The officer tugged at his jacket and actually cleared his throat. ‘I’m sorry to leave you sitting in here for so long. It’s somewhat hectic out there, as you can imagine.’
Neither of them sat down. They waited for him to deliver whatever fate he held for them.
‘I’m afraid…’ Nihal reached out for his wife, ‘that we’ve been working on the basis of some inaccurate information about the identity of the young people in the car. There have been quite a number of conflicting reports coming in, from various sources, and it’s taken some time to verify these different statements. But I can now confirm, with a degree of certainty, that your son wasn’t recovered from the scene with the others.’
‘What?’ they asked in unison.
‘We’ve checked and double-checked, but he isn’t in the hospital. He wasn’t brought in by the ambulances.’ The officer watched them, waiting for the news to sink in. Which it did, rapidly, bringing with it waves of confusion. He continued, ‘Mohir was reported, by a number of eyewitnesses at the party, as getting into the car that crashed; and given our – and your – inability to contact him, an assumption was made that he’d been involved in the incident. Hence you being asked to come to the hospital. But after checking the IDs of the other casualties, and now that the other parents have provided positive identification of their children, it’s become clear that Mohir is not among the injured.’
‘Are you sure?’ Nihal asked. It was hard to swap one narrative for another so quickly.
‘Yes. We’re sure. That’s what we were checking. Hence the delay in speaking to you.’
The following silence was a barren one.
‘So where is he?’ Shazia’s confusion echoed Nihal’s own. Where was their son, if he wasn’t at the hospital? He’d been with the others. He’d been in the car. He’d been involved.
The officer couldn’t tell them. ‘That’s what we’re trying to ascertain.’
Again neither Nihal nor Shazia could compose a response that was adequate. Eventually Nihal said, ‘So what do we do now?’
The officer paused. ‘We’d advise that you go home – wait for him there. He will, we have to assume, come home eventually. He was seen leaving the party, and a couple of witnesses are adamant that he got into the car, but that’s the last confirmed sighting we have of him. We’re obviously continuing our enquiries. Has he ever dropped off the radar before?’
‘No.’ They put up united front. What was he implying?
‘And you don’t have any ideas about where he might be?’
‘No.’ Again in unison.
‘Okay.’ The officer didn’t add anything. They all just stood there, in middle of the room, wrestling with their own thoughts and questions.
It was the woman who broke the impasse. ‘We have your contact details. Obviously if we hear anything we’ll contact you ASAP, and you must let us know if – when – he gets in touch with you or returns home.’
Shazia reached for her bag. They had to leave. There was nothing for them here. Mo was elsewhere, lost to them, and seemingly to everyone else.
As she reached out to push open the door, the officer said, ‘We’ll obviously want to talk to him when he does turn up…’ After a beat he added, ‘as a witness.’
Chapter 11
DOM WAS discovering that time moved at a totally different speed in hospital, dictated by medical priorities, not chronology. The doctor – who the ancient nurse had said would be along shortly to speak to them – had still not put in an appearance. The wait, in the dark, trapped in their tiny cubicle on the slumbering ward, had been interminable. Once he’d phoned Martha to tell her that her brother was okay, Dom had had nothing to do but sit and stew. Initially he’d been patient and polite, grateful even, but as the minutes crawled by he grew restless, then exasperated. After three hours of waiting he was angry.
Harry had been tight-lipped, which Dom supposed was understandable, but it was also deeply frustrating. When he’d tried to get details about the accident out of him, Harry had said very little, other than that the car had crashed when he’d swerved to avoid something in the road. He volunteered nothing else and, when Dom pressed him, he said he had a headache, lay down on the bed and closed his eyes – a piss off and leave me alone gesture, if ever there was one. Left to his own devices, tired, stressed and irritated, Dom had felt like a caged animal, hemmed in by a flimsy curtain, the cast-iron hospital protocol and an awful feeling of being totally out of control.
By dawn he had had enough. As Harry slept, or pretended to sleep, Dom went to the nurses’ station and demanded, rather than requested, that they be allowed home. The senior nurse repeated that Harry had to be seen to eat, without vomiting, and had to have had a normal wee and to have opened his bowels – and be signed off by one of the doctors – before they would be permitted to leave. Dom promptly went and fetched a can of Coke and a cereal bar from the vending machine, woke Harry up and supervised him as he consumed them. Then he pointedly took the evidence of consumption to the nurses’ station. He was told, again politely, but this time even more firmly, that they still had to wait until the full observation period had been completed.
And so they waited.
By late morning Dom was at his wits’ end with his son, and with the wait. He resorted to going out into the corridor. His in-box at least provided a distraction. Life went on. Time pressures and deadlines remained. He responded to a couple of enquiries, then composed what turned out to be a long email to the solicitor handling the Birmingham deal about the issues that had emerged during his visit. Before he knew it, nearly an hour had passed. Faced with the option of going back onto the ward or staying in the corridor working, he chose the latter. It was, he reasoned, better for everyone.
Harry was relieved finally to be left alone. He’d not spent this long with his dad, in such a confined space, for years − not since their camping holidays in Wales when he and Martha were kids. That felt a lifetime ago, in the dim, and increasingly hard to remember, post-‘Mum walk-out’ days. He and his dad were not good at being together at the best of times, and this was not the best of times. They needed other people around to act as a buffer. Harry didn’t normally give his relationship with his father much thought, but marooned in the hospital, his body and soul in shock and his dad sitting at his bedside vibrating with frustration, it was hard not to. The momentary relief of seeing a familiar face and hoping that his dad would somehow make it all go away had vanished within seconds. Dom was not the indulgent, loving type. Never had been…at least not with Harry. Their relationship had always been spiky, competitive, lacking in any emotion other than flashes of anger and, much more rarely, pride. Perhaps it was because, deep down, they didn’t really like each other that much. Who knew? Who cared? Normally.
Martha! She was the one who cared. She’d cried when Harry had called to tell her that he was okay; tears of disbelief, to start with, then of relief. She’d not asked what had happened, just how he was, what hurt, whether they were looking after him, when he would be coming home, if he really was all right. Harry could hear the fear in her voice and felt terrible for being the cause of it. When he’d said that he had to go – as if he had something urgent to attend to – Martha had insisted that he pass the phone back to Dom. Harry had been able to tell, by his dad’s whispered responses, that she was checking that he wasn’t lying to her about being okay. Harry watched his dad change as he spoke to Martha. His posture, his voice – everything about him – became softer and calmer. That hurt. But he was used it to. His dad ended the call and sprang back into his normal coil of repressed energy.
And so they had settled in to wait.
With every passing minute the pressure inside the tiny cubicle had built. He could feel his dad’s impatience pulsing off him. The nurses were patient with Dom’s rudeness and were kind to him, which only made Harry feel worse. They brought him cups of tea, which he accepted, to show willing, and offered him paracetamol, which he declined. There wasn’t enough pain.
Nowhere near enough pain!
When Harry asked about the others, which he did repeatedly and increasingly desperately, they smiled sympathetically and said they were sorry, but they didn’t know anything. His dad had been equally unforthcoming. He claimed to know nothing other than that Jess, Tish and Jake were being treated somewhere in the hospital – for what, and how bad their injuries were, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say. Out of habit, Harry’s hand kept reaching for his phone, only to flop back onto the bed. His lifeline was gone – taken by the coppers at the scene. Evidence? The thought made the sinews in his neck tighten. He thought about telling his dad about the blood sample the police had taken from him, but decided not to. It would all come out soon enough.
It was unbearable. The not being able to leave. The not knowing what he was going to have to face.
And yet after the seemingly never-ending wait, when they finally told him he could go home, Harry was floored. They were sending him away from the hospital, away from his friends. He did not require any further treatment – unlike them. He had been lucky – unlike them. Harry watched the doctor as she spoke, wanting her to look suddenly concerned and say they were very sorry, but they’d found something wrong, something serious, that had shown up on an X-ray. He was in fact badly hurt, and it was imperative that he stay. But that didn’t happen. He was discharged, with nothing more than a photocopied letter that had to be dropped off at his GP’s, when he got the chance. No medicines, very few wounds, no limp, no crutch; indeed, very little to show that he had even been in a car crash, except for the scatter of cuts on his arms, his aching, stitched hand and the scream in his head that no one else could hear.
Chapter 12
THE JOURNEY home was somehow worse than the drive to the hospital – the dark dread of imagining Mo injured having been replaced by the muddy confusion of him being missing. Nihal concentrated on his driving, very aware of the traffic and of the shocking normality of an ordinary Sunday taking place outside the thin shell of their car. Shazia was silent, her face turned away from him, staring out of the window. He knew what she was doing: she was looking for Mo. Illogical as it was, he ‘got’ that she was trying to spot their son at bus stops and amongst the people out walking in the cold sunshine. Her felt her body tense when they saw a young lad with dark hair waiting to cross at the lights on the high street. Even as they approached home, and the number of pedestrians thinned to near zero, she didn’t come back to him. She remained rigid with concentration, her shoulders tight.
As they turned into their road Shazia suddenly shouted, ‘No!’, causing Nihal to brake and stall.
‘What?’
She turned to him. ‘We can’t go home. We have to check.’
‘Check what?’
‘That’s he’s not still there.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Nihal restarted the car and drove the last few feet to their house. They parked up. This simple act seemed to tip Shazia over the edge.
‘Nihal! No! We can’t just go home and sit there waiting. We have to go and make sure that he’s not still there. They could’ve missed him.’
Realisation dawned. Nihal looked at his wife. ‘You want to go to the crash site?’
‘Yes. We have to. We have to make sure.’
‘Shazia. That doesn’t make any sense. He won’t be there. We should do what the officer said – go in, wait for him to come home.’
But Shazia simply stared at him, the look in her eyes steely.
Reluctantly, Nihal put the car back into drive and pulled away from the house.
They parked on Brayton Road and walked to the ring road.
It felt such a strange thing to do, to go looking for a Mo in full view of the passing traffic, but Shazia was adamant.
The scars in the verge were visible from quite a distance away, the muddy car tracks looked black against the grass. Both Nihal and Shazia shuddered to think of the car leaving the road and literally ploughing its way into the wall. The blue-and-white police tape twisted in the breeze. By unspoken agreement, they didn’t go up to the actual site of the impact. Instead they paced beside the road, looking for anywhere that a hurt, confused or concussed Mo could have crawled away to. That’s what Shazia was thinking: that he had somehow got out of the car after the crash and slunk away like an injured animal. It made no sense to Nihal, but there again, he couldn’t come up with any credible, alternative explanation for where their son was and why he hadn’t been in touch with them. Mo had been seen getting into the car. The officer had confirmed that much.
They weren’t the only ones on the side on the road. At regular intervals small knots of people arrived, many of them teenagers. Nihal watched as they bowed their heads for a few seconds, in actual prayer or just as a sign of respect, then stood with their arms linked around each other, staring at the physical scars left by the accident. The solidarity of friendship. As the cars whooshed by, the exhaust-laden air was filled with the sound of their whispered speculation.
Shazia and Nihal made three passes of the verge. It was pointless and upsetting, but when he suggested they return home, Shazia point-blank refused. She was not done searching, not yet. Mo had to be out there somewhere. It was their job to look. So, for no rational reason that Nihal could discern – other than Shazia’s maternal compunction to keep going – they left the ring road and made their way along to the park. Once there, they proceeded to conduct a bizarre version of hide-and-seek, looking behind trees and under bushes, for a child who was long gone.
Chapter 13
WHEREVER PETE went, he couldn’t relax. The front of the house was the worst – obviously – as the windows provided a clear view of the crash site, but even in the back room he felt uneasy, unable to settle. He was clear-sighted enough to know that his restlessness was caused by lack of sleep and adrenaline, but this sudden self-consciousness in his own home was unnerving.
He’d called into work as soon as the gym had opened and explained, very briefly, why he couldn’t come in. When Ellen started asking questions, he’d somewhat brusquely cut her off, saying that he’d see her on Monday morning as normal; and to get Rhys, the deputy manager, to call him if he needed anything. After Pete got off the phone, he ran a bath, wanting to be clean. He lay in the tub for a long time, poaching his tired body, watching the condensation trickle down the walls into the grubby grout. The previous night’s events jittered through his mind like one of the cartoon flicker-books he used to make when he was a kid; isolated images that, when strung together, created a jerky story that unfolded at double speed. In reality, each moment had felt painfully long.
He only got out of the bath when the tank could no longer yield any more hot water. Body scoured and hair washed, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, he went downstairs and put some washing in the machine. He watched it swish around for a few minutes, the detergent lifting the grass and bloodstains out from his once-favourite pair of trackie bottoms. He made a coffee – drank it; made toast – left it. He had no idea what to do with himself. Pete was not used to having time on his hands, especially at the weekend. Sundays were one of their busiest days, with people swimming or treadmilling off the excesses of the night before. For the first time in Pete’s life the quiet and his own company, which he usually cherished, felt like a pressure.
He flicked on the radio, switching his usual news channel over to a music station. He washed Cleo’s bowl and put down fresh food and water, though where she’d got to was anyone’s guess. Cleo was no biddable TV pet, purring and entwining herself around his legs, simulating love in exchange for sachets of expensive cat-gloop. She was independent, largely indifferent to him, almost feral. Perhaps that’s why they were such a good fit. The loner divorcé and his lone-wolf cat; both of them quite happy to coexist as long as there was no expectation of anything more than the convenience of having another soul present in their lives.
The radio announced that it was 9.30 a.m. Pete contemplated walking up to the shops, but swiftly discounted this as a tru
ly dumb idea. They’d all be buzzing about the accident by now, picking over the events, swapping tales of what had happened, who was involved and who was to blame. As much as he didn’t want to be alone, he didn’t wanted to be part of that particular feeding frenzy, either.
The rap of the door knocker made him jump. Through the glass panel he could make out two figures. Both male. Pete opened up and was relieved to see that it was an official visit, rather than a concerned neighbour’s knock. The coppers presented their warrant cards and he let them in. Immediately his house seemed to shrink. They made stilted small talk as they went through to the front room. All of them glanced outwards, across the road with its now-flowing traffic, before quickly taking their seats.
Over tea they took Pete’s statement, starting with the moment he realised that something had happened.
‘I was looking for my cat. That’s why I opened the front door. She stays out late sometimes, then whines to be let back in after I’ve gone to bed. It’s really irritating.’ He paused, wishing that was it: the beginning and end of a very boring, very short story.
Neither of the coppers said anything. They knew what came next, but they needed his version – his unique perspective on what happened.
‘That’s when I heard the noise. A really loud bang.’ He looked down at the rug, concentrated on the pattern and thought himself back into his front garden in the dark, cursing Cleo, impatient – just another normal night. He’d been about to shut the door, leave her outside to her own devices. ‘It was a crump, like a bomb going off. I looked up and saw the car. I could tell it was bad, straight away. Then the screaming started.’
One Split Second: A thought-provoking novel about the limits of love and our astonishing capacity to heal Page 4
