glance, but Travis just smiled and shook his head. ‘It’s not what you’re thinking… I’m a New Yorker, born and bred. I’ve done my fair share of cross-country travelling, but never like that. I’m a professional musician. There’s no way I could jump on and off moving trains and risk injuring my hands. I wouldn’t be much of a sax player without fully functioning fingers.’
He draped his arm affectionately over the top of his saxophone case and gave it a gentle pat. ‘Train hoppers have to contend with a shower of loose ballast if they fall between cars. They can lose limbs. Wind up dead. I like to think of myself as a free spirit, but those guys are fearless. I’m way too attached to life to risk it all for a cinema-screen view of the American landscape, no matter how awe-inspiring it might be.’
Their conversation was interrupted by the slamming of carriage doors and the piercing trill of the guard’s whistle. Ariel stared out of the window as the train began its slow, steady advance from the station.
‘Right on time,’ a voice announced at her side.
She turned to see Henry looking a million times better. ‘Hi, Henry. That was quick!’
Beneath his jacket he was now wearing a plain white shirt and light green tie. He’d washed his face and neck. Even wiped the specks of blood from his shoes. His complexion was still a little drawn, but overall she thought he looked pretty relaxed, considering.
He dropped his soiled clothing into a Tesco carrier bag which he flattened and slipped inside his suitcase, immediately above the elasticated straps. He clicked the case shut and bent over to lift it onto the luggage rack.
Travis sprang to his feet. ‘Can I help you with that?’
‘Oh, not to worry, I can manage. Thank you,’ Henry replied.
The loose, crêpey folds of skin on his neck stretched and tautened as he arched his back, and with quivering arms slid his case overhead. Lowering himself at last into his seat, he cast a final glance through the metal bars running above him.
‘We made it!’ he said to Ariel. ‘I don’t know why there’s always such a tangible sense of achievement about boarding a train. It almost makes you feel worthy of a medal just for negotiating your way to your seat.’
He clasped his hands in his lap, leaned his head against the back of his seat and closed his eyes.
Elsewhere throughout the carriage passengers shifted and settled; announcements were made over the loudspeaker; newspapers, books and laptops were opened; tablets switched on; earphones wedged in ears. Seduced by the rhythmic rocking of the train, a sea of heads lolled left and right.
Ariel gazed out of the window at the flat, industrial grey of the urban cityscape whizzing by. They were picking up speed now: ca-choo ca-choo, ca-choo ca-choo, ca-choo ca-choo.
Before long they slithered through a tunnel, and then, not even twenty minutes from King’s Cross, the train was flanked by a retinue of fields, and a bank of leafless trees rose to attention like balding consorts on either side of the track. The train barrelled onwards, the sun scrambling from behind a cloud to shine upon the trees’ outstretched branches, infusing them with an oddly mystical glow.
Exactly twenty-three minutes from London, the first cow lumbered into sight.
Ariel sank back into her seat.
The long journey north had begun.
It was dull and stuffy inside the shop, and she’d grown tired of sitting curled up in the window, her finger tracing the underside of the green and gold lettering on the far side of the glass.
She lifted the back of her hair and fanned her neck with her hand. Estelle was busy serving a woman with a sleeping baby strapped to her chest. Linus, huddled deep in concentration in the corner, was adding the finishing touches to a homemade display case for a brand-new delivery of dowsing pendulums. Of the handful of regular customers swaying like reeds among the shelves, all Ariel could see were their arched, round backs.
She blew a damp strand of hair out of her eyes and searched for Linus’s ancient Olympus behind the counter. The camera (her camera to be exact, now that she’d persuaded him to give it to her for her eighth birthday a few months earlier) was poised for action exactly where she’d left it the day before, on a concealed shelf below the till. She wanted to feel its sleek, black casing beneath her fingers and crouch down low like a photojournalist, whiling away the afternoon taking pictures of the tourists as they browsed, unsuspecting, among the stacks. White as death and slippery with factor fifty at the start of their holidays, by the end they’d be golden-fried and half a stone heavier from all the 99s, and the cockles and chips, and the drink.
But today, nothing.
Ariel trailed through the shop, along the cool, shady passageway leading to the back garden, and settled into a deckchair with a copy of The Adventures of the Wishing-Chair.
‘Hey, mind if I bring my coffee and join you?’ Frank shouted from the attic window. ‘It’s hotter than a Texan barbecue up here!’
She looked up, saw a smiling face, a crisp white T-shirt, a swirl of glossy, jet-black hair, and waved to Frank to come down. She hoped he might be wearing his stage clothes, but so far he hadn’t worn them once during the day, not in the whole two weeks he’d been lodging with them, not unless he was on his way out to do a show. And yet Frank managed to look like Elvis no matter what he wore, with his jutting cheekbones, his immaculately sculpted sideburns, his perfect, china-white teeth. According to Estelle, Frank wasn’t far off Linus’s age, but Ariel thought he looked years younger. Linus was in his early fifties and already had grey hair.
‘The mercury’s gotta be well up over eighty today,’ Frank said as he launched his six-foot frame through the back door. He ran a hand through his quiff and reached for a pair of aviator sunglasses in his back pocket. ‘At least out here there’s a trickle of fresh air!’
He crossed the lawn in four easy strides and lowered himself onto the grass next to Ariel’s chair. The turn-ups of his jeans rose to reveal a tattoo of an eagle on the inside of his left ankle. ‘I got that in Philly when I was eighteen,’ he said, rubbing his finger over the dull, black ink. ‘Thankfully, it’s pretty hidden away down there. I don’t like it so much any more.’
Ariel smiled and stared at her reflection in the mirrored lenses of Frank’s sunglasses. Her face looked small and oddly distorted beneath the sunhat Estelle insisted she wore to keep the heat off the top of her head. Whenever she became too hot, her head began to pound and she broke out in a prickly red rash on her chest and arms. She wasn’t supposed to be sitting out here at all at this time of day, but she liked slipping on her yellow Woolworth’s sunnies and gazing up at the cloud formations sailing overhead. She was convinced there must be other people like her somewhere on the planet, daydreaming beneath the rolling, marshmallow sky. Sometimes she invented stories about who they were and where they were living. Sometimes she imagined them inventing stories of their own about her.
Frank took a sip of his coffee and pointed a suntanned finger at her book. ‘Any good?’
Ariel’s
