Tuesday, 28 March, 8.45 a.m.
She didn’t have to wait long to find out.
The irony of it all was that the day had started so well.
Martha had sprung out of bed and thrown back the curtains to let in sunshine. It seemed like the first day of spring – the first really hopeful day of the year after a miserably soggy winter when homes had been flooded just in time for Christmas and the temperatures kept warm enough to harbour the most persistent of colds and influenza. Everyone had seemed to be coughing or sniffing or sneezing into tissues. People felt they had been robbed of winter’s purifying frosts and seasonal traditions: sledging and bracing walks in ice-cold sunshine, skating on ponds. That was what winter was about – not this country drowning in mud. There had been something too reminiscent of WWI in the mud, something equally dreary and dismal about the perma-dull skies and the ever-present sound of rain hammering down on roofs. Added to that the people of Shrewsbury had worried and watched the River Severn swell almost to bursting only to be held back by the flimsy-looking flood defences. Their beloved town was safe and dry but they couldn’t rid themselves of a tinge of guilt about the swell of water now passing downstream, to other towns and villages: Bridgnorth and Ironbridge, even as far down as Upton-upon-Severn. However, Martha was putting all this behind her that morning as she drove to her office. Her spirits under the canopy of a blue sky were high enough to hum a tune she was finding it hard to forget. Goodness knew why.
‘I just called to say I love you.’
Stevie Wonder. She laughed at herself. Maybe it wasn’t just young men whose thoughts turned to love when spring beckoned.
Right now, had she been a bird she would have been sitting at the top of a bush, beak wide open, trilling a welcome to the warmer days ahead.
11.45 a.m.
They’d been to visit their daughter who had just had a baby at the maternity hospital in Birmingham. The birth had been uncomplicated. ‘A normal delivery,’ Stella had announced proudly. She was due to be discharged later that day. And now, thinking of baby powder, nappies and breast milk, they were heading home. They’d travelled along the M54 and had hit the A5. Initially they were happy and relaxed, both dreaming of the little girl and her future. Radio 2 was playing old songs. Eileen was humming along to an old Elvis ballad that took her right back to her courting days. She turned to smile at Felton, her husband, wondering if he too recalled the moments.
Afterwards she could never again hear ‘Wooden Heart’ without a shudder and a bubble of nausea, but at the time she was smiling, lulled by the sunshine streaming in through the windscreen, the vision of their exhausted daughter, enveloped in her loving husband’s arms, and the tiny wrinkled face of their new grandchild who was to be called Kate. Not Catherine or Katerina, Cathy or Katy. ‘Just Kate,’ Stella had said firmly, brooking no argument or objection. But they wouldn’t have said anything even if she’d chosen to call the baby Muriel.
Even when they first saw the boy standing up there on the bridge they had still felt happy, excited.
The sky was blue that morning, practically cloudless, which made visibility just about perfect. But that, cruelly, made subsequent events all the more vivid. The day was warm for the month – another curse – the A5 was not that busy and they were in no great hurry. They were meandering, both of them still breathing in that soft, sweet-milk baby scent.
‘Kate,’ she murmured and they both smiled. They had their separate dreams. He was already constructing a dolls’ house. In his mind he was beginning to plan tiny rooms, a staircase, battery-operated chandeliers. Pictures. While she was equally busily dressing the little girl in pink with lace and ribbons – no, not ribbons. They get caught with dreadful results. She snatched back the ribbons and proceeded to imagine knitting something pink. Stella hadn’t wanted to know the sex of the child before it was born. ‘It’d be like opening your presents before Christmas,’ she’d said and her husband, besotted both with his wife and the image of fatherhood, agreed. So all Eileen’s knitting so far had been white or lemon. The layette would soon be augmented with pink.
They expected to arrive home in less than half an hour and planned to tidy up the garden after the recent storms. Afterwards they would separately estimate their speed as having been sixty miles per hour, or thereabouts. Eileen’s eyes were lazily scanning the road ahead, watching the sporadic shadows of other vehicles chase and then pass them. She looked up at the dazzling sky then along the verge where some unfortunate was waiting for the breakdown services. At least it isn’t raining on him, she thought before she tutted at the litter. How could people just chuck things out of their car, making the countryside filthy?
And then.
Her eyes drifted upwards to the bridge in the distance, seeing the silhouette of the child who had climbed the barrier. He seemed to be looking along the A5. At them. Now he was standing on the top rail. Balancing. He shouldn’t be there, she thought. Afterwards she would remember details. He was alone, wearing a red anorak and a blue beanie. But as she looked upwards, dumb and mute with horror, he seemed to raise his arms up, like Christ in Rio, almost in blessing. Then he toppled and fell through the air, spread-eagled like a sky diver, landing in a horrible crunching, swerving, skidding blur, thumping down on their bonnet before being tossed into the road. The breath that came out of her was a scream, her thoughts tumbling out.
Make it a dream. Make it a nightmare. Make it not real.
Then she started to shake. ‘Felton?’ Her husband had somehow, God knew how, managed to brake and put his hazards on, but all around them was mounting chaos, drivers, taken unawares by the sudden drama, unable to process the information quickly enough, failing to stop, slewing across the lanes, banging into one another like huge metal dominos, while a few vehicles, drivers intent on their journey, or perhaps not processing what had just happened, looped around them and carried on, slipping past the chaos and mounting pandemonium, screams, shouts, noise. It seemed to take forever for the whole scene to come to a crazy, slewing stop, and then there was a deadly quiet and brief stillness except for cars braking and skidding far behind them. And something was happening on the opposite carriageway as drivers heading east knew something was happening and were slowing to see what. Eileen, still belted into her seat, scrabbled around but she couldn’t find her bag, couldn’t find her mobile phone. Couldn’t stop her hands from shaking. She felt waves of dizziness and sickness as her eyes and then her brain initially tried to reject the dreadful image of the child thumping down on their bonnet but then, peering through the windscreen at the bloody dent, feeling and hearing the impact again and again and again, they both knew it had been for real. People were getting out of their cars to look. Look? She couldn’t look, not to the side, to the front or behind her. She couldn’t move. She wanted to shut her eyes, shut it out. She didn’t want to see his broken body because she knew it was there – somewhere in that confusion of vehicles all at the wrong angle to each other and the road. And if she saw it she knew it would stay in her mind forever. Whenever she closed her eyes, in the future, it would be pasted to the inside of her lids. When she slept it would invade her dreams. And worst of all, when she held her new beautiful little granddaughter, Kate, she would remember this boy in the red anorak and blue hat who had died (because he must be dead) on the very day that Kate had been born.
And so she focused only on her husband. ‘Felton.’ She tried her voice cautiously. ‘That was,’ she began to say, watching the colour drain from his face as it must already have done from her own. ‘It was …’
They both knew what it was.
Now the cars were stopped, the A5 blocked, it was quiet. The people standing on the road seemed like zombies, mute, not quite knowing what to do. They looked at each other, shocked into silence. And after the silence came a noise from a distance, softly approaching at first but increasingly strident. It was the noise of approaching rescue, of normality, of order, of the authorities. Police, ambulance. Even a fire engine screaming towards them along the hard shoulder. Eileen felt a sense of relief. These were the people who could return the scene to normal, make sense out of madness. Someone must have made the call and summoned them. And now the sirens were closer, screaming all around them. More were joining them. Louder and louder. Lights brighter and brighter. Relief had arrived, people who knew exactly what to do in such a situation. The peaceful scene had been shattered in the blink of an eye. From beginning to end was less than eight minutes.