Split Second (3 page)

She saw Ruby turn and freeze, alarm enlarging her eyes.

Luke! Oh, God. ‘Is he all right?’ Dread flared through her.

‘He’s stable,’ the woman said, and went on to give her instructions as the pressure built in Louise’s chest, making it hard to breathe, hard to concentrate.

‘I’ll come now, yes.’ She ended the call, her hand shaking. Panic fluttering at her back like wings.

‘Mum?’

‘It’s the hospital. Luke’s there. Get your coat.’ Ruby nodded, fled.

‘Please,’ Louise prayed, ‘please, please let him be all right.’

The car door was frozen, the key wouldn’t turn.

The de-icer was inside the car, so she hurried to fetch the kettle and ran hot water over the lock. The metal made a chinking sound.

It worked, and she got the de-icer and the plastic scraper and scoured away at the ice on the windscreen, her breath great puffs of mist. Beneath her feet the grass verge was lumpy, unyielding. Everything was frozen solid, brilliant and brittle.

They drove through the snow. The middle of the main road was clear, but everything else, the pavements, hedges, roofs and trees, was smothered in a layer of white. Smudging the edges.

Ruby spoke. ‘What happened?’

‘They didn’t say, just that he was stable.’

‘Maybe there was an accident? Like a crash?’

Incident
, Louise thought, they said
incident
. ‘I don’t know, love.’ Thinking only that he was hurt, whatever it was, he was hurt. Alcoholic poisoning? Drinking himself stupid. Would that be an incident? Or if he’d been messing with drugs. Something else reckless? Trespassing on the railway line. He wasn’t a bad kid, not nasty, just daft at times, taking risks. Better lately, though, much better. That didn’t matter, not now. All that mattered was getting there. Make him better, make it better. She wouldn’t let herself imagine how he might be injured, fought against the pictures rearing up inside her head. Not going there. Just do this, just get through this.

He’d always been a handful; the number of times she’d been summoned into school: Luke giving cheek, Luke not showing up. He was bright and bored. He couldn’t wait to leave. She’d been the same at that age. She had tried talking to him about A levels or doing a BTEC. Something to give him a chance of a decent job, not end up like her in the poverty trap, no qualifications, everything a struggle.

‘No way,’ he’d said. And she knew there was no shifting him. Stubborn as a mule, never knew when to back down or back off. Could be a good quality at times, that persistence, but at others he’d back himself into a corner and brick it up.

Days later he came in from town, put a pizza in the oven and announced that he wanted to join the army.

Over my dead body, Louise swore to herself. She hadn’t spent sixteen years raising him to have him go off and get blown to bits by a roadside bomb in a godforsaken desert. ‘Thought you didn’t like people bossing you about,’ she’d said. ‘That’s all you get in the army: rules and regulations.’

‘So?’

‘C’mon, Luke, you’re not exactly hot on authority, are you?’

‘What you saying?’ He was truculent, ready for an argument. ‘Someone’s got to fight for their country.’

She stifled a sigh, didn’t want to alienate him, wondered where the sudden interest in soldiering had come from. ‘What’s the attraction?’

‘Best training in the world, isn’t it?’

Then what? Kill people, be killed. Eight years ago, Louise had dragged him on the anti-Iraq war march, him and Ruby both. He’d loved it, shouted himself hoarse, enjoying the novelty of mass protest, the whiff of disobedience, transgression, marching down the middle of the road between the police lines, waving the flag he’d made. Ruby had cried, fearful that planes would come and bomb them any minute. Not understanding that this was a war where only the children of the ‘enemy’ would lose life and limb. An unequal and illegal war fought for duplicitous reasons.

‘Grandad was in the army,’ he said. Meaning Louise’s grandad, his great-grandad.

‘That was different, he was called up. He’d not have wanted you fighting in Afghanistan. He was a communist, I’ve told you that. He’d have known exactly what it was down to: oil and economics.’

While Louise’s mother had been roaming the world entertaining passengers in her glittery gowns and long black gloves, Louise and her dad Phil had lived with her grandparents. Grandad was a docker, a union man and a lifelong Party member. The only paper that came into the house was the
Morning Star
. Louise’s dad was a liberal, if pressed. Wishy-washy, according to Grandad. The house rang with political arguments and debates. Louise got dragged along to fund-raisers for Cuba and Angola, or commandeered by her grandad to give out leaflets for pickets during the miners’ strike, but once grown, she’d never joined a party or got involved. Her political activity ran to voting every election, paying union dues, even though the agency wasn’t unionized, attending the occasional demonstration and peeling racist stickers off lamp posts.

Maybe the army thing was a reaction against her and her views. Luke rebelling, thinking of something to put her back up. She decided not to give him any more ammunition. ‘Okay,’ she said steadily, ‘how about this – you still want to join up in a year’s time and you can go.’

He frowned at her, wary. ‘Why wait?’

‘You’re only sixteen, you’ll need my consent if you’re under eighteen, but I’d like you to give something else a go first.’

‘Such as?’ He leaned back on the chair, rocking it on its back legs, arms folded.

‘A trade – you choose.’

‘Not college,’ he insisted.

‘An apprenticeship. You’d be earning. There’s usually day release.’

‘What?’

‘You do a day a week at college, the rest on the job.’

‘You just don’t want me to join the army,’ he objected.

‘No, I don’t.’ She kept her voice level. ‘But I can’t stop you, once you’re old enough. People die, Luke, they get injured, lose limbs; or they get stressed out, can’t settle again. Why would I want that for you?’

‘I won’t change my mind,’ he said, his eyes fixing on hers. His lovely fine brown eyes

She nodded. ‘But give it till your next birthday. I’ll ask around, see if anyone knows anyone.’ She waited, tense. Hoping to God she could find an opening. Half the kids in Manchester were on the dole, a lost generation, they were saying. What would Grandad make of this? Cameron and cronies finishing Thatcher’s job. Privatizing everything that moved, dismantling the public services, the NHS, crushing the north, where no one ever voted Tory, penalizing the poor.

‘’Kay.’ He let the chair fall back in place, got to his feet. ‘Not doing plumbing, though – skanky, man.’

Her flat was across the other side of the dual carriageway, next to the railway station. She was on the second floor, her windows level with the platforms. Sometimes she got the train to work, though if she did, she had a fifteen-minute walk across town at the other end.

Emma liked being near the line; the sound of the trains was reassuring, somehow, telling her that there were all those people out there going places, coming back. Growing up in Brum, the railway had run at the end of their terraced street, so it was probably in her blood.

She fed the fish and went into the kitchen. She hadn’t had anything to eat since lunch, but with all that bother on the bus, she felt queasy still. Maybe something light? She opened the fridge and got out the Philadelphia cream cheese, put bread in the toaster and went to change out of her office clothes.

She settled in front of the telly with her plate and a mug of cappuccino. She kept flicking the channels, but there was nothing that held her attention. There was a repeat of
A Place in the Sun: Home or Away
on, but it was one she’d seen first time round. The couples were so choosy, and didn’t ever seem to actually settle on a place. They never liked the places that Emma did.

Sometimes Emma thought about working abroad. The sort of job she had, working in the claims office of an insurance company, meant she had quite a lot of transferable skills, for other office work at least, but she didn’t speak any other languages. ‘Barely speaks English,’ her dad would say. ‘Don’t mumble, girl.’

He’d always been impatient with her, impatient and disappointed. Because she got tongue-tied, because she was shy, he decided she was stupid. She sometimes wondered when it had started: had he been critical even when she was a baby? Because she was chubby (in other words fat), because she slept a lot and didn’t walk until she was eighteen months old, and because when she talked, her speech was whispered, hesitant. Had she been born like that, or grown to match his expectations: someone with no guts, no gumption, no wit? Feeble, worthless.

Emma texted her mum as she did every night, told her that work had been busy and town had been frantic. She paused, thinking about the bus: the hard face on the lad who hit the mixed-race boy, the girl’s thin giggle, that awful feeling, tight and sick, making you want to close your eyes and block your ears. She couldn’t have done anything, could she? She thought about telling her mum, but then her dad would want to talk to her, and she couldn’t face him now. She shook away thoughts of the bus; she was home, it was done with. She typed that it was snowing and sent the text.

Unable to settle, she turned off the lamp and pulled the curtains open. That way the velvet blue light from the aquarium cast a glow in the room. Outside, she could see the snow falling: rhythmic cascades of flakes, quick and quiet. The roof of the ticket office was cushioned in snow, as was the fence and the platform. Everything looked softer and cleaner somehow with the white covering.

Watching the fish usually helped her relax. Hypnotic or something. She didn’t know how it worked, but following them as they drifted to and fro would calm her down. The stripy green discus fish darted and turned swiftly in the tank, and the shoal of little neon tetras, sparkling blue and silver and red, wove in harmony through the weed. Emma stared for long enough, but her stomach was all knotted up. Maybe she was just too tired tonight. She’d feel better after a good long sleep. And it was Saturday tomorrow – a lie-in.

Andrew and Val sat in the waiting area for close to an hour. The place was quiet, just the faint background shush of air-conditioning, and now and then the squeak of footsteps as someone in scrubs or overalls wandered past along the corridor. The lights were harsh, recessed behind shiny silver grids in the low ceiling. At either end of the space, cheap foil banners proclaimed
Merry Christmas
, and someone had taped a sprig of plastic holly above the big round clock.

Andrew was thirsty; his tongue felt rough and too large for his mouth, his throat ached, peppery, but he would not move to go and find a drink. Someone would come. They must wait here.

Every few minutes Val spoke to him, often repeating herself. ‘They must have had a knife but he didn’t know. He didn’t even know he’d been hurt. He walked inside, you saw him. He was so worried about the one they’d set upon, he didn’t even think about himself. Why didn’t he ring the police instead of charging in like that?’ They weren’t questions to be answered, just asked over and over like penance, a chant of angry disbelief flung to the Fates or the Gods, falling on stone-deaf ears.

In the silences between, Andrew watched the long, slim black hand on the clock edge past the minutes. He got up and walked to the double doors, left ajar, and stared at the map of the hospital on the wall. The garish blocks of colour indicating different wards, a bewildering key below organized alphabetically by complaint rather than numerically by ward, starting with the emergency department: adult emergency. They were somewhere there.

He’d done some sessions in the rehabilitation unit here for one of his placements when he’d been training. He still did some NHS work alongside his private practice, but almost all of it at Wythenshawe Hospital, a few miles south, on the edge of the city. That had been a tough time – his training. He’d left his job in the local authority planning department after six months on sick leave with work-related stress. Val, also at the town hall, working in training, had wanted him to sue for constructive dismissal, furious at the insidious bullying by his manager, but Andrew hadn’t had the energy or the emotional wherewithal to do anything more than limp away. He was close to cracking up completely, and just the thought of confronting his manager, of statements and meetings and tribunals, made him panic. His health was more precious than winning the argument.

Training in speech therapy had been a random choice really, prompted by a radio documentary. It meant two years as a student on a bursary then a not very good income afterwards. Certainly less than he’d have made climbing up the civic ladder. But Val, now a team leader, was on a good salary, and with only one child, they were reasonably well off.

‘Andrew?’ She’d been repeating his name.

‘Sorry,’ he turned from the map, ‘what?’

‘Do you think we should go and find someone? Find out what’s going on?’

Who? Where? He felt completely inadequate. Before he had a chance to frame a response, a man appeared, his scrubs rumpled, his head covered with a patterned hat. Val stood up and quickly crossed to join Andrew. Her jaw was trembling.

‘Mr and Mrs Barnes?’

Andrew nodded. Val said, ‘Yes.’

Andrew watched the man close his eyes, a slow blink before he spoke, his lips parting, an intake of air.

That was all it took, and Andrew knew.

They could not go home. The police officer apologized, but the house had been sealed for examination. It was a crime scene. They could be taken to a hotel and a family liaison officer would meet them there. After tonight, perhaps they would rather stay with family?

Stupefied, they let themselves be shepherded from the room where Jason lay and along to the exit. The officer kept talking, a meaningless burble. Andrew wondered if he was doing it to comfort himself, like a child whistling in the dark, or if he thought it might help them.

As they reached the automatic doors, Val stopped and turned to Andrew. Her face contorted and tears spilled down her cheeks. ‘Not on his own.’ She shook her head, her voice thick.