So eager was I to get home to my wife and child, that I drove a little carelessly. It was Friday evening, and I was at the end of another long working week in the city. A weekend at home was exactly what I needed. When I was only a few roads away I rang Juliette. I was sitting in traffic waiting to join a roundabout and she told me she had lit the fire to make the house cosy for my return. She was bathing little Elliott and had allowed him to stay up late to see me. I was concerned when she hung up the phone without saying goodbye. Perhaps she had needed to urgently attend to our boy's regular antics of tipping water out of the bath.
I pulled up the gravel driveway and swung the car in front of the house, noticing that the front door was ajar and all the lights in the house were on. I got out and stepped across the threshold, calling out to Juliette. She didn't answer. From the kitchen a beautiful smell of cooking. The carpeted stairs were peppered with dark drips. The light from the bathroom illuminating the upper landing. I called up to Juliette, then Elliot. No answer.
They must have gone out into the rainy night. So I stepped back out through the door, looked around the gardens that flanked our driveway. I called out her name again.
Sirens, behind the house, and could I see flashing blue pulsing through the trees? Or had I imagined it?
I made my way along the walkway that led around the side of the house, to the end of our long garden where a neglected rusty gate led to an overgrown path which cut down the hill through the trees. I don't know why I thought they'd come this way, and it was my instinct above anything that encouraged me to continue.
Through the trees before me the sirens became louder. The flashing lights were real. I had never ventured down this path before but my wife obviously had because she knew where it led. She stood at the end of it, Elliott in her arms, wrapped in a towel. When I reached them I saw that the path came out near the roundabout.
I called her name but she didn't react. Instead she cried my name towards our car and ran forward through the rain, still carrying my boy. I looked at the crumpled cars and the body they were removing from the one with the crushed bonnet; the body of the man who was still, in death, holding a mobile phone.
I woke up early this morning on my 50th birthday. It was as bright outside as it would ever be at 5am due to it being the summer solstice, the longest period of daylight time. From here on, the nights get longer. Sitting in bed with a cup of tea I started to think about some of the first stories I wrote, and a few memories came back to me. The first thing I remember writing was in my penultimate year in primary school, so we're talking 1983-4. Successfully combining two major phobias of mine, it was called "Tarantursnake" and took up a whopping four pages of my English workbook. I remember getting a decent mark for it, but the only thing I could remember from the story itself was a man hanging on for dear life to a pole suspended over a pit of tarantursnakes. In fact, that may have been the whole thing. I'm not so sure it followed any conventional rules of narrative. Later, in 1987, in high school, a collection of us smuggled copies of the newly published paperback of
Nice little grim tale!
ReplyDelete