Free Solace of the Road by Siobhan Dowd

to be different. Definitely too many Es. It made your back ache.
    Then the sky clouded over and it started spitting. The last fry was gone and I was still hungry and I was being jostled by people rushing past, putting up umbrellas.
    Oh, God. I had nowhere to go. I had no idea where the A40 was. And I only had two quid and some change left. It wasn’t even enough to buy an umbrella.
    This town with the bikes and bat-wings was doing me in.
    Everyone rushed past without seeing me.
    The next thing I could feel a dribble of water on my mouth and I knew it wasn’t rain because it tasted salty. Get a grip , I told myself. I got off the freako bench and staggered up the street in the heels. I thought of going back to that church place because I reckoned you could at least go and sit inside and they wouldn’t charge you. But I must have turned wrong because I kept walking and couldn’t find it. There was just this long road with huge trees. The drizzle got harder. Then a big building with frilly windows loomed up, set back from the road across a lawn. A notice said it was a museum and free.
    Museums and me don’t go. All that junk in glass cases gives me a headache, big time. But the rain was hammering down now, and the wig would be ruined if I didn’t shelter. So I stumbled over and went inside.

Fifteen
The Place of Dead Things
    A heavy wooden door opened into a big bright hall with white light and dinosaurs. Way overhead there was a pointed roof of metal and glass. It was hot and hushed. School kids scooted in the aisles.
    I groaned. There were dead things in cases everywhere. Owls. An ostrich. A fox. Somebody had killed and stuffed them and it’s mean. They should let dead things rot in the ground like they’re supposed to. An otter with big dark eyes pattered across a pretend backdrop of undergrowth and water, like he was still alive. I imagined him rootling round, snuffing out his grub and taking a dip, and then somebody’d come up and coshed him on the head like they do seals in the Arctic. It’s cruel.
    I stopped in front of some dead old dinosaur. It was massive and had a thumb spike to kill its enemies. What would the world be like, I thought, if humans had lethal thumb spikes like that? Probably everyone would kill off everyone else and the last person would die of old age with nobody to have kids with. Thenmaybe the otters and seals would scamper to their heart’s content and not get coshed and the world would be a better place.
    Next I saw a booth with a curtain for a door. FLUORESCENT MINERALS, the sign said. Behind the curtain it was dark, with a load of rocks, and you pressed buttons to make a light come on. The rocks were dead, like everything else in the museum, but they were pretty as jewels, and jewels are things I love. Milk-white. Mauve. Silver. And amber, like my mam’s ring. I thought how you’d dig them out of the ground and make million-dollar pendants out of them and walk around wowing the world, especially if you were Gorgeous Grace. I could have stared at those rocks for hours, only just after I went in, a bunch of kids shoved in behind me. They didn’t bother with the rocks, though, they just kept ducking in and out, playing with the lights. All except this one serious-looking boy with round glasses. He came up as high as my elbow and had his nose glued to the glass case, reading. The other kids soon got bored and vanished, but he stayed put. We peered at the rocks together.
    ‘They’re cool, these rocks,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think?’
    ‘They look like they’re from outer space,’ he said. He was eight maybe, and already he had the same accent as Chloe and those mogits at the charity shop.
    ‘Oh yeah?’ I said. ‘Says here, this one’s from Iceland.’
    ‘Maybe it came down on a meteorite.’
    ‘Never.’
    ‘Yes.’ He turned his specs to me and his eyes were magnified through the glass. ‘We’re all from outer space originally,’ he went. ‘Every last atom inside us.