The Other Half of My Heart (23 page)

‘You should be so lucky,' Tina says. And for a second, it's all right. And it's going to be all right.

But then, Roddy says ‘Shit!' and Sam shouts ‘Fuck!' and Tina says nothing because she can make no sense of what she's seeing, lights slewing into her vision at the bottom-left corner of the windscreen, coming towards them.

‘He's jackknifed,' Sam shouts, ‘he's jackknifed,' and suddenly it makes sense, that what is coming their way is the back of the lorry, pivoting around the place where it's attached to the cab, slow but gaining in speed, in inevitability. It's overtaking the cab, which is turning away from them now, the driver's face a set contrast to his thrashing arms, which are turning the wheel as though – well, as though his life depended on it.

Tina hears a new sound. She doesn't know what it is. It might be her. It might be crying. It might be inside her, or outside. She thinks of their parents, champagne already in their hands; their father, watching out of the window, waiting for them to arrive. Not both of us, she thinks as she sees the corner of the truck's rear approaching them, not both of us.

‘I'm going to try to get around it,' Roddy says, his voice a grim hard calm, ‘hold tight.'

‘Yes,' Sam shouts, as Tina hears her own voice scream, ‘No!'

She can't move anything, not a lash, not a follicle, not a single muscle cell. Her body is locked, trapped, as the dislocated arm of the lorry's load flaps towards them.

And it looks as though they are going to make it; as though the sheer will of the three people in the car, the total of their youth and their love for each other and their smart clothes and their parents waiting and the whole and happy endlessness of possibilities for their lives, not so much added together but multiplied and multiplied again, squared and cubed and quadrupled, over and over, potential times love times need times devotion times cheerful sex times heedless loving times the girl from down the street times the quirk of the uterus that made Sam and Tina two where they could have been one times the how-did-it-go-so-wrong-so-fast birth of Roddy that made him a precious only, and lucky to have a mother who lived to tell the tale, although no one ever told the tale.

Yes, it looks as though they are going to make it.

The body of the Cosworth is low and the bottom of the lorry's load is high; and for just a slow, beautiful moment it looks as though the complex mathematics of the universe, of god and fate and good deeds done and future gold medals and honours degrees and plump new grandchildren like catkins on a spring branch, of Roddy's driving and the lorry driver's determination that this shall not happen, not today – it looks as though it might just work out. Tina can see them, telling the tale, the imaginings of their listeners not coming anywhere near this – this – this thing that there are no words for. She can almost see the three of them, looking round at their listeners' horrified faces, bonded even more closely together by the terror of the moment.

But.

Just the very outside corner of the back of the lorry catches the door post on the driver's side as Roddy swings the car left. They are on the tip of the outside bend of the road; beyond the back of the lorry the thick hedge, gloaming wet, is swinging back in, showing them a sweeping way to safety, the place they would have been if things had been a fraction of a centimetre different.

But the car is going the other way, and it's going fast. It's through something and over something else – Tina has her eyes closed again now, willed or maybe burned shut by the noise and the sparks – and one minute she's being shaken and the next she's weightless, and then there's the sound of a crumple and then there's the feel of it, concertina-ing her up, and blackness and a smell that's metal and heat and the tang of blood, and then nothing. Nothing for a long time.

The coach is coming up from the Flood farmhouse. Aurora Fielden is enjoying the space of two seats to herself – she can make sure the hem of her dress doesn't touch the floor, and take off her shoes and tuck her feet underneath her. It looks as though Roddy is not so much off-limits as unreachable these days. During his stay she'd knocked on his door on a variety of pretexts in everything from a towel to a ball gown and there was no getting so much as a rise out of him – he'd been wearing a towel himself, one day, she'd checked. Even her black lace knickers hadn't got a flicker of interest, and they never failed. Maybe she's played it wrong. Maybe Tina wears something cotton, and practical, and that's what gets him going.

She's heard good things about Tina's brother, though, and she thinks she could do with a change from her usual crowd. She's worked hard all summer, and practically been a nun this year. She deserves a fling. She might rearrange some place cards, if they get there in time for her to do it without anyone noticing.

The bus is full of excited chatter and the smells of too much perfume and aftershave expanding in the warm, enclosed space. After the endless talk about what to wear, within five minutes of meeting at the stables the ball-goers had forgotten their finery and were the same relaxed, friendly crowd that they usually were: Aurora was saving her energy, though, and so she'd made for the back of the coach and feigned sleep to save her voice for later. She hears Roddy's name mentioned once or twice, usually with Tina's close by, but otherwise there's nothing much of interest. Perhaps she does doze a little bit; certainly when the coach stops she feels as though she's jolted back to life from a very long way away.

The coach has stopped too suddenly and too soon. The driver gets out, and Aurora becomes aware of a swell of panicky chatter moving from the front of the bus to the back. She dreads a flat tyre, or a roadblock, or anything that might mean she has to walk anywhere in her heels. The clouds are still heavy and close, making the light an eerie dark grey-blue: all she sees when she looks out of the window is rain, sheets and sheets of it coming down.

And then the crying starts, and before the news makes its way back to her, she hears and senses the forward movement of everyone leaving the coach, and knows that it's more than a minor hitch. So she puts on her shoes and goes down to the front to investigate. And, faster than she knows how, but in memory ever after with a horrible slowness, as though the realization of what lies before her must be given piece by piece, lest the whole is too much, she sees it all.

The headlights of the stopped coach, on full beam, are lighting the place where the hedge is ragged and broken. There's a crowd of people standing next to the gap and a tattered line of onlookers spreading out each way.

Some of them are crying, some silent. Aurora walks back up the bus steps so she can get a clear view into the field below, and she sees the car that made the hole in the hedge. There's a steep, rocky drop between the road and the field where it's now lying, upside down.

The headlamps of the car are still working, still shining, but everything else about it screams ‘broken'. It seems to have bounced, and spun, so in the line of light spilling out from it there's a gouge of fresh earth that shows where it has been.

One of its wheels, the one closest to Aurora, is spinning still, faltering to a halt, a dropped coin on a tiled floor. The other tyres seem to be still. Aurora realizes that she's watching the wheel because it's the only thing moving.

She can't remember when she understands that it's Roddy's car. She can't remember anyone saying it. Maybe the noise that sounds like summer rain, falling still but unnoticed now, is actually the sound of names being breathed, just below the breath-line, over and over: Roddy, Tina, Roddy, Tina, Roddy, Tina, Roddy. Tina, Roddy.

The lorry driver is standing on the road, to the right of the group by the hedge.

Aurora can see him shaking from where she is standing on the step, which must be ten feet away. ‘I've called for help on the radio,' he says, to no one and everyone, to himself, to his hand, which he is examining in amazement, as though he has never seen such a miracle of life before. ‘They're coming.' Aurora is just thinking that someone should help him – that whatever has happened, and they don't know what that is, he's shocked and hurt – when one of the stable girls goes to him, touches him, and examines the blood on his head and face. Aurora thinks it's Fudge, although everyone looks different in their dressed-up clothes and hair, with expressions she's never seen on their faces before.

‘You need to sit down,' Fudge says, gently, to the driver. She touches his upper arm, cautiously. When he doesn't react, she takes a firmer hold.

‘The road was wet,' he says, ‘I couldn't stop it.'

‘Come and sit down,' Fudge says, and she steers him to the side of the road, out of the light from the headlights of his cab, and Aurora can't see them any more, although his voice – nothing I could do, nothing I could do – beats quietly on.

Aurora pulls her phone from her bag. There's no reception. She wonders about walking up to the Coach and Horses to get help. But there are enough people here to do whatever first aid is necessary. They need ambulances and the fire brigade, and they need them soon.

She can feel her agitation rising. She looks around the field, to see where the help is – there must be help, surely, coming – and sees the coach driver scrambling down the embankment with a first-aid kit slung over his shoulder. She recognizes the Floods' farrier and a couple of the grooms who work in the yard following him. Some of the girls have moved from shock to shocked action. Ells scrambles past Aurora and into the coach, and comes back holding the trainers that she'd brought with her for the walk home from the stables, later. She sits on the bottom step, shoves her feet into them, and then uses her teeth to tear at the hem of her dress. Once she's made a rip she grabs and pulls the fabric of the skirt. She stands and moves her legs, making sure she can move freely. She sees Aurora watching her.

‘First aid,' she says, ‘I'm trained. I don't know what I'll be able to do, but – I'm trained. I can try.' She looks at Aurora with eyes that say: I doubt I can make things any worse. She rubs the rain from her face, only for new rain to replace it.

‘Laces,' Aurora hears herself say, ‘tie the laces. You'll be no help if you fall.'

Ells bends, knots, nods, and pushes her way through the crowd and down the embankment. There's a slow trail now, a scramble of makeshift rescuers pushing wet hair from their faces and carrying blankets, coats, anything they have that they hope might help.

Two cars have pulled up behind the coach, and trained their headlights over the scene as well. The rain is starting to ease and the clouds to pull away, so it's as though a new day is dawning, and the headlights only serve to make the scene below stand out even more brightly.

Somewhere there's the sound of a siren. It doesn't seem very close. Not close enough, anyway. Aurora wonders whether news has reached the Floods and her parents and Anastasia yet, or whether they are still waiting at the Coach and Horses, chatting about traffic and rain and looking out of the window and wondering where everyone has got to.

When Aurora looks back down to the scene in the field, there are people grouped at either side of the car. And there's a shout, suddenly, that passes up the line, as strange and true as a new foal: Roddy's talking. Roddy's talking. Tina's breathing and bloody Roddy Flood is still talking! People start to laugh, too loudly, and Aurora feels her own relief start to bubble and gather between heart and throat.

But she doesn't dare let it out, because something's not right. She doesn't know what it is, but she feels like the person standing at the city walls watching the comet come out of the sky while the rest of the citizens sleep.

And then she sees it. There's another group in the field. They're standing away from the lights of the Cosworth, and they aren't talking, or listening, or doing anything. One of them is kneeling while the others stand. Someone in the group shifts – turns away, towards one of the others, who puts an arm around them in a gesture that's neither comfort nor despair, so perfectly is it poised between. Aurora sees what is at the centre of that pocket of silence.

She sees the foot first, the wet leather shining against the light. She struggles to make out the leg, because it's in black trousers made matt by water, dark against the mud and the grass, and anyway all wrong, thrusting as though it's trying to escape the body it's attached to.

Then she makes out the torso, follows the line of the body up, her eye caught by the white of a cuff and the gold of a borrowed cufflink and the grey of a hand. She knows she shouldn't be glad that the body is face-down, but she is.

And then someone standing next to the body finds their voice, cries out: and all of the watchers look, away from the car, away from the pulse of relief that there is life, talking, breathing life, and they see what Aurora is seeing.

There's a rush of inward breath, as though everyone must do something, anything, in this second, to protect their own life.

‘Who is it?' someone asks, although her voice barely scratches the air. The talk is already coming up the line: no one knows. No one wants to put a hand under that shoulder and haul a dead weight on to its dead back.

But Aurora knows. She thinks of the empty seat beside her on the coach, and her plans for who would be next to her in it on the way home.

‘It's Sam,' she says, ‘Tina's brother. It's Sam Randolph.'

Roddy's world doesn't extend to the noise outside the car. He feels very little. There's a pain on the side of his face which is cut and, later, will bruise to black. No one will say it to him, but it's likely that his cheek has been caught by the buckle on the side of Sam's shoe as Sam's body went through the windscreen, the skin scraped and cut from back to front rather than from front to back, the opposite of all the tiny nicks and scrapes from the shattered windscreen. There's warm wind blowing through the hole where the windscreen used to be; his headrest is in the wrong place; it's hard to breathe because his body is wedged sideways between the seat and the bottom of the steering wheel.