by Hatch, Ben
‘Dinah?’
The rain pounds down from the enormous black cloud overhead.
She turns the map 90 degrees.
‘It says straight on but the sign says left.’
‘I need to know where to turn, love. I’m at a junction.’
‘I don’t know where to turn, my love.’
Charlie makes the swimming motion again.
‘Charlieeee, Wales is a country. Like England,’ says Phoebe. ‘Not whales in the sea.’
‘Just carry on. Hang on, no,’ says Dinah. ‘That’s not right. Turn around.’
‘Charlieeeee! Daddy, Charlie’s not listenin’ to me. Charliee, listen to me. That’s very rude, isn’t it Dad?’
‘What?’
‘Turn around at the next roundabout.’
‘Charlieeeeeee!’
‘What, love?’
‘GUYS! I can’t hear Daddy. Will you be quiet? Go back on yourself. Turn around. I want to see what the sign said on the other side of the road. Oh hang on, no, A425. Ahhhhh, this map is so shit!’
‘Daddy,’ says Charlie, in a sing-song voice. ‘Phoebe’s lookin’ out my window. STOP LOOKIN’ OUT MY WINDOW!’ shouts Charlie.
‘Charlie, everyone can look out of everyone’s window, OK? You don’t own the windows. Kids! Please! Daddy and Mummy are lost, it’s all gone weirdly dark and we need a bit of quiet.’
We drive up through Flintshire on the scenic A548 coastal road and spend the day at the beautiful seaside town of Llandudno, a sort of Welsh Eastbourne. We visit the famous Punch and Judy show on North Parade run by generations of the Codman family since the time of Queen Victoria, and after this, the Victorian tramway to the 679-metre-high summit of the Great Orme. We wander round the visitor centre, with its sweeping views across the Irish Sea, learning about limestone pavements, cashmere goats and the rare silver-studded blue butterfly that only exists here and in a handful of other places in the world, while the kids, surrounded by history, beauty and rare wildlife are interested solely in riding the 30p Mr Blobby Seesaw in the Summit Complex arcade.
In the days that follow, driving through the slate hills of the Snowdonia National Park, it feels like we’re finally travelling properly now, away from big cities and out in the countryside.
We visit the National Slate Museum in Llanberis, and watch a traditional craftsman using a hammer and chisel to splice Welsh slate into slices so thin you could roll them up like ham. We walk round Portmeirion, a ridiculous, saccharine, over-the-top Italianate village created on the estuary outside Porthmadog that’s full of garishly bright three-quarter-sized villas and churches painted so like the brightly coloured homes on Balamory Phoebe asks, ‘Where’s Archie’s house, Dad?’ We buy buckets, spades and a crabbing net in Porthmadog and on Black Rock Sands beach Phoebe orders me about the rock pools. ‘Don’t stand on the seaweed, Dad. Dad you’re standing on the seaweed. Stand on the sand, Dad – like this.’ Meanwhile, Charlie runs about poking everything with his spade and I net a tiny fish half the size of a finger joint. ‘You got one Dad, well done. Let me see. Now put it in the bucket, Dad. You’re standing on the seaweed again, Dad.’
We round the Llŷn Peninsula. No mountains or fir trees now, just rolling green countryside, isolated farmhouses and fields of aimless looking sheep in the area where in the 1970s and 1990s Welsh nationalist group Meibion Glyndŵr set fire to English holiday homes. We take a boat to Bardsey Island to see the seals, we swim at Aberdaron. It’s the night after we walk across the Whistling Sands at Porthor beach that I start to panic. The panic comes from a feeling of immense pleasure I’d had at dinner that night. Sat opposite Dinah and me, Phoebe had been speaking, her eyes widening with interest, about the plot of a Scooby-Doo episode involving some stolen puppies. Charlie was every now and again trying to interject with his own less detailed knowledge about what he’d seen; ‘In their basket’, for example, or, ‘He had a tail.’ I’d finished my steak, was sipping a glass of wine and I’d felt such a piercing love for my family and the particular time we were at in our lives, it felt entirely fitting that just a few hours later Charlie should become quickly so very badly ill.
We’re at a B & B in Rhayader, undressing Charlie for his bath, when we notice how hot he is. Then in the water he shivers.
‘He’s ill.’
‘Definitely,’ says Dinah.
Half an hour later Charlie’s violently sick. I drive to the local Spar for paediatric Nurofen. They have none but let me use their phone to call the Spar in the next town. When I get back, Charlie points at his mouth.
‘Yes, you were sick.’
And his tummy.
‘Your tummy hurt. But you’re better now, aren’t you?’
Nod.
But he’s not. That night he deteriorates. Sleeping between Dinah and me, he begs for water and brings it back up almost immediately as we try to hoick him out of the bed to be sick in the bin, on a towel or, if we have time, the sink.
The next morning Charlie listlessly shakes his head at spoonfuls of Coco Pops. It’s Saturday morning. No GPs are around. The nearest out-of-hours service is in Carmarthen, the West Wales General Hospital, and we’re on the way there when it happens. We’re listening to Beatrix Potter, are up to the Jeremy Fisher story, and about to drop our bags at the cottage we’re staying at next that’s en route to the hospital, when I miss the turning. It’s a country road – no pavements, windy, undulating. There’s a small turning left up ahead and an even smaller turning opportunity opposite on the right. I slow down, indicate and start to make the right turn and just have time to say, ‘Shit!’ before it hits us. The sound is like a bomb going off. My head smacks the trim of the driver’s door. I come around a second later. In my driver’s side window there’s now a man’s face. He’s in a black car that’s filling up with smoke. I swing my head round to check on Dinah and the kids. I shout, ‘Is everyone all right? Is everyone all right?’ At the same time I’m aware Dinah’s shouting, ‘Get out of the car. Get out of the car.’
I open my door. The lady driver’s out of her seat. I shout, ‘Is everyone all right?’ at their car. The lady looks into the back of our Astra, sees Charlie and Phoebe and starts to say, ‘I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry.’
The man, whose face was next to mine, gets out. Their daughter climbs out with a red long-haired dog. She sits at the roadside stroking the dog, rubbing her neck. Our front wheel on the driver’s side is at right angles to where it should be. The front of our car has caved in a metre. There’s plastic trim over the road. The other car’s windscreen and side windows are shattered. Their airbags have inflated. I pull Phoebe out. Dinah does the same to Charlie. We check them over for cuts and bruises. The man tells me his partner saw us indicate right too late. They thought we were going left, tried to overtake. But there wasn’t enough room. She steered for the wall but the gap wasn’t big enough. They bounced off the wall and hit us broadside. He calls the police. Sat on the bank by the road, Phoebe strokes Dinah’s arm. Dinah’s crying. In my arms Charlie’s still not made a noise.
I feel woozy. I can’t think straight. There are things we should do – insurance companies, getting details, but it seems insurmountable to imagine something as small as where a pen might be.
When the second police car arrives they park at either end of the two wrecks. They put a sign up to slow down the traffic and I’m led to the driver’s seat of the police Range Rover. As I’m giving my account of the accident an air ambulance settles in the field next to us and the fire brigade arrives. The woman driver, composed before, is now in tears. I climb out of the police car and Phoebe’s excited now, ‘Daddy, I want to sit in the police car with you… Daddy, I want to go in the helicopter… Daddy,’ whispering now, ‘Tell the policeman I can wink. Daddy, Daddy, Daddy…’ And as I lower my ear to her mouth, ‘And that I can hop. Daddy, Daddy, Daddy. On both,’ holding up two fingers, ‘legs.’
Firemen open the buckled bonnet using a crow bar to check there’s no fire. They clear an oil pat
ch. Villagers slow down as they drive past to ask, through their windows, if everyone’s all right. One lady stops, offers to take Dinah and the kids to the cottage while the WPC, who’s been dealing with the other family, agrees to take me and all our things. But it takes a while to make this decision. It’s like a puzzle, a puzzle moments after waking when you’re groggy. I have to wade through the treacle of my mind. There are countless options – which is best? There’s the air ambulance, police cars, recovery vehicles arriving, Charlie who needs hospital, and we need our valuables from the car.
It feels a huge achievement to be at our cottage. It’s not ready yet so we drop the valuables with the owner, the policewoman returns for the kids’ car seats and I ring the insurance company. The woman’s abrupt.
‘Have you any speeding tickets you’ve not told us about in the last three years?’
‘Yes.’
I change my mind. No, the ticket I’m thinking of hasn’t gone through yet. They haven’t deducted the points.
‘Is the car insured for business use?’
‘I can’t remember.’
Were we on business writing the book? I stall. She keeps asking the question.
‘Do you use your car for business, Mr Hatch?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know.’
‘Mr Hatch, do you use your car on business?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know – we’re on holiday.’
The policewoman, back with our car seats, takes the phone from me. She gives the insurance company the name of the recovery agent and hangs up for me.
I keep having to think about everything I say and do. It’s like when the policewoman says I need to hand my documents in at Hove police station within seven days, including my driver’s licence. I explain I can’t do that – because it’s already at Swansea about to be endorsed with points – and she just keeps saying, ‘You have seven days,’ and I can’t get the problem across.
‘So that’s seven days, Mr Hatch.’
We look a strange sight in the Green Suite at West Wales General Hospital lugging our car seats around. We’re transferred to the Cilgerran Ward, where we commandeer a consulting room. There are bricks for Phoebe (‘Dad, there are BRICKS!’) and books (‘and look I’ve seen a Thomas book Charlie might like’). The doctor says Charlie needs an X-ray. He’s pale, slightly yellow. When I hand him the Thomas book his eyes widen slightly but he doesn’t open the book – he just holds it. Meanwhile, Phoebe’s reaction is to go hyper. ‘DAD, DAD, there’s two Mickey Mouses on the walls. LOOK!’ But if she bangs her leg or if we’re slow giving her the sip of water she’s asked for, she bursts into hysterical tears.
They want to keep Charlie in overnight on a drip to put some sugars back into his body. In the meantime they take blood tests and do their X-ray.
‘It sounds like a virus but he is very lethargic and that’s a worry to us.’
It’s around this point they discover we’ve just been in a car accident, have come directly from it. A nurse advises I have the bump on my head looked at. In fact, we should all go down to A & E, she says. Charlie’s wheeled away in the buggy for more tests, seemingly oblivious to our going. The wait at A & E is three hours and it’s here I think of something. The day before arriving in Rhayader I’d pointed out to Dinah the comically bad way a woman on the wrong side of the road was trying to make a right turn. Simultaneously a lorry on the mini roundabout got stuck unable to make a tight right turn himself. I’d had my own trouble driving into the B & B making a right turn. The whole thing had been like a Mr Men book about bad driving.
In A & E the doctor feels every one of our vertebrae. Phoebe, still skittish, says her back hurts. We’re strict when the doctor leaves to arrange further X-rays on her.
‘Does it really hurt? Was it a joke, tell us? You mustn’t fib to doctors. Was it a joke?’
Nod.
‘Was it really?’
Nod.
‘We don’t mind.’
Big smile.
‘Was it a joke?’
Nod, another big smile.
‘OK, never mind. Come here for a cuddle.’
Charlie is wheeled back with a cannula fitted for his drip. He’s given a metal-sided cot and put on a ward with two young chemo patients and at 10 p.m. Phoebe and I are given a room off the ward with two single beds. Dinah has a fold-out camp bed next to Charlie’s cot. Phoebe can’t sleep. She comes in with me and eventually drops off, her head on my chest, the first time she’s slept like this since the day she was born, the day we brought her back from the Royal Sussex County Hospital. In her sleep Phoebe scratches her eczema. I find the duty sister but she won’t give me hydrocortisone.
‘I have to cover myself. You can go to casualty if you want.’
‘It’s three in the morning. I can’t leave her alone. She’s three. She might wake up and panic if I’m not there.’
‘Politics, I know,’ she says, in a vague attempt at empathy.
Back in bed, listening to Phoebe scratch, I go through the accident again and again. I keep making the right turn. I keep trying to picture the seconds before the impact.
In the morning Charlie’s sitting up in the raised cot with a jumper on but only over one arm. The other arm is covered by a bandaged splint protecting the cannula. He’s eating tiny squares of toast.
‘I was just wondering where you were,’ says Dinah. ‘He has more colour, don’t you think? He hasn’t been sick. How did you sleep?’
I show her my flea bites. Dinah has five of her own. It must have been what Phoebe was scratching.
Phoebe plays in the pre-school area. They have a lava lamp. ‘LOOK, DAD! It’s pink and it goes purple. LOOK! SEE! Purple. NOW IT’S TURNING BLUE.’ Charlie plays with his Thomas train. He says his first words other than ‘Mummy’ and ‘no’ for almost a day and has already adapted to using one arm, the other having just a finger and thumb protruding through the bandages protecting the cannula in his wrist. When his X-ray results come back we’re led into the side room. The nurse stares at a computer screen. I see a white patch on his lung. ‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘It’s just a chest infection.’ Shortly after this Charlie comes off his drip. He plays with Phoebe in the pre-school room until the pharmacy opens for his antibiotics. It’s lovely seeing them together. It makes me tearful. Dinah too.
We’ve been looking forward to this cottage in the Brecon Beacons all week. It sounded so idyllic. Throughout difficult nights in one-room-only Travelodges and Best Westerns we’ve tried to imagine its dry stone walls, the log fire and the beamed ceilings. The cottage, however, turns out to be a bungalow. It has sliding OAP style doors. There’s no washing machine, dishwasher or toaster. The floors are lino, even in the living room. The double doors into the bungalow have that cross-hatched wire between the double glazing you get in institutional buildings. The bathroom has an orthopaedic handrail and there are wardrobes in the kids’ rooms so tall and thin and topple-risky we lay them flat on their sides like patients in the recovery position.
On the dining table there’s the producer form the WPC forgot to give me yesterday, along with a note (‘Hope everyone’s well’). It tips Dinah over the edge.
‘It’s the kindnesses,’ she says, in my arms. It’s the woman who gave us a lift, the people who stopped to ask if we were all right. The lady at the hospital who called the taxi for us earlier on. (‘If you know the way, fine,’ she told the driver. ‘If you don’t I’ll call another company. This family has been through enough.’) And the disabled couple in the next door bungalow who offered to buy us food at the supermarket and gave us their Sunday papers, which we read after lunch while the kids watch CBeebies and are kissed by us every few seconds.
That night I try to explain to Dinah about the fabric of events leading up to the accident, how there seemed a pattern we should’ve been able to read – the inability of everyone the day before to make a right turn, the obsession with the cottage we’d never get to. The military jet we’d been buzzed by
a few days before in the Dyfi Valley – the bang we’d heard when it passed overhead.
‘All of it was there – the sounds, the facts. We just didn’t read them. And that pause before I turned right. If I hadn’t have paused.’
‘Don’t say it.’
‘I don’t know why I paused. One more second and…’
‘Ben, I don’t want to talk about it.’
The next morning our insurance company says our car will be towed to a Brighton garage where an assessor will judge whether it’s worth repairing. If it’s not – and of course it won’t be – they’ll provide a comparable hire car until we’re made an offer. The hire car place is in Carmarthen. We take a taxi. ‘Blue car,’ Charlie immediately nicknames the Vauxhall Astra we choose. It’s the same as ours apart from the colour and one other crucial aspect: the smell. It has no smell. We drive it to the breaker’s yard. There are thirty wrecks in five rows of six, all with dents, smashed windscreens, crushed bonnets and missing wheels. The Astra is three quarters its normal size. Every window is smashed. One of its doors now hangs off. I take off the roof box and reattach it to the hire car and salvage Phoebe’s ZhuZhu Pet from the glass strewn floor, and a couple of DVDs from the glove box.
‘So what we doing, then?’
‘Now or later?’
‘Both,’ says Dinah.
That night, the kids in bed, we’re trying to work it out. The holiday letting agency has explained there’s a penalty fee of £200 for each cancelled booking. But Dinah, I suspect, still wants to abandon the trip.
‘Now, we’ve got no choice. We’ve nowhere to stay, love. We have to carry on.’
‘Drive all the way to Liverpool tomorrow?’
‘What else can we do?’
‘And later?’ she asks. ‘We can’t drive around in a hire car for the next three months. What are we going to do afterwards?’
‘I know you want to abandon it.’
‘I haven’t said that.’
‘But it’s what you think, isn’t it?’