Reluctantly Home
Imogen Clark
1
2019
She was going to be late for court.
She had been cutting it fine anyway, leaving chambers when she did, but Dominic had said it would only take half an hour to get there once she was through the worst of the central London traffic. Now, however, she was sitting in a stationary queue of cars watching the clock on her dashboard click over from minute to minute.
She couldn’t be late. The judge would crucify her in front of her client. He might even refuse to give her audience and then she’d end up slinking back to the office with her tail between her legs.
She could feel her heart beginning to race and her chest grew tight as her panic rose. She didn’t even know where this court was, or where she could park. And she still had some papers to read before the hearing. The whole thing was a disaster before she’d even begun. What had she been thinking, leaving so late?
Then, mercifully, the traffic began to clear, and the stream of cars sped up. She let out a slow breath. The situation might be salvageable. If she didn’t hit any more slow patches between here and there, she’d arrive with time to spare. She could feel the tension slip from her neck and shoulders as she relaxed. She began to run through her opening address, speaking it out loud as she drove; her voice sounded clear and confident. Years of court experience brought with them a certain self-assurance. She was good at what she did, she knew she was. She would win the hearing this morning and then . . .
She didn’t see the boy until he was already on her bonnet, his face distorted first by shock and then the impact with her windscreen. And then he was gone, rolling away from her and out of sight.
Where was he? She was going to run over him as well as knocking him down. Her instincts took over and she slammed on the brakes, the car shuddering to a stop. The driver behind was surely going to smash into her now. She braced herself for the impact, but it didn’t come, the car managing to brake in time. She could see the driver, a woman with silver hair, in her rear-view mirror. Her eyes were wide, her mouth open in horror.
But where was the boy? She should get out and see if he was all right, but she couldn’t make her legs move. All communications between her brain and her muscles seemed to have been cut. Her breath was coming in short snatches, as if something had sucked all the oxygen out of the car and she couldn’t get enough to fill her lungs. Her heart was banging so hard in her chest that she could barely hear anything else. But there was something, a little sound in the distance that she couldn’t quite focus on. It was a voice, she worked out. Someone was shouting at her. She tried to concentrate, listen to what they were saying, but it sounded very quiet and far away.
‘Are you hurt? I’m calling an ambulance. Stay where you are.’
It was the woman from the car behind, now out on the road next to her window, mobile phone in hand.
‘Ambulance, please. And police. There’s been an accident. A boy. He just ran out into the road. He didn’t look. He ran out and a car hit him . . . No . . . I don’t know . . . No, it wasn’t my car. It was the car in front of me, but it wasn’t her fault. There was nothing she could have done. He just ran out . . . Yes, I think so. Hang on.’
And then the woman was talking to her again through the window, her voice muffled.
‘Are you all right? Are you injured in any way?’
Suddenly she had to get out into the fresh air. The space was too small. She couldn’t breathe. She scrabbled for the seat belt, clicked it loose and flung the door open, pushing her way out. There were cars everywhere, all stopped and pointing towards her as if she was the main attraction. It felt surreal to be standing in the middle of the road surrounded by cars but without the sounds of engines around her.
But where was the boy? She dropped her eyes, searching for him, and there he was, lying across the opposite carriageway, the wheels of another car stopped just inches from his supine body. The first thing she noticed was that his leg was all wrong. It shouldn’t be at an angle like that. She wanted to bend down and straighten it for him. And then she saw his face. His eyes were wide open and sightless. That was when she knew, without a shadow of doubt, that he was dead. That she had killed him.
And then she woke up.
2
‘It’s okay. It’s over. It’s just a dream,’ Pip whispered to herself, repeating the mantra she had been desperately clinging to for the six months since the accident. Slowly, inch by inch, she pulled herself round to consciousness as her breathing levelled out and her heartbeat began to return to normal. She could feel her pyjama top sticking to her shoulders. The damp sheets beneath her were already growing too cold and clammy to sleep on.
Was this her life now, Pip wondered, being woken every night as her mind replayed the accident on a never-ending loop? It had been six months, and yet the dream was still as vivid as if she had hit the boy yesterday. And each time, she woke at exactly the same moment. It wasn’t the shock of the impact that ricocheted her from sleep into consciousness, although she could still feel the thud of the boy’s body as he hit her bonnet. No, the last thing she saw before she snapped awake was always his eyes, wide and staring at nothing. Those eyes haunted her, day and night.
Gradually Pip started to focus on the familiar space of her childhood bedroom. How had she ended up back here, after all those years trying to get away? She had been gone for over a decade, but the room still looked as it had done when she was eighteen. The baby-pink walls were speckled with dark Blu Tack marks where photos and pictures cut from magazines had promised her a life beyond the farm, and her bookshelves still bowed under the weight of teenage paperbacks and folders stuffed full of A level notes. When she was here, it felt almost as if she had imagined the life she had created in London, or that it had happened to someone else. It felt as if it was floating further away from her with every passing week.