The Moment You Were Gone (3 page)

Then he heard a sound, so tiny that it might have been the faint creak of a branch. It was coming from outside the car, and he struggled upright and listened intently. There it was again, just ahead of him, beyond the remnants of the bonnet. If only he had a torch. He scrabbled
in the pocket of his coat and fished out his lighter, flicked it on and held it at arm's length. Its blue light wavered and, for an instant, he saw a face pressed against the car's splintered front window, its open eyes glassily upon him. He looked away.

‘Where are you?' he called softly, walking forward.

The young man was lying up the bank, a few yards from the tree. His leg was twisted at an impossible angle, and his torso was dark with blood. But he was alive. Connor could hear the faint shuddering gasps he made. He let his lighter go out and squatted down beside him, in the damp grass and among the nettles, putting a hand on his forehead. ‘An ambulance will be here soon,' he said. ‘Just hold on.'

He didn't know what to do next. The young man – hardly more than a boy, he could see now – was breathing. He didn't need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation or cardiac stimulation. Connor took off his coat and rolled it into a pillow, which he eased under the youth's head, noticing how thick and dark his hair was and how he had a plaster on his jaw where presumably he'd cut himself shaving. The plaster seemed horribly sad to Connor. His shirt was sodden with blood.

‘My mates?'

‘Don't worry about that now.'

‘Gary? Dan?'

‘Hold on.'

‘Don't leave me here in the dark.'

‘I'm not going to. I'll be with you until the ambulance arrives.'

Now he could hear the high whine of a car being
driven fast, in too low a gear, then a sudden screech of brakes and a thump. He didn't move, but leant over the body in front of him.

‘Where are you?' he heard her call, but didn't reply. He didn't want to shout or make a loud noise.

Then she slid beside him, and as she did so the moon rose above the trees, illuminating the scene in its ghostly light.

‘It'll be here any minute,' she whispered. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, she leant forward and kissed the young man on his forehead, then wriggled out of her own coat – a Regency-style frock-coat, ripped at the armpit – and laid it over him. She picked up his hand in both of hers and held it firmly. The necklace she wore swung above his head like a metronome; her hair fell round him.

Oh, but she did remember that. The face that stared up at her, pale in the moonlight with huge, terrified eyes, as though she alone could rescue him. She remembered how he smelt, fear giving off its own dank and lonely odour, and how clammy, icily sticky his skin was to her touch. She had been filled with such agonizing tenderness for him, as if she was his mother, his sister, his lover, his friend all in one, and at that moment she would have done anything to save him.

‘I'm Gaby,' she said, not to Connor but to the figure lying on the bank, his eyes gradually closing. ‘You're going to be all right now. They're on their way.'

‘Keep your eyes open,' Connor said insistently, less because of what he'd learnt as a medic than from seeing films where the cop bends over his fatally wounded buddy
and urges him to stay awake a little longer. The phrase ‘bleeding out' came into his mind.

‘My fault,' whimpered the youth.

‘No,' said Gaby. ‘No, it's not your fault. Don't think that.' She wiped his forehead with the hem of her skirt, which Connor could see was made of some thin, shimmering material, but was now streaked heavily with oil and blood.

A bubble of blood escaped from the young man's mouth and Connor took the tissue from his pocket and dabbed it away. The man jerked and Connor laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘Lie still,' he said.

‘Hold on,' said Gaby. ‘Please hold on, sweetheart. Please.'

Together they leant over the dying man, speaking to him in turn, telling him he was going to be all right, assuring him they were with him. Nonsense words in the dark. Connor felt intensely moved by the intimacy of the scene, and at the same time oddly tranquil, although he knew that the young man was dying in front of them and behind them two more people lay dead. Then the sound of a siren cut through the silence and blue lights came round the bend. All was now bustle and purpose. Several vehicles lined the road. Orders were shouted urgently. Bright lights shone on the scene, lighting it up as if it were a film set, and figures carrying stretchers ran forward.

‘Stand back, please,' a man said, and Gaby and Connor got to their feet and watched as the injured man was slid on to a stretcher and taken away. For a moment, they said nothing.

Then Gaby, asked, ‘Will he be all right?'

‘I don't know. Perhaps.' Connor looked at her carefully in the gloom. Her pale face glimmered and her eyes were enormous. ‘Are you all right, though?'

‘Me?'

‘You did beautifully.' Connor bent down and retrieved his coat from the ground. It didn't seem right to put it back on, though the night was cold. He glanced across at Gaby. She had on slouchy boots under her long skirt, but only a black camisole top. ‘You must be freezing,' he said.

‘I suppose I am.' She sounded dazed.

‘Do you want to have my coat?'

‘No!' She wrapped her arms round herself and shivered violently. ‘In the car, those bodies,' she said, then stopped. ‘Well, I've never seen a dead person before.'

‘Nor have I – not like that, anyway. I've only seen corpses.' He was going to say that it was like seeing chicken breasts shrink-wrapped in a supermarket, then coming across a slaughtered bird hanging by its legs in a butcher's shop, but stopped himself. It would have sounded heartless.

‘But I thought you were a doctor?'

‘I'm not really a doctor. I'm only a medical student.'

‘You acted like a doctor,' she said.

‘I didn't do anything.'

Two men wearing yellow jackets and helmets, carrying giant metal cutters, came towards the car.

‘I don't want to watch this,' she said.

‘No,' said Connor, although he couldn't look away. ‘We should probably go. We can't do anything here.'

‘Don't we have to give our names to the police or something?'

‘Probably,' he said. ‘I don't know what the procedure is. But you're right. We should wait a bit, I guess. Do you want a cigarette?'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘But first I want to be hugged.'

So he put his arms round her and she laid her head on his shoulder. Her hair tickled his cheek and he felt her full, soft breasts squash against him. His T-shirt was damp and he understood that she must be crying, and then he realized that he was too. Tears trickled down his cheek and into his mouth and he made no effort to wipe them away. He couldn't remember the last time he had wept, and he didn't know why he was weeping now.

Gaby felt his thin body pressed against her, his strong arms holding her, the scrape of his stubble on her cheeks. She felt his tears; a stranger sobbing in her arms while she sobbed in his. Perhaps it was then that something untied in her; she was falling and knew there was no stopping herself now; she didn't want to stop herself and she didn't want to step out of the circle of his embrace into the cold night where three young men had just been snuffed out. They should stay like this, holding each other, and never let go.

‘I was at a party kind of thing,' said Gaby, into Connor's shoulder, her voice muffled. ‘I didn't really want to go – I was a bit tired and behind with work and besides, I knew that this boy would be there who I didn't want to meet. But, actually, it didn't really matter as much as I thought it would. I suddenly realized I didn't care about him after all, and it was like a weight being lifted off me. The party was fun. There were some nice people there. This weird guy was doing magic tricks in the kitchen. He
kept pulling aces off the top of the pack. I couldn't work out how he did it. I keep thinking I should learn to do tricks like that, but I never do. And I danced. I love dancing. Don't you?'

Her fingers found the tears on his cheek and wiped them away as she spoke. ‘Anyway, when I was biking back, I was feeling happy. It was dark, and there was a moon, and I was all on my own, between two places, just freewheeling down the hill with the wind and the trees and nothing else, and I felt that everything was OK. Then I saw that car. That's how quickly everything can end. It sounds really stupid, a cliché, but they've just stopped. That's it. They were driving along and probably talking and laughing, not paying attention, then everything was over for them. All their plans. Wiped out. It's hard to believe. And, one by one, their parents and friends and lovers will find out and everything will be changed for them. Maybe right now there's a phone ringing in a bedroom. They'll jerk awake, and when they see that it's still the middle of the night, do you think they'll know at once that something's happened to their son? My mother always says that once you've got a child, you always carry them around in your head and worry when you don't know exactly where they are, even when they're fully grown-up. And we'll just go on our way. We don't know anything about them. Except I'm always going to remember this – I hope I do, anyway. It's almost like a responsibility, being the last witness.'

‘Do you always talk so much?' He breathed in the softness of her hair, not wanting her to stop. Her words were like ribbons and scraps of silk that she was weaving
round him, protecting him from what was happening beyond.

‘Maybe it's the shock. Have they finished getting them out of the car yet?'

‘Yes. They've taken them away.'

She gave a sigh, then stepped out of his arms. ‘Let's have that cigarette.'

He shook two out of the packet and handed her one, then flicked the wheel of his lighter. In its flare, he saw her face differently – splotches of freckles, a full mouth, thick brows, a faint smudge of mascara beneath eyes that seemed almost black, a mole on her neck, sharp collarbone and the swell of her breasts.

And she saw him: sharp angles and planes, thin lips, exhausted eyes. ‘I don't even know your name.'

‘Connor.'

‘Connor,' she said, and took a deep drag, the smoke curling round her head. ‘What an odd way to meet.'

‘Here he comes.'

A police officer was making his way towards them. As Gaby gave a statement to him, he watched her. Her name was Gabriella Graham and she was twenty years old, a student at the university. She lived at 22 Jerome Street with four other students. She lifted her arms as she talked, leant towards the officer, pointed, pushed her hair behind her ears impatiently. The car had overtaken her at speed and crashed into the tree shortly after. No one else had been involved. She knew that two of them – the two in the car – were called Gary and Dan because the third man had called for them while he lay on the bank, but she didn't know the name of the other. She thought –
she turned to Connor for confirmation – that he had probably been the driver because he'd claimed it was his fault, but she didn't know for sure.

‘Would you like a lift back to the city?' the officer asked, when she'd finished. The ambulances were gone now; two men in luminous yellow coats were arranging cones round the wreckage.

‘It's OK. I've got my car,' said Connor. ‘I can drive us both.'

‘If you're sure you're in a fit state.'

‘My bike's here,' said Gaby. ‘And about your car –'

‘You can't ride home. We can shove it in the back somehow,' said Connor. ‘Or just put it in the boot and leave it open. It's only a few miles.'

‘It's up to you,' said the officer.

‘I parked your car in a bit of a hurry,' said Gaby. She gave a nervous cough. ‘Um, it might be a bit tricky to reverse out.'

‘Where are the keys?'

‘I think I left them in there. I can't remember, it's all a blur, but I haven't got them on me, so …'

‘Let's go and see.'

‘The thing is, I might have put them into my coat pocket, and I laid that over the top of him, remember, and it was still on top of him when they took him away, wasn't it? So your keys might be on the way to the hospital.'

‘Right,' said Connor, watching the police car leave.

But he found he didn't mind. For once in his life he wasn't thinking about consequences, schedules, the controlled execution of careful plans. He didn't care what
happened tomorrow, for the night had the quality of a dream, dislocated from the before-and-after, with its own internal logic. Indeed, he would have been almost disappointed to find that the keys were in the ignition, had it not been that the car was tilted at a steep angle, deep in the nettle-filled ditch.

‘Sorry,' said Gaby. ‘I was in a bit of a flap when I parked.'

‘Parked?' He raised his eyebrows at her sardonically, feeling inexplicably cheerful all of a sudden. ‘How did you ever pass your test?'

‘Well, about that – when I said I could drive, I wasn't being completely honest. I mean, I
can
drive, but I haven't passed my test as such.'

‘As such?'

‘I've failed four times, so far.'

‘Maybe you should have got a lift with the police officer after all.'

‘Too late for that.'

‘You'd better take your bike.'

‘I want to help you.'

‘Help?'

‘You keep echoing me. It makes me nervous.'

‘Nervous?'

She stared at his deadpan expression for a few seconds, then laughed. ‘We'll just have to walk,' she said. ‘I'll push my bike. It's only a few miles.'

‘Probably about seven or something.'

‘Two hours,' she said. ‘I walk fast and I bet you do. You look the type.'

‘What type is that?'