“Must have been a horrible night there,” Martin answered. “I’ll run a bath for her and do some toast. She’ll want something before she crashes…”
He flinched, not believing his unthinking choice of word, and the horror of the previous night rushed in again. He and Paul had returned home in a kind of dream state. The night had been alive with sirens and whirling lights and they had both fallen asleep in front of the rolling news.
The phone rang. It was Carol’s mother.
“Hello, Jean. Yes, I saw her on the news just now too. No, television always makes you look fatter than you are. Yes, it’s been awful. No, I don’t know how many were from the school, they haven’t released that information yet. Paul is fine. I’ll tell her you rang, soon as she gets back. OK, you too, Jean. Bye now.”
It was the second time she had rung. The first was at half six that morning when she had first heard about it on the radio. Other people had called: Barry Milligan had sounded irritable and hungover and his mood wasn’t helped by the fact that the rugby game had been cancelled out of respect. Gerald Benning, Paul’s piano teacher, had checked to make sure he was safe, and so had members of the family who hadn’t been in touch for years. It was positively ghoulish.
When Carol came through the door, she gave her son the biggest, chest-crushing hug he’d ever had. She had worked an extra four hours over her shift. Her face looked grey and drawn and her hollow eyes seemed to attest to the things she had seen in the casualty department.
Martin passed her a cup of tea, which she took gratefully, but refused the toast.
“I couldn’t,” she stated.
Neither Martin nor her son uttered a word while she drank it. Then, cradling the cup in her hands, she said, “I never want to go through another night like that as long as I live.”
“You were just on telly,” Paul ventured. “You were fierce!”
“That stupid, stupid woman. Why do they ask such inane, crass questions?”
“It’s what they do,” Martin said.
“I almost punched her, but you know what stopped me? I knew it’d help her flaming career and I’d end up on some cheap blooper programme that’d be repeated for the rest of my life.”
She closed her eyes and seemed to sag.
“There’s a bath waiting,” Martin told her. He had never seen her like this before. Carol always left the grimness of the job at the hospital and was able to detach herself from it. Not this time. She was too limp to manage the bath. She just wanted to flop into bed.
Halfway up the stairs, she stopped and said, in a small, defeated voice, “I recognised lots of them. Some had been your pupils, Martin. A few of them still are… or were.”
Across town, Emma Taylor sat on her bed, staring blankly at the wallpaper. Conor had gone with her in the ambulance. Both had been too stunned to say anything. In casualty Emma had been checked over: superficial burns to the back of her legs, which had been appropriately dressed and, due to the volume of more serious cases coming in, she had been discharged. Conor had been treated for the cuts and bruises he had sustained in the fight, but the sights that wheeled by while he waited never left him.
Emma’s usually disinterested parents had been loud and vocal in their sympathy, but of zero use and were more keen to find out if any compensation could be claimed. For the first time, the girl had not milked a situation to her utmost advantage. Instead she went quietly to her room, plugged her earphones in and replayed those moments over and over in her head. She hadn’t slept all night.
When her mobile rang, she didn’t hear it, but saw the flashing of the screen. She stared at it like it was something new and unrecognisable. The number was certainly unfamiliar. She picked it up and pulled out one earphone.
“Who’s that?”
“Conor.”
“How’d you get my number?”
“Nicky Dobbs gave it me. I knew you two used to go out…”
“Nicky Dobbs is a waste of space.”
“So I thought I’d…”
“What do you want?”
“About, you know. I can’t talk to anyone here about it. They won’t be able to understand.”
“Well, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“But you were in that car – you know what happened. The police are going to start asking…”
Emma bristled. “Are you going to grass me up?” she said. “Others will have seen you in it.”
“They was too busy running for their lives. Only you and me know I was in that car. Danny, Kevin, B.O. and Brian won’t be telling no one now, will they? They’re burned and gone. We both saw Kevin flapping about on fire. So you just keep your trap shut, yeah?”
There was a silence.
“You hear me?”
“I’m not sure,” Conor said at length. “I can’t get my head straight.”
“Then try harder!” she told him. “Don’t you think I’ve been through enough?”
“Yeah, course.”
“But you want to set the law on me as well? I wasn’t even driving!”
“No. I dunno. I can’t think.”
Emma ground her teeth. “Look,” she said, “there’s no way I’ll be let out of this house today. They’re useless, but think I need to stop in so they can claim extra for the trauma. I’ll work on them tomorrow and meet you then, yeah? We’ll talk it through, yeah?”
“Tomorrow? I’m not sure I can wait…”
“Just sit on it for one more bloody day, will you!”
“OK, OK.”
“Down by the boot fair then, about three.”
“The boot fair?”
“Where else is busy on a Sunday here? I’m not going to traipse up a lonely beach with you. It’s not a date.”
“I wasn’t asking for one!”
“See you then, then.”
“Umm… and Emma…?”
“What?”
“I’m sorry about Keeley and Ashleigh.”
The girl’s mouth dried. “Yeah,” she said. “Thanks.” She ended the call and closed her eyes. Images of her two friends caught in the Fiesta’s headlights reared in her memory.
Emma snapped her eyes open and continued to stare at the wallpaper.
The rest of that day passed quietly for the shocked town.
On Sunday the papers were full of it. There were sensationalised eyewitness accounts from whoever they could get to talk about the incident locally. Half of those interviewed hadn’t even been there. There was a two-page spread with a dynamic graphic of View Point Road and the progress of the car along it, with arrows indicating where the vehicle was going to crash and explode. There were photographs of the deceased, each taken at some point the previous year – all young, all smiling. Danny Marlow had been singled out as the cause of the disaster, but none of his family, especially his brother, would give an interview so the papers had to make do with the gossip they had wheedled out of neighbours and unnamed “close family friends”.
As well as all that, there were the usual scaremongering articles on the dangers of the Internet. Sporadic, starred panels voiced the opinions of waning celebrities whose publicity agents had eagerly volunteered their clients’ condoling sound bites about the tragedy,