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  – The war scar, said Fay.

  – The war scar, said Pete. I mean, it was pretty rough when I found it. I had to get it tidied up and finished off and that… Like, to begin with, I thought it was a joke or something, except for it wouldn’t come off. I’m not even sure that I didn’t go and get it done myself.

  – Urla troia! moaned Paolo.

  – Anyway, so I was wandering round Leeds with my brain deep-fried. No girlfriend, no flat, no job, no fucking car… I reckoned I had to possess something, do you know what I mean? Basically, anyway, I wound up at this police auction thing and got the ambulance for fifty quid I was supposed to have been saving. There’s always something wrong with it – the brakes or the carb – but it’s not bad for fifty quid.

  – I once stopped breathing and woke up in an ambulance, said Fay. There was a drip in my arm and stuff, and one of those things they stick in your nose. No tattoo, though.

  – What was that, then? said Pete. He glanced at her, then double-declutched as the lane began to incline. Booze?

  – A mixture, said Fay. Various things, all jumbled up together. I didn’t even drink for six months after that. I mean, I still hardly do anything now. It was just a couple of years when I kind of went ballistic.

  Pete was looking quizzically at the meters behind the steering-wheel.

  – I never knew about that, he said eventually. Funny, isn’t it? I mean, all the time we’ve spent as a group and nobody really knows a thing about what anybody else was like before. It’s like, the way you are on the first day of the first year, that’s the way you stay. Except for the odd story when something groovy happened, someone went travelling or something, that’s it. I’d never even thought about it. I just assumed you’d always been straight.

  – Oh, I have been, for ages. But… I mean, I did want to know what all the fuss was about. You know? It’s like, you went to Castlemorton, didn’t you? That massive Spiral Tribe rave. I mean, things like that are a big deal when you’re at school and everything. I’m not saying that’s why you went, but… when I was seventeen or eighteen or whatever, I was really needing something. You know? I felt empty, like there was this bloody great hollow inside me. So I started doing drugs and going to parties and stuff; but pills and acid and what have you, they’re not about closing you down. Do you know what I mean?

  – It’s funny, said Pete, a moment or two later, I couldn’t hardly remember Castlemorton the Monday morning after it happened. It kind of hardens, though. It becomes more solid, more… important. You should have seen the papers that week, though! Screaming about anarchy and what have you. I tell you, my skin was bristling the whole way down my body. Every bit of it! I mean, I know what you’re saying, and you’re probably right. That sort of thing was good cred, but… It was just like – us and them – and we were alive even if them fuckers weren’t! I believed in it, you know? Basically… I still do.

  With a roar, the ambulance topped the hill and began meandering – idling – down the other side, the road ahead of it silvery in the moonlight. Over to the right, exposed-looking lines of streetlights were woven together as if for mutual security. Slowly the moon swung away leftwards. Pavements pushed back the hedges. Fractionally different houses and regular orange light-bulbs rolled in from either side.

  Having left Dartmoor, Fay had never quite felt the same about it again. She loved it, of course, but returning was just that. The immense spaces weren’t the same without the farm to go back to; the kitchen and its hexagonal tiles, the dog sprawled under the table. She’d started to drive back down there on her own when she was old enough, parking just down the track from the farmyard and climbing the tor till she got to her rock. The niche was too small for her now, obviously, but she’d sit on another part, pressing her knees to her chest, closing her eyes, feeling the wind and hoping to be absorbed by it – even for a moment.

  That probably was why she’d had the dangerous phase, Fay reflected. Dartmoor, then four years’ perplexity, then wastedness because she just hadn’t felt like herself any more. None of them had, if she were honest about it. Her parents had drunk gin, and watched television, and ceased talking to one another; and in the end she’d only really recognised her dad in the evenings, for about half an hour before he fell asleep. Fay had just felt like she was withering, becoming someone else’s idea of herself, like her real self had dumped her and pissed off across Dartmoor, whooping and cheering because it didn’t have to worry about keeping warm or eating or any of that physical palaver any more.

  Tim hadn’t so much as twitched in the last twenty minutes, so Belle crawled across the bedclothes and pulled the half-smoked joint from his fingers. Tim’s eyes opened a little, but he said nothing.

  – I am not just a pretty face! said Paolo drowsily.

  He stretched – rolled his shoulders – then reached into a trouser pocket, removing his phone and wallet and stowing them in the glove compartment. Once he was comfortable, he closed his eyes and reconjured up Fifi.

  The ambulance was coming to a gradient, beginning to struggle, brown-leaved hedges tight around the mirrors. In front, a badger trundled unconcernedly across the lane, locating its path through the undergrowth and scaling the bank.

  – Bollocks! muttered Pete.

  He began to grow rigid over the wheel, willing the ambulance onwards; then he frowned and, abruptly, swung the wheel left, stopping the engine in an open gateway. The headlights were on a dozen or so large, round bales that someone had arranged into the shape of a steam train.

  – Shit, shit, shit! he said, jumping down from the step and hurrying round to the front.

  A moment later he was back at the door.

  – Belle! he said urgently. Pass us a drape out, would you?

  – What? said Belle, half-asleep. What’s going on?

  – Just pass us a drape, Belle. Please.

  An arm extended from the back into the cab, an ornately patterned bedspread hanging from its hand. Pete grabbed it and wrapped it hastily around his own arm, heading back to the bonnet and releasing the catch in a smoke signal of steam, smothering the window in condensation.

  – Madonna! said Paolo, waking suddenly. Fuck! Pete, what’s happened?

  – We’ve got a flat tyre, said Pete sourly. What do you think?

  – No! exclaimed Paolo.

  – No, what? said Pete, retying the drape around his arm.

  – No! said Paolo again. A flat tyre? It’s not possible!

  – Paolo, you are a halfwit. Pete gripped the radiator cap and twisted it.

  A plume of steam exploded into the air. Fay climbed down from the passenger side, watching as it slackened.

  – The bloody temperature gauge’s bust, said Pete.

  – Oh shit, said Fay. Oh well. It’ll cool down in a bit. Wicked train, don’t you think?

  She walked over to inspect it, her face white in the glare of the headlights, her hair in a ponytail, doing the zip on her fleece up to the neck.

  The train had four round bales for its wheels. It had three in a cylinder for its body, and for a funnel and a cab respectively it had two heaped at the near end and one at the far. Both were crowned with a thatch of grass. Connected by a piece of rope, the tender was a bale laid lengthways, with another at each end for wheels.

  Pete lit a cigarette, leaning against the front of the ambulance, watching as Fay climbed in stages onto the cab and sat down. She looked out over the hedges, shoulders back, legs hanging loosely. Away down the hill, the town stood out in dots of orange. The main road was a shadow and a pair of passing lights. Small, sinuous hills lay in folds across the countryside, their crests picked out by the moon.

  It was straight above the funnel – due west – close enough to the ground now to pronounce the missing sliver.

  m: open sesame

  Strange that the sky should elect to be blue. Strange too that it should be grey – or red, for that matter – but there was something more, something proportioning, about blueness. It put Pete in
mind of painting lessons at primary school: the stratum of blue they’d all laid out along the tops of their pictures, with mothers, or houses, or dogs underneath. The memory still jarred when he thought of it, the teacher leading everyone out into the playground and asking if anyone could actually point to the blue streak they insisted on painting.

  – Don’t know… they’d mumbled, one after another, when asked why they did it.

  It had been miserable, trooping back inside and filling everything between the earth and the ether in with a blue felt-tip.

  The evening before, Pete remembered, he’d spent pressed up against the television, one skewy eye shut, trying to see what went on around the corner. Although he hadn’t quite managed it, the idea had possessed him of looking at something more than house, mother and dog, through something larger than a little window. So he’d painted the earth – a blue and green splodge – with a fat blue line just above it. A really good idea, he reflected, much better than everything being blue. It was like, to see the mother, house and dog in the first place everything couldn’t be smothered in blueness, right? It had to change somewhere. And his changing place had been a fat blue line in space. You’d never see that through a little window of a picture.

  The teacher had sighed when she saw it, and made him do another one with the dog and the sky and everything on it like it was supposed to be. She’d kept a bit of an eye on him from then on, and once told his mother at a parents’ meeting that he was, quote, Too much of an individual for his own good.

  Pete was lying across the front seats of the ambulance, his head tipped back, looking at the twigs hanging upside down into the blueness, the auburn leaves, the ridge of the Black Mountain that traced the line of the windowsill. It seemed like such a long time since he’d looked at anything above the horizontal.

  It was the pangs for nicotine, though, that finally made him pull himself upright. He folded the blanket he’d been wrapped in, sitting it on the seat beside him and fumbling through his pockets till he’d mustered enough tobacco for a cigarette: dry old bits that kept getting in his mouth and making him cough.

  On the passenger side of the ambulance, a bank sloped towards a small, gorged stream. With a last puff, Pete threw away the cigarette and climbed inelegantly out onto the lane they were parked beside. He tied his heavy brown dreadlocks into a knot on top of his head, and went to splash water on his face. Behind him, the sun was beginning to make its way over the mountains, a shadow sliding down the west face of the valley.

  Then, as he crouched beside the water, light grazed the top of a beech tree on the opposite bank, and an oak, and another beech; and, gradually, the brown of the leaves on every side of him became reds and oranges, greens and golds.

  The sky itself seemed to sparkle as Pete reclimbed the bank. There was still no sound from the back of the ambulance, so he sat on a gate across the road, looking over a field with a pair of firs in its middle and the long, level Black Mountain running past behind it.

  The car approached quietly, appearing round a corner to Pete’s right, gleaming white in the sunshine. It was an Austin Maestro, not in the best of states, its police stickers starting to peel and rust in patches on the wheel arches. It drove slowly past Pete, then stopped, and reversed.

  – Alright? asked the officer, leaning an arm on the sill and squinting against the sunlight.

  He was sinewy-looking man, improbable in his uniform, with bushy sideburns and shaggy black hair. His eyes ran over Pete’s dreadlocks, his piercings and drooping clothes. He looked more curious than suspicious.

  – Fine, said Pete nervously, revolving on the gate to face him. I, um… It was getting late, so, you know, I thought I’d better stop for a rest.

  – Been here the night, have you? asked the officer.

  – Just a few hours, officer, said Pete.

  – Well, I just thought I’d check you’d not broken down or anything.

  – Oh no, said Pete hastily. No, everything’s fine.

  The man raised a hand to shade his eyes.

  – What is it, then? Three-litre?

  – Er, yeah… Three-litre, diesel. It’s a Tranny, basically.

  – Used to have one myself, reflected the policeman. No end of trouble it was. No bloody end. Just like this thing, as it goes.

  He tapped the Maestro.

  – A bit of a pair… said Pete.

  The policeman chuckled.

  – Damn right they are! Bloody junk! A Tranny to save people’s lives, and a Maestro to chase criminals! What in God’s name were they thinking? He chuckled again. You come a long way, then?

  – London, said Pete, unthinkingly.

  – London, echoed the officer. I went down there one time. Before I was a copper…

  He paused as if waiting for Pete to press him on the subject, but resumed anyway when he didn’t.

  – Not my sort of place, if you don’t mind me saying. No offence, like. Bloody noisy it was. I was in… round the middle, it was. Can’t remember too much about it, tell you the truth. Lot of houses and pubs. By Christ, we got pissed!

  – Were you down there long? asked Pete.

  – Oh, just for the game. Long enough, though, I don’t mind telling you… Where you headed?

  – To be honest, said Pete, I’m not really sure where we are right now, but I’m supposed to be in a place called… Llyswen? You know it? Near Hay-on-Wye.

  – Ah, Llyswen, said the policeman. He frowned and glanced along the valley. Well, you’re on the right road. Just keep going straight, over the Gospel Pass. Take the first left once you’re out on the flat there. You can’t miss it… I’m off to Hay now, as it goes. ’Fact, I’d better be getting along.

  – Thanks, said Pete.

  – That’s alright. Cheerio, then.

  He nodded.

  – Cheerio, said Pete.

  The Maestro rolled slowly off along the lane, skirting the perimeter of the field and becoming lost among trees where the road curled left.

  Out on the road, Belle was gazing at the mountains, her arms out to either side of her. Now that the sun was a little higher, the reddish-brown bracken on the mountains had started to glow. Even the rowans and the hawthorn trees were shining. Pete was perched on the gate he’d been perched on all morning, rooting through his pockets for more tobacco. A little way down the lane Fay was sitting cross-legged on the verge, scribbling in bursts in a notebook.

  Belle wanted a cigarette. She really wished that she could just stand there with her arms out – warm air on her skin, a germ of elation in her stomach – and find it all enough. But the idea of a cigarette kept worming its way back into her head, promising it would make the germ consummate. It was like, when she felt happy she always wanted to feel happy: pilled-up happy. If a feeling wasn’t perfect, it was never quite there. That was why she would sometimes make out that things were wonderful, when really they weren’t that great, or go on about psychic or emotional bonds with people, which, in truth, weren’t as striking as she did really want them to be. She was always trying to wish things into existence. It worried her sometimes.

  – This is it, said Pete, gesturing with a second, miserable roll-up. It was all I could scavenge from the cab, my pockets, everywhere… Maybe Tim’s got some. I don’t know. I don’t suppose Paolo has.

  Belle walked round to the back of the ambulance, pressing the rubber button and swinging one of the doors open. Inside it smelt of old smoke and sweat. She wrinkled her nose and assessed the mess. She’d really slept in here?

  – Tim! she said loudly. Hey, Tim!

  Tim was crumpled in a corner, like he’d fallen there from somewhere high up.

  – Euggh? he managed.

  – Tim! Belle repeated. I need a cigarette!

  – I was, Tim moaned, after a pause, visited!

  – What? said Belle.

  – Finished, Tim corrected himself.

  Belle did a breathing exercise she’d learnt in India in her gap year: sucking in air through her nos
e, holding it, saying Mahatma Gandhi in her head, and breathing out through her mouth. She kept up the exercise until she felt less irritable; then she returned to the others.

  – We have got to get some cigarettes, she said.

  A sign saying Llanthony appeared as the ambulance turned the corner at the end of the field. There was a yard on the left, a couple of farmhouses gathered round it and an oak tree in a radius of leaves in the middle. A couple of dogs were busying themselves in corners.

  Behind the yard fields ran up into pine woods. Farms were sheltering in hollows, their boundaries blurring with the desolate common land where sheep were specks in the bracken and streams like vein mouldings cut their way among rocky outcrops.

  – A pub! said Nick excitedly, leaning in from the back and pointing. Oh, a pub! Thankyou God!

  – It’s nine in the morning, said Pete soberly.

  – Yeah, but… Jesus, Pete! A pub!

  They drew up outside one of the Bull’s oak-framed windows, Nick and Belle peering against the sunlight to try and work out if anyone was inside.

  – Well, said Belle. I’m going in.

  She swung the passenger door open and jumped down onto cobble stones, steadying herself and breathing – Mahatma Gandhi – a couple of times before approaching the heavy, tar-black door.

  The room was dark and it took a moment for Belle to distinguish what was in there. Then she saw flagstones, vertical pine-panelling, a billiard table and a stone ash-filled fireplace. There were a lot of what seemed to be redundant organ stools scattered around tables peeling veneer. Dried flowers hung from the beams. The walls were covered with precise watercolours of horses.

  Belle looked at the watercolours and found them entrancing. They reminded her of when she used to ride herself. There was a bay, startled in a beam of sunlight beside the window, lissom, with a star on its nose just like Stella had. She really had to go and see her again sometime.