by Lia Louis
‘She’s – not really sick.’
‘Oh …’
‘Well, no, I mean, she is sick but – I don’t know.’ My heart clenches now, at the mention of Mum. A single icy shot of reality in this tiny little warm bubble, miles from it. ‘I suppose it’s just when you say ill or sick, people think hospitals and meds and being stuck in bed or something and, Mum … she doesn’t really fit in those boxes. She had a stroke, six years ago. And she hasn’t really been the same since.’
Sam is quiet, then says, ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
‘We’re lucky really, that she bounced back. She struggles on her feet, she lost a lot of sensation in the beginning, on her left. But now – mainly, it’s lost confidence. And I’m not complaining, because, well, things could always be so much worse, but – she’s doing less and less lately and I’m doing more and more and …’ And then nights like this happen, I want to say, but I don’t, and you wonder how much longer you can keep floating on like this, being at the helm of what feels like a gigantic ship you feel totally ill-equipped to steer, and one that just keeps getting bigger and heavier. ‘But we’re OK,’ I say instead. ‘Most of the time.’
I look up at Sam, snowflakes drifting beyond the glass behind him, rhythmically, like an old nineties screensaver, and I wait for the wince, the eyes widening, the judgement and most of all, the pity I notice ripple across people’s faces sometimes. Pity for Mum, of course, but also for me. Thirty-two years old. Always needing to be close to home. A world the size of a tiny speck in the sky compared to most people’s giant planets. Instead, Sam says, ‘That sounds super tough. Always having to be … the shoulders.’
Yes. The shoulders. I’ve never heard it put like that before. ‘Sometimes it can be. Like, tonight, for example …’ I look down at the red satin dress, the inky spots of snow slowly drying back to crimson. ‘Tonight was my first night out in about ten months and I had to plan with military precision, make sure I’d get home at a certain time and––’
‘And look how great that turned out,’ grins Sam, outstretching his hands, like a magician presenting the end of a trick.
I laugh. ‘Well, it could be worse.’
Sam looks at me sideways. ‘Yeah. Agreed,’ he says.
The hard buzz of a vibrating phone in the cubby beneath the stereo cuts through the calm of the car, and as if automatically, we both reach for it. My hand collides with Sam’s and a jolt fizzes through me, bubbles in my stomach as the warmth of his skin touches mine. Sam flinches his hand away as the phone tumbles into the footwell at my feet, and of course, I realise now, that – shit. The phone isn’t mine. The name ‘Jenna’ is on the screen on the floor, between my ankle boots, calling, and I definitely don’t know a Jenna.
I bend to pick it up. I know my cheeks must be bright shrimp-pink because my bloody ears are on fire and they always do that when I’m embarrassed. Crayfish Face, Dilly calls me, when it happens, and I know I must be in full Crayfish Face mode right now. ‘S-sorry, I thought it was mine, I thought it might be my mum …’
‘It’s cool, no worries.’ Sam takes the phone from me as Jenna’s name disappears and the screen flashes with a little grey rectangle of a missed call.
‘And now you’ve missed the call. Sorry.’
‘It’s no big deal, seriously. It’s just a call,’ he says, but something in his face, in his dark brown eyes, has changed and I can’t put my finger on what. An injection of reality perhaps, for him this time, in the shape of a phone call. He clears the notification with a swipe of his thumb. ‘Life was easier when we weren’t all so available and easy to interrupt, right?’
‘What, when we all wrote to each other?’
Sam nods. ‘I know nobody does that any more, but I dunno, it’s tempting. Less pressure to answer right this second, you know?’
‘Some people do,’ I say. ‘Steve and Candice did.’
Sam’s eyebrows knit together and he looks at me. ‘Who?’
‘These two people that work together at an office I clean,’ I say. ‘That’s what I do. I’m a cleaner. Houses, workplaces. Not exactly glam, but it fits in around Mum …’ And I’m not sure if waffling will help dilute the rising cringe levels in the car, but clearly, I’m going to try. Because trying to steal his phone. The touch of our hands. Sam’s flinch away like he’d touched shit on a stick. All these things that have ticked the cringe barometer from zero into a firm reading of seven out of ten, and suddenly this all feels a bit ridiculous again. Me. In this car. With him. ‘These two people who work there, Steve and Candice,’ I say, ‘they were having an affair and I used to find their Post-it notes to each other screwed up in their bins every Friday evening.’
‘And what did they say?’ asks Sam, a coy shadow of a smile on his face.
‘It was mostly tea-based. Like Steve, tea at three? And Candice, your tea is way too hot. And once there was a very straight-to-the-point nice tits one.’
Sam laughs. ‘Wow.’
I burst out laughing. ‘I know.’
‘See, maybe you’d have got somewhere with your Portland pen pal if you’d been more like Steve and Candice.’
‘Or I’d have been expelled.’
The buzzing of Sam’s phone cuts like ice through the quiet of the car again. His dark eyes drop down at the screen.
‘Ah. I really need to take this …’
‘Let me leave you, give you some peace. Plus …’ I pick up my phone now, ‘… eighty six per cent charge. I should probably stop stealing your power now and leave you be.’
Sam hesitates, Jenna in one hand, car door handle in the other, and I don’t know what I want him to say, but I know I don’t want to leave. Not really. Not one bit. ‘No, it’s – I mean, you don’t have to – seems silly not to let it get to a hundred, if …’
‘I – I’ll give you some peace,’ I say again, opening the car door. ‘I um. I need to check in at home, anyway.’
Sam nods, wordlessly.
I slide out of the car as I hear him say into the phone in a new voice – sweet, low, ‘Hey, you.’
Chapter Five
‘I’m completely freaking out, Charlie. I should go back to my car, shouldn’t I? I mean – what part of this is normal?’
‘You’ve hit it off with a stranger, Noelle. You’re borrowing a charger, you’re stuck in a blizzard. You’re not sucking him off and being filmed by his girlfriend, which by the way, people do all the time in Alston Park car park after midnight, and they’re not freaking out. They’re having a really lovely time.’
‘Right.’
‘So, do you want to stay in the car?’
‘Yes. But I don’t know if he wants me to and maybe I’m outstaying my welcome and also this is really weird, isn’t it, I mean it––’
‘You just said it was his idea to keep charging your phone.’
‘It was.’
‘Which is proof – oh hang on, Theo’s saying something. Ooh. Interesting. Theo thinks you only called me because you subconsciously wanted to deplete your battery so you have to stay with the hot and funny American for longer.’
‘Or I wanted to call you for you to tell me I shouldn’t be sitting in a stranger’s car. That maybe I’ve had a lapse in judgement, triggered by the fact that I had a weird, emotional evening, what with Ed, and Daisy’s camera, and perhaps I’m not thinking straight and—’
‘No way I’m doing that, Elle. Forgive me, but I like that you’re having a nice time with a nice guy. When was the last time you did that, eh? I mean you wouldn’t even go on a date with Jet.’
‘Jet?’
‘You know. Who Theo met on the reiki retreat, the one with the torso …’
‘Vaguely …’
‘And you wouldn’t double date with us and Simon the chiropodist either and I have trusted that man with my feet for eight and a half years, Noelle.’
‘Right. So, do you think I should stay? I mean, this Jenna, she could be …’
‘Stay in the car.’
&nbs
p; ‘He’s so nice, Charlie. I feel – I don’t know. Like I’ve been injected with something. He touched my hand earlier, accidentally and …’
‘Sparks. Energy?’
‘Yeah. Yes.’
‘Oh my God, you’re so marrying him.’
‘Charlie, that is ridicul––’
‘Theo says he’d give anything to read your aura right now.’
‘Tell him I’ve already read it and as auras go, it’s firmly shitting itself.’
‘Stay in the car, Noelle.’
‘OK. OK, I will.’
‘And maybe after this, you’ll be ready for Jet.’
‘I don’t think I’ll ever be ready for Jet.’
‘Shame. Theo says he teaches a class on cunnilingus. They practise on oranges. Oh, and sometimes cantaloupes. Noelle? Elle, are you still there?’
After Daisy died, it took me nine months to be able to bear even to look at a motorway, let alone drive on one. A motorway was loud and fast and unpredictable, where everything could go wrong in the split second it took to make one silly mistake. A motorway took away my best friend. And it should’ve taken me away too. But tonight, looking at this vast, long road, still and snow-covered and lined with trees, scattered with people, strings of cars lit up inside, like distant houses at night, the small orb of fear I still carry fizzles, like the end of a firework. It’s just tarmac that Sam and I stand on now. It’s just concrete and snow and trees and people trying to make their way home.
‘I can’t believe your umbrella has ears,’ says Sam.
‘Ears on anything adds charm, everyone knows that.’
‘They do?’
‘Of course. Scientifically proven too.’
Sam and I are queuing at the back of a bakery lorry, its shutter raised, a butterscotch yellow light on inside. We stand beneath my umbrella – a Christmas gift from Dilly, and for absolutely no reason at all, designed to look like a koala’s face. Sam holds it high above us both, the koala’s ears flapping in the icy wind. Sam is tall. Six foot three, perhaps, maybe even four. Mum would definitely be pleased. ‘I can’t abide short men,’ she always says, as if talking about an infestation of roof rats. ‘Spiteful little things. Malicious.’
After speaking to Charlie on the phone, I’d gone for a short walk to find a bush on the hard shoulder to pee behind which was about as life-affirming as you’d expect, and on my way back, two police officers had told me crisis groups were on their way and a lorry was giving out free food and water to drivers a little way down the motorway, and as a helicopter circled high above, somewhere in the black sky, I was struck properly, by just how serious and real this actually was. Traffic stranded. Free food and water. Crisis groups. For us. For Sam and me, for hundreds of us stuck here, on a motorway. I’d texted Ian to update him, my mouth dry suddenly, with anxiety. As dutifully as ever, he’d sent a message straight back, in the way Ian always does. Half text, half Trip Advisor review, and it made me smile, thawed the worry, imagining him and Mum safe and warm at home.
‘All fine and in hand here,’ he’d texted. ‘Listening to traffic radio. Very good coverage. Friendly presenter. Welsh. Stay warm.’
By the time I got back to the car, Sam had finished his chat with Jenna.
‘Food,’ I’d mimed through the glass of the window, and he’d wound it down. ‘Down there, apparently. Back of a truck. I can go and get some? Drop it off?’
Sam had opened his car door then. ‘I’ll grab my jacket,’ he’d said. ‘Back of a truck cuisine.’
We talked on the way down the motorway, meandering past open car doors and other drivers, about the hungriest we’ve ever felt in our lives, about the worst thing we’d ever eaten, joking about what we hoped to find being handed out. ‘Hot Cornish pasties,’ I’d said, and Sam had said, ‘Never tried one. Mine’d be oysters.’
‘Oysters? Never tried them but ugh.’
‘You should try them before you judge, you know.’
‘Nope,’ I’d replied. ‘Face might blow up. You know, I might have a reaction. You hear of it all the time. One oyster and that’s it – your face is a baked potato.’ And Sam laughed, his breath making clouds in the air. He’s smart, that’s what Mum would call him – a black duffel coat, buttoned all-but-one to the collar, a charcoal grey scarf, knotted at the neck. ‘Very swish,’ Mum would say. ‘Such lovely shoulders. And what a lovely straight and strong back.’ I bet Jenna would say the same too, whoever Jenna is, and we haven’t quite established that yet, and why should we? He hardly knows me. I’m some woman from the M4 who blows her nose on microfibre cloths and grabs at his phone like it’s a bloody lifebuoy. But it’s that something again, that feeling I can’t name. The alive, buzzy, electricity feeling. Sparks, as Charlie said, and it’s that that’s making me want to ask, and to know, and I wish it’d stay and piss off all at once.
‘Cheese?’
A woman in a sleeveless high-vis jacket smiles down at us now from the inside edge of the lorry, brandishing two sandwiches in cardboard triangles. She hands them to me, followed by two bottles of water, and I balance them in my arms.
‘Thank you,’ we say, and a man squeezes past us to the front of the queue and says, ‘Got anything gluten-free, love?’ and as we walk away, we hear her yet again, say ‘Cheese?’ like a puppet, pre-programmed with only one word. Cheese.
Sam and I look at each other at the exact same time, and the knowing smile he gives me makes a wave roll over in my stomach.
We walk back to the car on the hard shoulder where the snow is thicker on the ground, but less slippery from the lack of footsteps and tyre tracks. Spindly, young trees line the border of the motorway, snow balancing on their skinny branches like icing sugar, and we walk together, our shoes crunching on the snow underfoot, the air almost too silent in the way it is when it snows. Sounds muted and closer, the snow a natural sound-proofer.
Sam looks at me at the same time I glance over at him, the koala umbrella high above our heads, the bundle of sandwiches and bottled water still cradled in my arms. And it suddenly catches up with me, in one gust. This. The motorway. The snow. Me and Sam. The fact he could be anyone, the fact he is a stranger. The fact somehow – and I really don’t know how – I don’t feel like he is.
‘What’s up?’ he asks, calmly. It’s easy to see, even in the short time I’ve spent with Sam, why he does the job he does. It’s what you need, I suppose, if you ever find yourself hanging off a rock face, in need of a life-saving hand. Someone calm and steady. The sort of person that’d fare well in an apocalypse.
‘Nothing,’ I say, shaking my head, but it does nothing to stop the heat blooming across my cheeks. Crayfish Face, says Dilly’s voice in my head. Seriously, Elle, proper Crayfish Face happening right now. Sort it out. ‘I dunno,’ I say. ‘It’s just – I can’t believe this has happened. It’s all a bit … well, it’s mad, isn’t it?’
‘What, this? The snow? Walking along the freeway?’
‘Freeway,’ I repeat. ‘And yeah. All of that.’
Sam rubs a hand at the dark stubble of his jaw. ‘Yeah. I guess it is.’
And also, this, I want to say, walking with you, a stranger from thousands of miles away, mere hours ago on his way to the airport, and me, on my way home, from an evening that went spectacularly to shit. Daisy’s letter. Her lost camera. Ed. Yet if it had gone spectacularly right, if the snow hadn’t happened, if my phone hadn’t died, we’d have never met, Sam and me. I wouldn’t be right here.
‘It’s almost pretty, isn’t it?’ I say. A tactical change of subject. ‘The trees, the snow …’
‘Almost,’ says Sam. ‘Either that, or you’ve got like, motorway Stockholm syndrome, or something.’
‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘But, look, if we angle ourselves like this.’ I turn my back to Sam, to the gridlocked streams of motionless cars, straggles of drivers, some in their cars, some outside. ‘And we walk and look this way, at just the trees and the snow …’ I look over my shoulder at him, one of the koala ears above
his head flapping, as if waving. ‘We could be anywhere.’
Sam grimaces. ‘Oh-kay?’
‘You’re not convinced.’
Sam laughs, lines at the corner of his eyes crinkling.
‘You don’t know what you’re missing, Sam. Have a little imagination.’
Sam pauses for a while. He does that a lot, I notice, before he speaks, as if he lines up his words in his head before he says them out loud, instead of letting everything spill out, like a cluttered cupboard suddenly opened. ‘I guess at a push, we could be in a park somewhere,’ he says. ‘Or in a … very bald forest.’
‘We could be somewhere like Iceland,’ I say.
‘Or Quebec. You ever been to Quebec?’
I shake my head, keep walking. ‘Never. Not been anywhere like that really. Although I’d love to.’
‘Well – there it is.’ I glance over my shoulder to look at him. He’s turned sideways now too, his smile, amused, like a reluctant teacher who’s finally given in to a student’s silly joke. ‘Yup. Here we are. Snowy Quebec. Wow. It is just like the brochures.’
‘See. We just have to ignore the sound of music from cars …’
‘Yeah, and the police radios and the helicopter and – is that a …’ Sam stops walking for a second and so do I. ‘Is that a banjo?’
‘I have it on very good authority that it is a banjo, yes.’
‘Right.’ Sam chuckles, and we begin walking again, still angled away from the road, and thinking about how we must look to other drivers makes me smile, all hot cheeks and tingles.
‘We could just pretend there’s a busker in a Quebec park with us,’ I say. ‘You just dropped money into his banjo case because Americans always tip, and we Brits are terrified of it. Giving too much, giving too little …’
‘And we’re on vacation,’ Sam says, as if it’s factual. ‘Trip around the world. Planned it for months – years. You printed an itinerary.’
‘Did I?’
‘I think you did.’
‘I do quite like an itinerary,’ I say.
‘Jetlagged and in Quebec, that’s us,’ Sam carries on. ‘With a busker and an itinerary.’
