Four hours later we drive into the canopied artificial daylight of a service station on the M6. As I fill up the tank I study the docile shuffling of people inside, queuing at the registers and swaying among the shelves and cabinets. I wonder that they seem unembarrassed to be so lumpy and dark and heavy in a place so garish and streamlined. They appear quite undisturbed by the lights, and I want to learn how they do it so that I will look, when the time comes for me to go in, not as though I belong there (because none of them manages that) but just enough like one of them to pass without notice.
But before I’m ready, Arthur is wheezing his way out of the car. He needs a bathroom, he says, and sets off across the forecourt in a bizarrely careful way as if he thinks he is elsewhere, perhaps walking sideways down a flight of stairs. He’s lost one of his slippers. I retrieve it from the foot-well of the car and catch up with him at the entrance and we go in together. He halts, flinching, overawed by the piped music and excruciating light. He seems about to collapse under the glare. The toilets are at the back. Once I’ve got his slipper back on I steer him across the floor, concentrating on finding the shortest route between the stands of magazines and banks of candy and bins of DVDs and thermos flasks on special offer. Through the music and the plopping of the cash registers I sense people in mid-transaction going quiet and turning their eyes on us, but maybe I am only imagining it.
I push Arthur in the direction of his place and take myself to the ladies’ room. There’s a long mirror at the entrance that I can’t avoid, and that’s when I realize I probably wasn’t imagining that people were staring. I haven’t seen my own reflection in a while. I’ve changed. My face has puckered and turned a bready white, and my eyes are different, too, both faded and darkened. Rings have appeared around the irises, which are now a filmy watercolour blue. The pupils are sunk and tiny, like punctured holes. My mouth has the clamped, institutional look of someone whose incarceration, wherever it is, is chronic but no longer open to question, like a sanatorium patient or a life prisoner. Most dramatic though, is my hair. It’s grown, of course, and looks like grey, drought-stricken grass, but I hadn’t realized how flatly it sticks to my skull or how it sprouts up at the ends for being left unbrushed. The clothes could be better, too. They are plain enough and should not attract attention in themselves, but I am now aware my proportions have changed. The trousers flap at half-mast and the sweater seems empty in front and the sleeves hang over my hands to my fingertips. I see that I am wearing earrings, and the very idea of a surface such as mine being decorated in any way is preposterous. And being indoors so much has made me careless about footwear; the sandals don’t fit and never would have fitted, and the brown socks practical enough for an evening in the house seem here both to demand and to defy explanation.
Arthur’s getup, as I notice when I come out and find him leaning for support on the plastic dome of a pay phone bolted to the wall, is filthy. In this light I see that his purple sweatshirt with Let’s Cruise emblazoned on the chest is crisscrossed with stains from our picnic in the attic, and his trousers are spotted with the dribbles and spills of innumerable little accidents of one kind or another.
His free hand is fumbling with his trouser front and he’s oblivious to all else. I grab his other hand and pull him away, and he sets his eyes firmly on his feet and concentrates on getting them to move. We’re conspicuously slow. The attention we’re attracting is unmistakable now, and all I want is to get us through the door and back into darkness where the car is waiting. I’m trying unsuccessfully not to drag Arthur faster than he can go. We very nearly make it.
Hey!
I look up and see that the boy in the red T-shirt behind the register is talking to us. He has cinnamon skin and lustrous eyes. He can’t mean any harm.
Yes, what? I say pleasantly.
’Scuse me a minute!
Now the whole queue is turning to look at us-why? We’re not doing anything wrong, I know that, so the best thing we can do is ignore them. I grip Arthur’s arm and tug at him so hard he nearly falls over, but I have to get us out of this place.
The boy glances over his shoulder and calls into a little office behind the counter. Another man in a red T-shirt appears and swiftly crosses the floor in front of us. When he’s in position between us and the door, the boy speaks again. His eyes gleam like wet plums.
’Scuse me, madam, these premises are protected by surveillance cameras. I have to inform you that you and your car-
What? What’s the matter?
He pats a few computer keys and his machine makes some pucking and scratching noises.
I have to inform you that you have been recorded on the company’s CCTV security equipment getting fuel. Pump number 8, right? That’s twenty-six pounds eighty-seven, please. The company operates a strict zero tolerance policy with regard to non-payment. Cash or card, madam?
I simply forgot. It’s an honest error made in a moment of absentmindedness, brought on, no doubt, by the strain of events. In my past life, if such a thing was ever to happen, that’s what I would have been assumed to be: honest and absentminded. Now I look like a thief. They think I’m a thief, and suddenly I feel like one, so how can I do otherwise than act like one? I thrust the money over as if I were paying a fine. I don’t say anything; if I try to explain I just made a mistake I’ll sound like a liar, then they’ll think I’m a liar as well as a thief. But saying nothing makes me seem stealthy and even more guilty; it’s confusing me, being both exposed like this and wrongly accused, and my confusion, too, looks like guilt. I try an apologetic smile but that must look guilty, too, because the boy’s glare shifts from me only long enough to exchange a knowing look with his colleague. Arthur is shaking.
We make it out the door and back to the car. As we drive away it strikes me I’ve made another mistake. We’ll have to stop again. I should have bought food there. If I had, I wouldn’t have been able to forget about paying for the fuel. Now we’ve got next to nothing to eat and I can’t let Arthur starve. I am more unnerved than I can say; the thought of braving such a place again fills me with absolute dread.
We drive for many hours. At around three o’clock in the morning we leave the motorway, and immediately the rushing in my brain eases. Arthur’s head is lolling back, and as I turn up the slip road and steer around the roundabout, it tips and rolls and he wakes up. Just off the junction there’s a long lay-by with a couple of parked lorries and at the very end a food van, lit and open. I pull over and stop. Arthur staggers out and pees against a tree while I buy four of everything: burgers, sausages, bacon rolls, kebabs, chips-enough to keep us going for a while, appetizing or not, stone cold or not.
For the rest of the journey we are travelling into the light. Arthur is cheerful now. He fishes out various maps and points all over them with a pen from the glove compartment, though he isn’t saying much. Somehow he has three pairs of spectacles in his pockets and tries them all, finally using two pairs by wearing one and holding the other halfway between his eyes and the page on his lap.
Ruth, he says, making a face, the old B596 is no more. I’m rerouting us west of Bakewell, we can’t be doing with all this bypass nonsense.