Excerpt: The Rhythm of the Road

The following is an excerpt from the book The Rhythm of the Road
by Albyn Leah Hall
Published by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press; January
2007; $24.95US/$31.00CAN; 978-0-312-35944-7
Copyright © 2007 Albyn Leah Hall


Chapter I

1998

I was twelve years old when Cosima first rode with us.

I hadn't heard of her then. Nobody had. She was just another girl, a
hitchhiker with a name you might not remember.

A few things were different about her. She was American, but it wasn't just
that. On the road, we met just about everybody: Welsh people and Irish
people and Scots, German people and Spanish people and Americans and, of
course, people from every part of England. The American hitchhikers were
mostly the natural-looking kind, all denim and well-brushed hair, who could
have been English apart from flat, unfunny voices and a dislike of our food,
like beans on toast or Marmite. More than one of them tried to tell me that
pretzels were better than Twiglets and that the Little Chef wasn't like a
real American coffee shop. I told them it wasn't trying to be.

Cosima was a cowgirl, at least to look at. She wore a cowboy hat and a belt
with a brass buckle. She wore a suede jacket, its fringe damp and tangled
from being sat on in so many cars and lorries (or trucks, because they
didn't say lorry in the U.S.A.). Her accent wasn't broad, but her voice had
gaps in it wide enough to park a lorry in. I'd ask her a question and she
wouldn't say anything and I'd think she hadn't heard me. Just when I was
about to ask it again, she would answer. Cosima always kept you waiting,
even when she was right there next to you.

The second thing was her fiddle. The road had its musicians -- it was full
of them in summer -- but they were mostly boys with guitars or the
occasional girl with a guitar. Bobby used to play the guitar once, and he
liked to ask what kind of guitar he or she was carrying and maybe have a
look at it if we stopped for a cup of tea. We'd met boys with fiddles, but
not many girls.

It was six years ago, but I remember everything about that day. We had eaten
our lunch. We were seventeen miles north of Birmingham. We were listening to
Charlene Sweeney, our favorite country singer. The cars were like slugs all
around us, creeping along in the warm, grimy rain. I had that feeling I had
in my stomach that I got when we weren't moving. It was a stuck and heavy
feeling, as if I'd eaten bricks.

She stood with her thumb out, a slim, neat, cowgirl-looking girl, sandy hair
to her shoulders. I turned down the volume on Charlene Sweeney.

"Stop, Bobby."

He stopped. I shifted over to the flat area between the seats. A boy sat on
the grass behind her, or a kind of a boy. He had bleached hair and he wore
eye makeup. Sometimes girls pretended to hitch alone, when really there was
a boy just behind them. But this boy didn't seem interested in us. He got up
to read our registration plates and he wrote something on a piece of paper.

She climbed up beside me. She had green eyes, wide lips, and a flat nose --
a little too flat, which is what kept her from being an absolute beauty. She
was about twenty-four years old, maybe twenty-five.

Bobby leaned across our laps to open her door again and shut it properly
because there was a knack to it that nobody got except for him and sometimes
me. He loosened her seat belt to give it more slack. She watched his hand as
he did this. She sucked her stomach in so that it didn't touch his hand.

"I'm Cosima Stewart," she said. "Thanks for the lift. My friend's got your
license-plate number in case anything happens."

It was a funny way to say hello. What did she think would happen? There were
bad men on the road, but they didn't have kids with them. Bobby was in no
way dodgy, and he was the safest driver she would ever meet.

"Right enough." Bobby wove us into the middle lane. "It's nice to meet a
girl who takes care of herself. Not like that poor wee thing in July."

Cosima Stewart looked confused.

"He's talking about a girl who was found in a bag in a ditch in
Oxfordshire," I explained. "We knew that girl, or we knew her when she was
alive. We gave her a lift once."

Reprinted from the book The Rhythm of the Road by Albyn Leah Hall. Copyright
© 2007 Albyn Leah Hall.

Author
Albyn Leah Hall was born in New York and lives in London. This is her U.S.
debut novel.

For more information, please visit www.albynleahhall.co.uk