’d try my bread, Holly, love.’

  Now I can’t stand it when people call you ‘love’ when they hardly know you. For me that’s a wind-up to end all wind-ups.

  ‘It’s home made,’ she said. ‘Honest-to-God flour. Wholemeal.’

  I put a finger down my mouth. ‘Ick.’

  ‘Don’t do that, Holly, please.’

  I did it again.

  ‘Don’t! I make all this food, but you just eat rubbish, pure rubbish, instead. It’s a wonder your insides haven’t seized up with all that refined artificial stuff you put down yourself.’

  ‘With all that refeened arty-farty stuff you put down yourself,’ I said, and pretended to throw up over the loaf.

  Fiona snatched it away, leaving the bread knife behind, and went over to the kitchen worktop. She rattled at the bread bin.

  ‘Refeened, arty-farty,’ I said, wagging a finger at where the loaf had been.

  ‘Come on, Holly. Leave off. I’ve a good mind to call Rachel. Perhaps we need a talk.’

  The nail bomb burst. I picked up the bread knife and hurled it at the kitchen window. It missed and clattered into the sink. So I stood up, grabbed my chair and slammed the far leg into a kitchen cupboard.

  ‘Fucking bread, fucking kitchen,’ I screamed. ‘Go on, say it. You want me gone, Ray wants me gone, you hate the sight of me. And I hate your fucking fancy bread and I hate you too. I’m not your child. I don’t want to be your child. I’m Mammy’s child, not yours.’

  Fiona came over and put her hands on my shoulders. ‘Holly! Calm down.’

  I hated her touching me with her mad hot fingers. I shoved her out the way and ran from the room.

  I went upstairs. I slammed my bedroom door and locked it. She came and knocked a few minutes later.

  ‘Holly?’

  ‘Go away, Mrs Empty-Ovary.’

  Silence.

  Then Fiona again. ‘What was that you just called me?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘No. It wasn’t nothing, Holly. What did you say?’

  I didn’t answer.

  She went away again. Ten minutes later she was back.

  ‘I’m going out to the shops,’ she called through the door. Her voice was wavy like it had tears in it. ‘When I get back I hope you’ll be ready to apologize.’

  There was silence. Then I heard her go away.

  Soon as I heard that front door slam downstairs, I unlocked my door and went straight up to the top of the house to get the wig.

  Six

  Call Me Solace

  I reached the top landing, took the wig out of the drawer and rushed back to my room. All the time it felt like someone was watching me. A ghost, a bad ghost, out to get me.

  I locked my d
oor behind me to try to shut it out, but it followed me right under the crack.

  I sat at the mirror with my head down and breathed out. Then I pulled on the wig.

  I raised my head and stared in the glass. The room seemed to get darker. Outside, the rain had turned to snow. The hair of the wig and my own baby-fine brown hair were muddled round the edges. It was half Holly Hogan and half a crazy stranger. Stay cool, girl, I told myself. Tidy up.

  My heart thumping, I tucked in the stray dark bits. Then I brushed down the magic ash-blonde strands, combing them forward, then back, straightening the parting.

  When I’d finished, I put down the brush and took another breath. I switched on the bedside lamp, so that the shadows fell back to the room’s edges. Then I looked back in the glass.

  And there she was.

  The new girl on the block.

  She was three years older than Holly Hogan, dead smart, a real cool glamour girl.

  Grace told me all about glamour girls. They have slim-slam hips, she said, and they blow smoke rings at all the mogits. They have the whole world at their feet.

  In this girl’s eyes was a bit of Mam. She was halfway between Holly and Mrs Bridget Hogan. But she was soaring above us both on the way to a different life. She was the kind of girl you can only watch, you can never be.

  Her eyes blinked. Her mouth opened. I picked up the hairbrush again. I reached for the shell box and put on Mam’s old amber ring. It was big for my ring finger, so I put it on the next one up. Mam’s voice was in my head, talking to me, the way she used to when I was brushing her hair, back in the sky house. I was brushing and staring through the mirror to the other side, where the clouds bumped up against the window, way above the ground. Mam smiled back in her halter-neck dress, the one that showed off her cream shoulders and hugged her above the knees. Her hair was shiny curls but her eyebrows were dark, like frowns. She had her see-through drink in one hand and her lipstick in the other. She was getting ready to go out to her dancing job and I was brushing away.