Despite Hester’s plaintive pleas that they must sit ‘on the bank, away from the vehicle’, Melissa clambers back into the van and wraps an old tartan blanket she finds between the seats around her shoulders. It smells of the dog but she doesn’t much care.
Neither does she care about any supposed danger in staying in the van. There is nothing that could induce her to sit out there, where the roaring hornet drone of passing traffic feels like the cruellest of jokes that could be played right now.
Maybe it is justice, she thinks, pulling the blanket even tighter around her shoulders. The circle was closing.
The past is hurtling towards her like the cars that now rip past them.
***
After she and Jamie had been separated, Melissa spent the remaining year of her care in a children’s home about twenty miles from the house in Fernley Close. As soon as she was eighteen, she moved to London and, working as a waitress in a greasy spoon in Archway, she had moved into a squat in Arnos Grove.
This, she’d thought, was the real start of her life. Everything that came before had been practice for living.
When she thought of that house, it was a cocktail of smells that she remembered most: fishy rot from the damp patch on the ceiling. Burnt-sugar woodiness of the ever-present weed. Stale armpits, feet, and breath from the bodies that covered every scrap of floor space after a party. And always, the carbon smell of burnt toast. They all ate so much toast then, slice after slice turning black in the broken toaster, late at night when the munchies made them limp and liquid from giggling, or on those grey mornings after, when no one wanted to speak too loudly and coming down felt like drowning.
Melissa squeezes her eyes shut and wipes fresh tears from her cheeks now.
‘I’m sorry,’ she whispers to no one. ‘I’m so sorry.’
For a few moments she is broken. Lost in the guilt again. She pictures a car slamming into the van and thinks it would be a good thing. A few seconds of terror and pain and it would all be wiped out. The slate would be clean again.
But then she thinks about her daughter and panic thrums across her skin. Oh God, Tilly. Baby.
She pictures Tilly’s eyes widening in shock as some spotty copper breaks the news that will change her life for ever; her hands, habitually covered by her sleeves like they’re in mittens, snaking around her middle, and her whole body collapsing in on itself in misery.
And what about Mark? Whatever he has done, he doesn’t deserve this.
Melissa rummages in her bag for a tissue and blows her nose. She looks at Hester sitting high on the bank, anxiously peering at the traffic and tries to force herself to be calm again.
She has to get through this with the only resources she has.
Decisively, Melissa reaches into her handbag for the emergency make-up she keeps there. Holding her phone awkwardly on her knees as lighting, she attempts to repair her face. Taking a few minutes to apply liner, more mascara, and a slick of lipstick, she snaps the overhead mirror back into place. Hester is now watching her from the bank.
What a strange woman she is, thinks Melissa. So buttoned-up and repressed, but totally and utterly calm about the scene she witnessed in Melissa’s kitchen. It’s almost as though she is slightly enjoying it all. Melissa feels a ripple of distaste, even as she tells herself she mustn’t be unfair. Something is bothering her about the helpfulness though. It feels disproportionate. But she doesn’t have the space in her head to allow these thoughts to expand and fester.
She remembers how Hester was before. Too keen, too ready to be involved with her business and to offer her opinions. She had a way of taking over, of ingratiating herself into every corner of Melissa’s life that had been uncomfortable. And now what?
Now they were bound. Melissa has no one else.
Melissa tries to force her thoughts back on track, to the here and now. She wonders whether they should somehow get Jamie’s body onto the road.
Images of his body being pulped by passing cars bombard her. She can almost hear the sickening thumps of metal hitting flesh and she swallows bile. It could cause an accident. Yet more deaths.
No. There’s no other way. For now, they just have to push forward with the plan.
This reminds her of the phone and she quickly looks for it in her handbag, glancing up to check there are no slowing lights of the AA. Clambering out of the van again, she climbs up the bank and looks at the thick bushes growing there.
Jamie’s iPhone is an old model whose curvy shape feels strange and bulky in her hand. She had believed it to be turned off but she accidentally touches the home button and the screen saver blooms into life.
A baby beams out at her, all blonde hair and cheeks flushed rosy from teething. The merry blue eyes have the distinctive folded lids of Down’s syndrome.
Melissa scrabbles about in her brain for any mention of a child in their conversation but can find none. Then a casually tossed remark floats into her mind.
‘It’s time to grow up.’ She hadn’t asked him what he meant at the time.
Would knowing he was a father have made any difference to what she’d done? Would it have been different, if her fingers had found only the scrubbed kitchen surface behind her? Or if she had been a few inches shorter, or taller?
It was the work of a couple of seconds. And it couldn’t be undone now. It was too late.
There’s a sour, dirty taste in Melissa’s mouth and a terrible heaviness in her heart. There will never be a time when she feels any better. She believes this absolutely.
Glancing down at the phone again, a realization slams into her and she scrabbles to turn it off. Can’t they track people by where they’ve used mobiles? Shit. The smiling cherub’s face disappears.
Melissa brings back her arm and throws the phone into the bushes with all her strength. She doesn’t hear it land.
HESTER
I have managed to think up a reason for why we’re driving in the middle of the night. I’ll say that we are sisters (I find this notion rather pleasing) and that we are on a mercy mission to visit our dying mother. Melissa has had to borrow her husband’s van because he’s away at the moment with the car. Or something like that.
We had to leave so late because Mother might not make it to morning …
Yes, this seems plausible. I told Melissa there is no way the mechanic would need to go into the back of the van, but I can’t say that I really know for sure. There could be any number of technical reasons why he might suggest it. All I can do is hope and pray.
Bertie has fallen asleep on my lap and I stroke his soft ears and feel thankful for his trust and warmth.
Cars pass with aggressive speed, their sound like giant sheets of paper being angrily ripped apart. The vibrations rumble through the bank and into my sore hips. I’m sitting on my spare cagoule but the chill from the ground still seeps through and into my bones. It doesn’t feel like June. It could be October right now.
I glance at the van. I can see Melissa’s face in the glow of the mirror light and it looks as though she is applying make-up. We’re not likely to be appearing in Vogue as far as I am aware but I suppose I mustn’t judge. Younger women care about these things inordinately these days.
But I do wish she would join me here on the bank, as one is supposed to in these circumstances. Anything could happen.
I sigh, knowing that is a hopeless wish. If there is one thing I have learned in the last few, strange hours, it’s that this girl won’t do anything she doesn’t want to. I haven’t had time to run my story past her either. I can only hope she will employ that acting ability she demonstrated earlier.