Two Cows and a Vanful of Smoke (12 page)

I don’t like to think that I spend all my time in pubs. I don’t. But some pubs are easy places to relax, places where it’s easy to feel safe, easy places to hide. So when I met Sam and she asked if I fancied going up to Staple Cross, I said, “Let’s go,” and she slipped on the spare helmet, hopped on the bike, threaded her arms around my waist, held her face against my back and we headed off.

We sat at the same table we sat at when we first met, and we talked about that night, and how we’d talked about baking and my Gran’s talent for charming sheep. And the same feelings were there, and we talked about them too, how when I was with her I felt as though I was walking in a safe place where no one could touch me. And she agreed.

Other people came and went, some people I knew and some I didn’t, but we hardly noticed them. We were in our own world. I thought about how I’d sat with Spike earlier and how there was something similar about how I felt then and how I was feeling now, and I tied the feeling down. It was about feeling complete. Spike completes part of me, and Sam completed another part – and that, I supposed, was another thing about friendship. And it was something about love. Until you meet these people you are only part of a person. You need others to make you. So when we left and she climbed onto the back of my bike again and held me tight again, I imagined that she was melting into me, and adding the last bits that made me whole.

I pulled away from the pub and rode slowly, loving the feeling. I slowed down at a crossroads, turned the corner and stopped, turned and looked at her. She smiled, and I reached back and touched her lips with my fingers. She kissed my fingers and I stroked her cheek, and as I did this, headlights appeared in a gateway. They came on like day had suddenly broken for a second, and a car pulled out, skidded into the lane and accelerated towards us.

I turned left, and for a hundred yards I didn’t think about the car, but then it was right behind us, too fast, swerving into the middle of the road, pulling back at a bend, swerving out again. A white car. A growing engine. The driver looking straight ahead, his bald head shining and his mad mouth twitching. Dickens. When we reached a short straight, I gunned the bike, took a couple of bends, settled into another straight and Sam yelled, “What the hell’s he doing?”

“Hang on!” I shouted.

I’d given myself a couple of hundred yards on the car. It was easy. I was quick and I was slick and I had a choice. The car pulled up behind me. Dickens flashed his lights. At the next junction I could head up towards a fast empty main road or I could ride into the lanes – lanes I knew, narrow lanes, lanes I could lose the car in. I slowed, made as if I was turning towards the main road, watched as the car turned with me, then turned the other way and throttled up.

The night was falling fast now, a scarf of cloud slow and high across the moon, the high hedges looming and black. For a moment the noise and headlights disappeared, and we were alone and quick. Maybe I’d been imagining and maybe we weren’t being followed or chased or both. Maybe nothing was wrong. Maybe everything was a dream, and things were simply a fake. Maybe not. The car was back in my mirrors, coming at us again.

I felt like a hunted animal, adrenalined and head down, eyes wide and feet quick. But nothing was going to catch me. I knew the land. I knew the places to hide, the turnings and dips, and the shadows in the hedges. And I was brave, braver than Dickens and his idiot head.

A crossroads. A quick left. A house. A farm. I could turn into the yard. I didn’t. Just past the farm I hit a patch of gravel, and as my back wheel spun out from behind me, I eased off, turned into the skid, steadied, kept upright and pulled away again. Headlights cut and flew, the car gunned up close again, howling against the night. Another farm, and then a long straight that led towards darkening woods. Sam held me tighter, and I turned towards her and yelled, “We’ll lose him up here.”

We didn’t. For a minute we were away, but he caught up again and as we rode under the trees he started blaring his horn and flashing his lights. “What does he want?” Sam yelled, as we flew out from the trees and dipped into a nasty series of bends. “Fuck knows!” I said as the bike caught another patch of gravel and sprayed the car’s windscreen. I heard the stones splatter against the glass, and this slowed him for a moment, a moment to gun the bike again and head down to a place where the road widened and a tractor and trailer were parked in a lay-by. There was a place here where I could turn, and if I hadn’t had Sam on the back I would have, but I couldn’t. The balance was wrong. And suddenly the car was next to me and I was gunning the bike, but it wouldn’t pull away. The road narrowed again, and climbed. The hill was gentle at first, but then it got steep, and as we reached the top I couldn’t see beyond the brow. The car kept coming, and as we reached the top, I saw the brush of the lights of another car coming towards us. They disappeared for a second, and then they were in front of us, fifty yards away. I swerved towards the hedge, the lights flashed in front and the lights flashed behind, and I squeezed the bike through the gap between the hedge and the oncoming car, and as I did, I clipped its wing mirror. Then the bike hit something in the road – a branch, I think – and we were skidding sideways towards a field gate.

We hit the field gate at sixty and, at the time, I thought we were lucky. The gate splintered and smashed, and we stayed upright, rolling into the field. The grass swished beneath the tyres. I braked. I held it together. We were going to be OK. I started to lose the back wheel. I pulled it back. But then we hit a ridge, Sam screamed, and I felt her arms slip away from my waist. The bike lifted into the air, turned on its side, twisted and crashed into a pile of corrugated iron. For a moment the engine revved, but then it coughed and died, and the only sounds were the spinning of the back wheel and an engine in the lane. The moon shone. The moon shone on like a wish. And the moon took my wishes, broke them in pieces and scattered them across a pool of spreading oil.

A car door opened. It slammed shut. I tried to stand up. The bike was lying on my leg. I said, “Sam?” She didn’t reply. I couldn’t see her. “Sam?” Nothing. For a moment my mind failed me, and I lost focus. It came back as a figure walked towards me. I heard the sound of bleating sheep. I looked up. A man looked at me. He had a big face and was wearing a bright white shirt. His eyes were grey, and his lips were wet. He crouched down and said, “You all right, mate?”

I nodded. “I think so…”

“What was that bloke doing?”

“Which bloke?”

“The one that was following you. He was driving like a crazy…”

“I don’t know,” I said, and the man reached down, pulled the bike upright, and I tried to stand up.

My trousers were ripped, I’d taken skin off my leg, bruised my ribs and twisted my wrist, but I hadn’t broken anything. I pulled off my helmet, tossed it at the bike and looked around. I saw Sam. She was lying twenty feet away. She wasn’t moving.

I ran to her and the man followed. I bent over her. “Don’t move her,” the man said. “And don’t take the helmet off…”

I reached down and touched her shoulder. I leant towards her head and listened. She was breathing – small, shallow breaths like a cat would make in its sleep. A little trickle of blood was running from her nose. “Oh God,” I said, and the man said, “I’ll get help,” and turned and ran back to his car.

I sat with Sam for half an hour. I sat and listened to her, and every five minutes I said her name, but she didn’t say anything. I held her hand and squeezed it gently, and I cursed under my breath. I cursed Spike and I cursed friendship. I cursed smoke and I cursed greed. I cursed my thoughts and myself, and I cursed fate. And when I heard a siren in the lane, I stood up, ran to the gate and stood in the middle of the lane.

The ambulance men followed me to where Sam was lying. They had bright torches and a stretcher, and a big bag of equipment. They asked me if I was all right. I said I was. They said, “You sure?” and looked at my legs. I shouted at them to look at Sam. They told me to be calm and stand back while they looked at her, and they went to work. I don’t know what they did, but after ten minutes they gently picked her up and laid her on the stretcher. They carried her to the ambulance, and they spent another ten minutes doing things to make her comfortable. Then they told me to get in beside her and we drove away.

I don’t know about the rest of that night. When the ambulance man who sat in the back with me looked at my leg, he gave me an injection of something and put a dressing on the skin, and something in the injection made me sleepy. So when I looked at Sam with a mask on her face and a drip in her arm, she looked well one minute and dead the next, and her skin switched between different colours. One minute it was white, the next it was grey, then it was blue, and then it was white again. Or maybe this was real, maybe she was turning into something from a bad film. I closed my eyes and saw her flying through the air and cracking against the pile of corrugated iron, and I saw her bleeding from a deep cut in her head. Her hair was matted with blood, and her skull was showing. And I think I slept for ten minutes. And then I woke up. The ambulance doors opened. People came running from a hospital. They pulled Sam out, laid her on a trolley and wheeled her away. The ambulance men followed. Nurses asked them questions. I stood and tipped my head back. The sky was orange and black. The air smelt of diesel. Someone said, “You hurt too?”

“I’m OK.”

“You’re not.”

“I am…” I said, and then I felt something sweep through my body, feathers and damp wool, and sharp filings of steel. I tried to stay upright, but my legs had decided they didn’t want anything to do with me. I reached out and grabbed someone’s shoulder, and then everything failed, dark came down and I was gone.

When I was a kid I used to rush home from school, grab a piece of cake, stuff it in my mouth, swill it down with orange squash and go out on my bicycle with Grace. Sometimes I’d go first, and sometimes she’d go first, and sometimes we’d go together, and sometimes we went to the river at Stawley Mill, walk as far as a place where the river widened to a pool, and play on a rope swing we’d tied to an overhanging branch. You’d take a running jump from a slope on the bank, swing out over the water and scare the ducks. There was a log tied to the bottom of the rope, so you had a choice: you could sit down or stand up. If you stood you could push back and become almost horizontal as you swung, but if you sat down you could lean over and look up and imagine yourself as a bird. In the spring the breeze would tinkle through the branches and play on your face, and in the summer the sun would coin on the water like treasure. When the leaves fell in autumn, they’d drift past your face as you swung, and if you were lucky you could catch one in your mouth. Then they’d float away on the river, down towards Tracebridge and the memory of the witch who lived there, and on and on through the valleys and woods towards Taunton. We had happy days on the rope swing. We were never afraid of anything. We never fought. We were good children.

If we were feeling more adventurous, we’d forget the swing and dare ourselves to ride down to the ruins of the house at Marcombe Lake. This was the place where Professor Hunt kept his kidnapped woman and did his terrible experiments. He’d turned her skin into snake’s skin by injecting her with a special chemical he’d made, but she was rescued by a man who’d come to value a collection of books for the old Lord Buff-Orpington. I think Professor Hunt went mad when he discovered the woman had been stolen from him, and before he left the place and went back to wherever he’d come from, he set fire to the house. All this happened years ago: there were no firemen to come and put the blaze out, so it burned until there was nothing more than walls and gables and chimneys in the place where a decent house had been. And as the years went by, the walls and gables and chimneys crumbled, and ivy and elder grew in the places where the Professor had cursed and spat, and the woman had screamed.

One day we went down there even though we hadn’t planned to. I think we started by going for a walk in the woods below Belmont Hall to look for dormice nests, but before we knew it we were standing in the field above the ruins, and then we were running down the field, laughing and chasing each other. “Dare you!” yelled Grace, and I didn’t need daring twice.

The walls still had scorch marks, and when I stepped through the place where the front door had been, I tripped over a blackened plank of wood, part of the old collapsed roof. I turned around, waited for Grace, but she didn’t appear.

“Grace?”

No answer.

I laughed. “Please yourself,” I said, and I started to explore.

I think I would have liked to have been an explorer. I don’t know how people become explorers, what they need to do at school or who they need to know, but if I’d been a bit more adventurous and brave I’d have taken myself off to places like Mongolia or Patagonia, and searched for something that no one had seen for centuries. Treasure buried by dead monks or a dead king, jars filled with coins, tablets with secret writing on them, an odd-shaped object hidden in a cave. Then I’d have bought my finds back to England and written about it for the
National Geographic
magazine, and had my photograph on the cover, me smiling with a beard, bright eyes and a big scarf.

“Grace?”

Still no answer, so I started exploring the ruins. There were some people in the village who said that Professor Hunt had never done evil experiments on a woman, so maybe I’d find proof. Maybe I’d find a bottle of the stuff he injected her with buried in the floor, and I’d be able to take it back and show it around and tell everyone that the stories were true. I picked up a stick and started digging at the floor in front of the hole in a wall where the fireplace used to be. I found stones and a piece of broken china, more stones and some cinders, but no bottle. I picked the piece of china up, licked my finger and rubbed it. It was blue and white, with half a little flower painted on it. I heard a footstep on the other side of the wall, then another and another, light steps like you’d make if you didn’t want anyone to hear. I said, “I’m here, Grace.”

“I know,” she said, from behind me. I stood up.

“How long have you been there?”

“A couple of minutes.”

“Liar.”

“I am not,” she said.

“Yes you…” I started to say, when I heard the footsteps again.

I froze and Grace froze, and I dropped the piece of china. “Who’s that?” she whispered.

“I don’t know…”

We stared at each other. I didn’t know what time it was, but the sun was starting to sink, and long shadows were gathering around the ruins. I heard a scratching in the wall. A mouse. Grace said, “It’s getting late…”

One more footstep.

I said, “I don’t like this…”

“Nor do I.”

“Let’s go.”

Grace went first. We went the way we’d come. She looked around the corner of the wall, looked back at me and nodded. “It’s OK,” she said. Then she disappeared around the corner. A moment later I heard stones crashing over each other, the scrabble of feet, Grace’s scream. I ran after her and, as I did, a sheep shot past me, leapt over the remains of a fence that used to go round the old garden, and disappeared into a ditch.

Grace was sitting on the ground. She looked up at me. “Bloody hell,” she said. I think that was the first time I’d ever heard her swear, but it didn’t bother me. All I wanted to do was run home, sit in the front room and watch something nice on the telly. “Bloody sheep. Half-frightened me to death.”

“Come on,” I said.

“Give me a minute.”

“OK.”

So she sat for a minute and I stood next to her, and I watched the sun. It turned orange as it sank, and crows smudged its face with their filthy wings. They called their dirty caws, they flapped and they dropped, and they disappeared into the tops of some old trees. I suppose they sat in their nests and rearranged the sticks of their nests, scrapped with each other for a while and then settled down for the evening. I don’t know if they slept and I don’t know if they tucked their beaks beneath their wings; maybe they did, and maybe they pecked for fleas and ticks in their feathers. Something to eat before the night came, something to keep them occupied, something to keep for their dreams.

I dreamt about crows. Big birds with ragged wings and long beaks. They bothered me in my sleep, and when I woke up I was lying in a bed, and a doctor was shining a light in my eyes. I tried to sit up, managed to get halfway and flopped back onto the pillow. I said, “Where am I?”

“Hospital, Elliot. In Taunton. You had an accident. You were on your bike…”

“An accident?” And it came back. It came back like a punch. A winding punch from a big man with a fist like a hill. I remembered. It wasn’t a dream. The car in the lane, the other car, the gate, the bike twisting in the air. The ambulance. Sam. Beautiful Sam. Sam with the free eyes and the sweet voice and the fingers that smelt of onions. “Sam,” I said. “Where is she?”

“Who’s Sam?”

“The girl I was with. She came in the ambulance.”

“Ah…” said the doctor. “She’s being looked after now.”

“What do you mean?” I didn’t like the way he said, “Ah…” It was like he’d invited me to die. “I want to see her.”

“You can’t. Not at the moment. Not for a while.”

“Why not?”

“She’s quite poorly. We’re operating on her now.”

“Operating on her? Why? What do you mean?”

“I think you should try and get some sleep now, Elliot. Do you want us to call anyone?”

“No, why? Why are you operating on her?”

He looked at the floor and looked back at me and shook his head. “She took a knock on the head.”

“But she was wearing a crash helmet.”

“I know.”

“And that didn’t help?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“But she’s going to be all right?”

“We’ll know in a few hours.”

“A few hours?”

“Yes,” said the doctor, and I slumped back in the bed, looked up at him and said, “Could you call my mum?”

“Of course. Where is she?”

I told him and then I closed my eyes, turned on my side and watched the lights in the dark as they twisted and faded. Some of them were shaped like snowflakes, others looked like cows, others made sounds like bells chiming underwater. And then I let the lights disappear, and I dozed.

I dozed for a while. I think I dreamt, but it was difficult to know what was happening in my head; was a dream a dream or was it really happening? When I saw door after door opening and faces swimming from the walls, were they the faces of people I knew, or people I hadn’t met yet? And when I joined these people on a flying bus, did they feed me food or dust? So when I heard a voice calling my name I couldn’t decide if it was coming from the room or my mind, or even if my mind was in the room.

“Elliot?”

I opened my eyes.

“Elliot?”

My mum and dad were standing by the bed. She was holding my hand and he was standing to one side. They both looked grey and old, older than I’d ever seen them before. I had one of those odd thoughts where you think nothing is real. Maybe I was looking into the future, and they really were old. I tried to hold my hand up and look at it. I wanted to see if it was lined and wrinkled and covered in liver spots. I opened my mouth to say something, but I was dry. Blank. Empty. Nothing came out.

“You want some water, Pet?”

I nodded.

Dad picked up a cup, gave it to Mum, and she put it to my lips. The water tasted sweet, and as it trickled over my lips and down my throat, my body lightened and the pain in my leg faded. I wasn’t looking into the future at all. I was there. Real was the thing.

“Thank you,” I said.

“What happened?” said Dad.

I shook my head. “I got into a skid. Smashed through a gate, ended up in a field.”

“I always worried about you and that bike,” said Mum.

“My girlfriend… she was on the back.”

“The doctor said something about her.”

“What did he say?”

“That she’d been hurt.”

“I know that…”

“She’s in intensive care.”

“Intensive care?”

“That’s what he said, but he wouldn’t say anything else. But he did say you’re going to be as good as new.”

“But Sam…”

“I know, Pet…”

“I have to see her.”

“I don’t think you can. Not yet, anyway. All you can do at the moment is be quiet and rest.”

“Rest?”

“Yes.”

Rest? I couldn’t rest. I felt hot and fevered, and my head was raging. I had to get up. I had to move. I had to see her. I had to see her and help her and tell her I was sorry and hold her hand in the day and the night. I had to, and that was all I had to do.

Mum and Dad stayed for a while and tried to cheer me up with stories about home and when I was a kid and the ways I used to wind Grace up, and how she used to get back at me, but nothing they said made me feel better. I asked Dad to go and see Mr Evans, and tell him what had happened, and I asked Mum to give Grace a kiss from me, and when they’d gone I stared at the ceiling and listened to beeping machines and snoring patients and burbling nurses. Half an hour of this began to drive me mad, so I sat up, swung out of bed and looked at my leg. It had been cleaned and bandaged, and when I put weight on it, it hurt, but was strong enough. A nurse came to me and said, “What are you doing?”

“I need the toilet.”

“I’ll fetch a pan.”

“I don’t want a pan. I want to get up. I want to do it myself.”

She picked up a board hooked to the end of my bed, looked at it, looked at me and said, “OK. You know where it is?”

“No.”

“End of the ward on the right.”

“Thanks.”

It felt good to walk. It felt good to go to the toilet. And when I’d finished, I splashed my face with cold water, and that felt even better. Then I thought it would be good to take a longer walk. I couldn’t lie in bed. I couldn’t rest. I wandered down to a long corridor, and stood at a window.

Dawn was breaking, streaks of pink and orange and blue filled the sky, birds were singing from bushes and trees and roofs. I thought about the cows. They’d be coming in for milking. I thought about all the people who were sleeping in their beds. They’d be dreaming. I thought about Sam. I thought about her beautiful face and her hair tied in bunches, and I thought about her head. I went to look for her.

I walked down the corridor until I found a map of the hospital. Intensive care was on the floor below me. I followed the signs. It was easy to follow the signs.

When I pushed the door open, a nurse looked up from her desk and said, “Can I help?”

“Sam. My girlfriend. She’s here.”

She stood up. “And who are you?”

“Elliot. I was with her on the bike.”

“Well, Elliot, you shouldn’t be here, and you can’t see her. She’s asleep.”

“But…”

“No buts, Elliot. It’s the rules.”

“Can’t I just…” – I felt a bit faint, reached out and held onto the edge of the desk – “…just look. Look at her. Please?”

The nurse stood up, took my arm and said, “Listen, it’s against the rules. But I suppose… I suppose you could have a minute. Just one, mind you. No more…” and she led me to a window. “She’s in there,” and she pointed.

Sam was lying on a high bed. Her head was wrapped in bandages, and she had tubes up her nose. Drips were stuck in her arms, and a frame kept the sheets and blankets off her body. Machines beeped, lines danced, a nurse in a mask came and stood by her, checked her pulse, ticked a chart and walked away. I said, “Oh God…”

“We’ll know in twenty-four hours…”

“You’ll know what?”

“If she’s going to make it.”

I felt my blood ice.

“Are you her next of kin?”

I shook my head. “No.”

“Do you know where we can find them?”

I shook my head. “I know where she lives. Her other friends will know.”