‘Platform one,’ says Ella suddenly, her voice high-pitched with excitement. I glance up at the board; is it really that time already? My pulse quickens. This is it. It’s too late to turn back now and besides, I made a promise to my daughter. I can’t let her down.
We gather our things and move through the station, passing a stand where baguettes sweat behind glass and another where a florist struggles to keep rainbow bouquets from wilting in the heat. Above us dozens of other possible destinations glow in amber, reminding me of all the other places we could be heading. Notices advise us to be alert to anything suspicious and adverts blink and flash in bright lights. And my daughter and I roll our suitcases behind us, weaving in and out of other passengers.
The Caledonian Sleeper waits at the platform, bottle green with an emblem of a stag on the side of each carriage.
‘Is it your first time travelling with us?’ asks a pink-faced man in a green uniform with a thick Glaswegian accent. He clutches a clipboard and pulls briefly at the collar of his shirt.
‘Yes!’ Ella says.
‘No,’ I say at the exact same moment.
This train might look slightly more modern than the one I caught to London when I was eighteen, but I still remember it well. The man in the uniform looks at us both, frowning for a second before regaining his charming customer-service smile.
‘Well, here is a brochure about your journey,’ he says, handing it to Ella. ‘You’ll find a card in your room, if you could write down your preferences for breakfast. You’re in coach G, right down the other end. Just keep walking.’
‘Perhaps we’re walking to Scotland,’ Ella jokes as we head further and further down the platform. I don’t laugh though; suddenly I can’t even find a smile.
Finally, we find coach G and another staff member ticks our names off a list and helps us carry our luggage on board. The train’s corridors are so narrow that we have to walk to our berth single file. If we met someone coming the other way we’d have to back up like cars reversing on a country lane. Luckily the carriage is empty for now.
Ella opens the door onto a room not much larger than an airing cupboard.
‘This is so cool!’
My daughter has always been an optimist. The room contains a sink, a narrow set of bunkbeds and a small window. Ella dumps her suitcase on the floor and clambers straight up the ladder onto the top bunk. There’s just enough space for me to step inside and close the door. As Ella tests out her bed, I stow my suitcase under the bottom bunk and lift Ella’s onto the rack above the sink.
The train is mostly as I remember it, with its tiny corridors and long windows. But it’s my first time inside one of the cabins. When I took the sleeper train all those years ago I spent the night in the seated carriage. All the saved tips from my job at the local pub hadn’t been enough to cover a cabin, especially as I knew I’d need to keep money for when I arrived in London. I didn’t sleep all night. Instead I sat wide awake, running my fingers over a pebble stowed in my coat pocket and staring out the window into the darkness.
At 9.25 p.m. I feel a jolt in my stomach as the train pulls away from the station.
‘We’re moving!’ Ella says from her top bunk. She’s already changed into her pyjamas and is lying on her bed. Her voice brims with anticipation.
Standing by the window, I watch as the train eases away from the station and rolls through the city. The sky is a dark lavender washed with peach, city lights starting to glow as evening draws in. Endless office blocks and rows of terraced houses hug the railway line, bricks stained black from pollution. A few lone workers are still visible inside one office while in another I spot a cleaner pushing a hoover steadily between empty desks. I look up at the tower blocks not dissimilar to our own, lives cramped side by side and on top of one another. I wonder if any of the people inside these blocks know their neighbours, or whether it’s just me who has lived alongside strangers for most of my life. Some of the blocks we pass are sleek and modern, geometric shapes cut out of steel and glass. But squashed right up close too are buildings with boarded-up windows, supermarkets housed in ugly squat cubes, car parks and junk yards and building sites where cranes make a mess of the skyline. I picture the city stretching beyond the boundaries of what I can see, rolling out in a sprawling mass of buildings and streets, parks and stamp-sized gardens, the backbone of the River Thames arching through its centre. Millions of lives rubbing up alongside one another, crossing over and converging in the sounds of neighbours shouting and the smell of cooking seeping through ceilings and walls.
I can’t help but think of our flat, dark and empty now. The collection of stones and smoothed glass on the kitchen windowsill, collected from my daily runs alongside the river. The small living room with photos of Ella on the walls and a few of the two of us, and the growing patch of damp in the corner that I really need to get sorted. And Ella’s bedroom, the bed neatly made and a soft-toy puffin named Dora resting on her pillow. Whenever I step inside my daughter’s room I dread seeing that Dora has been relegated from the bed. It will happen one day, just like so many things I fear about my daughter getting older. But each time I see that floppy, faded puffin there I thank god it’s not today.
Outside the train window the city continues to flash by. This city has been my home for over twenty years but as the train edges towards the suburbs and then out into open countryside it’s as though a thread linking me to London strains and then snaps. In its place I feel the tug of a much older connection, one I’ve tried to ignore for years but that I feel now pulsing under my skin. It’s a connection that pulls me north. I picture mountains and black lochs, sheep and sunburnt bracken. Large, sweeping skies and teal sea. Something a bit like terror and something like excitement flutters uncontrolled inside. I gave everything to escape the place where I grew up. And I have resisted making this journey back ever since. I fought against it, ran away from it, hid from it. But despite it all, there is a part of me that longs to see a mountain again.
Chapter 2
Alice
Dust billows in clouds as I give the cushions another firm thump. I don’t know why but this house just seems to attract dust. I’ve spent the whole morning cleaning: hoovering, dusting and washing windows until they gleam and the beach and the sea can be seen crystal clear through the glass. I may have lived here for years but I still can’t get over this view. I’m not sure I ever will. Beyond the house the farm stretches around us in rolling green fields and stone walls, Jack’s polytunnel (my husband’s pride and joy) hunkered in the shelter of the cliffs at the back of the farm. From the living-room window we have a perfect view down the hill that gives this farm its name and onto the beach.
I’ve always thought of it as our beach. Silly really, because all the islanders use it too, for walking dogs, children’s beach parties and barbecues in the summer. But I’ll always think of it as ours. It’s where Jack and I first got to know each other all those years ago, walking side by side on the sand, him too shy to look me in the eye and me chatting so much, like I always do when I’m nervous, that I worried I bored him. Back then I was just a visitor to the island, a volunteer helping out on the farm on my gap year. Although the farm back then was nothing like it is today; you’d hardly recognise it. It had been neglected for years, the fields barren, the stone walls tumbling down, an air of forgotten-ness everywhere. Jack and the other islanders and volunteers nursed the place back to life. I suppose I played my part too, in a small way. And now it’s our home and one of the things I love most about it is having the beach right there on our doorstep. The beach has been my and Molly’s playground over the years and even though she’s now too old for building sandcastles and making driftwood mermaids I’ll always remember the first tottering steps she took there, the way she squealed with joy as a toddler as Jack and I swung her between us, her toes skimming the surface of the cold sea.
As though she knows I’m thinking about her, my daughter bursts into the living room, her short, light brown hair sticking up in all directions on her head and a wide smile on her face. Fourteen years of loving her and it still catches me unprepared sometimes, this fierceness.
‘Have you tidied your room?’ I ask her. She nods.
‘Yes, Mum. And I’ve made up the camp bed and cleared space in my wardrobe.’
‘You star.’
She grins.
‘Can I go meet Olive now?’
‘Of course, have fun.’
