Solace of the Road by Siobhan Dowd

– that was Mam’s boyfriend – he goes and gambles it all away. So here I am. In England. And skint.’
    The girl giggled. ‘Sorry.’
    ‘Yeah. Thanks. What’s your name, by the way?’
    ‘Kim.’
    ‘Say, Kim, d’you know where the A40 is?’
    ‘Hey?’
    ‘You know. The road that goes to Wales?’ Kim stared like I’d asked the way to the stars. ‘Never mind. Ta ’n’ all for the sandwich. So long.’
    ‘Hey, Solace,’ Kim called after me.
    ‘What?’
    ‘I’m off clubbing later. Maybe see you there?’
    ‘Where’s there?’
    ‘The Clone Zone. The new place. Where else?’
    ‘Oh, yeah. I’ve heard of it. But being skint ’n’ all—’
    ‘Girls go free on Mondays. Up to eleven.’
    ‘Really?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Maybe see you there, then.’
    I walked out of the shop and over to the freako bench where you can’t really sit and bolted the sandwich down. I don’t know when avocado tasted so good. The bells of the city started up. I got out the map and looked up where I was. The A40 snaked across the top bit of Oxford and then westwards and the first place after Oxford was Witney. So if I got the bus to Witney, I’d be on my way. All I had to do was go back to the bus square and catch it.
    I got up and walked what I thought was the right way. Instead I ended up back at the square where the church was and hobbled over the cobblestones to this round yellow dome. I peered in the windows while the bells kept jangling as if the whole city was getting married. Inside the dome were little orange desk lamps and people reading. They might as well have lived on Pluto, the way they hunched over their books. It was bat-wing paradise.
    I don’t know what got into me, but I got my mobile out and started dialling Fiona’s number without really thinking. A recorded voice came on, another one with a posh accent.
    ‘You have insufficient credit to make this call,’ she said. Hin-so-fish-shent cree-dit . She made it sound like a crime.
    The bell-ringings went mad.
    The nail bomb in my head was about to blow.
    Hin-so-fish-shent . It was like the woman was predicting my fate. I switched off the phone and buried it at the bottom of the lizard. I went away from the bells, up a narrow street with vans parked and old cardboard boxes everywhere. ‘Big Issue, Big Issue,’ this guy was bawling halfway down. He was more my type, I thought. Not like those bat-wings in the fancy round building. He had piercings in his ears and nose and cheeks and lips and probably his tongue. Grace called those types ‘magnet people’. You can’t possibly be a mogit if you’re a magnet person. Grace wanted a stud in her tongue something desperate, only she was too chicken to get it done and I wouldn’t go with her because it would’ve made me sick to see it. This guy had enough metal in him to sink the Titanic .
    ‘Roll up, roll up,’ Magnet Man yelled. ‘Big Issue?’ he went, holding out a newspaper that looked like it had been through a million grubby hands.
    ‘No thanks.’
    He grinned. He had gaps between his teeth you could drive a car through. It reminded me of Colette, this girl I knew in the sky house. She lived two floorsdown and we played broken dollies on the scary stairs, dropping them crash-hard down, far as we could. Half Colette’s teeth had fallen out. Or maybe they’d never grown in the first place.
    ‘Aw, go on, take it,’ Magnet Man said. ‘It’s my last one.’
    ‘Would if I could,’ I said. ‘But I’m cash-free.’
    ‘Cash-free?’
    ‘Skint.’
    ‘You can’t be skinter than me, honey. Not with those clothes.’
    He had holes in his trousers and his T-shirt looked like it had been buried and dug up again. I smiled. ‘D’you know where the square with all the buses is?’
    ‘Gloucester Green?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘I’ll take you there.’
    ‘No need. Just point me.’
    ‘It’s kind of wibbly-wobbly.’ His fingers did a flickery thing under my nose.
    ‘OK. You lead. I’ll follow.’
    He