34
FOR A MOMENT I do nothing. I just stand there staring stupidly at the cup, feeling the lethargy in my arms and legs, and the swirling confusion in my head that prevented me from noticing the effects of the drug before. What are they? Painkillers? Sleeping pills?
I stand there, swaying, trying to get myself together. Trying to balance.
And then I stumble towards the door.
I am not quick. I am slow – nightmarishly slow.
But as Clare leaps towards me, her battered limbs don’t quite obey. Her foot catches in the rug and she comes crashing down, her hip smacking into the wickedly sharp edge of the coffee table. She gives a scream that sets the echoes in the hallway ringing, and makes my already spinning head feel even stranger – and I stagger into the hallway.
I am struggling with the lock of the front door – the lock that seemed so simple and straightforward just a couple of hours ago. My fingers are slipping – the lock won’t turn – and then I have done it, and I am out, snapping through the flimsy police tape into the blessedly cold, fresh air.
My limbs feel like rubber and my head is sick and dizzy.
But this is what I do. I run. I can do this.
I take a step. And then another. And another and another. And then the forest swallows me up.
It is incredibly, indescribably dark. But I cannot stop.
The air is cold in my face and the shapes of the trees are black against black. They rear out of the chilly dark and I dodge and weave, ducking under branches, my hands held out to protect my face.
Bracken and brambles catch at my shins, ripping at the skin, but my legs are numb and cold and I hardly feel the slashes, only the tearing thorns holding me back.
It is my nightmare. Only this time it’s not James I’m trying to save – it’s myself.
Behind me I hear the slam of a car door, and an engine revving. Full-beam headlights glimmer through the tree trunks, sweeping round in a great curve as the car does a slow U-turn and then begins to bump down the rutted drive.
The drive goes round in long curves, so as not to climb the hill too steeply. The woodland footpath is direct. If I run fast, I can do this. I can get to the road before Clare. And then what?
But I cannot think about that. My breath sobs between my gritted teeth and I force my shaking muscles to work harder, faster.
I just want to live.
I’m gaining speed. The path runs downhill more steeply here, and my muscles aren’t forcing me on now, but trying to check my headlong rush. I leap a fallen branch, and a badger’s sett, a dark hole in the pale scattered snow – and then, with a suddenness that punches the breath out of me, I smack into a tree.
I fall onto my hands and knees in the snow, my head ringing in agony. My nose is streaming blood – I can see it dripping into the snow as I pant and pant, and when I touch Nina’s cardigan, the front is dark and soaked with gore. I shake my head, trying to clear the shards and sparks shooting across my vision, and the blood spatters across the clearing.
I can’t stop. My only chance is to get to the road before Clare can cut me off. I steady myself, one hand on the tree trunk, trying to overcome the sick dizziness, and then I begin to run again.
As I run, pictures shoot through my head, sudden flashes, like a landscape illuminated by lightning.
Clare, in her wellies, slipping quietly out of the house in the early morning to send those texts from my phone, from the point in the forest where reception kicked in, leaving her footsteps in the snow for me to find.
Clare – waiting until Nina was safely gone, and then driving off into the dark – to what? To park quietly in a lay-by, and wait for James to bleed to death?
Clare – her face white in the moonlight, stiff with shock, as I burst out of the forest in front of the car, screaming at her to stop, let me in.
She stamped reflexively on the brakes, I scrambled into the passenger side. As I slammed the door, she glanced at me and James, both without seatbelts, and then, without trying to explain, gunned the engine and stamped on the accelerator.
For a second I didn’t understand. She was steering towards the tree that loomed out of the darkness.
And then I realised.
I grabbed for the steering wheel, my nails in her skin, wrestling for control of the car – and there it goes blank.
Oh God, I have to get to the road before she does. If she parks across the foot of the track and cuts me off, I’m lost.
Everything hurts. Jesus – everything hurts so much. But the pills that Clare gave me have one silver lining: they’ve taken the edge off enough to allow me to keep going, combined with my own fear and adrenaline.
I want to live. I never knew how much until now.
Oh Christ, I want to live.
And then suddenly, almost without realising it, I’m at the road. The forest path spews me out onto the tarmac, so fast that I stumble, trying to slow down enough to stop myself shooting into the path of a car. I stand there, hands on my knees, gasping and panting, and trying to work out which way to go.
Where is Clare?
I can hear a noise, I realise, the growl of an engine as it shoots over potholes and around bends. It’s not far off. She’s almost at the foot of the drive. And I can’t do it – I can’t run any more. I’ve pushed my body beyond what it can do.
I have to run, or I will die.
And I can’t. I can’t. I can barely stand – let alone put one foot in front of another.
Run, I scream inside my own head. Run, you fucking waste of space. Do you want to die?
Clare’s car is at the road. I see the blaze of her headlights just round the bend, lighting up the night.
And then there’s a horrendous, screaming squeal of tyres, and a bang like nothing I’ve ever heard. There’s shrieking rubber, and the screech of metal, car on car; a sound that seems to echo for ever in the forest tunnel, shrill in my ears. I stand, my eyes wide with horror, staring towards the sound of the collision.
And then silence – just the hiss of a radiator venting into the night air.
I cannot run any more. But I manage to walk, my legs shaking. I have lost my flip-flops and the tarmac must be cold as ice – but I can’t feel anything.
In the stillness I hear the sound of sobbing gasps, and the crackle of a radio. Then, with a suddenness that makes me jump and almost stumble, the trees are illuminated by a ghostly blue, flickering like flames.
One more step. One more. I force myself on, round the bend – towards whatever has happened.
But before I get there I hear a voice, a shaking female voice. She’s speaking into something – a phone? But as I get closer I see it’s a police radio.
It’s Lamarr. She is standing by the open door of her police car. There is blood running down her face, black in the flashing blue lights of the emergency siren. She’s speaking into the radio.
‘Ground control, urgent message.’ Her voice is shaking, there’s a sob in it. ‘Request immediate assistance and an ambulance, to the B4146 just outside Stanebridge, over.’ She’s standing there listening to the crackling reply. ‘Roger,’ she says at last, and then ‘No, I’m not hurt. But the other driver – look, just send the ambulance. And a fire crew, with … with cutting equipment, over.’
She sets the radio carefully down and then goes back to the other car.
‘Lamarr,’ I say, croakily, but she doesn’t hear. My limbs are so heavy I don’t think I can go another step. I hold myself up on a tree by the side of the road. ‘Lamarr …’ I manage, one more time, my voice a shaking thread against the hissing of the engine and the crackle of the radio. ‘Lamarr!’
She turns and looks, and then at last I let my knees give way, and I kneel on the cold, snow-wet tarmac, and I don’t have to run any more.
‘Nora!’ I hear through the fog. ‘Nora! Christ, are you hurt? Are you hurt, Nora?’
But I can’t find the words to reply. Lamarr is running towards me, and I feel her strong hands beneath my armpits as I collapse onto the road, holding me, lowering me slowly to the ground.
It’s over. It’s all over.