Our House by Louise Candlish (13)

13

Bram, Word document

Right, enough scene setting. Lies, infidelity, best bird’s-nest intentions, you get the picture: I was already a fucking moron before we even get to the main event. To the tragedy that should never have happened. The grave I dug for myself.

(Second thoughts, maybe that’s not the best metaphor.)

It was the third Friday of the new custody arrangements and I had a company away-day at a country house hotel near Gatwick. I was second on the bill to present, along with another sales manager, Tim, who, conveniently for me, had written the thing. It was a complicated journey involving a change of trains at Clapham Junction and a taxi at the other end and when I missed the first train from Alder Rise, even before the ‘Delayed’ sign flashed up for the next, I calculated that I wasn’t going to get to the venue in time. Standing there on the mobbed platform, I found it impossible not to think of the Audi parked a minute away on Trinity Avenue, especially when the calendar app showed no activities that might require its use after school. Best of all, Fi was not at home, as she usually was on a Friday, but had left early with Alison to go to some antiques fair in Richmond, driving in Alison’s Volvo, which meant I could nip to the house and get the car keys without running into her.

So I slipped from the station and took the back route past the school and along Wyndham Gardens to the house. I considered texting Fi that I was entering the property without prior agreement, but I couldn’t spare the half-minute that would take.

Thank God I didn’t. A message stating my intention to drive that day could have buried me.

Speeding only when I knew for certain there were no cameras, and with the last of the rush-hour traffic against me, I reached the hotel with minutes to spare, co-presented the mumbo-jumbo Tim had strung together and then suffered the demoralizing tedium that is a full day’s programme of strategic team building.

(Basket-making. I’ve just remembered. After lunch – at which I restrained myself and had only two glasses of wine – we did a basket-making workshop. For fuck’s sake.)

Now fast forward to the drive back home. Not only was I exhausted, but I was antsy as well, thanks partly to the need to get the car back and partly to the darkening of my door by a new HR executive called Saskia. She’d been emailing me for the last few weeks about the firm’s reissued contracts following our merger with a competitor earlier in the year, contracts that required disclosure, among other things, of any motoring convictions. (Did I mention I hadn’t yet declared my driving ban to work? Even at this stage, the blunders were stockpiling.) I’d stalled her for as long as I could, avoided eye contact during the day’s activities, but just before I’d left the venue, she’d materialized by my side.

‘Everyone else in sales has got their contract back to me,’ she said. ‘I just need yours. Can you make sure you bring it in on Monday?’

She was young and attractive and aware of it and somehow this only added to my agitation.

‘If not, I’d be happy to reissue a new one and find you a quiet spot to read it through during office hours?’ she offered.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘No problem.’ And I hung back so she wouldn’t see me walking to my car, which I’d parked in a different car park from the assigned one just in case the ban came to light and someone like Saskia remembered seeing me driving off.

I can’t go on like this, I thought. The constant ‘just in case’ precautions. I have to tell people. I have to tell Fi. Without a doubt, she would consider the lying as egregious as the ban itself, so perhaps I could present it as a brand-new development? A six-month ban that began in August, when we were out of touch? What was the worst she could do?

Well, she could pull the plug on the bird’s nest, keep herself at Trinity Avenue with the kids and consign me to the flat fulltime. Maybe not even that. Once the need to economize lost its appeal, I’d be out of there too, just another sad fuck living with his mates or parents. Penge. Childhood meals. Godliness.

Now, of course, I see how lucky I would have been to settle for those consequences. I could have negotiated with Fi. Even when at the end of her tether she was no monster. Besides, the law protected fathers’ visitation rights and far worse scumbags than me had regular access to their kids.

So, I was driving home, avoiding the main arteries as I’d learned to do while driving ‘rogue’, taking instead the unsurveilled parallel roads, long residential stretches like Silver Road in Thornton Heath, which was where I was when I got clogged behind a white Toyota.

I began flashing him to get a move on. Can you make sure you bring it in on Monday? I was thinking, screwing my face up at the memory of Saskia’s voice, low-pitched and syrupy, as if HR was psychotherapy not bureaucracy, when I lost my patience and pulled out to overtake the guy. I shouldn’t have bothered – obviously I shouldn’t have bothered – but if I was the kind of person who regularly exercised restraint then I wouldn’t have been in that mood in the first place; I wouldn’t have been churning myself up about what I was going to say to Saskia or Fi; I wouldn’t have lost my licence; I wouldn’t have been at the wheel illegally. I wouldn’t have been estranged from my wife. But I was this kind of person: sick with self-pity, prickly with the urgent, petty, short-term desire to get the upper hand over a stranger.

So, evidently, was he, because just as I was beginning to cut in front of him he accelerated, forcing me to straighten and abort my overtaking. For a second or two we drove side by side without acknowledging the other, our cars inches from touching. I could tell he was scowling and swearing at me, and I set my own face in a sneer before glancing left. He was just the kind of bloke I’d known he’d be: hard jaw, hard eyes, built in that solid way, like a weapon. And not just scowling but raging. The adrenaline rush I had on facing his fury was so powerful that all reason was lashed into its flow; as I put my foot down in a second attempt to overtake him, I felt an intense release of all the fear and impotence of the last few months.

Then I saw the car coming towards me and I changed my mind and braked, ready to concede defeat now, expecting to slot back in behind the Toyota and suffer the sight of a finger raised in victory as we reached the junction. But that wasn’t the way it played out. To my confusion, he braked as well, blocking my attempts to slip in behind, and we were continuing side by side, as parallel as if the cars were joined. Every mile-an-hour my speed dropped, his matched it – we were going at thirty, twenty-five, twenty – and yet the oncoming car didn’t seem to be slowing, a little Fiat 500, snub-nosed and innocent, with a driver who’d either decided to trust us to sort this out in time or wasn’t concentrating fully, until suddenly there wasn’t any time left. One of us had to get out of the lane or we would smash head-on. The Fiat swung sharply with a split second to spare, seeming to accelerate instead of brake, screeching off the road at speed and into an off-street bay with a parked car.

The force blasted the parked car against the front of the house. The noise was horrendous, not a crash so much as a crumpling, deafening even through sealed windows; God knows how it must have sounded outside. Now I moved into the correct lane, not daring to look over my shoulder at the wreckage before pulling over. A little way ahead of me, the Toyota waited, idling, and I could see the guy holding up his phone, calling for help, I assumed. Then, not quite believing it, I watched his brake lights go out and the car roar off.

I sat there, nauseous and immobilized, the pleading in my ears some shrill, desperate version of my own voice:

Pull yourself together. Turn around.

Go back. Get out of the fucking car and help.

At least phone for help!

Do it!

My hands floundered, hunting for my phone in my pockets, on the dashboard, in the door pocket full of coffee cups and bits of plastic toy. It was on the back seat, possibly. My right foot was on the brake pedal and the leg had begun to spasm. I put the handbrake on, turned to reach over my left shoulder, but the seatbelt locked.

Then I remembered who I was. I was a man banned from driving, on the road without insurance, against the law, probably over the alcohol limit. A man with prior criminal convictions (we’ll come to that). What had just happened was dangerous driving by anyone’s standards, even before the question of human injury or damage to property. There was no way around this, I was looking at a prison sentence. Shame. Confinement. Violence. Leo and Harry taken from me. The end of everything.

Breathe. Think. The road ahead was empty, the pavements clear. The Toyota was long gone. Light-headed now, scarcely capable of conscious thought, I took the handbrake off, hit the accelerator and pulled away.

Miraculously, I was able to drive fifty metres to the next junction without anyone passing in the opposite lane. The only moving car I saw was in my rear-view, its driver having clearly come to the crash scene and stopped to help, just as any normal citizen would have.

Looking in the mirror before making a left turn, I expected to see smoke or some other evidence of carnage, but there was nothing. Only the same rooftops, the same sky.

‘Fi’s Story’ > 00:57:22

On the third Friday, I arranged to stay overnight with friends in Brighton. While not following any formal strategy, I was once again avoiding time alone in the flat – this in spite of being exhausted after a day out with Alison, not to mention concerned about the expense of all this gadding about.

When Bram arrived at the house for the 7 p.m. handover, he was subdued and I guessed that he too was still adjusting to the new regime, trying as I was to align the serrated edges where practice joined theory.

‘It takes a bit of getting used to, doesn’t it?’ I said.

‘Huh?’

‘This. The new us.’

Before he could reply, the boys descended from their rooms, Harry first, then Leo, who shouldered ahead of the noisy upstart and misjudged the manoeuvre so they arrived in a sharp-elbowed tangle.

‘Daddy, we’re staying up late, aren’t we? Aren’t we?’

‘Shut up, Harry,’ Leo snapped.

‘You shut up.’

‘I said it first. But we are staying up, aren’t we?’

It had plainly been established that Bram’s nights were for fun, following the austerity of school nights, my nights. This was an unavoidable consequence of carving up the week the way we had, Rowan had warned, and I needed to remember it was not a popularity contest. Bram and I were comrades, not rivals. No longer a couple but still partners.

‘Not too late,’ I told the boys. ‘But Daddy will decide, he’s in charge. You okay, Bram?’ I noticed now the telltale pallor of the mortally hungover.

‘Sure. You know these team-building days, by the end of it you’ve lost the will to live.’

I nodded, my sympathy waning. I hadn’t been aware that he’d had a work event, but if he was stupid enough to indulge in a drinking session the night before then what did he expect? Besides, one of the benefits of our being separated was that I was no longer duty-bound to listen to his complaints about work (nor he mine, let’s face it). So long as we each made our financial contribution and respected the terms and conditions, we had a free pass on that. ‘Anything I need to know about the flat?’

‘No.’ He gathered his concentration. ‘The hot water issue finally seems to have resolved itself. There’s milk in the fridge, should be okay for the morning.’

‘Thanks, though I won’t be there till later tomorrow. I’m going down to Brighton tonight.’

Bram looked faintly alarmed. ‘You’re taking the car?’

‘No, I assumed you’d need it for swimming tomorrow, and Leo’s got a party in Dulwich, remember? I’ll take the train. I’m visiting Jane and Simon,’ I added, though he hadn’t asked. I supposed it was on the phone calendar if he was interested. ‘Kiss Mummy goodbye,’ I said, trying to encourage Harry and Leo towards me, but they evaded my affections.

‘Only boys allowed,’ Harry said, with cheerful callousness.

Bram, Word document

Sitting watching anime with the boys that evening, I stopped myself from using my phone or laptop to search for news reports of the crash, which meant an agonizing wait for the local bulletin after News at Ten. Nothing. Did I dare take this to mean that any injuries caused by the accident had not been serious, much less fatal? Did I dare picture a figure staggering from the driver’s seat, shaken but unscathed? A figure whose focus during the incident had been on the irresponsible road hogging of the Toyota and not on the recklessly overtaking Audi. After all, the whole thing had taken place in a matter of seconds, too fast and terrifying for any of us to absorb the detail.

Then again, I’d absorbed the detail.

I’d absorbed the crashed car’s brand, model, even the year of registration: 2013.

I’d absorbed the fact that in the front seat there’d been not one figure but two.

An adult and a child.