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T HE THING ABOUT ABSCONDING is that you can’t go home. If you went home, the police would come and take your mum back to the hospital immediately. This would be something no one would want. And while helping someone abscond from a psychiatric ward is not illegal – your dad assures you this is not the case – the police would be annoyed at your dad for facilitating the escape. No, it’s best to lie low for a couple of weeks, make your way back to real life when everything has calmed down again.
But you aren’t actually aware of this plan. Not till – after an amorphous splodge of time – you arrive at what you presume is a pit stop.
The presumed pit stop is a motorway service station. The buildings here are low-rise, grey, and unsightly. Over there, there are rows of lorries. Drivers climb out of the lorries to smoke, engage in chit-chat, walk around looking at the slate-grey sky. Elsewhere, members of the public fill up their vehicles with petrol or diesel.
At the other end of the service station, there is some kind of indoor complex. From your previous experience of motorway service stations, you know this indoor complex will have a variety of shops and facilities for your comfort and convenience.
You wouldn’t mind checking out the complex. Not only do you need the loo, but you reckon there’ll be reading material available for purchase in the WHSmith. You need something – anything – to save you from the never-ending tedium of travelling from A to B. As you’re at a motorway service station, you assume you are still not even nearly there yet.
‘I know it’s not glamorous,’ your dad says, after he and your mum clamber out.
‘What do you mean?’ you say, because noting the service station’s glamour or lack thereof strikes you as beside every kind of point.
‘Where we are staying,’ your dad says, pointing at a building tucked behind the complex. ‘The hotel over there.’
You look over there and, indeed, there is a hotel. At first, you thought it was the arse end of the indoor complex. Now, you realise it is a building in its own right.
‘We’re staying there?’
Your dad nods. ‘Yes.’
You feel a feeling when he says this – a blend of disappointment and despair sprinkled with a little more despair. You make half of one of your noises.
‘This is really it?’ you say – not quite believing your final destination is this – a place people only ever pass through.
‘Yes. I think it’s best that we lie low here.’ He opens the front door to the hotel.
‘But we can’t stay here forever.’
‘Of course not. Just for a little bit. Then we’ll go somewhere else.’
You are not sure about this plan. Something tells you it isn’t robust. Despite this, you keep schtum.
‘Maybe think of it as an adventure,’ your dad adds.
Your mum is quiet. Her car nap must have been a deep one. She blinks at her surroundings, smiling faintly. She needs a shower, you think. A shower and a good square meal and maybe a little bit of vigorous exercise. Or maybe she needs another life – one with a job, another husband, another daughter, several sons, or no kids at all.
You enter the hotel. The hotel is not glamorous. The foyer has ancient, filthy carpet lining the floors but also half the walls. There is a weird smell in the air and the seats scattered around the foyer look like they were borrowed from a primary school.
‘This is already ten times better than the shithole I was just in,’ your mum says.
‘Let’s think of it as an adventure,’ your dad says again, as he accepts the room key from the woman at the front desk. ‘Let’s think of this as a bit of fun.’
Further reading:
On the Run: A Guide to Your New Life in Hiding