Twenty Questions for Gloria Read online

  “That guy sussed us, I know it.”

  I expected Uman to contradict me. But he said, “I think so, too.”

  “Right, we move on.”

  “Whoa there, Gloria, we have fifty-two consultants to consult; fifty-four including the jokers.” He produced the cards from his rucksack. “One doesn’t talk to Destiny, one listens.”

  “We can’t cut for this, Uman. It’s too important.”

  He shuffled, offered me the pack. “Red, we stay; black, we move on.”

  I refused to cut.

  So he did. It came up black.

  “There,” he said. “Destiny hath spoken.”

  QUESTION 14: Where’s your happy place?

  We separated. Uman’s idea.

  Even if there was a mobile signal up there and litter-grabber guy had called the police, it was unlikely they’d follow it up immediately, what with all the other tip-offs they must’ve had from all over the country. The time-wasters and cranks, the cases of mistaken identity. We didn’t expect a SWAT team to ambush us at any moment or a police helicopter to swoop over the brow of a hill. We figured we had time to hike to Church Stretton and get the first train or bus out before they’d be onto us. The alternative was to pull out the compass and walk due west into Wales for a few days. But we wanted to put as much distance behind us as fast as possible.

  “There is a third option,” Uman said.

  “What’s that?”

  “We run after that guy and kill him, then bury him in a shallow grave.”

  I smacked my forehead with my palm. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  We discussed potential murder weapons; skewering him with his own litter-grabber would be the most appropriate method, we decided.

  “Instead of burying him, we should chop him up and feed him to the sheep,” I said.

  “Theoretically brilliant,” Uman said. “Alas, I doubt that my Swiss army knife is up to the job…and, I might be mistaken, but aren’t sheep herbivorous?”

  “Damn. It shouldn’t be that complicated to dispose of a volunteer countryside warden.”

  As we reached the town, Uman suggested we travel separately, just for that day, using different types of transport. One of us dodging, the other weaving. If the police did get around to investigating the guy’s call, they’d be checking CCTV for two teenagers traveling together. “We can meet up again later,” he said, “once we’re well away from here.”

  “Meet up where?”

  “At an agreed-upon rendezvous point.”

  “Oh, good,” I said, “I’m glad we’ve sorted that out.”

  —

  “Just out of interest,” I ask DI Ryan, “did the litter-grabber guy call the police about us?”

  “Not that I’m aware of, no.”

  “Seriously? So we could have stayed down there?”

  The detective nods. “At that point, we thought you were in London.”

  —

  Bristol. I can’t even remember how I got there—that is, the route the Cards of Destiny selected for me—except that it involved two buses, then a train, and took an entire lifetime. Four buses, in fact, because I got on the wrong one and had to catch another back to where I’d gone off course. When I told Uman, he called it a “stroke of genius—weavery of the highest order.” His route had been more straightforward, if indirect—by train from Church Stretton to Cardiff, then another train back into England. By the time I found him under the departures board at Bristol’s Temple Meads station, he’d been waiting nearly two and a half hours.

  I’ve never seen anyone look so pleased to see me in all my life.

  We hit a coffee shop in the station, bought two supersized hot chocolates with all the trimmings, and took them over to a corner table, sitting with our backs to the other customers. We swapped the stories of our journeys. It was odd, after more than a week of doing everything together (apart from food runs), to have something to tell each other about our day.

  “I felt as if someone was going to recognize me at any moment,” I said.

  Uman said it had been the same for him. “There was a guy who got off the train at Cardiff—I was convinced he was an undercover cop. It was quite thrilling, actually.”

  “I know. How weird is that?”

  I didn’t admit to Uman that, on my own, I wasn’t half as confident—in myself, but also in the whole fugitivery malarkey—as I was when we were together. The worst part of traveling separately, though, was being phoneless and unable to keep in contact. That, and the thought of something going wrong. Of one of us being caught. Of having him taken from me, or of being taken from him. I wasn’t ready for the Days of Next.

  “What would you have done if I hadn’t turned up?” I asked.

  Uman shrugged. “I’d have waited till you did.”

  “But suppose I didn’t.”

  “You did, though.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Gloria, I’d have waited for you under that departures board until I grew so old my heart stopped beating and I fell down dead; until my rotting corpse oozed foul-smelling fluids across the concourse; until my remains were swept up and the floor swabbed with disinfectant by a cleaner in a high-visibility vest.”

  I told him I guessed that showed an acceptable level of commitment to our burgeoning relationship. (We were “burgeoning” by then. We’d moved on from “impending” and “embryonic.”)

  Where now? That was the other thing we discussed.

  “Let’s go somewhere special,” Uman said.

  “In what way, special?”

  “Special to us. I mean, special to you or special to me.”

  “A happy place?” I suggested.

  “Exactly and precisely that. So—where’s your happy place?”

  “Am I allowed only one?”

  “No, you’re right—we must make lists. I’m a boy and boys make lists, don’t they? It’s what I have to do, now my hair’s short.”

  We didn’t make lists of our happy places, as it happens. We drew lots.

  I tore a blank page from the pad where we kept score in our card games and Uman cut it into strips with the scissors tool on his knife. Three strips each. I took an age but he’d written his in a few seconds, folded each one, and dropped them into an empty cup. No peeking, we’d agreed. I actually wrote “NO PEEKING!!!” on one of my strips because I just knew Uman was sneaking a look. Sure enough, he raised his hands in apology. He cut me another strip.

  “No hurry, Gloria,” he said. “We can always pitch our tent here in Starbucks tonight.”

  “Don’t be so impatient.”

  “I’m not impatient, I’m desirous of everything at the same time.”

  “And don’t quote Kerouac at me when I’m trying to think.”

  I was tempted to write “Stretton Hills” on all three slips, just to see his face if one of mine was pulled out. It was my happiest of happy places by a mile. We couldn’t go back there, though. If you hadn’t been such a dick with that guy, I thought, we wouldn’t even need to do this. But I left it unsaid. I couldn’t be cross with Uman for long. To be honest, I was very happy just sitting there with him, reunited after half a day apart; just being on the run together.

  “You know, I’d be happy wherever we go,” I said.

  “That’s sweet,” Uman said. Then, flicking a chocolate-soaked mini marshmallow at me, “But so help me, I will start the mother of all food fights if you don’t just fill those slips in.”

  “All right, all right—God, you’re like my mum, nagging me to do my homework.”

  “Shit, homework.” He made a face like the figure in Munch’s Scream. “We forgot to arrange a forwarding address for the school to send us our assignments.”

  That cracked me up, it really did.

  I finished my slips and added them to Uman’s in the cup. He used a stirrer to swizzle them about, then placed a hand over my eyes while I picked one out. I handed it to him for the ceremonial unfolding and announcement.

&nbs
p; “Drumroll, please,” he said.

  I drummed my index fingers on the table edge.

  “Lady and gentleman, I can reveal that the next destination on”—he lowered his voice to a whisper—“the Uman-and-Gloria fugitive road show is…Bryher! Where the f—?”

  “It’s pronounced briar—silent h,” I said. “We went there a lot on holiday when Ivan and I were kids. It’s one of the Scilly Isles.”

  “Aren’t they somewhere near Scotland?”

  “They’re off the tip of Cornwall, actually.” I shook my head. Tutted. “Thirty thousand a year in school fees and you don’t know one end of the country from the other.”

  Uman looked at the slip of paper again. “Bryher,” he said, as if the word was a spoonful of ice cream and he was trying to guess the flavor. His eyes lit up. “Right, that’s settled, then.”

  No matter how often we made decisions on a whim—the turn of a card, a lucky dip—I couldn’t quite get over how ridiculously easy it was to live your life that way. How ridiculously brilliant it was. I felt a soppy grin spread across my face at the thought of going back to Bryher for the first time since I was about ten years old. My happy place. My happier past self.

  As we gathered our belongings and hauled our rucksacks onto our backs, I asked Uman, “What were your happy places, then?”

  “Kyoto, Niagara Falls from the Canadian side, and the mountains of Andalusia.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, right.”

  He rummaged in the cup and pulled out his three slips and showed me what he’d written. Sure enough: “Kyoto,” “Niagara Falls (from the Canadian side),” “the mountains of Andalusia.”

  “Uman, how would we have paid the airfares? How would we get on a plane, for that matter—we don’t even have our passports with us?”

  “Ms. Inexcelsis, trust me—we’d have found a way.”

  —

  We changed our appearances again in Bristol. If the litter-grabber guy had reported us, the police would have new descriptions: my red hair, Uman’s crew cut. Our clothes. Well, Uman’s, mainly. My black gear was pretty neutral, and I hardly wore my spares because Mum would’ve figured out what was missing from my wardrobe by then. Uman, though, looked like a children’s TV presenter on acid. Reluctantly, he binned that outfit and chose a less garish one from a charity shop (brown hoodie, khaki combats). He also bought a big, woolly Rastafarian-style hat, in the red, yellow, and green stripes of the Ethiopian flag.

  “I can’t be completely unobtrusive,” he said. “It runs contrary to my nature.”

  As for me, I dyed my hair blond. Punk blond, not Barbie-doll blond.

  Our other problem was money. Funds were dwindling, what with all the food and other stuff we’d bought, and the train and bus fares we’d paid (at full price because we didn’t dare use our young-person’s travel cards, which had our names on them).

  We did the math. We did the math again and it still didn’t add up too well.

  To reach Bryher, we’d have to travel down to Penzance, then catch a ferry to St. Mary’s, the main island in the Scillies, then another boat. Flying wasn’t an option. Too expensive and, anyway, you probably had to provide names and ID even for a domestic flight. The rail fare from Bristol to Penzance would leave enough cash for a few days’ worth of food or the cost of the ferry tickets. But not both. Even if we took the cheaper option of making our way down to Cornwall by bus, we’d still be short. And hitchhiking would make us vulnerable to suspicion.

  “Maybe we should go somewhere else,” I said.

  “We drew lots.” From Uman’s tone, that was all there was to say on the subject.

  “Yeah, but we don’t have to go to Bryher just because—”

  “Gloria, we’ve discussed this before. We are puppets and Destiny is the puppeteer.”

  “I don’t suppose Destiny could lend us a couple of hundred quid, could she?”

  “Sarcasm. In certain circumstances it can be a highly amusing form of humor.”

  “What about taking a chance on an ATM?”

  Uman thought for a moment. Somehow, he managed to look cool more than ludicrous in that Rasta hat. “If they’re monitoring our cards,” he said, “how quickly could they trace us?”

  “I don’t know—you’re the one who watches TV crime dramas.”

  He ignored this remark. “All right, we hit an ATM and immediately skedaddle the hell out of here by the speediest means at our disposal. Does that sound like a plan?”

  I agreed it sounded like a plan. It was late afternoon, though; the next train to Penzance would get there after dark and the bus even later, at midnight. Both rubbish times to be hiking out of an unfamiliar town to find a suitable site to camp, then erect our tent in the pitch-black.

  “We need another plan that sounds like a plan, until we can implement the first plan that sounds like a plan,” Uman said.

  “How about we stay in Bristol tonight—I don’t know, camp in a park or something—then, first thing tomorrow, we draw out some cash and catch the train to Pee-Zed.”

  “Pee-Zed. Is that what the locals call Penzance, dorn thar in Carnwooorl?”

  “Was that supposed to be a Cornish accent?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  I looked at him. “So, my plan—does it sound like a plan?”

  “It does sound like a plan.” Uman clapped his hands. “Let’s go find a park.”

  —

  As city-center parks go, it was okay. There are worse places to sleep rough, for sure. It had a ruined church and a riverside walk, neat lawns and pretty flowerbeds. More usefully, it also had an area of trees and bushes where—once dusk fell and the park emptied—we could sneak in and hide till morning. It was too overgrown in there to pitch the tent, so we simply crawled into the densest part, spread the mats as best we could, and laid our sleeping bags on top. If it rained, we hoped the shrubbery, and the canopy of trees above, would shelter us. The main thing was, we were well concealed from police or security patrols, or any undesirables, as Uman called them, who might hang out in the park after nightfall.

  It didn’t rain. I slept badly, though. It wasn’t the noise of the city (although the quiet spell between Bristol shutting down and reopening seemed way too short), or the cold (in fact, it was quite mild). What disturbed me most was the strangeness of trying to sleep with fresh air on my face after so many nights tucked inside our tent. Even when I buried my head in my sleeping bag I still felt…exposed, I guess. Endangered. Don’t be scared, I told myself. But you can’t tell yourself not to be scared, even if you’re not sure what’s scaring you.

  I must’ve dozed off eventually, because I dreamed that a fox was biting my face.

  The early-morning traffic woke me. I groaned, rolled toward Uman. The open-air thing had bothered him, too, by the look of it—he’d pulled the Rasta hat right down so that it covered his entire head, like a bank robber’s mask minus the eye- and mouth-holes.

  I kissed the place where I thought his lips might be. “You taste woolly.”

  “Mmmng.”

  “How can you breathe?”

  “I can’t” came the muffled reply. “Anyway, I’m still asleep.”

  “You look like a talking tea cozy.”

  Uman faked a snore.

  “I had a nightmare that a fox was eating me,” I said.

  “All right, you win. I’m awake.” He pushed the hat back off his face, leaving tufts of red wool snagged in his stubble. The daylight made him squint. He looked as tired as I felt. Gazing up at me, he said, “Hey, I’d forgotten you were blond now.”

  “Does it suit me?”

  “You look like that woman—what’s her name? From the sixties.”

  “Twiggy? The model?”

  “No, the one who murdered all those kids.”

  I yanked the hat back down over his face. Hard.

  After freshening up in some public toilets, we made our way back to Temple Meads station and bought tickets for the next train to Penzance. The remaining cash w
ould last us two or three days, we reckoned. Four if we rationed our food. Then that would be it.

  “Are we rationing yet?” I asked, eyeing the detritus of our breakfast donuts and coffee.

  Uman licked his fingers and dried them on a paper napkin. He still had scrags of wool on his chin. “Come on. Time for a visit to our dear old friend, Mr. ATM.”

  We had no choice. No money meant no more fugitivery.

  The train left in twenty minutes. The plan was to use a machine we had spotted a few streets away—not in the station itself (more dodging and weaving)—and draw as much cash as we could on both of our cards. Then scoot back to the station and vamoose—his wallet, and my purse, fat with the funds for all the food we could eat for a month and one-way tickets to the Scilly Isles. To Bryher. To whatever lay ahead of us, in the next stage of the Days of Now.

  “Here goes,” Uman said at the ATM, flexing his fingers as if he was about to crack open a safe. He grinned at me. But I could tell he was trying to laugh off his nervousness.

  I felt sick.

  What did we expect: flashing lights and an ear-piercing alarm the moment he inserted his card and tapped in the digits?

  Uman inserted the card. Tapped in the digits. No problem.

  He shot me another smile. This was going to work. He selected 200. We waited. For the chuntering of notes being counted, the whir of the slot opening, the money shuffling into the tray, the beeps reminding Uman to take the cash and retrieve his card.

  None of that happened.

  “Card retained,” he said.

  He didn’t need to; I could read the words myself. Uman swore. A lot. Loudly. I thought he was going to punch the screen but, as quickly as his temper flared, it dissipated. He simply leaned forward and rested his forehead against the ATM, his breath condensing on the glass.

  “Let me try mine. I mean, you never know, yeah?”

  “Okay,” he said flatly, after a moment.

  We both suspected what would happen this time. It did. Both cards gone. No cash.

  We just stood there, staring at the screen. As if it might all have been a horrible mistake, as if the message might erase itself, as if the ATM might suddenly clunk into action and dispense the money after all. Neither of us spoke. Neither of us said the words that were running through my head and, I’m sure, Uman’s as well.