‘He’s my mate, he’s all right,’ Rob was shouting. ‘What are you doing to him?’
A policeman knelt down in Rob’s place beside Danny.
Cars slowed to a crawl as they approached the van smashed into the bridge and the police car with its revolving light and the starburst of broken glass glittering across the wet tarmac.
The headlights burned in Rob’s eyes. As each car crept past he glimpsed white patches behind glass, staring faces. He wanted to shout at the people but he only blinked, and there was something sticky on his face. The policeman who was holding his arms made him sit down on the verge.
‘You’re hurt,’ the man kept telling him. ‘You’ve hurt yourself. Don’t worry about your mate now.’
He couldn’t see Danny. The other policeman was in the way, leaning over him and talking into his radio. Rob stared down the road at the cars and tried in the slippery daze of shock to connect up what had happened. It had been only a split second that had changed everything but he couldn’t remember the instant itself; trying to focus on it was like staring at a brownish spot in a mirror where the silvering had worn away. The reflections around it were pin-sharp; here was the policeman and the shiny peak of his cap, and in his mind’s eye Cat’s room and the two girls and the green glass of vodka in his hand. But the spot in the middle from which his own eye should have gazed steadily back at him was a blank. He couldn’t remember swerving or braking or hitting the bridge.
Rob put his hands up to his face. Blood was running from a cut on his forehead.
The other policeman stood up and Rob could see Danny again. He was still curled on his side. As if he was asleep, only his white face was disfigured by the black trail coming out of his nose and another dribbling from his ear over his cheek and jaw. A sound rose in Rob’s chest and burst out of him as a great roar.
‘Danny, Dan. Open your eyes. Open them.’
Rob fought to get to his feet. A hand on his shoulder held him down.
‘Can you hear me, Dan?’
‘All right, lad. All right. We’re waiting for the ambulance.’
As an answer, the wail of the sirens came first and then the blue lights, moving fast, up the road from the other direction. The first vehicle to pull up, at an angle across the road, was a white police Range Rover. Two more policemen in yellow-green fluorescent jackets leapt out of it. One stood in the road to slow the sparse traffic, the other ran to the van and Danny.
Yet more sirens and flashing lights were approaching. The police were waving the ambulance on. As soon as it crunched on to the hard shoulder the paramedics leapt out and ran to Danny.
A different policeman squatted on his haunches in front of Rob. Rob saw the tight rim of his shirt collar, even the prickle of stubble under his bottom lip.
‘Are you hurt?’
‘Not badly.’ Feeling was beginning to return to his body. Pain everywhere in sullen pools and darting stabs.
‘Were you the driver?’
Rob heard the stammer of two-way radios and the swish of tyres in the drizzle. He lifted his head.
‘Yeah. I was driving.’
The policeman had a notebook.
‘Tell us your name and address, son. And your friend’s.’
There seemed to Rob to be a weightless and airless interval of infinite time that was without movement, even for all the rolling wheels and turning lights, and silent within the din of radio static and voices and hurrying feet. They were seeing to Danny, crouching over him, shining a cruel light in his eyes.
Rob mumbled inaudibly through a mouth over which he had lost control, ‘You be all right. You be. All right.’
They were putting a tube down Danny’s throat. There was a flurrying circle around him that Rob could not penetrate. Even the policeman who had been questioning him was looking at the ambulance crew.
One of the paramedics said, ‘We need the air ambulance.’
When Rob heard it the realisation shot through him. He might die.
How fucking stupid. To be alive and having a drink and a smoke and the next minute to be lying by the roadside where you might be going to die. A huge anger swelled up in him. He wanted to roll up the realisation in his fist, crushing it into an atom that he could stuff through the blank mirror spot and obliterate.
‘Have you been drinking?’ the policeman was asking.
It was only now that the question dawned and the immediate certainty swam into his mind, an evil fish. Did I do this to Danny? And the answer. Yes, I did it.
‘How much have you had to drink?’ the policeman repeated.
The clarity of everything just before and after the moment of the smash was fading in Rob’s mind. The empty blur at the centre of his field of vision bled outwards. The blue lights twinned and quadrupled and splintered into fragments and the looming faces split and swelled and he couldn’t even properly distinguish the policeman’s old-young eyes any longer in his young face.
Rob moved his lips. ‘Not much. A couple. Just.’ His voice croaked away, caught in his throat.
They were kneeling beside Danny. They were holding a bag up, tubes going into him.
They brought a small black box and a white tube to Rob and pressed the tube into his mouth.
He did what they told him. Blow.
People coming and going, voices over his head but he couldn’t hear any longer what they were saying. And the policeman again, asking questions, while one of the ambulance men looked at his head and tilted it on his neck and lifted his arms and shone a light in his streaming eyes.
‘I don’t know. He lives with his mother. I never went there, why would I? I don’t know his address. Please.’
The lights shining in his eyes, showing up his tears. He hated crying, hated being seen to cry as much as he feared violence in himself and in others. They went together, the two things. Action and reaction, both fearsome.
The helicopter was coming.
After its lights appeared in the sky the noise grew suddenly loud, drowning out the police radios and the idling engines of cars, then became deafening. Rob crouched beneath the roaring, his head on his knees. The machine hovered over them and briefly stirred up a whirl of litter and wet leaves. Behind the verge was a field and a field gate. The paramedics lifted Danny on to a stretcher. A beam of hard light seeming as solid as a pillar shone from the helicopter and pinned them all to the earth. As if it was searching out him alone Rob stared straight up into the blinding nauseous eye of it. Then the helicopter sank to land in the field and the light abruptly snapped off and Danny, with the tubes and bags held over him, was spirited away to it.
Rob could see nothing now. They waited, separated by the hedge from Danny and the paramedics.
The noise swelled once more and the helicopter lifted, rocking over them as it rose, before it tilted and swung away over the wreck of the van and the stilled road. The busy rap of the engine changed in pitch, receded and was finally gone.
Rob leaned forward and retched into the grass between his feet.
‘Come on, son,’ one of the ambulancemen said. ‘Your friend’ll be in hospital in a minute or two. We’ll get you in there as well.’
One of the policemen, bulky and creaking in his fluorescent coat, followed him into the back of the ambulance. Rob was under arrest. The doors slammed shut on them and the ambulance bumped away.
Alarm clock. Half six