A Trick of the Mind

by Penny Hancock

  And now someone was in hospital and I had no idea how bad it might be.

  ‘We’ve got three things to celebrate,’ Louise said, taking a glass from Chiara.

  ‘Ellie’s exhibition, Chiara and Liam’s new addition, and . . .’ She stopped and smiled up at Guy, the tall blond Aussie she had brought with her, and he took her hand and held it out.

  ‘We’re engaged,’ she said, ‘and just look at the ring.’

  ‘It’s gorgeous, Louise. Congratulations.’

  I don’t think anyone noticed that I hardly ate. I moved the pasta about my plate, and smiled, but all the time the thoughts kept coming at me. The impact on the car, the way it had swerved as I looked at Pepper. I rifled through the images in my memory – could I have been mistaken? Were those broken branches I saw in the mirror, lying on the road? Or were they bits of a body, broken and scattered?

  But the impact would have been bigger if I had hit a man, wouldn’t it?

  What if the man was dead? Might I be his killer?

  When we’d cleared the dishes, I ran upstairs. It was eleven o’clock. There would be local news. I turned on the radio and listened. The item told me that the young man in the hit-and-run incident on the A1095 was in a worse condition. No one had come forward. The incident had happened at approximately eight forty-five.

  Well that sorted it.

  It had been eight fifteen when I’d gone along that stretch of road. I remembered glancing at the clock. It couldn’t have been me.

  No way.

  ‘Police are appealing . . .’ I switched it off. Went downstairs. In the kitchen I smoothed my hair in the glass, composed myself. The others had rolled a joint and the pungent smell of weed permeated the sitting room. Liam lolled back, a hole in the knee of his baggy jeans, with Chiara dressed in her assortment of mismatched vintage clothes leaning back against him. I loved my friends. I wanted to join them in their happy haze, but the thought wouldn’t leave me.

  It was a quiet road, and there were all those shadows. If the man, boy – the radio hadn’t specified his age – had been lying there, unable to get up, it could well have taken half an hour before another driver spotted him, which would mean he could have been hit at eight fifteen, as I drove round that bend.

  If the driver had knocked the man over and only realised later, what would they do? If they only realised after hearing the news item that it was them?

  Would they go to the police?

  Or would they keep quiet?

  If they went to the police, how crazy that would sound.

  ‘I only just realised.’ As if they wouldn’t have noticed before.

  The police would think they were crazy, or a liar, and they would be crazy or a liar, because no one could hit a person at that speed on a road and not know it straight away.

  Everyone was dazed with fatigue by now, discussing the cultural differences between London and Sydney.

  ‘I’ll just take Pepper out for a wee,’ I told them, and clipping on his lead I went outside. The wind had dropped a bit but the rain was coming down in a fine mist. The sea swished and crashed against the beach, over the dune. There was a smell of rotting things. Was it the same smell I had breathed in with such relish earlier? Now it smelt rancid, fishy, unpleasant. The wind must be blowing up from the fishing huts huddled over to the west of here, where lobster pots and abandoned boats and discarded fish carcasses had been left in the brine and were beginning to fester.

  I opened the passenger door of my car and switched on the ignition and the lights. I walked around it.

  Nothing I could discern, no dent, no scratch. Pepper was snuffling away at something on the car, licking at it. I looked more closely. Or was there something there, close to the wing mirror, where it had folded in with the impact? A dark patch. My heart rate sped up again. I pushed the wing mirror back into place and saw that the glass had shattered. No! I imagined a person stepping out from the shadows, taking the impact from the wing of the car without my seeing, then being thrust back against the tarmac into the depths of those tall hedges. My hand strayed to the dark patch on the car that Pepper had been licking. It came away with a dark sticky brown stain. The same as the stuff on my dress?

  It was blood.

  I knew what I had to do.

  I would drive back the way I came. I would remember, if I went the same way and looked into my rear-view mirror, re-creating my journey, whether I had hit a man or whether I hadn’t.

  If the worst came to the worst and I realised there had been someone there, who had stepped out maybe at the last minute, who I must have rammed with my mirror or even with the whole nearside of my car, I would go to the police, confess, tell them that I had no idea until I heard the news.

  Either that or I’d know once and for all that I hadn’t done it.

  But I must go now. It could not wait until the morning. By then the scene would have changed. It would be light, things would have been cleared up or washed away by the rain.

  I went indoors. Everyone was sprawled on the sofas now except Louise, who was leaning back against Guy’s knees while he played with her hair, pulling at a curl, straightening it out and letting it spring back. They were talking about some trek they had gone on into the outback, the amazing russet-red colour of the sand and the mountains.

  I could only see the blood on my dress. Was it human blood?

  ‘Aboriginal art,’ Louise was saying. ‘I had no idea, I’m going to use it in my work.’

  I went over to Chiara and spoke into her ear. ‘I’ve got to get some dog food. I think there’s an all-night supermarket in the town,’ I said.

  ‘You’re not driving?’

  ‘I’ve only had one glass,’ I said.

  Chiara frowned.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ I wanted to go now. I couldn’t bear to wait any longer.

  ‘Do you want me to come?’

  ‘No, it’s OK. Thanks though. I’ll leave Pepper here if you don’t mind. Won’t be long.’

  ‘Can’t it wait till the morning?’

  I shook my head.

  I couldn’t speak any more. My mouth was dry. Because my real reason for going out at midnight in the car in the rain seemed completely absurd, but I would never rest until I had gone back and done what I should have done to start with.

  Checked.

  It was darker than I’d thought it would be and the rain drummed against the windscreen, obscuring the view further. I tried to remember where it was I’d felt the impact. I screwed up my eyes, looking out for the broken branch. Anxious about my driving, I went slowly, peering in my rear-view mirror, checking all around. The road twisted. It was difficult to see anything but the beam of the headlights reflecting off the wet road.

  I had been driving for maybe fifteen minutes when I thought I saw it. The branch, bent in the middle like a long arm dangling its fingers onto the narrow road – it would be hard to miss. I couldn’t stop here, it was close to a bend, so I drove on and then, just a couple of hundred metres further on, there was a police cordon, the cones, the place they taped off where the man was hit. A notice asking for witnesses. And more tree parts, snapped off, scattered on the road. Now doubt played through my mind. Which branch had I hit?

  I had to drive for another five minutes in order to reach a junction where I was able to turn and come back, reliving the journey I made earlier this evening when I had been so convinced I was taking my life in a new direction.

  I was ignorant about impact, and thrust, and momentum, all those things we were supposed to learn about in physics that seemed pointless – of no relevance to my life as it was at that time. If I’d listened, I might have had some idea of what it might have felt like. Whether I might have knocked into a grown man and only heard the slam of the wing mirror, experienced a tilting of the car to the right. Whether the impact could have thrown him far.

  What speed had I been travelling at when I came down this road? How fast would you have to be going to do that?
I wasn’t a fast driver – something my more reckless friends laughed about. But I hadn’t been thinking clearly this evening. I’d had the music on loud and Pepper had distracted me with his barking. I might have been going at forty, possibly fifty. Don’t they say if you hit someone at thirty you can kill them, but at twenty they survive?

  I certainly hadn’t been going slowly enough, in that case, to hit a man and not kill him.

  The radio had said he was alive though. Injured but alive.

  For a few moments this skewed logic reassured me – I had been going too fast to have hit and not killed a man! Hoorah! I couldn’t have hit him – if I had he would be dead.

  Then the truth flashed back. He might be brain-damaged or his back might be broken. He might be crippled for life even if he wasn’t dead. It might be worse than if he’d died.

  I passed the spot again, the tape and the cones and the police cordon. I looked into my rear-view mirror.

  I could see nothing but the bough of the tree. Nothing else on the road, nor in my memory. But if you did something so ghastly might you wipe it from your mind? Might you shut down, unable to relive that awful vision, the intolerable knowledge that you’d just destroyed a life, while you were so full of your own rosy future that you didn’t even bother to look where you were going? I had been distracted by Pepper. I was talking to him, telling him we’d be OK without Finn, and so I could have hit the man, and passed it off as nothing but a broken branch on the road.

  The other branch was round the next corner. There was a lay-by just in front of it so I pulled up.

  There was a strong wind blowing now, buffeting the car so it rocked as I opened the door and got out. The wind almost blew me back into my seat as I stepped onto the tarmac. It was pitch dark. No traffic, nobody, nothing. I stood for a moment, my senses straining. The wind must be blowing in from the sea, there was the faint smell of salt on it, mixed with vegetation. I was thirsty. My mouth dry.

  The wind whistled through the hedges, shifting a plastic bag that had caught there, blowing it up so it billowed white in the night. The rain had stopped but I wished I’d put on a fleece instead of just this cardigan over my T-shirt and jeans. I pulled the cardy closer around me and headed back up towards the place where the cones were, the signs saying ‘Accident’, the calls for witnesses.

  There wasn’t much to see. The cones had been moved back and the yellow tape flapped now on the verge. A car was coming, its lights appearing and vanishing as it approached along the bendy road. I drew back into the hawthorn, out of sight. As it passed something glinted in the hedge, lit up momentarily by the car lights. I moved across. A shard of glass, it looked like, caught in the hedge. The police must have missed it. I looked about. It was difficult to see anything else in the cordoned-off area once the car had passed. I don’t know what I’d expected. A shoe? Blood? A body part? I shuddered.

  But I had something.

  I had the bit of glass. I could check whether it matched the glass from my mirror where it had broken and if it didn’t I could leave this whole thing alone and get on with my weekend.

  I turned and started to walk back to my car. Round the bend, along past the tall hedges, and then the tree branch loomed into focus, just beyond where I’d parked, hanging over the road, ragged at the ends, sticks strewn about the road; several cars must have driven into it. Then I could see, a little further on, the mangled body of something, squished up against the verge.

  I bent down. A bird. Feathers flattened against the tarmac. Not much left of its head. Quite a large bird, black and white. A magpie? Stupid to let the old wives’ tale affect me, but nevertheless, I regarded magpies as unlucky. If I’d hit this one, if it had flown into the side of my car, knocked my wing mirror, then fallen concussed, if it had lain there as other cars passed, flattening its head into the road, I didn’t want to think too much about it.

  But this was my explanation. I had hit something. I had seen something on the road in my rear-view mirror, but it was just this poor bird.

  I shivered. I must get back. As I set off, towards my car, I noticed a track I hadn’t seen earlier, on the same side of the road as my car. It was a narrow single track, difficult to spot, as it ran just below the level of the main road. A battered van was waiting there, in the entrance, near an open gate, parked, its lights off.

  Who had parked here, at night, in an entrance to a farm track? Was that someone sitting there in the driver’s seat? A head silhouetted against the sky, which had brightened a little as the clouds parted in the wind, revealing a watery moon.

  My heart did a little skip as I saw it.

  Why hadn’t I spotted it before? I began to hurry.

  As I drew closer to my car I wondered why I hadn’t left my headlights on. They would have lit up the road so I could see what I was doing.

  I was certain then, that I heard the gentle thunk of a door closing.

  The van door.

  The wind dropped, I could hear the tread of footfall on rough ground. Someone was coming down the track.

  I walked faster, fighting the urge to run, my ears straining – how close were they? I was aware of the solitary figure I made on a remote part of this deserted road at night. I’d told no one where I was going. If anything happened to me . . . I might disappear and they would have no idea where to begin to look. I’d let my preoccupation lead me into the jaws of real danger.

  The footsteps were accelerating now, they’d grown heavier, were getting close.

  I reached my car. Fumbled for the keys I’d dropped deep into the small pocket of my cardy. I tried to control the trembling of my fingers. Why had I locked the car door? Had I imagined there might be a car thief out here at this time of night? I should have left the headlights on, the door unlocked for a quick getaway. I’d been operating on automatic as if I’d parked in the street outside our Mile End flat where people were paranoid about car theft, instead of in this country lane.

  Why hadn’t I brought Pepper?

  I longed to be with the others now. Not here, driven by the kind of irrational thoughts I’d believed I’d stopped having.

  The figure from the van was closing up now, his stride long. I glanced up. His face – what I could see of it, the bottom half shrouded in a scarf, the top shaded by his hoodie – was pale in the night.

  I pressed the button on my key fob twice.

  My fingers were weak. Nothing happened. I was frozen, my fingers disconnected from my brain, my will. I forced them to do as I wanted.

  He was maybe ten metres away, his feet scrunching on the road, closing in on me.

  At last the locks clacked open. I pulled open the driver’s door. Fell in, slammed it shut.

  Pressed the lock again. My fingers felt like rubber.

  I put the key in the ignition. He was there, a face hovering a few inches from the windscreen.

  I started the engine. Put my foot on the clutch.

  A thump on the window. Then the face disappeared from view. He was coming round to the door as the car jerked into motion.

  I had my foot on the accelerator. I pulled away too quickly, stalled. He was at my door now, his eyes leering above the scarf that shrouded his mouth and chin, a broad nose, eyes set far apart. I tried again to get the car started. It hiccupped, lurched, stalled again. He had hold of the door handle. I didn’t want to look at the face, and I pulled away, but I did look, caught another glimpse, this time he was mouthing something. I left him on the verge, shouting inaudibly as I headed back to the sea.

  ‘Where have you been, Ellie?’ Chiara stood in the kitchen doorway. ‘You were ages! I was going to come and look for you!’

  ‘The shop was shut. I tried somewhere else, but . . . you know.’

  ‘We tried your mobile,’ Louise said, joining us, ‘but you’d left it in the sitting room. We were worried.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  ‘Scatty as ever,’ said Chiara, putting her arm round me. ‘She went for dog food! At this time!’


  Louise yawned. ‘I could’ve sent Guy to get some in the morning. He’ll want a run.’

  ‘You are nutty sometimes, babes,’ Chiara said. ‘Pepper isn’t going to starve if he doesn’t get breakfast at the crack of dawn. You’re over-compensating for Frank.’

  ‘Who’s Frank?’ Louise asked.

  ‘The old man across the corridor from us in London,’ Chiara said. ‘Ellie’s taking care of Pepper for him while he has heart surgery. He told her he was afraid Pepper would die before he did.’ She was chuckling. ‘And Ellie told him she was sure he wouldn’t.’

  ‘That was tactful!’

  ‘I felt dreadful. It sounded like I was hoping Frank would die first,’ I said. My voice came out weak, wobbly.

  ‘She was being nice,’ Chiara said. ‘Weren’t you, Ellie?’

  ‘I didn’t want him to worry, he was going through such a lot.’

  ‘So you offered to look after his dog?’

  I shrugged.

  Chiara hugged me.

  ‘Ellie’s always kept an eye on Frank. She’s got the kindest heart. My philosophy is if you always try to do the right thing – in the end you’re bound to do the opposite!’ She squeezed my shoulder. ‘I keep a bit of a distance myself.’

  ‘Anyone would’ve looked after the dog in those circumstances,’ I said.

  ‘I wouldn’t,’ said Chiara. ‘Dogs should live outside as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘How long’s it going to be though?’ Louise asked. ‘You might have adopted him permanently, if the old man dies. What sort is he?’

  ‘A Norfolk terrier.’

  ‘Cute!’ Louise ruffled Pepper’s fur, and Pepper, out of character, growled.

  I didn’t sleep that night, I lay and listened to the hiss and suck of the waves on the shore. I’d hit something, and a man had been injured.

  His life might be ruined. I imagined he might be a young man, a teenager perhaps? His parents would be beside themselves. Or his girlfriend. Where had he been going? Was he alone? When would they have heard that their son had been hit on the road and the driver had gone off without stopping?