A long black car glided under the motorway, so silently that she wasn’t sure she had seen it at all. Otherwise this stretch of the dual carriageway between Birkenhead and Chester was deserted. The trees beside the pavements were fossilised by the sky, the tall concrete streetlamps were clogged with shadow. In the distance ahead she saw houses and shops, the green neon glare of a fish-and-chip shop. She wasn’t even surprised to realise she didn’t feel hungry at all.
The shops must be farther away than they looked. What felt like fifteen minutes’ walking brought them no closer. Several were lit by now, and beyond them cars turned across the carriageway, flashing their headlights at each other. All of that felt like companionship, but she had only just started to run when she came to a signpost that brought her up short. It was a sign for Liverpool.
It appeared to be pointing down a side road. Vandals might have bent it, but the route made sense; it would be closer to the river. Beyond the trees that overhung the side road she saw a lamplit row of white cottages that looked inviting and safe. She ran across the road and under the trees.
They blotted out the sky at once. They were so swollen with ivy that she could hardly see between them. Sodden leaves flapped down, thickening the pavements and the narrow road. Rowan slid downhill on them, flailing her arms. Usually this would be a game, but not when you were sliding down a tunnel that felt dank and rotten, a dark tunnel with light at the end. As soon as she lurched to a halt at the beginning of the lamplit street, she looked back.
The rotten tunnel seemed much longer and steeper. She couldn’t see the main road. The tunnel reminded her suddenly of the open grave, as if the world had turned upside down and the grave were hovering over her, waiting. She flinched away from that, towards the first lamp.
The white cottages multiplied as far as she could see, an unbroken shadowless terrace of them on each side of the road, beneath the lamps that looked exactly like household light bulbs standing on their heads. Since there were no front gardens and no gaps between the cottages, there was nowhere anyone could hide. She stepped forward almost confidently on the flagstones of the pavement, which were white.
So were the doors of the cottages, which opened straight onto the pavement, and the curtains at each small neat window. As the narrow glassy sky turned deep blue and then died out, the street grew whiter still, the outlines of the roofs and chimneys sharpening like ice. Rowan was glad that the street was deserted, but shouldn’t there be sounds of people dining or watching television in some of the curtained rooms? Almost at once she reached the first cottage she could see into downstairs, into a room with rings of dancing fairies printed on the wallpaper. Perhaps the people who lived in that cottage had a child who couldn’t climb stairs, though there was no furniture to show what the room was used for.
Rowan hurried past another dozen cottages or so, and then the silence made her glance back. The decaying tunnel was out of sight, but why wasn’t the white street more encouraging? Perhaps it was the absence of any signs of life. Maybe she would see someone through the next uncurtained window, several cottages ahead on the opposite side of the street; just the sight of someone else might be enough. She went forward so quickly that she felt she was losing control, in danger of being unable to stop. Instinctively she reached out to the wall of the nearest cottage to slow herself down, and her hand sank in.
The wall felt chill and gritty, yet it made her think of softened flesh. She recoiled before she had time to gasp, but the sensations clung to her, swarmed through her. When she realised that she’d left a shallow handprint in the white surface, she was so embarrassed she wished there were somewhere to hide after all. She turned nervously to make sure that nobody had seen what she’d done to the wall, and then she saw that she had left faint footprints in the deserted pavement.
The street seemed to close around her, the long white street whose doors she had suddenly become more aware of. They appeared to be composed of the same substance as the cottages—the same as the pavement into which she hadn’t noticed her feet were sinking. She backed away from the sight of the treacherous pavement that could only lead back to the rotten tunnel, then she twisted round and fled. She had almost forgotten the uncurtained window, and when she came abreast of it she was caught by a shudder that seemed to pass through the street as well as through her. Beyond the window, the downstairs room was papered like a child’s bedroom with rings of bright-eyed dancing fairies.
So was the next front room she fled past, and the next, and the next. It seemed that the cottages no longer needed to hide whatever they were now that she had come too far even to think of retreating. The lightless sky made the white roofs appear to crouch toward her. She wondered suddenly if this might be where Vicky had meant her to end up. Though the idea was dissociated as a thought in a nightmare, she looked back wildly in case Vicky was there. But what she saw was far worse. Every front door in the entire street behind her was wide open.
She thought she would never be able to look away. She stared at the vista of open doors as if staring were all that might keep the street deserted, and then she began to edge backward. Suppose she was backing toward more open doors and whatever was beyond them? She whirled and saw that the doors ahead were still closed. She felt as though she had become pure panic, unable to think. All she wanted was to be out of the street that was like an endless dream about to turn into an endless nightmare. She thought she felt the pavement dragging at her feet, about to harden like concrete. Her panic seemed to blind her then as she flung herself forward, no longer caring how she escaped as long as she did. All at once, with no idea of how she’d got there, she was in the midst of darkness.
It was like falling into a pit and being buried at once. She twisted round so quickly that she lost whatever bearings she might have had. Across a field that glistened faintly, blackly, she made out streetlamps at the end of a line of white cottages. She turned and strained to see something, anything, else. She had lost her sense of staring and of herself when reddish light flared and showed her that the field was at the edge of water.
The light reminded her of a rocket bursting in the sky, but it couldn’t be Guy Fawkes Night; it wasn’t November yet, not even October. Green light flared across the water, silhouetting a few houses and confirming that it was the river across which she was seeing them, and then the dark rushed back. It seemed to engulf her like mud, and wasn’t the earth underfoot growing softer, liable to suck her down? But she’d seen a wall at the edge of the field by the river, a wall whose top was level with the earth and which had railings to cling to. A leap so desperate she couldn’t judge its distance took her onto the wall.
The stones were uneven, but more than wide enough to walk along. She didn’t need to hold the railing. She peered at the field, which was utterly black now that she was closer to the glow of houses across the water. She began to walk as fast as she dared along the slippery wall above the slopping blackness of the river.
A mist was settling over the river, muffling the lights that branched across the sky and any sounds they made. Having consumed the far bank, the mist lay contentedly in the middle of the river. While she strained to see across, the black field was buried under concrete that proved to be the final resting-place of piles of torn cars. Whenever a wind set the rusty metal creaking she thought someone was creeping after her from car to car.
Eventually the scrapyards gave way to dockland. Lightless ships towered above her, weeds dangling from their portholes. Chains thick as her waist and gleaming sullenly like tar tethered the ships to the wharves. The stains and rust that glistened on the hulls, and the weeds that looked dredged, made her feel the ships had drowned and then been dragged up by their chains, especially when she heard water falling hollowly inside them. Catwalks railed with sagging links led across the mouths of docks, led her between ships which blotted out the night sky on both sides of her and which stirred ponderously, restlessly, in the dark. It was like trying to find her way through a maze whose walls threatened to collapse toward her. She felt as though the ships would never end by the time she saw a hint of open night beyond them. But when she came into the open on top of a thick rough wall, she saw the distant landing-stage at Birkenhead.
A glow the size of a hotel was gliding toward it—a ferry with passengers singing indistinctly and dancing on the decks. Rowan fled toward the landing-stage, a mile or more away. Long before she got there she heard the ferry thump the tires at the edge of the stage. Revelers crowded up the ramp and into the night, and she hadn’t reached the pay booths when the lights of the terminal were extinguished. The ferry was moored and dark.
All she could do was huddle in the chill glassed-in waiting room until morning. Up in the streets of Birkenhead people shouted and sang for hours, and then there was only the lapping of waves. But she was nearly home, where she and her parents would hug each other as if they might never let go, though when they did she thought she might sleep for days.
A dark bulk looming out of the fog brought her back to the moment. It was another ferry, carrying transport staff from Birkenhead to Liverpool. When they were out of sight on board she stole onto the deck and hid behind a funnel while the ferry turned toward a dull pink dawn over Liverpool. As soon as the men were under the awning of the Liverpool terminal, Rowan flew across the wooden ramp and up to the bus station at the Pier Head.
Three red-faced men were huddled on a bench, but seemed too intent on drinking from brown paper bags to notice her. Otherwise the Pier Head was deserted, even the dozens of numbered bays that ought to contain buses. The desertion made her feel as if the world might be about to play another trick on her, and so did what the three men seemed to be repeating as they passed a paper bag among them. All the same, she had to make for the dock road.
It was the most direct way home, but the loneliest. It led between warehouses for miles. When she heard children playing, out of sight on a cracked road beyond a pub where blurred garlands hung inside the frosted windows, she had to force herself not to go looking for company. She’d be in Waterloo by the time the sun was highest, she promised herself.
She almost was, though the sun stayed dismayingly low. Past the traffic lights at the end of the dock road she saw the radar station, its dish turning like a blind beggar’s, and the yachts drooping on the marina. She ran past the silent overpass and the stone angel at the Five Lamps, and saw families coming home from church. Children were riding new bicycles in the side streets or showing off their other presents, and there was no doubt now what the day was or what she’d heard the red-faced men at the Pier Head wish one another. How could she have been lost for so long? Had Vicky done that to her somehow? She didn’t care now that she was nearly home.
The street by the railway station shone with melted frost, a light that felt like a memory of warmth. She ran into the side road, past the house whose side said Thompsons Boot Repairers. Children whom she knew from the school turned away from her without noticing her, having been called home; it must be time for lunch. She’d be in time for hers, she thought, and wondered how she could have gone so long without food as well as sleep. She raced to her street and down it, past windows full of coloured lights, to the house.
It looked new. The walls had been pebbledashed, and gleamed against the dunes and the glittering bay. Her grandparents’ car was parked outside; it must have been granddad who’d landscaped the garden with rockeries and curving paths. An extra strip had been tacked to the sale board: SALE AGREED, it said. She didn’t care. Home was wherever she was with mummy and daddy, and she would tell them so. She passed beyond the open gate and went up the path.
The front door had changed. The walls were blue and printed with delicate blossomy silhouettes, and a large blue Chinese paper globe lit the room. The room was full of people: mummy and daddy and mummy’s parents, Jo and Eddie and their children. Rowan had been looking forward to being with just the family, and surely the neighbors would leave them alone when she went in, the neighbors she could see and whoever else it was that the grown-ups and Patty were talking to while the children played near the Christmas tree. Rowan pressed close to the window and watched, letting the sight of the tree and the presents and above all her family make up for everything she’d gone through, waiting for someone to turn and notice her, enjoying the prospect of the moment when they would all be together at last, stifling a giggle as she imagined how surprised whoever saw her first would be. Waiting seemed like the best Christmas game of all, with the best prize ever at the end. But when she realised it had begun to rain, she raised her hand to tap on the glass.
Then grandma held out a wrapped present to the person whom the grown-ups had been talking to, and who stepped forward now. “Happy Christmas, Rowan,” grandma said.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Happy Christmas, Rowan,” Edith said, and Alison echoed her under her breath like a prayer. It would be a happy Christmas, they would make certain it was. The family was all here, at least all those who had survived, and that was what Christmas should be. She and Derek and her parents had the present they had wanted most of all: they had Rowan, safe and sound. Today of all days Rowan must realise how much they wanted her, how they would have given anything to have her back the night she was lost in Wales. She must never feel unwanted again, and Alison would be happy to devote her life to making sure she never did.