A siren was wailing behind them, an ambulance with its blue lights flashing. ‘Okay, slow down, move over to the left, you need to give way,’ she instructed Jake.
‘The feds are coming for me!’ he cried, forgetting to slow down in his thrill as he flung the car over.
‘Foot on the brake,’ she said as the ambulance loomed in her rear-view mirror, its siren in crescendo. ‘Brake!’ She had to stamp on her own brake pedal, jerking the car to a stop as the other vehicle hurtled past, resisting the urge to cross herself, like her mother always did whenever she saw an ambulance or funeral procession. Lara wasn’t all that superstitious but she knew that life could surprise you, and not always in a good way.
‘Sorry,’ said Jake, chastened.
‘And we call them “police” in this country anyway,’ she teased as he recovered himself. ‘Or actually, if it says “ambulance” across the top of the vehicle in big letters, “paramedics”. Okay, straighten up and let’s go again.’
They were trundling around the northern outskirts of Scarborough, the town that had been home to Lara and Eliza for the last eighteen years. She’d moved here amidst a flurry of big life changes; leaving her job and her small shared flat in North London five months’ pregnant, in order to make a new, fingers-crossed start with Steve. Since then, life had taken a slower turn and she’d settled into the place, loving its big skies, sandy beaches and old-fashioned seafront. Unable to pursue her fashion journalist career here – at the time of moving, the internet was still in its infancy and the scene very much London-centric – she had trained as a driving instructor as a stop-gap role, plucking the notion pretty randomly from the air when her relationship fell apart and single motherhood demanded back-up plans. What else could she do, besides write about the season’s new hemlines and trouser styles? Drive. That was about it. Okay, she’d thought, signing up for a course – she would give it a whirl as an interim measure, then return to journalism once the dust had settled. Somehow or other though, fifteen years later, here she was, still booking lessons and arranging tests, motoring up and down the same roads, as the sun went on rising and setting, and the seasons wheeled slowly around her. It was early spring now, with its heavy rain showers and fresh winds; the time of year when every student of hers familiarised themselves with the windscreen wipers pretty quickly.
‘How are you ever going to meet a new man, though, teaching teenagers to drive all day?’ her best friend Heidi tutted now and then, and it was true, Lara did spend most of her time with young people, the small confines of the car scented with their cheap perfumes and hair products. There was no flirty office banter when you were a driving instructor, no watercooler chat with attractive colleagues to get your pulse racing. How did other people meet their soulmates anyway? It all seemed so random. Heidi, for instance, had got chatting to her now-husband Jim purely by chance when they’d been given seats next to each other at a Violent Femmes gig twenty years ago. Lara’s brother Richie had met his husband Jordan at a bus stop in Sheffield following a train cancellation; these days they lived in Auckland together and had recently celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary. To think that such perfect couples had only met because they had been allocated certain tickets from a concert venue or were meant to be catching a particular train . . . it blew Lara’s mind, actually, to think that these paths could so easily never have crossed at all. And what if you had met your soulmate, only to have lost them almost immediately? Maybe it was better not to dwell on that.
She found herself thinking about Jake and his love of marine biology as she made her way home at the end of the day. He’d told her about a phenomenon called ‘mouth-brooding’, where certain species of fish incubated their eggs in their mouths, which often meant the parent fish not being able to eat, presumably for fear of swallowing their own offspring. The sacrifices made by parents – humans and fish alike! She wondered how it must feel when the parent fish eventually dared release their young, in the hope that they could survive alone, swim safely away. Then she gave a hollow laugh, recognising her own projection. No surprises where that particular train of thought was coming from. This autumn, exam results permitting, her daughter Eliza would be heading off to university and leaving her mother behind. While Lara was excited for her that the world was about to open up so thrillingly, she couldn’t deny that she also felt a stomach-turning dread at the prospect of being completely alone for the first time in years. Sometimes in the dead of the night she lay awake, the same old questions looping around her mind. What would she do to fill the evenings and weekends? How would she manage in a silent, empty house, with no one to chat to about the day, to laugh with, groan over trashy TV, nag about leaving wet towels on the bathroom floor for the millionth time? She thought again of her mum, who allotted different chores to each day of the week so that she always had ‘something to look forward to’. This was not a future Lara wanted for herself. But how else should she fill the absence Eliza would leave? Who was she, without her child?
‘Hi love,’ she called, letting herself in to their small semi, a mile or so out of town. Up on the hill, there was a sea view from the bathroom window if you leaned out far enough, and a sky full of swooping gulls. Tonight she was greeted by a thud of loud music from upstairs – presumably this meant Eliza’s migraine had abated. ‘I’m home!’ Lara shouted, but no reply came.
Ah well. She’d make a start on dinner. Eliza babysat every Thursday evening for the Partridges, three doors down, so there wasn’t much time to cook anything elaborate, just some noodles and a stir-fry, she decided. She made a fuss of the cat, then washed her hands, switched on the radio and began chopping an onion. The news was being read and she frowned as she heard one story about a sinkhole in China, where a busy road junction had just cratered out of sight with no warning. Fifty metres deep, the newsreader said in sober tones. An entire bus and several other vehicles had been swallowed up, with the number of casualties unconfirmed as yet.
It gave her pause, her hand momentarily still on the knife, as she tried to imagine how it would feel to have the road suddenly collapse like that. Would you even have time to process what was happening as you plunged into the crevasse? Would you pray, scream, clutch at the person next to you on the bus seat? She visualised the terrible crash of impact, followed by the moments of stunned silence immediately afterwards, the startled cries of birds as they scattered above the scene.
Shuddering, she resumed chopping, only for Eliza to burst into the room, looking stormy. ‘Hi,’ Lara said, taken aback. ‘Is everything okay?’
The question was met by a disdainful snort. ‘Is everything okay, she says,’ Eliza commented sardonically to the air around her as if a vast TV studio audience were hanging on her every word. ‘Well, no, actually, everything is not okay, Mother. Starting with you, lying to me – that’s really not okay.’
Lying? This didn’t sound like the preamble to a standard moan about missing tights or Lara having failed to iron a top she’d promised to. ‘What do you mean?’ she asked, plucking a clove of garlic and peeling off its papery outer layer.