In a Dark, Dark Wood

I open my eyes.

‘We got James out to the car. We didn’t have anything to carry him so Tom took down a door. Clare was driving – Nina was supposed to go in the back seat with James, and I was going to direct.’

‘Supposed to?’

‘It … there was a misunderstanding. I’m not sure what happened. We got James into the car and we realised there wasn’t going to be room for all of us. I told Nina she should go with him – she’s a doctor – and I’d stay. She agreed, and we ran back into the house to get her phone and blankets for the car. But something happened …’

‘Go on.’

I shut my eyes, trying to remember. The events are starting to blur together. I remember Clare gunning the engine, and Tom calling something over his shoulder. ‘Why not?’ Clare shouted back. And then, impatiently, ‘Oh never mind, I’ll call when I get there.’

And then there was the grinding sound of tyres on gravel and I saw the red of her tail-lights as she bumped off down the rutted track to the road.

‘What the fucking fuck?’ Nina had shouted from upstairs. She skittered down the stairs and bellowed ‘Clare! What are you doing?’

But Clare was gone.

‘There was a misunderstanding,’ I say to Lamarr. ‘Tom said that he told Clare we were just coming, but Clare must have thought he said “They’re not coming.” She started off without Nina.’

‘And what next?’

What next? But that’s what I’m not sure of.

I remember Clare’s coat was hanging over the porch rail. She must have intended to take it and forgotten. I remember, I picked it up.

I remember …

I remember …

I remember Nina crying.

I remember standing in the kitchen, with my hands beneath the tap, watching James’s blood run down the plug hole.

And then … I don’t know if it’s the shock, or what happened after, but things begin to fragment. And the harder I push, the more I’m not sure if I’m remembering what happened, or what I think happened.

I remember picking up Clare’s jacket. Or was it Clare’s? I have a sudden picture of Flo at the clay-pigeon shoot, wearing a similar black leather jacket. Was it Clare’s? Or was it Flo’s?

I remember picking up the jacket.

I remember the jacket.

What is it about the jacket I can’t remember?

And then I’m running, running through the woods, desperate to stop them.

Something started me running. Something had me shoving my feet into my cold trainers with panicked desperation, and tumbling headlong down the narrow forest track, the torch swinging wild in my hand.

But what?

I look down. My fingers are cupped as though I’m trying to hold onto something small and hard. The truth, perhaps.

‘I can’t remember,’ I say to Lamarr. ‘This is when it starts to get really fuzzy. I can remember running through the trees …’

I stop, trying to piece it all together. I gaze up at the harsh striplight, and then back down at my hands, as if they can give me an inspiration. But my hands are empty.

‘We’ve got a statement from Tom,’ Lamarr says at last. ‘He says that you were holding something, looking down at it in your palm, and then you just took off, without even putting your coat on. What made you set off?’

‘I don’t know.’ There is rank desperation in my voice. ‘I wish I did. I can’t remember.’

‘Please try, it’s very important.’

‘I know it’s important!’ It comes out as a shout, shockingly loud in the small room. My fingers are clenched on the thin hospital blanket. ‘D-do you think I don’t know that? This is my friend, my – my—’

I can’t speak. I can’t come up with a word for what James is to me – was to me. My knees are drawn up to my chest, and I am panting, and I want to hit my head on my knees, and keep on hitting until the memories bleed out, but I can’t, I can’t remember.

‘Nora …’ Lamarr says, and I’m not sure if her voice is trying to soothe or warn me. Perhaps both.

‘I want to remember.’ My teeth are gritted. ‘M-more than you can believe.’

‘I believe you,’ Lamarr says. There is something sad in her voice. I feel her hand on my shoulder, and then there’s a bang at the door and the nurse comes in, pushing a trolley.

‘What’s going on here?’ She looks from me to Lamarr, taking in my tear-stained face and unconcealed distress, and her pleasant round face puckers in disapproval. ‘You, Missie, I’ll not have you upsetting my patients like this!’ She stabs a finger at Lamarr. ‘She’s not twenty-four hours after nearly killing herself in a car crash. Out!’

‘She didn’t—’ I try. ‘It wasn’t …’

But it’s only partly true. Lamarr has upset me, and in spite of my protest I’m glad to see her go, glad to curl on my side under the sheets as the nurse dishes up cottage pie and limp green beans, muttering under her breath about the high-handedness of the police, and who do they think they are, barging in here without so much as a by-your-leave, upsetting her patients, setting them back days if not weeks … A school-dinner smell fills the room as she plops and ladles and sets the tray down beside me.

‘Eat up now, pet,’ she says, with something close to tenderness. ‘You’re just skin and bone. Rice Crispies are all very well but they’re no food to get well on. You need meat and veg for that.’

I’m not hungry, but I nod.

When she’s gone though, I don’t eat. I just lie on my side, holding my aching ribs, and try to make sense of it.

I should have asked how Clare was, where she was.

And Nina, where is Nina? Is she OK? Why hasn’t she come and seen me? I should have asked all this, but I missed my chance.

I lie, staring at the side of the locker, and I think about James and about all we meant to each other, and everything I’ve done and lost. Because what I realised, as I held his hand and he bled all over the floor, was that my anger, which I had thought was black and insuperable and would never fade, was already going, bleeding out over the floor along with James’s life.

It has defined me for so long, my bitterness about what happened. And now it’s gone – the bitterness is gone, but so is James, the only other person who knew.

There is a lightness about that knowledge, but also a terrible weight.

I lie there, and think back to the first time – not the first time I met him, for that must have been when we were twelve or thirteen, younger perhaps. But the first time that I noticed him. It was summer term in Year 10, and James was playing Bugsy Malone in the school play. Clare was – of course – Blousie Brown. It was a toss-up between that and Tallulah but Blousie gets her man at the end and Clare never did like playing the loser.

I’d seen James before, in lessons, horsing about, flicking paper planes and drawing on his arm. But on stage … on stage he somehow lit the room. I had just turned fifteen, James was a few months off sixteen – one of the oldest in our year – and that year he had shaved a savage undercut into his hair, and twisted the remaining black curls on top into a little knot at the back of his skull. It looked punky and rebellious, but for Bugsy he had smoothed it down with hair oil and somehow, even at rehearsals in his school uniform, that simple thing made him look completely and utterly like a 1930s gangster. He walked like one. He stood like one, an invisible cigar clenched in the corner of his mouth so convincingly that I could smell the smoke – though there was nothing there. He spoke with a laconic twang. I wanted to fuck him and I knew that every other girl in the room, and some of the boys, felt the same way.

I knew what Clare thought, for she’d told me, hanging over the row of chairs behind me, whispering into my ear, her pink Blousie lipstick tickling my hair.

‘I’m going to have James Cooper,’ she told me. ‘I’ve made up my mind.’

I said nothing. Clare usually got what she wanted.

Nothing happened over the summer holidays, and I began to wonder if Clare had forgotten her promise. But then we went back to school, and I realised, from a thousand tiny things – the way she flicked her hair, the number of buttons undone on her school shirt – that Clare had forgotten nothing. She was just biding her time.