Read an Excerpt
MONDAY
It was quite late when they saw the accident. They'd been driving for almost
three hours, ambling down the M4 at a humiliating 55 mph. The minibus – a
rented Ford with a broken wing mirror – had been making shrieking noises for
a while now. When Jaws changed gears or accelerated the shriek crept
upwards, close to hysteria, choking Hen's thoughts. On the level, moving
along the slow lane as they were now, the noise subsided a little but the
sudden switches of volume had prevented any of them from dozing off.
The minibus was arranged like a coach with seats running parallel
down its length and an aisle in the middle, but this was not like any coach
Hen had seen before. Normal coaches were designed with some token
understanding of the human body. They had seats covered in carpet and
armrests one could lever up in order to sleep. This thing had seats covered in
gaffer-taped plastic, a floor speckled with old chewing-gum spots and a smell
of sweat and fried rubber.
Jules leaned over the gap between the front seats and glared at
the speedometer. 'Doesn't it go any faster?'
'Play something,' said Miss Naylor. 'I spy with my little eye.'
Jules mouthed 'Wanker' at the back of Miss Naylor's head and
turned to see if anyone had been watching her. She caught Hen's eye,
grinned, and began picking at her cuticles.
The heat and the finicky driving were beginning to make all of
them restless. It was one of those tight flat summer days without sun, and
the heat rising up from the road seemed to get thicker with every mile they
moved. It was making Miss Naylor's foundation leak. Hen watched a trickle of
sweat creep down the side of her cheek and disappear into her shirt. Miss
Naylor had a broad, bland face, small eyes which bulged a little when she
was angry and dyed ginger hair. She usually wore yellowy make-up slapped
on thick as fish batter. The make-up clashed with the ginger and the result
was so compellingly unattractive that Hen often had to suppress the urge to
ask Miss Naylor if she'd ever considered surgery.
There were ten of them crammed into the minibus, eight girls in
the back and two teachers up at the front. Things had started well enough.
They had stood by the school gates waiting for the other two groups of girls
to leave. Mel and Mina had been arguing, but as the last van turned the
corner, they stopped and gazed after it. In the silence, Hen had glanced
upwards and noticed that someone had left the porch light on even though it
was now bright day. The light shone without anything to shine for, and there
was something about its wasted usefulness which made her feel sorry for it.
She felt empty for a second, a feeling almost like homesickness.
She wondered if she ought to feel jealous of the others. One lot
was supposed to be going to Warwickshire and the other to Norfolk. She had
no idea what either of these places was like, except that they involved
countryside and undignified exercises, but it was possible that the
countryside and the undignified exercises would be more interesting in
Warwickshire and Norfolk than they would be in Gloucestershire.
Two minutes later, Jaws came round the side of the science block
in the minibus. She was smiling. The smile dwindled as she drove closer.
Jules jeered. 'We can't go in that.'
'Why not?'
'Because,' – poking an accusatory finger at the tyres, – 'it's
embarrassing.'
'So how else are we going to get there?'
'Maybe we . . .'
'It's either this or walking.'
'. . . could just stay . . .'
'No. Definitely not.'
Caz picked up her bags. 'Come on. It's bad, but it's not as bad as
here.'
And so far, she seemed to be right. Just to turn out of the school
drive and onto the main road had given them all a flip of exhilaration. The
minibus might be old, but it worked and the day was warm and every inch
they drove was an inch further away from school. Izzy had brought along
several tapes and taken control of the stereo, overriding Miss Naylor's
desultory protests. Hen had leaned back against the open window and felt
the beat going right down deep into the back of her skull.
They'd chattered for the first hour or so, and then, as the
temperature rose, had slowly fallen silent. Just after they passed the
Swindon junction, the traffic slowed and then stopped.
Hen leaned back in her seat, shifting from thigh to thigh to stop
her bones from aching. As they crawled round a curve in the road, she could
see blue lights and the stripes of police vehicles ahead. An accident. The
minibus screamed as Jaws tried to put it back into gear. The traffic was
squeezing into the slow lane; once in a while a sunburned arm poked out of a
car window, waving at Jaws to make space. Hen saw a carful of small
children making faces out of the window. One of them stuck his tongue out
and rolled his eyes at her. Next to him, a little girl in pigtails raised a single
obscene finger and giggled, her mouth shaping insults silently through the
glass.
For the next half a mile, they stopped and stalled and started and
then stalled again every few yards. A van which had been blocking their view
moved over and Hen felt the blue light slam against the back of her eyes. The
scene assembled itself into a recognizable disorder – three cars, one upside
down with its back axle resting against the twisted central barrier, and
another two crumpled beyond sense. Fragments of windscreen glass
spangled prettily from the fast lane, and a fireman sprayed the bonnet of each
car in a shining grey-green arc. Someone had scattered sawdust over
something on the tarmac. There were two fire engines parked by the verge,
an ambulance with its back doors swinging open, and three police Range
Rovers. One of the policemen was standing near the flow of the traffic trying
to direct the cars past the scene. Most drivers seemed too diverted by the
possibility of gore to pay him any attention.
Hen was not sure where the figure came from. She only knew that
she turned and saw someone running from the hard shoulder towards her.
The person ran without purpose or direction, with no regard for where it was
going or how it got there. It blundered into a shrub on the verge, pulled free
and then ran on, almost as if it couldn't see the line of cars, the motorway,
the ambulance doors swinging open. There seemed no sense or reason in
the figure's trajectory, only this mad stumbling rush straight into the path of
the traffic.
At the last minute, just before the figure whacked headlong into
the side of the minibus, it stopped. Perhaps it had finally seen the white
metal looming up in front of it; perhaps it had simply exhausted itself. It stood
with its shoulder to the window, crowding up against Hen's vision. In the
stillness the figure reassembled itself. It was a woman, dressed smartly, as if
for a wedding. She was wearing a tight, livid pink suit with a miniskirt that
barely covered the tops of her thighs and a pair of vicious-looking black
stilettos. Underneath the skirt, she had on a pair of scarlet tights which had
ripped as she'd run. Her legs seemed absurdly thin and stringy, as if they
shouldn't have been able to support the person on top. The woman's face
was obscured by a huge cartwheel hat on which she'd fixed what looked like
Valentine's Day decorations – huge papier mache hearts, a plastic red rose.
Hen could hear the woman singing, repeating something over and
over. And then she turned and the huge hat knocked against the window of
the bus. It spun off, tripping over the road onto the verge. Hen saw, all at
once, the woman's face. The face was hideous: a huge sick purple moon, a
chunk of rotting meat painted to look like a woman. On her cheeks there
were pits and lines like the marks on something diseased. Her lips were
slashed with scarlet lipstick and her gaze was high and hectic, as if nothing
of the scene in front of her had registered at all. All the colours were wrong –
the pink jacket, the scarlet lipstick, the face dark and raw as butcher's liver.
On top of the face, false and garish, was what looked like a black wig.
Strands of dark hair hung down over the huge decaying nose, groping around
her neck. The woman looked straight at Hen, and straight through her.
One of the policemen had seen the woman and was weaving
through the ticking vans and people carriers towards her. As he got to the
side of the van, he extended a hand. 'Come on,' he was saying. 'Come on.
We've been looking for you. Over here, love.'
The woman turned towards him. Hen saw the policeman stop.
She saw the look on his face shift from hurried concern to incomprehension
to a kind of blank-eyed terror. She saw his hand hesitate and his body go
still. Then he gathered himself and touched the woman's arm. 'Over here,' he
said unhappily. 'Come on.'
The woman stopped singing and looked down at his hand on the
sleeve of her pink jacket. The silence stretched out. All the noises from the
other cars seemed to have stopped; all the sirens and the racket of the crash
dwindled away. There was just this policeman, and Hen, and the woman,
standing there, watching the policeman's hand.
Then the woman giggled coquettishly and began to walk away
from the minibus, allowing herself to be led over to the police cars. As she
moved, Hen looked down at her legs. And saw that her ripped scarlet tights
were not tights at all. The woman's legs were slathered in blood.
At the same moment, the minibus lurched forward. The policeman
who had been directing the traffic appeared at the opposite window and then
vanished behind them. Hen heard the crunching of the gears and the sound of
the engine accelerating. She looked out of the window at the verge and saw
the woman's pink hat with its hearts and roses lifting and falling in the
breeze. The motion of the hat made it look as if it was breathing, as if it too
was alive, and just waiting there. She watched the hat until they were past,
past the ambulances and the crash and the policemen and the hurting blue
lights. She felt the wind against her face as the landscape changed and the
green verge began to flick past as it had before. She shifted in her seat and
found that she was shaking uncontrollably.
The rest of the bus seemed unconcerned. Jules had begun to say
something and Miss Naylor was trying to reassemble the broken mirror so
Jaws could see out of it. Ali, who was in the seat two spaces in front of her,
sat up. She had been resting her head on the window and gone into a trance,
staring fixedly at a spot somewhere up in the clouds. She didn't seem to
have noticed the window rattling against her head.
'Hen.'
No reply.
'Hen.'
Hen looked up. Jules was leaning over her, prodding her arm. The
breeze from the windows had ruffled her hair out of its clip and it swung loose
over her face. As she bent over Hen her eyes seemed larger than normal.
'Space chicken.'
'What?'
'Hel-lo. Hel-looo. Earth to Planet Hen. Hel-lo.'
Hen looked down at Jules's finger. 'What?'
'Fit policeman.'
'What?'
'Fit police. Didn't you see?'
'Where?'
'The policeman. The policeman directing the traffic.'
'What policeman?'
'Back there. With the accident. Oh, never mind.' Jules sighed and
sat down in the seat next to Hen. 'You look weird. You OK?'
'The woman. The woman with the blood.'
'Woman? Woman with blood?'
'On the road. Out there. The woman with the hat.'
Jules bent down and peered past Hen out of the window. 'Where?
Can't see.'
'She was there. Right there, by the window. She had on this
hat . . .' She swivelled round to look out of the rear window, knowing that the
woman was far behind them now but wondering if she might not appear
again, smiling crazily through the glass.
'Amazing crash,' said Jules cheerfully. 'Really heavy.'
Hen realized that she had probably been the only one to see the
woman properly. All of the rest of them had been looking out of the opposite
windows at the crash. Perhaps she'd imagined it. Had she seen the woman?
And if she hadn't, if she'd just daydreamed her, boiled her up from old sick
bits of imagination, then how had it seemed so real? She turned away and
stared out at the verge again. She was still shaking; she couldn't stop.
Jules touched her arm again. 'You OK?'
Hen yanked her sleeve away. 'Yes. Fine.'
And then, a couple of minutes later, pawing at her stomach, 'No.
Going to be sick.'
By the time they'd stopped the bus, watched Hen as she vomited weakly into
a hank of shrub, clucked around for a bit, asked Hen fourteen times how she
was, got back in the bus, stalled, driven a few more miles, stopped for petrol,
let Hen off the bus to clean herself up, let Jules go with her because she
insisted, waited, torn Jules away from one of the arcade machines, stalled
again, and pulled back to the road at a scorching 45 mph, they were late. By
now, it felt to everyone as if they'd been on this stinking bus for most of their
lives. Up ahead, Hen watched the immense H-shaped struts of the old Severn
Bridge creep closer. The red lights on the top shone placidly at her. She felt
woozy and light-headed, although the shaking had stopped about an hour
ago.
'Very dangerous, the Severn.' Miss Naylor didn't seem to be
talking to anyone in particular. 'Quicksand. They say you can walk across
the whole river in some places at low tide, if you know where the sand is. In
most places, it's very shallow. The channel where the water really moves is
quite small, considering.'
'Weird.' Jules swivelled round in her seat and looked down. Hen
saw a silvery glimmer of water and a toy-sized tug boat far away in the
estuary. The water moved in thick slow circles, over and under itself. Only the
width of the estuary told Hen in which direction it flowed. Out in the mouth of
the river the currents crept round each other, meeting and parting without
rhythm or direction. Something about the water seemed misleading to Hen.
Over there in the distance the river looked harmless. Only when she looked
down through the railings of the bridge could she see how fast it was going.
You'd never know until you were dead that it might kill you, she thought.
'Doesn't look like it's dangerous. Just looks like a river.'
'I wouldn't expect you to think anything different.'
Jules glowered at her. 'Cow.'
Hen kept on watching the road ticking past. A flicker of scarlet
caught her eye; just a shop sign. When she closed her eyes the woman
came back. When she opened them again the woman stayed there, just at
the corner of her vision. She wouldn't go away.
Copyright © 2002 by Bella Bathurst. Reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Company.
