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When she was fit enough to leave St Andrews, Beth was picked up by her younger brother, Jody. As he slowly wheeled her in a chair past the garish artwork in the hospital corridor, she was still unnerved by how such a catastrophic episode in her life hadn’t rippled the world around her. It just sounded small, like she was listening to everything through a tinny speaker.
In her head was the same circuit of thought she’d woken with. She’d been driving. That much was certain. Was Luc’s death entirely her fault? Why had he been whispering “sorry”? Did he feel he was to blame? She had no recollection of how they’d ended up in the wreckage. However much she tried to negotiate the solid block of darkness lodged between their setting off for the restaurant and their being suspended from the ceiling of the car, it remained immovable. Was she deliberately blocking out the trauma to avoid facing her responsibility for it?
But she couldn’t understand how Luc had broken his neck when his airbag had inflated. The police had said he hadn’t been wearing his seatbelt. But he’d been hanging in the car as she had. If he’d released himself, it didn’t seem possible he could have sustained the injury with such a short fall. Would he still be alive if the driver from the brown camper had helped instead of assaulted her? Why had he kicked her? Was it because they’d struck him? Had he also attacked Luc?
During their visits, Jody and her parents had relayed everything that had occurred while she was oblivious, did their best to fill the other void between the French roadside and waking in St Andrews.
Beth visualised her unconscious self being wheeled from the first casualty department, where the doctors had worked on her, and flown to the ward at home, and at the same time Luc’s lifeless body being transported to the morgue, the undertaker’s and then to the Rouen crematorium near his mother’s house. She tried to imagine what she might have read for him if she’d been at the service but found it impossible to even project herself there.
Luc had been cremated. Even though they should have just moved into their new home together, he was now in an urn at his mother’s. She’d taken charge of the ashes in Beth’s absence and they were now in Quincampoix. His father had died before their wedding, and Luc had been estranged from his mother because of the handful of men she had chosen to make his interim stepfathers. He had plenty of friends and work colleagues to grieve him but no other family.
The holiday in the Forêt domaniale de Lyons had been their escape from solicitors, paperwork and an attempted mugging that had been the reason for their move from Edgeware to Wandsworth. The move date had been delayed and had made them both fractious. They’d spent the fortnight prior to it living out of boxes, sitting on telescopic chairs and yelling at each other. The rows had always come back to the same issue.
They’d decided to abscond and rent their usual holiday accommodation, Gîte Saint Roch, a converted timbered barn in Luc’s favourite corner of Normandy. It was in one of the most beautiful European beech forests, and it was where she’d proposed to him three years earlier. She’d beaten him to it by one day.
Luc had delayed asking her while he’d waited for the perfect conditions. When the sun shone through the slender trunks, it was like being inside a natural cathedral. But Tuesday had been overcast so he’d decided to wait.
They’d both known it would be a race to that question on that first holiday. The time had felt right. He’d produced the citrine ring after she’d proposed. Citrine was her birthstone and it had still been on her finger as she’d watched her hands dragging her body away from the car wreck.
It was Beth who’d suggested the last-minute January getaway. If she hadn’t, they would now be safely ensconced in their new house. Everything waited for her, boxed and in storage. She thought about the two of them wrapping up their life in newspaper and how she’d never conceived she might have to unwrap it alone.
It seemed like a premonition now. Luc had been ruthless when they’d emptied out the memory chest as they’d packed up in their Edgeware home. Most of its contents had gone to the dump. All their cards to each other, birthday and otherwise, all the mementos they’d kept from restaurants they’d eaten at and postcards from places they’d visited – they’d all been disposed of, and she’d felt a pang as they’d tipped them into bin bags. It was almost as if he’d been preparing for what happened. All those ephemeral keepsakes took on a new significance now. She supposed they’d been covered over in some landfill or incinerated as Luc had been.
Jody wheeled her out into the car park’s cold morning air and opened the passenger door of his muddy tungsten Golf Mk7. She delicately climbed in. He’d been doing his best with the clichéd platitudes. Beth acknowledged how difficult it must have been for her younger brother to comfort her when their communication from childhood had always steered clear of any displays of emotion.
“You hungry?” Jody broke the silence as they pulled out into the main road.
“Not really.”
“Sorry, I’m fucking famished. Do you mind if we stop somewhere?”
“Sure.” She looked through the window at the grey sky mirrored in the tower blocks on either side of them. Her own reflection barely registered behind the bright white squares of the remaining gauze plasters around her mouth. She glanced down and found she had a tissue-wrapped bunch of canary-yellow lilies in her lap. She vaguely remembered Jody handing them to her in the ward. Cars beeped behind them, and Beth realised Jody was driving deliberately slowly. It had barely occurred to her she was back in the front seat of a car.
They stopped off at a down-at-heel burger bar that smelt of stale cooking oil. Beth seated herself in the window seat and examined the smudges on the glass while Jody ordered. After a few moments she noticed a young couple in the car park having an argument while they loaded up their car with shopping. She wondered how many times she and Luc had fought and how much time it had accounted for – days, months? Their last major quarrel at home had been pretty intense. The fallout from it had hung about like a bad smell for days afterwards.
Jody dropped onto the red plastic chair opposite and his arms trembled as he raised the meat-stacked bun to his mouth. Beth noticed they were the only customers. What time of the morning was it, anyway? She glimpsed his watch and saw it was just after eleven.
He chewed robotically, and a string of melted cheese undulated on his ginger beard. A closely cropped crown of the same colour circled the sides of his bald head. Beth had seen him like this plenty of times. Low blood sugar turned him into a zombie. He’d put on a lot of weight since last year. That was the last time she’d seen him prior to the crash. Her mother had told her he’d developed type 2 diabetes. Good to see he’d modified his diet. She decided not to point out that he’d bitten off a corner of the wrapper as well.
Jody swallowed a lump of ground beef and briefly closed his eyes to savour the moment like a much-needed fix. He breathed with difficulty past his adenoids and then continued munching with his mouth open, sucking in air so he didn’t have to stop eating. When he opened his eyes, there seemed to be more of his personality present. “Sorry, but I would have keeled over.”
“Thanks for picking me up...and sorry they made you wait so long.”
Jody nodded, but his gaze left hers. He was uncomfortable with anything that wasn’t a joke or a statement of fact. Fortunately, it suddenly started raining hard and they both sought refuge through the pane. The couple got in their car to resume their squabble and thick rivulets poured down the window as if the burger bar were going through a car wash.
“Your swelling has gone down.”
Beth found Jody studying the bottom portion of her face when she turned back to him.
“Looks much better now.” He took another bite, not shifting his eyes from her mouth.
“Considering...” Beth knew she didn’t need to elaborate.
Jody had listened to her account several times and didn’t appear to want to hear it again. For a moment it looked as if he was going to use his chewing as an excuse not to answer. “They’re still saying your airbag didn’t deploy properly?” He knew they were.
“It deployed. Both of them did. And before you quote the accident report again, we both had our belts on. We were hanging from our seats by them.” She could see Jody’s eyes glaze. He’d been understanding but had been trying to persuade her that constantly analysing an incident she could only partially remember was going to drive her crazy. She repeated her version of events anyway. “I only undid mine to crawl out of the car. Luc probably removed his after I blacked out. Why does nobody believe that?”
He examined her injured face as if it were explanation enough and then looked back out at the couple again. “Like they say, maybe your memory is still dealing with last year’s mugging.”
“I know what I saw. There’s no connection between what happened at the roadside and what happened in a car park five months ago.” But even though they were becoming less frequent, Beth still had her own nocturnal flashbacks to the first incident.
She had been watching Luc put the groceries in the car when she saw the shadow of the hoodie with the baseball bat on the concrete wall. She’d turned and lashed out at them and her fist had connected with their mouth. She’d felt it wet on her knuckles and their teeth had left several dents in them. The attacker had run off, leaving them both unharmed but shaken. The police had done little even though CCTV had captured the incident.
“Luc was still depressed about it. He needed the trip to France more than I did. I knew it was because he felt he should have protected me. If that hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t have been on that road.”
“You can’t think like that.”
She knew he was right, but the idea of one trauma leading to another had occupied her thoughts the whole time she’d been recuperating. “I told him we couldn’t run from violence. Look where it got us. We left muggings and drug culture and moved to a neighbourhood targeted by the East Hill Sniper.”
The sniper had hit the news while they were still waiting for the keys to the house. The gunman had taken random shots at wealthy residents from a high-rise block less than half a mile from where their new home had been built.
“I’ve been told you either live amongst it or in a place that invites it.”
It was what one of her witnesses had said to her. Even having spent six years as a victim-support counsellor, she’d still rejected it. Now she wasn’t so sure.
“But I didn’t expect to find it when I crawled out of our car.”
“Every doctor who examined you said your injuries were sustained in the crash.”
“I know the man who attacked me was real, Jody. Luc was the one still troubled by the mugger.”
“Your brain took a real knock. I’d be surprised if things didn’t get all shook up.”
“Then why did the other driver flee the scene?”
“The camper was unlicensed.” Jody closed his eyes to relate the fact to her once more.
“Maybe he thought he could rob us first.”
“But from your account, he could have done that very easily, without any resistance from either of you. And nothing had been taken from your bag or... the wallet.”
Beth realised he was avoiding mentioning Luc’s name. “Perhaps he was disturbed when the coach arrived–” but she didn’t continue. There was no point sustaining a conversation she’d already had with him and the police a dozen times over. She hadn’t been able to alert them to the assault until after she’d emerged from her coma. By then there were no longer any palpable leads to the vanished driver or his trashed camper. It had been scrapped weeks after it had been towed from the site. Plus the Normandy police had barely hidden their suspicion that the assault story had been an attempt to cover up the fact she and Luc had been less than safety-conscious in the car.
Jody looked out at the car park again. “Our guardians are still on their Med cruise until Sunday night.” Jody always called them that. It was a joke, but also his way of reinforcing the distance he felt towards their parents. It was one of the few things she had in common with him. “So you’re welcome to stay at mine.”
She’d never been invited to her brother’s pad before. Had no idea what sort of place he lived in. Her father had texted the night before, apologising for not being back for her return, but saying that Jody would give her a key to the house and to make herself at home in the meantime. She’d dismissed their offers of cancelling their holiday when it was unclear when she would be discharged from hospital. They hadn’t taken much persuasion.
“Thanks for the offer...” She examined Jody’s face for a reaction. Was he just saying it because he felt he should, or was it a genuine gesture? Jody at least appreciated that the last place she wanted to be was in an empty house, whether it was their parents’ or a new home with stacks of boxes to unpack.
He looked down into his fries without meeting Beth’s eye on the way. “I mean it. There’s a box room; you can have some private time. If you need to get away from all the shit.” He prodded his food around the carton.
“That’s really kind...” Beth didn’t mean to say it the way she did, leaving the sentence hanging as if she couldn’t think of an excuse to say no.
Jody rose, closing and stacking his food cartons. “I’ll eat the rest of this on the way.” He shuffled awkwardly out of the fixed seat, his belly dragging along the loose salt at the edge of the brown tabletop.
They moved to the exit and stood in the doorway looking out at the rain.
Jody covered his shaved head with an old Gentleman Jack baseball cap. “Ready?”
“It would be good not to have to deal with the shit when they come back.”
“I’m not just talking usual parental stuff. They’ve had reporters calling at the house.”
“Why?”
Jody didn’t turn. “Those clips of you on the Internet; you’re an online celebrity.”
