6

Accident-Accident

By Tamworth, the fog was so thick she could barely see beyond a few yards. The watery outline of trees seeped into air, with crows roosting in the branches like big black buds. There was no horizon and no sky. You might have thought this was the only place left in the world, a service station on the M42. Maureen phoned Harold from the car park, once she’d had a change of clothes. The coach of football fans spilled out of the entrance, holding their flags above their heads and singing, “Eng-a-land! Eng-a-land!”

Harold said, “An accident? What do you mean, an accident? Are you hurt? What happened?”

“No. The car is fine. There’s not even a dent on the bumper.” The air wrapped itself around her, like a wet bandage.

“I wasn’t worrying about the car. I’m not worried about the car at all.”

“Well,” she said, “that’s because you don’t drive any more.”

He gave a soft and slightly creaky noise that she knew was him smiling. “No, Maureen. It isn’t because of that. It’s because you’re my wife and the car isn’t. The car is a car.”

“Well, I just wanted to say I’m fine. Nothing broken.” She was talking in an oddly bright voice she didn’t like, but she couldn’t bear to tell him about the other car that had stopped or the young man who had got out to help her. From the motorway she heard sirens and saw flashing blue lights within the fog as police and ambulances wove north. “Now they’ve closed the M42 completely. There’s been an accident.”

“Another accident?”

“Yes. Not like mine. Mine was nothing. I only hit a patch of black ice and swerved into the hard shoulder. This was a lorry. I have to follow a detour.”

“Poor you.”

“It could add another hour. More, maybe. I don’t know.” She held tight to her mobile. She didn’t want him to hang up. Not yet. But she also didn’t know what to tell him. Out of nowhere, she had a picture in her head of him tying back brambles once on an overgrown path, so that other people would not get hurt. It was such a Harold thing to do. She wanted to cry but she could not let herself. “How is Rex?” she said. “Is he with you?”

“Yes. Rex is here. We’re playing drafts.”

“Hello, Maureen!”

“Ask him if he took his pills.”

“Maureen says, ‘Did you take your pills?’ ”

“Yes, Maureen!”

“Have you been eating properly?”

“Very well.”

“Don’t just eat sandwiches.”

“We won’t.”

There was a moment of silence that felt longer than it was. Harold said slowly, “Are you all right, Maureen?”

“Of course I am. I’ve had a bit of a shock, but I’m fine.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m positive.”

“So long as you’re sure. You know I’m here whenever you need me.”

“So am I, Maureen!”

“Thank you,” she said. “Tell Rex thank you too.”

“We know you can do this.”

“You can do this, Maureen!”

“Make sure you drive carefully.”

“I will. And don’t forget to eat.”

“We won’t.”

“Promise me. Not just sandwiches all day. Sandwiches are not enough. They’re not a proper meal.”

And he said yes. He promised. “Not just sandwiches,” he said. “We will eat proper meals.”

---

—

This was what she did not tell him. Could not, in fact. About the kindness of the young man who had stopped to help her. The kindness that had made everything a hundred times worse. Because there she had been, with the front of her car at an angle and right against the barrier of the hard shoulder, shocked but not injured, and not a disgrace either, when a young man pulled up behind and leaped out. He signaled at her to unwind her window and leaned down to ask if she needed an ambulance. He was wearing no coat, in her distress she somehow noticed that, but he looked clean, his chin shaved soft and pink, his parting straight, and his sweater ironed—the sort of young man her mother had once hoped Maureen would marry. She insisted nothing was wrong but he wouldn’t go away. He was hell-bent on being helpful. Suddenly all she could think about was a tight-bunched feeling in her bladder.

“You might be in shock,” he was saying. “Is there anyone you would like me to ring? Are you sure you can move your legs?”

“I need a washroom,” she said, in her best telephone voice.

“Come again?”

Too late. She had wet herself. Right there in front of the lovely clean young man with no coat. She moved her legs to keep him happy and it all just happened. An involuntary dissolving of her body that briefly felt delicious, followed by a terrible warm flow between her thighs. Afterward the traffic began to move again, but slowly, and she had to reverse into the waiting queue, with this man now in his car behind her, knowing full well what she had done, and she had to drive twenty miles in that slow procession of traffic, sitting in her own wetness. She was disgusting. She said it aloud, “You are disgusting, Maureen Fry.” And then she had to walk into the service station with something from her suitcase, hiding her behind with her handbag. She headed straight for the washroom and there she yanked out a wedge of paper towels and soaked them with water before locking herself inside a cubicle.

“Pooh-ee. That old lady stinks,” she heard a child say.

She could have died. She could have died of the shame. She waited for someone to use the hand-dryer before she stuffed her soaked underwear into one of those bags for sanitary towels and shoved it into the bin. Then she had dressed—all the while balanced in that tiny cubicle—in her clean underwear and slacks that were supposed to be for tomorrow, trying her best not to get them on the tiled floor because it too was wet, while everywhere she looked there were poster adverts for period-proof underwear. Oh, the world made no sense. She walked out of the washroom with her chin high, but feeling scorched. In the shop, she found antiseptic wipes and took them to the self-checkout because the last thing she wanted was any kind of conversation with another human being.

And now here she was, back at the car, cleaning the driver’s seat. She should have listened to the assistant with green fingernails. She should have bought those three air fresheners.

“Okay,” a man was saying to his wife, as they passed. “Okay. I may not know what I’m talking about but anyone with any sense would agree with me.” They each nursed a tiny dog in the crook of their arms.

Maureen drove on. From Tamworth the traffic was directed to Atherstone, but then there were roadworks and yet another detour. A detour of a detour. She didn’t know that was even possible. Worse, the smell was still on her and it was in the car too and all she could think of was a hot shower. She tried to keep her mind on the road ahead and not allow her thoughts to drift but it was hard when everything looked the same. “I want a dog! I want a dog!” David used to say. There was a Christmas they had given him a fluffy toy that went, “Woof! Woof!” when you pressed a button, and even sat on its back paws, as if it were begging, and he had said, “Oh! A dog!” But she had caught him afterward, staring at the garden with the toy dog back in its box, and she had known, with a dropping away in her heart, the disappointment.

The traffic reached a standstill on a dual carriageway. The banks were littered with plastic. Fly-tipping: a row of ten bin bags someone had arranged in a line. She was behind the coach of football supporters again. They waved their flags out of the windows and she watched anxiously, not wanting them to notice her. People began to get out of their cars and lorries and walked where pedestrians were not allowed to go. They climbed the central reservation and tried to see what was going on ahead. They got out their phones and even spoke to one another, complete strangers. Then the football fans jumped down from the coach, carrying beers and waving their flags, knocking on people’s car windows. Maureen sat very tight and still. A car of young women waved to the football fans and got out too, laughing, even though they were dressed in tiny tops that were more like bras, and began sharing beers with them, as if they were in a club. Young people, thought Maureen. There was something about the glint in their eye, and the carelessness. And yet she had been the same once. Hard to believe, but she had thought she was on the cusp of the future. She had honestly believed history was all a kind of rehearsal and the real business of life would begin, with Maureen at the center. She would pass her school exams with flying colors and go to university to read French—no one else in her village had gone to university—and life would happen. She would meet other people like her, gifted and exalted, clever people, who wore berets and smoked those French cigarettes and talked about philosophy. Not that she had read any yet, but she would. Hadn’t her father always told her? She could do anything if she put her mind her to it.

Ahead, the traffic began slowly to move. People got back in their cars. Beyond the fog, she saw nothing but industrial units the size of hangars.

On and on. So slow it would have been quicker to walk. Briefly the fog cleared and the sun threw out pale arms as if it were drowning in cloud. A gorse bush flashed yellow sparks. After another half-hour, Maureen pulled over at a lay-by to stretch her legs. There was one of those vans where you could buy burgers and kebabs and the smell was of overheated rubber and hot fat. She was too exhausted to eat but she finished her flask of coffee.

At the opposite side of the lay-by, a man was sitting alone in the back of his car, with the windows steamed up. He seemed not to be doing anything. She even wondered if he was asleep. Suddenly he opened the door, walked to the bin and emptied a plastic bag of water bottles and polystyrene food trays into it, then smoothed his plastic bag and folded it into a neat square. He pulled a toothbrush out of his pocket and a tube of toothpaste, cleaning his teeth and spitting onto the ground, before returning to his car and getting once again into the backseat. He was wearing smart casual clothes. If he had seen her, he didn’t acknowledge it.

As Maureen drove on, she thought about the man in the car and wondered how long he had been there. Days, probably. It was possible he had no home. But there was only so much you could see of another person’s trouble without getting lost yourself. Better not to get involved in the first place. A truck slowly overtook her, piled high with discarded Christmas trees. A flock of crows flew out, like charred scraps.

In her mind, Maureen was back in David’s room. After Harold’s walk, she had decided to redecorate that too. She had chosen a bright shade of yellow and taken down the blue curtains and made flowered chintz ones instead. It had felt right. Like a fresh page. Peaceful, even. She put a desk in there, thinking she might try her hand at poetry, though the few times she tried, she gave up. The words she wanted would not come, or lost their color the moment she put them together. It was no wonder she’d flunked her exams at school and ended up at secretarial college instead of university: it turned out she was not so special after all.

David’s room had stayed the same for several years, sherbet yellow and empty. She could go past his closed door without hurting, or even feeling the need to go inside and talk to him the way she once used to. It was the pandemic that changed things. Everyone forced to stay at home. She found herself going back into the room, if only to be in a different space. And it had struck her then with a force that made her weak how ferociously empty it was, and how ghastly and yellow, and how much she did not like those flowery chintz curtains. She did not like them one bit. So she had begun to fetch things of David’s out of the loft and put them back. His books, his trinkets, his photographs. One by one. She even found his old blue curtains and re-hung them. Harold had said nothing. Maybe he didn’t notice. Sometimes she thought they were heading in opposite directions—as if she was now responsible for carrying all those things he felt free to let go. And yet the room was all wrong. Even if she made it blue again, she would still see the yellow. She would still know she had tried to pack David’s things away. It left her with a bitter, vinegary feeling. The only thing she had left of David was his room and, look, she had vandalized it.

From far away came a fresh memory of looking at him as a baby when he was so small and black-haired, and realizing, with a sense of responsibility that terrified her, that nothing lay between him and the loneliness of the world except her, all her love and her fear, but mostly her fear, because if anything happened to him, she would not be able to bear it. She would not survive. She had never known such silence as the moment she found out he was dead.

Maureen pictured the trinkets she had placed back in his room—a china zebra and a wooden horse and a glass deer, the photograph of him as a baby. Such meager scraps on which to heap all her great love. The emptiness stretched between them on the shelves. Where were all those words he had once told her that she must have forgotten, or misunderstood, all those stories, all those ideas, never realizing how little she would have left of him one day? How was she supposed to bear the weight of so many things she still couldn’t understand?

The traffic poured back onto the M1. Loughborough, Kegworth. Nottinghamshire at last. Welcome to Robin Hood County! Maureen shook her head. She groaned. All this relentless thinking and remembering, and she had still over two hundred miles to go. Stuck in the car, she was exposed only to herself, with no Harold to dilute her. Smoke tumbled upward from chimneys. The coach of football fans was back and they pointed down at her and laughed, and even though it surely wasn’t possible they knew what she’d done earlier, she couldn’t help feeling that they did. She thought of home, where everything was clean and in the right place, and the pink bathroom suite with its brass taps and matching pink tiles, which didn’t need replacing, not really, and she thought of Harold padding downstairs in his bare feet that still bore the scars from his walk to Queenie. She thought of the man living in his car and how much she did not want to dwell on other people’s sadness.

Maureen swung off at the next exit, and pulled over at the first garage. She didn’t even make it to a proper parking space. She reached for her mobile and as soon as he answered she told him she’d made up her mind. She was turning round.

“But why?” he said. “Why?”

“Harold, I had an accident-accident. It wasn’t just the car. I wet myself. I actually did that. And now I’m wearing my clothes that are supposed to be for tomorrow and I want a shower, Harold. I want a shower. I can’t do this. I’m not like you. And I’ve only just passed Nottingham. I won’t even get to the guesthouse in time for dinner. I’m coming home.”

There was a pause during which he said nothing and then there came his voice with its familiar soft creakiness.

“Oh, Maw. We’re getting older. That’s all. But you wanted to see the garden. You couldn’t get it out of your head. And now you’re more than halfway. So why don’t I look for Kate’s number and ask if you can stay there for the night? It doesn’t matter if you arrive late. You won’t feel right unless you do this, Maureen.”

Listening to him, she felt her heart swing wide open. He understood and accepted her for who she was, in the same way, many years ago, that she had watched him dance as a young man, all arms and jumping about, ignorant and out of place, and she had accepted him too. Maureen had not known what she was for until the day she met Harold: all she wanted after that was to stand between him and the rest of the world. In love and loved. It would be fanciful to say the fog was clearing but she thought there was a thinness to the cloud where she hadn’t seen it before. A promise of blue, even if it wasn’t there yet.

So Maureen did what he told her. She got back on the road. Rex texted her a list of directions to Kate’s home and a smiley emoji.

Ten minutes later, her phone gave another ping from the passenger seat and there came one more text from Rex. This time it was an attachment to a map, with an arrow showing where she could stop at a service station and take a shower.

The emoji he chose was a unicorn with hearts for eyes. She didn’t understand the point of it. But still. She smiled.