The Man Who Didn't Call

by Rosie Walsh

  He nodded.

  ‘It was the first time I’d been up there on the anniversary of her death.’ His voice was tight, bound securely to prevent collapse. ‘Normally I’d spend it with Mum, who’d just go through old photo albums and cry. But that day I just . . . I just couldn’t do it. I wanted to be out there, in the sunshine, thinking good things about my little sister.’

  Me. I’d done this. Me and my weakness, my monstrous stupidity.

  ‘I walk along there every year on the second of June,’ I told him. I wanted to fold myself around him, absorb his pain somehow. ‘I go there, rather than up to the main road, because Broad Ride was their kingdom that afternoon. They had nail varnish and magazines and not a care in the world. That’s the bit I fly back to remember. ’

  Eddie looked briefly at me. ‘What magazines? Do you remember? What nail varnish? What were they eating?’

  ‘It was Mizz ,’ I said quietly. Of course I remembered. That day had been playing out in my head my entire adult life. ‘They’d borrowed my nail varnish. I’d got it free with a magazine; it was called Sugar Bliss. We had Linda McCartney sausage rolls, because they were both having a vegetarian phase. Cheese-and-onion crisps and a tub of fruit salad. Only Alex had smuggled in some sweets.’

  I remembered it as if it were yesterday; the wasps hovering over the fruit, Hannah’s new sunglasses, the swaying shades of green.

  ‘Skittles,’ Eddie said. ‘I bet she brought Skittles. They were her favourite.’

  ‘That’s right.’ I couldn’t look at him. ‘Skittles.’

  I caught up with them at the main road. Bradley was trying to turn right, towards Stroud, but a succession of cars stuck behind a tractor had held him up.

  Stay calm , I told myself, as I got out of the car and jogged up to his passenger door. Just get her out and treat this all as a joke. He’ll be OK if—

  Bradley spotted me and quickly turned left instead, engine roaring. I ran back to my car.

  ‘You can speed up if you want,’ Alex said. Already Bradley’s car was nearly out of sight. ‘You can floor it. I don’t mind.’

  ‘No. He’ll slow down and wait for me so he can race me. I know what he’s like.’ Blood pounded in my ears. Please, God, let nothing happen to her. Let nothing happen to my little sister. I looked at my speedometer. Fifty-five miles per hour. I slowed down. Then I sped up. I couldn’t stand it .

  Alex turned on my stereo. It was a group of American kids, Hanson, singing a silly earworm song called ‘MMMBop’. Nineteen years on I still couldn’t bear to hear it.

  After a horrifyingly short time, Bradley was racing back towards us on the other side of the road at sixty, maybe seventy miles per hour. ‘Slow down!’ I yelled, flashing him. He must have U-turned in the road up ahead.

  ‘Chill!’ Alex said. She flicked her hair nervously. ‘Hannah’s fine!’

  Bradley shot past, beeping, and then screeched the car round onto our side of the road. ‘Handbrake turn,’ Alex marvelled. I came almost to a stop, watching them in my rear-view mirror. I barely breathed until they had straightened out and were driving behind us again. I could see her there, in his front seat, a whole head shorter than him. A little girl, for Christ’s sake.

  She stared straight ahead. Hannah was only that still when she was afraid.

  ‘How do you know what a handbrake turn is?’ I heard myself ask. I was driving slowly, my hazard lights on. Please stop. Give me my sister back. I wound down the window and pointed frantically towards the verge.

  ‘My brother told me,’ Alex said. ‘He’s at university.’

  For a moment I felt angry that her brother – some idiot – thought it was clever to teach his little sister about handbrake turns. But then Bradley dipped back so he could roar up behind us, screeching on his brakes at the last minute. I gasped. He did it again. And again, and again. I tried several times to stop, but each time I did, he tried to overtake me. So I continued driving, just like he wanted me to. I couldn’t let him fire off ahead with my sister again.

  He carried on like that until we started to approach the dip in the road, not far from the Sapperton junction and the woods. But by then he must have become bored, because he didn’t stop when he revved up into the back of my car; he hit it. Gently, but still hard enough to make me panic. I’d only had a licence three weeks.

  ‘Shit,’ Alex said, only more quietly than before. She was still trying to look excited, but it was obvious she was afraid. Her slender fingers were closed tight around the old grey webbing of the seatbelt.

  We descended into the dip, Bradley flashing and beeping on my tail. He was laughing. And then – even though we were heading down into a blind bend – he pulled out to overtake.

  Everything seemed to hang like a droplet on a tap, ready to fall and smash.

  A car came round the bend on the other side, just as I knew it would.

  Bradley was nearly level with me. There was no way they could avoid crashing.

  My sister. Hannah.

  My emergency-response system took over at that point, I told the police afterwards. I knew that because what happened next was not a matter of choice; it was simply what happened. My brain instructed my arms to swerve the car left, and the car swerved left.

  If you lose control of your car, never aim for a tree , Dad had told me when he taught me to drive. Always aim for a wall or a fence. They’ll give way. A tree won’t.

  And the tree did not give way, when the passenger side of the car – the side containing sweet little Alex Wallace with her blonde flicky hair and her Skittles and her blobby nail varnish – slammed into it.

  The tree didn’t give way, but Alex did .

  I forced myself to look at Eddie, but he was still facing away from me, looking out to sea. The shining globe of a tear tracked slowly down his face and he brushed it away, pinching the top of his nose again. But after a few seconds he let his hand fall, and with it tears. He stood and cried, this big, kind man, and I felt it more strongly than I had done in years. That loathing of myself, that desperation to do something, change things, and the subsequent despair that I could not. Time had marched on, leaving Alex behind. Leaving Eddie in small pieces, my sister unable to forgive me.

  ‘I spent years wondering what I’d do if I met you,’ Eddie said eventually. He wiped at his eyes with his forearms, turned to face me. ‘I hated you. I couldn’t believe that scumbag went to jail and you didn’t.’

  I nodded, because I hated myself, too.

  ‘I asked why they weren’t punishing me,’ I said uselessly. ‘But they kept on saying I didn’t do anything illegal. I wasn’t driving recklessly.’

  ‘I remember. Our family liaison officer had to explain it to us.’ Eddie’s voice was flat. ‘It made no sense to my mother.’

  I closed my eyes, because I knew what he was going to say next.

  ‘All I know is that you chose to save your sister, and because of that, mine died.’

  I wrapped my arms around myself. ‘That wasn’t the choice I made,’ I whispered. Tears blocked my airways. ‘That was not the conscious choice that I made, Eddie.’

  He sighed. ‘Maybe not. But it’s what happened.’

  The police came to the hospital. The BMW had been stolen, they said.

  Why had I accepted what he’d told me? Why had I ever listened to anything he had said? A sick panic washed over me at the thought of all I’d given this man. My virginity. My heart. My self-respect. And now the life of a young girl. My sister’s best friend.

  A witness had seen the driver running across fields, away from the accident. Who was he?

  ‘Who was he?’ Dad repeated, confused. He was sitting by my bed, holding my hand. Mum was on the other side, a human shield between the police and her daughter. ‘Who was he, Sarah?’

  ‘My boyfriend. Bradley.’

  ‘Your what?’ Dad was even more perplexed. ‘You had a boyfriend? But how long for? Why didn’t you tell us?’

  And I turned my head and cried into the p
illow, because it was so obvious now. So obvious that Bradley was a vile human being – had always been a vile human being – and so obvious that, deep down, under those tightly folded layers of adolescent insecurity, I’d known.

  My actions might have saved my little sister from death, but they failed to protect her from harm. Bradley had swerved into the space I’d created, ramming Hannah’s side of the stolen car into the back of mine. Hannah had two operations in two days. She was in the ward on the floor above mine, concussed, badly injured and, for the first time in her twelve years, silent.

  Bradley, whose name I gave to the police, was nowhere to be found. ‘Try Greggsy’s,’ I told them, and he was arrested soon after.

  After I was discharged, I sat by Hannah’s bed every day for two weeks until she was free to go. I didn’t go to school; I barely went home. I remembered almost nothing, other than the quiet beep of machines and the hum of a busy paediatrics ward. The fear when one of Hannah’s machines made a strange noise; the guilt like a blowtorch to my chest. Mostly she slept; sometimes she cried and told me she hated me.

  The police insisted there were no charges to bring against me, no matter how determined Alex’s family were to see me punished. The guilt grew stronger. I testified against Bradley at Gloucester Crown Court and was reprimanded because I begged the judge to try me, too.

  I didn’t know Alex’s family. Mum and Dad had almost always ferried her to and from playdates at our house because – as Mum put it – ‘Alex’s mother struggles sometimes.’ She had since had a full mental breakdown, they said in court. Not only that but she had been single since Alex was young, so her son had had to drop out of university to look after her. Neither of them made it to court.

  Someone in the jury looked at me then. A woman, probably Mum’s age, who could imagine what it must be like to lose a child. She looked straight at me and her face said, That’s your fault, too, you little bitch. That’s your fault, too.

  Carole Wallace managed to call us three times before the psychiatric nurses realized she wasn’t calling her son and revoked her telephone access. I was a murderer, she said, once to Dad, twice to our answerphone. Our neighbours stopped inviting Mum and Dad round for dinner, or talking when they came past. They didn’t blame me, I don’t think; they simply had no idea what to say to any of us. ‘Sometimes the elephant is just too big for the room,’ Dad said.

  Hannah refused to sit at a table with me. People stared at my parents in the supermarket. Alex’s photo continued to appear in the local press. I went back to school, but within hours I knew I was finished there. People were whispering. Claire said I should have been done for manslaughter. Mandy was not talking to me at all, because I’d sent the police after Greggsy’s cousin. Even some of the teachers couldn’t quite look me in the eye.

  That night Mum and Dad sat me down and told me they were putting the house on the market. How would I feel about moving to Leicestershire? Mum had grown up in Leicestershire. ‘We could all do with a fresh start, couldn’t we?’ she asked. Her face was translucent with worry and exhaustion. ‘I’m sure we’d be able to find somewhere for you to carry on your A levels.’

  Mum was a teacher. She knew that was impossible. It was only then that I realized quite how desperate she was.

  I went upstairs and called Tommy, and flew to LA the very next day.

  I went so that Alex’s family could grieve in peace, without the risk of ever having to run into me. I went so that my parents wouldn’t have to move halfway across the country, so they’d have a chance at starting over without the titanic shadow of their daughter looming over everything. I went to find sanctuary in a place where nobody would know what I’d done, where I wouldn’t be That Girl.

  But most of all I went to LA to become the sort of woman I wished I had been the day I’d met Bradley. Strong, sure of myself, afraid of nobody. Never, ever, ever afraid to say no.

  Eddie and I were drawing close to Venice now, the boardwalk snaking past shops and stalls peddling cheap gifts and henna tattoos. Music boomed out of a speaker somewhere; homeless people slept under palm trees. I gave a couple of dollars to a man with a rucksack full of patches. Eddie watched me with a blank face. ‘I need to sit down,’ he said. ‘I need to eat something.’

  We sat outside a bar, where we were the focus of a madwoman with a parrot and a roaming accordionist. Eddie had no answers to the madwoman’s questions and just gazed blankly at the busker as he swayed around us.

  ‘I can take you to Abbot Kinney, if you like,’ I said. ‘It’s another street, nearby. More upmarket if this is too crazy for you.’

  Reuben loved Abbot Kinney.

  ‘No, thanks,’ Eddie said. For a moment he looked like he might smile. ‘Since when was I upmarket?’

  I shrugged, suddenly embarrassed. ‘I never really got to find out.’

  He glanced sideways at me and I saw what might be a pocket of warmth. ‘I think we got a pretty good measure of each other.’

  I love you, I thought. I love you, Eddie, and I don’t know what to do.

  His muffin arrived. I imagined my life, stretching out ahead of me without Eddie David, and felt light-headed with panic. And then I imagined him, all those years ago, envisaging a life stretching out ahead of him without his sister.

  He ate his muffin in silence.

  ‘My charity,’ I said eventually. ‘My charity was set up for Alex.’

  ‘I did wonder.’

  ‘For Alex and for Hannah.’ I picked at a hangnail. ‘Hannah has kids of her own now. I’ve seen pictures. I sent them presents every birthday at first, but in the end she sent a message through Mum asking me to stop. It kills Mum and Dad. They tried everything to bring us back together. They just thought she’d climb down, eventually. Perhaps she would have done if I was still in England . . . I don’t know. She was such a stubborn child. I guess that’s the sort of adult she became, too.’

  Eddie looked down the beach. ‘You shouldn’t underestimate the impact that my mother will have had on her. She never stopped hating you. At times it’s the only thing that’s got her through.’

  I tried not to imagine Eddie’s mother’s house, the walls holding old anger like nicotine stains. I tried not to imagine my sister there with Carole Wallace; the words they’d use; the tea they’d drink. Although, oddly, there was comfort to be found in that picture, too. In the possibility that my sister’s wholesale rejection of me could perhaps have been helped along by someone else.

  ‘Do you think that’s partly why?’ I asked, turning back to him. My desperation was palpable. ‘Do you think your mum might have been egging her on, all these years?’

  Eddie shrugged. ‘I don’t know your sister very well. But I know my mother. I’d probably have reacted differently to you if I hadn’t been listening to Mum for nineteen years.’

  He looked as if he might say something else, but then closed his mouth.

  ‘I’ve struggled to be anywhere near children since it happened,’ I said. ‘I refused childminding jobs, wouldn’t babysit, went on ward visits with Reuben only when there was no other option.’

  I paused. ‘I even refused to have a baby with him. He made me go to therapy, but nothing would change my mind. When I saw a child – any child – I saw your sister. So I steer clear. It’s easier that way.’

  Eddie ate the final piece of his muffin and rested his forehead in his hand. He said, ‘I wish you’d used your family name when we met. I wish you’d said, “I’m Sarah Harrington.”’

  I yanked the hangnail off, leaving a soft strip of stinging pink. ‘I’m not reverting to Harrington, not even after the divorce. I don’t want to be Sarah Harrington ever again. ’

  Eddie was squashing the final crumbs from his plate onto a finger. ‘It would have saved us a lot of heartache.’

  I nodded.

  ‘And your parents were meant to have moved to Leicester. There was a “sold” sign at the end of their track for weeks.’

  ‘I know. But I moved to LA, and I w
as the problem. Their buyer fell through and they decided to stay. I think by then it was pretty clear I wasn’t coming back.’

  A long silence fell.

  ‘Could I ask why you call yourself Eddie David?’ I asked, when it became unbearable. ‘Surely your name’s Eddie Wallace?’

  ‘David’s my middle name. I started using it after the accident. For a while everyone recognized my name and there’d be all this . . . I don’t know . . . kind of suffocating sympathy, I suppose, when people realized who I was. It was easier to be Eddie David. Nobody knew him. Just like nobody knew Sarah Mackey.’

  After a while he turned to look at me, but his gaze was pulled away again, like water running back to the sea. ‘I’d give anything to have worked out who you were before it was too late,’ he said. ‘I just – I just can’t believe we never made the connection.’ He scratched his head. ‘You know they let him out after five years?’

  I nodded. ‘He moved to Portsmouth, I heard.’

  Eddie said nothing.

  ‘It was my Facebook, wasn’t it?’ I said. ‘You saw a post from Tommy. He called me Harrington.’

  ‘I saw it about twenty seconds after you left. And for the first minute or so, before the shock set in properly, I just thought, No. Pretend you haven’t seen that. Make it go away, because I can’t not be with her. It’s only been a week, but she’s . . .’ He flushed. ‘She’s everything ,’ he finished off. ‘That’s what I was thinking.’

  We sat in silence for a long time. My heart was racing. Eddie’s cheeks were faintly red.

  Then he told me about his mother, about her depression, how it had exploded after Alex’s death and deteriorated into a complex mental health cocktail from which she had never really emerged. He told me she had moved to Sapperton when she’d come out of the worst of the breakdown, because she wanted to be ‘closer’ to her dead daughter. Recognizing that she was too vulnerable to survive alone, Eddie had abandoned any hopes of returning to university and moved in with her for a while. He persuaded Frank, the sheep farmer, to rent him a crumbling cow barn on the edge of Siccaridge Wood, which he slowly turned into a workshop and then, once she was able to live on her own, a home of his own.