Everyone in an anecdote has a different version of it

Coming out of Kinross services, she looked like someone with no need to hold down a proper job. Lace and PVC, boots with soles two inches thick, tiny handbag in one hand, everyone stared and she ignored them. She’d touched up her makeup in the toilets, face white and lipstick black. She walked to the car where I smoked, conventional in my black jeans and leather jacket.

“Where do we go next?” asked Lilith. That was the only name I knew her by. Maybe there are girls who are actually christened Lilith, but I can’t imagine her parents choosing it. It was a name taken to discard another. “The woman in Smiths, she said this is the country’s most northerly services. So we can’t go much further.”

“That sounds about right,” I said. “The M90 is as far as the motorways go.”

“So what next?”

“We can still go further north,” I said.

“And then?”

“We’ll figure something.”

If we just kept going, we’d end up at John O’Groats. At nineteen, I’d never been to Scotland before, had no idea what we’d find at the end of the country, but it was better than spending time in Worthing. We could turn back, but we knew what awaited us if we did.

While I finished the cigarette, Lilith cleaned the road litter from the footwell, crumping the wrappers into a ball, then tottered to the bin. She looked thin, and my friend Alice had once cruelly compared her thin legs and big boots to golf clubs. Alice was full of arch comments - she had volunteered herself as the queen of the whole scene in Brighton, deciding who was in or out. I’d have been labelled a casual for my lack of piercings or complicated hair if I wasn’t Alice’s old friend. Because of her, I got away with holding down an office job.

“Let’s drive,” said Lilith. We clambered into my old Escort and continued north.

Lilith fell asleep almost as soon as we’d merged back to the motorway, and I wracked my brains for a plan. I reckoned that we’d run out of road before we ran out of money for rooms and petrol. Would we find jobs on a noticeboard somewhere, settle down up here? Lilith was far from her natural environment, and she she’d only had her job at a petrol station because her uncle managed it.

The countryside was beautiful, and I wondered if I should wake her. The roads up here seemed calmer than I was used to, and I enjoyed the drive. My boss texted again, saying I could come back in a few days, take some time off, I’d obviously been working too hard. Lilith’s uncle had called her an ungrateful bitch and said she’d already been replaced.

Reaching John O’Groats was inevitable. It was drizzling when we arrived, and there was nothing to do other than walk along the harbour. Lilith took my arm for balance, and we stared at the islands in the distance. We’d need the ferry to go further.

“Someone tried to rob the petrol station one night,” said Lilith.

“Seriously?” I said. “What happened?”

“He had a knife and told me to give him everything in the till and all the fags he could carry. I refused. We just stared at each other until he walked away.”

“Your uncle must have been pleased. You’re a hero.”

Lilith shook her head. “He didn’t believe me, and told me I would have been a twat if it did happen, as it’s not worth being stabbed over someone else’s money.”

Lilith opened her little handbag, and dropped a few items from it into the sea. That night I asked her what they were and she wouldn’t say. Two other couples stood on the harbour, and I wondered if they had stories like ours.

On the drive back, Lilith told me I sometimes whimpered in my sleep. Nobody else has ever said that, so I guess it must have been something about that journey. I dropped Lilith off at the end of her road, and the last time I saw her she was waving, her bulky carry-all beside her, which she insisted I did not need to carry to her shared house. She never came back to the clubs and her uncle refused to put me in touch with her, so we lost contact.

Years later, I was on a platform at Fenchurch street station. A woman introduced herself as Vanessa, and I had no idea how I knew this woman in a floral dress. She only had enough time to explain that we’d driven to John O’Groats together, then her train pulled in. I don’t know why she bothered to introduce herself, but then couldn’t let the train go by and get another. I watched her among the jostling passengers. At some point, Lilith had been crumpled up and cast aside.

Some Background

The narrator of this story is Davey the Drummer, who also turns up in the final story of A Foolish Journey. Davey is a member of Nearvana, a tribute band. That band has turned up tangentially in a number of stories. I’ve never actually watched a tribute band, but I find the idea fascinating. I once had some help moving from someone who ran a Beatles tribute band, for which he had different Beatles in every area of the country. He could put together a band for a particular location from different sets of John, Paul, George and Ringo.

This was not originally written as one of the South Downs Way stories, but rather was a prompt from my regular writing group, Todmodern’s Wednesday Writers. I liked it, and decided to plug it into the other stories. Having done that, I can see some interesting places to take the characters.

The photo I’ve used is not from Kinross services, but from Trowell. I have no idea why they have stone figures at the entrance way, but I like that they do.

Recommendations

I’m obsessed by music, and there are dozens of albums I love dearly. Some are them are famous and others are less well-known but deserve to be. An example of the latter is Digital Underground’s Sons of the P. I first heard this over thirty years ago and loved the songs but certainly didn’t understand them. The record is inspired by P-funk, and is full of references to George Clinton songs, as well as its own mythology about the D-Flow shuttle. Even while it baffled me, I could tell there was a whole universe within these songs.

Digital Underground were an odd band. As well as being the people who first bought Tupac Shakur to prominence, they were most famed for the Humpty Dance. This featured Digital Underground’s leader Shock G as his comedy alter-ego, Edward Ellington Humphrey III - also known as Humpty Hump. This flamboyant character was Shock G in Groucho glasses and a comedy nose.

Older now, I appreciate the songs more. If I was to recommend one, it would be Tales of the Funky a joyful celebration of Parliament/Funkadelic. None of the band’s other albums grabbed me this much, but it’s a great example of what hip-hop can do.

Shock G passed in 2021. Everyone knew that he was Humpty Hump, but my favourite story about him is when, through the use of a double, he shared the stage with Humpty at a live gig, and the other rappers at the show could not work out how he had done it.

What Else?

Every month, I publish a summary of what I’ve been up to on my blog. I recently published my round-up for September. It looks like September was spent mostly watching movies.