‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ says the young man.
Jim tries to refold the piece of paper in his pocket, only somehow it is caught round his keyring. The young man stares.
He says, ‘Did the car knock your hip as well?’
There, it is done. The paper is folded twice. ‘Y-yes,’ he tells himself because it is safe now.
‘It did?’ says the man. ‘Shit.’
It is safe but Jim still doesn’t feel it. Bad thoughts are clamouring at his back. He can hear and feel them. Further rituals are needed. He will only know everything is safe if he sees a 2 and a 1. He has to find the numbers. He has to find them right now, otherwise it will all get worse. ‘H-h-help,’ he says, scanning car registration plates as they pass.
The young man glances over his shoulder. ‘Help! Help!’ he shouts. Traffic is beginning to slow but none of it has the right numbers.
If Jim hurries he can go back to the supermarket. The café is closed but the store will still be open. He can visit the personal hygiene aisle where they stock 2 in 1 shampoo. This has worked before. It is like another sticking plaster for emergencies. As he turns from the young man, a hot flash shoots all the way up his leg. He wonders if his foot is still attached to the rest of him. He has to grip his hands into balls so that the young man won’t see but unfortunately Jim is right in the path of someone else. She sees everything.
‘Jim? What happened?’ Without her hairnet and her orange hat, it takes a moment to place her. It is one of the young girls from the supermarket café who described him as backward. She has a mane of bright pink hair and so many studs in her ears they look upholstered.
‘You know this guy?’ says the young man.
‘I work with him. Up at the café. He does tables. I do food.’
‘He’s been hit by a car.’
‘An accident?’ Her eyes widen.
‘The driver didn’t even stop.’
Her eyes pop. ‘A hit-and-run? You’re joking.’
‘He says he’s OK but he’s in shock. He needs to go to hospital. He needs an X-ray and shit.’
The girl’s mouth lifts into a smile as if she is tasting something delicious that she hadn’t expected. ‘Jim? Shall we get you to hospital?’ There is no need for her to loom very close, or exaggerate the words, or indeed shout, as if he is deaf or slow of understanding, but she does all three.
Jim shakes his head to show a no. ‘I-I-I—’
‘I know him. I understand his language. He’s saying yes.’
And so this is how Jim finds himself in a minicab, squashed between two young people who seem to like talking. He needs to see the numbers 2 and 1 or the girl will be hurt. The young man will be hurt. So will the minicab driver, and all the pedestrians hunched inside their winter clothes. Jim tries to breathe deeply. He tries to empty his mind. But all he can see is devastation.
‘Look at the poor guy shaking,’ says the young woman, dipping her head to address the young man. And a little later: ‘By the way, my name’s Paula.’
‘Cool,’ says the young man.
There will be ambulances, there will be doctors, there will be injuries everywhere. A coil of pain twists through Jim as the car turns into the hospital car park and he remembers.
She says, ‘My parents named me after that singer. The one who died.’ The young man nods as if everything is clear now and watches her, grinning.
When they took patients for treatment, the nurses used to tell them to wear loose clothing. This was not difficult. They were often wearing each other’s things anyway. ‘Who’s frying tonight?’ he heard one of the older patients ask the first time. They walked the corridors in silence. There was one set of doors for entry and another for exit so that those who were about to receive treatment did not meet those who had already had it.
In the operating theatre the staff smiled at him reassuringly, the psychiatrist, the nurses, the anaesthetist. They asked him to remove his slippers, and sit up on the bed. Bare feet were necessary, explained his nurse, so that they could see the movement in his toes when the fit took hold. Jim stooped to remove his slippers but he was shaking so much he almost fell. He wanted them to laugh because he wanted them to be kind and not hurt him so he made a joke about his feet, about the length of them, and they all laughed. Everyone, it seemed, was on best behaviour. And that frightened him even more. The nurse stowed his slippers beneath the bed.
It wouldn’t take long, they said. He must relax. ‘Don’t fight it, Jim. Remember to breathe deeply, like we showed you.’
The nurse took one of his hands and the anaesthetist took the other. He was lucky, a voice said, he was lucky to have such good veins. There was a prick to his hand and emptiness trickled into his knuckles, his arm, his head. Briefly he heard female laughter from a dormitory, the yelling of crows in the garden, and then women were flying and the noises were nothing.
He came round in another room. There were other patients beside him and they were sitting quietly. One man was being sick into a bucket. Jim’s head pounded as if it had grown too big for his skull. There were mugs of tea and a Family Assortment tin of biscuits.
‘You must eat,’ said the nurse. ‘It will make you feel better if you eat.’ She offered him a pink wafer on a plate. The smell of it was like an assault. He could smell the vomit too and the violet scent of the nurse. Everything seemed to smell too big and that made him feel even worse. ‘All the others are eating,’ said the nurse.
She was right. They were sitting with their nurses and taking their tea and biscuits and each of them had two red marks on their forehead, as if the burns had been there all along. No one spoke. He saw this and it was terrible to witness and then somehow he didn’t see. He wondered if he had marks too but by the time he remembered to look, several nights had passed, or maybe longer. This was how it went. Time was something altogether more fragmented than it had been before. It was like throwing a handful of feathers into the air and watching them drift. Moments no longer flowed from one to the other.
The waiting room at A&E is so full there is standing room only. It’s because it’s the weekend, says Paula; her dad was always in A&E on a Saturday night. There are men with bloodied faces and closed-up eyes, and an ashen-faced boy with his chin high in the air. (‘I bet that kid’s got beans up his nose,’ says Paula.) There is a woman crying on to the shoulders of another woman and several people with makeshift bandages and slings. Whenever the ambulance crew rush in with a patient on a trolley, everyone turns away. It is only Paula who stares long and hard.
She explains to the nurse in the reception kiosk that Jim has been hit by a car. It’s a hit-and-run, she says. The receptionist replies she will need a few simple details. His name, postcode, phone number and also the address of his GP.
‘Jim?’ says Paula. She gives him a nudge because everyone is waiting and he isn’t saying anything, he is only shaking.
‘Proof of ID,’ repeats the woman.
But Jim can barely hear. The question is like being hit by a fresh barrage of memories that are so deep, so wild, he struggles to keep standing. His foot feels sliced in two; the intense pain seems to answer the pain in his head. It is too much to think about so many things. He grips on to the ledge of the nurse’s window, mouthing, Telephone, h-hello. Pen, hello.
Paula’s voice rings through the silence. ‘It’s OK, he’s with us. Can you put my address?’ His records would all have been at Besley Hill, she suggests. ‘He was up there for years but he’s completely harmless.’ She pulls a face to suggest her mouth is about to voice something for which the rest of her is not responsible. ‘He talks to plants and stuff.’
‘Take a seat,’ says the receptionist.
When a blue plastic bench comes free, Jim offers it to Paula but she laughs and says cheerfully, ‘You’re the one with the injury. You’re the one who got run over.’ She has a way of talking up her sentences, as if the conclusion of every one of them hangs at a point high in the air. It is like being repeatedly led
up a precipice and left there, and it makes him dizzy. Meanwhile the young man slots loose change from his pocket into a vending machine. He snaps off the ring pull to a can of fizzy drink and offers it to Jim and Paula.
‘Not for me,’ says Jim. He can barely swallow. He can’t see the numbers 1 or 2 anywhere.
‘I’m gasping,’ says Paula. ‘It’s stress,’ she adds. ‘Stress does funny things to people. I know someone who lost all her hair overnight.’
‘No way,’ says the young man.
‘And I know someone else who ate a mussel and had a heart attack. Then there was this other woman, she choked to death on a cough sweet.’
A nurse calls Jim’s name and beckons him towards a cubicle. She wears a coat, a white coat, and it looks like all the other white coats, and briefly he wonders if this is a trick to give him treatment again. He almost falls.
‘He should be in a wheelchair,’ says Paula. ‘It’s outrageous.’
The nurse explains there is no wheelchair available until after the X-ray and Paula takes Jim’s arm. She holds too tight and he wants to scream but she is being kind and he mustn’t. The nurse has rubber shoes that squeak on the green linoleum floor as if she has something half alive trapped on the sole. She studies her clipboard and signals for Jim to step up to the bed. He is shaking so hard they have to take his arms and help him. When the nurse tugs the plastic curtain around the cubicle, the chrome rings scream on the pole. Paula and the young man move to the far end, where Jim’s boots poke over the end of the bed. They look concerned but eager. Every time he moves, the young man’s bomber jacket creaks like a plastic chair.
‘I gather there has been an accident,’ says the nurse. Again she asks for Jim’s name.
This time Paula is taking no chances. She supplies it.
‘And my name’s Darren,’ adds the young man, although no one has asked.
‘No way,’ says Paula.
‘It is,’ says Darren, and even he sounds surprised.
The nurse rolls her eyes. ‘Can we get back to the accident? Have the police been informed?’
Darren pulls a sensible face. He describes at length how the driver reversed without warning while Jim, in turn, ceases to listen. He thinks instead of the bewildered look Eileen sent him, as if she were something else, not the person she appeared to be but another person locked inside that one, a fragile, small version of herself, like the last in a set of Russian dolls.
‘He doesn’t want to press charges,’ says Paula. ‘By the way, I knew this woman who had a car crash. She lost both her legs. She had to have plastic ones. She kept them under the bed at night.’
‘No way,’ says Darren.
The nurse asks to see Jim’s foot and finally there is enraptured silence.
It is half past ten by the time they are ready to leave the hospital. The X-rays have revealed there is no break in the toe bones but the junior doctor on duty suspects damage to the ligaments. As a precautionary measure, Jim has a blue plaster cast set as far as his knee, a bottle of painkillers and a borrowed set of NHS crutches.
‘I always wanted crutches,’ Paula tells Darren.
‘I bet you’d look lovely,’ says Darren. They blush like baubles.
Jim is lucky, adds the nurse, and she sounds confused: due to the unaccountable length of his footwear, the damage is minimal. She gives him a leaflet about looking after a plaster cast and a check-up appointment in two weeks’ time. When she asks if he would recognize the driver, Jim stammers so hard over the word ‘N-n-no,’ she rearranges her hair. She advises Paula that Jim should contact the police once he is over the shock. Even if he doesn’t wish to press charges, there is Victim Support as well as telephone counselling. It’s not like the old days when psychology was a dirty word. There are all sorts of strategies in place to help.
The young couple insist on taking another minicab and dropping him at the estate. They refuse to accept his money. Paula tells Darren about a number of accidents she has witnessed, including a real-life pile-up on the motorway and the burning of her friend’s ear with hair tongs. Jim is so tired he can think of nothing but sleep. His fold-out bed seems to take shape in the dark, along with his blankets and pillow. He can hear the squeak of its hinges.
Once they have passed the sign welcoming careful drivers, the Green and the skate ramps, he asks to get out.
‘But where’s your van?’ says Paula, peering at the tightly packed houses and the Christmas lights pulsing all over Cranham Village, like fast blue headaches. Jim points towards the cul-de-sac. He lives right at the end, he says, where the road stops and the moor takes over. Beyond his van, the black branches of the trees tremble as a gust of wind takes up.
Paula says, ‘We could take you inside. We could put the kettle on.’
‘You might need help,’ says Darren.
But Jim declines. No one has ever been inside his van. It is the deepest part of himself, the part that no one must see. And thinking this, he is aware of a searing pain that is like a fresh rift between him and the rest of the world.
‘Sure you’ll be OK?’ calls Darren.
Jim nods because he cannot move his mouth to speak. He waves to the minicab driver to show that he is all right, that he is happy.
Beyond the estate, the moor looms dark and solid. Timeless layers of earth and grass have been ground to stone. An old moon shines over the land and a thousand million stars send points of light across the years. If the land stretched now, opened right up and swallowed the houses, the roads, the pylons, the lights, there would be no memory of anything human. There would be only the dark, sleeping hills and the ancient sky.
The minicab makes its way past the Green, its tail lamps glowing. Turning the corner, it is gone with a snap and there is only Jim, watching the dark.
13
The Mistake
WHEN THE SECRET came out it was by mistake. It spoke itself. It was like having a dog that ran into other people’s gardens before you could do anything about it; except that they had no dog, of course, because pet hair made his father sneeze.
His mother had only come to Byron’s room to take his temperature before bed. Lucy was already asleep and he had been waiting for his mother a long time, but there had been a telephone call from his father. He couldn’t hear what she was saying because her voice was slow and quiet. There was no fluttery laughter. When she entered his room she had stood for a moment, with her face lowered to the floor, as if she was somewhere else, not his bedroom, not even seeing him, and that was when he had mentioned his tummy ache. It was like reminding her who he was.
On studying the thermometer Diana sighed and said she couldn’t understand what was wrong. ‘You don’t seem to have any real symptoms,’ she said.
‘I was fine before it happened.’ The words flew out and then he realized what they were and smacked his hand to his mouth.
‘What do you mean?’ said his mother. At this point she was busy wiping the thermometer with a cloth. She replaced it in its slim silver case. ‘You were fine before what happened?’ She cocked her head. She waited.
Byron studied his nails. He hoped that if he kept quiet, if he acted as if he wasn’t there, the conversation might go away. It might lose interest in Byron and saunter off to become an entirely different set of words about an entirely different set of problems. ‘Nothing,’ he said. Once again all he could picture was the red bicycle and the little girl.
His mother stooped and pressed a kiss to his forehead. She smelt sweet, like flowers, and her soft hair tickled his forehead. ‘She shouldn’t have been running into the road,’ he said. This sentence too shot out so fast it was hot and fluid.
His mother gave a laugh. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘It wasn’t your fault.’
‘My fault? What wasn’t?’ Again she laughed, or at least she gave a smile with a noise attached to it.
‘You haven’t done anything wrong because you didn’t know. There was the mist and the extra seconds. You’re not to
blame.’
‘I’m not to blame for what?’
‘The little girl. The little girl in Digby Road.’
His mother’s face pleated. ‘What little girl? I don’t know what you mean.’
Byron felt solid ground had been suddenly swept away, and that he was stepping once more on stones and branches, while water swelled at his feet. He only went forward with the conversation because the option of going backwards seemed to have sailed out of reach. Twisting the corner of his sheet, he described how he had seen the little girl shoot from her garden gate on her red bicycle and how he had seen her again, after the car stopped, not moving. He found he only had a small number of words at his disposal and so he kept repeating them. Digby Road. Mist. Two seconds. Not your fault. Then, because his mother was not speaking, only listening with her hands pressed over her mouth, he said: ‘I told you to drive on because I didn’t want you to be scared.’
‘No,’ she said suddenly. It was a small sound and it was also the answer he was least expecting. ‘No. That can’t be true.’
‘But I saw. I saw the whole accident.’
‘Accident? There wasn’t an accident.’ Her voice grew with each phrase. ‘I didn’t hit a little girl. I’m a careful driver. I’m very careful. I drive exactly as your father taught me. If there was a little girl, I’d know. I’d have seen. I’d have stopped the car.’ She kept her eyes fixed to the floor. It looked as if she were replying to a patch of the carpet. ‘I’d have got out.’
Byron felt his head spin. He took shallow gasps, more and more of them, which yanked at his chest and throat muscles. He had thought about having this conversation so many times, or rather about not having it, and now that it was finally happening, everything seemed wrong. It was too much. It was too much to deliver his mother the truth and discover that, after all this, she could not see it. He wanted to fall to the floor and not think. Not feel.
‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘What’s happening, sweetheart?’