The Hiding Place(84)

Annie stared back at me.

I swerved, the tires bumped the verge, I wrestled with the steering wheel to drag it back again. The rubber squealed but managed to regain its grip on the tarmac. Dad fell heavily against me. Crap. I’d forgotten to do up his seat belt. I shoved him back into his seat with one hand, trying to control the steering wheel with the other.

Annie lunged from the back seat. Her fingers clawed at my face and grabbed my hair, yanking my head back. I tried to bat at her with my free hand but her grip was surprisingly strong. I felt her nails rake my flesh; the roots of my hair screamed. I bunched my hand into a fist and struck her hard in the face. She fell back.

I grabbed the wheel again, just in time, as headlights flashed by on the opposite side of the road. Fuck. I pressed my foot down harder still on the accelerator. I had to get to the hospital. Had to. The speed crept up to seventy. I saw Annie pull herself up to a sitting position. I tried to strike back with my elbow, but she ducked past and wrapped her hands around my eyes. Her fingers dug in. I yelled. I couldn’t see, my eyes were streaming. Just glimmers of darkness and light.

I let go of the wheel with one hand, tried to pull her fingers away. My foot slipped on the accelerator. The engine screamed. I felt the car spin, the wheels leave the tarmac and hit the grassy bank.

The car bucked. Annie’s fingers let go. A huge black shadow loomed ahead. A tree. I tried to grab the wheel back, stamped on the brake. Too late.

Impact. A monstrous jolt. Crunching metal. My body flew forward, nose smashing against the steering wheel. The seat belt flung me back again. Dazed. Something crashed past me out of the windshield. Pain. My chest. My face. My leg. MY LEG! Screaming. My own.

Blackness.





35





“That was how we found you.”

“We?”

“Me and Dad. We were coming back from the evening football match. Dad spotted the car, all smashed up against a tree.

“We pulled over, to see if we could help. Saw right away that your dad was dead. I found your sister’s body a little way from the car. I couldn’t help her…” He pauses. “I went back to the car and Dad said: ‘The boy’s still alive.’ Then he said, ‘And he’s got a big problem, hasn’t he?’

“I knew what he meant right away. You were only fifteen. You shouldn’t have been driving.

“We decided to move you. Put you in the passenger seat and your dad in the driver’s so the police would think he was driving.”

“Why? Why did you care?”

“Because, whatever differences we had, Dad believed you looked after your own. You were part of my gang. Your dad was a miner—even if he was a scab. You didn’t turn your own in to the pigs.

“I was supposed to come and see you in the hospital, tell you to stick to the story. But turned out you’d already got one of your own. Couldn’t remember anything about the crash, a nurse told me. That true, Joe?”

I stare at him. Lies, I think. There are no such things as white lies. Lies are never black or white. Only gray. A fog obscuring the truth. Sometimes so thick we can barely see it ourselves.

To start with, I wasn’t sure what I remembered. It was easier to just go along with what the police and the doctors told me. Easier to close my eyes and say I didn’t know what had happened. Couldn’t remember the crash.

I never told Mum. But then, she never asked. About any of it. She must have had questions. She must have cleaned up the blood. But she never said a word. And once, when I tried to talk to her, she gripped my wrist so hard it left bruises and said: “Whatever happened in that house, it was an accident, Joe. Just like the crash. D’you understand? I have to believe that. I can’t lose you too.”

That was when I understood. She thought I had done this. That I was somehow responsible. I suppose I couldn’t blame her. I had been acting weird for weeks. Hardly eating, not talking, staying out as much as possible. And in a way, I was responsible. I had caused it. All of it.

When I returned home, on crutches, pins in my shattered leg, the house had been aired and cleaned and Annie’s room had been freshly decorated. Everything was the same as it was before.

I didn’t try to put Mum right, or tell her what had really happened. And she never put into words what I saw in her eyes: that the wrong child had been lost. That it should have been me. Until the day she died, Mum pretended she still loved me.

And I pretended not to know that she didn’t.

I clear my throat. My head feels too full, conflicting thoughts wrestling with each other in the mud of my consciousness.

“You want me to thank you?” I say.

Hurst shakes his head. “No. I want you to take these”—he gestures at the crowbar and the tie—“and chuck them into the River Trent. And then, I want you to fuck off and never come back.”

I feel sick. Loser sick. That feeling when you see the other player’s cards and know you have been screwed. That you are done. Well, almost done.

“The police will ask you questions too. Why you moved me. Why come forward now? Tampering with the scene of an accident. That’s a crime.”

He nods. “True. But I was just a kid. It was my dad’s idea. Now that I’m older and wiser, it has made me reevaluate things. I need to come clean. If I have to, I can spin this. And they’ll believe me. I’m a respected member of the community. While you? Well, look at yourself. Suspended from your current job. Suspicion of theft from your old school. You’re hardly a model citizen.”