CHAPTER 51
Recovery from surgery was slow, but nowhere near as bad as I had feared. When I left Hemmings’ place, Carol was with me, having taken the train down so that I wouldn’t have to ride all the way home again alone, but for my little rubber ring under the new anatomy. We hardly spoke at all; what should have been the celebration of my body finally being compete was lost in the rattle of train wheels and Tannoy announcements from the guard. It all felt so utterly meaningless, and the question locked in my mind was whether I should really have bothered going through with the surgery. What, after all, was the point?

CHAPTER 49
“Good morning, Mr Hemming’s office, Julia speaking. How may I help you?”

“Um, my name is Debbie Wells. I was down for an assessment with Mr Hemmings about some surgery”

“Thank you. May I take your date of birth and postcode?”

CHAPTER 48
The seats were uncomfortable, as always, but in differing ways. Most of them were hard plastic chairs, that gradually sent your arse to sleep, with the occasional comfy-looking armchair bearing a beguilingly padded seat that was actually worse. You sat on the thick cushion, and the air trapped under the vinyl cover slowly farted out through the holes in the plywood base. With a sigh, you gradually descended to a perch on the base board, the frame digging into the backs of your thighs as the trapped sweat began to soak them.

CHAPTER 47
Sunday morning’s light told me I had got outside far too much alcohol the previous evening, and with that thought I realised that the evening had actually become morning before I had managed to deliver a very unsteady Mam to our corner of the site.

Hangovers are funny things, because they mirror the preceding state of drunkenness. When plastered, your mind comes up with all sorts of insights and mystical revelations, which will change the course of your life and deliver immeasurable benefits, if you could only recall them the following morning. Instead, the hangover arrives, which allows a detailed examination of the damage you are doing to your health.

CHAPTER 45
I tugged her out of the marquee and around behind the burger van, where the blast from the band was partially blocked, replaced by the chugging of a small electrical generator.

“What do you mean, Mam?”

“I can’t feel it, love. I mean, I can hear it, feel the sound in my gut. I just can’t FEEL it, can’t move to it!”

CHAPTER 43
The sun was warm on my face as I dozed on a south-facing bench, its heat reflecting back from the honey-coloured stone wall behind me, my backpack heavy against my side. It had been a rather complicated train ride to Hexham, but I was there, and the weather seemed set fine. All I had to do was wait for Mam and Dad, grazing occasionally from the food I had grabbed in Carlisle station as I waited for the little railbus that served the smaller stations. Mick had dropped me at Crewe, where I had caught the Intercity to the place Charlie had taken as his new home. I knew he was now locked up, but I had still felt the back of my neck prickling as I had waited on the platform.

CHAPTER 41
I had a hangover the next morning, but we had the shower, as Mam had promised, and I spent more than a few minutes soaking, which gave me time to settle my mood and my behaviour. Not my day, much as I might have wished things had followed a different course, but in a way the day actually was mine. Two people I loved would be happy, so suck it up, woman, and be happy for them. After all, didn’t I have Class?

CHAPTER 39
Mick Worsley had put a word in for me with the boss, and they had been as helpful as I could have hoped. There was a drop due in Chester, another a day later. I could ride there on the first drop, and if I could find somewhere to spend the night, I was guaranteed a lift most of the way there and back. I had started to laugh when Mr Mossman mentioned ‘finding somewhere to stay’, and he had given me a sharp look.

“Nothing really, Boss. It’s just that the last time I found somewhere to pass the night in Chester, it was under a tarpaulin in a pleasure boat by the river. I might just go a bit upmarket this time”

CHAPTER 37
The pattern of my life was set for the next year and a half, and to be honest, it wasn’t that bad. I worked hard in the week, putting in the hours at both the training centre and the local haulier, Mossman’s, that Dad had passed my care onto. There is more to driving a freight lorry than sitting behind the wheel, and Mossman’s gave me a decent apprenticeship in those extras. Their fitters talked me through the basics of maintenance, so that I could make a half-decent guess at the cause of a problem, and perhaps solve it without needing to call out a fitter or tow truck, but that wasn’t all of it.

CHAPTER 35
We left the Farmyard in light rain, heading north again through the maze of roads and lanes towards Aberystwyth. I wondered where we would end up on this circuit, knowing only that it would probably involve some time with Graham.

“Dad?”

“Aye, duck?”

“We going back to that do in Cumbria?”

CHAPTER 33
That was going to take some planning, but we had time, and the Hairy Stotty was calling, a rally far more to my taste than the Midgesummer had been. We made our way down there with the van’s windows wide open so as to catch a cooling breeze, which didn’t work too well, and on arrival found that the ground was baked absolutely solid. That lasted right up to the Saturday evening, when the weather broke.

CHAPTER 31
The other side of the ‘dinosaur' was lit up in the orange of the sunrise, and so were several other hills showing to the right of its northern slope. The hill we had passed on the way in, a chaotic pile of loose rock from the road, showed a grander flank, holding what looked like a hollow above steady slopes of green dotted with white sheep. People were already moving on the campsite, with several cooking bacon of porridge on little stoves.

“Morning, love!”

CHAPTER 29
They featured on the front page, as well as in what seemed like half the rest of the paper. It was a style of reporting I had already come to recognise and despise: a story too shocking for their readers, see pages 2-26 plus special colour supplement.

It wasn’t quite as bad as that, but there was a lot to read. Mam set out a couple of camping chairs, Rosie sitting beside me as I read. Dear god, and I had thought my time with the bastards had been a taste of hell. It seemed I had been given an easy time, compared with what I read.

CHAPTER 27
I slept well that night, even though my dreams were a little confused, and the dawn’s light had been replaced by a Summer morning when I eventually emerged from the tent. Mam and Dad had slept in the van, which felt a little strange at first, but it was simply another stage of my healing and growth.

From the day of our meeting, I had slept between or by them, except in our winter house, and now I was being given my own space, possibly as a recognition of greater maturity but maybe as a hint that my life was now a safe one.

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CHAPTER 26
Life went on. It sounds trite, but I came to realise that my decision to choose continuing to breathe had been made when I went out of a window in Runcorn; what followed was simply fine detail. It didn’t make the process of living any easier, but the days or hours I managed to get things into some sort of perspective kept me on some sort of even keel. In the end, I simply had to look at the two people who had rescued me for validation.

CHAPTER 24
“Up you get, Duck! Time to get rolling!”

The beginning of March, and my bag was already packed, along with my bedroll, stowed in the van. I found the bathroom empty, to no great surprise, so I pulled my nighty off for a quick wash of the various bits Ken referred to as “Face, fork and pits”, as well as doing my teeth.

CHAPTER 22
There is something I have always liked about a sleeping bag, and in later years I discovered the same feelings for small tents. It feels nest-like, a small space entirely one’s own, where everything feels close and warm. I luxuriated in my bag for a little while after I woke, but I needed a wee, and there was only so long I could put it off. In nighty, dressing gown and socks, I did the necessary before creeping down the stairs and past the living room door. From behind it came the sound of more than one snorer. I filled the kettle, and then decided to set a pan of water boiling so that there would be plenty for the tea that I knew would vanish almost as soon as it was poured.

CHAPTER 20
As I slipped out of the back door, Ken coughed for attention, and I dropped both carrier bags in shock.

“Where were you going, Deb?”

CHAPTER 17
We spent two more days in our little place in the woods, which sat on a very quiet road in a corner of Kent that somehow seemed to escape the hurry and bustle of the outside world despite sitting so close to three main roads. Years later, I would read of the man who lived secretly in his tent, hidden away in the bushes of the central reservation of the dual carriageway leading past Southampton’s railway station, his life passing in parallel with that of the commuters streaming past each day.

CHAPTER 15
“What’s a diddycoy, Loz?”

“Ah, love, it’s one of those words that has two meanings. Two uses, really. See, Ken’s Romany, mother and father. Me, it’s just my Dad, so that makes me a sort of mongrel, and the old Romany word means mixed blood. That’s one meaning, and one use of the word. If you were ours by blood, that is what you would be. The other meaning is also tied in with how it gets used, and it’s just another insult. They throw the same thing at the tinkers, and most of them have got big houses in Ireland as well as bloody big caravans.

CHAPTER 13
The ‘pernackity’ turned out to be a sort of hotpot, sliced potatoes in a rich gravy; the ‘stotty’ was a flat, round piece of bread. In later years, the closest equivalent I could find was ciabatta. It had the same dense texture and weight to it, and I was profoundly disappointed to discover that many ‘stotties’ sold in chain stores were actually just a flatter version of sliced white bread.

CHAPTER 11
I was officially no longer a Rally Virgin, with the badge to prove it, so I was feeling ten feet tall as we rolled into the site entrance, which was in a field next to a motorway. There was the usual collection of hairy people at the gate, all with the badges and patches now so familiar to me, many in the woolly hats that were almost a membership badge in their own right.

“Loz?”

“Yes, love?”

“Is this an MC thing?”