Ana with one n craned her neck back to look at the rest of us. “I used to be a primary school teacher.”
“Used to be?” Coming from Barbara Clench, that question had a not-going-to-end-well quality.
“Yeah, now I take my clothes off on the internet.”
For a woman who, by the looks of her husband, had a full and active sex life, Barbara Clench could be difficult about this kind of thing. Her lips got very thin. “Don’t you find that rather degrading?”
“Sort of,” Ana with one n admitted. “I mean when you think about it, there’s something pretty degrading about the fact that I went to university, did two degrees and a professional qualification, spent three years working seventy-hour weeks with disadvantaged children, and at the end had nothing to show for it but crushing debts and a few nice thank-you cards.” She took a deep breath. It sounded like she did this rant a lot. “So I decided that if the choice was getting wanked over by strangers or fucked over by the Department for Education, I’d pick the one that paid better.”
There was complete silence in the bus while Barbara radiated the kind of stifling disapproval that you could radiate only after a lifetime of never bothering to examine a single preconception. A
silence that persisted until Oliver, in his best peacemaker’s voice, said, “What if we try ‘London Bridge Is Falling Down’ instead?”
Two hours into a four-hour journey we stopped at a service station so that Rhys could have, in his own words “a slash and a sarnie.” I took the opportunity to stretch my legs and grabbed one of the family-sized bags of Skittles that they were, for some unfathomable reason, selling at a discount in W.H. Smith. Once we’d taken our welcome break at the Welcome Break, we piled back into the minibus for the second and, as it turned out, more complicated part of the journey.
Coombecamden,
the
technically-a-city-because-it-had-a—
cathedral-even-though-it-was-actually-tiny of which Miffy’s father was apparently Earl, was situated a little way south of Liverpool, right by the Welsh border, but Rhys’s mate’s house was a little way west of that and a fair distance into the countryside. Which meant that we spent the next very long time on narrow, windy roads occasionally blocked by sheep, trying to navigate by a bickering consensus of low-resolution satnav, poorly understood maps, and guesswork.
The rain didn’t help. It had started drizzling as we passed Birmingham. By the time we hit Stoke-on-Trent, that had upgraded to pissing down. And, once we left the M40 and were into the bit of the country where there were hedges instead of pavements and everywhere was called something like Muclestone or Wetwood, it was raining so hard that the windscreen wipers were just making ripples on a pond.
Eventually, Rhys pulled over on a stretch of grass that I wasn’t totally sure he should have been pulling over on, but was too much of a city boy to challenge, and announced, “Here we are,” with thoroughly unearned cheerfulness.
“Where is here, exactly?” I asked.
“Charlie’s house.”
I peered out of the window, but between the rain and the fact that the sun had set an hour ago, I couldn’t make out anything except wet and bush. “Are you absolutely certain?”
Rhys tapped his phone, which was showing a little blue circle inside a big blue circle. “Google Maps never lies.”
“No,” I admitted, “but it’s sometimes very economical with the truth.”
Oliver patted me gently on the leg. “Perhaps one of us should get out and take a look?”
One of us, we all knew, meant Oliver. I certainly wasn’t about to go, and Rhys didn’t seem to be up for it either. Besides, getting your bearings after a long minibus journey seemed far more like Oliver’s skill set than mine in that it was a useful life skill, rather than the brand of occasionally helpful bullshit that I preferred to trade in.
Clambering past me and out through the front of the bus, Oliver vanished into the night, only to return a few moments later with his hair plastered to his head, his jacket wet through, and his trousers damp to the shins. “There is a house there,” he confirmed. “But it’s on the other side of a rather large field.”
“Ah, that’ll be it.” Rhys’s aura of cheeriness had never really gone away, but it had ebbed slightly when it had looked like we might be stuck in the dark and houseless. Now it was flowing back with a vengeance. “The Google Maps do that sometimes in the countryside. They put you in the right general place, but they can’t work out where the roads go. I suppose it’s because they’re hard to see from space.”