“Pigs.”
“You seen some?” He craned behind quickly, throwing the car into a steep swerve.
“No. Keep your eyes on the road! You’ll kill us both. Anyway, not that sort of pig – real ones, well, storybook ones, oh, never mind…”
There was a signpost with a picnic table on it. We turned off the road and found a big rest stop, well hidden. There was a tractor trailer parked there, and we pulled up behind it and both had a swig of Coke and some chocolate biscuits. A bloke appeared from the side and walked ’round the back of the truck. He stopped to light a cigarette, then checked that the fastenings on his rig were done up. All the while, I could see he was looking at us. He was pretending he wasn’t, but you know, don’t you, when someone’s staring at one thing but looking out of the corner of their eye at something else? Instinctively, I slouched down in my seat as I watched him walk ’round to the cab door and haul himself up.
“Can you see him?”
Spider picked a bit of biscuit out of his teeth. “What, that driver?”
“Yeah, can you see him in his cab?”
“Just in his sideview mirror. Why?”
“What’s he doing?”
“He’s smoking a cigarette and he’s talking into a little radio thing.”
My skin was pricking all over. “He’s spotted us, Spider. He’s calling the police.”
“Nah, don’t be daft. These truck drivers talk to each other all the time.”
“But what if he is? What do we do?”
“We need to dump this car, get another one. Let’s get out of here, anyway.” He started the engine and shifted easily through the gears as he accelerated away and back onto the main road – he was getting the hang of driving.
I looked behind. Way back, the tractor trailer was lumbering along, following us.
When you looked, there were trucks everywhere – one a couple of vehicles ahead of us, and, every minute or so, one coming the other way. If the first driver had spotted us and had told all his mates, we were completely stuffed. They’d be able to trace our every movement. A truck was heading toward us, and as I looked into the cab, the driver met my eyes – just for a moment – then looked away. He had a headset on, and was talking as he passed us.
“Spider, we’ve gotta get out. They’re on to us. That truck just now, he looked at me. Did you see?”
“Nah, man, I’m keeping my eyes on the road, like you said.”
“Watch the next one.”
Another couple of minutes and another truck approached. The driver definitely clocked us. Spider saw it, too.
He cursed and swung into the next side road, steaming along a narrow lane. I was holding on to the door with one hand and the dashboard with the other, praying we wouldn’t meet something coming the other way. He slowed down and eventually pulled up at a place where a little lane, not wide enough for a car, met our road.
There was a signpost, a green one, saying FOOTPATH. My heart sank.
“Gather up the stuff, we’re going to have to leg it.”
“No way. Where to? How…?”
“We’ll just take our stuff, go up this track, walk a few miles, find somewhere to kip down, and I’ll get some more wheels as soon as I can. Nick something from a farm. Come on, get the stuff together.”
We bundled everything we could into some plastic bags. I frantically flicked through the map book, and tore out the pages showing where we were now and all the places between us and Weston.
“Yeah, good thinking, thatta girl.” Again, you could tell Spider was buzzing with adrenaline. I guess I was, too, but it was like two sides of the same coin. He was excited, enjoying the adventure; I was eaten up with fear – they were closing in on us.
We couldn’t get everything in the bags. I put the coat on, easier than carrying it, and Spider draped a blanket ’round his shoulders; then, with a backward glance to the car, we started up the lane. God knows what we looked like – a pair of dossers, I suppose. We weren’t like hikers with backpacks and walking boots, just ordinary kids with plastic bags, and a touch of the charity shop about us.
The bags were a bloody nuisance. One of them kept bumping my leg, no matter what I did. I tried turning it ’round, swapping hands, nothing worked. Bump, bump, bump. The plastic cut into my hands, a cruel, nagging pain. And my feet and legs were all over the place. The track was so uneven; there were two deep ruts made up of stones, big ones and small ones, and a hump of grass in the middle, but all different levels. I started off walking in one of the dips, but my ankle kept turning over on the stones, so I switched to the grassy strip. That was OK, until it suddenly decided to slope or there was a hole or whatever, and then my ankle would go again. And all the time, bump, bump, bump, the bloody shopping bag. I got so sensitive to it, it felt like a sledgehammer hitting the side of my knee.
After going on like this for half the morning, I stopped and dropped both bags. I turned my hands over to look at the palms: They were bright red, crisscrossed with fat white lines where the bags had cut in. Spider carried on, oblivious. It was like he was listening to music; he was walking along to his own rhythm, nodding his head, his legs kind of springy – but, of course, it was just in his own head. After a few seconds, he realized I wasn’t following and turned ’round.
“What’s up?”
“I can’t go on any farther. I’ve had it. Can we stop for a rest?”
He looked at his watch. “We’ve been walking for six minutes. If you went back to that bend, you’d still be able to see the car.”
I kicked one of the bags. “I can’t do it! I don’t like walking!”
“We walk miles in London, along the canal and the streets. Miles, man. You can do this.”
“Yeah, but that’s London, civilization. They’ve got pavement and tarmac there. This is crap! My ankles hurt. And these stupid bags keep banging against my leg, and look at my hands!” I held them up toward him.
“Look,” he said patiently, “we need to get as far away from that car as we can, find somewhere to hide out. Why don’t we follow this path for an hour and see where we get to?”
“You’re not listening to me! I CAN’T DO IT!” I let out a scream of frustration; I may even have stamped my feet. Then I picked up one of the bags with both hands and flung it. It sailed gracefully through the air and lodged in the top of a hedge, about six feet up.
Spider lurched over to me and put his hand over my mouth. “Shh! You’ll have them all running here, you divvy.” There was light dancing in his eyes, a broad grin on his face. He was laughing at me.
He was laughing.
At.
Me.
I went ballistic, lashing out with fists and feet, screeching and grunting. “Don’t you ever laugh at me! Don’t you ever…!”
Instead of backing away or hitting back, he got his arms and legs ’round me, and kind of wrapped me up, and squeezed. My arms were held down by my side, my legs had nowhere to go. I was held in close, my face pressed into the smelly place under his arms, and he sort of sapped the fury out of me. I could feel it going, feel my body relaxing. His chin was resting on the top of my head, and we stood there for a bit, just breathing.
“You alright now?” he said after a while.
“No.” But I was, or at least I was better.
Spider released me and went to fish the bag out of the hedge. “Let’s have a bit of chocolate and press on. I’ll carry your bags.”
I couldn’t let him do that – I mean, I have got some pride. “Piss off, I can carry my own bags.”
“Yeah, right.”
In the end we compromised and he carried the awkward one, and we set off again, up the track, as a soft yellow light filtered through the branches and leaves above us, and the sound of sirens drifted over from the main road.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN