Читать книгу Bad Friends - Claire Seeber, Claire Seeber - Страница 7

BEFORE: JUNE

I breathe hard onto the coach window and watch the fug slowly spread before me. Tracing the small cloud with my finger, I write my name across the middle like a schoolgirl. My name slants; a single tear tracks downwards from the M. I make a fist and vigorously rub myself out again. My hand is damp now; I wipe it dry. Cocooned in this muggy warmth, safe for the moment from the damp, dark night, I’m struggling to stay awake. Far off in the drizzle a tiny house twinkles with beguiling light, nestled into the old church beside it like a trusting child. I gaze wistfully after the enticing image, but we are truly hurtling down the motorway now, a sleek capsule slicing the M4’s black, and the house has vanished already.

I hold my breath as the teenage boy beside me bobs his head shyly, uncurls his awkward new height from beside me, scuttling with an odd spider’s gait to talk to his mates up-front. Now he’s gone there is some space here for my sadness, some room to acknowledge the pain of what I’ve just left behind. I feel utterly raw; like I’ve been flayed alive. I bite my lip against the grief. The truth is we’ve gone too far this time, I can’t see a return. We said it all; we let the floodgates down and we got truly drenched.

An abandoned can of Strongbow rolls under my feet. I let the can rattle until it annoys me, hitting my heel over and over. I retrieve it, stick it firmly into the net on the seat-back in front, fighting the urge to lick my wet fingers, drying them instead on the knobbly cloth on the seat beside me. I wish I’d had the foresight to find something to kill the ache before embarking. I wish I had some wine, my iPod, a cookery book – any means, in fact, of forgetting. I wish I wasn’t travelling alone. I wish I’d known I would be.

My eyelids droop inexorably until my head bangs against the thick, cool glass.

‘Ouch.’ I jerk up, feeling foolish, forcing myself upright again. I don’t want to sleep here, don’t want to surrender to the inevitable nightmares surrounded by these strangers. So I watch the little woman across the aisle, a mousey hobbit who mouths each word of Northanger Abbey aloud, scanning each page fervently, her pale lips oddly stiff despite their constant movement. I wish that I’d never read the book myself so that I could have that pleasure again for the first time. The couple in front lean into each other, the tops of their heads touching, their hair almost entwined as he whispers something he wants only her to hear. Right now, I think tragically, it’s unlikely I’ll ever feel any first pleasure again; that anyone will ever want to whisper anything to me again. I almost smile at my self-indulgence. Almost – but not quite.

Eventually I succumb to sleep, rocked by the lullaby of voices that murmur through the dim coach. I don’t notice the dark-haired girl as she passes by to use the poky loo, though later the girl swears blind that she saw me in my seat – she liked my hair, the girl says (God knows, it’s hard to miss). Says she knew I was a kindred spirit. But I do notice the tall man who drops his bag as he stumbles past, jolting me uncomfortably back into wakefulness. I am startled again as I glance up, befuddled. My heart stops; I think it’s Alex. My heart flames with pain; my belly corkscrews.

I won’t catch the man’s eye, although I can sense he wants to speak. I can’t bear to look at him. He might see what I’m trying so hard to hide, so I turn away again. I find my fists are clenched, nails dug deep into my palms. I twist my hair into a nervous rope, tucking it behind one shoulder. Even in my shadowy reflection I can see the red of it, the flame I can’t escape and –

I see something else, something beyond the window, out there in the dark. I hold my breath in shock.

What I see is fear. Pure and undistilled, the face I gaze into is mad with it, big eyes rolling back into the brain until they are all white; a nightmare vision that is in fact quite real. The nostrils flare in panic, the huge teeth bared in a grin of frothing terror, the mane flying in the wind. For one small second snatched in old time, the time that will soon become the time before – the safe time – I find I’m not scared. I want to stretch my hand through the window and smooth the trembling flank; soothe this rearing beast. But then my own terror crashes in around me and I feel very tiny. The horse’s great flailing hooves will surely pierce the coach’s metal side. Frantic, I press back into my seat, trying to flatten myself against the blow.

The chance to find my voice, to shout a futile warning, has already passed. The lullaby is building to a shriek. The passengers are screaming, have begun to scream as one, because the coach is tilting, tilting on its axis until it cannot right itself again, until finally it topples. It skids across the road in hideous scraping chaos, on its side now – and still the coach keeps moving. I am level with the road; blue sparks fly up from the concrete before me as if a welder were torching the ground. Then I roll, slam hard into a body so all the wind goes out of me.

I cannot see. My hands flail at the blackness. Panting with terror, I am thrown against some metallic edge. A flash of agonising pain fills my left shoulder as I crack it on what must be the ceiling. A child cries piteously. Someone’s foot grinds into my gut, a fist pummels my mouth in fear. I claw at my face as something oddly intimate drapes itself across me, a mouthful of hair that chokes and sickens me. I struggle to breathe, to let some air in. Any air. I panic that I am blind. We are still moving. Why the hell haven’t we stopped moving?

A huge whump: the central reservation crumples as the coach crashes through, on its back now. It’s slowing, and someone near me is screaming, they won’t stop screaming, on and on –

A terrible metallic crack ends the voice. The coach is jerked by force into the fast lane. My head whips forward, then snaps back again. There’s a crunch as the first van hits us head on, and folds: then the next vehicle, then the next. A hot flash up my left leg. Finally there is silence – almost silence. Just a single horn blaring into the complete darkness, then, soon after, another: a petulant electronic chorus. Closer to me, a whimpering that spreads like wildfire. We have finally stopped moving and now there is nothing. Just darkness. Just the sob of my own breath as I clasp myself and wonder: Is this death?