The Road Trip
Beth O'Leary
NOW
Dylan
‘The road of friendship never did run smooth, is what I’m saying,’ Marcus tells me, fidgeting with his seat belt.
This is my first experience of a heartfelt apology from Marcus, and so far it has involved six clichés, two butchered literary references and no eye contact. The word sorry did feature, but it was preceded by I’m not very good at saying, which somewhat undermined its sincerity.
I shift up a gear. ‘Isn’t it the course of true love that never runs smooth? A Midsummer Night’s Dream, I believe.’
We’re by the twenty-four-hour Tesco. It’s half four in the morning, the air thick with duvet-darkness, but the bland yellow light from the shop illuminates the three people in the car in front as if they’ve just moved into a spotlight. We’re close behind them, both following the slow, rattling path of a lorry ahead.
For a flash of a second I see the driver’s face in the rear-view mirror. She reminds me of Addie – if you think about someone enough, you start to see them everywhere.
Marcus huffs. ‘I’m talking about my feelings, Dylan. This is agony. Please get your head out of your arse so that you can actually listen.’
I smile at that. ‘All right. I’m listening.’
I drive on, past the bakery. The eyes of the driver in front are lit again in the mirror, her eyebrows slightly raised behind squarish glasses.
‘I’m just saying, we hit some bumps, I get that, and I didn’t handle things well, and that’s – that’s really unfortunate that that happened.’
Astonishing, really, the linguistic knots in which he will tie himself to avoid a simple I’m sorry. I stay silent. Marcus coughs and fidgets some more, and I almost take pity and tell him it’s all right, he doesn’t have to say it if he’s not ready, but as we idle past the bookie’s another flash of light hits the car in front and Marcus is forgotten. The driver has wound the window down, and she’s stretched an arm out, gripping the roof of the car. Her wrist is looped with bracelets, glimmering silver-red in the car lights’ glare. The gesture is so achingly familiar – the arm, slender and pale, the assertion of it, and those bracelets, the round, childish beads stacked up her wrist. I’d know them anywhere. My heart jolts like I’ve missed a step because it is her, it’s Addie, her eyes meeting mine in the rear-view mirror.
And then Marcus screams.
Earlier, Marcus gave a similarly horrified scream when we passed a Greggs advertising vegan sausage rolls, so I don’t react as fast as I perhaps otherwise would. As the car in front stops sharply, and I fail to hit the brakes on the seventy-thousand-pound Mercedes that belongs to Marcus’s father, I have just enough time to regret this.
Addie Bang.
My head whips up so fast my glasses go flying backwards off my ears and over the headrest. Someone screams. Oww, fuck – a pain shoots up my neck, and all I’m thinking is God, what did I do? Did I hit something?
‘Shit the bed,’ Deb says beside me. ‘Are you all right?’
I fumble for my glasses. They’re not there, obviously.
‘What the hell just happened?’ I manage.
My shaking hands go to the steering wheel, then the handbrake, then the rear-view mirror. Getting my bearings.
I see him in the mirror. A little blurred without my glasses. A little unreal. It’s him, though, no question. He’s so familiar that for a moment I feel as if I’m looking at my own reflection. Suddenly my heart’s beating like it’s shoving for space.
Deb’s getting out of the car. Ahead, the bin lorry moves off and its headlights catch the tail of the fox they braked for. It’s moving on to the pavement at a saunter. Slowly, the scene pieces itself together: lorry stops for fox, I stop for lorry, and behind me Dylan doesn’t stop at all. Then – bang.
I look back at Dylan in the mirror; he’s still looking at me. Everything seems to slow or quieten or fade, like someone’s dialled the world down.
I haven’t seen Dylan for twenty months. He should have changed somehow. Everything else has. But even from here, even in half darkness, I know the exact line of his nose, his long eyelashes, his snakeskin yellow-green eyes. I know those eyes will be as wide and shocked as they were when he left me.
‘Well,’ my sister says. ‘The Mini’s done us proud.’
The Mini. The car. Everything comes rushing back in and I unclick my seat belt. It takes three goes. My hands are shaking. When I next glance at the rear-view mirror my eyes focus on the foreground instead of the background and there’s Rodney, crouched forward on our back seat with his hands over his head and his nose touching his knees.
Shit. I forgot all about Rodney.
‘Are you all right?’ I ask him, just as Deb says,
‘Addie? Are you OK?’ She pokes her head back in the car, then grimaces. ‘Your neck hurting too?’
‘Yeah,’ I say, because as soon as she asks I realise it does, loads.
‘Gosh,’ Rodney says, tentatively shifting out of the brace position. ‘What happened?’
Rodney posted on the ‘Cherry & Krish are Getting Hitched’ Facebook group yesterday evening asking for a lift to the wedding from the Chichester area. Nobody else replied, so Deb and I took pity. All I know about Rodney is that he has a Weetabix On The Go for breakfast, he’s always hunching and his T-shirt says, I keep pressing Esc but I’m still here, but I think I’ve pretty much got the gist.