The taxi driver is drunk.
He is talking about St Ives again, saying he would buy every damn house, shop, gallery if he could, which would make him the fucking King of St Ives. He loves every inch of that place, but St Ives is a whore, a filthy whore, and when Alison asked why he was here instead of there she had no idea that she was pressing a button, flicking a switch. His disappointment, all over the dashboard. His despair, all over the passenger seat.
Now he is driving at fifty-seven miles per hour through a residential area. The front windows are open, and he can’t hear his passengers protesting behind him.
Sadie and Alison reach into their bags for their mobile phones but there’s no time to call the police. The car is swerving. The driver is shouting. They speed through four gardens and smash into a tree.
The driver jumps out, runs across the grass.
The surrounding houses begin to light up, windows and doors open, people rush outside. They were asleep, watching TV, arguing, making tomorrow’s packed lunch, having sex and, in one case, reorganizing a knicker drawer by colour and style, and now they are standing in their porches and front gardens staring at a taxi, a bent tree, a man running away.
Alison opens the car door. Without thinking, she also starts to run.
Sadie doesn’t register this at first. She is looking under the passenger seat for her mobile phone, which flew from her lap when the car swerved and crashed. She hears the door open, hears footsteps, has a horrible sense that something precious has gone. She fumbles in the dark, reaching as far forward as she can until her fingers find something hard, something rectangular.
A man’s voice: “You all right, love?” He is peering in, looking at a woman with her head between her knees, assuming that she is badly hurt.
Sadie straightens up, puffs out air as if she were in labour, holds up her phone. “I’m okay,” she says, breathless, “but only just.” And this, she realizes at that moment, is the story of Sadie Swoon. She is always okay, but only just. And what happens when you are only just okay? People take no notice, no one rallies round, nothing happens. This is middle-of-the-road life, a life of moderation, checklists (feed dog, pick Stanley up at six, buy padded bra) and as many raw vegetables as possible to extend this life of moderation, to make the endurance test go on and on.
“I always thought of myself as subversive,” Sadie says. “What a joke.”
“Right,” the man says. He is wearing stripy pyjamas.
“I bought him flowers all the time. I was always in charge of the barbecue.”
“I see,” the man says. This woman is clearly concussed. She is babbling. He turns away for a second to beckon his wife with a frantic wave.
“I’m the most sociable person you’ll ever meet,” Sadie says, “and mostly I dislike other people.” She buries her face in her hands but the tears she is expecting don’t come. She is emotionally constipated, has been for as long as she can remember. She is bunged up. Must’ve been those bloody antidepressants. Do they make laxatives for the psyche? What’s the emotional equivalent of a prune? She looks up at the man, who has been joined by a woman in a burgundy dressing gown.
“I’ve called an ambulance, dear,” the woman says, leaning in to take a good look. She sees something in Sadie’s face, a kind of anguish, a desperation that makes those five words seem grotesquely inadequate. She tightens the belt of her dressing gown and gets in the car. “You’re not alone, dear,” she says, pulling the door shut.
Sadie examines the stranger’s expression—warm and full of pity. Where is Alison Grabowski, the one who was here first, just moments ago? She leans forward, trying to see past the stranger’s massive breasts, wide shoulders, enormous hair, but all she can see is the woman’s husband, who seems to be drawing circles in the air with a sparkler but there is no sparkler.
“He wants me to open the window,” the woman says, expelling warm breath that smells of brandy. “But I see no need.”
Sadie feels sick. The woman’s perfume, body and breath are filling up the car, eating the air. Soon they will both suffocate. This woman has the power to do that. She is the sort of person who would hold a pillow over someone’s face and then potter off to bleach some cups when the deed was done. Oh yes, Sadie is completely sure of this. She sneers and shakes her head. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” she says.
“You’re concussed, dear,” the woman replies, smiling. Her mouth seems to bulge as if she has too many teeth.
“No,” Sadie says. It’s the same no she uses on Harvey when he pulls socks off the clothes horse and shakes them as if they were a rabbit. She opens the car door and gets out. An ambulance arrives, paramedics dive into the car and start assessing the woman in the burgundy dressing gown, and she goes along with it, she says I feel shell-shocked and strange, and her husband watches, knowing that his wife’s cumbersome tendency to snatch attention from anyone and everyone is gradually making him hate her—really hate her. She is the Pac-Man of middle-aged women, forever munching. That’s why her mouth seems to bulge—it’s full of what she has taken from other people and is incapable of digesting.
Sadie moves towards a small crowd on one of the front lawns. Huddled together in nighties, pyjamas, shorts and vests, they are watching Alison Grabowski, who is chasing the taxi driver from one immaculate lawn to the next. Someone says look at her go, she’s got balls that girl, but Sadie can’t tell where the voice is coming from. Look at her go, she’s bloodywell got him, she’s on top of him. Give the girl a round of applause!
And she is. She is on top of him. It looks sexual but it isn’t (although one can never be sure).
“Quite a woman,” says the man in stripy pyjamas, whose Pac-Woman wife is now sitting in an ambulance with a blanket around her shoulders.
“Yes,” Sadie says, but the word breaks, splits in her mouth, tastes like metal.
The man hears it break. He checks his pockets for a tissue to give to this woman, but there are no pockets—just flappy pyjamas, big blue buttons, flannelette. He feels useless, underdressed.
A woman’s voice: “Are you crying?” It’s Alison. A word accidentally slips from her mouth: “Darling?” she says.
“I don’t cry,” Sadie says.