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Last Orders by Graham Swift Page B

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Authors: Graham Swift
Tags: prose_contemporary
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I pointed.
    Rockabilly, Uttoxeter, hundred to eight.
    She said, 'What is it?'
    I said, 'It's a dormobile. A camper-van, deluxe model. A travelling home for two.'
    She said, 'That's the last straw.'

Vince
    It wasn't like it is now, a quick race down the motorway and the taste of London still in your mouth half-way through Kent. It was like a voyage, only the other way round. So that instead of the waiting and hoping to sight land, you were moving over land in the first place, all impatient, all ready for that first glimpse. The seaside. The sea.
    I watched Sally's legs. I watched the fields and the woods and the hills and the cows and sheep and farms and I watched the road, grey and hot, like elephant skin, coming towards us, always coming towards us, like something we were scooping up, eating up, but then I'd watch Sally's legs, resting on top of Amy's. Or not so much resting, because they were always moving, shifting, sliding, and when we got near the sea they'd start to jiggle up and down, her feet going under the dashboard, the way they did when she won at the spotting game, 'O' for orchard, 'P' for petrol station, or when Amy asked her if she needed to stop and have a pee, 'P' for pee. Then she and Amy would go off together, separate, behind a hedge, so I knew it wasn't just a case of pulling out your widdler, it was something different.
    It wasn't so much the way they moved or even the way her cotton skirt would ride up sometimes so Amy would flip it down again if Sally didn't. It was their smoothness and bareness, their sticky-without-being-stickiness, and it was that they had a smell which you couldn't smell above the smells of going along the road but I knew it was there and I knew it was how Sally must smell all over, the bits you couldn't see. It was like the smell of the seaside, it was like the differentness of the seaside before you got there.
    Sally on Amy's lap, me in the middle, Jack. We could've swapped round, I could've gone on Amy's lap, I wasn't so heavy. Salty could've gone on my lap. But that was how Amy wanted it. I saw that.
    And one day he said anyway, 'You'll have to go in the back. You aint getting smaller, either of you. If you want Sally to come, you'll have to go in the back.'
    So I went in the back where I couldn't watch Sally's legs, and all you could smell was the sweet, stale, stick-in-your-throat smell of meat.
    It wouldn't be there at first. There was the picnic bag and the bag of beach things and the rug they put down for me and the soapy smell of whatever he used to scrub it all out with. But after a while the meat smell would come through, like something that had been hiding, and after a while more the sick feeling would start and you'd have to fight it.
    But I never said, I never said, and I don't suppose they even guessed, what with the windows down in front and the air rushing in, I never banged on the metal and said, 'Let me out, I wanna be sick.' Because I was doing it for Sally's sake, so she could be there. She was in the front where I couldn't see or smell her, I could only smell meat, but her being there where I couldn't see or smell her was better than her not being there at all, and when we got out at the other end she'd be there, really, and so would the seaside. The meat smell and the sick feeling would get blown away by the smell of the seaside, and though you knew it was still there in the van and there was the journey back, you didn't think about that till it happened. When something's one thing, it aint another. And when I got back in the van to go home, I'd think, It evens out, because in one direction there's what's ahead and in another there's the memory, and maybe there's nothing more or less to it than that, it's nothing more or less than what you should expect, a good thing between two bad things. Air and sunshine and, either side, being in a box.
    I reckon she should've been impressed, that I did it for her sake. So I never said. But maybe she wasn't impressed,

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