Subjects, p.29
Subjects, page 29
He pulled up after five minutes more, across the overgrown gate of an unused house, where he always parked. Then, leaving his door open and engine running still, he leaped across the road, and up two stone steps, to batter on the doorway of a house they’d never visited before.
The children watched him as he banged the metal knocker again with a distinctive rap and saw him nervously feel in his pocket as he waited for the occupant to wake. Just as he was squeezing past the box hedge, trying to look through the front window, the owner appeared at the door: a slight figure, wrapped in a white dressing gown, with bare feet, pale skin and, falling to just below her shoulders, a sleepy head of natural, wavy, walnut-coloured hair.
From the other side of the road, they could see her looking up at him, concerned, accepting, in shock, and hear the ups and downs of an earnest conversation between them both. Then he took whatever it was he was holding in his hand – something small, something silver, that for a moment caught the street light – and pressed it into her right palm, folding her fingers over until they were completely closed. She turned her feet upon the black scraper mat, as if to go back inside, and he started down the steps again, his face drawn and tense. Then they both turned back to one another, and he grasped her by the shoulders and kissed her on the forehead, and she rose up on her toes and kissed him once upon each cheek.
He was back in the car, with the door slammed shut, as soon as her black door was closed.
‘Who was that, Daddy?’ the boys asked.
‘Does she know where Mum is?’
‘Was that money you gave her, Dad?’
‘Why did you both kiss?’
Florence was silent, working things out. She’d seen that woman before, she thought, in a curled-up photograph.
Hugo knew a shortcut out of there, and he was almost certain where Sofia must have gone. The manic journey continued, as he wrenched the vehicle free of the Victorian maze and out towards the bypass, along the hedge-lined, sixty-mile-an-hour clearway. Isaac’s tummy ached, and he felt a little sick, after all the twists and turns and as the speed went up.
Hugo had a single mission now, and Tim found himself looking at a version of his father he had never seen before – unkempt, focused, as he always was, but with the jokey soundtrack all edited away.
‘Are we…?’ Tim started but decided to save his breath. Hugo was glancing in the mirror now, gambling on overtaking the lorry in front, pulling in after it just as an overnight courier van shot past.
‘Dad,’ said Florence, ‘it’s a sixty limit here.’
He wasn’t listening, just looking, picking off the signs in his headlights, until the one he wanted came into view. Then they were swerving down a shallow concrete helter-skelter, onto a dual carriageway, and immediately off it again, veering left at the first exit, which carried them up to a giant roundabout, coolly lit with a blinding dish of white-blue light on a tall black pole.
What he wanted was straight ahead. The Royal Mail depot. He went over without stopping, then took the slip road off to the left, following it down the hill and turning into the top entrance, where he stopped, uncertain at last, wondering if he was authorised to continue down the steep, ramped road to the grey metropolis below.
Everything that moved was red, crisscrossing under the glaring lights in an impossibly complex night-time game of Solitaire. Small red vans crawled like ladybirds, lining themselves up in shining rows, parking neatly, then peeling off again. Medium vans fed on what the little vans had brought, collecting the reshuffled contents from inside the great warehouse. Periodically, the juggernauts came in, holding back as they rolled down the great steep ramps, then powering on through the tunnel, out to the other side.
‘What are we doing here, Dad?’
‘Do you want to post something?’
‘Have you ever seen so many vans?’
‘Does our postman work here?’
‘How do they know where the letters go?’
‘Do they know where everyone lives?’
‘Do they know where Mummy is? Is that why we’re here?’
‘Why’s everything red, Dad?’
‘What’s Mum’s car doing there?’
He looked down over the tubular fence which stopped them tumbling from the road into the loading area below and saw the only vehicle which wasn’t shining red.
It was her. Waiting for him. For her next step. Sitting in the Citroen, engine running, fifteen metres below. And just visible through the windscreen, the handwriting too distant to make out, he could see a thick brown A4 envelope, curved heavily over the dashboard.
If she was telling the truth, that envelope did not contain her entry. That was in the post already, about to go. No, it was his. She’d ensured the electronic obliteration of his awkward masterpiece. Now she must have waylaid Vince at the sorting depot, or someone else who knew him, and persuaded them to extract the hard copy from a post sack, a conveyor belt or an automated bin, to enable the destruction of its final paper form. He didn’t doubt that she would shred it, or burn it all to ash, and he had no desire to save it now; the experiment was done.
If she was capable of doing that, then so was he. He had to get her entry back, before it was too late. The copies on her PC he could easily delete. Florence knew her password, and she would back him up. He’d be home well before Sofia if he took that shortcut. But the hard copy, the tangible evidence of his lapsed morality. It would be better for everyone if that ceased to be.
He put the car back into gear again and checked quickly behind. He would drive down into the depot and beg someone to help him get it out.
‘Can I press the button with the ribbons now? Will it help us not to skid?’
‘Are you sure it’s OK to go down here, Dad?’
‘What does “authorised” mean?’
‘What’s Mummy doing now, Dad?’
He looked down at the Citroen. It was moving now, forwards in an angry arc, then back towards the towering concrete wall. Then it shot off forward towards the six red rolled-up doors of the warehouse, squealing off into a left-hand turn just before it would have hit. The car was at a right angle to him now, fifty metres away. So that was her strategy, he thought. When she was wild like this, her game plan might be anything at all. She was going to stop him getting in. And she’d placed the vehicle between him and all the possible ways out.
He’d misread her again. Now she was reversing, crashing into the metal safety fencing, leaving one piece buckled and a loose end juddering behind. The Citroen was facing him defiantly, up the one-way ramp. He looked down but couldn’t see her face, forty metres away. She must be revving the pedal hard, the exhaust panted out white clouds of gas in the artificial light.
‘What’s Mummy doing now?’
Hugo replied at last, his wobbling voice at odds with his reassuring intent.
‘I think she’s trying to come up here. She’s not really supposed to, but I think she’s made up her mind. It’s a bit on the narrow side, so I’m just going to let her come past.’
He flashed his lights just once at her, but she did not respond. Perhaps she was waiting for a bit more space.
He tried to reverse a little, back through the entrance archway, as it was wider the other side, but his rear view was blocked by a red articulated lorry, pressing up behind him and jolting to an unwilling halt with an impatient hiss.
‘Why’s she not moving? Is the clutch broken again? Maybe she’s run out of fuel? Is there enough oil?’
It was no use. He would have to go forward, and she would have to let him pass. He saw her reverse back a little further. Then, slowly, he let the handbrake off, starting to roll inevitably down the concrete track. The lorry followed behind him, gathering momentum.
‘Mummy’s coming up now!’ shouted Isaac in delight. He started to wave at her, pleased she’d been found at last.
To his horror, Hugo realised he was right: she was moving too, and what was more, driving up at speed. Christ Almighty, she was aiming for them, trying to kill them all.
The lorry was right behind him. There was nowhere for them to go. She was like a steam train. Trajectory predetermined. Except that she was travelling on screaming, burning tyres and storming through a deadly cloud of nitrogen oxide, hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide. He and Florence were making silent calculations. If a vehicle with a mass of X is currently travelling at twenty miles an hour, and accelerates with a constant acceleration…
There was no point mathematically in swerving, to the right or to the left. The lorry behind them was wider than them both, and if he slowed down any more, they would all be crushed.
In the end he sacrificed himself and, just before they struck, turned the wheel a touch away from Flo so that the oncoming vehicle might smash into him first. He couldn’t help it. He closed his eyes before the two cars hit. The last thing he saw was her wild auburn curls, tumbling forward over the dashboard and covering her face, and, in his peripheral vision, a spring of Florence’s hair, flung towards the windscreen as his eyelids screwed themselves shut.
*
The shards of glass lay wetly glittering. Sofia stared at them contentedly. It was a small price to pay in terms of collateral damage, and you could hardly achieve success without a degree of that. Someone would be along to clear it up in a few minutes’ time. She didn’t need to worry about it. In fact, she didn’t need to worry about anything anymore. Everything was resolved. She would stay just where she was and revel in the moment.
Forty
Friday, 25 November 2016
‘Sorry,’ she said, as the barman knelt to sweep the glass into a dustpan. She giggled. ‘We got a bit carried away. I’m celebrating – we’re all celebrating. Can you put the cost of a replacement on the tab?’
‘You’re all right, love,’ said the barman. ‘Congratulations. Your husband told us all about it. Refill’s on us.’
‘I cannot believe,’ said Mrs Berrisford, dabbing her trousers with a tissue, ‘just how far a teensy little glass of champagne goes.’
‘Or that you managed to throw it directly in my lap,’ protested her father, walking awkwardly back from the gents. ‘You may be a prize-winning author, my girl, but your hand-eye coordination is still distinctly lacking.’
‘It’s bad enough you tried to kill us all off in the first place,’ said Tim, ‘without then showering us with alcohol and bits of broken glass.’
‘I didn’t kill you all off.’ Sofia laughed indignantly. ‘The ending is open to interpretation. The reader is very much left to decide what happ—’
‘Oh, yeah, right,’ joked Tim. ‘Like we end up sandwiched between a lorry and a speeding car, driven by a suicidal maniac who just happens to be you, and we all get out without so much as a scratch? I mean, I’ve heard about lucky, but…’
She’d changed the names of course, to protect everyone, but it seemed the end version was disappointingly transparent. Florence and Hugo had read it all. Tim had found it a bit weird and skipped to the car chase. Isaac had been given the gist and told it was about a lady who always wanted to know more.
‘I didn’t mean it to end like that,’ she said. ‘It just kind of ran away with itself.’
‘Kind of ran away with itself! I should say so!’ protested Hugo. ‘I mean I may have many faults – I’d be the first to admit that. And I know things haven’t been perfect, the last ten years or so, but to portray me as some kind of Don Juan who fails in his “suppression of base desires” and commits long-term adultery whilst still submitting monthly papers to the Institute of Biochemistry – I only wish I had the energy. And while I’m deeply flattered you rewrote me as a creative genius who could knock out excruciatingly funny thirty-thousand-word comic sci-fi novellas at the same time—’
‘Yes, Dad, stick to the day job,’ said Tim. ‘I’ve seen your reports. There’s no way you could produce a story when your normal writing’s as dull as that.’
‘What’s all the stuff about this Annabel anyway?’ said Florence. ‘I mean I know you and Dad were both with other people at university, but you can’t slate him just for having a girlfriend, months before you met.’
‘I’m sorry, darling,’ Sofia said to Hugo, going red. ‘I got a little paranoid. I found the letters, when I was looking for something else, and a few other things which didn’t quite seem to fit, and I brewed on it for quite a while – when I wasn’t well – and it all seemed to come together into a plot line. It all grew out of that.’
‘You are aware, my darling, that she broke up with me twenty-three years ago?’
Sofia dropped her head.
‘And that she is terribly, annoyingly organised and still sends me birthday cards about three weeks in advance? The last one came in bloody February, if I recall. And that her mother and mine are incredibly close still, having been next-door neighbours for the first eighteen years of my life, and that recently, Annabel dropped off a parcel, c/o Mr Hugo Gardner, from her mother to mine, as she happened to be going past on her way down south? Not to mention the fact that I still send her mother – Mrs Fisher – a postcard every time I go abroad. That’s Mrs Fisher, not Miss Fisher by the way, as she would be if she’d kept her maiden name, which she didn’t.’
‘Yes.’ Sofia giggled with nervous relief. ‘I know all that. But somehow, after I’d been in hospital, and banged my head – or was it even before, perhaps – it all got contorted, intensified. And you have to admit, it’s a bit more exciting as a plot line than going off with the postman or a tall, dark, handsome stranger.’ Of course, Sofia thought stupidly, the children had confirmed only that the postcard had been to someone called Fisher, not whether it was to a Mrs or a Miss.
‘Granted, I did keep bumping into Annabel once it was all over,’ Hugo went on, reminiscing now. ‘Kind of embarrassing really. Graduation – when she came to see her brother, and yes there was that wedding, when you were expecting Florence, but I promise you we shared nothing but awkward memories, every time we met. Now Annabel would have been proud if I’d written that story, Sofia. It was her that got me into all that science fiction in the first place. She wouldn’t have tried to run me over for my efforts, that’s for sure.’ He squeezed her shoulders and looked at her as if he couldn’t believe she was back, then kissed her decisively through her hair, above her ear.
Sofia laughed. She blushed. She laughed. A dark kernel of doubt unfurled itself inside and dissipated through her skin out into the open air. She looked at him earnestly, genuinely crestfallen. ‘It wasn’t – it really wasn’t meant to be you. It’s just it’s so much easier to base a character on someone you know. You were just a wireframe, someone to hang things on. I never expected for a moment I would win. It was just a process. A quest. Something I needed to finish.’
‘What’s a quest, Mum?’ said Isaac.
She thought for a moment.
‘A hunt. An expedition. A journey to find something.’
‘What were you looking for?’ said Tim.
Sofia looked down at the sodden beer mats on the table. She wasn’t certain anymore. ‘It’s complicated,’ she said finally. ‘I can’t remember exactly what started it all now.’
‘Is that why you went to the mountains?’ said Isaac, making a mess with an ice cube he had extracted from the bottom of his glass, trying to lift it off the table by sucking on it with a straw.
Sofia looked at him strangely. ‘I don’t think so, Isaac. Don’t do that, please.’
‘And will someone please explain all the stuff about the sodding trinket?’ asked Florence, holding out the silver fish hanging around her neck. ‘I’ve been carrying it round like a talisman for weeks, and then I find in Mum’s masterpiece that it carries some explosive connotations linked to Dad’s supposedly sordid past.’
‘Oh, that thing,’ said Hugo. ‘Well, that was from Annabel, I admit, but moons ago, and given in an utterly platonic spirit of support for old times’ sake.’
‘And I’ve been giving Mum a hard time because she didn’t recognise it?’
‘Well, I probably shouldn’t have given it to you. It was perhaps a touch undiplomatic. But I have to say, it’s always meant a lot to me, and I’ve always struck lucky every time I had it on an examination desk.’
‘I think probably being a natural genius is the key factor in your “lucky” successes, Dad. Not sure it did me much good.’
‘You clearly didn’t need it anyway. You did incredibly well.’
Florence had indeed done commendably given the circumstances of her revision. Three solid C grades, somewhat lower than predicted.
‘I’m sorry, darling – with me being ill, and the boys, and Dad away, it must have been impossible to study properly at all.’
‘That’s OK, Mum, don’t worry. I can give them another shot next year.’ Florence smiled resignedly and took another sip of sparkling water from her glass.
‘So, what are you planning to spend your winnings on, Mrs Gardner?’ The barman was back. ‘Apart from another bottle of champagne.’ He winked and slapped down a fresh copy of the local paper, folded back at the relevant page.
Subject of praise, the headline said. Mother of three wins local writing competition.
Mother of three Sofia Gardner, aged forty-one, was delighted to find herself winner of the top prize – £1000 – in Raithford’s yearly Regional Writing Competition last week. In a darkly playful debut work, she tells the story of a former psychologist who, finding that fifteen years of motherhood have atrophied her brain, embarks on a journey of epistemological discovery, only to find herself unearthing a good deal more than forgotten facts.
The author, who admits to having had a number of “ups and downs” herself following the birth of her second child, described herself as “over the moon” to receive the accolade.
