Runaway

I

‘Jobbies!’

No one was paying much attention to Jeff, or the road. We were, all of us, lost in our own thoughts. Coming to terms with just what it was we had done, and were doing, and the realization that there was no going back. These were dark moments of doubt and regret, yet at the same time seductive and exciting. Like those first pioneers who had crossed the North American continent, we were setting out on a journey without the least idea of where it would take us and when, or if, we would ever be back. It was a journey into our collective future. A voyage into the unknown.

‘What’s wrong?’ I said. I was still perched uncomfortably on the engine cowling, Maurie in the passenger seat, and Luke and Dave on the settee in the back. I hoped I wasn’t going to spend the entire trip with a 1703cc engine thrumming away beneath my arse. It makes me shudder now to think that none of us wore seat belts. There weren’t any in the van, and in 1965 we simply never gave it a second thought. But if we’d had a collision, or even made an emergency stop, I’d have been head first through that windscreen.

‘I’ve missed the turn-off,’ Jeff said. We had come up through Busby and East Kilbride New Town. As a kid I had thought there was something almost futuristic about East Kilbride. Clusters of skyscraper apartments that I could see on the skyline across the fields. There was nothing like that where we lived, and I thought they looked exotic, like a page from a sci-fi comic pasted on the horizon. Of course, I had no idea then what soulless places new towns really were.

‘What road should we be on?’

‘The A776 to Hamilton, and then on to the A74.’

‘Well, what road are we on?’

‘The A726 to Strathaven,’ Jeff said. (Which is pronounced ‘Straven’, even though there’s an ‘ath’ in it. I’ve never known why.) ‘There’s an AA Book of the Road in the glove compartment. Get it out and tell me how we get on to the A74.’

I dug a big Reader’s Digest AA book out of the glove compartment and by the light of the courtesy lamp flicked through pages of maps until I found us. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘We go straight through Strathaven and stay on the A726 till we see a turn-off for Lesmahagow. That’s the most direct route for getting on to the A74 now.’ Which is how I became our navigator for the journey. By accident and default.

We got safely on to the main road south in the end, and ploughed off into the dark of the night. I was aware of the shadows of treeless hills rising up around us, the old van labouring up inclines, and then gaining speed on the descent. Jeff seemed to be doing his best to run over the rabbits that kept darting across our path, as if it were some kind of a game.

There was a long, slow climb up and over Beattock Summit. I could feel the wind up there buffeting the high sides of our van, and saw Jeff fighting the wheel to keep us in our lane. No one spoke much during those first couple of hours. It was a time of reflection, of ugly reality setting in.

Then Dave’s voice piped up from the back. ‘Gonnae have tae stop for a pee soon.’

It was another fifteen minutes before we saw the lights of a transport café up ahead in the darkness, like an island of light floating in the black of the night. When I think of that night, I wonder what the odds were of our stopping at that café, at that moment. But I have since learned that fate, and Dave’s bladder, work in the strangest ways.

Tall, four-headed lamp posts spilled their yellow light on to a wide gravel parking area as we pulled off the road. There were several lorries, drawn up side by side, a van and a couple of private cars. We all climbed stiffly out into the cold wind that swept down from the hills above us, stamping the blood back into sleeping limbs, and went into the smoky warmth of the café. Some lorry drivers who clearly knew one another sat around a couple of Formica-topped tables that were marked with coffee rings and cigarette burns, and sticky with spilled sugar. A couple of other tables were occupied by solitary travellers, and an elderly woman behind the counter asked us in a velvety-rich smoker’s voice what we would like. We ordered coffees and Tunnock’s Tea Cakes, and took it in turns to use the toilet.

As I waited my turn I noticed a young man leaning against the far end of the counter, sucking on a cigarette and casting an interested eye in our direction. He wore jeans and Cuban-heeled boots, and a chequered shirt with its sleeves carefully folded up to the elbow, revealing tattoos on both forearms. He had the classic Elvis, or Teddy boy, haircut, heavily greased and swept back to a duck’s arse, a tall quiff trembling precariously over an exposed brow. A black leather bomber jacket was draped over the back of the chair behind him, and he had an air of such quiet self-confidence that you could only be impressed. He was skinny, and looked half-starved, but I thought he was cool. Especially the way he sucked his cheeks in when he pulled fiercely on his cigarette. He blew rings that hovered in the still air, and I wish now that I had never set eyes on him.

I spotted a public phone on the back wall, and asked the woman with the velvety voice for change so that I could make a call. I left the others gathered around the counter and headed for the phone. It was with an increased pulse rate that I pumped pennies into the slot and dialled. I didn’t press the A button until I heard her voice, having been ready to press B immediately and get my money back if her father answered.

‘Hi, it’s me.’ I wasn’t sure what kind of response I was going to get.

Jenny’s voice immediately dropped to conspiratorial. ‘Jack, where are you?’

‘Dunno for sure. Somewhere south of Beattock Summit.’

‘Your dad’s after you.’

‘What!’ The shock of her words made my face sting.

‘He’s with Maurie’s dad, in Maurie’s dad’s car. They left about half an hour ago to try and catch up with you.’

I had an absurd, fleeting vision of our two dads sitting in the dark in Maurie’s dad’s car with not a word to say to one another. Two more different people it would have been hard to imagine. The Jew and the atheist. To my knowledge they had never actually met. But I immediately refocused.

‘How did they find out? I mean, it’s not that late. They shouldn’t have found the notes yet.’

There was an ominous silence on the other end of the line.

‘Jenny?’

And she blurted it out. ‘It was me, Jack. I told them. Not long after you’d gone.’

‘Why, for God’s sake?’

‘Because it’s madness. You’ve no idea what you’re getting yourselves into. I thought maybe they could have stopped you.’

I swallowed a deep breath and raised my eyes to the nicotine-stained ceiling. ‘Jesus, Jenny! You shouldn’t have done that. Jesus!’ Thoughts were darting through my head like swallows on a summer’s evening, and I couldn’t keep track of any one of them.

‘Give it up, Jack. Come home.’

‘No!’ I almost shouted down the line at her. Then, more quietly, ‘Not sure I’m ever going to speak to you again, Jenny.’ And I hung up, breathing hard, pulse racing.

If the dads had left half an hour ago, they could only be about an hour behind us, if that. And given the speed of the van, it wouldn’t be long before they caught us. And what then? I conjured a horrible picture in my head of an argument at the roadside, and the humiliation of me and Maurie being dragged off by the ears to sit in the back seat of his dad’s car before being driven home in disgrace.

Luke and Dave and Maurie had carried their coffees to a table and were seated around it sipping their hot milky drinks and talking in low voices. I pulled up a chair and leaned into the table. They knew straight away from my demeanour that something was wrong.

‘Two of the dads are after us in a car.’

‘Christ! Whose dads?’ Dave said.

‘Mine and Maurie’s.’ I turned to Maurie. ‘They’re in your dad’s car.’

I have never seen anyone change colour so fast. Maurie’s normally florid complexion turned grey, then white.

‘How did they know we’d gone already?’

I suppose I must have blushed with guilt. ‘Jenny told them.’

Dave pushed himself back in his seat, breathing imprecations.

Luke, who’d been listening in silence, suddenly said, ‘What about my dad?’

I shrugged. ‘She didn’t say anything about him.’ And I saw in his face, just fleetingly, what I’ve always thought was disappointment. I said, ‘They’re only about an hour behind us.’

It was pure panic I saw in Maurie’s eyes. ‘What are we going to do?’

‘We’ve got to get off the A74,’ I said. ‘And stay off it. At least for tonight.’ I looked around, suddenly aware that Jeff wasn’t with us. ‘Where’s Jeff?’

Maurie nodded behind me towards the counter, and I thought I detected a hint of jealousy in his voice.

‘He’s talking to that bloke over there.’

I swivelled in my seat to see Jeff and the Elvis lookalike in animated conversation at the far end of the counter. Some joke passed between them and they both laughed.

I said, ‘We’ve got to get out of here now.’ I stood up and hurried across the café to catch Jeff by the arm. ‘Excuse me.’ I nodded apologetically to Elvis and drew Jeff away. In hushed tones I explained to him why we had to leave.

Jeff’s eyes opened wide. ‘Jobbies! And they’re actually on the road now?’

‘Yes.’

He glanced at his watch. ‘How did they know?’

I could tell this was going to cause me some grief in the hours to come. ‘Long story. But there’s no time to waste. We’re going to have to get off the main road.’

‘Excuse me.’ Elvis leaned into our conversation, and the most unexpectedly soft Irish brogue issued from smiling lips. ‘Couldn’t help overhearing. Jeff here was telling me what you fellas are up to.’

I glared at Jeff, but he was oblivious, and Elvis offered me his hand.

‘I’m Dennis, by the way.’

It was a warm, dry hand that gave mine a firm shake. But there was something about his smile that didn’t quite reach his amber eyes, and I felt an immediate distrust.

‘Sounds like you boys’ll have a bit of explaining to do if the old fellas catch up with you.’

The others had gathered behind me now, and Dennis smiled around the anxious faces.

‘How long behind you are they?’

‘About an hour,’ I said reluctantly.

‘Well, if you’re going off-piste you’ll need a plan.’

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I said, ‘We’ve got good maps.’

‘Excellent.’ Dennis nodded in smiling approval. ‘But a map’s not a plan. Tell you what. I’ve been hanging about here for a while now looking to catch a ride. Figured I wasn’t going to make it home tonight. But if you boys want to give me a lift, I can offer you a bed for the night. Or, at least, a floor.’ He grinned. ‘And your dads’ll never find you.’

‘Where?’ I could tell from Luke’s voice that he was as wary as I was.

‘I’m renting a wee farm worker’s cottage down in the Lake District. Me and the missus. She’s got a job in the local dairy, and I’ve just been up in Glasgow looking for work.’

He looked at his watch, and I saw that the tattoo on his left forearm was a snake curled around a dagger.

‘If we leave now we should reach Penrith before the old fellas catch you, then we’ll be off the main road and they’ll never find you in a million years.’

Jeff had no hesitation. ‘Brilliant, that’s what we’ll do.’

I glanced at Luke, who gave an imperceptible shrug of the shoulders. Dave and Maurie looked uncertain.

I said, ‘Maybe we should talk about this.’

Dennis lit another cigarette. ‘Be my guest.’

‘Just between us,’ I said, and I walked off to the table where we had been seated earlier. The others followed.

‘What’s the problem?’ Jeff jerked his thumb back towards Dennis. ‘That’s a really gen bloke. And we’re not going to get another offer like that tonight.’

‘I don’t like him,’ I said. ‘We can navigate ourselves “off-piste” for tonight.’

‘I’m with Jack,’ Luke said, and we looked at Dave and Maurie.

Their joint indecision was paralysing.

‘This is just rude,’ Jeff said. ‘We’re insulting the bloke now. And we don’t have time to argue about it. It’s my van. I say we go with him.’ He looked at each of us in turn, almost daring us to say no. And when no one came up with a better plan, he turned and waved to Dennis. ‘We’re on.’

Dennis smiled and lifted his bomber jacket. ‘Good call, boys. You’ll not regret it.’

But I had a bad feeling that we might.

II

To my chagrin it was still my fate to sit up on the engine cowling. Maurie had moved into the back to share the settee with Luke and Dave, and had been replaced in the front by the cool Dennis who, as if to underscore his image, chain-smoked an American brand of menthol cigarettes called Kool.

There had been a strange, unspoken shift in the hierarchical structure of our little group. I had been the prime mover in the decision to run away, along with Luke, and up until then had been silently accepted, if not actually acknowledged, as the leader. But now I had been displaced by Dennis. He was three or four years older than us, and beside him we just seemed like the schoolkids we were. And Jeff, the only one of us not still at school, had become his lieutenant. I felt control of our situation slipping away from us, but was powerless to do anything about it.

The A74 took us on a tortuous tour of the southern uplands of Scotland before levelling off into the flood plains of the Solway Firth and the River Esk. I saw a signpost caught fleetingly in our headlights for a place called Metal Bridge, and shortly after that we saw a sign at the side of the road for ENGLAND, and I left Scotland for the first time in my life. Odd how straight away it felt different, as if I had passed into a foreign land. And those differences were immediately apparent in the change from stone-built to brick-built houses and farm buildings. I felt the chill of uncertainty creep over me. I was well out of my comfort zone now.

Carlisle was like a ghost town, alien and strange. Empty streets simmering in darkness beneath feeble street lamps. We stopped at an all-night filling station for petrol, and drove out of town on the A6.

The tension in the van was very nearly tangible. No one actually voiced the thought, but it seemed likely now that Maurie’s dad and mine could not be very far behind. I could see Jeff constantly checking his side mirrors and tensing every time we were overtaken.

The only one of us completely at ease with the situation was Dennis. He lit another Kool as we passed a road sign for Penrith. It was just ten miles away.

‘Won’t be long now,’ he said.

I could hear him grin in the dark, and saw his smoke rings flattening out against the windscreen in the lights of an on-coming vehicle.

And then we were off the A6, heading west towards Keswick on the A594, and it was like a huge weight had lifted off us all. We had made the turn-off before the dads caught up, and now we were home free, as if the invisible umbilical that had somehow kept us attached to everyone and everything we had known since birth had finally, irrevocably, been severed. We were into the uncharted territory of our new lives.

Dave, it turned out, had cans of stout planked in his rucksack. He passed them around, and we smoked our Player’s No. 6 and speculated about how much longer it would take us to get to London, and what we were going to do when we got there.

The road wound its way through undulating, open country peppered with darker areas of forest, and a three-quarter moon shone its colourless light across the land. We passed through tiny villages, houses huddled in darkness, and became aware of the land starting to rise up around us again as we drove into the Cumbrian mountains.

Moonlight cascaded across black water below us as we drove down into a larger town beyond the village of Threlkeld. Its street lamps twinkled in the night, light pollution masking the great canopy of the cosmos whose jewelled sky had, until then, sparkled above our flight path.

‘This is Keswick,’ Dennis said. ‘And Derwent Water.

Jeff changed down the gears as we descended into the town, past slate stone villas sitting proud above steep gardens, and a red-sandstone police station on the bend at the foot of the hill.

As we turned into the main street Dennis said, ‘Stop here.’

Jeff pulled up sharply. Dennis swung the door open and jumped down on to the pavement. Cigarette smoke from the van billowed out and cold air rushed in.

‘Going to call the missus, just to let her know I’ll be arriving with a few fellas. If you’re lucky, she might do you a fry-up.’

He grinned and pulled open the door of the red telephone box that stood on the corner, swinging himself into the light inside and fishing in his pocket for some coins.

I pulled the passenger door shut and said, ‘We don’t need him any more, and we’ve got him almost home. We could just drive off.’

Jeff swung himself round in the driver’s seat and glared at me. ‘Are you mad? The bloke’s just saved our hide. And do you really want to spend the night in the van?’

‘I don’t like him,’ I said.

‘Neither do I.’ Luke’s voice came from the back, and I felt bolstered by his support.

But Dave said, ‘He seems alright to me.’

And Jeff clamped his hands firmly on the wheel. ‘Well, I’m driving, and I’m not leaving him here. End of argument.’

And it was.

Dennis climbed back in, bringing the chill of the cold night air with him. ‘It’s all set. My good lady’s cracking eggs into the pan as we speak. Bet you fellas are hungry.’

‘Sure are,’ Dave piped up from the back.

Luke said nothing, and Maurie, who had been ominously non-committal about the whole thing, remained silent.

Jeff glared at me. ‘I could eat a scabby dug,’ he said, and crunched the column shift back into gear.

The van lurched off through Keswick, gathering speed until we emerged from its leafy suburbs on to a road signposted to Braithwaite. We were there in a matter of minutes, slowing to wind our way through narrow streets crowded by stone cottages, then out again into vivid moonlight that washed across a valley floor of fallow fields and phosphorescent streams.

Tree-covered hills folded in around us. We passed a cottage called Sour Riggs crouched behind high hedges, and the entrance to a place called Ladstock Hall. But we couldn’t see the house itself.

‘Take a right just up ahead here,’ Dennis told Jeff. His earlier, relaxed demeanour had gone, and he seemed alert now, a little on edge, sitting forward in his seat and peering ahead through the windscreen.

Jeff had to slow almost to a halt to make the turn into what was little more than a lane. I saw a wooden signpost pointing the way to Thornthwaite Church.

‘You live in a church?’ I said sceptically.

Dennis glanced at me. It was clear he knew I didn’t like him.

But still he smiled. ‘Haha, no. Irreligious, me. The missus, too. Haven’t been in a church for years.’ He paused. ‘The cottage is just beyond it.’

Jeff had reduced the speed of the van to little more than walking pace to guide it between the hedgerows, the bowed heads of thousands of daffodils smothering overgrown verges and glowing virulent yellow in the headlights. We came round the bend at the foot of the slope and saw the church brooding darkly behind a high stone wall and surrounded by the headstones of the dead, big and small, and canted at odd angles. A farm gate closed off access to a muddy track from a small parking area, and a car sat, half-reversed into a path that disappeared into dark pasture beyond a small, fast-running stream.

Jeff stood on the brakes, surprised by the unexpected car, then blinded as its headlights came on full beam.

Dennis was out of the door before any of us could even speak, and shadows moved through the lights like ghosts in the night. Men with stout poles that they started banging along the side of the van. Fists thumped on the back doors and a voice shouted, ‘Open up!’

We were trapped. There was no way forward, and it would have been impossible to back up at any speed. The driver’s door opened, and a grinning Dennis leaned in to turn the key in the ignition and pull it out. The engine spluttered to a stop and the lights dimmed imperceptibly.

‘Jaisus,’ he said. ‘What a bunch of losers you kids are.’ Then, ‘Everybody out.’

And we knew there would be no arguing with him.

Jeff and I jumped down from the front, and the others opened the back doors to climb out. All five of us were herded into the glare of the headlights from the two vehicles, and I saw that our attackers were only four in number. But they were older than us, and bigger, and armed. Resistance just wasn’t an option.

Suddenly Maurie broke free of the circle of light and started running back up the lane. I craned round the van to watch as one of our assailants went after him, catching up with him quickly and bringing him to the ground with a whack across the back of his thighs. I heard Maurie cry out in pain and then, as he was dragged back into the light, saw tears of fear and humiliation staining the dirt on his face.

Jeff became almost incandescent with rage. ‘You bastard!’ he screamed, and leapt at Dennis.

But he didn’t even get close. A baton swung through the headlights and I heard the crack of it on his skull, dropping him to his knees.

‘Stupid runaway kids,’ Dennis said, his smiles and pretence of geniality long since lost to his true colours. ‘Bet you’ve got every penny you possess on you. And anything and everything of any value.’ He strutted across the tarmac in front of us. ‘So you can just empty your pockets on to the ground and step back. Everything, mind. We’ll search you.’ And he nodded to one of his accomplices. ‘Go check out their bags.’

Maurie helped Jeff back to his feet, and Dennis brought his face to within inches of the drummer’s. ‘Should have listened to your mate here, sonny.’ And he flicked an unpleasant look at me.

But I wasn’t feeling particularly vindicated just then. I could see the blood trickling down Jeff’s neck from his head wound, and was too angry and scared.

One by one we laid out the contents of our pockets on the tarmac. Wallets and keys, cigarettes, lighters, loose change. One of Dennis’s henchmen scooped it all up and began assessing the haul. We must have had nearly a hundred quid between us, which for a bunch of schoolkids was a lot of money back then. But Dennis seemed less than pleased with his booty.

He glared at us in the headlights. ‘You hiding something?’

‘What would we have to hide?’ I said. ‘There’s only one of us not still at school. That’s all our savings.’

The one who had gone to rifle through our bags came back empty-handed. ‘Just clothes and toiletries and a few cans of beer wrapped inside a Playboy magazine,’ he said. He had a broad North of England accent.

The mention of the Playboy magazine drew all our eyes towards Dave, and I’d swear he blushed, although it was hard to tell in that light.

Dennis sneered. ‘Hardly worth the bloody trouble.’

‘What about all that gear in the back of the van?’ the one with the accent said. ‘Drums and guitars and shit.’

But to my relief Dennis shook his head. ‘Too big. We’d need to take the van as well. And we’d only get pennies for the stuff.’ He leaned in towards us, leering. ‘If you’ve got any sense you’ll get into that van and head back up the road. It’s way past your bedtime. Your mammies’ll be wondering where you are.’ Then he grinned. ‘If you can ever find the keys, that is.’ And he turned and hurled the ignition keys through the darkness, over the wall and into the cemetery. ‘Happy hunting. Or should that be haunting?’ Which brought guffaws of laughter from his mates. ‘And you’ll not be needing this.’ He held up Jeff’s driving licence and tore it into little pieces before casting them into the night.

They jumped into their car and its engine kicked and revved. With a squeal of tyres it kangarooed out of its place of semi-concealment, accelerated past us to squeeze by the van, two wheels gouging deep ruts in the verge, and sped off into the dark.

We stood then without moving or speaking, hearing the sound of the car slowly vanishing into the night, watching its lights track back along the road we had travelled just ten minutes earlier, until both sight and sound of it were lost to us.

Jeff sat down suddenly in the middle of the road and put his fingers to his neck, bringing them away smeared with blood, startling and red. ‘Aw jobbies.’

Maurie said, ‘I’ve got some first-aid stuff in my bag.’ And he ran round the van to get it.

Dave’s voice, laden with sarcasm, injected itself into the gulf of silence he left us with. ‘Thanks, Jobby Jeff! That’s a really gen bloke. I’m not leaving him here.’

Jeff’s head swung slowly round to turn dangerous eyes on Dave. ‘Fuck off,’ was his only comeback. But then, ‘And don’t call me Jobby Jeff!’

‘Fighting among ourselves is not going to do us any good,’ Luke said. ‘We’ve got to figure out what to do. We’re not going to get very far without any money.’

Maurie returned to more silence and knelt beside Jeff to wipe the blood from his wound and slather it with antiseptic cream, before crudely covering it with a sticking plaster. We watched despondently, each of us nursing his own private despair.

Until Dave said quietly, ‘They didn’t get all the money.’

Every head turned towards him, and he opened his jacket to start pulling his shirt out of his trousers, revealing a canvas money belt strapped around his waist.

‘Got it as a Christmas pressie a few years ago and never used it. Till noo. Thought it might be a good way of carrying my cash.’ He unzipped one of its many compartments and pulled out a wad of notes. He held them up. ‘Twenty quid. Should get us somewhere.’

And suddenly our predicament didn’t seem quite so bleak.

‘More than enough to get us back home,’ Maurie said, provoking a chorus of unanimous dissent.

Luke said, ‘No fucking way am I going back.’ His determination to see this thing through was resolute.

It took me a moment to realize why I was so shocked, before I understood. It was the first time I had ever heard Luke swearing.

‘So what are we going to do?’ Maurie’s voice was almost plaintive.

I said, ‘Well, the first thing we need to do is find those keys.’

‘How are we going to do that in the dark?’ Jeff winced as he placed his hand over the gash on his head.

‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ I said. ‘But I’m sure you’ll figure it out.’

‘Me?’

‘Aye,’ Dave said. ‘We wouldn’t be in this mess if you hadn’t made us give that bloke a lift.’

I stooped to pick up the lighters that the thieves had left lying on the ground. They had taken our cigarettes, so we hardly needed the lighters any more. But I chucked them at Jeff. ‘You’ll get some light off these till they run out.’

He snatched them up and scrambled to his feet. ‘And what are the rest of you going to do?’

‘Get some sleep,’ Luke said, and he headed off to climb back into the van.

Jeff looked nervously towards the pool of darkness that engulfed the church and the cemetery beyond the wall. ‘That’s a Christian cemetery?’

I glanced at the sign, which read Church of St Mary the Virgin.

‘So?’

‘So, I’m Jewish.’

‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

‘The spirits might not like a Jew poking about a Christian burial place.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake!’

‘Exactly!’ Jeff glanced at Maurie. ‘Will you help me?’

But Maurie just raised his hands. ‘You’re on your own this time, pal.’

To his credit, Jeff accepted his fate, punishment for his role in talking us into taking Dennis on board, and I almost felt sorry for him as he tentatively pushed open the gate to the churchyard. A tangled arch nurtured over decades from the intertwined branches of two trees led to the church itself. Beyond and around it the cemetery lay in deep pools of darkness cast by the shadows of trees in the intermittent moonlight. I was glad it was Jeff going in there in the dark, and not me.

I returned to the van and curled up in my big furry coat in the front passenger seat. The others had made themselves comfortable in the back. But sleep was not quick in coming. It had been a long day, and although we were all tired, the adrenaline was still pumping. It hardly seemed credible that this was the same day that had begun with Jenny and me being summoned to Willie’s office. Already that seemed like a lifetime ago.

Dave’s hushed voice came out of the darkness. ‘Why does Jobby Jeff always have to say that fucking word?’

‘What word?’ Luke said.

‘Jobbies. I hate that word.’

Which was met with silence.

Then, ‘Are you asking me?’ Maurie’s voice came out of the dark.

‘You’re his pal.’ Dave made a noise of snorted disgusted. ‘I mean, every time he says it I get this picture of brown, stinky sausages dropping oot a dug’s arse.’

Maurie said, ‘It’s to stop him swearing.’

‘Why does he want to stop swearing?’

‘He told me he was shocked when he started work at Anderson’s. He’d always thought it was just us, you know, kids that swore. I mean, you don’t hear your folks swearing, do you? Then he’s in among all these adults. Grown men. And they’re all swearing like troopers. So he thought he would try and stop.’

I raised my head from my coat. ‘What about you, Luke? I never heard you swear before tonight.’

‘Oh, I decided years ago that I wasn’t going to swear.’ Luke’s was the sweet voice of reason illuminating the night. ‘Seemed to me that if you had to swear it demonstrated a lack of vocabulary.’

There was a further silence as we all absorbed this.

Until Luke added, ‘Mind you, there’s times when nothing else’ll fucking do.’

And we all roared and laughed, and heard Jobby Jeff’s plaintive voice calling from somewhere beyond the cemetery wall.

‘What’s so funny?’

III

I woke up freezing cold as the first sunlight of an early-spring morning slanted through the trees and crept slowly into the front of the van. I was stiff and sore from sleeping in a bizarrely twisted position in the front passenger seat. But slept I had, without stirring all night. I stretched and peered into the gloom behind me to see Dave and Maurie on the settee, locked in what was almost an embrace, and wished I had a camera to capture the moment. There was no sign of Luke.

I glanced across to the driver’s side and saw Jeff curled up in a foetal position, wrapped up in his own jacket, his head tucked inside it for warmth. I hadn’t heard him getting in. The inside walls of the van were running with condensation.

I didn’t have the heart to wake anybody, so I climbed stiffly out on to the tarmac. I stood, then, at the side of the road and released a stream of hot urine on to the daffodils, watching steam rising into the sunlight. The scrape of a footfall in the lane turned my head and I saw Luke walking down from the road, hands pushed deep into his pockets. He nodded and stood beside me to unzip his fly and empty his bladder, too. Sunlight sparkled in the twin streams.

‘We’re not going to get far on twenty quid,’ he said. ‘Not with five of us to feed. And the Thames is a thirsty beast.’

I zipped up again. ‘So what do you think we should do?’

But he just shook his head. ‘I haven’t the first idea.’

I pushed open the farm gate and slithered down the bank to the stream that bubbled past the church, first dousing my hands in it, then slunging my face with ice-cold water. The shock of it brought blood stinging to my cheeks.

I looked back up at Luke, who stood watching me. ‘I wonder if Jeff found the keys?’

Luke pursed his lips. ‘He didn’t.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I was still awake when he got back in the van. He didn’t look for long. To be fair, he was never going to find them in the dark.’

I shook my head in despair. ‘Maybe we’re going to have to go home after all.’

Luke was unfazed. ‘You go if you want, but I’m not.’

And I knew that if Luke wasn’t, then neither was I.

I scrambled up the bank as Maurie and Dave jumped down from the back of the van. They both emptied their bladders and then joined us beside the stream.

Dave glared at Maurie. ‘He had a stonking bloody hard-on during the night.’

Luke and I both laughed.

I said, ‘How do you know that?’

Dave was indignant. ‘Cos it was sticking into my back, that’s how.’

Maurie blushed. ‘That wasn’t my fault.’

‘Well, it certainly wasn’t mine!’ Dave was not amused.

Luke controlled his laughter. ‘Nocturnal erections, otherwise known as nocturnal penile tumescence, Dave. We all have them. Three to five times a night, usually during REM sleep. Doesn’t mean Maurie’s in love with you. You must have woken up with one yourself a few times.’

Maurie growled, ‘Or when he’s got his face stuck in that Playboy magazine.’

Dave punched the fleshy part of his upper arm. ‘Shut up!’

Maurie clutched his arm. ‘Hey! That hurt!’

I changed the subject. ‘So did either of you bright sparks get any ideas during the night about what we’re going to do?’

Which brought an abrupt end to the juvenile banter. The lack of any serious suggestion was ominous, the four of us standing there with our hands thrust in our pockets feeling the early warmth of the sun make inroads into the legacy of cold left by the night.

Then Maurie said, ‘Do you think we could make it to Leeds?’

He had the oddest look in his eyes that I would remember many years later. But at the time I thought nothing of it. The rest of us gawped at him in disbelief.

‘Leeds?’ Dave said. ‘Why would we want to go there?’

At first Maurie seemed reluctant to tell us. But in the end he said, ‘My cousin’s there.’

I frowned. ‘Is that the lassie that ran off with her boyfriend?’

He nodded.

‘I thought no one knew where they’d gone.’

Maurie said, ‘They went to Leeds. That’s where he’s from. Andy McNeil. I’m the only one that knows. She called me, and made me swear not to tell anyone. You know, we were close when we were kids, so she trusted me. Then she wrote to me. Sent me her address and a phone number. I packed her letter to bring with me before we left, just in case my folks found it.’ He was struck by a sudden thought. ‘Shit, I hope those bastards didn’t take it.’

He rushed back to the van and disappeared inside, only to emerge a few moments later clutching a dog-eared blue envelope.

‘Got it.’ As he reached us again he took the letter out and looked at the untidy handwriting scrawled across the page in pencil. ‘Always had a feeling that things weren’t going quite right for her.’

He glanced up. And that same expression flickered briefly across his face, like a passing shadow.

‘What would be the point?’ Dave said.

‘Of what?’

‘Going tae see your cousin.’

Maurie turned on him. ‘A roof over our heads, food in our bellies. And maybe they can lend us money and help us get back on the road.’

I sensed Maurie’s anger. He had just broken his promise to his cousin for our common good, and maybe he felt the idea deserved a better reception.

I did, too. ‘I think it’s a brilliant idea. And in the absence of a better one, I say we go to Leeds.’

‘Me, too.’ Luke nodded his agreement

Dave shrugged. ‘Suppose so.’ And, as an afterthought, ‘What about Jobby Jeff?’

‘He doesn’t get a say.’ I was adamant about that. ‘We wouldn’t be in this mess if he hadn’t insisted on giving Dennis a lift.’

‘Good.’ Luke rubbed his hands together with renewed enthusiasm. ‘All we have to do now is find the keys for the van and we’ll be on our way. Someone better wake up Jobby Jeff.’

IV

We searched among the gravestones for more than half an hour without success. Great gnarled pines sent long shadows through grass that hadn’t yet been cut after the winter. It gave me a strange feeling to be searching like that among the dead, where people had been laid to rest for eternity. I felt like we were disturbing their peace. Thomas Bowe of Swinside Farm. Henry Herbert Jay and his wife, Jessie. Joseph Tickell of Thornthwaite, who died on 7th March 1901, at the age of seventy. It didn’t seem right to be tramping over their graves, stupid boys on a fool’s errand, naive and unworldly, taken for suckers on their first night away from home.

In the end it was Luke who solved our problem. We were simply searching randomly. Until he called on us to stop. We all raised expectant heads as he stooped to pick up a stone from the path, and weighed it in his palm.

‘This is probably close to the weight of the keys,’ he said. ‘I’ll go out there and throw it from where Dennis was standing. I think I remember roughly what direction he threw them. You lot watch out for where it lands, and we’ll concentrate our search there.’

We watched as he went back out into the turning area, positioning himself where he thought Dennis had been standing, and then throwing the stone just as hard as Dennis had thrown the keys. We watched where it landed, which was quite a bit further in than any of us had been looking. We found the keys nestling in the grass within three feet of the stone in less than two minutes.

Another ten minutes and we were on the road, following the signposts back to Keswick, where we stopped at a café and bought tea and bacon butties. I consulted the Reader’s Digest AA Book of the Road, and plotted a course. And then we were off, heading south out of Keswick on the A591 to Windermere and Kendal.

The first few miles passed in sombre silence, until someone in the back said, ‘It’s different with me and Veronica.’

And we all burst out laughing.

Except for Jeff, who looked both puzzled and aggrieved. ‘What?’ he said. ‘What!’

Which only made us laugh even harder.

Spirits soared then, and we started singing daft rugby songs with vulgar lyrics. It is astonishing how youthful ignorance can put adversity so easily aside to breed baseless optimism. Older, wiser heads might have embarked on this leg of the journey with a little more caution. But when you are seventeen, with the road powering past beneath you, and the sun shining in your eyes, you never imagine for one moment that things could ever go anything but well.

The road wound through mountain passes, tree-covered escarpments rising steeply from deep, dark lakes reflecting mountains like mirrors. Thirlmere, Windermere. If I hadn’t known better I’d have sworn that the Scottish West Highlands had been transplanted right here in the north-west of England.

It was a stunning day. Chilly still, but without a cloud in the sky. It didn’t take us long to reach the crossroads town of Kendal and then on to the A65 cross-country to Leeds itself.

I

Two things happened on that drive to change our mood. The first was a change in the weather. From that clear, cold, sunny start, the day turned slowly grey. Dark clouds overtook us from the west, low and laden with rain that began to fall around lunchtime. The second was a change of landscape.

From the lakes and mountains of the north-west, we had reached to the rolling farmland and picturesque stone villages of the Yorkshire Dales. But now, as we approached Leeds itself, the darkening sky turned sulphurous yellow, the mills that ringed the city pumping coal smoke into air already thick with it. Stone villages and affluent suburbs gave way to decaying brick terraces. As we drove into it, the city seemed to fold itself around us, drawing us into its crumbling industrial heart.

This was a city in transition, in the process of slum clearance and new build. A city characterized by the chimneys of the mills that pricked the blackening sky, a legacy of nineteenth-century industrialization which, within a quarter of a century, would be decimated by eleven years of Thatcher government. Years that destroyed the industrial base of a nation and sowed the seeds of future financial meltdown.

I had grown up in another industrial city, but Leeds had little of Glasgow’s Victorian grandeur, or the splendid architectural inheritance of the Tobacco Lords. Perhaps it was the rain, and the poisonous sky, but it felt mean as we approached it that afternoon, a city in decline. On another day, in bright sunshine, Leeds might have offered a very different impression of itself. Sunlight so colours our view of the world. But that afternoon it spoke to us only of grim urban deprivation. Our optimism of earlier in the day was crushed by its minacious sky and the creeping return of a brutal sense of reality.

We parked the van in a side street on the south-western edge of the city, bought some cigarettes, and went into a pub crowded with factory workers at the end of their shift. We found seats in an alcove near the back and sent Jeff to get us halves of lager, since he looked older than the rest of us. We sat and smoked, making our own contribution to the pall of pollution that hung in the place, kippering our clothes and stinging our eyes. Maurie used the phone at the bar to call his cousin.

While he was gone, Luke picked up her letter from the table and read it out loud.

‘Raitch?’ Dave said.

‘Rachel.’ Jeff rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘Lovely-looking girl. Used to fancy her myself.’

‘Before Veronica stole your heart?’ I cocked an eyebrow in his direction.

He gave me a withering look, then flicked his head towards the letter. ‘She doesn’t sound very happy.’

Luke whistled, and we all turned to look at him. His eyes were still fixed on the crumpled sheet of blue notepaper in his hands.

‘Just seen the address.’ He looked up. ‘Quarry Hill Flats.’

I frowned. ‘What, you mean you know it?’

Luke raised his eyes from the letter. ‘It’s pretty famous. Or should I say infamous?’

‘How would you know?’ Dave took a long pull at his beer.

‘We got several classes from Mr Eccleston on twentieth-century social housing. Part of my history of architecture course.’

I pulled a face. ‘You mean, you were actually awake through that stuff?’

Luke smiled. ‘It was interesting. Quarry Hill Flats was the centrepiece of it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because it’s the largest housing estate of its kind in the world. I don’t remember the exact details, but I think they took their inspiration for it from some complex in Vienna. A new kind of approach to social housing, old Mr Eccleston said it was. They cleared an area of inner-city slums in the Quarry Hills area in the thirties, right in the centre of Leeds, and built this...’ he searched perhaps for the word that Mr Eccleston had used, ‘... Stalinesque monstrosity. Almost completely enclosed, with huge archways leading into it. He showed us plans and photographs of it. Massive, seven- and eight-storey blocks, a thousand flats for three thousand people. Sort of teardrop shaped, the whole complex, which is kind of ironic, given the way it’s turned out.’

‘What do you mean?’ I was curious about this social housing experiment where Maurie’s cousin had ended up.

‘Well, it’s become a bit of a nightmare of a place, Jack. Falling apart, really. Physically and socially. Problem families, vandalism, gangs.’

‘Jees,’ Dave said. ‘And that’s where Maurie’s cousin lives?’

Luke nodded. ‘So it seems.’

A troubled-looking Maurie came back and slumped down into his seat. We all turned expectant eyes on him, but he was lost in some glassy-eyed distance.

Jeff couldn’t contain himself. ‘What did she say?’

Maurie came out of his reverie, as if aware of the rest of us for the first time. ‘She said not to come before about ten thirty tonight.’

I leaned forward. ‘And?’

‘And nothing. That’s it. But she did say not to bring the van into the complex.’ He hesitated. ‘She thought it might not be safe.’

Dave laid his hands on the table and spread his fingers. ‘Great!’

Luke said, ‘Why do we have to wait till ten thirty?’

‘She’d rather Andy wasn’t there when we came. She thinks he’ll be out till about midnight.’

‘Aw jobbies,’ Jeff said. ‘That means she’ll want rid of us before then. So much for a roof over our heads. It’ll be another night in the van.’

But my eyes were fixed on Maurie. That sense of troubled preoccupation hadn’t gone away.

‘What’s wrong?’

He glanced up at me, and then away again quickly, reluctant to meet my eye. ‘She says she can lay her hands on some money. But she wants to go with us.’

You could have touched the silence that settled among us, as if it had taken form.

Jeff was the first to voice our misgivings. ‘We can’t take a girl with us, Maurie.’

‘Why not?’ Maurie turned angry eyes on his friend.

‘Because we’re five blokes, and... well, it wouldn’t work, that’s all.’

He looked around the table for support, which was there in our faces, but no one said anything.

‘Why does she want to go with us, Maurie?’ I asked.

‘Because she’s in trouble, Jack.’ He hesitated, then sighed. ‘Something to do with drugs. And Andy. She wouldn’t be any more specific than that.’ He looked around the assembled faces, then said fiercely, ‘I’m not going without her.’

‘And if we don’t want to take her?’ Luke said.

‘Then you’ll go your way and I’ll go mine.’

Which really wasn’t an option, since Maurie was our singer and frontman, and there was no way we would find work in London without him.

Jeff said, ‘How much money?’

Maurie frowned at him. ‘What?’

‘How much money can she get?’

Maurie shrugged. ‘Don’t know. More than enough to get us to London. That’s all she said. I couldn’t talk her into going back to Glasgow.’

‘Okay,’ I said, ‘we might as well be democratic about it and put it to a vote.’ I raised my right hand. ‘I say we take her.’

I looked at the others, and one by one they raised reluctant hands, all except for Jeff. Maurie glared at him, but there was more hurt than anger in his eyes.

Until, finally, Jeff said, ‘Oh, alright.’

And it was settled. But none of us was happy with this completely unforeseen turn of events.

II

It was dark and raining heavily when we drove down Eastgate towards the roundabout at the foot of the hill, shortly after ten o’clock.

‘Jees,’ Jeff said, his voice hushed as he peered past the wipers and the rain towards the dominating seven-storey sweep of concrete that characterized the front end of Quarry Hill. It curved round St Peter’s Street, beyond the roundabout, and filled the view at the end of the road. We all crowded towards the front of the van to get a view of it. I had never seen anything on that scale in my life. It bore no relation, architecturally, to anything else around it. It was as if some giant spaceship had simply landed on the hill, vast and incongruous, and couldn’t take off again.

‘It looks like a prison,’ Dave said.

And I thought yes, that was it. It was exactly as you might have imagined some grim Soviet prison block where political prisoners were sent in their thousands for daring to think. All it lacked was the razor wire and the sweeping criss-cross of security searchlights.

‘That must be Oastler House,’ Maurie said. ‘Rachel said the whole complex is made up of about a dozen different blocks or “houses”, as they call them. She said to enter through the arch at Oastler, and they’re in Moynihan, which is the big block that runs the length of the north side.’

Jeff swung left into Vicar Lane, and we entered a maze of narrow backstreets lined by three- and four-storey red-brick factories and warehouses. He found parking in Edward Street, and cut the engine and lights. We all sat listening to the tick, tick of the cooling engine, reluctant to go out into the rain that we could hear battering on the roof.

Finally, a little before ten thirty, the rain eased a bit and we slipped out into the dark. The city was pretty much deserted. We could hear the rumble of light traffic on the main thoroughfares of Eastgate and St Peter’s Street, and New York Road beyond, but there wasn’t a soul in sight as we turned left into Lady Lane and hurried in the darkness down the hill towards Oastler. The Kingston Unity Friendly Society building loomed over us on our right, and on the left stood Circle House and the darkened window of Harold’s hairdressers.

We ran across the roundabout in a huddle and on to the concourse that led to the huge archway in the centre of the towering arc that was Oastler House. Lights burned beyond balconies in random patterns across all seven floors, and our footsteps echoed back at us in the dark from the curved walls of the arch as we passed through it. We emerged on the far side into another world. A world unto itself, enclosed and private, the city behind us shut out and lost beyond the dominating blocks of flats that ringed its perimeter. Even in the dark you could see the neglect and decay. Stained concrete, cracked and crazed. Street lamps whose bulbs had died, leaving pools of darkness around them. Weeds poking up through fissures in the tarmac. Football fields and kiddies’ play areas sad in their tawdry, shadowed emptiness.

Away to our right I saw an old red-brick building that had somehow been subsumed into the development, and the raised circle of an enormous gas storage tank.

‘This way.’ Maurie led us off to the left, blocks of flats rising up all around us.

We followed the curve of Oastler to Neilson, and another arch that offered a tempting escape back into the outside world. But we still had business within. There were vehicles parked along the front of the buildings, and further blocks were separated by cluttered open areas abandoned to the creeping advance of nature in the process of reclaiming them.

There was no one around. No movement, no sign of life, except for lit windows punctuating black spaces. I know now, of course, that good, working people lived ordinary lives in these blocks. Were born, and lived and died here. Played, fought, laughed, made love, as well as the best of a deteriorating environment. But to us, in the dark and the rain that night in 1965, it seemed alien and hostile.

Maurie found the entrance to Rachel’s stairway near the far end of Moynihan and we escaped the rain into a scarred and gloomy stairwell that smelled of urine. The lift was only big enough to take two, and so we decided to climb the stairs to the third floor. The smell of urine gave way to the perfume of stale cooking, cabbage and onion, and drains — a low, unpleasant note that seemed to permeate the entire building.

We passed along a dimly lit corridor to Rachel’s door near the far end. Her flat was on the interior side of the development. Some idiot with a can of spray paint had left his signature along most of the length of the wall.

Maurie knocked on the door, and after a brief wait we heard a girl’s voice come from the other side of it.

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s Maurie.’

The door opened, and she almost flew into his arms. He was as much taken aback as we were. She buried her face in his chest, her arms reaching around his substantial girth to squeeze the breath out of him.

‘Oh, Mo, I’m so glad you’re here.’

Her voice was muffled, almost lost in the damp of his jacket, and it wasn’t until she stepped back that I really saw her face for the first time.

There are many ways to describe a moment like that. Most of them mired in cliché. I could say that time stood still. Or that my heart pushed up into my throat and very nearly choked me. And in their own way these things would be true. I had butterflies in my stomach, and my mouth was so dry I could barely separate my tongue from the roof of my mouth. So I could be forgiven a little hyperbole.

When I first met Jenny Macfarlane, there had been an instant and powerful attraction. I had wanted her to be my girl. But at the risk of sounding like Jeff and his Veronica, this was different. I knew, beyond any shadow of doubt, that this girl would mean more to me than any other in my life. I knew it then, and I know it still today, fifty years on. But in the words of the song from a 1969 Rolling Stones album, Let it Bleed, you can’t always get what you want.

Of course, I didn’t know that then.

Her face was thin, and very pale, as if she hadn’t eaten much, or had suffered a recent illness. But her eyes were huge. The deepest, warmest brown, a mirror of the chestnut hair that fell in unruly ropes over her shoulders. She just made you want to protect her. From all the darknesses of the world. She wore a long-sleeved, close-fitting white smock over bell-bottomed jeans and brown boots. She was a skinny girl, but not skeletal. She carried flesh on her bones in the right places, and there was something almost classy about her. Elegant. She wore not a trace of make-up, and didn’t need to. Her lips were dark and quite full, in contrast to her long, thin nose, and her jawline was so well defined it was almost elfin.

Her relief at seeing Maurie was tangible, and her emotion welled up to moisten those big brown eyes, so that they soaked up and reflected almost every ounce of light in this whole dismal place.

We all stood back a little, feeling like intruders, embarrassed and unwilling witnesses to a very personal moment. She hardly noticed us.

Then she glanced nervously along the corridor before ushering us inside. ‘Come in. Quick. You don’t want to be seen out here.’

We shuffled into the flat after Rachel and Maurie like sheep, and she closed the door carefully behind us. Through an open door on the left I saw an unmade bed, street light from the window falling across a tangle of sweat-stained sheets. From the hall she led us into the living room, where glass doors opened on to a cluttered balcony that looked out into the very heart of the Quarry Hill development. It seemed that half the flat had spilled out on to the balcony, bags of rubbish, broken bits of furniture, the detritus of a life in disarray, all piled up like debris washed ashore after a storm. The balcony itself gave on to a joyless view of other apartments, lights burning in countless windows, other people’s lives spooling out behind glass like so many private movies. Short ones, long ones, sad ones, happy ones.

But there was nothing happy about this apartment. It was a car crash of a place. We had to wade through an accumulation of old clothes, the flotsam and jetsam of lives in chaos, just to get out of the hall. There was a foul smell in the flat, and rising above it the unpleasant odour of paraffin. I saw an old paraffin heater sitting in the corner of the room, and thought that probably explained the tracks of black condensation that stained the walls and windows.

The mouldy remains of half-eaten meals littered a Formica-topped table.

‘Jesus!’ Maurie voiced all of our thoughts in a single oath. ‘How can you live like this, Raitch?’

I saw tears well up in her eyes again.

‘It’s not my choice, Mo. It really isn’t. It’s not my home, it’s Andy’s. And whichever of his friends decide they’re going to crash for the night. There can be eight or ten people sleeping over, some nights. You have to step over bodies just to get to the loo.’

Maurie shook his head in confusion. ‘So why do you stay?’

‘Like I said, I don’t have a choice. If I tried to get away Andy would come after me. I’m not his girlfriend, I’m his property. And where would I go? What would I do? I don’t have any money.’

Jeff said, ‘You told Maurie you could get your hands on some cash, Raitch.’

She glanced at Jeff, and I could tell immediately that she didn’t like him. One look was all it took to convey a whole history that the rest of us knew nothing about.

‘I know where it is. I just can’t get at it.’

‘What do you mean?’ Maurie said.

Without a word she led us back out through the hall and into the bedroom I had glimpsed on the way in. The smell in here was sour. Body odour and feet. On a bedside table there was a candle and, laid out on a dirty handkerchief, a syringe, a small round metal container, a strip of stained blue rubber about fifteen inches long and other, unidentifiable bits and pieces. Although I had never witnessed anything like them, I knew instinctively these were the accoutrements of the heroin addict. It was startling to see them laid out like that, as if they were everyday things in everyday use. And in truth, they probably were. But I was distracted by Rachel dropping to her knees at the side of the bed and reaching under it to slide out a small trunk secured by a large padlock.

‘This is where he keeps his stuff. And his cash.’

‘His stuff?’ I said.

And she looked at me, I think, for the very first time. There was a moment, I am sure of it, that mirrored for Rachel the moment when I first set eyes on her. I can still see and feel it clearly in my mind, although I wonder now if it wasn’t exaggerated in my imagination, and imbued in later years with the memory that I have of it today.

‘The stuff he sells,’ she said.

‘Drugs?’ Maurie seemed shocked.

She nodded. ‘H.’

‘He’s a dealer?’

‘And user.’ Her brave face crumpled just a little before she caught herself. ‘He’s started making me take it, too.’

She pulled up her sleeve to reveal the bruises and scabbing around the injection sites in the crook of her arm. The stunned silence in the room seemed to affect her more than anything else. As if serving, somehow, to bring home to her just how far she had fallen. We were her peers. Middle-class kids from a south-side Glasgow suburb, staring at her with the same horror she would have felt herself in other circumstances.

Silent tears brimmed on her lower lids, before spilling over to run down her cheeks. ‘Please, Mo. Get me out of here.’ Though for some reason, it was me she looked at.

But it was Jeff who took the initiative. Not the brightest, but always practical. ‘Are there any tools in the flat?’

She wiped her cheeks dry with her palms as she stood up. ‘Andy keeps stuff in a box under the sink.’

We followed her through to the kitchen.

In the cardboard box there was a stout screwdriver, a set of spanners wrapped in cloth, a claw hammer, a rusted file with a pointed end, a bicycle pump and some corroded tins of chrome cleaner. Jeff grabbed the box and carried it back through to the bedroom.

Maurie turned to Rachel. ‘Get packed, Raitch. Minimum that you need. You got a bag?’

She nodded. ‘Andy’s got an old sports bag in the back room.’

‘Then pack now.’

The imperative in Maurie’s voice infused us all with a sense of urgency. None of us wanted to be here when Andy got back. I hurried through to help Jeff try to break open the trunk.

‘We’ll never bust this padlock,’ he said. ‘Best we can hope for is to break the clasp.’

His instrument of choice was the file. It was about twelve inches long and solid iron. He insinuated it between the clasp and the body of the trunk and braced his legs against the trunk itself to try to lever it free. The side of the trunk buckled with the force of it, but the clasp remained firmly attached.

I sat on the trunk and added my heel and the strength of one leg, to try to gain more leverage. The scream of metal under stress filled the room, and there was some movement of the rivets that attached the clasp to the trunk. Enough for me to be able to force the head of the screwdriver between the two and hammer it down. The panel welded to the clasp buckled, and with two of us now exerting leverage at different points, the whole thing bent outwards, protesting all the time, until finally it gave. Jeff fell backwards and the padlock dropped to the floor.

I threw back the lid of the trunk. Me and Jeff, and Dave and Luke, all crowded round to look inside. If we had expected it to be crammed full of heroin we were disappointed. It was almost empty, except for a single, clear plastic bag sealed with sticky tape and filled with a white powdered substance. It was about the size of a two-pound bag of sugar. The bottom of the trunk was littered with small resealable plastic sachets, all empty. There was a small set of scales, a spectacles case that opened to reveal several unused syringes, and a black cloth bag with a string threaded through the open end of it, gathered and tied in a bow. I untied it and pulled the bag open to lift out two wads of banknotes. Fives, tens and twenties.

‘Jees!’ Dave’s voice came in a breath that seemed to fill the room. ‘Must be a couple of hundred quid in there if there’s a penny.’

I weighed them in my hand. It was certainly a lot of money.

‘We can’t take that,’ Luke said suddenly, and we all looked at him.

‘Why not?’ Jeff said.

‘Because it’s stealing.’

I stood up. ‘Luke, this isn’t honestly earned money. The guy sells drugs. He trades in people’s misery. It’s not theft, it’s liberation.’

But Luke shook his head. ‘It’s still stealing.’

I felt frustration well up inside me. I needed to provide him with a logic for taking it. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Andy and Rachel are a couple, right? They share their lives. So, by rights half of this should be hers.’ I threw one of the bundles back into the trunk. ‘We’ll only take her half.’

‘Hey!’ Jeff protested.

But I never took my eyes off Luke. ‘It’s more than enough to get us to London, Jeff. What do you say, Luke?’

I could see the internal struggle going on behind his eyes. Whatever else those years of being dragged around the doors had done, they had instilled in him an unshakeable sense of morality, of right and wrong.

He nodded and said quietly, ‘Okay.’

Maurie and Rachel appeared in the doorway. She was wearing a black leather jacket now, and he was carrying her holdall.

‘We ready to go?’

‘We are.’ I thrust the notes at Dave. ‘Better stash this in your money belt.’

Luke leaned into the trunk and lifted out the plastic bag of white powder. ‘Not leaving him with this, though.’ And he pushed past the rest of us to get to the toilet, where he burst open the bag and emptied its contents down the pan.

Rachel’s voice was hushed and filled with fear. ‘Oh my God, he’ll kill us. He really will. He’ll kill us.’

Luke flushed the toilet.

We were all in the hall when the front door opened. A thickset youth wearing ox-blood Doc Martens and black drainpipe jeans lifted his head to look at us in astonishment. He had a chequered shirt beneath a navy-blue donkey jacket, like coalmen wore, with leather patches across the shoulders and on the elbows. He sported an American army-style crew cut, and had a scar that ran from the corner of one eye, through top and bottom lip, to his chin. His eyes were a dangerous blue, one of them substantially paler than the other, and he was as surprised to see us as we were to see him.

There was a moment of tense stand-off as we all assessed the situation.

His eyes found Rachel’s. ‘What the fuck’s going on, Raitch?’

Incongruously, I was aware that he didn’t have a northern accent. It was a London twang, like you heard on Steptoe and Son. But he didn’t wait for an answer. His right hand went around behind him, to pull a long-bladed knife from beneath his jacket. He held it out to one side, away from his body, tense and ready to fight.

The rest of us were frozen by fear. There might have been five of us, but he was the one with the knife. And whoever came up against him first was going to feel the cold, deadly penetration of its blade.

‘Put the fuckin’ chib away, pal,’ Dave said in his broadest Glasgow accent. ‘And you might just come oot o’ this alive.’

I flicked a quick glance in his direction. I knew Dave to be the gentle giant that he was, and I had never heard him speak this way before. He was trading on his home city’s unenviable reputation for gang warfare and violence, and the attendant sense of menace inherent in the Glasgow accent. It had its effect.

Doc Martens let a little of his tension go, and he took half a step back. ‘So what’s happening?’

Rachel’s voice was trembling. ‘Just some of Andy’s friends down from Glasgow, Johnno. No need for aggro.’

I saw his eyes pass quickly over each of us in turn, making a rapid appraisal, before his gaze turned towards the bedroom door, and I knew he must have seen the open trunk. It was pure instinct that made me reach for Rachel’s holdall and take it from Maurie. If one of us didn’t take the initiative, then Johnno would, and he was still the one with the knife.

‘Brought him some good stuff,’ I said, and Johnno’s eyes dropped for a moment to the bag.

I swung it at his head as hard as I could, surprised by the weight of it, swivelling on the ball of my foot and very nearly losing my balance. The bag connected full-on with the side of Johnno’s head and smacked it hard against the wall. I saw blood burst from his mouth and his eyes tip back in his head. His knife slipped from his fingers as he dropped to his knees and fell forward.

‘Bloody hell!’ I looked at Rachel. ‘What have you got in here?’

Frightened eyes darted from the bag to meet mine. She shrugged. ‘Nothing, really. Shoes mostly.’

‘Shoes?’ Maurie glared at her. ‘That’s the minimum that you need?’

‘Let’s get the hell ootie this bloody place!’ Dave stepped over Johnno’s groaning and semi-conscious body curled up on the floor.

And one by one we followed him down the corridor, moving as fast and as quietly as we could towards the stairwell.

We got as far as the first landing, the echo of our footsteps following us down, when we heard voices and stopped in time to see three youths coming round the bend on the landing below us. They stopped, too, looking up in surprise through the gloom and graffiti, and there was the briefest hiatus. Then the tallest of them, a pale, good-looking boy with blond hair greased back in a quiff, bellowed Rachel’s name. The force of it in the confined space of the stairwell was almost shocking.

‘It’s not what you think, Andy.’ Rachel’s voice seemed feeble by comparison, like the plaintive cry of a seagull against the roar of a storm.

But Andy’s eyes had found and fixed themselves on Maurie. ‘You?’

And I saw knives glinting suddenly in the light that came up the stairwell from below. We turned to run back up the way we had come.

‘Keep going,’ Rachel said breathlessly. ‘All the way to the top. We can get on to the roof.’

Then what? I thought.

And almost as if she had heard me, she whispered in the dark, ‘We can get down another stairwell.’

As we ran up to the next floor I could hear raised voices shouting below, Andy’s rising above the others. ‘Don’t worry. They’re not going anywhere. I want to check the flat first. Guard the stairs.’

Then the echo of footsteps running along the hall. I replayed Luke pouring the bag of heroin down the toilet, and I knew then that Rachel’s worst fears would almost certainly be realized.

Andy would kill us if he caught us.

Four floors later, lungs bursting, we staggered up the final flight of steps to the door that opened on to the roof. It wouldn’t budge.

‘Jesus, it’s locked!’ Dave’s voice exploded in the dark.

There was no light here and we could barely see a thing. Jeff and I put our shoulders to it. On the third attempt, we heard the splintering of wood and the door flew open.

We spilled out on to the huge, open expanse of flat curving roof. A combination of fear and oxygen-starved muscles very nearly stole away the ability of my legs to hold me up. I staggered, gasping for breath, and felt the cold rain mingling with the sweat on my face. I became aware of the almost eerie, yellow-misted cityscape that stretched off to the north, the occasional car or lorry passing seven floors below us on New York Road. On the other side, the lights of Quarry Hill twinkled in suffocating silence. For several minutes it was all we could do to catch our breath, and it took a blood-curdling yell rising up through the dark from the stairwell below to get us on the move again.

The roof was peppered with obstacles. Chimney cowlings, the openings to stairwells, square blocks housing lift gear for each stair. Rachel led the way, running between them, arms pumping, head thrust back, and I realized that I was still carrying her bag.

We were running west, I think, towards Eastgate, even though that sounds contradictory. As we got towards the end of it, the roof dropped down a floor, and we had to turn back to the last stairwell. To our great, collective relief the door was not locked, and we went charging noisily down the stairs. For some reason there were no lights here, and the presence of each and every one of us was felt and heard rather than seen. Heaving lungs and breath catching in throats were the sounds that accompanied us through almost the entire descent.

By the time we got to the second floor there were lights again, and on the first-floor landing we stopped, trying hard to hold our breath and listen for any sounds coming from below. With luck, Andy and his friends would have no idea which of seven or eight stairwells we might have come down. But we didn’t want to run the risk that somehow they might be waiting for us below.

Luke volunteered to check. We watched him from the top step as he moved carefully, quietly down to the next landing and then disappeared from view. We heard nothing for so long that I was starting to fear the worst.

Dave put that fear into words. ‘Something’s happened to him.’

But then, almost immediately, we heard his short, sharp whistle, our signal that it was all clear, and we hurried down after him. It was only when we reached the last few steps that I realized Rachel was clinging to my arm. When we reached the lobby I looked at her, and she became suddenly self-conscious, letting go of me as if my sleeve might burn her.

As if she needed to find something to say, to cover the moment, she muttered, ‘Thanks for carrying my bag. I’ll take it now, if you want.’

But I held it away from her. ‘It’s okay. We need you to show us how to get out of here.’

Maurie came back from the door that led out into the complex. ‘Yeh, which way, Raitch? I can’t see anybody out there.’

She gave me a small, uncertain smile, and hurried with Maurie back to the door. She leaned out, glancing both ways, then turned to look at our anxious assembled faces. Our lives, it seemed, were now dependent on this scared and unreliable teenage girl who had been injecting herself with a Class A drug.

‘To our right,’ she said, ‘and then out through the Neilson arch.’

It was still raining, and a mist was rising now from the ground all about us, cold and damp and forming haloes around the street lamps. But even as we ducked into the Neilson arch, and the world outside was framed by its curve beyond the darkness, angry voices rang out behind us, and we heard footsteps running down the road that ran the length of Moynihan. They were only two or three hundred yards away.

I felt almost gripped by panic, sensing the anger in their voices, and the intent in those sprinting feet. Rachel darted out across the deserted New York Road, and we followed her blindly along an alleyway that ran down the side of the green-tiled City of Mabgate Inn, where we were swallowed by darkness.

I could hear the sound of rushing water, and skinned the palms of my hands as we dropped down from a moss-covered wall into what seemed like a river below. Although we landed on solid ground, the roar of water was deafening now, catching what little light there was down here as it gushed past our feet. As my eyes accustomed themselves to the gloom, I could see brick warehouses with dark, arched windows rising up around us, and the crumbling Victorian stonework of walls that led off into the blackness of a tunnel ahead.

‘What is this place?’ I heard Maurie’s voice struggling to make itself heard above the rush of water.

‘It’s a stream that they made into a canal.’ Rachel’s voice came back in the dark. ‘The Meanwood Beck. There’s walkways along either side. It’ll take us into the Mabgate tunnel.’

‘And where will that take us?’ I could hear Dave’s panic. He didn’t like the dark.

‘Right under the city, for about half a mile. Until it reaches the river. But we won’t go that far. There’s several culverts that’ll take us back up on the other side of Eastgate.’

‘You’ve been down here before?’ There was incredulity in Jeff’s voice.

‘No. But it was Andy’s planned escape route if we were ever raided by the cops.’ She took her holdall from me and crouched down to unzip it. ‘He kept essentials in this bag in case he had to run for it. I chucked most of the stuff out except for this.’

She drew out a long-shafted metal torch, and I realized what it was in the bag that had done most of the damage to Johnno’s head.

We heard voices then, whispered calls reverberating not far off in the dark, and we knew that Andy and his friends were close by.

Rachel stood up quickly. ‘This way.’

And we followed her into the tunnel.

Only when we had been completely enveloped by the utterly dense, velvety blackness of it did she switch on the torch, and its beam played out ahead of us in the misted underground distance. The dark shapes of what could only have been rats scuttled off up ahead, then stopped to turn and look back at us, tiny eyes glowing like pinpoints of light in the shadows.

Broad walkways on either side of black water in spate ran beneath the low arch of the brick tunnel, and we had to stoop as we ran. I glanced back as the tunnel curved round to the right, and the lights of the city behind us vanished from view. It seemed unlikely that Andy and his pals would pursue us into it without light. But his voice did. A voice filled with hate and anger, bellowing above the thundering of the water.

‘You fucking bitch! You’re dead! Fucking dead when I get you!’

I caught a momentary glimpse of her scared rabbit’s eyes as she glanced back over her shoulder, and I felt again that strangely powerful urge to protect her, no matter what.

We pressed forward into the darkness for eight or ten minutes before Rachel suddenly stopped. She turned the beam of her torch into a crudely constructed side tunnel that narrowed as it twisted off and up. ‘I think this is one of the culverts.’

‘You’re not sure?’ Jeff seemed ready to blame her entirely for our predicament.

And I suppose, in a way, she was. But I was quick to defend her. ‘She’s never been down here before. How could she be sure?’

Luke took the torch from her. ‘I’m taller than the rest of you. I’ll lead the way. If I can get through, everyone can.’

‘What about fat Mo?’ Dave said, and I saw him grinning in the peripheral light of the torch. ‘He’s no’ as tall as you, but he’s twice as wide.’

‘Fuck off.’ Maurie glowered at him.

We set off up the side passage in single file, Luke leading with the torch, the rest of us in touching contact with the one in front. I felt Rachel reach for my hand, finding it in the dark, and I let her take it and held it as we climbed more steeply and the passage narrowed. We waded through water rushing down from street level, soaking into shoes and socks, and the roof sloped down so that we had to bend almost double.

Then suddenly we emerged into a wash of yellow sodium street light, and we straightened stiff backs and breathed fresh air to fuel our relief. We were in a narrow, overgrown culvert beneath a tall brick building on one side, and an overgrown stone wall below a railing on the other. But it was easy enough to climb up and over the railing to drop into the cobbled lane on the far side of it.

Rachel stood gasping and looking around anxiously. ‘Okay, I know where we are. And we’re ahead of Andy,’ she said. ‘But he’s bound to check it out. Where did you park the van?’

‘Edward Street,’ Jeff said.

Rachel nodded. ‘Then we’re just a couple of streets away.’ And she set off at a loping run without another word.

We exchanged glances and set off after her.

She took us into Bridge Street, then cut up into Templar Place, before we found ourselves back in Lady Lane and immediately got our bearings. Edward Street was less than fifty yards away.

The van seemed like a haven of safety, and it was an enormous relief to reach it. For once, I got the passenger seat, with Rachel perched up on the engine cowling. The others all squeezed on to the settee in the back. Jeff started the motor and the headlights picked out reflections on the wet cobbles as we turned into Lady Lane and headed down towards the Eastgate roundabout.

We were almost there, cruising cautiously and keeping a wary eye on the streets around us, when Andy and three others came running out of Bridge Street and into the middle of Lady Lane. Pale faces were caught full in our headlights.

‘Jobbies,’ Jeff muttered. He dropped a gear and accelerated straight at them.

Rachel screamed and braced her feet on the metal dash, but at the last moment the drug dealer and his friends leapt out of the way. I could hear their raised voices swearing at us in the dark, and someone thumped the side of the van as we passed.

Jeff swung left on the roundabout, following the curve of Oastler House north, before turning right into New York Road and accelerating past the length of Moynihan, from where we had just escaped. No one spoke as we watched the serried ranks of balconies pass by on our right, misted windows rising up seven and eight storeys to cast diffuse yellow light into a thickening fog.

From there, York Road ran almost straight through the city, heading east. The rain got worse, and Jeff eased back on the speed, headlights raking the misted night as we cruised through what felt now like a ghost town. We passed only occasional vehicles, and there was nobody about on foot.

I checked the time. What had seemed like an eternity had, in fact, been little more than an hour. It was twenty minutes to midnight.

III

I juggled the AA book of maps on my knees by the intermittent light of passing street lamps, trying to get our bearings.

‘We’re on the A64,’ I said, ‘heading sort of north-east.’ I looked at Rachel. ‘You got any idea where that’s going to take us?’

She shrugged. ‘Not a clue. I’ve hardly been over the door since I’ve been here.’

Suddenly Jeff said, ‘I think we’re being followed.’

I craned my neck to try to catch a glimpse in the wing mirror of the car that was on our tail. But all I saw were headlights. Luke clambered over the settee and the piles of gear to look through the back windows.

‘It’s a Cortina,’ he said. ‘White. Pretty bashed-up-looking.’

‘Oh shit.’ Rachel was even paler than when I’d first seen her. ‘That’s Andy’s car.’

‘How in God’s name did he manage tae find us?’ Dave said.

‘His car wouldn’t have been parked far away,’ Rachel said. ‘They must have gambled on which way we went.’

‘Lucky bloody gamble.’ Maurie’s muttered oath was almost inaudible but summed up our collective sense that the only luck we‘d had since leaving home was the bad kind.

‘I don’t think they’ll try anything in the middle of a main road,’ I said with a great deal more confidence than I felt. There was, after all, virtually no other traffic on it. ‘We’re never going to outrun him, that’s for sure. Just don’t let him get past us.’

‘How am I supposed to do that?’ I could hear the panic in Jeff’s voice.

Then Luke called from the back, ‘He doesn’t seem to be trying to catch up or overtake us. He’s just kind of hanging back there.’

‘Hanging back for what?’ Jeff could hardly keep his eyes on the road for looking in the mirror.

‘Waiting for something. I don’t know. The right moment to get past us, maybe.’

I looked again at the map and said, ‘Just follow the signs for Tadcaster, and that’ll keep us on the main road.’

Jeff began banging his palms up and down on the wheel. ‘Jobbies, jobbies, jobbies. You shouldn’t have poured that stuff down the toilet, Luke.’

But Rachel said quietly, ‘It’s not about the H, or the money. It’s about me. I told you. He thinks of me as his property. And if he can’t have me back, then he’ll kill me.’

‘We’re not going to let him do that,’ Maurie said.

‘Oh, aye?’ Dave’s voice was loaded with scepticism. ‘Who’s this we, kemo sabe?’

For ten, maybe fifteen minutes, the Cortina followed at a discreet distance. We were out in suburbia now, residential streets branching off left and right. We took a left at a roundabout and followed the ring road for half a mile, before turning right at the next, sticking to the A64 and the signposts for Tadcaster.

The housing around us became more sparse, and up ahead I saw that the street lamps came to an abrupt end, leaving only darkness beyond them. Fear sat among us like another passenger. It could only be a matter of time before Andy made his move.

To make things worse, the rain began falling harder. Jeff was hunched over the wheel, staring through the wipers, trying to focus on the road ahead.

‘Here he comes!’ Luke shouted from the back.

I could see the approaching headlights in the wing mirror. I saw Jeff tensing, and at the last moment he swung the wheel hard right and crossed the centre line into the other lane. The Cortina swerved to avoid us, and I saw its lights veer left and right across empty spring fields, as the driver tried to keep it on the road.

We were on the wrong side of the road now, and the Cortina tried to accelerate through on our inside. Jeff swung left, and there was a deafening bang as the side of the van made contact with the front wing of the car. The Cortina braked, and fell back, lurching violently.

Jeff hung on to the wheel, grimly trying to bring the Thames back under control without braking. But we all knew that he couldn’t keep this up. The Cortina came screaming up again on our outside.

And I shouted, ‘Left, Jeff! Go left here.’

There was a narrow country road, cutting off at an angle just ahead. A signpost to a place called Thorner. Jeff braked fiercely, then pulled hard to the left, and we slid more than turned off, the back of the van snaking behind us, before Jeff regained control.

The Cortina overshot the turn, and I saw its brake lights as we turned. Its wheels had lost their grip on the wet surface and the car was sliding sideways down the middle of the road. Then I lost sight of it behind the hedgerows.

We were now on Thorner Lane. But there was no sign of Thorner itself. Just a long, straight road that disappeared beyond the reach of our headlights. Jeff accelerated to a dangerous speed.

And Luke’s voice came from behind us. ‘They’re back again.’

I could see the lights of the Cortina in the mirror. It was still a long way behind us, but there was never any doubt that it would catch us up. This, though, was a much narrower road, and if Jeff stuck to the middle of it, then there was no way for the Cortina to overtake.

Which is when I saw the lights of a car coming in the opposite direction.

I glanced at Jeff. His teeth were clenched, his jaw set and his focus dead ahead. He made no attempt to slow down.

‘Jeff,’ I almost shouted at him. ‘You’ll never get past him at this speed.’

His face was lit up by the lights of the oncoming car. Rachel put her feet up on the dash again to brace herself, and the driver of the approaching vehicle flashed his lights several times

‘Jeff!’ I almost screamed at him, but it still made no impression. Now I could see the faces of the driver and his passenger ahead of us. ‘Jesus! They’re cops!’

At the last moment Jeff pulled the van to the left and the oncoming police car swung to our right, mounting the verge and losing control as we passed it. We all turned to look out the back to see what had happened. The police car slewed to a stop, side-on in the middle of the road, and the braking Cortina slid sideways into it. It all seemed to happen in slow motion. By the time the Cortina hit the police car it couldn’t have been going at any more than five or ten miles an hour — not enough for anyone to get hurt — but I could imagine only too well the panic in one car and the fury in the other.

I looked over at Jeff again, and saw what I could have sworn was a smile on his lips. There was madness in his eyes.

‘You’re insane,’ I shouted at him. ‘Aff your bloody heid!’

He kept his foot to the floor, and through a copse of black trees we saw the lights of Thorner twinkling in the darkness ahead.

‘We need to get off the road.’ Luke’s voice was very close behind us, and I turned to see the fear blanched in his face. ‘The cops’ll be coming after us now.’

Jeff eased off on the accelerator as we drove into the village. A long street of old honeycomb-yellow stone cottages and newer brick-built houses lost among rolling wooded country. There was blossom on some of the trees, caught pink and white in our headlights, along with the spring green of an enormous weeping willow. Yet more trees stood winter stark and glistening against the blackness beyond them. We passed the stone gables and bay windows of the Mexborough Arms, set back behind an empty car park, and at the foot of the hill I saw the bell tower of the village church standing square at the corner of a sharp bend in the road. We were still going too fast to take it comfortably.

‘Slow down, Jeff.’

He ignored the low imperative in my voice.

And so I shouted now. ‘For God’s sake, slow down!’

I don’t know where his head was, but it was only at the last moment that he seemed to realize he wasn’t going to make it and stood on the brakes. The wheels locked and simply slid on the wet tarmac, as if on ice, and we sailed almost gracefully, turning as we went, to plough straight into the church gates.

The noise was ear-splitting. A deafening bang followed by the screaming of metal on metal. Then a strange, almost eerie silence. The engine had stalled, and the only sound was the hiss of steam escaping from a fractured radiator. Nobody spoke. I looked at Jeff and saw that he had cracked his head on the door column. Blood was trickling down his forehead. Rachel was almost on top of me, but miraculously neither of us was hurt. The back of the van was a chaos of bodies and equipment.

‘You okay back there?’ I don’t know why I was whispering.

But Dave whispered back. ‘No, we’re not. I’m gonnae kill that eejit!’

‘We’ve got to go!’ It was the urgency in Luke’s voice that shook us out of our state of shock. ‘Take only what you can carry.’

He pushed the back doors open, and I felt cold, damp air flooding in. The three in the back jumped down on to the road. I could see lights coming on in houses all around us.

Jeff still seemed dazed. ‘What about my drums? My dad’ll kill me.’

‘You’re already dead, Jeff.’

I climbed out of the van and ran round the back to get my bag and my guitar in its hard black carry-case. Heavy, but I wasn’t leaving it behind. Dave grabbed his, too.

Luke went and pulled Jeff down from the driver’s side. ‘Come on, man, we’ve got to get out of here.’

And as startled residents, so rudely awakened from their sleep, started to emerge from doorways and paths, the six of us ran back up the road in the rain towards the pub. Several voices called after us, but we never looked back.

At the Mexburgh Arms a road turned off to the right and there was a sign for Thorner Station.

Luke said, ‘If we can get to the station, then we can follow the track out of here without touching the road.’

The distant sound of a police siren drifted through the damp night, hastening our progress away from the main street. The road curved to the right beyond the pub, past a bowling green that lay mired in shadow. On the other side of the street a collection of stone-built farm buildings clustered in the dark. Past them, on the rise, stood the low silhouette of Thorner Victory Hall, and Station Lane cut off to the right. The sweet scent of warm manure filled the night air as we ran silently past Manor Farm towards the arch of a stone bridge and a railway cutting that ran beneath it.

The lane then rose steeply upwards to the station itself, which stood in darkness at the top of the embankment. The gate to the platform was padlocked, and all the windows of the brick station house were boarded up. There was a weathered poster pasted to the wall. Station Closed due to Beeching Cuts.

I said, ‘Maybe we can lie low here for a few hours out of the rain, then head off before it gets light.’

‘Well, we’re no’ gonnie meet any trains, that’s for sure,’ Dave said.

I climbed over the gate, and the others passed their bags and guitars across to me before climbing over themselves. By what little ambient light leaked through the trees from the village, we could see that the platform was littered with debris. The rails themselves had already been lifted, and were laid along the side of the track awaiting collection. There was a sad sense of abandonment about the place, haunted by the imaginary ghosts of all the passengers who must once have passed this way, the distant echo of forgotten steam trains lost in the mists of railway history. An old timetable pasted to the wall listed all the stations from Leeds to Wetherby. Scholes, Thorner, Bardsey, Collingham Bridge...

Dave and Maurie kicked open the door of the waiting room and we all trooped inside out of the rain. There was a damp, fusty smell in here, the odour of neglect. All the fittings had been stripped out of it, the ticket office window boarded up from the other side, the floor strewn with rubble and covered in a layer of dust.

I laid down my bag, leaned my guitar against the wall and slid down it to sit on the floor, drawing breath for the first time and feeling a pall of depression settle over me as the adrenaline that had fuelled us in these last few hours ebbed away.

It had been almost blind black when we arrived, but now a break in the clouds let a little moonlight through to race across the land, and we cast shadows for the first time over the dusty floor as light fell in through the open door.

Rachel stood, hesitant and painfully alone somehow, in the middle of the room as we all found our spots and settled down to while away the next few hours.

I slipped my arms out of my big furry coat, holding it open, and said, ‘It’s big enough to share.’

She didn’t need a second invitation and I felt, more than saw, Maurie glaring at me across the room. She sat down beside me, and I put the coat around both our shoulders. I liked how she leaned into me, her head resting against my shoulder, and I slipped an arm around her waist to pull her closer.

I was almost overwhelmed just by the softness and warmth of her body. She smelled earthy, musky, and I felt the first stirrings of desire. I laid my cheek on top of her head and closed my eyes, waves of fatigue surging through me.

Then out of the silence that had settled in the waiting room, Jeff suddenly said, ‘What’s the Beeching cuts?’

For a moment, no one responded.

Then Luke lit a cigarette, his face briefly illuminated by the flame of his lighter, and he said, ‘Beeching’s a guy commissioned by the government to make the railways pay.’

‘What, you mean, they’re losing money? Any train I’ve ever been on is standing room only.’ Dave’s face, too, was momentarily illuminated as he lit a No. 6.

‘They’re losing millions,’ Luke said. ‘So Dr Beeching’s solution is to cut all the branch lines that are turning in a loss. Like this one, presumably.’

‘How’d you know all that?’ Jeff said.

I heard the amusement in Luke’s voice. ‘Modern studies, Jeff. Our history teacher takes the classes. You’ve had him too, I think, Jack.’

‘What? Mr Shed?’

‘Yeah. You should hear him on Beeching. Thinks the guy’s an idiot.’

‘Why?’ Maurie this time.

I saw him lighting his cigarette from the end of Jeff’s, and the smell of cigarette smoke in this cold, empty place was oddly comforting. Like the conversation we were having that failed to address any of the real issues that confronted us.

‘Because he says that Beeching’s ruining the best rail network in the world. Reckons by the time he’s had his way and closed half of it down we’ll probably end up with the worst.’

‘Well, he’s had his way here,’ I said. And for a moment I had the strangest sense of witnessing the end of something. An era, maybe. A turning point in the history of our country. The dreams of a nation described by an abandoned railway station and torn-up rails. A track from the past leading to nowhere in an uncertain future. A track that we would follow ourselves sometime in the next few hours without any idea of where it would take us.

‘I suppose we’ll be in big trouble now,’ Jeff said. A reality check.

I lifted my head from Rachel’s. ‘Because of running the cops off the road?’

‘Well... that, too.’

‘What else?

Silence.

‘What else, Jeff?’ Luke said.

‘Well, I’d always figured we’d get the van back before anyone noticed it was missing. You know, get ourselves sorted in London, then I’d drive it back up to Glasgow.’

The tension in the waiting room positively crackled in the dark.

‘You stole it?’ I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

‘I borrowed it. It was a trade-in at the garage. I’m responsible for stocktaking, so it wouldn’t have been missed for weeks.’

‘Jesus!’

Another first. I’d never heard Luke blaspheme before.

‘So now we’re car thieves as well. Thanks, Jeff.’

I closed my eyes and tried to picture the scene at the gate of the church. Residents gathered around the wreck of the van. The blue flashing lights of one or more police cars. All our gear abandoned in the back of it. The crackle of a police radio. Perhaps the registration number of the Thames being radioed back to base. How long before they discovered it was stolen? Hours? Days? Weeks? We were in more trouble now than I could ever have imagined.

I laid my cheek again on Rachel’s head and breathed in the scent of her. For some reason it lifted my depression.

I

I must have dozed off, because when I came to I realized that everyone else was asleep. The one-time waiting room itself seemed to be breathing, filled with the soft sounds of sleep. Someone was snoring, but I couldn’t tell who.

My left arm, extended around Rachel’s waist to draw her closer, had gone to sleep as well. I could feel pins and needles in my hand, but I was reluctant to move in case I disturbed her. The gentle purr of her breathing was muffled by my chest where she had turned her head to rest against me. I reached across to feel the shape of it through soft hair, and stroked her, filled with a strange tenderness. I wondered what it was about her that had this effect on me, but I guess there is no way to ever understand these things.

She stirred, and I felt her head turning up, so that she was looking at me. I could barely see her. My voice was the faintest whisper in the night.

‘Why did you come to Leeds with him?’

I sensed her tension.

‘I made a mistake.’

‘Quite a mistake.’

I felt her nodding.

‘Sometimes you can’t see the real person for the person they want you to see. Andy was... well, he made me laugh. He was funny, and quite charming in his own way. He treated me with respect. I felt wanted.’

Her head lifted again, as if she desperately wanted to meet my eyes. But I couldn’t really see hers.

‘You can’t know how good it is to feel wanted, when you never have been your whole life.’

I finally moved my arm out from behind her and stretched it to get the blood flowing. ‘Who didn’t want you?’

‘My parents for a start.’

‘I’m sure that’s not true.’

‘Oh, it is. Ask Mo. They wanted a boy. Someone to take on the family business. But there were birth complications and, after me, they couldn’t have any more kids. I always felt kind of resented. All I was good for was marrying and having kids to carry on the Jewish line.’ She pulled herself more upright. ‘You got a fag?’

I lit one, then another from mine, and handed it to her.

‘Not that they ever treated me badly. I got everything I ever wanted. Just to shut me up, really, while they got on with their own lives.’ I heard her ironic little laugh. ‘Poor little rich kid.’ She paused. ‘I was so unhappy, Jack. Andy rode into my life like a knight in shining armour. He was older than me. Had money, a car. Dead corny, I know, but he swept me off my feet.’

‘I remember Maurie telling us about how you ran away with him.’

A tiny laugh shook her. ‘Must have been the talk of the steamie.’

‘So when did you know you’d made a mistake?’

‘Almost immediately. You saw what Quarry Hills is like. And the flat. It was pretty much that way when we got there. From a posh villa in Whitecraigs to a tip of a council flat in Leeds. Could hardly have fallen further. And Andy... well, it was like he just became someone else. The real Andy. The one he’d been hiding behind all that crap.’

‘But he still wanted you.’

‘Oh yes. But he didn’t just want me. He wanted to possess me. I was his trophy bird. He’d fly off in a jealous rage if anyone so much as looked at me. He wouldn’t let me out on my own. I always had to be with him, or left behind at the flat. It was a nightmare. And it was pointless trying to make a difference, clean up the place, build the nest. He would only come and shit in it again.’

All of her tension had returned, and I could feel her body shaking, as if she were shivering from the cold. I tried to draw her closer to me under the coat, but she pulled away and stood up, her face glowing red for a moment as she dragged on her cigarette.

‘There’s got to be a loo in here somewhere.’

‘I doubt if there’ll be running water,’ I said.

But all she said was, ‘I’ll go see if I can find it.’

I watched the faintest shadow she cast soaked up by the dark, and heard the shuffle of her footsteps as she moved away across the waiting room. A door scraped open, and she disappeared off into the station house.

Silence returned, except for the communal breathing of the sleeping runaways. I thought briefly that I heard voices somewhere in the distance, and the revving of an engine. I listened hard. But it’s amazing how invasive and deafening silence can be. Whatever I thought I had heard, I didn’t hear it again.

It was impossible to know how long I waited for Rachel to return. I might even have drifted off again, just for a moment. But in the end I began to worry.

I got stiffly to my feet and stretched aching limbs, listening in the dark to see if I had disturbed any of the others before tiptoeing across the waiting room to find the door that she had opened. I almost bumped into it, and felt my way into what must once have been the original stationmaster’s house. It was pitch in here, as if someone had placed a soft, black blindfold over my eyes. I felt my way around the walls until I found another open door, and as I stepped out into a narrow hallway my eyes immediately detected light. The faintest flickering line of it, coming from under a door at the end of the hall. The air seemed infused with a strange, sweet, vinegary smell, cloying, and it caught in my throat. For just a moment my confusion was disorientating, before sudden realization dawned on me.

I strode down the hall and threw open the door. The small toilet was filled with the yellow light of a candle whose flame dipped and dived in the sudden movement of air. She had already cooked her heroin in a small round metal container and was drawing it up into her syringe through a cotton filter. A half-empty sachet of white powder was set on the lid of the toilet seat, next to some burned tinfoil and a cotton swab. The case that she used to carry her gear lay open beside it.

She had removed her jacket and rolled back her sleeve, a length of black rubber tubing already tied around her upper arm.

Her head whipped round in surprise, dark eyes full of fear and need and deceit.

‘You fool!’ My voice thundered in the confined space, and I swept all the paraphernalia of her habit off the toilet seat. I grabbed the syringe and threw it on the floor, stamping on it until it was shattered and useless, and tipped her cooked H into the dust.

The sound of her scream erupted even before the echo of my voice had died, and she flew at me in a rage. I felt the force of flailing fists hammering at my face and my chest. I tried, and failed, to catch her wrists, and in the end simply threw my arms around her and pulled her hard against me so that she had no room to move. She fought and kicked and shouted, and I heard the footsteps of the others running through the station, voices raised and calling our names.

By the time they reached us, Rachel was reduced to a sobbing wreck, still held firmly against me, but no longer fighting it. Maurie’s face in the doorway flickered pale in the candlelight, eyes wide. The faces of the others pressed in around him. I nodded towards the floor, the shattered syringe, the scattered paraphernalia of a user’s habit, and I saw his eyes close in despair. When they lifted again to meet mine I saw the question in them. What could he do?

My almost imperceptible shake of the head said there was nothing. I saw Luke’s hand on his shoulder, pulling him away, and the four of them were absorbed into darkness.

I held Rachel like that for a long time, feeling her tremble almost uncontrollably.

Then her voice came, sobbing and muffled. ‘I don’t want to take it. I don’t. But you have no idea how bad it feels when I can’t.’

‘It’ll pass,’ I said, and immediately felt her push against me.

Her face turned up, eyes burning with anger. ‘How would you know? What would you know about any of this? I hate you!’

And still I held her. ‘I’ll help you.’

‘How?’

‘I’ll help you get through it.’

‘There is no getting through it, there’s only hell.’

‘Then I’ll go to hell with you!’ I shouted at her. ‘But I’ll bring you back again.’

She swallowed hard and stared at me, eyes filled with many emotions. Confusion, pain, distrust. And something else. Something almost animal. And suddenly her face rose to meet mine. Mouth against mouth. A kiss so full of primal passion that I swear I very nearly lost consciousness. Her tongue forced its way past my teeth, then she bit my lower lip and sucked it into her mouth before just as suddenly she broke away. And we both stood breathless, staring at each other. I still wasn’t sure if what she felt was loathing or lust.

But that was the first time that Rachel and I kissed, and it is a moment I will take with me to the grave.

II

She spent most of the remaining hours we passed in that place coiled around me like a limpet beneath my coat, sometimes shivering violently, and at other times just trembling. She was frequently in tears, and I had no real idea of what kind of pain she was going through.

Once, she untangled herself from me to go out on to the platform and I heard her throwing up. I went out after her, and found her standing right on the edge of it, arms wrapped around herself for warmth, shaking uncontrollably. The rain had stopped, and the sky above was broken now, moonlight flashing through silver-edged clouds in fits and starts. But it was cold, and in the colourless moonlight she had the bloodless face of a ghost. I put my arms around her and enveloped her in my coat, lending her my warmth to try to stop the shivering.

‘What does it feel like?’ I whispered. ‘What does it give you that makes you keep coming back?’

For a long time she was silent, and I didn’t know if she was thinking about it or just ignoring me.

Then in a tiny voice she said, ‘Oblivion. It takes you down to a place where nothing else matters, Jack. Feels so good, like an end to pain.’ A pause. ‘But when you come back up the pain’s still there, just waiting for you. The world seems even shittier than before, and you can’t wait to escape from it again.’

I tried to imagine what that must be like. And I said, ‘I guess life’s really all about pain, isn’t it? That’s what feeling is. Any feeling. Even good feelings can be painful in their own way. And pain, pure pain, is just the most heightened feeling of all.’ I felt her head lift, and looked down to see her big brown eyes staring up at me. I chuckled. ‘Never knew I was a philosopher, did you? Neither did I.’

A smile brought a little animation back to her face.

‘If you don’t feel anything, Raitch, you might as well be dead. I don’t pretend to know what a heroin high is like, and I never want to. But what you describe seems to me like dying a little. I’d rather be alive and deal with the pain.’

She nodded and laid her head against my chest. ‘Me, too. But once you start along that road, Jack... It’s a gentle slope on the way down, but Everest climbing back up.’

‘So let me be your Sherpa.’

Which made her laugh, and I think it was the first time I ever heard her do that.

The moment was broken by the sound of a car engine turning over at low rev and slowly approaching through the night. Then came the sound of acceleration, and headlights tipping up into the sky, before levelling off and shining among the wet branches of the trees that grew along the near embankment. The car had pulled up outside the station.

We ran quickly inside to waken the others, but they were already on their feet. The sound of a car door opening seemed inordinately loud in the still of the night.

Jeff peered out through a gap in the boards that blanked out one of the windows. ‘Jobbies, it’s the cops!’

His whisper conveyed his panic, and there were no words required to choreograph our flight. Splinters of light came through all the gaps in the boarding, like cracks in the dark, as someone on the outside shone a torch on the building. In hurried silence we collected our stuff and moved quickly out on to the platform. The sound of footsteps on gravel accompanied the beam of the torch as it flashed around the gate off to our right, and we jumped down on to the track and began running north, across the bridge we had seen from Station Lane. Houses and pasture shimmered below us on either side of the embankment, a stream bubbling in reflected moonlight, and I felt how totally exposed we were before we reached the shadowed shelter of the trees.

I didn’t look back until the track began to curve away to the left, and I saw the beams of two torches playing around the station platform before disappearing inside the building itself. Of course, we had left traces. Cigarette ends. The scattered remains of Rachel’s abortive attempt to reclaim oblivion. They would know we had been there, but not how long since we had left, nor which direction we had taken. It only remained for us to put as much distance as possible between them and ourselves before daybreak.

And so we pressed on. It was not easy to make good speed walking on uneven ballast, which was all that remained of the track after the lifting of the rails and sleepers. Nature was already reclaiming it, with weeds and grasses poking up between the stones, and growth from the embankments on either side encroaching on what had once been clear and well-maintained track.

We were, intermittently, raised up above the land, or plunged into the shadow of steep embankments rising up into the night. Sometimes exposed to the world, and at other times lost beneath overhanging branches, wading through long grass and briars.

There was not much to be said as we trudged through the darkness, tired and dispirited, each of us wondering perhaps how it had all come to this. How quickly we had transitioned from predictable suburban existence, school and group, exams and dances, to the chaos of the last thirty-odd hours. How easily we had completely lost control of our lives. And I suppose that only now were we starting to come to terms with how lost and foolish and naive we really were.

Dawn arrived almost without us noticing. A grey light that gradually brought definition to the world around us, before the first shallow rays of angled sunlight played through the branches of the trees. The birdsong was very nearly deafening.

Tangled, tree-covered embankments rose steeply on either side, and ahead we saw the tall arches of a bridge that carried a road across the old line perhaps thirty feet above us. A car passed unseen across it, behind high brick walls. Sunlight fell in broken patches all around us, and I felt the chill of the night slowly start to dissipate.

I had no idea how far we had come, but Luke suggested it was perhaps time to get off the track and back on to the road, and there was not one of us who was going to take issue with him.

It was a hard climb, with bags and guitars, up the sodden, overgrown embankment, brambles and branches catching and tugging at our clothes. But the reward was sunshine and smooth tarmac beneath our feet. I glanced at Rachel. Her pallor was almost deathly, and she seemed to have shrunk during the course of the night, her eyes even larger in her skull.

‘You alright?’ I asked her in a low voice.

She nodded, but she didn’t look it.

We walked, then, for fifteen or twenty minutes along the narrow country road that the bridge had carried across the railway until we reached the main A58 road to Wetherby. It was another ten minutes before we successfully flagged down a farmer in a tractor pulling an empty animal trailer. Luke did an amazing job of persuading him that our van had broken down on the road and that we needed to get to the nearest town to phone for help. All those years, I thought, spent on doorsteps with his parents, smiling and feigning vulnerability, drawing the pity or sympathy of otherwise hostile householders.

The farmer chuckled and said, ‘Well, if you don’t mind squatting down in the straw and shit in the trailer, I’m going to the market at Wetherby, and I can take you that far.’

And so that’s what we did. A kind of final indignity. But in truth, by then we were past caring.

III

In a café in Wetherby we got egg rolls and mugs of steaming hot tea, and began to feel almost human again. I watched Rachel eat hungrily, as if she had not fed herself properly in weeks. She caught me looking at her, then quickly averted her eyes, embarrassed. We lit cigarettes, and through a fug of smoke drew up our battle plan.

Maurie had crossed the street to a newsagent’s shop to bring back a map so that we could see where we were. He stabbed a finger at Wetherby, then traced a line along the B1224 to York.

‘Bound to be able to catch a train to London from there,’ he said.

Luke nodded. ‘It’s on the main east-coast line from Edinburgh.’ He glanced at Dave. ‘We got enough money for that?’

Dave patted his middle. ‘More than.’ Then he glanced at Jeff. ‘But maybe we should be looking for a new drummer. It would save us money.’

‘Hey!’ Jeff protested

But it was Maurie who shut him up. ‘You don’t even get a say in this. We were running away from home, that’s what we were doing. Being accessories to theft wasn’t part of the deal. The least you could have done was tell us.’

Jeff adopted a wounded look. ‘We’d never have got on the road at all if I hadn’t got us a van.’

And I began to think that maybe that would have been the best outcome of all.

There was a silent stand-off before Jeff said, ‘Aw, come on, you’re not serious.’

Dave leaned across the table, his voice low and dangerous. ‘I’d dump you in a heartbeat, pal.’

It was Rachel who surprised us all. ‘Maybe you should just go home, the lot of you.’

Twenty-four hours earlier there would have been an instant chorus of NO! The fact that no one said anything spoke volumes.

I looked at Rachel. ‘What about you?’

‘I’m going to London.’ Her quiet certainty left none of us in doubt that she meant it.

‘I’m going with Rachel,’ I said.

‘Never in doubt for me,’ Luke said. ‘The day I left home was the first day of the rest of my life. And that doesn’t include going back. Ever.’

‘Well, I’m going with you guys.’ Maurie looked at his cousin. ‘Someone’s got to look out for Rachel.’

She glared at him. ‘I can look after myself.’

‘Oh, really? You haven’t done such a great job of it so far.’

I felt a spike of anger and pushed my hand into Maurie’s chest, shoving him back in his seat. ‘Lay off her.’

Luke intervened. ‘Okay, enough! Enough! We’re going to London, right?’

There was a silent, huffy acknowledgement around the table, and Jeff said, ‘But not without me.’

It was more a question than a statement, though not one that anyone chose to answer.

Luke said, ‘We need to save our money. So we should hitch. But not all together. In ones and twos. It’s not that far. About fifteen miles. We should make it by lunchtime and we can all meet up at the station.’

‘I’ll go with Rachel,’ Maurie said, and he looked at me in a way that dared me to contradict him.

Which, of course, I did. ‘No, I will.’

He glared. ‘Well, maybe we should ask Rachel.’

All eyes turned towards her. She glanced at both of us and I willed her to choose me.

Finally her gaze met mine, conveying a confusion of unspoken messages. ‘I’ll go with Jack.’

And Dave said, ‘Aye, and if Jeff’s the last there, we’ll just get the train without him.’

It was no surprise, then, that Jeff somehow contrived to be first.

Rachel and I got a lift almost immediately. I made myself inconspicuous as she stood at the side of the road. A white delivery van driven by a young man in his twenties pulled up within the first few minutes. He looked seriously disappointed when I appeared behind Rachel to climb up into the front beside her. But by then it was too late. Grudgingly he slid my guitar into the back of the van and took us all the way to Station Road in York, dropping us right in front of the historic, yellow-brick station building.

However, he’d had to stop to make several deliveries en route, and Jeff was standing under the clock waiting for us when we got there. He had cadged a lift on a motorbike, riding pillion without a helmet, and his hair looked like he’d been pulled through a hedge backwards. He was pleased as punch to have got there ahead of us.

By ten thirty we were all assembled in the station. By eleven we had six one-way, off-peak tickets to London and were standing on the platform waiting for our train. Within half an hour we had a second-class compartment to ourselves. We were oddly subdued as, finally, the Deltic, Class 55, diesel-powered train pulled out of the station on its two-and-a-half-hour journey to the capital.

At long, long last we were on our way to the Big Smoke, and not one of us had a word to say about it.