The sea turned rough as the great hulk of the boat left Dublin Port. The engines churned while young men huddled on deck, cupping their hands over cigarettes near the stairwell. As the boat gathered speed they turned their faces to the wind, looking through sea-salt tears at the country they were leaving behind. Were any of these young men, Annie wondered, running away for reasons as dark as her own? Had any of them committed a crime as well? Maybe. Although, it was more likely that most of them were going to England for work. Here, on deck, they were planning their new lives and hoping to make their fortune. In a few years’ time some of them would come home, triumphant, with new suits and leather wallets, to make their mothers proud. They would marry sweethearts and build houses next to their parents. Others would never return, instead deciding to settle and rear their children as English. They all smoked together for now, gazing at the disappearing land, their lips sucking on the ends of their burning cigarettes. Annie imagined that they must be sad to be leaving loved ones behind, even though they were looking forward to the adventure of a new life. They were so different to Annie, who had no loved ones and was trying to escape an old life.
A young man standing next to her threw his cigarette into the water, looked over at the ports and gave a huge wave. She couldn’t pick out who it was directed at among the crowd that had gathered there.
‘Are you leaving many behind?’ he asked. The roar of the engine and the wind caught his words so he leaned in closer to ask again. Annie stiffened. There was a smell of beer on his breath. Along with the boat it made her nauseous and then anxious. She must not start talking to people on the boat. It wasn’t safe. Not yet.
‘No,’ she said, giving him an awkward smile before quickly turning back and walking down the metal stairwell into the ship. Once she got onto English soil, she would feel safe again. She had to remind herself that even running, as she was now, she felt safer than she had done since her mother died.
When Annie got to the top deck lounge, people were flooding up from the car deck, snatching seats from the rows of hard chairs and rushing towards the bar. Annie quickly sat at the end of a wooden bench. As the journey progressed, she began to feel grateful that she was not sitting on her suitcase on the floor like some of the others around her. Conditions on the boat were quickly deteriorating. Less than an hour out of port and the upper deck was covered in vomit, and a heavy rain shower carried the debris down the stairs, making the ship’s population shelter below. Somebody closed the deck door and cigarette smoke clung to the ceiling in a malignant cloud. For the next seven hours, while the vast boat heaved its cargo of sickened travellers across the Irish Sea, Annie curled her body into a tight ball, put her head on her suitcase and slept as much as she could. Every hour or so she was woken by somebody sitting on her feet, the sound of men singing, children wailing or the smell of some unfortunate vomiting nearby. Each time she started awake, Annie felt only relief that she was here, in this filthy, floating no-man’s-land, rather than with Dorian. Dead or alive. Although, in her half-asleep state, she was able to admit it to herself: he was worse alive. Dorian could never hurt or touch her again. She was on a wooden bench inside a boat, with only a coat and a case for bedding, surrounded by strangers, vomit and smoke, not knowing where she was going or what she was going to do when she got there. Yet she was sleeping more peacefully than she ever could at home. It was called that but it never truly was any more than a prison.
When they arrived in Holyhead the crowd shuffled in a sleep-riddled state, shoving past one another onto the train to London. Annie was less lucky in finding a seat this time and spent the journey walking up and down the train carriages, sometimes finding an empty corner where she could rest for a minute on her suitcase before moving along when a friendly Irish person tried to lead her into a conversation.
They arrived at Euston station at five in the morning. The crowd flooded off the train as quickly as it got on the boat in the first place. The empty station suddenly began to bustle as the Irish boat–train crowd surged in, their relatives arriving to collect them, or wandering around in search of coaches. Leeds, Manchester – they gathered by the entrance to the tube station, waiting for it to open.
Annie automatically followed a group of people towards the open mouth of the station. When they got out onto the wide pavement in front of the station the crowd dispersed, each individual disappeared into the London streets until Annie was left standing alone. She turned and looked back at the station front. The portico entrance, the grand Euston Arch, had been pulled down a few years ago to make way for a new, modern building. The world was changing. Out with the old, in with the new. But so far, the brave new building was just an ugly no-man’s-land. A half-built concrete box scattered with scaffolding and builder boards, some of which would probably end up being worked on by some of the young men she had just shared the boat journey with. Euston station was in transition, neither old nor entirely new yet. The truth of where she was, or rather, where she wasn’t hit Annie in a wave of panic. She had nowhere to go and she had no plan. So she started walking. What other choice did she have? This was not a field in the middle of Ireland. She could not simply sit down and disappear. If she started walking something would surely present itself to her, as it had when she was running earlier and decided to hop on the bus to Galway. She walked past closed shops and large buildings that could be universities, schools or libraries. London seemed a bit like Dublin but on a much, much larger scale. In Dublin you could walk in almost any direction from Stephen’s Green in the city centre and, before the hour was up, you would hit the coastline or open fields. If you looked up the side roads off Baggot Street, you could see the Dublin Mountains. Here, the buildings seemed to stretch on forever. The streets were empty at this time in the morning, making it feel like a ghost town.
Finally, around nine, the streets began to fill up. Cars started to roll along the roads at a leisurely morning pace and, with them, big red buses. When Annie saw them she began to get excited. This was the London she knew from books and photographs. Her mother had taken her to the pictures when she was young, and Annie remembered seeing almost this exact scene – red buses trundling down the broad roads. So when a number 14 bus stopped in front of her at some traffic lights, she hopped on and climbed up the steep stairs. The conductor frowned when he saw she had nothing smaller than a crown to pay the tuppenny fare but he let her off with a shrug. It was too early to be splitting shillings.
From her seat on the top deck, Annie watched London come to life. Shops opened, women pushed large prams down narrow streets, men in bowler hats rushed to offices, crowds of people gathered at stairwells to the underground, disappearing down as others spewed up. Annie was happy here, observing other people. She could have sat on the bus all day if it hadn’t stopped outside Westminster and Chelsea hospital. Annie felt a sort of dread in her stomach when the bus conductor shouted, ‘All change here!’
Once, when she was younger, Annie thought she would like to become a nurse. She might have worked in a hospital. Like hundreds, even thousands of Irish nurses, she could be over here working. That was back when her mother had just met Dorian and she wanted to please him. With the thought of him fresh in her head, Annie got off the bus and began walking, almost running, away. She neither knew nor cared where she was any more. Annie was utterly, utterly lost. She looked around for something familiar – a face, a tree, a plant – but all she saw was busy strangers, concrete and closed windows. She could jump in the River Thames and not a soul would find her, or care or miss her. Perhaps that was exactly what she should do. How could she start a new life here? She knew nobody and could do nothing. She was no good to anyone. All she had ever known was serving the cruel man she had left for dead. Every inch of her wanted to scream out. Standing in the middle of the street, she was trapped in her own body. Imprisoned by her misery. Her heart started beating so fast and her breathing became so heavy with panic that she thought she might faint. Searching for somewhere to sit, she spotted a cafe just a few doors along from where she was standing. A homely looking woman was putting a noticeboard outside. The smell of cooking wafted towards her from the open door and, as it steadied her, Annie realised that she was hungry. She stepped into the steaming cafe and took a seat by the window. If she was going to throw herself into the Thames, she may as well have breakfast first.