‘Matt? Matt?’
She leaned over him, panic pressing heavily on her forehead and squeezing the air from her lungs like a vice. What was she going to do? Clearly in his delusional pain he had overlooked the fact that she couldn’t drive the camper van. Well, that wasn’t entirely true, she could drive but…
She looked around the van, then at the rain lashing ferociously on the windscreen obscuring the road ahead. She felt like she had landed in the middle of a scene from a horror movie as every bit of daylight seemed to have been sucked from the sky by the storm. Nausea rumbled in the pit of her stomach as she dashed outside, panicking as terror overtook every one of her senses. She squinted through the deluge in the hope that an errant tourist would pass by so she could flag them down and beg a lift to the hospital. But how long would that be? And was it fair to make Matt wait?
She clambered into the back of the camper van and unearthed a couple of blankets. She rolled one up and slotted it under Matt’s head and the other she draped over his prostrate body. Then she climbed into the driver’s seat and yanked it forward so she could reach the pedals comfortably. This wasn’t exactly how she had envisaged her first time behind a steering wheel after such a long abstinence when Alice or Lauren or one of her other friends’ nagging forced her to eventually deal with her demons.
She turned the key in the ignition and a shock of electricity shot through her as the engine rumbled into life. Her fingers trembled on the wheel, not from the cold but from fear. She couldn’t prevent her thoughts from screaming back to a similar rain-soaked night when she and Brad had enjoyed a rare night out at the theatre and she’d offered to drive them home so he could have a glass of Merlot at the interval.
She hadn’t seen the Mercedes come screeching through a red light so she hadn’t been able to avoid the inevitable collision. Brad’s beloved BMW Roadster had been fatally wounded, or so you would have thought from the way he’d described the deep gouge that had been taken out of the passenger door. He had blamed her, despite it being blatantly obvious that it wasn’t her fault and the fact that the Mercedes driver had leapt from his vehicle and apologised profusely.
It had been their first major argument and she had found afterwards that she had lost her nerve to negotiate the capital’s streets. She hadn’t offered to drive again and she’d just got used to Brad always taking the wheel whenever they left London for a weekend away.
And here she was, her confidence in her driving abilities in tatters, staring at the road before her. And it was raining, just like it had been that night. She felt paralysed, all thought and movement frozen out of her body. Every muscle tensed until the burn of her grip on the steering wheel invaded her hands and the pain dragged her mind back to the challenge that lay before her.
Could she really drive Matt to hospital or was that another accident waiting to happen? She thought about how far she had come in other areas of her life since the beginning of the Cornwall assignment. How, with Matt’s constant positivity and encouragement, she had been able to face up to the fact that she had allowed Brad’s overbearing personality to hold her back professionally and creatively and that Brad’s jealousy was his problem, not hers.
Now it was her turn to repay the favour, to deliver a random act of kindness to even up the karma. Matt had done so much for her over the last two weeks and, despite what had happened last night, she owed him tremendously.
She dragged every ounce of courage she possessed from the depleted reservoir, slotted the camper van’s gear stick into first and released the handbrake. Before slowly lifting her foot from the clutch, she took a final glance over her shoulder and made her decision. She clenched her teeth. This was it – her first foray into the motoring world for two years. Her heart pounded to the determined mantra she had used many times in the past when presented with difficult issues.
You can do it! You can do it! You can do it!
She squeezed the accelerator and steered the Satsuma Splittie out of the car park and onto the road towards the town. She could hear the blood whooshing through her ears, her throat had tightened and her breath came out in spurts. Perspiration tickled under her arms and between her breasts. She concentrated hard on the various manoeuvres necessary to keep the van on the road and heading in the right direction, driving as swiftly and smoothly as possible to spare Matt from prolonged pain.
The frantic journey seemed endless. Her temples throbbed and she wasn’t even aware of the tears coursing down her cheeks. She had tensed her jaw so tightly the muscles in her face ached and she could taste the sharp metallic tang of blood on her lower lip.
Darkness wrapped its velvety cloak around the windows and softened the sharp edges of the road ahead. Thankfully, the rain had driven those fell-walkers and hikers of a more sensible disposition to the warmth and comfort of a real fire and a hearty plate of food in one of the many country pubs she passed on the way.
‘Ergh,’ groaned Matt as she took a corner a little too sharply.
The manoeuvre sent a spasm of terror through her heart before she managed to right the van. ‘Hang on, hang on. We’re nearly there.’
Another five minutes of sheer hell and she pulled into the neon-illuminated car park of the hospital. She allowed a heavy breath to escape her lungs as she straddled two parking bays and leapt from the driver’s seat to slide back the camper van door. Realising she couldn’t move Matt by herself, she dashed into the reception area to ask for help, gabbling an almost incoherent explanation about an accident on the moors in the rain.
After that everything became a blur of activity as paramedics strapped Matt onto a trolley and wheeled him away to triage. She slumped down onto an uncomfortable plastic chair in the waiting room, removed a packet of tissues from the pocket of her borrowed cagoule and blew her nose. A bout of violent trembling overtook her, and when a man with an impressive Gandalf beard handed her a cardboard cup of sweetened tea she had never been so grateful for anything in her life and promptly burst into tears.