by Tessa Hadley
—Lu’s wallet, she said.
From the pouch she took out something wrapped in tissue: a small blade, the kind that comes with a craft kit. She slipped her pajama top down from her shoulders.
—Hold the light. Here. She showed him where to shine it. On her arm just below the round ball of her shoulder was a row of five precise cuts, each about four centimeters long, one under the other. The top cut was a healed pale line; the ones below looked successively newer; the last one was puffy with an ugly red scab.
—It’s a sacrifice. Like the Aztecs.
—But what’s it supposed to do?
—It makes you strong. It stops bad things happening.
—Does it work?
She shrugged exasperatedly. Toby, it’s just a game.
—I really don’t think it’s a very good idea.
—If you tell, I’ll kill you. I don’t do it very often. You have to use it with care, or it works against you. I’m doing this one specially for you. Keep the light steady.
She pressed the blade into position to make a new cut underneath the last one; then, with only a sharp suck of breath, she pulled it smartly across, slitting the skin. Beads of blood brimmed out of the cut and ran down her arm; she blotted them up with a handful of tissues she had ready, then pressed the tissues against the cut and held them there, hissing slightly through her teeth.
—Now give me the light. It’s your turn.
She gave him a new clean blade out of her wallet, then put the bike light under her face again and grimaced, making a leering mask.
—Do you dare?
Toby took the blade. Something in the hot shifting space with its careering shadows and its intense focus on the ritual act made his heart pound; he felt again, as he hadn’t felt since they were children, the old exhilarating liberating power of play. He put the blade against the top of his bare arm, and when she had the light steady he held his breath and cut.
CLARE ASKED BRAM if she could have the car to take the children away for the weekend. She had a chance to borrow a cottage in the country that belonged to a friend of her mother’s. She and Bram had been there together with the children a couple of times.
Bram had arranged to take the car in for a service that Saturday.
Clare said surely it wouldn’t matter, it could wait another week. Couldn’t he rearrange it?
Of course he could.
Then on Friday night on their way down to the cottage the timing belt went, and one half of the engine stopped still while the other half kept going and the second half mashed into the first half and wrecked her pistons. This was how the man at the garage explained it to her later. All she knew at the time was that there was suddenly no power; she pressed the accelerator to the floor but got nothing. The car slowed and stopped. There was no crunch or bang, although from the garage man’s description of what had happened one might have expected it. They sat for a few moments in the sound of the rain. When she tried to restart the engine, though, there was an awful decisive clanging. She tried a few more times, but she knew from this sound that the engine was injured, probably mortally: probably dead under its tin lid. She didn’t even entertain the idea of taking a look at it.
There was no way she was to blame for this. Bram really hadn’t put up any objections to her borrowing the car. He hadn’t suggested for one moment that it was rash and irresponsible of her to postpone the service, or that she was taking any risk in putting off an essential check.
* * *
EVERYTHING had been going so well. She had wondered what it would be like to go away all on her own with the children for a whole weekend. Family experiences were so distorted at the moment; she alternated between passionate desperate love for the children and then a sort of astonishment that after all when she spent time with them it was absorbed in the old ordinary tedious things: eating, cleaning up, squabbles.
They had been playing music on the car stereo; they were all singing along to “Everybody Likes Saturday Night” and “I’m Gonna Mail Myself to You.” Clare had always had a superstitious anxiety about the feel-good exhilaration of music on the car stereo; when she first learned to drive she had vividly imagined how after an accident the music might play on in a kitsch irony over tangled metal and bodies. But this moment of family togetherness had caught her out and she had forgotten to fear it. Also, she was concentrating as well as singing: it was dark and it was raining hard, she had the wipers going at full speed and she was leaning forward over the wheel, frowning ahead to make out the road, a winding country road she had driven only once or twice before. They had not met any other traffic but if they did she would have to reverse, the road was too narrow for two cars to pass. She was thinking that this was an adventure, an adventure they would remember.
The silence after the timing belt went and the car died was an absolute transformation. The girls in the back waited untroubled for her to start up again; but Coco in the front seat suspected disaster at once, and after she turned the ignition to restart and got that dreadful snarled-up grinding noise he was quite certain. He turned his head—which was otherwise always straining in slightly tense eagerness to look ahead, even in the dark—in a quick assessing glance at her, gauging her reaction, probably her competence.
—Hazards on? he suggested lightly.
Clare put her hazard lights on.
—Jesus Christ, she said. I have no idea where we are.
They were nowhere. They were still a long way from the cottage. They had been driving for something like ten minutes since they went through the last village. (Or was it five? Or fifteen?) She hadn’t been aware of any houses at the side of the road since then, she didn’t even really know what landscape she was driving through, only that the road had wound up and then down again and that the tunnel of her headlights on high beam had swung at the turns in the road onto the slick gray trunks of beech hedges, sometimes overgrown into trees. Now she couldn’t see anything beyond the little cell of blinking light around the car, which was filled with slanting pewter-colored needles of rain. They had stopped on a gentle slope, pointing downward.
—We’ll have to call someone, she said. We’ll have to use the mobile phone. We’ll call the AA, or maybe the police. I hope it works here.
Lily, catching on, moaned softly at the idea of the police.
—Lo Batt, Coco said. (She could hear that he said it in the spelling in which it appeared on the little screen of the phone.) Low batteries. I tried to call Granny earlier.
—Now why do you waste it? she spat at him. I told you not to use it precisely because it’s supposed to be for an emergency like this. This is what I keep it for, not for messing about making unnecessary calls.
—I didn’t. It was Lo Batt before I tried. I couldn’t make the call. It needs recharging. You forgot to recharge it.
—It’s always my fucking fault, she said, as if he was a grown-up.
He was adjusting position nervously inside his seat belt, shuffling skinny legs so that he could sit on his hands inserted flat from the sides, staring out ahead through the windscreen again, although there was only the long tunnel of rain splinters to see.
—I’m sorry. I’m just panicking. Trying to think of the sensible thing to do.
They tried the phone but the batteries were down of course. She tried the engine again. Horrible.
—You could put it into gear, Coco suggested. Then let it freewheel down without the engine. We might see a house. We could look out on either side for lights while you steered.
Clare considered this. It sounded like a good idea; it sounded like something Bram might have tried. I can’t, she said. I don’t dare. I don’t know if it would be all right. What if I couldn’t stop it?
He shrugged. Why wouldn’t you be able to stop it? Your brakes wouldn’t stop working, just because you didn’t have the engine on.
—I don’t know. I don’t dare. What if a car came the other way and couldn’t hear us, or I couldn’t stop?
—Wha
t if we hit an animal because it didn’t hear us coming? Lily said, panicking. A deer or something?
Coco dropped his head back on the rest and raised his eyes in exasperated incredulity. Oh, Lord! I suppose the woods round here are just packed full of deaf deer.
* * *
CLARE IMAGINED leaving them in the car while she went to look for a house. She imagined herself killed on a road, and her body buffeted around by oblivious traffic in the dark like a sodden doll while the children waited patiently, bravely, passing the hours. (Long ago she had read somewhere about this really happening to someone and had stored it in her archive of horrors.) She imagined coming back to the car with help and, as she turned the corner, seeing a door torn open, the car empty. She imagined how if they all stayed huddled under their duvets waiting for morning in the car, some swift vehicle might come upon them out of the dark without warning and have no time to stop. (In the last moments as the engine died she had managed to steer onto a little verge against a hedge, but more than half of the car still stuck out into the narrow road, and there probably was not room for anything to pass.)
She decided that they must all get out of the car and walk back to the village she thought she remembered driving through; at least she found a good torch (Bram’s) in the glove compartment. It was better opening the car door and standing up in the windy wet night than sitting inside thinking about it. In the few moments while she fished out raincoats, hats, and gloves from the boot, her hair went into soaked quills, piping water down her cheeks; water spattered across the protesting girls when she climbed into the backseat to force Rose’s resistant arms into the sleeves of her coat. She stuffed sweets and drinks into their pockets, found her purse and checkbook, ordered the children out onto the road, left the hazard lights on, and locked the car. Already Lily and Rose were crying at the dark and the rain. Looking behind as they set out she felt a kind of outrage at herself on behalf of righteous motorists: at her car blocking the road, flashing its orange lights (how long would they last?). She felt as if she fled the scene of some error, irresponsibly; as if there must be some superior sane solution that she was incapable of seeing.
* * *
COCO WENT FIRST, with the torch; Lily stumbled after; Clare carried Rose. Water was running in a little stream down the edge of the road where they walked; the night was full of the noise of rushing water. Soon Clare felt the water in her socks inside her boots. It was dark, but once their eyes adjusted they could make out each other’s shapes and the bulk of the hedge against the sky; perhaps there was a moon behind the clouds. Coco and Lily trudged ahead in a mute stoicism. Straggling wet stems from the hedge smacked across them; a bramble ripped Clare’s cheek and then snagged on Rose’s tights. As soon as they were around a bend in the road and out of sight of the lights of the car, Clare was convinced the whole expedition was insane. The village might be five miles away, or ten. There might be a house five hundred yards the other way down the road, its lights hidden by a dip in the land. Rose was so heavy. Clare wondered how long she would be able to carry her: another five minutes, or ten?
She stopped.
—Oh, God, she said. Are we doing the right thing?
Pale blobs of faces turned to look toward her.
—We could have just waited in the car for someone to come along and help us, said Coco.
—But perhaps no one would have come.
—Surely someone would.
—Then they’ll pass us now. We can wave and stop them.
—But we’ll have to be careful. We’re not wearing anything white, we won’t show up much.
Lily without a word pressed her chin in Clare’s coat and stretched up her arms pleadingly; it was her baby gesture, meaning she wanted to be picked up.
—Can’t you see? How can I? Do you seriously think I can carry two of you? Actually, I can’t even carry one. She pulled apart Rose’s wet woolen mittens from where they were clasped at the back of her neck and slithered her down to the ground. There. We all have to walk. We just have to walk. I’m not going back to sit in that car and wait, like a sitting target. This is England, not Russia or somewhere. There’ll be a house soon. When we get to the top of the hill we’ll see lights. Then we can telephone.
She held Rose’s hand and they toiled on. They were splashing through such deep water it was like walking upstream. Then Rose tripped and, although she dangled from Clare’s hand and didn’t go down completely, her legs and skirt got soaked. Clare picked her up and carried her again, and felt the wet soaking through her own coat to her skin.
Rose moaned and shivered.
—Shut up, said Clare. Stop it.
* * *
CLARE HAD BEEN READING Tolstoy’s Resurrection. (It was packed in one of the bags in the back of the car.) She thought there were two ways you could read it, either with your defenses up or your defenses down. If you read it with your defenses up, you could cleverly perceive all the ways it was unbalanced and twisted by certain sexual obsessions. For instance, the portraits of the wealthy women in the novel are so distorted and uncompassionate, loaded with Tolstoy’s disgust at how he desires them, their flattering flirtations and their naked shoulders.
But she was wondering about that now. What if the cleverness to see those twisted things was just another kind of complacency, to defend oneself against the truth in the book? A privileged wealthy man sees a prostitute tried for murder. He recognizes her as a girl he once seduced; he understands the falsity in his own life and the inequity in his society; he gives up everything to follow the girl to Siberia and offers to marry her, not because he desires her again (apparently he does not) but to redeem himself, to do right.
He changes his life.
What if this expressed a true possibility?
Clare thought while she was reading this novel that perhaps in her life she was wrong, she was perverted, she was in her foolishness and vanity sacrificing something precious. What if she was leaving a good man and breaking up a family, not even for love but just for curiosity, out of dissatisfaction? What if she was doing this not, as she had believed, out of deep inner need but in fact because she was following a pattern, a seductive and flattering and false suggestion that flowed at her on all sides from novels and films and advertising, about the importance, the paramount and endless intricate intriguing importance, of her own fulfillment?
* * *
THE WIND DROPPED and the rain eased off. The night dripped and rustled; there were stinks of rank vegetation and dung. They reached the top of the road where they had left the car, and turned left, and then right, Clare trying to remember their route when they’d come the other way. They must have reached the top of a slope because they found themselves climbing down again, but they hadn’t seen any lights. For a while, Clare found, you could achieve a kind of mechanical equilibrium, where your body repeated the round of movements that produced a forward motion while your mind floated detached somewhere outside: presumably this was what soldiers did when they marched. But the moment she was aware she had achieved this equilibrium, it was spoiled by consciousness; she became painfully aware of how difficult each effort was, and then her movement disintegrated, she stepped onto something awkward underfoot, a branch or a stone, Rose slid down her hip, her back ached, her restraining hands parted under Rose’s weight, she simply couldn’t move forward any farther. She had to let Rose slither to the ground again.
They heard the sound of a car, then saw its lights. Partly Clare was concerned to press them all back safely into the hedge, partly she was trying to think how to stop the car and ask for help. It took a while to catch up with them, dipping out of sight, winding behind a hill and reemerging; and then, when it was close, its lights and speed and the roar of its engine were overwhelming. Clare, waving her hat at the car and pointlessly shouting, felt a strong embarrassment. Who would these people be, what would they think of her, wandering with her little vulnerable brood astray in the wild night?
Somehow, in the disorientation of t
he approaching din and glare, Rose slipped out of Clare’s grasp. She was well beyond the age of darting heedlessly into traffic; she might have been trying to attract the car’s attention because she was fed up with walking, or she might have panicked at its oncoming noise and been unable to escape in any direction except directly at what she feared. The slick blue of her raincoat was suddenly illumined in the car’s lights. Clare screamed: her hands flew to block her mouth as if to stop what was going to happen coming out from there. Coco threw himself at Rose and snatched her back out of the way of the car as it passed in a waist-high spew of water: she landed on her face at the side of the road with Coco half fallen on top of her. He smacked her once heavily across the bottom in the wake of the drama of the receding car.
—You naughty naughty little girl, he shouted.
There was no way of ever being quite sure, in the reconstructions afterward, whether the car would have hit Rose or not, if Coco hadn’t snatched her back. The car didn’t stop. Probably the driver never even saw them; or he shook his head at such irresponsible pedestrians.
Clare knelt on the road beside her. Is she all right?
Rose didn’t move. They shone the torch on her: the elastic on her hat was up under her nose; there was a smear of mud on her creamy cheek and a trickle of blood; her big eyes stared into a tangle of muddy roots in the hedge.
—’Course I’m all right, she said, willing there to be nothing dangerous or dreadful that had happened, that could touch her. She sat up.
Coco rocked on his haunches, shivering and chattering his teeth. I saved her life, he remarked experimentally.
—You ran into the road, Rosie, reproached Lily. How many times have you been told?
Clare sat in a pool of water. The rain began to fall again, the sound of the first drops sharp as a handful of thrown gravel, then the successive sweeps of it like a rustle of fine cloth through the trees, pressing, hastening.
—I can’t go on, she said. You go on without me. I just want to stay here and die.
