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 already.
Jess reached out from under the covers and felt for the button, but even when she found it and pressed it hard the ringing wouldn’t stop. And as soon as she opened her eyes on the darkness Jess registered that it was the doorbell ringing, not her morning alarm. The time was almost three a.m. She groped for her dressing-gown, the old winter tartan one, and pushed her feet into her slippers. She lifted aside the window curtains and looked down into the road. There was a police car parked in front of the house. Its revolving light sent silent blue arcs sweeping over the street.
She ran down the stairs, a mumble of fear in her head. The door was still unchained, so he was not home yet. But that was not so unusual. Quite often he stayed out all night. He was an adult now; how could she stop him, even if it had seemed appropriate to try? Jess thought of these things as she unlocked the door, for a last instant keeping the smooth sequence of reason between her and the police and whatever they had brought to her house.
‘Mrs Arrowsmith?’
‘Yes.’
A woman police officer, round-faced and young, probably no older than Beth. If something had happened to Beth … Involuntarily Jess’s hand came up to her mouth. The palm of it, pressed against her nostrils, still smelt cleanly of bed, warmth and safety.
The policewoman tilted her head to indicate the hallway.
‘May I come in?’ Holding up something, her warrant card, for Jess to see.
‘Of course, come in. What’s happened?’
They faced each other under the bright hall light.
‘Is Daniel Arrowsmith your son?’
Jess almost laughed before the terror hit her. It couldn’t be Dan because Dan was invulnerable. His happiness and ease protected him from injury. It was his older sister Beth who drew concern like a magnet.
A snapshot. Beth’s small, furrowed face above a smocked frock and the wide gummy beam of her baby brother as she anxiously held him in her arms. Aged three and six months respectively. Ian had taken the picture with a new camera Jess had given him for his birthday. If only Ian were here now. She was afraid to hear this news on her own.
All these images flickered through Jess’s mind faster than film through a projector.
