The Northern Clemency by Philip Hensher

we’d be stopping at Leicester Forest East,” Alice said. “The service station. It’s the next one—I think it said seven miles.”
    Bernie was gritting his teeth: he was stuck between lorries, thundering along at a frustrating ten miles an hour below the speed limit, boxed in by faster lines of traffic solidly flowing to the right. He felt like a box on a conveyor belt. “Not a bad idea,” he said. “They won’t worry if we don’t, though.”
    “It might be as well,” Alice said. “Sandra.”
    “What about Sandra?” Francis said, his chin resting on the back of his mother’s seat, his face almost in her hair.
    “Oh, nothing,” Alice said.
    “Your mum means,” Bernie said, “that she might be fed up of riding in the lorry by now. The excitement might have worn off.”
    “I didn’t mean that exactly,” Alice said.
    “Or on the other hand they might—” Bernie broke off. “We ought to get a radio in the car,” he said, after a while. “Aren’t you hungry, Frank? I’m hungry. That wasn’t much of a lunch.”
    “It couldn’t be helped,” Alice said. “Everything was packed away.”
    “I know, love,” Bernie said.
    New experiences filled Francis with automatic dread. He had disappeared when the removers had arrived, feeling that demands would beplaced on him, but dreading most the presence of rough men in their emptying house. He had never eaten in a motorway service station before; whenever they had travelled, picnics had been packed to be eaten in fields or off the dashboard, according to rain. Now he felt, knowing it to be stupid, that indefinite dangers were presenting themselves, dangers involving crowds of strangers, unfamiliar islands of retail and cooking, the probability of being lost and abandoned. The fear of abandonment was always high in him, and the specific dread, on this occasion, was of the family losing their possessions, now loaded into an untrustworthy, wobbling van.
    “Here we are,” Bernie said, as the half-mile sign flashed past; he signalled left, and then Francis’s favourite thing, the three signs indicating three hundred yards, two hundred, a hundred, with three, then two, then one finger. You could work out how fast you were going: just count the seconds between each sign and multiply by whatever. But, of course, they were slowing down. There was a fragile bridge, glass, metal and plastic, over the breadth of the motorway, and people walking across it as if they did not know they were at any moment to be plunged, shrieking, into the metal river of traffic when the structure collapsed. At this new terror he shut his eyes.
    “And there they are,” Alice said, with soft relief. The van was reversing into a bay in the lorry park to the left; they drove right, and Bernie found a space. They got out and waited for the men and Sandra; but as they approached, they were a few feet behind her; she was walking with brisk anger. The youngest man had a flushed face, as if he had just been discovered in some peculiarly personal activity; the chief remover’s mouth was set.
    They waited by the Simca, Alice smiling defensively. “Lovely day for it,” she called to them, but they didn’t reply. Sandra, scowling, came up and took her father’s arm.
    “I think it’s best,” the chief remover said, “that your daughter ride in the car the rest of the way.” He had stopped; the other two kept going.
    “I thought she’d get fed up of it before long,” Alice said hopefully.
    “We’ve got the directions,” the chief remover said, ignoring this. “We’ll see you up there in a couple of hours, I reckon.”
    He walked off, following the others. Bernie squeezed his daughter; no one said anything. In a moment, they went inside; Bernie had seen that the men were going upstairs, but there was a nearer café on the ground floor. They went into that and ate fish and chips, all together.And when the men went out, back to the lorry, they pretended not to notice, and sat there