Snap

by Belinda Bauer

  Scared.

  Stupid.

  Watched them grow smaller instead of bigger?

  Tears fizzed up Jack’s nose but furiously he willed them away. Crying never got anybody anything. He had to think about other things right now.

  Like staying alive.

  He tensed. He slid his eyes sideways and looked at the door handle. He imagined how it would feel in his hand, how it would open, how he’d roll sideways – away from the blade – how he’d hit the tarmac and try to stay loose as a drunk, and hope he wasn’t hit by a truck …

  Catherine dithered on to the roundabout. ‘Where—’

  ‘North!’ While shouted. ‘North!’

  ‘Which way is north?’ Catherine turned to look at her husband – her lips red and swollen with bawling, her red eyes rimmed with black that ran rivers down her face. She looked like a clown.

  A sad clown.

  ‘Left!’ shouted While, and leaned between the seats to yank the wheel. ‘Left!’

  The car lurched one way, While lurched the other, and Jack twisted and smashed the china clown into the bridge of his nose. It shattered in his hand and blood ran through his knuckles, although he didn’t know whose it was.

  Catherine screamed as her husband fell behind the passenger seat, his left hand protecting his face, the knife in his right stabbing at air.

  Jack leapt into the back in a single movement. He landed on While knees-first, snatching the knife from his hand even as he ground the shards of clown into the man’s eyes. While shouted and grabbed his wrist, and Jack slashed at his hand and arm until he let go.

  Horns blared. Catherine screamed again and the car veered the other way, and Jack fell on to his back behind the driver’s seat.

  While flailed blindly for something to pull himself upright. He struggled into a sitting position on the floor of the car, and Jack kicked him in the face. He was only wearing trainers but a kick in the face is a kick in the face, and While slammed against the door, crying out through a bloody mask. Even his teeth were red. Then he doubled over in the footwell behind the passenger seat, dripping blood into his hands, howling like a mourner.

  ‘My eyes! My eyes!’

  Jack slithered into the front seat and groped for the recline lever. He found it and threw himself backwards, and While cried out again as the seat hit him in the back of the head, doubled him over, and trapped him on the floor.

  ‘Adam!’ screamed Catherine.

  ‘Keep driving!’ shouted Jack. ‘Just keep driving!’ He would make her drive to a town. Somewhere big enough for a police station.

  Adam While tried to force the seat upward. It bucked under Jack and he jumped on it hard with his knees.

  ‘You little fucker! I’m blind! I can’t see!’

  Jack turned around and sat on the seat-back to give it extra weight. There was blood all over the back seat and the windows. His left hand was bleeding, but not enough to have made so much mess. He winced at the needle-like shards of china still stuck in his palm. The handle of the knife was slippery with blood. He wiped it on his sleeve.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ said Catherine. ‘I’m so sorry! I didn’t know …’ She choked on her tears, then got back enough control to go on: ‘He said he only wanted to talk to you.’

  ‘You don’t talk with a knife,’ said Jack angrily. ‘Nobody talks with a knife.’

  He focused on the road ahead. They were on the motorway. He didn’t know where. He’d lost his bearings.

  ‘Where are we?’ he said.

  ‘M5 south,’ she said.

  ‘Fuck!’ shouted While. ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck!’ Then he whimpered, ‘Cath, help me! My eyes are bleeding. I can’t see! I think I’m blind!’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Jack, without energy. He stared at the knife in his lap. Wiped more blood off it.

  One of two.

  Catherine started to cry again.

  Adam While said ‘Catherine’ once, but she didn’t answer him.

  Jack squinted into the fast-lowering sun. A big blue signpost said Exeter was straight ahead. Exeter was good. There was a big police station there. They would go to Ex—

  ‘Stop!’ he cried.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Stop right here!’

  Catherine swung the car over as others hooted and swerved around her. They crunched to a halt on the hard shoulder, close to a short line of conifers.

  ‘Turn it off.’

  She switched off the ignition. And for a long moment the only sound was Adam While, snuffling and moaning in the footwell. Then a car sped past them, and made them shake. And another.

  Too dangerous.

  Jack stared at the road ahead, memory making him shiver in the heat.

  ‘This is where it started,’ he whispered.

  ‘What?’ sniffed Catherine. ‘Where what started?’

  ‘This is the last place I saw my mother.’

  Catherine blinked at him, wide-eyed.

  ‘The car stopped right here,’ he said, and pointed up ahead with the knife. ‘And she walked up the road to find a phone.’

  Catherine looked up ahead. There was no phone in sight, and then a wide bend hid everything.

  ‘We waited for an hour,’ Jack went on. ‘I had a watch for my birthday. It was so hot it smelled like the car was melting. We played “I Spy”. Me and Joy. But we waited too long to go after her …’

  He cleared his throat. ‘I waited too long.’

  Catherine stared at him questioningly, but Jack went on, his eyes distant and his voice soft, as if remembering a dream.

  ‘We walked and we walked. We were thirsty and scared and nobody stopped to help us and I had to carry Merry because she wouldn’t walk.’ He glanced at Catherine and gave a brief smile. ‘She was such a brat!’

  Then he sighed and looked up the road again. ‘So I carried her, and all the time I kept thinking, someone will stop. Someone will stop and help us. But nobody did. Nobody helped us. And when we got there, Mum was gone. The phone was just dangling.’

  ‘What happened?’ said Catherine, her voice low with horror.

  ‘Lies!’ cried Adam. ‘He’s telling you lies!’

  But Catherine’s eyes never left Jack, transfixed by his story.

  ‘Somebody did stop to help her. She thought he’d stopped to help her, you know? But he didn’t stop to help her. He stopped to kill her.’

  Jack wiped his nose on his bloody arm, and stared at the sun turning orange in the sky.

  Catherine was shaking so hard that Jack could feel it through the seats.

  ‘Adam?’ she asked. ‘Adam?’

  There was a long, stretched silence.

  ‘Adam?’ she said again, and her voice was tremulous with fear.

  ‘One bad choice, Cathy,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘I only snapped once. I’d never do it again …’

  Catherine While started to cry big, gasping sobs of horrible understanding.

  Jack felt strange. For years, he had imagined this moment. The moment he would hear someone confess to killing his mother. He had always thought that when it came he would rage and rant and slash and burn. That the anger and loss he’d kept inside him for so long would explode like a sun, and consume the whole planet in a fiery rampage of hatred and vengeance.

  But he heard Adam While’s confession now with dull disinterest.

  It meant nothing.

  It changed nothing.

  He didn’t even want to know why.

  It was just … over.

  He got out of the car.

  ‘Where are you going?’ said Catherine.

  The boy shrugged and stared at the horizon. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m just going to walk.’

  Then he looked at her intently.

  ‘Will you be OK?’

  Catherine opened her mouth to say NO! but instead she said, ‘Yes, I’ll be OK.’

  Jack Bright paused, then nodded – then turned and walked away without another word.

  Catherine While felt some
part of her leave wih him. Some part that didn’t want to be her any more. Wanted a different life, a different future from the one where her pregnant belly was pressed against the steering wheel of the pea-green Volvo, with blood on the seats and her husband – her murderous husband – trapped and bleeding to death in the rear footwell.

  ‘Cath?’ he whined. ‘Can you take me to a hospital?’

  Catherine thought about it. She could take him to a hospital.

  Or she could not.

  ‘Catherine?’ he said. ‘I’m bleeding a lot. I think he cut a vein in my arm. And I’m blind. And I can’t breathe so well, bent over like this. I can’t move! I can’t fucking move! Can you put the seat up? So I can breathe? Please? … Catherine? Please?’

  ‘Be quiet,’ she said. ‘I’m thinking.’

  One bad choice, she was thinking. One bad choice. She must be careful not to make another. Here. Now. On the hard shoulder.

  She stared up the road. The boy was almost at the bend already. A small figure, getting smaller, and indistinct against the fields backlit by the orange sun.

  Adam started to cry again. Weaker now.

  Her heart barely heard him.

  Finally she turned the key.

  ‘Catherine!’ he wept.

  But Catherine didn’t answer him. She checked her mirrors, signalled, and manoeuvred the pea-green Volvo with Side Impact Protection System and automatic child locks out into traffic.

  By the time she passed Jack Bright, she was doing seventy. She had a full tank of petrol. She could drive all night if she wanted to. Maybe she’d do that.

  Things would be clearer in the morning.

  Jack was on the hard shoulder.

  Small bugs whirred through the motionless air, and cars that passed kicked up little dust devils on the verge, where long yellow grass grew to his hip.

  But cars passed less frequently now, and the rolling hills to the west made for a tall horizon. Dusk was on its way, and the heat was starting to leave the day.

  There was a scrubby little tree up ahead. Wild red apples scrunched softly underfoot as Jack approached. He sat down and picked one of them up.

  It was small but perfect, like an apple for an elf.

  He remembered Joy biting into one; spitting out the sour chunk. He remembered putting Merry down in the dirt among the fruit. He remembered hiding the baby bag …

  Slowly he got up, and wiped his bloody, dusty hands on his jeans, still wincing at the splinters.

  The apple tree leaned on the barrier like a weary spectator. Jack reached over the warm metal, his hand groping blindly in the narrow gap between the two. Expecting nothing, but touching something.

  Something plastic. Soft. Familiar.

  Carefully he tugged the bag free of the place where he’d left it three years ago, when he’d been another boy and Joy had been Joy, and Merry had been no more to him than a hot, awkward weight on his shoulder. And his mother had only been gone a long time, and wasn’t yet dead …

  The bag was squashed and a bit grubby, but still easily recognizable – zippered pink plastic, with the Mothercare logo.

  Jack sat down cross-legged under the tree once more, and unzipped the bag.

  The smell of it alone was like time travel. Warm plastic, and that weird baby-bottle smell.

  The bottle was the first thing he took out. He held it up and squinted. There were still a few drops of water in the bottom. Then the nappies. Two of them in a plastic sachet that held three. Joy had taken one so their mother could change Merry when they found her. Which they never had, of course. Jack tried to remember when someone had next changed Merry, but he couldn’t.

  There was loads more stuff in the bag. Wipes and a flannel, and a little wooden dog on wheels with a spring for a tail, and three plastic pots of food – withered carrot sticks, dry, black apple slices, and immortal jelly babies.

  Jack cleaned the blood off his hands with the wipes and ate the jelly babies.

  At the very bottom of the bag was an old red leather purse.

  Jack raised it slowly to his nose and memories went off in his head like fireworks. His mother’s smile at the school gate; standing bored beside her at the supermarket checkout; her hand on his back as he bent over his homework …

  He opened the purse. There was money inside. Not much. A few quid. A credit card. He ran his thumb over the raised letters of her name.

  MRS EILEEN BRIGHT

  There was a loyalty card and two coupons for teabags. 50p OFF!

  Jack opened the soft leather folds wide so he wouldn’t miss anything. There were a few coins. And a piece of stiff paper.

  Jack’s heart beat faster.

  A secret! Something wonderful that only his mother knew … Please, please, please … Please don’t let it be a shopping list. Please let it be some precious thing …

  Jack held his breath as he withdrew the paper from the purse.

  It was blank. He turned it over.

  It was the photo.

  The photo he remembered. The photo he’d thought was lost or imagined. The photo that had a stolen frame waiting for it at home.

  They weren’t doing anything special. They were just laughing together on the blustery cliff, with their hair in their eyes, and blissfully ignorant of their own futures. His father had Merry in his big strong arms, Joy wore that jumper she never took off, while he made bunny ears behind her head. His mother had one hand on his shoulder, but was bent a little, as if speaking to him.

  He couldn’t remember what she had said to him, but from the look on her face he knew it was I love you.

  Anger left Jack like a balloon, and even through his tears he felt so dizzy with joy that he wondered why he had held on to its cruel string for so long.

  It doesn’t matter, he thought. It was late, but it wasn’t never.

  Jack stared at the photo for so long that when he looked up again, it was night. The cars that passed him now had their lights on. Nearby, an owl called, and the dry scrub around the apple tree was suddenly silent. Then slowly, slowly, it came alive again with scraping and rustling and creeping and crawling …

  Small bugs

  He put the purse back in the nappy bag along with all the other stuff. He put the VC knife in there too.

  He didn’t want it, but he knew the police would. And after that, maybe Louis …

  He didn’t put the photo back in the bag though. That, he slid deep into his pocket so he could look at it at a moment’s notice. He would show it to Joy and Merry when he got back home. Because back home was where he’d be going. Back home to his family. Back home to Marmite and sparklers.

  It was a long walk. He wouldn’t make it tonight, and wasn’t going to try, but the west was gorgeous with red, and it wasn’t going to rain.

  So he lay down on the hard shoulder, with the baby bag for a pillow.

  Tomorrow, a police car would find Jack Bright stretched out among the apples, already covered by a fine sheen of road dust, and so still that they’d think he was dead.

  Tomorrow a policeman would shake him awake, as if for school.

  But tonight he slept under the brand-new stars, with one pocket full of diamonds and the other full of love.

  He didn’t dream.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Catherine While paid cold hard cash for the right to appear as a character of my choosing in Snap. She was the highest bidder in the annual CLIC Sargent Get In Character auction for children and young people with cancer. Thanks to Catherine, and to all the under-bidders who forced her to be so generous!

  Many thanks to my publishers and translators all over the world, but particularly to my editors, Sarah Adams, Amy Hundley and Stephanie Glencross, for their patience, enthusiasm and insight.

  And a special mention to Sarah, who first imagined a knife beside her bed …

 

 

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