Missing You (29 page)

‘It was magic.’

She swung on his arm. ‘Is everything OK?’

‘Yep,’ he said, throwing the cigarette end onto the road. ‘Everything’s fucking wonderful!’

They went into the Star, which was a pub for older people; it did two-for-one meal deals for pensioners and was carpeted and fussy with dusty and faded fake potted plants on the window ledges. Fen had never been inside before. It smelled of toilet-rim air freshener. It was the pub where they were least likely to meet anyone they knew but it was also the closest to the school. Tomas bought two pints and a bottle of Becks for Fen and they sat in the window seat. Outside people held on to their coats and hats.

Tom was animated, happy.

‘Who’s that for?’ Fen asked, nodding at the extra pint.

‘My man Joe.’

Fen felt a squeeze of pleasure in her belly. She loved being with both boys. She loved being the only one who shared their secret, and she loved acting as a go-between for them, running errands, taking messages. When they were together, the three of them, those were the happiest times for her. It was as if they were a secret society from which the rest of Merron’s population was excluded.

‘He should be here any minute,’ said Tom. ‘He’s just gone to fetch his mum’s car.’

‘Why? Are we going somewhere?’ Fen asked. ‘Am I going with you?’

Tomas grinned and tapped the side of his nose.

‘Wait and see,’ he said happily, ‘wait and see.’

Then he said: ‘Oh fuck “wait and see” – look what I’ve got!’ And he put his hand into his jacket pocket and pulled out tickets to see James in concert in Manchester that night. ‘Freebies,’ he said, ‘for the backstage staff. And I’ve checked with Deborah and Dad’s in hospital overnight so she doesn’t need us at home. She said we deserved a night off away from the sickbed.’

‘Oh my God, Tom!’ cried Fen, clasping her hands together. ‘What, I’m going with you? Really? I’m really going with you? Thank you, thank you, thank you!’

‘Who’s the best brother in the known universe?’

‘You are,’ said Fen. ‘You’re definitely the best.’

‘Were you going out with my son?’ asks Emma Rees. ‘Were you his girlfriend?’

Fen shakes her head.

‘Then what was that about you sharing a secret? There was something Joe wasn’t telling me, wasn’t there?’ says Mrs Rees. ‘Was he on drugs? Had your brother got him onto drugs?’

Her voice is cold and terrified.

‘No,’ says Fen. She is so afraid of the rest of the story that she can hardly concentrate. She can’t think. She doesn’t know what the right thing to say is any more. Also, she is terrified, afraid of inflicting more damage than is necessary.

‘I used to hear Joe on the phone, speaking to Tomas,’ says Mrs Rees. ‘He’d be whispering. He’d change the subject when he heard me coming. It was drugs, wasn’t it?’

‘No,’ Fen says, more convincingly.

‘Then what was it? What was going on?’

‘I promised I wouldn’t . . .’

‘Fen, for goodness sake, my boy is dead! My son is dead. Nothing you tell me can make that any worse than it already is. I don’t
care
how bad it is . . .’

‘It’s not a bad thing,’ says Fen. ‘They were in love.’

‘Who were?’

‘Joe and Tomas.’

Mrs Rees makes a little squeak of shock. Fen looks up at her and holds her eye.

‘No,’ the older woman whispers.

Fen nods. ‘Yes.’

Mrs Rees is silent for a very long time.

Then she says: ‘Was it some phase they were going through?’

‘No, it wasn’t like that. They really loved one another,’ Fen says as calmly as she can.

‘In that case, why didn’t Joe tell me?’ Mrs Rees asks. ‘Did he think I’d be angry? Did he think I’d stop loving him? Did he think I’d be ashamed?’

‘I don’t know. It was difficult for them, in a place like Merron. They didn’t want to hurt you.’

‘No,’ says Mrs Rees. ‘No, you’re wrong. It can’t have meant anything to Joe. Maybe he was confused. If it had been important, he would have told me. He always told me everything.’

Fen thinks maybe she should leave. Emma Rees said she wanted the truth, but now she’s had a part of it, she’s denying it. If she can’t accept this much, how will she deal with the rest of it?

She puts her hands on the chair arms to push herself up. ‘Perhaps I should go,’ she says.

‘No.’ Mrs Rees shakes her head. She pushes Fen’s shoulder; she pushes her back down into the chair quite roughly. ‘Oh no, you’re not going yet. Not until you’ve told me everything.’

‘Then you have to believe me when I tell you they loved one another. Otherwise none of it makes sense.’

Mrs Rees laughs, a horrid, bitter laugh. ‘Oh, they loved one another, did they? They loved one another, my Joe and your Tomas? That’s why your brother left my son on his own, dying in the rain, in the dark, at the side of the road? Because he
loved
him? Yes, yes, that really makes sense.’

‘It wasn’t like that. He didn’t leave Joe.’

‘No? So how was it, then, Fen? You tell me how it was.’

Joe arrived at the pub a short time later, shrugging his shoulders apologetically because he hadn’t brought the car. His mother had already taken it. It didn’t matter because Tomas had an alternative plan. They drank their drinks and then the three of them went back to the Wellers’ house. It was empty of course. Lucy was married by then and Deborah and Gordon were at the hospital. Fen knew where the keys to her father’s car were kept. He didn’t use it any more; he was too ill to drive. It wasn’t taxed or insured and probably hadn’t been serviced for ages. It wasn’t in the best condition and one of the headlights wasn’t working, but none of them worried about that. It was a car, there was petrol in the tank, they had the keys and they were going to Manchester. That was all that mattered to them.

The boys sat in the front and Fen sat in the back, behind her brother. It was a big, powerful German car. It ate up the miles. On the way into the city, it was still light and although the wind was strong it hadn’t yet started to rain. They stopped to buy chips and maybe the boys were drinking beer, Fen can’t remember exactly. They were all happy and talkative. For weeks, months, Fen had been creeping around her father’s house, being quiet, feeling sad and frightened, hearing his groans, learning new words like ‘thoracotomy’, ‘pleura’ and, most recently, ‘palliative’. She hadn’t laughed or gone wild for months. That night she felt like a can of Coke that’s been shaken and is about to have its ring peeled back. She felt effervescent, full of energy and excitement and joy.

‘Joy?’ asks Mrs Rees.

Joy, yes, that’s what Fen felt, at the start of that evening.

When they reached the city they left the car parked in a residential side street and followed the crowds milling along the pavements. There was the usual pandemonium, the jostling and shouting and anticipation outside the venue, and after all that, the concert was great, it was brilliant. Fen hung on to Tom’s arm and watched his face change colour in the lights and admired him for knowing all the words to all the songs, and Tom’s other arm was around Joe’s shoulders and nobody minded, nobody stared, nobody even noticed that Joe’s hand was in the back pocket of Tom’s jeans, that the two of them were so close they were almost the same person.

Everything was fine, perfect, happy, hot, steamy, cheerful. Fen’s eardrums were ringing, her throat was hoarse and her feet ached with dancing, but she wanted to dance forever; she never wanted the evening to end.

Towards the end of the concert Tomas wandered away. He just faded into the crowd and Fen thought he must have gone to the toilet. It was only when he came back that she could tell by his eyes that he had taken something. But it didn’t really seem to matter, because all three of them were as high as kites on the music and the energy and the atmosphere. They were singing as they walked back to the car. They’d get home somehow.

‘You let your brother drive, even though he had taken drugs?’ asks Mrs Rees, incredulous. ‘You let him get behind the wheel of that car
knowing
he was off his head?’

‘No,’ says Fen, ‘no, we didn’t.’

‘What happened, then? Was Joe driving?’

Fen shakes her head.

‘No, he’d had too much to drink.’

‘Who, then?’

‘It was me,’ says Fen.

Mrs Rees holds one hand to her mouth, the other rests on her hip, and all her fingers are trembling.

‘Did you know how to drive?’

‘I’d had a few lessons.’

‘A few lessons?’

Fen nods.

She feels slightly dizzy, faint. The truth hangs exposed in the small, hot room and it is crushing, blinding, awful.

‘Go on,’ says Mrs Rees, ‘go on. Tell me. Don’t stop now.’

Fen continues although her voice fractures and fades, eroded with emotion.

She knew what she was doing when she slipped into the driver’s seat of her father’s car and took off her shoes, then reached between her knees to find the bar that would pull the seat forward so her bare feet could reach the pedals. She knew it was a reckless and dangerous plan and that she had neither the experience nor the skill to make such a long journey in the dark, and the weather was worsening, yet as soon as Tomas suggested it she agreed to drive without a murmur of dissent.

She agreed because she wanted Joe and Tomas to love her, not because she was coerced. She wanted to be one of them. She craved their attention and their admiration. She wanted to be a hero too.

She could have said: ‘No.’ She could have suggested they stay in Manchester overnight; they could have slept in the car. It would have been OK. The boys would never have forced her to do anything she did not want to do. She was the one who insisted she was competent.

It was a long journey home, longer than the outward drive had seemed a few hours ago, in daylight. They were taking what Tomas called the Scenic Route along the country roads, to avoid running into police patrols. The broken headlight made them conspicuous and vulnerable to being stopped, and none of them wanted to be caught in an illegal car, with no L plates and a learner driver in control. It was dark, gone midnight and by now it was raining. Fen had never driven in the dark before. She sat forward, holding tightly to the steering wheel. The wipers went backwards and forwards, and in between their strokes the screen spattered with water that shattered the view of the narrow road, always disappearing around another bend. From time to time a wheel hit a pothole and the car would lurch. Fen stared into the darkness ahead.

The boys were noisy at first, but then their banter, their relentless mickey-taking, eased off and they too went quiet. Joe, in the passenger seat beside Fen, fiddled with the radio; Tomas wound down his window in the back and smoked. And then, because he’d let the rain in, all the windows steamed up. Fen leaned forward to wipe the windscreen with the elbow of her jumper, to clear a space through which she could see. They travelled along the unlit, winding country roads, the wet, potholed tarmac shiny in the greasy, yellow gleam of the single functioning headlight. Fen felt the car slipping on the bends, she felt the pressure of the pedals beneath the soles of her feet, but she’d come this far, she was doing fine. The boys kept telling her she was doing fine.

They were driving along the bottom of a wooded gorge and the rain was coming down in sheets. Tomas yawned. He sat forward between the two front seats so that the point of his right elbow nudged Fen’s shoulder, and he said: ‘I’m going to close my eyes for five minutes.’

Joe turned his head. He cupped Tom’s face gently in his hand and pulled it towards his, and they kissed. And Fen took her eyes off the road for a second, just a second, as she turned to watch them, more than a second, maybe, a few seconds, and it was the most beautiful, gentle, tender kiss and then . . .

‘What?’ asks Mrs Rees.

. . . then . . ..

‘Then what?’

. . . there was a jolt and the car was going sideways. It was at right angles to the road and . . .

‘It rolled over?’

Fen heard Joe say: ‘Oh shit!’ in a voice so calm that she was not afraid.

‘At the inquest they said it must have aquaplaned,’ said Mrs Rees.

Fen felt the car roll and lurch, and the steering wheel tore itself from her hands and spun as if possessed.

They were in the air, flying.

A blast of cold air smacked Fen hard in the face, then something more solid hit her, but she was so disorientated she didn’t know what was happening and there was no time to think.

She was thrown forwards and backwards, she banged her head and her elbow and then she slipped and became wedged between the steering column and the front seat. And when she pulled herself up, half-choked by the seatbelt, her fingers hooked under the dashboard, the car was stationary, the right way up, rocking violently and then more gently on its wheels. Through the crazed glass of the buckled windscreen, in the alarming on–off glare of the hazard-warning lights, she saw distorted trees bending broken limbs towards the car and a vicious swathe carved into the verge behind her, the grass turned over and churned to mud, and, way back, appearing and disappearing in the flashing lights, an incongruous bundle of leather and denim lying almost flat to the ground.

And it was strange, but the engine was still running and the radio was still playing, still playing the same song it had been playing a few seconds earlier, as if everything was still the same and all right. Elvis Presley was singing ‘Suspicious Minds’.

Mrs Rees hardly seems to breathe. She gazes at Fen. Fen licks her lips. She is finding it more and more difficult to speak.

She listened to the music for a moment or two. Then she heard Tom’s voice behind her shoulder. He was asking: ‘Fen? Fen? Are you OK?’

‘I think so,’ Fen said. ‘What happened?’

‘We must have hit something in the road. We rolled over.’

Gingerly, Tom leaned forward and wiped blood from Fen’s chin. She saw the black smear glistening on his palm. Her lip was stinging where she had bitten through it.

‘Where’s Joe?’ she asked.

‘Where was he?’ asks Emma Rees.

Fen’s breath comes shakily. Now Mrs Rees seems very calm. Her eyes are cold; her lips are set in a line.