The Way Barred

by Dominique Kyle

  “Did you eat and drink today?” Paul checked suddenly, leaning in through the window as I did up the harness.

  I nodded and started the engine. He straightened up and let me go. Another Stock backed up a bit to let me squeeze into the queue.

  They opened the gate and we began to file in. I glanced in my mirror. Tom was still standing there on his own.

  The F2s started to drive round anti-clockwise, trying to sort themselves out into their correct starting positions while the Junior Bangers headed the opposite way to us towards the gate. I stopped whenever one passed. I wasn’t going to trust the judgement of a hyped up testosterone laden fourteen year old lad at the wheel of a half crushed Mini especially it they’re the sort who grin manically while going for their car with a sledge hammer…

  I kept half an eye to the gate. No number 89 slipped on at the last minute, and finally the gate was hauled across and that was that. No more cars would be allowed onto the track till after the end of the race. My heart sank and I wanted to cry. I tried to hold it back. You can’t sniffle in a full face helmet because you can’t get at your eyes to wipe or nose to blow. We shot away, the green flag waving. I put my foot down and slewed my way round. Conditions were nice. Not too wet, not too dry. But that meant they were nice for everyone else too. Click, clunk. I just lightly touched a few people out of the way while heading for the front. I was concentrating super-hard, putting everything else but the race itself out of my mind. Three laps, four. Getting there… Then suddenly I had a tremendously strong sensation of Tyler being right there with me for a moment, just a split second. He’s thinking about me, I thought, wishing me well, and then something ripped away and I doubled over the wheel, my foot coming off the accelerator. Behind me surprised cars shunted into me. I was pushed sideways with more piling up behind. I tried to pull myself together and went to start the engine again but I was clumsy and couldn’t seem to co-ordinate and I kept stalling it. The other cars variously backed and forwarded to get out of the pile and eventually the motionless yellow flag turned into a waving one and everyone else started filing patiently past as we all untangled ourselves. I got my engine started again and it sounded fine, but I couldn’t drive. I wasn’t fit to drive. I pulled off slowly onto the infield and came to a halt in the centre. A late middle aged steward with a thatch of grey hair came over. He leant in, “Are you ok?”

  “I’m ok in that you don’t have to call a doctor or anything, but I don’t feel at all well,” I said shakily.

  He nodded. “Ok, I’ll keep an eye on you and if you wave at me I’ll come over, ok?”

  “Yes, thank you,” I said gratefully.

  I didn’t pay much attention to the race. It seemed to be fiercely fought as car after car started pulling off the track and another yellow flag was waved, but I put my arms around my wheel and put my head down on them feeling dizzy and weak and a bit sick. I didn’t even bother to note who won it. I was just waiting to exit the track. Oh God they seemed to be taking so bloody long! As soon as they hauled the gate back open I was the first one off and drove a bit too fast back to our place. I pulled myself out. Jo and Paul were walking back from the stands. Jo looked really disappointed. I yanked off my helmet and balaclava and threw down my gloves and headed straight towards Tom.

  “Have you heard from him?” I demanded urgently.

  He shook his head. And then his phone, lying beside him on the bonnet of the van started ringing. He snatched it up and looked at the display. “It’s Mick!”

  He answered it swiftly. “Mick what the hell- ?”

  There was a short silence. “Shit! You’re kidding me! No, no of course you wouldn’t about a thing like this, sorry! I just can’t take it in…”

  I grabbed the phone off him. “What’s happened to him Mick?” I said desperately.

  “I’m so sorry Eve,” Mick was crying, “By the time the ambulance got there through the snarl up, he was already dead. They did their best but they said he was gone and they couldn’t do anymore. They said he had catastrophic internal injuries…”

  I gave the phone back to Tom and walked away. I didn’t know where I was going. I just had to get away to be on my own somewhere.

  “Eve?” Jo’s voice. She grabbed at my arm but missed and I speeded up, heading away across the stands. “Eve!” Her tone sounded sharp and cross. “Don’t just walk away from me!”

  I broke into a run.

  On the other side of the stands there was the way through to where the F1 pits were or I could continue to the main stadium building where lots of people were milling about. I felt like I would go crazy if I couldn’t curl up somewhere on my own and rock and clutch at my stomach. I couldn’t process it. I couldn’t bear it! I leaned back against the rough pebble dash wall of the stadium and started bashing myself slowly against it. Then I turned round suddenly and started hitting it with my fists and then kicking it, silently so that no-one would notice, and then I started smacking my head against it again and again.

  “She’s here Dad!” I heard Jo’s voice.

  “What the hell are you doing Eve?” Paul sounded horrified. He grabbed me and pulled me away from the wall. Blood was running down my face from my forehead so I couldn’t see and my fists were mashed and dripping red too. I tried to struggle away from him.

  Suddenly Quinn’s voice was there. “Here, give her to me. She does this. You have to hold her.” His arms came tightly around me and he sat down on a step and pulled me down on his lap, clamping me to him. I tried desperately to pull away and hit at him but he held me trapped so tight that I couldn’t. I kept smacking my head against his shoulder and he held his own head out of the way and clamped my head down with one hand. “Hey, hey, hey,” he kept saying. “I’m so sorry, Eve, I’m so sorry!”

  Suddenly Rob appeared from around the corner. He skidded to a halt. “I just heard! God it’s awful! I can’t take it in! Poor Eve…”

  “What have you heard? Will someone please tell us what has happened?” Jo shouted frustratedly at him.

  Rob sounded taken aback. “Don’t you know? Tyler’s dead. He and Mick had to attend a call out on the motorway and as Tyler was loading the car on the truck, another car just took him out! Fucking motorway drivers! They don’t pay attention! Looking down at their bloody sat nav or phone or more interested in their packet of crisps!”

  “Oh my God!” Jo started to cry.

  “Shit it brings it home doesn’t it? I’ve nearly had it happen to me a couple of times! Mick swears they were following all the right protocol, had all the bollards out, had their high vis jackets on, were keeping on the inside but the car just ploughed into him at seventy miles an hour. Mick says he was still alive – just – for a bit, but the ambulance took too long because of a jam on the slip road and he was gone by the time they got there and they couldn’t do anything for him…”

  “She knew when it happened, didn’t she Dad?” Jo said, sounding distraught. “That’s why she pleaded with us not to make her drive – and then I went and made her despite that agreement we made with her that we wouldn’t ever make her!”

  “I need to get her home,” Quinn said urgently to Rob.

  “Fuck it, I’m not driving now,” Rob said roughly, “Let’s take her home. Tolly and Dave can load up the car after we’ve gone.”

  Pete suddenly arrived, panting. “Tom just told me! Shit that’s just awful! I just can’t believe it…” Then, “For God’s sake, how did she end up like that? She’s covered in blood. What’s happened?”

  Quinn stood up with me still in his arms. I clung round his neck and breathed him in and out. I blotted everything else out and just breathed Quinn in and out. In and out. He carried me to Rob’s car and put me in the back and got in with me. Rob got in the driver’s seat and we left straight away. I lay curled up along the back seat with my head in Quinn’s lap while he stroked my hair and occasionally murmured ‘poor Eve’ to me.

  That night he got into bed with me and held me the whole night long. I d
on’t know if I slept or not. It all seemed irrelevant. I stared blindly ahead of me. I was never going to see him again, he had gone. It felt like my insides were ripped out. It felt like I had an arterial bleed and all my life force was pumping out of me and filling the room. I was never going to see him again. It didn’t seem possible. Where had he gone? Where could a person go like that in a split second? One moment filling your life with love and warmth and security and happiness, and the next not even in existence. Inside I wept and keened and howled and screamed. Silent crying, dry eyed on the exterior, but drowning in my own tears within. I knew how to do that. I’d done it for years.

  Every now and again Quinn would sing my song to me. The one he’d promised to keep only for me. Over and over again. Daisy stuck her head in once, then retreated. Quinn stayed right by my side and finally he fell asleep. Mostly I didn’t. Time had no meaning.

  Two days later, Sue and Jo turned up. They stood in the doorway looking across at me. “Is she eating and drinking?” Sue asked Quinn.

  He shook his head. “Not as far as I know, although I’ve had to go to work of course. But I can’t see any signs of her having moved from her bed. I rang into Entwistle’s for her. He’s given her the week off.”

  “I know,” Jo said. “The men are gutted. They really liked Tyler.”

  “We’ve come to get her and take her back home with us for a bit,” Sue told Quinn. “Will you help us get her to the car?”

  Quinn came over to me. “Up you get, Eve. You’re going with Sue and Jo now.” When I didn’t move or answer he just hauled me up to a sitting position, and then picked me up in his arms and carried me down to Sue’s 4x4 and dumped me on the high back seat where I just lay down and curled up defensively.

  “Is she speaking?” Sue asked.

  Quinn shook his head.

  “Ok,” Sue said, “let’s go.”

  At the Satterthwaites’ Jo opened the door and said sharply. “Out you get Eve. Dad’s not as young and strong as Quinn so we don’t want him doing his back in having to lug you about!”

  At her harsh tone I curled up tighter like a snail in a shell and refused to move.

  Sue went away and came back with Pete who pulled me up and then rather clumsily lifted me against him, tossed me up a bit until I was balanced and he had a good grip and took me over to the house. I breathed him in and out, but whereas Quinn had soothed me, breathing Pete in didn’t. It made me feel agitated and unsafe. I pulled out of his arms and stood up by myself in the middle of the red terracotta tiles in the kitchen.

  “She looks awful Mum,” Pete said. “She’s still in the same clothes and all covered in blood.”

  Jo whispered something to her mother and Sue said briskly, “Off you go now Pete.”

  Once Pete had gone, Jo said to me. “Mum is going to run you a hot bath and you are going to soak in it. You haven’t even changed your tampon have you? You’ve got blood all down your trousers. You could get Toxic Shock Syndrome you know! So you need to get yourself completely clean and I’ll loan you a night time pad. And we need to see if you’ve broken your knuckles punching the wall like that, because they look all swollen and bruised, and we need to see if your forehead is gashed as at the moment it’s covered in dried blood and scabs and we can’t see how bad it is.”

  Sue came back in and led me out of the kitchen and upstairs into the bathroom. “I’ll bring you a nice soft towel and some underwear and your pyjamas and then I want you to go to bed.”

  In bed, a bit later, clean, pyjamaed and padded up. Sue and Jo examined my hands and my face.

  “Ouch,” Jo commented, wincing.

  “We’ll leave them a bit longer and see,” Sue decided with my hands.

  Jo sat with me and said nothing while Sue went to make me a mug of tea.

  “Aren’t you going to make her eat?” Jo said when that was all she came back with.

  Sue shook her head. “She’d only be sick. Leave her be. All the time she’s in bed it doesn’t really matter if she eats or not…”

  I drank the hot tea not because I wanted it, but because I knew they wouldn’t go until I did. I was glad she hadn’t tried to sneak any sugar into it, it would have tasted foul at the moment. My body just wanted to die and didn’t want me to sustain it. It was rejecting anything that meant it might have to continue to live.

  They left me.

  Two days later and three cups of tea a day later, Sue came in and laid my washed clothes on the bed. “Get up now and come down to the evening meal with us.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said firmly. “You don’t have to eat. I’ll just put a tiny amount out for you just in case, but you’re to come down and sit with us. You have to be back at work on Monday you know so you need to start eating from tomorrow.”

  I got up, got dressed and came downstairs. My legs felt wobbly and weak. I sat at the end of the table and stared repulsed down at the small pile of stew and potatoes and peas and didn’t touch it. Without food my body felt pure and clean. I couldn’t face dirtying it up. The family held normal conversation around me, and then finally, while I was sitting ignoring the small portion of tiramisu sitting in front of me, Jo said, “You should come to Birmingham at the weekend with us, Eve.”

  “No,” I said.

  “At least she’s speaking now,” Jo remarked. She looked fiercely at me across the table. “Everyone will be desperate to see you. They’re dedicating the Shoot Out in memory of Tyler and they’re going to have a two minute silence on his behalf before it starts.”

  I glanced briefly at her. “No!”

  “She’s not ready, Jo,” Sue intervened. “Her first milestone needs to be getting back to work on Monday.”

  Sue moved us next door to the living room before I could disappear upstairs again and they put the telly on to watch some detective serial they’d been following. I hunched up on the sofa with my knees drawn up thinking about the two times we’d sat in here with Tyler laughing and joking. Sue gave Paul a significant look and he reached over and put an arm round me and pulled me over to him. I remained resistant for a minute or two then gave in and leant against him, curled up, with my eyes closed, ignoring the TV, ignoring everyone else in the room, just breathing along with him and breathing him in. It calmed me. I think I fell asleep. I woke up next morning in bed and couldn’t remember getting there.

  Next day Sue made me eat toast and marmite for lunch. It spoiled my pure cleaness. It clogged up my mouth with yeast and salt and weighted my stomach. But once it had gone down the spell was broken, and I ate a proper meal with them that night, a small portion.

  “Has she cried at all?” Jo suddenly said. “Because I haven’t seen or heard her.”

  When you don’t talk to people, they start talking about you in front of them as though you’re deaf, or they’re in a zoo and they’re looking at you through a pane of glass.

  “Doesn’t seem to be,” Pete agreed.

  Sue shook her head. “She seems too shocked.”

  Next day Sue made me carry the buckets for her down to the stables. The organic moist urea mouldy intense stench down there always disturbed me. Horses are quite stinky. In the past when I’d commented on it she’d laughed and said she didn’t think so, she liked the smell and she thought cars and diesel and petrol were truly disgusting smells and couldn’t understand why we wanted to spend our whole lives wreathed in them. I didn’t know why the hot straw and manure smell upset me so much. I got away as soon as possible and went and sat in the garage to be soothed by metal and oil. Paul was working on Pete’s car in readiness for the Shoot Out and the Winner Takes All. I crouched at the side with my arms wound tight around my knees and watched him quietly. He chatted away to me about nothing much that I remember, and didn’t expect me to answer. I thought about the times that I’d watched Tyler working in here. The time I’d been teasingly tickling his neck to watch him stop breathing. How could he not be there anymore? How could he not be coming back? How could I live wit
hout him? My gut was empty and ripped to shreds. My heart beat without meaning.

  They came back really late on Sunday. Everyone was asking after me, they said. Tyler’s funeral was on Thursday, and because the whole Stocks community was turning out for it, Jeanette had had to book a bigger venue. Several people would be speaking at it. Paul and Rob on behalf of the Stocks, Mick on behalf of the business, Tyler’s father and little Tilly on behalf of the family. Did I want to come along with them?

  “No!” I said.

  “Actually, it would be a bit awkward for Jeanette,” Paul pointed out to Jo. “Unless she really wanted to be there I think she’s doing the right thing by staying away. The other drivers will understand why…”

  “Burial or cremation?” Sue asked.

  “Cremation,” Paul answered.

  I got up and ran out of the room and curled up on my bed feeling horrified and enraged. They were going to burn him. He was going to go up in flames and become nothing but ash. He wouldn’t exist anymore. I began to cry.

  Since I cried all night and was still at it the next morning, Sue rang Entwistle. “She needs another couple of days.”

  By evening I was hoarse, limp and exhausted and had stopped eating again. Sue brought me something in my room.

  “You need to go back to work on Wednesday, Eve. This time you can’t put it off.”

  On Wednesday I went back into work with Jo. The men all said how sorry they were. I said nothing. I cried into the engines, I cried into the coffee, I cried over the log book. But I did all the work I was asked to do, and went back to the Satterthwaites’ at the end of the day and ate what was put in front of me, then went to bed.

  On Thursday Sue took me into work, because the other three were going off to the funeral. The men knew what day it was and didn’t speak to me. I found I couldn’t cry today. It was too awful to cry. It felt like the well had dammed up again. I sat at the table that night and listened without comment and without tears to the description of the funeral. I wished now I had just sent at least one single flower along with Jo. I thought of Quinn and his family all going along to see the body of their mother and tenderly laying precious things in the coffin. I hadn’t been able to go to see Tyler. And now I would never see him again because they’d burned him up and he’d turned into ash and Jeanette had him in a horrid pot somewhere. A horrid, horrid pot. I suddenly almost heard his voice saying, you’re my precious thing, darling, you’re the only precious thing I want. And I suddenly burst into tears again and I couldn’t even get out of the room. I just sat there at the table and howled till I couldn’t breathe and my stomach hurt and Sue and Paul both came and held me.