“Not far, today,” he says. “Over from Brighton.”
“Brighton? That’s like a hundred miles away.”
He checks a gizmo on his handlebars. “Seventy-one.”
“Is taking photos of bridges, like, a hobby of yours, then?”
The man thinks about this. “More a ritual than a hobby.” He sees I don’t understand. “Hobbies are for pleasure, but rituals keep you going. My son died, you see. I take the photos for him.”
“Oh, I …” I try not to look shocked. “Sorry.”
He shrugs and looks away. “It was five years ago.”
“Was it”—why don’t I just shut up? — “an accident?”
“Leukemia. He would have been about your age.”
The klaxon blasts again, and the road section’s lowering. “That must’ve been awful,” I say, hearing how lame it sounds. A long, skinny cloud sits over the humpbacked Isle of Sheppey, like a half-greyhound half-mermaid, and I’m not sure what else to say. The VW revs up and moves off the moment the barrier’s up, leaving a trail of soft rock in the air behind it. The cyclist gets on his bike. “Take care of yourself, young lady,” he tells me, “and don’t waste your life.”
He circles around and heads back to the A22.
All that way, and he never crossed the bridge.
CARS AND TRUCKS wallop by, gusting seeds off dandelion clocks, but there’s no one to ask the way to Black Elm Farm. Lacy flowers sway on long stalks as trucks shudder by, and blue butterflies are shaken loose. The tigery orange ones cling tighter. Ed Brubeck’ll be working at the garden center now, dreaming of Italian girls as he lugs bales of peat into customers’ cars. Must think I’m a right moody cow. Or perhaps not. The fact Vinny dumped me is fast becoming exactly that, a fact. Yesterday it was a sawn-off shotgun wound but today it’s more like a monster bruise from an air-rifle pellet. Yes, I trusted Vinny and I loved him, but that doesn’t make me stupid. For the Vinny Costellos of the world, love is bullshit they murmur into your ear to get sex. For girls — me, anyway — sex is what you do on page one to get to the love that’s later on in the book. “I’m well rid of that lechy bastard,” I tell a cow watching me over a gate, and though I don’t feel it yet, I reckon one day I will. Maybe Stella’s done me a favor, in a way, by tearing off Vinny’s nice-guy mask after only five weeks. Vinny’ll get bored of her, sure as eggs is eggs, and when she finds him in bed with another girl it’ll be her dreams of motorbike rides with Vinny that’ll get minced, just like mine were. Then she’ll come crawling back, eyes as red and sore as mine were yesterday, and ask me to forgive her. And I might. Or I might not. Up ahead there’s a roundabout and a café.
And the café’s open. Things are looking up.
THE CAFÉ’S CALLED Smoky Joe’s Café and it’s trying hard to be an American diner off Happy Days with tall booths you can’t see into, but it’s a bit of a shit-hole, really. There’s not many customers, most of them glued to the footy on the knackered telly up on the wall. A woman sits by the door, reading the News of the World in a cloud of cigarette smoke coming from her pinched nostrils. Buttony eyes, stitched lips, frizzy hair, a face full of old regrets. Over her head is a faded poster of a brown goldfish bowl with two eyes peering out and a caption saying: JEFF’S GOLDFISH HAD DIARRHEA AGAIN. She sizes me up and waves her hand towards the booths, meaning, Sit where you want. “Actually,” I say, “I just wanted to ask if you know how to get to Black Elm Farm.”
She looks up, shrugs, looks back, and breathes smoke.
“It’s here, on Sheppey. I’ve got a job there.”
She returns to her paper and taps her fag.
I decide to phone Mr. Harty: “Is there a pay phone?”
The old moo shakes her head, without looking up.
“Would it be possible just to make a local call using your—”
She glares at me, like I’ve asked her if she sells drugs.
“Well … might anyone else here know Black Elm Farm?” I hold her gaze for long enough to tell her the quickest way to get back to her paper is to help me.
“Peggy!” she bawls, into the kitchen. “Black Elm Farm?”
A clattery voice answers: “Gabriel Harty’s place. Why?”
Her button eyes swivel my way. “Someone’s askin’ …”
Peggy appears: she has a red nose, gerbil cheeks, and a smile like a Nazi interrogator’s. “Off fruit-picking for a few days, is it, pet? It was hops in my day, but hops is all done by machines nowadays. You take the Leysdown road — thataway”—she points left out of the door—“past Eastchurch, then take Old Ferry Lane on the right. On foot, are you, pet?” I nod. “Five or six mile, it is, but that’s a stroll in the park for—”
There’s a godalmighty clatter of tin trays from the kitchen and Peggy hurries back. I deserve a packet of Rothmans now I’ve got what I came in for, so I go to the machine in the main part of the café: £1.40 for a packet of twenty. Total rip-off, but there’ll be a bunch of new people at the farm so I’ll need a confidence booster. In go the coins before I can argue myself out of it, round goes the knob, plop go the ciggies. Only when I straighten, box of twenty Rothmans in hand, do I see who’s sat behind the machine, bang across the aisle: Stella Yearwood and Vinny Costello.
I duck down, out of sight, wanting to puke. Did they see me just now? No. Stella would’ve said something breezy and poisonous. There’s a gap between the machine and the screen. Stella’s feeding Vinny ice cream across the table. Vinny looks back like a lovesick puppy. She runs the spoon over his lips, leaving dribbly vanilla lipstick. He licks it off. “Give me the strawberry.”
“I didn’t hear the magic word,” says Stella.
Vinny smiles. “Give me the strawberry, please.”
Stella spikes the strawberry from the ice-cream dish and pushes it up Vinny’s nostril. He grabs her wrist with his hand, his beautiful hand, and guides the fruit into his mouth, and they look at each other, and jealousy burns my gut like a glass of neat Domestos. What sicko anti-guardian angel brought them to Smoky Joe’s right here, right now? Look at the helmets. Vinny’s brought Stella here on his precious untouchable Norton. She hooks her little finger through his, and pulls, so his arm and body follow, until he’s leaning all the way over the table and kissing her. His eyes are shut and hers aren’t. Vinny only mouths the next three words, but he never said them to me. He says it again, eyes wide open, and she looks like a girl unwrapping an expensive present she knew she was getting.
I could erupt and hurl plates, call them every name under the sun, and get a ride back to Gravesend in gales of tears and a police car, but I blunder back to the heavy door, which I pull instead of push and push instead of pull ’cause my vision’s melting away, watched by the old moo, oh, Christ, yeah, ’cause I’m bags more interesting than the News of the World now, and those button eyes of her don’t miss one single detail …
OUT IN THE open air my face dissolves into tears and snot, and a Morris Maxi slows down for the old fart at the wheel to get a good eyeful and I shout, “What are you bloody looking at?” and, God, it hurts it hurts it hurts, and I clamber over this gate into a wheatfield, where I’m hidden from the roundabout, and now I sob and sob and sob and sob and sob and sob and punch the ground and punch the ground and sob and sob and sob … And That’s it, I think, I’ve no more tears left now, and then Vinny murmurs, “I love you,” and reflected in his beautiful brown eyes is Stella Yearwood and here we go again. It’s like puking up an iffy Scotch egg — every time I think I’m done, there’s more. When I calm down enough for a cigarette, I realize I dropped them by the machine in Smoky Joe’s. Bloody great. I’d rather eat cat shit on toast than ever set foot inside that place. Then, of course, I recognize the growl of Vinny’s Norton. I creep to the gate. There they are, sat on the back, smoking — I just fucking bet—my fags, the fags I just paid £1.40 for. Stella would’ve spotted the box at the foot of the machine, still in its cellophane, and picked it up. First she steals my boyfriend, now it’s my fags. Then she climbs onto the Norton, puts her arms round Vinny’s waist, and buries her face in his leather jacket. Away they go, down the road to the Kingsferry Bridge, into the streaky blue yonder, leaving me grimy and hidden like a tramp with crows in a tree going What a laaarf … What a laaarf …