by Stephen Laws
Steadying her breathing, she threw the gears into reverse.
Something was dragging at the rear axle. Cursing, she kicked open the door—cursing again when the wind snapped it back at her. Squeezing out, hanging on to the door lest the wind rip it from its hinges, Cath struggled out into the howling night. Had she wrecked the bloody car, after all? The wind buffeted her against the bodywork as she made her way to the back, hand over-hand. At the rear, through tear-blurred eyes, she saw what had happened. A branch had snagged under the bumper. Sod’s law dictated that the damn thing must have also entangled in the wheels and that she’d be stranded. But to her immense surprise, the branch yanked out on the second attempt. She tried to see if there was more stuff snagged under there, but it wasn’t possible in the dark. With no flashlight in the car, she’d just have to try again. Maybe being a professional cynic just brought its own bad luck with it. A renegade thought came to her; one of the unrehearsed things she’d said at an after-dinner speech somewhere: I’m not a cynic—I’m just a disillusioned optimist.
“Who will shortly be lying under another fallen tree if I don’t get the hell out of here fast,” she said into the storm as she reached the driver’s door. She was just about to yank it open again—when she saw movement from the embankment below her. The headlights must have dazzled her when she first got out of the car, probably the reason she didn’t see what was below. But now, with those twin beams stabbing off into the rain-whipped darkness, they gave enough illumination beneath to make a kind of shadow show in the gully.
There was a man down there, staggering with both arms out—as if he were walking on a tightrope—but something much bulkier than that. Now, he was jumping down from the raised edge of that bulky, indeterminate shape—and someone else was clambering up into silhouette relief. Although Cath had no way of knowing what had happened, or what was going on down there, instinct told her that it was bad. When someone cried out in agony from the darkness, her instinct seemed to be confirmed. Cath moved quickly to the roadside, edging around the headlight beams.
Shading her eyes from the glare, she called down to the shapes. Later, she wouldn’t remember what it was that she’d cried.
“Hello? Anything wrong? Can I help? Are you in trouble?”
Later, it would seem to be important—almost vital that she could bring it back to mind—because perhaps if she’d said something else, something different, maybe everything would have turned out differently.
The response from the shapes down below was immediate.
The first silhouetted figure wheeled to look up, arms pin-wheeling at his sides; as if he was still on that tightrope and Cath’s voice threatened to unbalance him. Indeed, it did seem to unbalance him as the shape fell to its knees on the embankment and then staggered upright again. The second shape looked up from the tangled mass. Then a muffled voice that didn’t seem to belong to either of the men shouted up to her through the storm:
“Yes! For Christ’s sake, give us a hand.”
Another voice now: the tightrope walker: “Have you got a car . . . ?”
And before Cath could answer, a torch beam stabbed up out of the darkness directly into her face. Cath recoiled, shaded her eyes; saw a third figure blundering around on that dark mass as the second man jumped down out of sight into the darkness.
“What’s happened?” she called down. “Are you all right?”
And now that third voice called up to her again; this time she could make no sense of it above the storm wind. But as the third man clambered about in the wind, his torch beam flashed over and around him.
And in those brief moments, the light gave Cath a jigsaw piece-by-piece view of what had happened; each flash revealing another piece of evidence.
The dark mass at the bottom of the gully was a wrecked Land Rover.
It was lying on its side, the roof ripped, luggage rack tangled. Glass from a shattered windshield sparkled and glittered around it in the torch beam.
Now Cath realised that the three men had been climbing out of a broken side window when she’d arrived on this storm-driven scene.
There were two tyre-track gouges over the edge of the embankment. Then a ragged gouge about twenty feet down where the tyres had impacted in the soil after roaring over the edge at speed. Further tyre gouges and then an explosive flurry of soil where the Land Rover had impacted and rolled.
The tree behind her, lying across the road.
The storm.
All the pieces fit.
Moments earlier arriving on the scene, and perhaps that falling tree would have sent her car careering off the road and over the embankment, and those silhouettes scrabbling around down there in the dark from their Land Rover wreck would only now be arriving on the scene to ask the same questions of her—if she hadn’t broken her neck in the process.
Behind her, the night seemed to split apart.
Whirling, heart leaping, Cath saw another tree on the other side of the road tilt over into the rain-slashed night. This time it didn’t come down across the road. It fell away into the darkness, branches thrashing as if it were alive and trying to keep its balance. Cath recoiled, shielding her eyes as a flurry of clotted mud and pebbles clattered and burst on the roof of her car, thrown up by the roots ripping from the ground. Now, it seemed that the girl who had flown in on this scene—the one who’d wanted to take off on a wild romantic flight into the night—really had flown away. Now she was a woman alone, faced with the urgent, practical task of helping these people. This stretch of the road was on a promontory, the road raised high and starkly exposed. On a night like this, with a storm wind unlike anything she had experienced before, this was surely the worst, most exposed stretch of road anyone could be on. How long before another tree came down? How long before her own car was blown off the road?
Staggering back to the edge of the embankment, Cath looked down. And now, in the torch beam that slashed and dissected the night, she could see that the two men were pulling a third away from the wreckage of the Land Rover, and it was clear from the way that he took all his weight on one leg and threw back his head in silent agony as they threw his arms over their shoulders, that he was badly hurt.
Cath swayed from side to side as the wind dragged at her, not knowing what to do for the best. Should she go down there and help? Or wait for an instruction? Or call something else out, just to let them know that she was still here?
No, you wait. They’ll drag him up. (“Have you got a car?” one of them had called.) And then you’ll help them into the car, and then you’re going to get off this road and into the village as fast as possible.
The men started to climb the embankment.
Down there in the gully, there seemed to be natural shelter. The storm wind still raged and tore at their fluttering jackets, but did not prevent them from climbing. Here at the top, with Cath constantly looking over her shoulder to check that another tree wasn’t coming right down on top of her, she had constantly to step back to the edge and look down; the wind constantly pushing and dragging her from sight.
“Come on!” she cried needlessly, when they were about halfway up, the wind snatching her voice from her mouth. The figures were still silhouettes, even though they were less than fifty feet below her. And although she could see no details of the injured man’s face, she could see and imagine that agony as his head twisted from side to side as they climbed.
When they reached the top of the embankment, Cath held down both hands to help. And at that moment, the storm wind decided to send her cartwheeling back away from them. Sprawling in the mud clots and the whirling air, Cath was overwhelmed by her own shamed anger at such helplessness. On all fours, knees skinned, and snatching the hair out of her eyes, she turned back to see the two men hauling the injured third over the rim and toward her. At last she could see their faces, and in that moment a first lightning flash seemed to take a photograph of the scene; indelibly imprinting it in Cath’s mind. Every detail of the three, frozen in place, f
ixed in her mind. A portrait, perhaps, that she should never forget.
The man on the left must be about Cath’s age. A black woollen cap on his head, and oh God wasn’t it so much like the woollen cap that the guy had been wearing on that New York street so long ago?
Give me the fucking money! he’d said, knife skittering from his hand and into the snow. Somehow, in that same moment, she saw David; looking up at her, his hands clenched to his middle, trying to keep the life inside him; that terrible lost and lonely look in his eyes, and the cold reflection of snowflakes in his wide and dreadfully frightened eyes . . .
No!
This man wasn’t like that, at all. Did everyone wearing a cap have to be a potential murderer? No, this man was staring hard at the man supported between them. A moustache, an aquiline nose, heavily gloved hands. A smear of blood above his right eye. The man on the right was younger, perhaps twenty or twenty- one. Stockier than the other two, heavy knitted pullover beneath his quilted jacket, like a fisherman’s gear somehow. Thick, curly hair; blowing all over the place—like a perm job gone badly wrong. Small eyes were hidden in the round pinkness of a puffy face that was also somehow a baby’s face.
And the man in the middle. Just as Cath had thought, a man in agony. The eldest of them all, perhaps forty or forty-five had short, cropped hair. Either the designer stubble of a vain man or perhaps he’d just not had time to shave. His face was screwed in pain. His leather jacket was torn down one side, from armpit to hem. But Cath’s gaze in this infinite moment went to the real horror of that frozen tableau. To the man’s left leg. The jeans were torn above the knee, a ragged and horribly nasty hole ripped there—and when the wind flapped at the torn fabric, she could see a glistening, dark redness beneath. She didn’t need a medical degree to guess that the man’s leg was broken, the way it hung so horribly unconnected below the kneecap.
“Car!” yelled the man with the woollen cap, seeing Cath at last.
At first, she thought he was yelling about the wreck of their own car, down there in the gully. Sharing his anger at the terrible bad luck they’d had. For a second, she stared at him, waiting for him to say something else; then realised that he had been yelling at her about her own car. Suddenly galvanised, she clambered to her feet and hurried to the vehicle as the three men staggered through the wind blur toward her. Someone was yelling again as she flung open the passenger door and looked back. But now there were only two men—the injured, older man sprawled on the trunk, face down, letting it take his weight while the younger man looked anxiously back to the embankment. The man with the woollen hat had gone.
“Where . . . ?” Cath started to say, and the words were cut off by the squealing creak of wood, like a sailing ship running aground. The younger man flinched, his shoulders hunching in anticipation as Cath whirled around, waiting for that expected tree to come down on them. The creaking squeal became a roaring crash as the unseen sailing ship exploded through invisible foam onto a beach that was still twenty miles from where they stood. Another tree, somewhere in the dark. Cath dragged the car door open and hung on to it, beckoning urgently as the younger man dragged his older and injured companion away from the trunk and along the side of the car toward her. She held the door and hung there with fierce impatience. Had the man in the hat run off?
The older man swatted out at the young man, yelled something through his pain that the wind swallowed. When the young man tried to help him again, he pushed him back with surprising strength; so much so that the younger man had to throw his arms to either side to regain balance. Then the older man flung himself back hard against the car, flattening his back there to take the weight off his damaged leg, breathing heavily. He turned his attention back to the embankment and this time, Cath saw how the young man seemed to be keeping a wary distance from the older man. Was he afraid of him?
Why the hell were they taking so much time?
“Will you for God’s sake get in the car?” Cath yelled.
Something about the last few minutes—seconds, moments? —had seemed to rob her of any initiative, any strength. She was used to being an observer; she was a writer for Christ’s sake, she was supposed to observe. But something that was happening here seemed to be stealing her soul away. The older man turned to look at her. Was it because she’d felt so free a little while ago, as she’d flown down this road? Was it because of the special thing that had happened between Drew and herself? All those dreams of a new and liberating love—without any guilt about David. Had she let her defences down somehow?
The older man, the man with his back to the car, turned to look at her. Rain was streaming down his face, dripping from his nose.
For the first time, she got a proper look at his eyes.
They were black, and they rooted her to the spot.
Because for one horrifying moment, she seemed to be seeing the eyes and face of a dead man. Someone who had been dragged from a river, even down to the rivulets of water streaming from his face. There was blankness there, a frozen white mask without any emotion at all. That blankness and lack of emotion was somehow dreadful.
“Got them!” yelled a voice from the edge of the embankment, breaking Cath out of that terrible moment, as Cath’s eye contact with the dead-faced man was broken. The man with the woollen hat was hurrying toward them once more; this time carrying three small suitcases—one in each hand and the third under his arm; small, but heavy enough to make him round-shouldered as he ran. Had he gone back for their bloody luggage?
Angry at her ineffectiveness, angry that she’d been reacting like a frightened rabbit, Cath leaned into the car through the passenger door open and popped the lock on the rear door. Then, hurrying around the front of the car, shouting: “Right! Get in the car. The next tree coming down could be right on top of us!”
By the time she’d angrily clambered behind the wheel and slammed the door, the baby-faced man had manoeuvred the injured man into the backseat. That dead face was a screwed-up mask of pain as he sat and shuffled backwards, now moving his bleeding leg gingerly after him, both hands gripping his upper thigh as if he could strangle the agony in his flesh. Cath flinched as something bumped the rear of the car. Expecting the shriek and grinding crash of another falling tree, she flashed a look in the rear view mirror to see that the man in the woollen cap was yanking at the trunk of the car.
“Leave it!” she snapped. “Leave the bloody cases. We can come back for them.”
“Gimme the fucking keys!” snapped the younger man—and God, didn’t it sound like Give me the fucking money! Before she could react, he jerked over the seat, snatched the keys from the ignition and lunged from the car back out into the night.
What the hell was happening here?
Something was going wrong with her Good Samaritan act.
Angrily, she twisted in her seat to see the younger man rounding the back of the car, jamming the keys into the trunk. The trunk swung open, obscuring her view—and the car bumped again, rocking on its suspension as the cases were thrown in. In the backseat, the injured man winced, breath hissing through his teeth.
Their eyes met again.
This time, he was trying to smile. It just didn’t work.
“S’alright about the cases,” he said through pain-clenched teeth. “We need them.”
Now the man with the cap was climbing in beside him, the baby-faced one sliding into the passenger seat and handing the ignition keys back. Cath snatched them from him, and in the next moment the car screeched in a U-turn away from the uprooted tree, and back in the direction she’d come from.
“Where you taking us?” asked the man in the woollen hat, and then—as if he’d been perhaps too brusque considering that she was their rescuer: “I mean, which way.”
“Your friend needs medical help,” Cath replied as the headlights swept away down the embankment, picking out the trees on either side of the road on the way down. They hissed and thrashed as if they were alive. “Best bet is Stamford. But we’ll have to go
the long way round ’cause of that tree blocking the road.”
“Can’t,” said the injured man through clenched teeth. Cath looked to see him bowing his head as he kept that pain-stranglehold on his leg.
“No can’t about it,” said Cath. “That leg’s broken and you need help.”
The other two men looked as if they were going to object, but quieted when the injured man said: “Okay, you’re driving.”
Now Cath was driving into the wind and was fighting to keep control of the steering wheel. On the way up there, the wind had been behind her, promising to give her wings. Now it was a downhill battle to keep the vehicle on the road and prevent from slamming over the roadside and into the darkness.
“Tree knocked us clean off the road,” said the woollen cap. “One minute nothing. Next thing, wham! Straight in the gully.”
“Yeah,” said baby face. “Wham!”
Cath didn’t have to turn her head to see that he was smiling. Something was wrong with him. A penny short of a shilling, as her mother used to say.
Cath gripped the steering wheel tight as the wind buffeted the sides of the car. She remembered this downhill stretch. There were cracks and ruts in the disintegrating tarmac on either side. If she hit one in the dark, with a wind like this, the wheel could easily be yanked out of her hands. Maybe she could slow down, but the thought of another tree coming down out of the darkness kept her foot on the accelerator. The needle wavered around fifty. Dangerous to go slower, dangerous to go faster. On the fringes of the headlight beams, she could see the bushes and trees thrashing and writhing. It was as if herds of wild and invisible animals were rampaging in the night. More than that, it seemed that the night had come alive.
“Bad night to be out,” said Cath through gritted teeth. She was being ironic, trying to make some kind of bond with these ungrateful strangers.
“Could get worse,” said the man in the woollen cap, turning to look at his friend in the backseat.
