Her Closest Friend (ARC)

by Clare Boyd

I giggled. ‘It’s annoying you know me so well.’

  ‘Let’s go and see the car,’ she said, jazz-handing the gloves in my face and pulling me up to sitting.

  ‘Nooo,’ I cried. ‘Nooo. I don’t want to.’

  The inebriation was a comforting place to be, away from bad thoughts. I had no desire to rake up the past. It would be like picking at scabs that weren’t ready to come off.

  ‘Come on. It’s all fixed up. Come on,’ she said, physically dragging me by the arm.

  I stumbled behind her, complaining.

  The hit of cold air from outside almost stopped my heart, reminding me for a lucid, depressing second that sobriety was around the corner, reinforcing my reluctance to see the car.

  The heavy side door clanged and scraped open, like fingernails down a blackboard, and I put my hands to my ears and ground my teeth together.

  Sophie clicked on the light switch. The gloominess of the garage was accentuated by the bulb’s dim glow. Cobwebs broke on my face as we edged around the Alfa Giulia. Sophie stopped to touch the steering wheel and glanced back at me, looking embarrassed, as though she had been caught brushing her hand over someone’s thigh.

  Sandwiched in between the wall and the blue car – the car that had taken us on so many journeys together – I was struggling not to sway and trying hard to focus.

  ‘Come on, get in,’ she said.

  ‘We can’t drive it! We’re too pissed!’

  ‘We’re not going to drive it,’ she said.

  She climbed into the driver’s seat. I opened the passenger door to see that she had pushed the passenger seat forward. ‘Get in the back.’

  ‘No,’ I said, pulling the seat upright.

  She pushed it back again. ‘Come on. For old time’s sake.’

  I climbed into the back seat and perched awkwardly in the middle, leaning forward as much as possible, feeling instantly claustrophobic.

  Sophie elbowed me in the ribs. ‘Sit back,’ she said, turning on the ignition.

  ‘Don’t turn it on!’

  ‘It’s okay, I left the side door open!’

  The exhaust fumes became thick in the car as she revved. My stomach rolled slowly over, the vodka sloshing. I swallowed, pushing down the shoot of liquid that rose up my throat. ‘I need to get out. I’m going to be sick,’ I said, gulping away the saliva pooling in my mouth.

  Sophie reached over to press down the lock.

  ‘Don’t, Soph,’ I groaned. I had to lie down across the back seat.

  She switched on the radio. ‘Deda said I should turn the engine over every now and again.’

  A love ballad blared out from the car speakers. Sophie sang a couple of lines at the top of her lungs before changing the station. Loud grime pulsed through the seats. She began dancing, swaying her arms, hitting the roof.

  The car rocked. My head was splitting. The plastic seats stuck to my cheek. I remembered falling off the back seat.

  The rain. The music. The thud. The jolt.

  My body rolled into the footwell. My nose was squashed onto the floor of the car behind the passenger seat.

  ‘Ouch. What? That hurt,’ I rasped, winded by the dividing hump between the two footwells.

  ‘Shut UP!’ Sophie yelled.

  I twisted round, rubbing my face, feeling my hands damp with sick and sweat.

  ‘Stay there,’ she said.

  My head pounded. I closed my eyes, wanting to sleep forever.

  When she returned to the driver’s seat, I mumbled, ‘What happened?’

  ‘We must have hit a deer,’ she replied, pushing down the handbrake, pulling away.

  ‘No!’ I wailed, beginning to cry, noticing that the windscreen was cracked in the top left-hand corner.

  ‘It’s okay. He didn’t suffer.’

  ‘No, no, no. Let me get out! Please!’ I cried. I began to cough, inhaling the fume-laden air in sickening gulps, closing my eyes. But my head swam. ‘I get what you’re trying to do! I was to blame, wasn’t I? I was behaving like an idiot and I distracted you.’

  She switched off the music and there was a sudden quiet. I opened my eyes. She was looking down at me.

  ‘Yes, Naomi. That is exactly why that dumb animal died.’

  I looked away. Tears trickled down the seat, just as they had that night after impact.

  The car moved away. The carcass was left behind, dying a slow, lingering, tortured death. ‘We have to go back,’ I cried.

  ‘Stop whining. Let me think.’

  ‘We must go back to check.’

  ‘No. We can’t go back.’

  I released a sob. ‘We can’t leave it there.’

  She twisted round. ‘D’you want to break his neck? Do you? Could you do that with your bare hands? Could you?’

  I reeled from her fury, flopping back into the seat, drunken and useless, closing my eyes to the fractured glass, the backdrop to her silhouetted form. I felt a wave of remorse. Time would not turn back for me and I cried; cried for myself and for Sophie and for the thing that we had left to die by the road.

  Then the engine cut out and Sophie’s smell pervaded my head, her smoky fingers and her damp palm stroking my cheek.

  ‘Shush, shush. It’s okay. I’m going to sort this out for us,’ she had whispered.

  I stared down at the dividing hump between the two footwells and remembered the pain in my ribs and the bruising, and how my forehead had been cut by the window-winder. On the plane to Bangkok, a few days later, my body and mind had been broken.

  ‘It was a horrible night,’ I shivered.

  She snorted. ‘Don’t feel bad. People hit deer all the time. It’s no big deal.’

  I sat up, wiping my eyes, suddenly alert to her change of tone.

  ‘The near miss scared me shitless, Sophie!’ I cried. ‘We could’ve had a much worse accident that night. I risked your life and mine by being a complete idiot. By being so fucking drunk all the bloody time. We could’ve died!’

  Speaking of it, of my culpability, was as if a cork had been unplugged from my chest, as though my heart was beating for real, for the first time in years. The two decades between now and then had a veneer over them, polished and beautiful but designed to cover over the cracks and flaws. That night had been a turning point in my life, a ground zero. My recklessness had shocked me. There had been no conscious desire to die; there had been no conscious desire to live. I had never wanted to feel that way again.

  ‘We didn’t die,’ she said, switching off the engine, just as she had that night. She reached back to stroke my cheek, soothing me with her calm voice, her hair tickling my nose. She did not smell of smoke as she had done back then; she smelt of cleaning fluids and petrol. ‘Did something else happen before? At the party, I mean?’ she whispered, with that gentle voice that drew the truth out, and, as always, I fell under its spell.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come on, you can tell me.’

  I lay there, still, for a few woozy moments, until my confession came up from the depths of me.

  ‘I let that loser – what was his name? You see, I can’t even remember his name.’

  ‘Jamie?’

  ‘No. Not him. The one with the horrible teeth. He lived in Will’s house, with Debbie. What was his name?’

  ‘Matt?’

  ‘That’s the one. I shagged him in the loos.’

  ‘He was disgusting.’

  Letting that revolting boy fondle and touch me had been like taking a knife and cutting at my own skin to feel pain. Neither emotionally engaged nor numb, I had enjoyed the euphoria of sex, then the disgust and the shame. I had deserved it. Yes, I had deserved his snuffling mouth over my breast and his vile secretions dampening my knickers.

  ‘Why did I do that?’ I whispered, massaging my fingers, crushing them together, trying to bring them to life.

  Sophie looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘Because of what happened to you.’

  My whole body stiffened. I had goaded her for an honest answer, bu
t I loathed her for answering honestly.

  ‘I don’t ever want to talk about that,’ I said. I did not want to be that girl any more.

  I clambered out of the car, managing to reach the rhododendron bush before throwing up. My guts heaved and twisted as I expelled our conversation, expelled her answer. I hadn’t been looking for a real answer.

  As I wiped my mouth and stood up, I saw the metal of Adam’s car flash through the trees and swing into the drive.

  The girls! I remembered. They can’t see me like this!

  It was too late. They were jumping out and racing over to me.

  ‘Are you okay, Mum?’ Diana asked, looking down at the pool of slimy sick at my feet.

  ‘Sorry, girls. I’m not feeling too well. I think I must have eaten something funny.’

  Adam approached. The hotness inside me clashed with the chill across my skin.

  ‘Hi Naomi,’ he said, more as a question, as though I wasn’t recognisable in my current state. He removed his sunglasses, squinting at me.

  ‘Don’t come any closer,’ I insisted, putting my hands up, worried that he would smell the vodka and see the tremor that had broken out across my flesh. ‘I might’ve come down with some grim vomiting bug.’

  He smirked, clearly cottoning on. ‘Where’s Sophie?’ he asked, glancing behind me at the house.

  My brain rattled as it sought an answer.

  ‘We were just… er… looking at the… at her grandad’s car.’

  The three children stood by Adam’s side with puzzled expressions. Dylan’s small, wet mouth had a crook at its edge, as though he knew more than the girls. He scratched at his elbows.

  ‘Hi, kids!’ Sophie cried, stalking out of the garage, wiping her hands on a chamois cloth, looking sober and bright. ‘Just cleaning the car so we can sell it.’

  I noticed a twitch in Adam’s eyebrow. ‘Oh, yes?’

  ‘Want to stay for tea, girls?’ Sophie asked, opening her arms for Dylan’s embrace.

  I thought of her bedroom, which still needed clearing out. I couldn’t stomach it. I was about to remonstrate when Adam saved me. ‘No. Sorry girls,’ he said. ‘We can’t this evening. Another time, maybe.’ He looked straight at me. ‘Come on, I’ll take you and the girls home. I imagine you might feel too… ill to drive?’

  While dying of humiliation, I was humbled and grateful that he was here as a sober, sensible grown-up to scoop us up and take us home. ‘Thanks, Adam,’ I said.

  Having started off today with the intention of helping Sophie, of sorting her out, I was ending the day as a snivelling, vomiting burden.

  ‘I’ll walk over at some point and collect the car,’ I said.

  ‘How will you get the girls to school tomorrow morning?’ Adam asked me.

  ‘Charlie’s taking the train up to Manchester for a conference tomorrow. We can use his car.’

  None of us spoke for the rest of the journey. It was unlike Adam and I to drop the show; the two of us were the chatty, personable contingent of the foursome. Strangely, the girls didn’t talk either. In spite of my vomiting bug lie, they knew something wasn’t right. I knew something wasn’t right. This had not been a boozy lunch or a birthday breakfast drink. This had been sad drinking. Inappropriate drunkenness. A depressing regression.

  I stared out of the window, thinking of Sophie and how she attracted trouble, how I was attracted to her trouble. I had only wanted to help her. Helping her was not good for me. She wasn’t good for me. But in spite of the splitting headache and the regret, I felt the tug of separation. If she was the only person in the world who connected me to my past, and understood who I really was, how could I ever let her go?

  She was my unsuitable friend. My Achilles heel. She was the drink you reach for when you know you’ve already had too much.

  Chapter Ten

  Sophie’s eyes were falling closed as she drowsily fumbled for the newspaper clippings in the mattress. She didn’t feel drunk – she had chucked most of her vodka shots over her shoulder without Naomi noticing – but she felt tired and she was yawning every few seconds.

  When she couldn’t initially see the articles sticking out, she thought, for a second, that Naomi had found them without telling her, but it seemed they had been pushed back inside by the pressure from the fitted sheet.

  Originally Sophie had enjoyed the idea of toying with Naomi, to tempt fate, to position her close to the evidence: warmer, warmer, cooler, freezing, warmer, warmer, HOT! Part of Sophie had truly wished that Naomi’s never-still hands had felt inside the torn opening of the mattress to find them. But Naomi had been genuinely – endearingly – upset and vulnerable in the Giulia, and Sophie had felt bad for getting her drunk, for goading her, for forcing her into that confessional mood. Her openness had scared Sophie a little, as though she might have had more to tell than Sophie could have handled hearing.

  Now Sophie lay down on the bed, curled up, with her right palm sticking out and lying upwards, open, sore, itching. The articles were right by her face. The smell of old paper reminded her of her grandfather’s books.

  If she fell asleep, she would dream. Her dreams always allowed Naomi to find her secret stash, but when she did, the newspapers would be blank. In her dreams, Jason Parker’s face always faded to nothing. In her dreams, the event had been erased from history.

  Dozing, she saw Naomi sticking her hand inside the mattress, and saw Jason Parker’s face in full colour.

  Her eyes popped open. She had drifted off. The crispy black-and-white pages had remained there next to her, untouched by anyone but her. The photograph in the article lay across her rash-covered palm.

  She read it again, for the hundredth time:

  The Exeter Daily

  * * *

  EXETER: MOTHER APPEALS FOR HIT-AND-RUN DRIVER TO COME FORWARD

  * * *

  12th August 1999

  * * *

  The mother of a young man found dead near the roadside in a suspected hit-and-run incident appealed to the driver to examine their conscience and come forward.

  Jason Parker, 22, a student from Exeter University, was walking back from a party at the Stoke Cannon Inn at around 11.30 p.m. on 19th July, along Stoke Road towards Exeter.

  Mrs Parker, 44, from Exeter, said, ‘The driver might not have known that Jason was dead, or what or whom they had hit, and I’m appealing to that person – who would have been driving in the dark in bad weather – to come forward. If you are reading this, I’m begging you, please call the police so that me and my husband, and his brother, can move on and grieve for our beautiful son and brother.’

  Mrs Parker reported her son missing two weeks prior to his body being found in a wooded area by the side of Stoke Road. A fellow student had mistakenly thought that Jason had left the party early, after a small altercation, by taxi to head back to Streatham Campus, where he lived as a student, taking his Bachelor of Science in Chemistry at Exeter University. The police made progress in their investigation when they discovered that Jason had failed to find an available taxi firm, and had possibly decided instead to walk back along Stoke Road when the party was over.

  ‘When the police called round to tell me they had found his body, my life ended, too. I would not wish that moment on my worst enemy,’ Mrs Parker said.

  If you have any information please call Devon and Cornwall Police on 01428 444 222.

  Sophie had information, for sure. But she doubted they still wanted it. After twenty years, his mother and his family would have made peace with his death. He had been dead for almost as many years as he had been alive. If she confessed now, their pain would resurface and they would relive their grief all over again. This was what she told herself. This was how she overrode her guilt. This was how she lived with herself.

  But each flashback of the night itself, as and when it came, was infuriatingly short. More and more, she craved context and detail. She wanted to go back, to be there where it happened, play it out again, find a way to trigger new informati
on and clear the black fog that had descended on her memory over time. And she knew exactly how she could do that.

  Quickly, she shuffled away the clippings and stuffed them back inside the mattress.

  She was going to drive to Exeter now. Like visiting the grave of a loved one, she would revisit Stoke Road, connect with her fading memory of that night.

  Dylan was asleep. Adam was at home. She had sobered up enough to drive. She could make it there and back by morning, just as she had managed to do that night, all those years ago, in reverse, from Exeter to Surrey, with a cracked windscreen.

  She nipped back inside the house and grabbed the Saab car keys. The shack was dark and she guessed Adam had gone to bed.

  As she drove, the radio DJ spoke in low tones, reflecting how spooked she was by her thoughts and by the hoot of owls and the snake of lonely roads.

  The twists and turns of tarmac fell beneath Sophie’s wheels and she began to feel drowsy. The radio was beginning to grate on her. She switched it off, deciding to replace it with her own cheerier playlist. With one arm, she rummaged in her bag to find her phone and realised, with a sting of regret, that she had left it at home. The sense of aloneness was magnified by its absence.

  She stopped off to get some coffee, returning to her car reinvigorated by the hit of caffeine. Thoughts of what she would find at her destination buzzed through her mind as she retraced the route instinctively. But the drive was taking longer than she remembered. Or it felt longer. Back in the day, the time had floated by without any urgency attached, taken up by gossip, junk food and dance music. If only she could go back to those carefree days.

  Three whole hours of endless catseyes later, Sophie spotted the signs to Exeter. Faced with red lights, she was tempted to ride on through the ghost town junctions, just as she and Naomi had done in the 1990s, when there had been few surveillance cameras. Now, she sat waiting, being a good girl, but impatient for them to change, impatient to get there.

  When she turned into Stoke Road, near to the Stoke Cannon Inn, her impatience flipped to fear. She slowed the car, crawling along at ten miles an hour, wondering if she should U-turn and head back the way she came. Before she could decide, she saw the pub up ahead on the right. She remembered the revellers that night, how bright and alive and busy it had been. As she drove past, she could see that it was boarded up. Rusted metal barriers had been bolted to the windows and the white walls had been scrawled with graffiti. There was a FOR SALE sign hanging lopsided from the low stone wall where they had often sat, waiting for cabs.