Free The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

lose it andand snap, “I already feckin’ told you, Dave!” and go upstairs to the kitchen, and as she’s looking out over the river, she’ll be thinking,
She’s only fifteen, anything could’ve happened …
 Serve her bloody right.
    Gulls kick up a racket on the river, below.
    A police boat buzzes under the bridge. I walk on.
    Up ahead, there’s a Texaco garage—it’s open.
    “W HERE ’ S THE BEST place to hitch a ride to Sheppey from?” I ask the bloke at the till, after he’s handed me change and my two cans of Tizer, my Double Decker, and pack of Ritz biscuits. My £13.85 is down to £12.17.
    “I never hitch,” he says, “but if I did, I’d try the A2 roundabout, the top of Chatham Hill.”
    “How do I get to the top of Chatham Hill?”
    But before he answers, a woman with raspberry-red hair comes in and the Texaco bloke just drinks her in.
    I have to remind him I’m there. “ ’Scuse me? How do I get to the top of Chatham Hill?”
    “Head left out of the forecourt, over the first set of traffic lights, past the Star Inn, and up the hill to the clock tower. Take the left turn to Chatham and follow your nose a bit further, past Saint Bart’s Hospital. Keep going till you get to an Austin Rover dealer and you’re at the Chatham roundabout. Stick your thumb out there, wait for a knight in a shining Jag to stop.” He deliberately said it all too quick for me to take in. “You might get lucky, or you might be waiting hours. You never know with hitching. Make sure you’re dropped at the turnoff to Sheerness—if you find yourself in Faversham, you’ve gone too far.” He readjusts his crotch and turns to the woman. “Now, what can I do for you, sweetheart?”
    “Not calling me ‘sweetheart’ would be a good start.”
    I don’t hide my laugh. The guy stares daggers at me.
    •   •   •
    L ESS THAN A hundred yards later this knackered Ford Escort van pulls over. It might’ve been orange once, or perhaps that’s just rust. The passenger winds down the window. “Hi.” I’ve got a gobful of Ritz biscuit and must look like a total spaz, but I recognize who it is straight off. “It’s not quite a shiny Jaguar,” the woman with the raspberry-red hair slaps the door cheerfully, “and Ian here definitely isn’t a knight,” the guy driving does a little lean-over and a wave, “but if you’re after a lift to Sheppey, we’re going nearly to the bridge. Guide’s honor, we’re not axe murderers or chainsaw killers, and it’s got to beat standing on a slip road for six hours waiting for someone like
that
”—she cocks her head towards the Texaco garage—“to stop and ‘What can I do for you, sweetheart?’ all over you.”
    My feet are killing me, and a lift off a couple’s safer than a single man, she’s right. “That’d be brill, thanks.”
    She opens the back of the van and shunts some boxes to make space. I wedge myself in, but there’s windows on all sides so I’ve got a nice enough view. Ian, who’s midtwenties, baldish, and has a nose as big as a Concorde, asks, “Not too crushed back there, I hope?”
    “Not at all,” I say. “It’s dead cozy.”
    “It’ll only be twenty-five minutes,” Ian says, and we move off.
    “I was saying to Ian,” the woman tells me, “if we didn’t give you a lift, I’d spend all day worrying. I’m Heidi, anyway. Who are you?”
    “Tracy,” I answer. “Tracy Corcoran.”
    “You know, I never met a Tracy I didn’t like.”
    “I could find you one or two,” I say, and Ian and Heidi laugh, like that was pretty witty, and I s’pose it was, yeah. “Heidi’s a nice name, too.”
    Ian does a dubious
mmm
, and Heidi gives him a poke in the ribs. “Stop interfering with the driver,” he says.
    We pass a school ordered from the same catalogue as Windmill Hill Comprehensive—same big windows, same flat roofs, same muddy football pitch. I’m actually starting to believe I’ve left school: It’s like old Mr. Sharkey