Hello Friend We Missed You

I have to return some videotapes m8 (pt2/2)

Hill looks at the phone screen and puts the phone down on the passenger seat. It’s started raining heavily, making it difficult to see much through the windscreen. It’s dark outside and Hill remembers how he used to walk along this road as an eighteen-year-old when he couldn’t afford a taxi back from the pub. On one of these nights he witnessed an accident, a car had hit a kerb, flipped, and split itself in two on a tree. As an ambulance, fire engine, and several police cars arrived, Hill hid in a bush on the other side of the road and watched for two hours as they dragged bodies and body parts out of the wreckage. When Hill arrived home later that night, shaking and staggering from room to room, he saw light escaping from underneath Roger’s study door. As he began turning the door handle he heard the sound of Roger quietly crying. Hill let go of the door handle and walked upstairs to his room and lay quietly on his bed, awake, until the morning.

Above the sound of the rain, now torrential, Hill hears the sound of the phone vibrating.

Probably Jack, Hill thinks.

Probably Trudy, Hill thinks.

Hill picks the phone up and reads texts from Domino’s:

Hello Friend We Missed You

Hello Friend We Missed You comes through another ~ten times in quick succession before Hill puts the phone back on the passenger seat, facing down.

Hello Friend We Missed You, Hill thinks.

Hill reaches underneath the passenger seat and pulls out Roger’s MacBook. He takes it out of the tweed case and opens the screen, the light illuminating the cabin’s filthy plastic dashboard and watermarked ceiling. He opens Final Cut Pro and clicks on A Quiet Island. Hill clicks play and the video freezes instantaneously, the cursor turning into a small, perpetually spinning rainbow.

, Hill thinks.

Hill closes his eyes, tunes in to the sound of the rain battering the car, and passes out.