The Accident (7 page)

He shifts in his seat. ‘No, I’m not.’

‘Sorry. I meant – you’re her boyfriend.’

‘No. I’m not.’

I frown, certain I must have misheard him. ‘I’m sorry. I thought you just said—’

‘We’re not going out any more.’ He glances away, as though embarrassed. ‘Charlotte dumped me.’

‘No!’

I can’t believe it. Charlotte
ended it?
Charlotte
did? I felt sure that if anyone had called time on the relationship it would have been Liam. She idolized him. Tall, dark, two years older than her, handsome in a scruffy hair-in-his-eyes sort of way and in a band, she’d almost collapsed with excitement a year ago when one of his friends approached one of her friends in the school canteen to tell her that Liam thought she was ‘fit’.

She didn’t give the slightest hint anything was wrong in their relationship although … I look from Liam to the clock on the mantelpiece, distracted by the tick-tick-tick filling the room … and time slips away.

It’s three weeks before Charlotte’s accident – a Saturday afternoon – and she’s just returned from a shopping trip in town. I’m in the living room, reading, when I hear the door to the porch open. I call out, asking her if she’s bought anything nice but I’m ignored. I don’t ask again but I do keep an eye on the open living room door. Seconds later Charlotte slams up the stairs looking white as a ghost. I call after her, asking if she’s okay but the only reply I receive is the sound of a bedroom door slamming. I half-rise from the sofa, unsure what to do. Charlotte’s not one for mollycoddling, especially when she’s upset. She won’t let me hug her and flinches if I so much as stroke her arm. She’s stressed, all the kids are. You just have to stand at the school gates for a couple of minutes to work that out. Their GCSEs are fast approaching and coursework is mounting up. Charlotte even had to go into school in the holidays so her teacher could help her complete it on time. I sink back into the sofa. I haven’t been sleeping well recently. My nightmares have returned and the last thing I need is a screaming match with a fifteen-year-old.
She knows where I am
, I think as I pick my book back up again.

‘Did you split up on a Saturday?’ I ask Liam. ‘About nine weeks ago?’

He runs a hand over his face. ‘No, it was …’ he pauses and I sense that he’s struggling to suppress his emotions, ‘… she ended it the day before her accident.’

‘Why?’ I lean forward in my seat, my hands gripping my knees. Why didn’t I contact him sooner? It’s as though I’ve been sleepwalking since Charlotte’s accident – longer than that – and I’m only just waking up. Splitting up with her boyfriend
has
to be the reason she stepped in front of the bus. You never feel heartache as keenly as you do when you’re young. You think it’ll destroy you and that you will never love, or be loved, again. She didn’t write about it in her diary though.

Liam stands up, crosses the room and picks up his guitar from the stand next to the bookcase. He sits back down and strums a few chords.

‘Liam?’ It’s as though he’s forgotten I’m in the room. ‘Why did Charlotte end your relationship? How was she?’

He looks at me blankly.

‘When she ended your relationship, how was she?’

He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know, I wasn’t there.’

‘Sorry?’

He looks back at his guitar, strums a few more chords then slaps the strings with the palm of his hand, silencing the sound, then looks across at me. ‘She dumped me by
text
.’

I can sense that he doesn’t want to talk about it. That he wants me to leave. But I can’t. ‘What did she say? In her text? If you don’t mind me asking.’

‘Not much.’ He reaches into the side of the sofa and Milly starts to her feet as a small, black, plastic object whizzes through the air and lands on the sofa beside me. Liam’s phone. I look at him, to check it’s okay for me to go through it. He nods then looks back at his guitar.

Charlotte
the open message is titled. I read it then look at Liam in surprise.

‘That’s it?’

He nods.

I look back at the text message:

It’s over between us Liam. If you love me you’ll never contact me again.

‘Did you ask why?’

Liam doesn’t answer. He’s staring at the carpet, tapping his foot repeatedly.

‘Liam?’

‘What?’ He doesn’t look up.

‘Did you contact her?’

‘Of course I did.’ He moves as though he’s about to put his guitar on the ground then changes his mind. He hugs it to his chest instead, the side of his cheek pressed against the fret board. ‘You don’t get a text message dumping you out of the blue like that and not ring up to ask what the fuck’s going on, do you? Not if you still love the person.’

Milly snuffles at my feet.

‘What did Charlotte say?’

‘She didn’t.’ Liam looks at me blankly, like the fight has gone out of him. ‘She wouldn’t answer her phone. I texted her loads, but she didn’t text back. Not once.’ He shakes his head. ‘I know she’s your daughter but I didn’t deserve that, Mrs Jackson. I didn’t deserve to get dumped by
text
with no explanation and then get ignored like I didn’t even fucking exist.’

I’m torn. Part of me wants to cross the divide between us and wrap Liam in my arms and take away the hurt. The other part wants to ask if they argued, if he did anything to warrant Charlotte ending the relationship in such a brutal way. I decide to do neither. He looks close to tears and I don’t want to upset him more than I already have. Not if I want him to talk to me again. I stand up and pull on Milly’s lead so she rises too.

‘I’m sorry, Liam,’ I say. ‘I had no idea about any of that. Charlotte didn’t breathe a word.’

He sighs heavily, then crosses his arms and looks away. Conversation over.

It’s only when I’m halfway home that I realize I didn’t bring up the one subject I’d traipsed all the way over to White Street to discuss. Sex. There’s no way I can turn back and knock on the door again, not with Liam the way he was when I left. I don’t know what drove Charlotte to do what she did but I can’t help but feel that it was cruel, even for a teenager. But maybe Liam had done something to deserve it? Sometimes you have to escape from a relationship as stealthily and quietly as you can.

‘Here we are, Milly,’ I say as I fit the key in the lock, turn it and twist the handle of the porch door. ‘Home again. Home ag—’

My voice catches in my throat. There’s a postcard, picture side up, on the mat. I start to shake as I reach down to pick it up.

‘Stop it, Sue,’ I tell myself. ‘Stop overreacting, it’s just a postcard,’ but as I turn it over in my hands and look at the other side my ears start to ring. My vision clouds and I grab the doorframe, blinking hard to try and dispel the white spots that have appeared before my eyes but I know it’s too late. I’m going to faint.

Friday 13th October 1990

Nearly two weeks since James told me he loved me and I still haven’t been to his place. All I know is that he lives in a three-bedroom terraced house near Wood Green. Hels is worried. According to her, you don’t date a man for six weeks without seeing his place unless he’s got something to hide. I told her that I wasn’t bothered – that going to hotels was exciting and staying at mine was convenient, but she knew I was bullshitting. You can’t be friends with someone since you were ten and lie to their face and get away with it.

‘Has it occurred to you that he might be married?’ she asked me over lunch the other day.

I told her it had, but there was no mark on the third finger of James’s left hand and he hadn’t slipped, not even once, and mentioned a wife or children. He hadn’t even mentioned an ex-girlfriend. I’d told him all about Nathan. I’d even told him about Rupert and the fact we’d had a drunken shag at uni, long
before I introduced him to Hels and they got it together but he’d never so much as mentioned another woman’s name. Helen thought that was odd – that his silence meant he was obviously hiding something. I argued that some people are private and prefer to keep the past buried.

‘What then?’ she said. ‘Ex-con? Prisoner on the run?’ We both laughed. ‘Maybe he still lives with his mum and dad?’

I stopped laughing. That wasn’t such a ridiculous suggestion. James did keep running off from my place at the most bizarre hours, claiming he had ‘things to do’ and ‘stuff to sort’ and, no matter how much I interrogated him, he refused to expand on his vagaries, saying instead that what he had to do was ‘dull’ and I ‘really wouldn’t be interested’.

‘Definitely married,’ Hels said when I told her that. ‘Why else would he suddenly rush off and not tell you where he’s going?’

Before she went back to work she made me swear
that I’d stop ‘fannying around’ and demand that James take me to his place or I’d end the relationship. I wasn’t sure about throwing ultimatums around but I promised her I’d bring up the subject when I meet him for dinner tomorrow.

I’m sure there’s a perfectly innocuous reason why he hasn’t invited me back to his place. So why do I feel so sick?

Chapter 7

I come to on the floor of the porch. One of my cheeks is pressed against cold tile, the other is strangely damp. I glance up to see Milly standing above me, her big, brown eyes fixed on the empty dog bowl in the corner of the porch, her tongue dripping with drool. She senses me looking at her and smiles down at me before enthusiastically licking my cheek.

‘Hello Milly Moo.’ I sit up slowly, gingerly checking my body for injuries. Nothing appears to be broken, though by the way my left temple aches, I think I’m in for a pretty impressive bruise. For a split second I assume I tripped and fell but then I spot the postcard on the floor beside me and it all comes flooding back again. The image on the front shows James Stewart sitting on a step smiling a goofy smile whilst, behind him, a shadow of an enormous rabbit is projected on the wall. It’s an image from the film
Harvey
. The postcard could so easily be innocuous – a simple hello from one friend to another – only there’s no chatty text on the other side of this postcard, there isn’t even an addressee. There’s just a stamp, postmarked Brighton and an address,
my
address.

This isn’t someone forgetting to write a postcard and slipping it into the postbox with a handful of letters by mistake. That’s the explanation Brian would come up with if I told him about it. He’d give me a look,
the
look, the one that says ‘you’re going to have another episode, aren’t you?’ and then he’d throw it in the bin and tell me that everything’s fine and I’m safe. Only I’m not safe, am I?
Harvey
was James’ favourite film. I lost count of the number of times we watched that film together.

Milly startles as I kick out at the postcard, sending it spinning and scuttling under the shoe rack. If I can’t see it then maybe I won’t think about it. Maybe I’ll be able to ignore the fact that, twenty years after I left him, James has finally tracked me down.

I try as best I can to forget about the postcard but it’s like trying to forget how to breathe. Whenever my mind pauses, whenever it’s free of thoughts about Charlotte, Brian and what to cook for dinner, it returns to the porch, peers under the shoe rack and pulls out the postcard. No matter where I am in the house it haunts me from its dark, dusty corner. I want to visit Charlotte but I’m too scared to leave the house. What if James is waiting for me? If he’s been watching the house he’ll know I’m home alone but all the doors and windows are locked – I’ve checked three times – and there’s no way for him to get in. I’ve got my mobile phone in my hands, primed and ready to key in 999 if I hear the slightest noise.

There won’t be time to call for help if I leave the house and James attacks me. If he’s hiding in the bushes opposite the front door he could get me as I get into the car or, if he’s in a car down the lane, he could follow me to the hospital and attack Charlotte. It’s been less than twenty-four hours since I last saw her and I’m already consumed by fear and guilt because I haven’t seen her today. What if, deep in her subconscious, she knows I haven’t been to visit, and it makes her retreat deeper into her coma? What if she wakes up and I’m not there? What if she dies?

For the next couple of hours I don’t know what to do with myself. I jump when the phone rings and start when the wind rattles the letter box. When there’s a knock on the front door I run up to Brian’s study and peer down from behind the curtain, only to discover the electricity man pushing a card through our letter box. What am I doing? I’m allowing the memory of James to terrify me, to stop me from visiting my own daughter. I am not ‘Suzy-Sue’ – I haven’t been her for a very long time.

I return downstairs and fish the postcard out from its dusty hiding place with the fire tongs and burn it in the fireplace in the living room. I sit on the sofa, watching as the flames lick at the corners, dance across James Stewart’s lolloping smile and then envelop him. When he and his strange rabbit sidekick have turned to dust I sweep them up.

As I pour the ashes of the postcard into the kitchen bin a new thought occurs to me. What if the postcard was meant for Oli from one of his uni friends? What if they were too stoned to notice they hadn’t put his name or a message on it and I just burnt it! What if he asks where it is? How do I explain what I just did without sounding certifiable? My hands shake as I reach for my car keys and I steady myself on the kitchen table. I drop my head to my chest and inhale slowly – one, two, three – then out again. I do it again – one, two, three – then out again. I need to be calm. I need to think clearly, otherwise I’ll have another episode. This is how they start, this is how I go from normal, sane, rational Sue to neurotic, paranoid ‘I’d better lock Charlotte in her room for the weekend because Brian is away at a party conference and BBC news has reported a child abduction in the next town’ Sue. One, two, three. One, two, three. Slowly my breathing returns to normal.