Julie had not stood a chance.
The doctors he spoke to reassured him that she was unlikely to have felt anything, the impact was so swift, so massive. There was nothing to suggest an accident had taken place here.
Don had received a face full of broken glass, but he was otherwise unmarked. He could walk. He could get in and out of bed. He could turn his head. Everything that Julie could not. Even the cuts on his face had healed without leaving obvious scars. The scar he needed to heal was inside him. That was partly the reason for this trip. To confront the moment of his wife’s death, and to carry on to the place they had meant to be journeying. To find a way forward.
They had been a scant ten minutes away from Sheckford, that awful day. Now Don went back to the car and switched on the engine. He pulled out into the road. A blade of sunshine sliced through clouds and turned the snow golden. Apart from the streak of red far off in the distance, on one of the hills surrounding the town.
A lorry thundered by him, dragging up a great fan of slush that covered his windscreen, blinding him for a moment. His heart racing, he cleared the filth from the glass, his head full of collisions and the feel of all those icy pebbles of windscreen assaulting his face. The shock of cold air as his car was bisected. No scream. No sounds at all.
Now the red was gone from the hill. Or maybe it was a different hill, a different angle, an illusion formed by the sun and the strange refracted light coming off the crystals of snow and ice.
Maybe it was in his own eyes.
The doctor had explained to him that all that exploded glass had to go somewhere. There would have been some splinters he wouldn’t even feel. The force of the impact would have sent them into his flesh so fast, so smoothly, that there would have been no blood. There was the likelihood that he would carry minute slivers of glass around in his flesh for the rest of his life. Some survivors of bomb blasts, he was told, had suffered hundreds of tiny splinters of glass passing right through their bodies.
He was a year further away from her. He was a year closer to her.
Don would not let himself get distracted again. He completed his journey concentrating fully on his driving, checking his speed, his rear-view mirrors and keeping his hands at ten to two on the steering wheel. He let out a long, low sigh when he arrived at the hotel car park and turned the engine off. He listened to it ticking like some horrible countdown. Keep busy. Keep moving.
He got out of the car and strode past a woman holding a leash, calling into a clump of bushes for a dog that would not come. From the sounds of her, she’d been calling for some time. A red glove came up and rubbed at her face, perhaps in an attempt to coax the worry from it.
He checked into the hotel and tossed his suitcase on to the bed. The exact room they would have taken a year previously.
Why are you doing this to yourself?
He turned but of course there was nobody else in the room. He stared at the reflection of himself in the full-length mirror fitted into the panels of the wardrobe doors. The mirror was not the best quality. Red paint edged it, indicating that at some previous time it had been part of some other furniture. The tain was scarred and there was foxing in the corners. A look of shabby chic, he supposed the hotel was going for, but it appeared out of place when compared to the rest of the room, which was formal, Edwardian, verging on the cold.
“God, you’d have hated this, Ju,” he whispered.
He sat on the edge of the bed and stared at his fingers. Julie liked his fingers. She had described them as surgeon’s fingers, as early as their first date. He could do nothing for her, though, with these delicate fingers. He could not stave off death. He couldn’t find the life in her and coax it back, make it bloom, make it overpower the hurt that took her away. He felt bad that he had escaped with little more than bruises and shock (poor thing) while she had the life slammed from her in less than a millisecond. He wishes she were merely lost, like that dog in the bushes.
He unpacked, desultory, quietly panicked by his decision to come here. He didn’t know what to do. He had been filled with plans when he took that journey up with his wife. They were celebrating their third anniversary. Glass, ha ha. But also he’d meant this trip to be a way for them both to shed the tension that had been building up in London. Julie’s homeopathic shop in Camden had been hit hard by the recession. She relied on the Christmas shopping period to tide her over the following half-year, but trade had been anything but brisk. She had had to let one of her assistants go and, although she enjoyed a steady supply of small orders via the website, and as a practising herbalist was able to lean on the money she made from her patients, it was not enough to help them scramble out of the red. Another twelve months like this would have buried the business. Instead, they buried Julie, and all the worry over the business meant less than nothing. It was sold. It was over.
As for Don, he was teaching guitar to a class of young boys and girls at the local primary school. They had more often than not been bought the instrument for Christmas, or their birthdays, but little thought had gone into it. The parents tended to buy expensive items, without pause to consider if the guitar would be too big or small, the neck too wide for the child to be able to shape a decent barre chord. In the main his pupils had no natural aptitude. No promise. One boy had picked up the guitar like a double bass. Another had held the guitar in the correct manner but, astonishingly, had used his strumming hand to fret chords and vice versa. It was enough to make him want to restring his Gibson via their scrawny little throats.
It had been such a long time since he had relaxed, or even tried to. He stared out of the window at the square and the people milling around it. The opera house and the park were possible places to visit, but he didn’t feel like being among other people. He shaved because it ate up some time. As he did so, he thought about guitars and people. He wanted to write a song about Julie, but he didn’t know how to begin. All the great songs written by guitarists for important people in their lives. John for Julia; Eric for Conor; Joni for Kelly; George for Patti. Mothers and fathers, sons and daughters. Lovers. There ought to be something in him for Julie, but every time he thought of music, he felt guilty. How could he even begin to consider the positioning of notes on the stave when she would never again be able to do the things she loved?
He felt a twinge in his cheek and ran his finger over the skin there. He hadn’t nicked himself shaving but there was a lump in his cheek. Great, he thought, I survive a major road traffic accident only to fall foul of cancer. He checked in the mirror. Maybe the blade had taken the top off a pimple he hadn’t noticed. The edges of the lump were raised. It felt tender. He tried squeezing it, convinced now that it was filled with pus and he would have to clean it or run the risk of it becoming a boil, or worse. He stopped immediately. The slightest pressure told him that there was something solid beneath the skin.
He called down to reception and asked for ointment, plasters and painkillers. He poured vodka from the miniature in his minibar and drank it in one swallow. When the packets and pills came, brought by a young man whose expression clearly spoke of his disdain for anybody who asks for such things from room service, Don tenderly applied to his cheek some of the ointment – which contained a substance he recognised from Julie’s work in homeopathy, something that was good at drawing out foreign bodies – and placed one of the plasters over it. He stomached the pills with more vodka. He changed into a shirt and trousers, went down to the bar and had a cocktail, read the newspaper and, when the bar started to become busy, retired to his room, more than a little drunk, where he slept fitfully.
At one point during the night, he was sucked deep enough into sleep to suffer a nightmare. He dreamed he was hiding from something that was trying to sniff him out. Something that had poor eyesight, but keen olfactory organs. Something that was intensely hungry for Don.
He had hidden in a city filled with black glass. But its surfaces made poor reflections, clinging jealously to their colour as if they would reve
al terrible pictures if they were allowed to clear. There was no light anywhere. Whenever Don thought he had discovered somewhere safe, cracks would appear in the glass and he would see his pursuer’s thin, long fingers, scabbed and pitted, picking through the fractures in a bid to get nearer to him, near enough to be able to swipe at Don’s clothes. This happened, finally, and he felt the fingers like needles piercing the skin of his thigh. He was swept towards the crack in the glass and unceremoniously dragged through it. He was choking on splinters. And if he looked through the thin aperture, an aperture whose edges he was unravelling messily upon, he could see the shadow of its face and the writhing puncture at its centre ringed with shattered white teeth, surely too thin and weak to be able to do all this.
“Name’s Kerner. Grant Kerner. How’s your breakfast?”
Now that Kerner had drawn attention to it, Don realised he no longer wanted his food. It was swimming in grease. The bacon was undercooked, the tomato blistered black on the outside, solid and cold in the centre. And he was still mindful of the unhealthy, yawning mouth he had witnessed in his dreams. He couldn’t remember the last time he had been hungry, or enjoyed a meal. He pushed the plate away and drew his coffee nearer. Caffeine and alcohol seemed to form the limit of his appetites these days.
Kerner was eating muesli loaded with extra whole hazelnuts and dried apricots. Don’s jaws ached just watching him.
Kerner was obviously one of those people who liked to winkle information out of people and he perhaps saw Don as something of a challenge. He kept on at him throughout Don’s second cup of coffee and while he wrapped miniature pots of jam in a serviette and stashed them in his coat pocket.
“I’m a photographer,” Kerner said, although Don had not asked him his occupation. “I take pictures of crippled things. Cars, buildings. Broken architecture. People, if I can get away with it. Things that don’t work the way they ought to. What do you do?”
Don thought of his job. For so long he had been going through the motions it was as if he was working from a script every day. In a way he was, following the slavish schedules set down by a government eager to have its target figures bolstered by achievable test results.
He showed the children how to play basic chords, the first few essentials: A, D and E, corrected them when they went wrong – which was often – and put on excruciating “musical” events for their parents to come and listen to. Interaction was at a minimum. He thought the children could see right through him, though they were all under ten years of age. He wondered if he resented them, since Julie’s death. He wondered if maybe he was taking out the fact that he was fatherless, and had never intended to be – certainly not at this age – on them.
“I’m unemployed,” Don said. He tried to think of a job so far removed from who Kerner seemed to be that he wouldn’t ask him any follow-up questions about it. “I used to work in Human Resources.”
That worked. Kerner’s smile froze a little; he nodded, gazed outside. “That your car?” he asked brightly, apparently happy to find another conversational topic.
“The Focus? Yeah.” Don closed his mouth. We used to have a Volvo. You know, safest car in the world.” Until I totalled it. And my wife.
“I drive a Lexus.”
“Nice.”
“Yeah,” Kerner said. “I like to drive gone midnight. Empty roads. Good up here. Some good roads. Hairpin bends and suchlike.”
“It’s just a metal box to get me from one place to another.” Don had bought a second-hand car a week after the accident. He forced himself into the driver’s seat. He would not allow it to lock him down. Metal boxes. Wooden boxes. Snow globes.
“Well, I must go,” Kerner said, and drained his cup. “Some good light here in the mornings. Click-click and all that. Peace out, rainbow trout.”
Don watched Kerner move through the dining room to the door. The other man was of a similar age to Don, he reckoned, but there was a world of difference in their physiques. Kerner’s limbs were slender, he was lithe and stealthy. He panthered across the room. Don hated his own rounded posture. He was all clump and jostle. Too many hours hunched over his guitar. He resolved to do something about it – cut back on the alcohol, eradicate the fast food from his diet, try to exercise more – but even as he left the hotel lobby and walked across the square to his car, he knew this would never be the case. Some people were born to the shape they would occupy all their lives.
I’m going to take you to the school I attended. I was a model pupil. Don’t laugh. I was a senior prefect. I never had a day’s absence. I took eight “O” levels and scored As for all of them.
Don sat in his car wondering how he had arrived here; the journey was a blur. It angered him that he should still be able to switch off whenever he drove, considering what had happened. He got out, stalked away from his little metal box, his mobile coffin, and loitered by the school gates. So this was his old seat of learning, Sheckford Junior. So what? It might have meant something had she been with him.
There’s the veranda where I used to sit with Belinda Smart, under our coats, feeding each other toffees. There’s the playground where Johnny Dobson fought back against Mr Addison. There’s the school field where I got ambushed on my birthday and I was egged to within an inch of my life. Now it was all just memories. Then and now. No context. His life was a flatline without detail. Bedtime stories, and not very good ones at that.
He walked along the edge of the school grounds until he reached the gym. Everything the same. Everything changed. His youth was so close sometimes, he felt he could feel it beneath his fingers. He saw himself every day in any number of mirrors, and it was Don, it was him. But a photograph from even as recent as five years ago displayed to him a massive change in how he looked. His skin greyer now, his eyebrows lighter, his eyes more sunken. But he had not seen it happen. He had been tricked.
He was a prisoner to the calendar, he realised, as we all were. He thought in little boxes that were to be ticked off and filled with things to do. Almost every day he thought back to what he had been doing ten years ago, twenty years ago, further. He lived in the past, by his diary. He was a history man, his head full of dead leaves. It was a form of reassurance, he knew. There were too many roads into the future and he didn’t like not having a map for it.
Movement. He turned and gazed out over the school fields
pelting Debbie Epstein with snow, winning the high jump and just missing out on the 800 metres title, kissing Penny Greig for the first time near the pavilion
and saw a couple gesticulating wildly at each other as they raced across the grass towards the main road. She was having to run to keep up with him, her red scarf flapping at her throat like a terrible wound. She spotted Don and pointed at him. The man’s head snapped up. Little hair. It was like a pink oval, a beige egg sitting on an elaborate eggcup. They arrowed towards him. The man was rolling his sleeves back as if setting himself for a scrap.
“Martin,” she was calling. Don shook his head, but then realised she wasn’t attempting to address him.
“Have you seen Martin?” Her voice was brittle. She was at the edge of tears.
“My boy,” the man explained, and he was full of accusation. “Our boy. He was playing in our garden on Kent Lane, just down there at the foot of the fields. Keepy-uppy. In our garden.”
“I was washing dishes,” said the woman. “I could see him. And then I went to empty the washing machine and when I came back he was gone and the back gate was swinging open.”
“Maybe he kicked his ball over the wall,” Don said.
“Martin is six,” the man said, as if that was explanation enough.
“He can’t reach the latch,” the woman said.
“I haven’t seen anyone,” Don said. “I just got here.”
The man looked him over as if Don might somehow be concealing Martin on his person. “The police,” he said at last. “We have to bring the police into this.”
“Oh, God,” the woman said. And the
n she screamed Martin’s name.
Don drove back to the hotel and forced himself to face up to what was going on. His coming here was nothing to do with a pilgrimage. It wasn’t a personal tribute. It was running away. All of those responsibilities back home; they’d still be there when he returned. Debts and deadlines and demands. Julie was the soft barrier that prevented him injuring himself against all that bureaucracy. She organised, she delegated, she controlled. It might have lapped around their ankles occasionally, but the water never rose around their throats, as it seemed to be doing these days.
Now Julie was gone, every day was like crashing his car. There were impacts everywhere. He missed her so desperately it was as if he could still feel the mass of her in his hands. Her smell was in every room she’d inhabited. There were shadows and shades of her in everything he owned. When the sun shone she was splintered within it; when it rained, each drop carried a fragment of her reflection.
He had tried to find that snow globe of hers, after the crash. She took it everywhere with her. It had been a gift from her childhood. A lucky token. He had wandered around in the ruins for an age until the ambulances arrived, his face dripping into the snow around the wreckage, poking with his toe amidst the mangled aluminium, the torn fabric seat covers, the shreds of her. It was gone.
This is madness, he thought now, but there was no way he could stop being dragged under. To tackle that might mean he had to force her out of his life altogether and he was not ready for it.
The stress of the afternoon was in him like hot pins. The way that poor woman had screamed for her son. It was animalistic. He could understand her need. He had wanted to howl like that, for Julie. It built up inside you. You forgot who you were.
He tried to make the room comfortable enough so that Julie might come to him in some way. He needed to be warm and clean and relaxed. He bathed and drank a glass of whisky. He put her favourite music station on the radio. He sat by the window and closed his eyes. He determined what each sound was and relegated it to the back of his mind. There was space here for her.
The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror 23 (Mammoth Books) Page 42