They Thought I Was Dead: Sandy’s Story

63 27 September 2011

‘MAMA!’

I don’t know which it was that woke me up. Bruno’s scream, his frantic shaking of my arm or the blare of the oncoming truck.

A bloody great idiot coming at me on the wrong side of the road. Headlights blazing, horn blasting. I could see the driver’s face, he was so close. He looked horrified.

Tall trees to the right and to the left.

Oh Jesus.

‘MAMA!’ Bruno screamed again, in utter terror.

And then I realized.

I was completely on the wrong side of the road. Heading straight at the truck, a massive green beast of a thing, horn blaring like the lungs of some prehistoric monster.

I swung the wheel and somehow — it felt like inches — managed to steer our rented Golf over to the right.

Shit.

I was drenched in perspiration.

And shaking at the horrific realization.

I had fallen asleep at the wheel and had drifted right across the road, into the path of an oncoming petrol tanker. I’d nearly killed my son and myself.

I blinked away tears of tiredness, slowing right down and checking the time. It was midday. I’d been driving for three hours, after a night of almost no sleep at all, in the heat of the sun, which I felt inside the car despite the aircon. Some while back I’d turned off the autoroute to avoid getting jammed on the Périphérique around Paris.

We were approaching a town or a village now, to my relief. I slowed even further to comply with the 50kph speed limit, still shaking and drenched in perspiration, and looked for a cafe, badly in need of a strong coffee. A very strong one. And I hadn’t eaten anything on the boat, nor had Bruno other than chocolate bars. I saw a cafe, with a small car park, and tables outside in the morning sun.

Five minutes later, Bruno was drinking an Orangina and I was sipping a double espresso, followed by Red Bull, while we waited for Bruno’s croque monsieur and my cheese omelette to arrive.

Bruno was absorbed in his electronic game. I studied the Google maps on my new phone. Avoiding the Périphérique had added two hours — in theory only, I knew — to our journey. We’d been driving for three hours, which meant, if all went well, we would arrive in Munich sometime around 11 p.m. Too late, I decided. I began to search on my phone for a cheap hotel towards Strasbourg, an Ibis or a Mercure, and saw one that would then give us just a four-hour drive to Munich the next morning. While I did, I was thinking about Nicos. About how he had got on last night with his rendezvous.

These were people not to be messed with, he had told me. They’d come a long way for this deal and, if it worked out, it could develop into a major slice of the lucrative Channel Islands drugs market for the gang. They weren’t going to be happy when he opened that suitcase, that was for sure. While the thought of that made me smile, it also made me concerned. I’d learned over the past four years that Nicos in a good mood was a powder keg that could explode at any moment. In a bad mood he was dangerous to the point of out-of-control.

I was thinking hard, racking my brains about whether I had left any clue behind of where I was going. Because that was all it would take him. Just one clue, and he would find us. I could not think of any, not now anyway, to my relief.

As we sat, with a blip-blop-blip-blop soundtrack from the game Bruno was playing, I was increasingly aware I was due more methadone. The caffeine from my coffee and Red Bull just weren’t enough, I was getting restless and very anxious. I tried to calm myself by remembering inspirational quotes from a life coach I’d found online some months back.

Don’t try to know who we are. Know who we aren’t. Eliminate that first.

Was that what Michelangelo meant when he talked about how he carved his astonishing figures?

The sculpture is already complete within the marble block, before I start my work. It is already there, I just have to chisel away the superfluous material.

Wasn’t that what I needed to do to find — happiness? Fulfilment? My purpose on earth? My reason for existing? My mojo?

Chisel away the superfluous material in my life? And then see the true me deep inside?

Wasn’t that what I had been doing in leaving Roy and now Nicos?

‘How’s your toasted sarnie?’ I asked Bruno, who was busy shaking tomato ketchup onto it.

He didn’t reply, concentrating furiously on getting more sauce from the container, and then more still.

‘Don’t you think that’s enough, darling?’ I suggested.

He gave me one of the strange, unsettling looks he so often did. One of those looks that made me think I was talking to a mature adult, and not a small boy. ‘Ketchup is life,’ he said.

‘You think?’

He nodded. ‘I know.’

‘Really?’

‘Mama, if we had crashed, we might both be ketchup now.’

He looked so serious as he said it, I wasn’t sure whether to smile or cry. Then he focused back on his game. Within moments he was so absorbed he had forgotten all about his ketchup-spattered toasted cheese and ham sandwich.

Blip-blop-blip-blop.

‘Your croque monsieur is going cold,’ I said. But he didn’t hear me.

I ate my omelette in silence, breaking off chunks of the baguette that came with it and wasn’t fresh; it was a good day-old and plaster-of-Paris hard. I felt nauseous but needed to eat. Maybe the proprietor, a middle-aged woman with a bun, had me pegged as yet another dumb Brit who never complained.

Maybe today she was right. I wasn’t in any mood to get into an argument over bread rolls. Suddenly I shivered, as if someone had walked over my grave.

Thinking about the near miss with that tanker.

Thinking about death. Oblivion.

Trying to think about what I actually wanted.

I had bolted from my life with Roy. I had now bolted from my life with Nicos.

I was heading towards a possible new life with a man I barely knew, other than having the sense that he was kind.

Hans-Jürgen Waldinger.

Heading to the address he had given me, twelve miles south of Munich, when we’d spoken on the phone three days ago. When he’d greeted me like not just an old friend, but like the person he’d been waiting for all his life.

After all my shitty time with Nicos, it was incredible to hear — and feel — the warmth and welcome in Hans-Jürgen’s voice.

Sailors talk about any port in a storm.

But as we drove back out of the car park and onto the road, Bruno tapping away on his machine, it wasn’t thoughts of ports in a storm that filled my head during the miles ahead. It was a sense of destiny.

I was such a mess it never occurred to me at that moment that I might need a Plan B.