Our House(24)

#VictimFi, get it?





Bram, Word document

Sitting watching anime with the boys that evening, I stopped myself from using my phone or laptop to search for news reports of the crash, which meant an agonizing wait for the local bulletin after News at Ten. Nothing. Did I dare take this to mean that any injuries caused by the accident had not been serious, much less fatal? Did I dare picture a figure staggering from the driver’s seat, shaken but unscathed? A figure whose focus during the incident had been on the irresponsible road hogging of the Toyota and not on the recklessly overtaking Audi. After all, the whole thing had taken place in a matter of seconds, too fast and terrifying for any of us to absorb the detail.

Then again, I’d absorbed the detail.

I’d absorbed the crashed car’s brand, model, even the year of registration: 2013.

I’d absorbed the fact that in the front seat there’d been not one figure but two.

An adult and a child.





14


Bram, Word document

That weekend was hands-down the most harrowing of my adult life: I was incarcerated in my own mind, incapable of thinking of anything but the crash. On Saturday morning, I took Leo and Harry to their swimming lesson by bus, resisting their clamour to be chauffeured by claiming I couldn’t find the car keys. I’d get away with it this time but I wasn’t going to be able to stop driving them indefinitely without their commenting on it to Fi. I wondered, semi-deliriously, if I might be able to fake an illness that precluded being at the wheel: epilepsy, perhaps, or a vision condition of some sort.

As luck would have it (luck – there’s a relative concept), the library across the road from the pool was open and after the lesson I was able to dump the boys in a drop-in storytelling session while I used one of the public PCs. It didn’t take long to find what I was looking for.

Mother and daughter crash victims in critical condition

Two victims of a collision yesterday on Silver Road in Thornton Heath are fighting for their lives in the intensive care unit of Croydon Hospital. Police from the Serious Collisions Investigation Unit are appealing to anyone in the area between 5.45 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. to come forward with information.

The owner of the parked Peugeot into which the victims’ Fiat plunged came out of her house in time to see a dark-coloured car – possibly a VW or Audi – turning in the distance, but was too far away to identify the model or registration. Her own car was written off in the incident. ‘That’s nothing compared to what this poor family is going through,’ said Lisa Singh, a GP who has in the past petitioned without success for the introduction of speed cameras on Silver Road. ‘It’s a rat run during morning rush hour,’ she added.

A spokesman for the Met Police said, ‘The dark-coloured car did not stop at the scene and we are currently working to trace its identity and whereabouts.’





My first thought: a dark-coloured VW or Audi – I’d been seen and was going to jail. My life was over. It took a superhuman effort to conceal my urge to roar with terror at this, to reason with myself that there’d been no definitive recognition, only an approximation. How many hundreds of thousands of dark VWs and Audis were there on the British roads? Black was, I knew, one of the most popular colours.

Then (and, I’m ashamed to say, only then): fighting for their lives – what did that mean? I prayed it was the standard exaggeration of local news reporting, the reality being closer to some serious bruising and a broken rib or two.

Back to: galling that the Toyota had not been mentioned – but wait, wasn’t that also good news? Were this other guy to be apprehended, he would be able to identify not only the model of my car but also my face. Far better that he stayed out of the frame.

Then: what about cameras? Great, so there were none on Silver Road, but we were led by the media to believe they were on virtually every corner, that we were under constant surveillance by the authorities, not to mention on a more accidental basis by one another. After fleeing the scene, I’d zigzagged through more residential streets before eventually heading back to Alder Rise, and I was fairly sure I hadn’t passed any shops or public buildings that might have had security cameras. Did bus shelters have them? And what about private residences? Could the police access satellites?

No, that was foolish. I was being paranoid.

Then I thought about forensics. Might there be something on my car, tiny bits of paint or dust from the wrecked Fiat that could incriminate me? If I took the car to a car wash would that signal guilt? Did car washes have CCTV? Likely, yes. If I hosed it myself, neighbours would remember, even note it as unusual (‘Well, some of the guys would be out washing their cars at the weekend, but never him before.’). Detectives looked for anomalies, didn’t they? Breaks in routine.

All this in a matter of minutes. I could see it was going to be very easy to lose my mind.


‘Fi’s Story’ > 01:00:14

I remember the Sunday of that weekend well, but not for anything related to Bram. Having returned from Brighton on Saturday evening and gone straight to bed with a book, I made the morning Pilates class at the gym behind the Parade for the first time in years. Walking in with my kitbag and water bottle, I felt like an actress playing the role of a child-free mistress of her own destiny. I imagined myself recalling the class to younger female colleagues on Monday; ones like Clara, whose smile had occasionally drooped when I recounted my weekend schedule with the boys.