writing_shadows

You can walk from one end of the winnebago to the other in ten paces. I know. I've counted.

It is also two paces across, in most places. Narrower in some. A little wider in others.

I sleep in a bunk above the drivers cabin. You climb up a ladder to get there, and then need to crawl once you've up there, because the roof is so low. It's not bad, really. It's broad, at least, with room for me and my husband. The ceiling is plastered with notes and diagrams - things I'm trying to learn. Immediately above my head right now are two pages of notes on Hangul, the Korean alphabet. Just to my left, is my huge flow chart of the occult occurances in London and to my left are the wardings that were written in Sumerian cuniform on the walls of London.

I think Lennie mostly tries to ignore the crap I pin up there, except to swear occasionally if the blue tac gets too dry and he's woken by falling paper. He's a long suffering wolf, is my husband.

Down below is the drivers seat and passenger seat, and then just behind that the table and benches where we sit to eat. Then there's a kitchenette, and a two tiny rooms, small as broom closets, which hold the toilet (that always smells in summer) and shower (which never gets properly hot). Then, at the back, there's a bit of a screen which we keep pulled out to screen Holly's room a little and give her some privacy. Right now there is also a hole in that. We need to get that sorted.

There are some drawers, one tiny closet, and a box on the roof where most of our things are stored. You can't keep much out at any one time. Not in a van. You've got to be tidy in a van. Things have to be put away, otherwise the place becomes impossible, and even worse when you're moving. You can't have much stuff full stop, because there's nowhere to put it.

Thankfully, we're mostly dirt poor, so I've never had to worry much about stuff. My clothes stay in the one small closet, by the cooker. Overalls, for working on cars and bikes with Rusty. Smarter clothes for whenever I can get away. I like clothes that make me feel smart. White shirts, with crisp white collars. Brightly coloured dresses, that cling around my thighs. Shoes.

I love shoes.

I can't have many. No money, nowhere to put them. But I love shoes. High heels, big heels, stompy boots, glittering sandals. If I could, I'd have a whole wardrobe, just full of shoes.

I've said that to Lennie, a couple of times. He either smiles at me affectionately and says I can have whatever I want, or he asks me if I'm out of my goddamn mind. It depends on his mood. Either way, I know I can't really have many. Not a lot of room in a winnebago, you see.

My books get stored in the lock up, in south London. I go there whenever I can, and sneak into the cold little room, with the chill white strip light and I sit there for as long as I can. I love books. Of course, I know I don't need to keep them. Libraries make more sense - public libraries, I mean - where I can go, read, give them back. But it's nice to have books which are yours. Books that you've collected, books that you can go back to and read over and over again, like they are old friends. When I was about eleven I read a version of Beauty and the Beast, where the Beast seduced Beauty by showing her his library. That made sense to me, even then. I dreamt of having a room of my own back then, full of books. Full of my things.

I've got some things, of course - a really battered laptop, for a start. The laptop was a crazy extravagance one year after some flash bastard tipped me in £50 notes for doing some kind of shady clean up job on his car. Said I was a good girl, and tried to look down my top whilst doing it. I smiled, looked nice, and took the cash. Tried to forget about the fact that I'd been picking bits of someone's skull out of the passenger head rest. That makes me a bad person, right? I know it does. I didn't even tell Lennie, for fear he'd flip out. I told Rusty, who just grunted and let me keep the money. Rusty's solid for things like that. And I really wanted a computer. It's made things a lot easier. There's a lot I can do on the computer, and it's a sign, really, of how much better things have gotten. Ten years ago I'd have thought it a miracle that we weren't going hungry at all.

So, I should be grateful, right?

The winnebago smells slightly of gas fumes and petrol.

It's because we spend so much time on the road. We patrol the M25, and I think the reek of the M25 clings to it. My pack loves the M25. It's our territory, they say. And territory is worth something. You protect your territory. Lately it's turned out that there is even something on the M25 that is worth protecting, as some crazy guy draws sigils all over it. So, good thing that we are there, I guess. And we nearly always are. We drive along motorways and park in laybays, listening to the roar of the traffic, like a sooty river. My sleep is punctuated by the sound of car horns - the brash shout of the car horns, the sonorous boom of the lorry horns. I drift in and out of sleep, on those nights, always waiting for the next burst of noise, never wanting to let myself slip away completely.

Sometimes we can stop up in a proper caravan park, with clammy shower blocks and noisy children. Actually, I don't mind the children so much. I think it's the shower blocks I object to the most. They always seem to have something vile lurking on the floor. Last time it was a used condom. The time before that, someone's faeces. Once Holly stood on a used syringe. She was only about five at the time. I nearly had a nervous breakdown. But the kids are OK and I quite like the dogs actually. I've asked Lennie if we can have a dog before. He asked me if I'm out of my goddamn mind.

I think I walked out on him over that row, actually.

People say I'm unreasonable sometimes. I don't know why.

Anyway, we move on.

A lot of the time we park up by the junkyard where Rusty works, the junkyard that was Dad's. The old house is still there, broken and boarded up. I keep wanting us to move back there, but Lennie likes to stay on the move, and we've only ever spent a few nights, camping out like ghosts in my childhood memories. One time I spent a day cleaning out the old kitchen, making it as bright and clean as it was when I was a kid. I don't know why. We had to be the other side of London before nightfall.

Still, I love going back to that place. It's a little quieter than anywhere else we ever go, and I like the quiet. God knows why - it's not like I was brought up without noise around. But I do. I love the stillness you get in the dim hours of the dawn. I love the silence in empty places, the softness of the sounds you get when all the grey uproar of modern living has faded.

We went back there last night, after I'd got home from central London, smelling of the soap from the showers at Paddington Station, where I'd washed away the mascara that I'd cried into zebra stripes down my face (I don't normally cry, honestly) and the engine grease that I'd rubbed behind my ears to make sure that I didn't smell of anything else which might cause questions. I'd not done anything to be questioned on, but thirty years of living with werewolves has made me careful and I was still feeling a little too fragile to talk about that evening, sitting with a man I'd thought had walked out on me years ago, trying to forget the dreams I'd had when I was fifteen. I hugged Holly, which normally makes me feel better, but I discovered that last night it just made me want to cry again, because I couldn't quite forget any of the things that Jonah had told me, which included the fact that my girl had now decided to write a will.

So I washed my face at the kitchen sink, and spent the rest of the evening focussing on the smell from the chemical toilet, because that is pretty much the best possible way to stop you thinking of anything sentimental.

I'm good at tricks like that.

Then when we'd got back to the junkyard, and Lennie and Holly had gone for a run - one of those runs that I can't follow them on - I went for a walk.

I walked out past the garage, then up past the old house, locked and boarded up these days. I tried not to remember my childhood there - Rusty still smiling, tickling me until I screamed, Raphael and Izzy trying to sneak in the back door so I wouldn't see that they were both coated in mud, Jonah sitting on the staircase, looking at me in exasperation whilst he tried to get me to actually finish my homework and I tried to get him to notice that I had cut two inches off the bottom of my skirt, and resewn the hem, just because he was coming round. OK. I know. Look, I was fifteen years old at the time. I've grown up since then. Anyway, I didn't think about all those memories. Not for long. I walked down the lawn at the back, grown over now, and clambered over the remains of the fence. There's a bit of field behind that, and then some more fencing, because the ground dips sharply down into a hollow that no farmer thinks is worth filling in, and has left to grow full of trees. It looks thick and impenetrable from the outside, but there are paths that wind their way through it, when you know it well enough, and there is no sound there at all. No roads. No noise. Just the sound of the wind.

I love that hollow. Ever since I was a kid, it's been my place. The place I go to whenever I want to feel safe. I've brought others there, on occasion, but they never seem to feel the need to stay. They go away again and it reverts to just being mine.

It takes thirty seven steps to get to the bottom of the hollow, to the patch where the grass runs out, and there's only moss on the ground, surprisingly soft. Up above, there are trees, including one knotted old oak that I've always loved to climb. And god, it's quiet. So blessedly quiet.

I sat there for a while, with my chin resting on my knees. I cried for a bit again, over all the dreams that have died over the years, over all the innocence that got chewed up by the tainted heritage that we all carry in our genes. I cried because I was thirty four, because my daughter isn't even eighteen, and is making plans to die. I cried because all the promises I made when I was eleven, when I was thirteen, when I was fiften, had all been broken, and because I'd ended up in the same situation as my mother. I cried because I loved my husband, but didn't know how to be his wife, and I cried because once I'd turned a teenage boy into Prince Charming in my mind, and now it turned out that maybe I was right, but all the chances we'd had had been burnt up by the years.

Then I went home, to the winnebago.

You can walk from one end of the winnebago to the other in ten paces. You can also find the picture of your daughter's first day at school still pinned to the fridge, and that godawful hat that your husband loves hanging up on a wall, with a couple of loose blonde hairs still clinging to it. You can settle into the corner seat, with the cushion that your daughter embroidered with the word 'mummy' when she was about seven, and you know that's your corner.

And, sweet Jesus, it isn't what you dreamed of at all. And sometimes the fact that you're here, unrooted and restless as the wind, can make you want to scream, but then, life isn't about dreams, is it? It's about finding the small places where you can be happy, the moments, the things you can cling on to. It's about making the best of what you have and remembering what's important.

You can walk from one end of the winnebago to the other in ten paces. Then you stand at the cooker and try and work out what to make for tea.