Four Coins

Eva had no waterproof, no sleeping bag, no tent, not even a plain torch.

She had her school rucksack, and inside it four things: a builder’s plastic sheet folded down to the size of a book, five metres of rope, a jumper and a spoon. Four coins in her pocket and a cat.

And with that she had walked into the middle of the woods, at night and in the rain, and it didn’t strike her as anything out of the ordinary.

What she was carrying was the anger from in front of that door, and it lasted her exactly until the middle of the night.

For now it was lasting. When it started raining harder she lifted her face and picked up the pace.

“Doing all right, eh, Fay?” The cat went in front, a pale smudge in the blackness, stopping every so often to check she was following.

Behind her, above the trees, she could still make out the glow of the city. She had her back to it.

One step. Another. One step. Another…

She walked at a good pace, not thinking about anything.

She kept that up for a couple of hours, chasing the little white smudge moving ahead of her.

The night she found Fay came back to her, which was the same one she left home.

That was a year and a half ago. Her parents was much further back: six years shut in a flat with an older sister who behaved the same as them, or worse.

“I don’t care what you want! Here we do what I say and that’s that!” She remembered the scene, her sister snapping in two the bamboo flute she had made herself.

She replayed her parents arguing. Always arguing. Her whole life had been nothing but that: rushing, timetables, piano exams, the correct clothes. And what for?

Underneath all that, right at the bottom, something came to her that never came: the smell of a green plastic sheet strung between two trees, woodsmoke going up the sleeve of a fleece, and a big hand showing her a knot her fingers still knew how to tie fourteen years later. She pushed it away at once. That door she kept locked, and it wasn’t the night to open it.

Fay miaowing on his own in the middle of a street at three in the morning, which is the only good thing that happened to her that day.

Ow! She had trodden on a stone sharper than it needed to be.

She stopped.

And stopping, she looked around.

She saw nothing.

She looked back for the glow of the city. It was gone.

The distance had swallowed it.

The only light going was the moon, stuck in the clouds, just enough to see the mud and not enough to see where she was going.

And there the anger ran out on her. Just like that, all at once, the way petrol runs out.

It wasn’t the rain. Or the cold, or the hour, or the place. All of that she had sorted: in four minutes she could tie the sheet between two branches and be dry, and she had done it two hundred times, and not one of the two hundred had frightened her.

What landed on her was the other thing.

The tiredness. The hunger. And not knowing, again, where she was or where she was going.

What was she doing there? What the hell was she doing there, in the middle of nowhere, drenched and in the dark?

She patted her pocket. Her four coins were still there, jingling. In any town they would buy a sandwich and a coffee.

Out here they were worth nothing. There was nobody to give them to. There was nothing.

Then she felt something warm on her foot.

Fay was licking her toes, one by one. His tongue was the only warm thing in that whole place.

She looked down.

The cat was as soaked as she was, an absolute state.

And there he still was, licking her toes one by one, with all the patience in the world, as though that were the thing to do.

Soaked, lost and together.

Eva blew out a breath and wiped her face with the back of her hand.

“Come on, Fay. We’re not staying here.”

The cat shook the water off with a shudder and set off. But not along the track.

He headed for the trees, into the closed blackness of the wood.

“Hey, hey. Where are you going?” Eva stopped at the edge of the track. “Not that way, silly.”

Fay stopped where the mud ended and the undergrowth began.

He turned, looked straight at her and pointed his little head at the wood again.

Once. And again. As if telling her the way was through there.

“No, Fay. I trust you, but that’s enough adventure for today, please.”

The cat didn’t move.

“In the next village we’ll ask about Axel. A lad with a big rucksack. He can’t have got far, somebody will have seen him. We’ll find him, you’ll see.”

Fay stayed looking at the trees a moment longer.

Then, just like that, he came back to the track and set off ahead of her.

Eva followed him.

Luckily it was starting to ease off.

She walked the rest of the night behind the little white smudge, not thinking.