He said, 'Long way from home then?'
I nodded, feeling my head heavy, my neck sagging with tiredness.
He said, 'So where would that be?'
He leant forward, arms hugging the steering wheel.
I said, 'Blackburn.'
27, Ollerton Road, Blackburn.
He said, 'But not any more, eh?' pulling a packet of ciggies from his shirt pocket. 'Blackburn rover, eh?' grinning at his own joke. 'London, eh?'
I nodded.
He shook the packet of cigarettes, nudged one up with his thumb and drew it out with his mouth. He passed the packet to me but I shook my head.
He said, "Day trip or for ever?' feeling for a lighter. I didn't answer. He flicked the lighter and I saw his face, red and bunched and knotty, in the flame. He said, 'How old are you, love?' breathing out smoke.
I didn't answer.
He said, 'Seventeen?' He took another drag on the cigarette, looking at the road like it was his road, the wipers dancing across the windscreen. 'Just seventeen, you know what I mean] sort of singing. He said, 'I can take you to London, love. I can take you where I'm taking my meat.'
He turned and I was looking straight at him. He said, 'What are you looking at?'
I said, 'You remind me of my dad.'
It's a good line, a handy line, stops 'em in their tracks. I'd used it before.
Besides, he did, just a bit. Remind me.
And it was him I'd blame, my dad, my dad Bill It was him I'd give as my excuse, if I was ever called to account, if I ever found myself slinking back, or being carted in a cop car, to Ollerton Road. I wasn't the first to leave, was I? It was him who set me my example.
Maybe he was thinking of me right now, with his floozy in the Isle of Man, if that was where and how it was. Waking up in the small hours, lighting a ciggy. Rain on the window. I wonder what that Mandy's up to, I wonder what that lass is doing right now.
He used to say, 'You're a wicked girl, Mandy, you're a wicked girl.' But always with a sideways smile or a wink or a click of the tongue, whether I'd done wrong or not, as if it was only ever ten per cent a ticking-off and ninety per cent a show of approval. 'You're a wicked girl, I don't know what's going to become of you,' looking at me like one day he was going to have to come and pull me out of trouble. And I used to like saying, because it had just a touch of wickedness itself and because it was different from what the other girls said about their fathers, 'My dad's a sailor.' Sailor Bill. Barnacle Bill.
Not that working on car ferries made you a real sailor.
Fleetwood to Douglas, there and back inside a day. And in winter, Heysham to Douglas, an hour longer. But when I heard him leaving in the early mornings, trying to coax that clapped-out Hillman into life, I'd think, He'll be at sea soon, my dad Bill, the voyage out, the voyage home.
Except one day he never came back.
I never said 'seaman', it didn't sound right, though it was a wicked word too, a giggle word, if you said it the wrong way. Why is a ship like a rubber johnny? Because it's full of seamen. And he'd been a real sailor once, or so he said. He'd seen the world. Shanghai, Yokohama. But then he'd met Mum and the world-seeing days had come to an end, or so she said. One wild night in Liverpool Brown arms, tattoos and a large pinch of salt. Sailor, stop your roaming. Though it's hard to imagine that ever having happened, it's hard to imagine Mum having been that woman, when you saw what she got for herself by way of replacement, that creep Neville from the Town Hall. 'Mandy, I want you to meet Mr Lonsdale.' Neville Lonsdale, Town Planning. And from then on we were going to lead a different sort of life.
He used to put that pasty face in front of mine, dimpling like a vicar, and say, 'So what do you want to be, Mandy, what do you want to do when you grow up?' As if it earned him points in her eyes. Someone at last with a bit of concern, with a bit of respect. Neville the devil. What I wanted to say was that I wanted to be wicked, I wanted to be wicked like Dad said I was anyway. I wanted to be Mandy Black, and I wanted to be wicked.
And so I was. I hung around in pubs and dance-halls, I twisted and shouted, I let hands scurry up my skirt, and worse. I let myself be pushed up against walls. I gave Mum and Neville hell, which was only what they gave me. But more than that, I said to my best friend and partner-in-sin, Judy Battersby, 'How about it? London. Bright lights. You and me.' But she never showed up, she chickened out, the cow.
And I suppose what I always hoped, right up until the last moment, was that he'd come back anyway, with five years' worth of excuses. That he'd throw down his kit-bag then he'd throw Neville out the front door. Then I wouldn't have to run away myself.
But they found the Hillman in Liverpool, not Fleetwood. So he might have gone anywhere. Not a floozy in the Isle of Man but floozies all over, in Shanghai and Yokohama. I had this picture of him, which I still have, it's a daft picture but I still have it. That he'd sailed away to the South Seas. Grass skirts and coconut trees. He's still there now, thirty years younger, with a flower stuck behind his ear. Not the Isle of Man. Isle of Woman, more like.
He said, 'What's your name, love?'
I said, 'Judy.'
He said, 'Mick. Anywhere London or somewhere London?'
I said, 'Anywhere London.'
He said, 'Til take you to Smithfield. Heard of Smithfield? There in two hours. It's all right, love, it's okay, you can nod off.'
So Mandy Black, or Judy Battersby as she was travelling as, arrived in London in a meat lorry and got carted away again in a butcher's van, without so much as a peep at Leicester Square. It's a famous story, it's done the rounds, it might even have reached Ollerton Road. Blackburn to Bermondsey, going up in the world. But now when I think of it, now when I see them huddled up in shop entrances and archways, in smelly blankets, I think, I was lucky. And when I think of that girl with a rucksack heading down the A5, I think, That was my adventure, my big adventure, though it hardly lasted twelve hours.
To run away from home and find another home in less than a day, though the new home wasn't a real home, any more than the one I left. The new home was all the opposite of what it seemed: a son whose home it wasn't but it was, a daughter whose home it was but it wasn't because she had to be kept in a Home, a mum and dad who weren't really a mum and dad, except to me.
Why should I have fitted into that? Why shouldn't I have taken off again like a shot? When the world was saying anyway everything is changing now, everything goes. It couldn't have just been him, Vince. That we were somehow, underneath it all, like brother and sister, worse, father and daughter. Just back from the Middle East, 'from the bleeding garden of Aden, sweetheart,' with his kit-bag slung in a corner of that bedroom he'd hardly moved back into before he moved out again for me. 'V. I. Dodds.' The smell of him in there, sweat and engine oil and Senior Service. Tattoos up his arm. 'You can lick 'em but they won't come off.' So it was like committing incest, like throwing the whole thing open, like being dangerous where you ought to be most safe. Safe as houses. And in a camper-van too, Uncle Ray's camper, like a pair of gypsies.
Blackburn to Bermondsey, aiming high. But that's where I stayed and that's what I became. Vince's floozy, Vince's wife, Vince's sister, daughter, mother, his whole family. And Jack and Amy's little grown-up girl. So it's as though I don't know any more who that lassie on the A5 was. As though in those twelve hours on the road I might have been aboutfl to become anyone. What do you want to be, Mandy? November '67. The year of Sergeant Pepper. Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire. It wasn't Wednesday morn- f ing at five o'clock, it was Thursday evening at eight o'clock. But I couldn't help carrying that song in my head, like my theme tune: She's leaving home, bye, bye.