Lorries, cars, buses, splash past. They seem indifferent, not even inhabited by human beings, just steel boxes of varying size and design and colour careering past as though on a conveyor belt. ‘What do we do now?’ she asks. She feels hopeless and angry, above all angry at James for bringing her here.
‘We walk on a bit.’
‘Walk on? I thought the idea was to bum a lift off someone.’
James is wearing a smug expression that says this is what he knows and she doesn’t. He’s the expert here. ‘First rule,’ he says. ‘Only hitch where there’s a place the driver can pull in. No one’s going to stop in the middle of a main road.’
‘What’s the second rule? Give up and take a taxi?’
They shuffle through the drizzle as far as a lay-by. ‘You may as well start,’ he says, plonking his rucksack on the grass verge. ‘Shouldn’t be difficult. I’ll stand back a bit. They’ll stop for a girl.’
‘For a girl?’
‘Come on, stick your thumb out.’
‘I don’t want that kind of lift.’
‘It won’t be that kind of lift. It’ll be a lift.’
‘It’s like hustling.’
‘It’s only hustling if the customer thinks you’re a tart. But they’ll just assume you’re hitching. Now stick your bloody thumb out.’
She does so, like someone trying in vain to plug a leak. Cars splash by.
‘You want to look the driver in the eye as well. Make it personal. That’s rule number two. You’re a girl, so take advantage of it.’
‘I told you, I don’t want that kind of lift.’
‘Come on, Ellie. All he’ll want is a grope.’
She turns on him, but at the very moment that she’s about to loose a stream of invective, a van slithers to a halt in the lay-by. ‘Hop in,’ the driver yells through the window, and James is opening the door and shoving Ellie and the rucksacks across the seat before she can utter a word. ‘Dover,’ James says across the sodden, furious figure sitting in the middle of the bench seat. The driver, a callow youth with prominent Adam’s apple and rodent teeth, slams the vehicle into gear and accelerates back into the stream of traffic. He’s chewing gum and smoking and scratching his groin, all these things at the same time as driving. It takes concentration, a degree of slick skill. ‘You going abroad then?’
‘France, Germany, Italy. Maybe Greece.’
He grins at them. ‘And you’ve had a row already?’
11
‘About last night,’ she says. They’ve bought tickets, had something to eat in a greasy-spoon café and then boarded the ferry and waited for it to depart, all without broaching that most delicate of subjects. Now they are on deck looking back over the ship’s wash to where low-lying cloud throws a wartime smokescreen across what might be the white cliffs of Dover fading into the night. The lounge they have abandoned is like a refugee encampment, littered with squalling babies and arguing adults, dominated by a large, loud American extolling the virtues of the latest film to anyone who will listen and many who are trying not to. ‘You’ve gotta see it,’ he is insisting. ‘It’s just ace. This little guy Hoffman. He’s a real star.’
Out on deck it is quiet and cool. The rain has stopped.
‘What about last night?’
He senses rather than sees her indifference. ‘I’m sorry, that’s all. Just… I don’t want to rush into anything.’
‘Bloody Kevin again.’
‘Perhaps.’
There is silence between them but not around them. Around them, beneath them, is the sound of the ship and its way through the water. It pitches and shudders like an old lady confronted with something not altogether pleasant. Deep in its bowels is the rumble of machinery. He wonders what she thinks of him, while she wonders what he thinks of her. Neither offers the other much in the way of clues. Should he take her hand? It seems mad. They’ve kissed a bit, and now he doesn’t know whether to take her hand or not.
‘Strange, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Tomorrow morning we’ll be in France—’
‘Belgium, actually. Zeebrugge, remember?’
‘Only because you insisted, because it was cheaper.’
‘My mother brought me up to be careful with money.’ He waits. ‘You were different with your parents, you know that? From what you’re like at Oxford.’
‘Different how?’
He can’t quite say. A hint, a feeling. ‘Obedient,’ he suggests. ‘Wanting to please.’
‘That’s why I try to get away from them. Isn’t it the same with you?’
‘You’ll have to come oop North and find out.’
‘That depends on whether we survive this trip.’
We, he thinks. What exactly is this collective? Does it even exist outside the limits of this journey? And in the spirit of scientific exploration he decides to attempt to find out, turning towards her and taking that hand and ducking down to kiss her on the mouth. There is a moment’s hesitation, just the fragile touch of her lips, and then she moves towards him and her mouth opens and for a moment there is the vibrant dance of her tongue against his.
She pulls back and moves away, turning back to the sea, her face in profile.
‘What does that mean?’ he asks.
‘It doesn’t mean anything. It just is.’
‘Isn’t it a signifier?’ The word seems to startle her. Maybe he isn’t meant to know things like that.
‘What on earth have you been reading? Derrida?’
‘Some crap about semiotics.’
‘Well, if anything it’s a floating signifier. It means everything and nothing. What you want it to mean.’
‘I want it to mean you really fancy me.’
‘But maybe that’s not what it does mean.’ She laughs and gives him a little consoling nudge in the chest. ‘Come on, we’d better go inside and find somewhere to sleep.’
12
A Flemish dawn insinuates itself into the early morning. Ellie peers, bug-eyed from lack of sleep, through the salted window of the lounge. There’s a smear of sea and vague shapes of coastline and harbour. ‘Where in God’s name are we?’ she wonders out loud.
‘Zeebugger,’ says James. They take turns to guard their rucksacks while the other goes to wash in the overcrowded bathrooms. The ferry docks with a clanging of steel and a blast of ship’s siren.
Outside on deck the air is cold. It has a different quality from the air they left behind at Dover, a strange hint of foreign, a sense that they are on the edge of a continent that stretches to the Mediterranean, to the Urals, to Finisterre. No longer marooned on an island, encompassed by an island’s limitations. Here, anything is possible. But is that sensation just an illusion? After all, there’s nothing much to see, just the industrial desert of Zeebrugge that lies all around the docks like children’s toys abandoned across a concrete playground. Could be anywhere. Thames estuary. Merseyside. Tyneside.
Ellie huddles against him for warmth, which is good. He puts his arm around her and smells her hair. A warm, maternal scent that doesn’t quite match the girl herself, who is brittle and filial. Below deck engines are being started. On the quayside men are waving instructions. Foot passengers begin to file off the ferry like the infantry of an invading army, each trooper bowed beneath the burden of his or her backpack. All that is missing is the weaponry.
‘Foreign soil,’ James says portentously as he steps down off the gangway. Not really true. Foreign concrete, more like. ‘The first time,’ he adds.
‘The first—?’
‘— time abroad. That’s right.’
‘I don’t believe it—’