They tied the boat up and Maya thought that was it, but the drama was far from over.
Liz ran off towards a shed and Maya wondered whether she wanted to take shelter inside. But she quickly came back and had in her hand a can of something.
Before Maya could even question it, Liz poured whatever was in the can into the boat, pulled a lighter out from her pocket and threw the flame onto the boat.
The whole thing went up.
Maya had never been so scared in her life. ‘What did you just do!’ she roared.
But she moved quick enough when she heard a male voice yell that he was police, that they should stop right there.
They didn’t. They ran. Like cowards. Away from the scene.
Two days later, Maya had the biggest row she’d ever had with her dad. She hadn’t left the house since the night outside the pub, petrified the police would come to arrest her. She’d caught a glimpse of the local paper reporting the incident when she went to get a drink from the kitchen and she felt so much guilt, it almost swallowed her up.
‘Did you fill in another UCAS form?’ her father asked her as she tried to escape back up to her room and leave the newspaper article behind.
She turned halfway to the top of the stairs to face her father. ‘What?’
‘Don’twhatme, Maya. You heard what I said.’
‘I did, but I’ve told you, university right now isn’t in my plan.’
‘This again…’ He turned to go.
Maya could’ve easily headed upstairs and closed her door on her father but something made her chase after him into his study.
‘You know what I want to do, Dad. I want to be a helicopter pilot.’
His jaw twinged. ‘So you say.’
‘You don’t think I can do it?’
‘It’s a lot of study, a lot of money, and you might not even like it after all that so?—’
‘Said every single person at university! Who knows that they’ll love their field of study?’ She was yelling at him now, something he wasn’t impressed with but seemed too shocked to address. ‘Helicopters will be my life, Dad. Get that into your thick head!’
She’d gone too far.
She knew she had.
And she couldn’t retreat fast enough to escape the bellow that followed.
‘I am still your father; you do not talk to me like this inmyhouse. Undermyroof. If your mother was here?—’
‘Yeah, well she’s not, is she! Neither are my grandparents; you took them from me too!’
When she ran up to the top of the stairs, his voice followed, something about showing respect, she didn’t much care. All she knew was that she had to get out of here. And this time, for good.
She pulled a big rucksack from the wardrobe, the suitcase from under the bed and threw as many of her things in as she could.
‘Maya…’ Her door had opened so quietly she hadn’t heard her sister Julie come in. ‘What are you doing?’ But Julie knew what this was; that’s why her eyes filled with tears.
Maya sat down on the bed and held out her arms to her sister and they sat there together, sobbing, hugging, Maya doing her best to explain that she wasn’t walking away from Julie, only the man they called their dad, the man who hadn’t understood her in a very long time.
Maya left that night. She had no idea where she was going, she just knew she had to go. It was pouring with rain, she got on the bus that went from 100 metres past the driveway to thefamily home and sat on it until the driver announced it was the last stop.
Whistlestop River. The town she’d been in before. She stepped off that bus, saw the sign and almost tried to clamber back on again and beg the driver to take her anywhere but here. The place where she’d behaved so abominably.
