Bella spun the wheel, hand over hand over hand, and the brakes and the tyres screamed and the hedge burst out at them from the wrong side of the road.
‘Shiiiiiiiiit!’
Bella shrieking as they were torn across a tangle of branches and thorns with a grating noise rising to a high, thin whine like a scythe on a sharpening wheel.
And ‘Shiiiiiit!’ again, and a wing mirror snipped away as Jane lurched against Bella, all the breath kicked out of her, and the windscreen was full of slapping branches before the radio car seemed to wrench itself out of the hedge, hit the tarmac again with a clanging jolt.
The engine coughed once and stalled.
Jane wasn’t aware of losing consciousness, but she seemed to awake into a deep, uncanny stillness, during which she could only think about that newspaper picture of her dad’s car, balled like paper, with him and his secretary and lover, Karen, all mashed up together inside.
She became aware of a distant voice: Bella saying, almost calmly, ‘Got to get out. We’ve got to get out of here.’
The voice repeating itself over and over again, but that was probably only in Jane’s head because Bella was saying now, ‘Are you all right? Are you all right, Jane?’
Jane’s mind was searching back through thirty seconds of snapshot memories for the horrific reason Bella had braked and swerved and they’d come off the road.
She sat up. The car was full of twigs and leaves. The recorder had fallen on to her trainers and she pulled one foot from underneath it, feeling for the door-pull. It still worked, but the door wouldn’t open.
‘Can’t get out my side,’ Bella said. Her velvet hat had come off and there were twigs in her hair and her face was raked with blood.
‘Hang on.’ Jane turned herself round, wedged both shoulders against the passenger door, her feet up against the handbrake. Heaved backwards, and the door sprang open and she slid out, clawing wildly at the air. Bella grabbed her hands before she could hit the tarmac. Let her sink down gently to the road.
Bella was easing herself out of the car as Jane struggled to her feet. She saw the car was side-on to the road, blocking one narrow carriageway and half of the other. The steeple of Ledwardine Church prodded out of some trees about half a mile away. Bella leaned back against the car, put a tentative hand to her face.
‘Oh, shit,’ Bella said. Jane remembered the window had been wound all the way down on the driver’s side, Bella leaning an elbow out, offering a bare face to the slashing twigs.
‘Jesus, my whole face is on fire. I’m gonna be disfigured for life. Still…’ She smiled wanly at Jane through the streaks of blood. ‘You’re OK. And we’re not dead, are we?’ She pushed her hands through her hair, as though feeling for fractures. ‘And it’s not as if
… Oh no.’
She sagged against the car, and they looked at each other, remembering. There was a white, almost wintry sun now, in a sky like tinfoil. Jane didn’t seem to be hurt at all, no cuts, no scratches, no aches, except for an ankle where the recorder had fallen. But she felt sick with dread, remembering what had been in the road. What was now concealed by the radio car, side-on against the traffic, except there was none, no vehicles in sight, no sounds of traffic, the road clear in both directions. This was the straight stretch into Ledwardine from Madley and few people came this way on a Saturday.
Jane said softly, Til look.’
‘No.’ Bella stood up stiffly. ‘You stay there.’
But they knew they were both going. They went slowly around the car, taking different routes to show they weren’t scared, Jane round by the boot, Bella by the bonnet.
Somewhere in the car, a phone bleeped. Neither Bella nor Jane looked back.
Jane saw the dead eyes of the ewe first. The ewe lay in a lump at her feet, like you sometimes came upon them dead in fields, bloodlessly dead for no apparent reason. Sheep seemed able to leave life behind in an instant, without suffering, without a thought. Poor sheep. They should die in grass, not on tarmac because of stupid farmers too mean to put in proper stock-proof fences. ‘Poor sheep,’ Jane said aloud, as though, by focusing all her sorrow on the ewe, there would be nothing more.
‘Oh Christ,’ Bella said.
There was some blood where she stood. Though not much of it. The blood was over a yard from the sheep, where there was another hump, a black and white checked blanket thrown over something. The blood was seeping from underneath the blanket.
Jane stared at it, rejecting it. It was a blanket. There was nothing underneath it. It was a familiar pattern. It was just a blanket.
‘Please,’ she said, feeling her eyes bulge, her lips already stretching in pain and shock. ‘Please…’
‘Don’t look,’ Bella said. ‘Let me.’
But Jane was already bending down and lifting the hem. Out of the corner of an eye, she could see a wheel in the hedge.
Jane looked down. Kept on looking.
Under the summer-fine wool, the old warrior’s head lay in profile on the road. The lips closed under the hooked nose, one eye wide open, as blank as the ewe’s. The face weathered and reddened by the many years of wind, and now by sticky blood.
When she’d come off her moped, the light, summer poncho had been thrown over her head.
Bella was back in the car. Jane could hear the tight little bleeps as her fingers stabbed at the mobile phone.
‘No,’ Jane said. ‘No.’
She pulled the poncho away, sank down to the tarmac. She didn’t know what to do. She was sure Lucy was breathing. She had to be breathing. She put her cheek against Lucy’s breast. That was a heartbeat, wasn’t it? She didn’t know what do.
She looked up.
The sky wore a remote, uncaring sheen.
Through the blurred screen of her tears, Jane screamed into the mindless, heartless, self-satisfied face of her mother’s bastard God.