Road Ends (16 page)

Megan, conscious of her sensible skirt and plain white blouse, both bought for the interview, did her best to join in, though not with the screaming. She’d smile at some new purchase and say, “That looks nice,” but the girls would look at her with puzzled smiles as if she were talking a foreign language.

Tracy, who was small and pretty with hair cut in a neat dark cap, was getting married as soon as she and her boyfriend had saved enough money to buy a house because she “
refused full stop
!” to live with his parents. She was on “The Pill” (when she first mentioned it, Megan had no idea what pill she was talking about) but kept forgetting to take it and was constantly having scares. Julie’s mum was divorced and going with a man who drove a Bentley and had a son who looked like Mick Jagger but without the lips. (
Ooooh
! the other girls said, and shrieked with laughter.) Viv, who was tall and thin with elegant legs and long blond hair, wanted to be a model. She practised walking as if her hips were dislocated, up and down the aisle between the dresses, when Mrs. Timms, the floor manager, was on her lunch break.

All these things and more Megan had learned about her fellow shop assistants, and yet the girls remained as unknown and unknowable to her as a flock of flamingoes. It wasn’t that they
deliberately tried to exclude her—she could see that—it was that they seemed to exist in a different world. Like aliens, she thought. Except that she was the alien. They were so strange that sometimes she wondered if she were making them up—maybe the whole thing was a dream and when she woke she’d be back in her own bed in Struan and it would be time to get up and turf the boys out of bed and get breakfast on the table. Many times she wished that were so, and that wish dismayed her. Who’d have thought she could be so unadventurous, so timid?

You need to pull yourself together, she said to herself. This is what you wanted—something new, something different. You should be enjoying it! She gave herself an ultimatum: enjoy it or go home. But it was an empty threat. She knew she couldn’t go home, not yet anyway; she’d only been here six weeks. And no matter how hard she tried she didn’t seem to have the strength, or the will, to enjoy it.

She searched the papers for other jobs but apart from being a waitress or a cleaner—and she’d spent her whole life so far being both—everything required qualifications she didn’t have.

During her lunch hour she grimly put up her new umbrella (she’d have happily sold umbrellas all day long) and explored the streets around Dickins & Jones: Regent Street, Oxford Street, Bond Street, Carnaby Street—famous names, she knew that now. With the sole exception of those living in the Canadian North, everybody on the planet knew about Carnaby Street. She tried to immerse herself in this new world—the chaotically colourful stores, the constant background beat of music leaking out of doorways, the clothes and shoes and jewellery spilling out onto the streets—but there was too much of everything. She found herself longing for the drab ordinariness of the Hudson’s Bay store in Struan with its wide, dark aisles and piles of shirts and socks and underwear that didn’t change from one year to the next.

She couldn’t seem to focus on anything here, far less become a part of it. Sometimes when she got back to Dickins & Jones she couldn’t remember a thing she’d seen.

There was an ache inside her, centred more or less mid-chest. It was with her all the time; sometimes she was conscious of it even in her sleep. It exhausted her, she who normally had enough energy for ten people. She wondered if she could be ill. Maybe she had some low-grade infection that was pulling her down. Perhaps that was what prevented her from enjoying things.

Morning and night she had to gird herself for the ordeal of travelling to work and back. She went by “underground,” which turned out to be a long tubular version of hell, especially at the end of the day. At the evening rush hour people poured down the steps at Oxford Circus in a flood, great waves of them surging down the escalators, along the echoing corridors and out onto the platforms, where they waited, heaving and swelling, for the trains. There would be a thundering in the tunnel, growing with tremendous speed, and a train would roar out of the darkness and come to a stop. The doors would roll open and people would pour out and then the waiting throngs would lunge forward, forcing their way onto the train, more and more of them, until they were crammed together so tightly Megan could hardly breathe. She was always dizzy with relief when she reached her station and could push her way out at last into the cold night air and walk home alone with her umbrella through the dark wet streets.

She thought of the space, back home in Canada. The vast and glorious emptiness of the North. So much land, so few people. She hadn’t appreciated it, hadn’t realized how beautiful it was, until now.

——

The journey into work and out again was not the hardest part of her day. The hardest part was the moment she opened the door of number 31 Lansdown Terrace. Although she had stopped expecting to find her suitcase waiting for her in the hall, she could not rid herself of the hope that the photographs would be there. Whoever stole the suitcase could have no earthly use for them and surely he or she would realize their importance to her. It would be so easy to put them in an envelope and slip them through the letterbox—or not bother with the envelope, just shove the photos loose through the door. Every evening she searched through the pile of bills and papers that no one else bothered to pick up off the floor. The first time she did it she found her last letter to Cora, unopened and mottled with footprints, but the photos were never there. Every evening she had to fight down the disappointment. You’re being ridiculous! she thought, heaping her coat on top of one of the bicycles in the hall and making her way through to the kitchen at the back of the house. Just ridiculous! Grow up!

When she’d first seen the kitchen Megan’s immediate impulse had been to buy herself a pair of rubber gloves and an economy-size container of household bleach and scour it top to bottom, but she’d stopped herself in time. She hadn’t flown three thousand miles to fall into that trap again. Besides, none of the others would notice, or if they did, they wouldn’t like it. They were like her brothers, the girls included: they seemed to like squalor; they created it wherever they went. So each evening she cleared just enough space on the kitchen counter to prepare and cook her supper and just enough space at the kitchen table to sit down and eat it to the accompaniment of music pounding through the walls. She knew the names of some of the bands now—Beatles, Monkees, Animals. Like a zoo. She sometimes thought that if she’d had control of the volume she might even have liked some of them.

From time to time one of her flat-mates would wander into the kitchen. Megan would say hi and sometimes they’d say hi back, depending on how stoned they were. She’d figured out what the strange smell in the flat was.

She never saw any of her flat-mates prepare a meal. Sometimes there would be a loaf of sliced bread sitting amidst the chaos on the counter, the slices gradually disappearing as the evening wore on, but that aside, they all seemed to exist on fish and chips that they brought home wrapped in newspaper and stinking of vinegar. The oily, reeking papers littered the flat.

She was powerfully aware of not belonging. As with the girls at Dickins & Jones, there seemed to be no common ground. Sarah, the girl with the bug-like glasses who had been kind to her on the night of her arrival, Megan liked, but even she was exceedingly strange. It turned out she owned the flat—in fact, owned the whole house. Her parents, it seemed, were rich. Megan tried to pay rent, but Sarah wouldn’t take the money. When Megan protested, saying she couldn’t simply stay without paying, Sarah had smiled her gentle, unfocused smile and said, “Why not? Everybody else does.”

Megan would have liked to get to know her better but somehow it wasn’t possible.

“Do you have a job?” she asked tentatively one evening.

“Oh, sort of,” Sarah replied, lighting a misshapen little roll-up. “I work in an art gallery. Just a commercial one.”

“Oh,” Megan said. “That sounds interesting. What do you do?”

“Nothing, really. Just smile at people. Have you seen my handbag? I put it down somewhere.” And she wandered out.

Maybe it was the pot. They all lived in their own little clouds. It surprised Megan that any of them managed to get up and go to work in the mornings. Not all of them did; some appeared to spend twenty-four hours a day slumped in front of the television. Sponging off Sarah, who didn’t care.

The only one who seemed even to notice Megan was Zack, the hairy, bearded one who had blamed her for the Vietnam War the night she arrived. He’d hang around in the kitchen in the evenings when she was making supper (a chop or a piece of chicken or sometimes a stew), getting in the way and trying to persuade her to smoke a joint. Megan had no intention of being persuaded to do anything by anybody, least of all Zack.

“What is it with you American-sorry-sorry-Canadians?” he would say petulantly. (He reminded her of the twins—they used that same tone when they didn’t get their own way.) “You don’t drink, you don’t smoke, you don’t do drugs—what do you do?”

“We work,” Megan said. It made Canadians sound prissy, but she didn’t care what Zack thought of Canadians.

Zack snorted—he wouldn’t have touched work with a barge pole. “You want to try living a little.” He’d hold his damp little weed in front of her nose. “One puff. Jesus, what’s the matter with you, just take one little puff.”

“Do you mind getting out of the way? I need to get to the sink.”

“How about sex? Do Canadian women ever have sex?”

“Do English men ever grow up?” Megan said, straining rice. “Or do they stay twelve years old all their lives?”

“Jesus, you’re one uptight female, you know that?”

She’d found a tiny box room, hardly bigger than a cupboard, to sleep in so that she wouldn’t have to listen to people having sex two feet away. It was full of cardboard boxes, which she dragged out and deposited in the centre of the living room floor to see if anyone would notice and throw them away, which nobody did. The boxes stayed as she’d left them for three days, after which they were gradually trampled flat and became part of the carpet.

The box room was exactly the width of the mattress and about four feet longer, long enough that she could close the door at the
foot of it and stash her few belongings at the head. Along with a new hot water bottle, she’d bought herself two pairs of sheets and pillowcases and two blankets. With her coat on top of them she was warm enough to sleep. There was no light in the room but she bought herself a flashlight—a “torch” they called it here. One night Zack stumbled in and lay down on top of her. She hit him in the face with the torch and he retreated, bellowing. After that she shoved the mattress down to block the door before getting into bed.

She felt safe in her cupboard. Safe from what she didn’t know, because there was no real threat in the house—the likes of Zack didn’t worry her. It was just that the tough, resilient core of herself, on which she’d always assumed she could rely no matter what, seemed to have developed cracks, and she didn’t want to strain it any further. Maybe it had never been as tough as she’d thought.

She found it impossible to imagine Cora in this house. Cora wouldn’t have fitted in any better than she did. Supposedly she’d left after having a fight with Seb, which suggested she’d had a relationship with him, but Seb spent his life in a virtual coma on the sofa in the living room. When Megan asked him if Cora had left an address or been in touch, it took her question so long to penetrate the fog she wondered if he was asleep with his eyes open. Then he slowly turned his head, focused on her face and said, “What?”

The Cora whom Megan remembered was far too sensible to get involved with someone like that. Could she have changed that much? Could people become
less
adult and sensible over time rather than more? Or had Megan not known her as well as she thought? Maybe Cora had decided to “live a little” as Zack put it. Maybe the fact that Megan didn’t fit in here was nothing to do with being foreign; maybe she, Megan, was simply stuck in a rut and determined to stay there, afraid to try new things.

So I’m a coward, she thought, curling herself around her hot water bottle, safe in her cupboard. I’m a coward.

After supper each evening she searched the Rooms to Rent section in the
Evening Standard
but there was nothing she could afford that she wouldn’t have to share. She longed for a place of her own. She thought she wouldn’t be so lonely in a place of her own.

She hadn’t written home because she hadn’t known what to say that wouldn’t reveal her unhappiness. But when she saw her mother’s writing on the envelope, she saw her mother’s face, the strained look she had when any of her children were later home than expected or in any way unaccounted for. It wasn’t fair to make her so anxious.