Blink of an Eye

CHAPTER TWO

Naomi

Run! Run! Freaking out, fear squirting inside. Run! Can’t move. Something squats on my chest, heavy, cold. Choking. Shout, warn them! Shout for help. Mouth stuck, tongue too. Can’t even open my lips. Scream trapped in my throat, loud and red raw. Got to get away. Get away!

No light. Pitch dark and cold. Buried alive. Suffocating. Can’t smell. Dark, still, silent. No – thumping, hammering. Something, someone, hammering. Thud, thud, thud, thud. Digging to reach me? Nailing me in? Each thud rocks me. Am I the nail? Salt in my mouth, brine.

Help! The scream echoes round inside my head. Alex! Mum! Dad!

There! Going up the escalator. I’m running. Legs like rubber bands, heart exploding, yelling and yelling. They never turn. They don’t see me. No one sees, no one hears.

The ground trembles, hammering louder. Everything shudders and cracks. The pillars shatter and collapse, great clouds of dust billow, huge discs of stone fall and tumble, rocking the ground.

Running, dodging, everything thick with gritty dust. The ground splits, like cloth tearing, a massive wrenching noise and the world erupts. Tongues of fire and a blizzard of ash. I can’t stop.

Falling.

Falling.

Like a puppet bumping off the walls of the canyon. Thump, smack, thump. To the bottom.

Crouching in a ball, arms over my head, coughing. I hear the beast coming, a river of molten lava, stone and gravel and debris. Thundering.

Battering me.

Burying me. Deep in pain.

No one will ever find me here.

Carmel

It was Alex’s mum, Monica, on the phone. We had met briefly a couple of times. I was a little taken aback, then I assumed she was calling about Alex’s new job and began to talk. ‘Alex told us this afternoon, it’s wonderful for them-’

She cut me short. ‘Carmel, listen, I’m sorry, I’ve got some bad news.’

I laughed, I think I laughed, awkward, wrong-footed, trying to deny the danger in her voice. It seemed preposterous that there could be bad news. Was she ill, perhaps? Why was she sorry? My mother? Did she know her? Had Mum had another stroke, or an aneurism? That might be a blessing – something that allowed her to escape from the bizarre and frightening world she now inhabited.

‘What is it?’ I said. ‘What?’

I heard her sniff or swallow, felt my skin chill and my stomach tighten.

‘I’m sorry, there’s been an accident. Alex and Naomi… in the car, there was a collision.’

My heart imploded; that was how it felt, a collapse in my chest, pain and my vision blurring. All that was left was the voice on the phone, the words that I was trying to decipher, the gaps between the words where the truth hung.

‘Are they all right?’ I could still speak, though I sounded odd, fractured, jerky. ‘Monica?’

‘I’ve talked to Alex,’ she said. ‘I’m waiting to see him. He’s got broken bones, bruising.’

‘Naomi?’ I was trembling and shuddering. I thought about hanging up. I didn’t want to know. It must be bad; she was breaking it slowly, gently. Couldn’t come straight out with Oh, she’s great, not a scratch or Just a bump or two, miraculous escape.

‘I don’t know,’ she said quietly. ‘Alex said they were working on her.’

Working on her. I swallowed. ‘Which hospital?’

‘Wythenshawe.’

In the taxi, I texted Phil, my fingers slipping, missing the keys, then I realized he would have his phone off while they played. Directory enquiries put me through to the pub. I could hear the band in the background, ‘Stagger Lee’. We once learnt to jive to that, rockabilly style. Broken chicken walk, they called the step, almost like a limp, and the moves included lots of spinning round and away from each other, then back together. Me getting the giggles and losing the rhythm and setting Phil off. I repeated to the barman that he must interrupt the set at the end of this number and tell the lead guitarist, Phil, to ring his wife urgently. A family emergency. He promised.

Phil would be tapping his foot as he played, exchanging banter with Hugh on bass and lead vocals, supplying the odd backing harmony when the fancy took him, jamming with his mates at the end of a perfect day, no idea what was about to hit him.

A collision, Monica had said. So what about the other vehicle? Another car? A bus? A lorry? Where had they crashed? It was about a twenty-minute drive from Suzanne’s to ours. Were they coming back to ours? I couldn’t remember. It’s not like there were any fixed arrangements; they had their own keys, made their own meals. Or were they going to Monica’s? Her house was even closer.

A new moon, a sliver of white, cut the inky sky. The roads were quiet: Sunday evening, people facing work the following morning. Working on her.

As we approached the hospital, the lights glared out from the corridors and entrance bays, the car park.

At A &E I paid the driver and got out. An ambulance was approaching, still out of sight, but its siren, insistent keening, filled the night.

Outside the entrance there was a couple standing with two policemen. The man had an arm round the woman, hugging her close, and she was weeping into his chest. He was smoking, his own eyes bright with pain. I quickly averted my gaze, not wanting to intrude, hating the sudden surge of empathy that quickened my pulse and stung my eyes. Why were the police there with them? Had they done something wrong?

My phone rang and I slid it open. Phil.

‘Carmel?’

‘Oh Phil, it’s Naomi, there’s been a car accident. I don’t know… I’ve just got here, Wythenshawe. Come now, you must come now.’

‘Oh God.’

There was a chant in my head, pleasepleaseplease, a frantic mantra. Not to any particular higher entity. To the world, to the world and everything in it, pleasepleaseplease.

Naomi.

The enquiries desk was quiet. Half a dozen people waited on chairs nearby, subdued. One man had a dressing pressed to his ear. An older woman opposite him was bent double. I rang the bell for attention, my eyes skating over notices about abuse of staff and no-smoking policies.

A woman came through and sat down behind the counter. She asked how she could help and I gave her Naomi’s name and said she’d been in a car accident.

‘Date of birth?’

I reeled it off. A September baby. An Indian summer. The nights had been sultry, the days baking. I’d moved in a daze, barely sleeping, trying to look after her and Suzanne, who was two and a half going on middle-aged and patently jealous of the baby. We had laid blankets on the flagstones and filled a paddling pool with water, kept it topped up. Sometimes I’d pull up a chair and rest my feet in it, feeding Naomi while Suzanne water-boarded her dolls: ‘Naughty baby, you so dirty.’ Phil took a couple of weeks off, got a mate to staff the shop, so he could cover the washing and shopping and feed us. We lived on salad, bread and cheese.

‘Are you next of kin?’

‘Her mother.’

The nurse checked a clipboard, then the computer. ‘Yes, she’s here. I’ll ask someone to come and have a word. If you’d like to take a seat in the other waiting room, along the corridor on the left.’

There was no one in the waiting room, just two rows of plastic chairs and a low table between them with magazines on. Garish colours and chirpy headlines exhorting the reader to Eat for Health this Summer and Exercise for Energy!. Posters on the wall advised about bowel cancer and stroke, chlamydia and smoking cessation.

It was impossible to sit still and there wasn’t enough room to pace. I checked my phone. Where was Phil?

Naomi. My heart felt unsteady, beating more quickly than usual, and with each thump I felt an ache inside, as though the shock had bruised it.

In the end I settled for sitting down, elbows braced on my knees, head in my hands, rhythmically drumming my feet in an effort to release some tension.

I hadn’t let Suzanne know yet. Would they still be partying? We’d found it easy to maintain a social life when Suzanne was very small; she’d sleep anywhere and accompanied us to parties, concerts and festivals. But she probably already had a set bedtime for Ollie. She’d be feeding at four-hourly intervals through the night rather than on demand, and getting him to sleep through like a dream as soon as he’d gained enough weight. Suzanne didn’t do failure. She might be asleep herself, it was after ten. Or she might still be clearing up; she’d never leave a mess overnight.

I was selecting her phone number when there was a knock at the door. A man in a doctor’s coat. ‘Mrs Baxter?’

I dropped my phone as I sprang to my feet, then winced and scrabbled to pick it up.

‘Yes, how is she? Is she…’ My throat closed up, suddenly dry. I could feel the drum of a pulse under my jaw, hear a humming from the strip lights. Pleasepleaseplease.

‘She’s being prepared for theatre,’ he said.

‘Oh, thank God.’ The pictures I had been holding at bay – Naomi decapitated, Naomi crushed, Naomi on a slab – flooded in. I began to cry.

That was when Phil arrived. He said later that when he heard me crying, he thought we’d lost her.

The doctor sat us both down and explained that Naomi’s heart had stopped and she had been resuscitated at the scene. She had sustained a fractured skull, broken ribs, a broken collarbone and a broken ankle, and she also had extensive internal injuries. Their first priority was to isolate and stop any internal bleeding and repair damage to vital organs.

Phil kept asking questions: would she be okay, exactly what organs were damaged, how long would the surgery take, would she make a full recovery?

The doctor stressed that it was impossible to say at this stage how she would respond, or what they would find once they had her in theatre. He said it could be several hours. He had questions too about whether she’d had any previous surgery, any allergies or pre-existing medical conditions.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘She’s always been really healthy.’

‘And Alex?’ asked Phil. ‘Her boyfriend?’

‘I believe he’s in X-ray.’

‘Monica said he was okay, broken bones and bruises,’ I said.

‘Monica?’ said Phil.

‘That’s how I knew,’ I explained. ‘She rang me.’

‘The accident,’ I turned to the doctor. ‘Do you know what happened? Was it another car?’ Or an HGV, I thought, pinning Alex’s Honda Civic beneath the chassis. Had the fire brigade needed to cut her free?

‘I don’t know, I’m sorry. But the police are here and they’ll be able to tell you more.’

The couple at the entrance doors, the man smoking, the woman weeping: were they in the other car? In the absence of hard facts, my mind was hyperactive, swooping on anything to fill in the blanks.

‘She will be all right?’ I said, as he took his leave. A plea as much as a question.

‘We’ll do our very best,’ he said, confirming my fears.

Once he’d gone, Phil turned to hug me and we sat like that, twisted in the chairs, until I broke away, my arm deadened and my neck cricked.

He kissed my head.

‘We’d better ring Suzanne,’ I said.

He sighed. ‘She can’t do anything at this time of night.’

‘I know, but we can’t not tell her.’

He rubbed his face, sighed again, cleared his throat as he stood and keyed his mobile.

I listened to his side of the conversation as he spoke first with Jonty and then Suzanne. I closed my eyes and leant my head back against the wall. She was alive – now she had to stay alive. That was all that mattered. Pleasepleaseplease.

Phil had finished talking, promising to update Suzanne the moment there was any news, whatever time it was. Insisting there was absolutely no point in her coming to the hospital yet, while Naomi was on the operating table. Now he sat on one of the chairs opposite me, frowning, deep grooves between his bushy eyebrows, his mouth set. He looked over at me, shaking his head, his eyes raw. I walked across to him and put my arms around his head, pulled him close, felt the heat of his head against my belly, noticing how the hair on his scalp was thinning. Daft the things you see at times like that.

‘What on earth happened?’ When he finally spoke, his words were muffled.

I shook my head and exhaled, a long breath. There was nothing I could tell him.

Time passed. My eyes were closed, not because I was trying to sleep but because the harsh lights were unbearable, when a sound startled me, a door banging somewhere in the bowels of the building. My mouth was tacky. I signalled to Phil for the water: he had found a vending machine earlier and got drinks. He handed me the bottle; his eyes were bloodshot, his jaw darkened with stubble.

The next thing I remember, some time later, was the door opening. ‘Mr and Mrs Baxter?’ There were two police officers, a woman with freckled skin and glossy red hair pulled back in a French plait, and a stocky man with his hair cut very short. It made him look like a soldier. I wondered if they still had rules about hairstyles. Was he allowed to have a skinhead? I met plenty of police in the course of my work, but hadn’t come across anyone with such short hair. Maybe he’d had chemo or shaved his head for charity?

He introduced himself and his colleague. I forgot the names as soon as I heard them, but he gave us his card. He was John Leland and he added her name in biro, Phoebe Jones.

‘What happened?’ Phil said straight out, but the man put off answering, saying they would tell us what they could but they needed to ask some questions first.

Outrage flared through me. Were they bargaining with us? Naomi was seriously hurt, her skull cracked, her insides torn, on the operating table; no one would or could tell us if she’d be okay, and now the facts of the accident were being withheld.

‘We want to know what happened.’ My voice was loud and shaky as I got to my feet. ‘Why on earth can’t you tell us that?’

‘Carmel…’ Phil tried to calm me down.

‘The investigation into the accident has only just got under way.’ The woman had a high, breathy voice which sounded at odds with the authority she held.

‘The bare facts, then,’ I insisted. ‘We don’t even know where it was or how they crashed.’

‘Mottram Lane,’ Leland said, ‘just after the junction with Lees Hall Road, near the school.’

Only five minutes from home. I pictured it in my mind’s eye. There were traffic lights on Lees Hall Road and it was a right turn into Mottram Lane coming back from Suzanne’s. The river ran along the left-hand side of the road for a couple of hundred yards until the end of an S-bend where houses began. Opposite, on the right, were houses then a school. The start of the bend was sharp; you couldn’t see round the corner and there had been a successful campaign to get a green-man crossing instead of relying just on a lollipop lady to help people negotiate the traffic.

They were nearly home.

‘What about the other vehicle?’ I said.

Leland stilled and blinked a couple of times; his colleague shook her head almost imperceptibly but I caught it.

‘What?’ I asked. ‘There was another vehicle, wasn’t there?’ I looked at Phil. ‘They said a collision. Monica… or the doctor.’ Suddenly my memory was unreliable. Had someone said that? It was Monica, wasn’t it? Or had I dreamt it up to plug the vacuum of knowledge?

‘A cyclist was involved,’ Leland said. ‘It appears that there was a collision between the car and a cyclist.’

‘Oh God, no.’ I sat down. Cyclists were at real risk of accident. Drivers didn’t see them, didn’t give them enough room; our whole car-first culture and the lack of separate cycleways always made them vulnerable. Phil cycled to work most days unless he had anything bulky to carry. The girls had both used bikes to get around as teenagers, but we wouldn’t let them ride into town, the route was too dangerous.

I imagined a bloke, a mountain biker on his Sunday ride out to the Peaks and back, tired and mud-splattered, lurid Spandex and a fancy water bottle. Or a woman, someone like me, with a butcher’s bike, sit-up-and-beg, a wicker basket in front, cycling home from a picnic with friends. Alex seeing them, a fraction too late.

‘How are they?’ Phil said, his voice gruff.

Phoebe Jones was picking at her nails, her knees and shoes close together.

‘Didn’t survive the accident,’ said Leland.

I gasped, and Phil reached and took my hand, gripped it hard.

‘That’s terrible,’ I said. I saw Naomi holding up the champagne and Alex’s dazzling smile and the patchy shade beneath the birch tree. And some poor person lying like a rag doll on the road, their bike a tangle of metal.

Phil shuddered.

But there was worse to come.

‘It was a little girl,’ Phoebe Jones said, in her breathy voice. ‘Nine years old.’

I struggled to take it in. ‘No.’ Then, ‘You’re sure?’ Desperate. Stupid. As if there was some chance they had it wrong, might backtrack, find a get-out clause. As if they would tell us something like that if there was the faintest margin of doubt.

Leland coughed. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘And you don’t know why, how?’ I asked. ‘Was she crossing the road? Where was it? Was it a blind spot? Could Alex not stop in time?’

Silence. The fizz of the lighting, Phil’s breath unsteady, a swift intake of air from Leland, who shifted on his buttocks and said, ‘Apparently Naomi was driving.’

‘Sorry?’ I was numb, something clotting my senses, my comprehension.

‘Naomi was driving the car; Alex was in the passenger seat.’

Naomi was driving. The enormity of what he was saying tore into me. I could not speak. With my hand clamped to my mouth, I shook my head over and over, my eyes burning. No no no no. Please no. A child was dead. Naomi was driving. Naomi. They were working on her. She was in theatre. Naomi was driving.

After. When everything changed.