Half-Sick of Shadows (30 page)

Acrobatically, and maybe in defiance of one of Newton’s laws of motion, he twisted one hundred and eighty degrees in mid-air. Perhaps he hoped to scramble back on to the bridge.

Unfortunately, in equal measure for both parties, the car approaching the bridge as Edgar jumped did not have time to scramble one hundred and eighty degrees also. Neither could it manoeuvre up or down, left or right. Edgar faced the car the right way up, legs off the ground like the rest of him. The car, the hair, horrified eyes, mouth wide open for a bloody kiss: all were on course to impact crunchingly.

Yes! He knew that face!

The eyes behind the wheel latched on to Edgar’s. Four eyes met.

Two thought bubbles in unison:
Shit!

Had the motorway been less busy at that hour, had no vehicle been so near to the bridge, Edgar might have hit macadam and broken a leg or legs, mangled an arm, punctured an internal organ with a displaced rib, and perhaps suffered spinal and cranial injuries, although that is something no one can know for sure. Fortunately, however, the vehicle approached at just the right time and fast enough for its bonnet to fill the gap between Edgar and the macadam. It broke his fall. The vehicle that broke his fall was a large four-by-four with huge wheels. Its underside was thus some distance off the road.

Now, Edgar’s body was some distance off the road too.

Having bounced off the bonnet, Edgar flew like Superman … well, perhaps not quite like Superman, but he did fly.

The squealing of birds sounded like footbrake, rubber and macadam all in a spin. Superman ran out of propulsion fuel. He dropped like seagull poop and, for a second time, hit metal like an over-ripe tomato thrown at a wall. He lay there motionless – but, oddly enough, spinning. Edgar lay there wetly and awkwardly, face – what remained of it – looking at his right shoulder, all four limbs bent at their joints and splayed, mostly on the four-by-four’s bonnet – as it spun for the million and umpteenth time – although his head and shoulders were on the windscreen, which miraculously remained intact, but cracked and in need of replacement.

You can cover a crack on a windscreen with brown tape to stop it spreading, but they won’t let you drive it in that state. The rest of the four-by-four, which was metallic blue and bloody in the proximity of Edgar’s landing, was relatively undamaged – quite a large dent up front, though, visible when they got round to peeling off Edgar.

The four-by-four spun on to the hard shoulder, and now, motionless like Edgar, it faced the direction it had been coming from.

Mrs Wipple’s hair needed dressing now. On impact – Edgar with the bonnet of her four-by-four – her hair took a turn for the worse.
She
needed a vodka top-up. In fact, she’d had a couple or three before commencing her journey. Thus, drink-driving was on her mind as she passed out, a fine, losing her licence. And murder.

Mrs Wipple regained consciousness.

The entire incident came back to her in a trice. Indeed, her mind could scarcely have been better jogged than by Edgar’s head so near and upon the cracked glass. The door was a little stiff, as was Mrs Wipple, but a weighty shoulder and a desperate kick shifted it. Before she could say ‘I’m lucky to be alive but that poor sod isn’t’ she was outside, dazed and bruised. Scratched and sore. But intact.

Having limped around her four-by-four, hands in the pockets of her fur coat, and taken a good look at Edgar from several angles, Mrs Wipple sighed and concluded that there wasn’t much she could do. Nothing, in fact – she being knowledgeable in the ways of haircuts but knowing nothing at all of bones, and those other kinds of cuts.

She stood akimbo, looking some hundred metres along the motorway at the pile-up of several cars framed by the bridge. The pile-up was fresh, new, still steaming. When did that happen? Funny, she hadn’t heard a single crash!

That’s going straight back to the manufacturer, thought Mrs Wipple. What use are air bags if they don’t work?

Under normal circumstances, she loved being at the centre of attention. This circumstance, however, was decidedly abnormal. The centre of attention would involve ambulances and police cars. She had no option but to flee, to get out of there before someone saw her. Her hair was a mess. Doubtless, someone had already seen her.

Mrs Wipple ran away. Staggered. Walked. Tottered.

She tottered along the hard shoulder for ever such a long time.

Someone had best contact the police. Mrs Wipple had a mobile phone, but it was in her bag, and her bag was in the car. They would breathalyse her if she went back. They would find the vodka bottle in the glove compartment. She found a relatively dry patch of hard
shoulder
. There, she sat down on her gnarled, expansive bottom. ‘Thinking cap on,’ she said. ‘First things first. Don’t panic.’

The distant siren, soon to be followed by flashing lights, got her moving. She flung herself – in so far as a woman her age in a fur coat can fling – over a grassy rise and tumbled into a shallow stream on the other side. She lost a shoe and stood ankle deep in icy water. There, Mrs Wipple hid until the police car sped past.

Mrs Wipple retrieved her shoe and climbed out of the stream on the opposite side from the motorway – on the side of dense woodland and escape. Tears cut lines through her make-up and her face looked like the surface of Mars. It was no consolation whatsoever that dusk changing to night meant that no one could see. Who could see her anyhow, in this jungle where the thickness of overhanging branches made the darkness darker? She stumbled on, near blind, whimpering, carried forward by the logical belief that if she walked in a straight line – or as straight a line as possible given all these woody obstacles – she must emerge from the other side sometime. But, then what?

The fingers she touched against her head came away bloody. I’m concussed, thought she, I need a sticking plaster.

Night would be harder to survive than day. It gets colder at night and you can’t see. By daylight, you can gather berries and leaves. There might be apple trees. Wood! She could build a raft using vines like Tarzan to bind the timbers. Mrs Wipple had never before hunted rabbits or deer. Learning to throw a spear would be easy; setting traps and gutting fish – that would be a challenge.

‘Survival.’ That’s what came first: food and shelter. Regardless of whatever else she had to do, she had to survive until the rescue team found her. They were bound to send one when someone noticed her missing. There was plenty of kindling. It was a bit damp, but if she rubbed two sticks together hard enough …

In the better weather, when the season changed and sunshine dried everything flammable, a passing ship might see the smoke from her
fire
. Survival packs of juice and nutritional chocolate bars might drop from the sky when she ran low on berries and rabbits. Protection from the elements. The Swiss Family Robinson. ‘Cover,’ said Mrs Wipple. ‘I shall build a tree house.’ Building a tree house required a saw and a hammer, and she had neither. Nor did she have a large sheet of industrial plastic for the roof.

Night fell. Mrs Wipple got to her feet – although she couldn’t remember having sat down – and looked around her. If she moved off now, to find a better spot, she might only find a worse one. She gathered fallen branches, woody lattices and moss clumps. With these, she built two walls – of sorts – at either side of her spot against a tree. They were quite low walls, as walls go, and more like two piles of knee-high woodland, really, but they served to demarcate her private and secure spot from the badlands beyond it. ‘Tonight I must sleep,’ thought Mrs Wipple while staggering about, ‘and restore my strength. Tomorrow, I must build a raft.’

Until noon the next day she stirred not once. When she woke, beside a puddle of vomit, she had a pneumatic drill in her head.

Remembering, as soon as her eyes opened, that she ran over someone in her car – a day ago, a week ago or whenever – Mrs Wipple burst into tears. The victim was dead. Mrs Wipple didn’t know how she knew. Nevertheless, she knew. No number of buckets of tears, no amount of guilty sorrow, no heart and brain and soul-felt apologies could undo, or even reduce, the fact that she had killed him.

And her such a kind and tender thing, girl and woman, all her life. Yes, thought Mrs Wipple, as she lay there, sobbing in dewy dampness, I’m loud, I’m clumsy, I’m big, I’m annoying, but my heart has always been in the right place. I’m not a murderer. Yet I have murdered. As her sobbing turned again to wailing, ‘I deserve to die,’ she told the living trees, dead leaves, and fullness of nature’s woodland of living and dead things. Sucking her thumb and whimpering, she had a thought: I could eat a horse. On that thought’s tail came another: I could hang myself from a tree.

But she didn’t have a rope. Or a horse.

After more hours of fruitless wandering, sweating inside her fur and drunk on despair, Mrs Wipple suddenly stopped dead and sobered when it hit her. A moment of lucidity struck like lightning. She looked all round at so much woodland that looked like so much woodland at night, and thought, calmly, In my distress and disorientation I’ve been travelling in a circle. Oh dear me.

A beast in a tree shook its branches. Monkeys, thought Mrs Wipple and fled at speed, throwing off her fur as she went, ripping off her cashmere cardigan, silk blouse and pearl necklace. She ran, in a bra like two tents drawn tight over footballs, like Xena the Warrior Princess, expecting a monkey to land on her shoulders.

And one did – sort of.

Mrs Wipple stopped dead and screamed like a car trying to start with a flat battery: ah-ah-ah. Her hair would have defied gravity and stood on end if finer and less plentiful.

‘Sweet Jesus,’ said Alf.

Mrs Wipple’s arms made crossbones across her breasts. Paralysed, she didn’t run away.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘Sorry to have startled you.’

Mrs Wipple’s cavernous mouth hung open to fill, empty and refill overworked lungs. Her two amazingly plump breasts heaved up and down, in and out, and side to side as one. They juggled turn about as two, headed off east and west and reunited in the middle.

‘I’m Alf,’ he said.

‘I had an accident.’

‘I know,’ he replied, with a kindly smile.

‘What are you going to do to me? I’ve no money. And I’m old.’

‘I’m not going to do anything to you.’

‘Then what do you want? Can you help me?’

He shrugged apologetically. ‘Sorry. I can’t intervene. I can’t undo what’s been done. It’s against the laws.’

‘There’s money in my bag. In the car.’

‘I don’t want money.’

‘What, then? You can’t have sex it won’t be nice I haven’t washed in days and I have my period.’

‘I’m not obliged to tell you this, but I want to. No one should die with a bad conscience. I want your conscience to be clear. For that, you must know that no one blames you. No one will ever blame you. You are innocent.’ His smile, this time, was a flash. ‘It is an un qualified good to die with a clean conscience.’

‘Die?’ Mrs Wipple, having calmed a degree, started up again.

‘All of us die some day. You have nothing to fear from me.’

‘I don’t want to die!’

‘And you have nothing to fear from death.’

‘Don’t hurt me! I can’t stand needles! I … I must be on my way,’ said Mrs Wipple.

‘Not yet.’ Alf walked to where the fur coat had fallen, picked it up and gave it to her. Mrs Wipple accepted the coat with one arm, the other trying to hide both breasts and failing spectacularly.

‘Goodbye,’ said Alf. ‘Watch your footing … in the dark.’

Mrs Wipple escaped. Her head spun. Everything else spun in the opposite direction.

‘Stop!’ called Alf. Mrs Wipple did, but she didn’t turn round. She listened. ‘That’s the wrong way. The track to your right.’ Mrs Wipple thought about taking it. Then she did.

When she believed herself far enough away from the would-be rapist, she knelt with an ear to the ground – John Wayne did it once in a movie. The rapist had lost her scent.

Her feet were so numb, soon she’d be walking on her shins. Mrs Wipple’s mind turned to those television documentaries she’d watched about how to survive in extreme conditions. But she didn’t have a penknife with which to skin a snake for food, nor a string with a bent paperclip tied to one end to dangle in a crack in the ice in hope of a passing, short-sighted fish.

Dusk would arrive in an hour. I closed the curtains, wished I had Alf for company, and strayed to the kitchen to see what Sophia was up to. Water boiled in the stock pot. I watched as my sister brushed vegetables off the chopping board into it with the back of a hand. She added a crushed stock cube, gave the brew a stir, and put on the lid.

‘Have you seen Gregory?’ I asked, wondering what my chances were of borrowing his wheels. Probably zero.

‘Last I saw him he was mucking about outside.’

I hoped for a pot of tea, but Sophia dusted vegetable residue off her hands and retrieved flour and eggs from the pantry.

‘What are you making?’ I asked.

‘A pie,’ she replied, cheerfully enough.

‘What kind of pie?’

‘I don’t know yet. A pie pie.’

‘My favourite.’

I put on my coat, scarf and gloves and lied to Sophia that I had a date with Alf in Garagh and she shouldn’t wait up; I’d be home late. I’d be home exceedingly late – some time tomorrow – if I tried to walk it. Besides, Alf was almost certainly somewhere else. But I didn’t know where else to look for him. While in Garagh, I might have a few beers and brood on regrets about our evening in Ruse Bay.

I intended to hitch a ride part of the way, or all of the way if possible, on a passing tractor. The chances of encountering a passing tractor were slim, but if I did it would surely stop, local tractor drivers being what they were. Meeting a hitchhiker is a major event. In reality, I knew I would probably only make it on foot to Bruagh. Maybe I would buy cigarettes in Maud’s shop, with a little of the money Farmer Barry had given me, and cough my guts up in the rain while walking back to the Manse – that counted as entertainment around Bruagh.