muzzy bonhomie of drink, froze the breath in his lungs and stiffened his limbs into immobility. In the minutes that followed he wanted to shrink and hide, but he made himself act. He felt small and clumsy, but his reactions were quick, as he had learned to make them.
*
The cold air outside hit Rob in the face. He couldn’t quite remember where he had left the van. Danny leaned dazedly against some railings next to the dustbins, rubbing his mouth.
Rob yelled at him. ‘You fucking loser. Bloody come on, will you?’
Rob began to run and after a second Danny thumped in his wake. Far worse demons chased after Rob; images of violence gathered force behind him and loomed out of the blackness so that he ran faster, head bent and arms pumping like a little boy’s, his breath coming in tearing gasps and the fear of a descending blow stiffening his shoulders in anticipation.
They reached the parked van by some stroke of good fortune and flung themselves into it. Rob started the clapped-out engine and reversed with a squeal of tyres, then accelerated hard away from Cat’s street and the railway embankment. Rob tried to remember where he had been and where he should be going. The streets formed an intricate triangle, alternately dark and patched with lurid light. Danny sat slumped sideways in the passenger seat.
Rob muttered, ‘Where the fuck are we?’ The side roads all looked the same. He jerked his head round furiously to Danny.
‘I’m sorry,’ Danny whined. ‘I dunno what happened. I just lost it.’
Rob was afraid of the eruption of violence within himself, as well as in other people. As if he could smell his disgusted fear, Danny wheedled, ‘You’ll stick up for me? Our word against theirs, isn’t it? If they catch us, that is.’
Rob only whispered on an exhaled breath, ‘You little …’ But he didn’t finish. Words that were too similar had been directed at him.
At last they reached the bypass, the open road that Rob had gunned the van down earlier on the way to the club. There was a bump and the tools in the back rattled a warning. He pulled the wheel and the van straightened again, then he blinked into the rear-view mirror and saw it. There was a flashing blue light behind them. He swore and Danny peered at him before looking behind.
‘Shit. Drive,’ Danny howled. ‘Drive, will you?’
Instinctively Rob stamped his boot down hard. There was too much play in the accelerator. The van shuddered and whined and picked up speed. At half past one in the morning there was almost no traffic on the road. They hurtled forward, deafened by the racing engine, and for a minute or two it seemed that the police car was falling back.
‘Yeah. Go, man!’ Danny shouted, with sudden wild elation.
But the police siren was closing on them, audible even over the engine roar. The van juddered as if it would fall apart.
Rob stared ahead. There was a bridge. Concrete pillars daubed with graffiti.
Lights coming the other way. Fast, a dazzle in his eyes. The road vanishing.
Brakes, the brakes. A long squeal, shrieking in his head, echo of an echo. And then a smash. Explosion of glass and metal and pain.
Rob moved his head. There was cold air, and a bright light in his eyes. The light was his own headlamps shining on grass and concrete slewed at a terrible angle. He turned with cold precision and saw that the seat next to him was empty and the passenger door open. Had Danny undone his seat-belt? Or in their hurry to get away from Cat’s had he never fastened it?
To undo his own caused him a breathtaking stab of pain. He swallowed it and pushed the driver’s door open with his shoulder. He crawled out on to the grass and saw a car stopped behind him, someone running. Before anyone reached him he pulled himself around the back of the van because the front was all smashed in against the bridge.
Danny was lying on his side on the verge. Rob knelt down beside him. He saw that there was blood coming out of his ear and nose.
‘Come on, mate.’ He leaned over him. ‘Get up now. Don’t piss about. Just get up, will you?’
Hands grasped his arms and began to drag him backwards.
‘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
