The Make (28 page)
Authors: Jessie Keane
The snow was coming down thicker and faster as the heavy drove himself and Gracie toward Deano Drax’s place. The car was struggling, the back wheels spinning sideways as they went off the main drag and on to the country lanes that would lead them to Drax’s hideaway.
‘We’re never going to make this,’ said the heavy, wrestling with the wheel as the car spun wildly on another sharp turn. The wipers were whooshing across the screen, the snow coming down so hard and fast now that they were barely coping.
Gracie looked at him. He had a big bald head, a sharp pecker of a nose, fleshy cheeks pockmarked with teenage acne scars, and hazel eyes. He didn’t look as if he was enjoying this any more than she was.
‘You got a mobile on you?’ she asked.
He patted his pocket. ‘Yeah, but I’m not sure how much battery I have.’
Shit
, thought Gracie.
If that’s flat, we’re out here in the middle of nowhere with no means of communication.
‘What’s your name?’ she asked.
‘Paul.’
‘Shouldn’t you be at home with your family, Paul?’
He gave her an exasperated look. ‘Yeah. Should be. But here I am, babysitting you.’
Paul took a hard curve and the wheels spun sideways again.
‘Steady,’ said Gracie.
‘You want to drive? It’s a fucking nightmare.’
‘No I don’t.’
‘Then shut up will you?’ He was silent. ‘This is a stupid fucking idea,’ he said after a few beats.
‘Look, I told you. I think this Drax arsehole might have done Lorcan some damage.’ Gracie drew a calming breath and tried to keep the explanation succinct. ‘Lorcan’s gone out, I don’t know where, and he hasn’t come back. It looks like Drax put my brother George in hospital. And it looks as if he’s already nabbed my
other
brother Harry. Now Drax has snatched Alfie – we
think
it’s Alfie – so it’s perfectly feasible that he could have nabbed Lorcan too. Lorcan was all stoked up, ready to do Drax some serious damage. And I think . . . I think he’s gone to do it.’
‘You tried his mobile?’
‘That’s the very first thing I did. It wasn’t turned on.’
‘Get the police involved,’ advised Paul, wrenching the wheel hard round as the car lost its grip yet again.
Gracie let out a
huff
of breath. ‘Look. Back there at the club, I would have. But I don’t have my mobile.’
‘Well, let’s try mine. If this Drax is as bad as you say, let’s try taking the sensible option.’
He thought she was crazy. Hell,
she
thought she was too. She had no idea what she could do up against a bastard like Drax. But she knew she had to do
something.
‘Give it here then.’
He tossed her his mobile. She flipped it open, fiddled with it in the dim light it cast, trying to familiarize herself with it. She stared hard at the screen, saw the amber warning light.
‘Shit,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘You’re right. The battery’s pretty low.’
‘How about the signal?’
Gracie tilted the phone in various directions. ‘Patchy.’
‘Try it anyway.’
Gracie tapped in 999, but the signal was too bad. She heard no ring tone. She halted the call, if only to preserve what was left of the battery’s life. She sat there, staring at the snow hurtling towards them, then being shoved to one side by the steady, almost hypnotic
whumph whumph whumph
of the wipers.
‘I read somewhere that the phone company can track a person down to a few feet using the signal from their mobile phone,’ she said, and then they were rounding a hard curve in the road and suddenly, too suddenly, there was something ahead in the road, a fucking
tree
was lying across it, and the car was going too fast.
Gracie let out a yell and automatically put her hands up in front of her face. Paul stamped on the brake. The wheels lost their grip. The car careered almost gracefully off the road, rotating like a spinning top. Then it shot down a steep bank, the engine roaring, then rolled end over end and came to rest on its roof. The wheels spun on thin, cold air. The engine coughed once, then died. All was silent beneath the falling snow.
Sandy and Suze were back at the hospital, sitting with George. It was Christmas Day, the day when families should be together, at home, safe and secure. But here was poor George, confined to intensive care, surrounded not by laughter and love but by beeping monitors and briskly efficient nurses.
‘At least it don’t look like he’s screaming any more,’ said Sandy, who was on George’s left side, holding his hand.
‘No,’ said Suze bleakly, who was on George’s right, holding his other hand.
George was lying still now, and it was as if he was asleep, just asleep and likely to wake at any moment and start with the cheery George-type banter. He wasn’t puffy any more, and the frightening movements had stopped. Suze focused on the steady rise and fall of George’s chest.
Sandy’s eyes followed hers. ‘It’s good he’s breathing on his own now,’ she said to Suze.
George was indeed breathing for himself. That was progress. But Suze felt consumed with dread for him. What if he woke up demented, brain-damaged? What on earth would they do then? What if he wasn’t right in the head, her poor clever lovely George?
She knew you were supposed to think positive, be calm, but she couldn’t. She was this boy’s
mother
, and all she could think was the worst. She always had. An ambulance passing in the night, sirens blaring? It was George or Harry they were going to collect, broken into pieces, from some road accident, some fire, something
awful.
It was a woman thing, she supposed. Other families had come in here today, to be near their loved ones on Christmas. A special day, a happy day for most; but for Suze and Sandy, and for all these other poor souls in the intensive care ward, a day of torment.
Suze thought of her childhood Christmases, spent with her mother. Her parents had separated when she was seven and she’d been an only child. Christmas hadn’t been that much fun. Dad had left and didn’t show any signs of ever coming back, or of making the slightest effort to keep in touch with his daughter. They’d been poor, her and her mother, although Mum had tried her best to make the day good for Suze.
Then, marriage to Paddy Doyle. She had created her own happy Christmas tableau then, and added three kids to the mix. But she and Paddy had followed a pattern set by her own parents. Arguments. Clashes. She’d sought refuge in the arms of other men and Paddy had found out. Then Paddy had left and taken Gracie with him up to Manchester, cutting the family into two halves.
Suze thought of Gracie, and her daughter’s fractured marriage. There were patterns there, and she hoped that Gracie would be the one to break the cycle; but she doubted it. Some things went too deep to alter.
Gloomily, Suze sat there and sighed. And now look at the mess they were all in. Someone coming at her door, the door to her
home
, with a chainsaw. Getting bags of Harry’s hair sent to them. Anything could be happening to him, and what could they do about it? Whichever way you looked at it, they were fucked, the whole damned lot of them. Suze sat there looking at the steady rise and fall of George’s chest, and thought miserably about all the hurts and injustices that an unkindly nature had inflicted on her over the years. It would take a fucking Christmas
miracle
to make this situation any better.
‘Suze,’ said Sandy.
‘Hm?’ Suze looked across at Sandy, whose eyes were round with wonder.
‘Suze,
look
.’
Sandy was staring at George’s face.
George’s dark brown eyes were open. Slowly, they blinked. They moved around the room almost vaguely. Then they moved down, and settled on Suze’s face. Then they moved to the left, and alighted on Sandy’s. Some spasm flittered across George’s face. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out, just a gasping wheeze.
Suze was on her feet in an instant, leaning over George. ‘Don’t worry lovey, you’re all right,’ she said quickly, the words tumbling over each other. ‘You can’t speak, they’ve had to put a thing in your throat, but you’re all right, don’t worry, it’s all okay,’ said Suze. She let out a sudden laugh, and now her tears of joy were splashing down on George’s face. He looked up at her.
Oh Jesus please let him be okay now
, thought Suze. If this was their Christmas miracle, then a Christmas prayer wouldn’t go amiss, surely?
George’s eyes slipped to the left again, to Sandy. He opened his mouth, but again there was no sound.
Sandy leaned in with a smile. Their eyes met. She kissed his cheek.
‘Nurse!’ called Suze, and George’s nurse came hurrying over to welcome him back to the land of the living.
The whole world was upside-down, and full of eerie silence.
‘Paul?’ gasped out Gracie. She felt a deep sense of unreality. It was still snowing, but the wipers had stopped working. Through the windscreen she could see nothing but a solid film of snow, tinted pale primrose by the glare of the headlights. The seat belt was cutting into her flesh, holding her suspended, upside-down, in her seat. Her breath plumed out into the rapidly chilling air inside the car. She was aware that she was shivering with shock as well as cold. The window on Paul’s side was gone, shattered into fragments. That side of his face and his right-hand shoulder looked bloody.
‘Fuck it,
Paul
,’ said Gracie, louder.
No reply. His eyes were closed. Gracie was scrabbling for the seat belt release, her shaking hands failing to find it half a dozen times before finally, cursing, shivering, she had it and pressed it. She fell free of the belt’s restraint, her head and shoulders hitting the car roof, her legs sprawling. How to get out? She still had Paul’s phone in her hand. She stuffed it into her coat pocket and crawled, crab-legged, awkward, disorientated, over the unconscious Paul. She grabbed the jagged window opening and hauled herself through and out. Branches caught at her, dragged into her hair and dug into her stomach.
She fell, panting, whimpering, into a snow-filled ditch. She sat there for a moment, too stunned to move. Slowly, half afraid to find out, she checked herself over for injuries. But she was okay, not a mark on her. She looked back at the car. It was sloping down, bonnet-first, into the ditch, resting on the driver’s side against an old, twisted oak tree. Now she could see what had happened when the car spun out of control and turned over. The car had struck the oak on Paul’s side, shattering the window.
Gracie dragged herself to her feet, staggered up to the car where Paul still sat pinned by his seat belt, upside-down, unconscious.
‘Paul!’ she yelled at him.
No answer. Just the moaning of the hard chilling northern wind through the branches of the trees.
Gracie looked all around her, wondering what the hell to do now. She could see faint lights in the distance up ahead. A farmhouse, hopefully, where she could summon help. She’d have to go on foot, alone, from here. Not a cheering prospect. And what about Paul? She couldn’t just leave him like this: he’d freeze to death. She flipped open the phone.
Shit.
Now the battery was dead.
She left the damned thing switched on and tucked it into Paul’s jacket. Wondered whether she ought to at least get him upright, but she’d heard you could make matters worse by moving crash victims, exacerbating injuries. No, she was going to have to push on, reach that house up there, get some assistance. There was nothing else she could do.
With a last desperate look at Paul hanging there, Gracie struggled up the bank of the ditch and back on to the grass verge. The snow was relentless now, slicing towards her almost horizontally, stealing her breath away and tinting the whole night-time world pale blue. Ahead, there was light, warmth, help. She had to go for it; there was nothing else she could do. She scrambled over the fallen tree that had been Paul’s undoing, then slowly, stumbling a bit but then gaining pace, Gracie started walking.
The lights of the house seemed to recede as Gracie trudged through the snow, twisting her ankles a dozen times on unseen obstacles. Every step she took seemed to take the damned things further away, not closer. She could have howled aloud with the frustration of it. She was so worried about Lorcan, and Harry, and Alfie – and now there was Paul back there in the car, probably freezing to death, if not mortally injured already. She
had
to get help for them all. When she reached the farmhouse –
if
she ever did – she was through playing silly buggers. She was going to call the police, call out the whole fucking army if necessary. She was done with pussyfooting around. Deano Drax had to be stopped, right now. Eventually, she rounded a corner, and at last she could see the outline of a big thatched house.
There were lots of lights on in there. It looked cosy, welcoming. Gracie started forward, walking past two big pillars on which hung large, dark-painted wrought-iron gates. The gates stood open. She paused there. Then slowly, she looked up. On each one of the pillars was a huge stone lion, pawing the frigid air, wearing a collar of snow and roaring up at the cold night sky.
It was Drax’s place.
Gracie froze, her heart hammering, her mind in a flat spin. What to do, what to do? She looked to the left and to the right, but there were no more comforting lights, no
nothing.
This was the only place out here. She thought again of Paul, lying injured back along the road. He could die, and if he
did
, then she was responsible. She’d wanted to come out here, not him. She thought of Lorcan. He was a big hard bastard but he wasn’t twisted like Drax. Anything could have happened to him. As for Harry, he could already be dead for all she knew. And Alfie. What about him? He could be here, inside this house, kept prisoner, abused, hurt.
She looked up at the lions. They seemed threatening, warning her to back off. But she couldn’t. Whatever it cost her, she knew she had to go on.
