The Story of Us (2 page)

Caroline jumped into her car and started the engine, while I over-enthusiastically hugged the assortment of female friends who'd shared the day with me. They were an eclectic mix from long-past schooldays, university and work, and although most of them had started the day as strangers to one another, they were ending it as deepest friends. Or could that just be the cocktails talking?

When the last of the waiting cabs or good-natured other-halves had collected everyone, I ran lightly across to where Caroline's car was ticking over as she waited for me. I saw that Amy had already joined her in the vehicle, shot-gunning the passenger seat. She swivelled around to look at me as I opened the rear door and slid gratefully into the car's warm and cosy interior. ‘You don't want to sit here, do you?' she asked with typical guileless charm. I looked down at the very tiny space Caroline's seat left for my legs in the rear section of the car. I'm no giant, but I had to be at least fifteen centimetres taller than my old friend. ‘It's just I might get car sick if I sit in the back,' Amy continued.

‘Daiquiri-sick, more like,' corrected Caroline. Flicking off the car's interior light and fastening her seat belt, she gave us both a tolerant grin. ‘There's a thirty-pound surcharge if you puke in my car.'

‘Drive on,' Amy commanded, and then turned again to stage whisper to me, ‘She's such a
grump
when she hasn't had a drink!'

It was a forty-five minute drive back to the small market town where I'd grown up; the town that I'd happily escaped from to go to university, that I thought I'd never return to after I got my first job in London, and that I'd had no choice but to move back to just twelve months earlier.

The country roads that we travelled along were largely deserted, but then it was getting late. I still found it so very different from the buzzing traffic that had continually hummed past my small London flat, no matter what time of the day or night it was. For a girl born and raised in the country, I was a real city-lover.

A fine rain had fallen earlier in the evening and in the headlights' beams I could see a glittering reflection on the black tarmac as the roads began to freeze. It was the beginning of March, but it still felt very much like winter. I really hoped the weather was going to warm up before the wedding, or I was going to need thermals under my strapless bridal gown.

In the front seat Amy and Caroline were debating whether it had been poor judgement on Amy's part to give the bartender her phone number. No prizes for guessing which one of them thought it was a bad idea. Caroline had been happily settled with her own partner Nick for… well, for ever it seemed, and I knew she sometimes took a dim view of Amy's more adventurous
love life. My own relationship with Richard was much more to Caroline's liking: childhood sweethearts; separated for years and now happily engaged to be married. Real story-book stuff, she claimed.

‘Any man – no, boy – who spends the entire night trying to look down the front of your top doesn't deserve your number,' Caroline declared scathingly.

I sniggered, but had to admit the barman
had
spent a great deal of time talking to Amy's chest and not her face.

‘I feel sick,' said Amy, in a small shamefaced voice.

‘With humiliation?' I asked jokingly.

In reply Amy gave a small heaving sound.

Caroline flicked her eyes from the road to her passenger. Even in the darkened car, on a road with no street lamps, it was obvious to see that Caroline's humorous prediction had come true.

‘Jesus, Amy. Hang on, I'll pull over in one second. The road's too narrow here.'

‘Can't wait,' Amy gurgled back somewhat unpleasantly.

‘There's a carrier bag on the floor by your feet,' Caroline advised.

That was the last normal moment the three of us would share.

After that, everything happened really quickly and really slowly, all at the same time. Before I had the chance to tell her not to do it, Amy had unclipped her seat belt in order to reach for the bag. Caroline, her attention split between the road and her imminently vomiting friend, rounded a tight bend and there, immediately in front of us, illuminated in two piercing beams of light, was a large stag standing in the middle of the road.

Someone swore, possibly me, but the sound was lost in the cry of screeching rubber as Caroline slammed hard on the brakes, and jerked sharply on the wheel to avoid the animal, which even as we approached still stood straddling the white line, as though he had all the time in the world to get away. Perhaps it's like that for animals too, those final moments before an accident: the moments when you seem to have an endless amount of time to see exactly what's going to happen; think about it, do something, do nothing, and
still
wait for the impact. That's what it seemed like to me.

I saw Amy straighten up in her seat, a totally different sick look on her face; I saw the deer growing larger and larger directly in front of us, and then the animal was suddenly replaced by a view of the steep grass bank which ran alongside one edge of the road. A bank we were heading towards far too quickly.

The moment we hit it everything speeded up again. The car bounced back violently from the impact, and although Caroline had frantically tried to steer us back on to the road, there was nothing that could be done to avoid the collision. I felt the biting jerk of the seat belt cut across my body, as I was thrown forwards and then backwards in my seat. I heard the bang of an explosion which heralded the mushrooming bloom of the airbag, which suddenly obscured everything out of one half of the windscreen. But Caroline's car was an older model and only had protection on the driver's side, and sometime during the seconds when we hit, when my eyes were screwed tightly shut in terror, it happened. When I opened them again, Amy was gone.

And still it wasn't over. Like a nightmare you just can't wake up from, I felt the car flip into the air. One minute the road was beneath our wheels, and the next the car was on its roof, torpedoing and spinning out of control across the road in a cloud of bright orange sparks. The scrape of metal on tarmac was deafening and didn't stop until the very last moment when the car eventually left the icy surface behind and crashed, rear-end first, into a steep ditch on the opposite side of the road.

I didn't lose consciousness, and I'm still not sure if that was a blessing or not. I felt the flaring burn of pain as the side of my head collided with a sharp piece of metal which had once been part of the car's roof. The car was crumpled around us like an old tin can a giant had finished drinking from. We were wedged so tightly in the ditch that all I could see on both sides were thick walls of mud and twisted roots. It actually wasn't easy to see anything at all, as the only light around came from one remaining headlamp which – God knows how – was still working, but due to the angle of the car was now illuminating the inky-black sky. It sliced into the dark, like a spotlight to the fallen.

From the seat in front of me, which had collapsed backwards and was now painfully crushing both my legs, I heard the terrified sound of Caroline moaning and crying. I tried to reach out my hand to her, but the driver's seat had me pinioned where I sat. ‘Caro? Are you okay? Are you hurt?'

More crying and a long wailing moan, which I actually thought for a second was an animal. Was the deer down here in the ditch with us? Had we hit it after all? Then I heard the hitching breaths between the moans, and realised it was my friend's voice – well, something like her voice – because it was plain to hear that she was in shock.

‘What happened? Where are you?'

‘I'm right here, Caroline. I'm in the back seat. Are you hurt?'

She sounded genuinely confused at the question. ‘Hurt? No. Why? What happened?'

I was no medic, but this was most definitely shock.

‘We had an accident, Caro,' I said, surprised my voice sounded so calm and controlled. ‘There was an animal in the road and we… we crashed.'

‘We've crashed?'

I paused before answering. I didn't know what to say to her, because I had a feeling that hysteria was really only a moment or two away, and I needed to ask her something really, really important.

‘Caroline. Can you see Amy? Is she there beside you?' I felt, rather than saw her move in her seat, and then scramble up on to her knees and crawl over to the passenger seat, as though to confirm what her eyes were telling her. The only good thing that proved was that Caroline could still move around, so probably wasn't that badly hurt. ‘She's not here! She's not here! Where's she gone?' Her face suddenly appeared in the small gap between the two headrests. Her eyes, frantically darting in their sockets, raked the rear of the car. ‘Is she back there with you?'

I bit my lip and swallowed noisily before answering, trying all the while not to look past Caroline at the Amy-shaped gaping hole in our shattered windscreen, which looked to be ringed with something dark and dripping.

‘I think she got thrown out, Caro. She'd just undone her seat belt before the crash—'

‘So she's okay? She wasn't in the car when we crashed, so she's okay, right?'

It was like talking to a five-year-old. Was it just shock, or had Caroline hit her head? I looked at the windscreen, or what was left of it, bowed out in a funnel shape from the accident. I looked at the hole and tried really, really hard not to look at Amy's blood which was still trickling in places over the shattered screen.

‘Caroline, you have to get out of the car and find Amy.'

‘No,' protested my friend, shaking her head to emphasise her words. ‘I can't. I shouldn't. You mustn't move after an accident.'

How on earth had that little gem stayed in, when all other good sense seemed to have temporarily been lost?

‘I know, I know. But you've already moved a bit and Amy's hurt. She's gone thr—' Something stopped me from making this too graphic, given Caroline's current state of mind. ‘She's not in the car any more. So you need to find her and check she's okay. Can you do that for me?'

Caroline looked back at me, her face a picture of terror. I was terrified too, not just from what had happened, but for what she might find waiting for her out on the road. ‘You're coming too, aren't you? We'll look together.' She clearly hadn't seen, or perhaps just couldn't comprehend, the mangled driver's seat that was crushing both my lower limbs and imprisoning me in the car.

‘I can't get out,' I said, and although I thought I was being so brave, I was suddenly aware that the whole time I'd been talking to her, tears had been falling down my face. I heard them now in my voice as I spoke. ‘The seat's trapped me here,
you
have to do it.
You
have to find Amy and get help.
Please
, Caroline.'

Something in my desperation pierced through the cushioning haze she'd been enveloped in since we crashed. She nodded fiercely like a child. I looked at the front doors of the vehicle and saw that, like the rear ones, they were wedged tightly in the ditch. There was only one way in and out of the car. ‘You have to climb out through the windscreen and then crawl up the bonnet until you can grab on to the grassy sides of the bank. Can you do that?'

It was a lot to ask, it was a lot to do, but until help in the form of the emergency services reached us, Caroline was our only hope. She turned wordlessly and stared at the hole in the windscreen, then placed her hands on the dashboard for purchase.

‘Wait!' I commanded, reaching in the mangled remains of the back seat for the jacket Amy had thrown in earlier. ‘Put this around the bottom of the hole before you crawl through, or you'll cut yourself to pieces.'
Just like Amy must have done
, a horrible voice intoned in my head.
Stop it!
I couldn't think like that. I couldn't let the panic take over.

Caroline actually managed to accomplish her exit from the car and climb up the bank with remarkable ease. Without another word she did everything I had asked of her, and scrambled from the tip of the bonnet on to the side of the bank, using an exposed tree root for a handhold. And then she was gone.

The wait seemed interminable. I knew how hard the task I'd given her was. The light from the headlamp was uselessly illuminating only the sky, and the moon was covered with scudding clouds. It was virtually pitch-black out there, and Amy could be anywhere on the road. Caroline could literally walk right by her and never know it. I heard her calling Amy's name, the sound getting increasingly fainter as she moved further away from the car. Amy was unconscious, I told myself. Amy couldn't reply because she was unconscious. Any other reason for the lack of response was unthinkable.

As the moments passed I struggled yet again to free myself, shoving both hands against the back of the seat and pushing with every last ounce of strength in my body. It was no use. The seat wouldn't budge and I couldn't pull my legs free. I began to feel sick from the effort, and the wound on my head, which I'd been doing my best not to focus on at all, began to bleed even more profusely, dripping down my forehead and into my eyes.

I hadn't heard Caroline's voice for a minute or two. ‘Caroline, are you okay? Have you found her?' I called out. No answering reply came back. And I could only pray that a shocked and confused Caroline hadn't wandered completely off the road and into the surrounding fields, and was now too far away to hear me.

Then an answering scream split the night, horrible and terrified, just one high-pitched strident cry of a name.

Caroline had found Amy.

I don't know what we'd have done if he hadn't come along just then. I certainly hadn't heard the approach of a car, but suddenly the night was filled with sounds: Caroline screaming, and then a long shriek of brakes as a car attempted to come to an emergency stop. I tried to imagine what was happening on the road: Caroline, kneeling beside Amy's prone body, and then the two of them caught like rabbits in the headlights, as a car rounded the corner and ploughed straight into them in the darkness.