When Harry asked about the others, which he did repeatedly and increasingly desperately, they smiled sympathetically and said they were sorry, but they didn’t know anything. His dad had been equally unforthcoming. He claimed to know nothing other than that Jess, Tish and Jake were being treated somewhere in the hospital – for what, and how bad their injuries were, he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, say. Out of habit, Harry’s hand kept reaching for his phone, only to flop back onto the bed. His lifeline was gone – taken by the coppers at the scene. Evidence? The thought made the sinews in his neck tighten. He thought about telling his dad about the blood sample the police had taken from him, but decided not to. It would all come out soon enough.
It was unbearable. The not being able to leave. The not knowing what he was going to have to face.
And yet after the seemingly never-ending wait, when they finally told him he could go home, Harry was floored. They were sending him away from the hospital, away from his friends. He did not require any further treatment – unlike them. He had been lucky – unlike them. Harry watched the doctor as she spoke, wanting her to look suddenly concerned and say they were very sorry, but they’d found something wrong, something serious, that had shown up on an X-ray. He was in fact badly hurt, and it was imperative that he stay. But that didn’t happen. He was discharged, with nothing more than a photocopied letter that had to be dropped off at his GP’s, when he got the chance. No medicines, very few wounds, no limp, no crutch; indeed, very little to show that he had even been in a car crash, except for the scatter of cuts on his arms, his aching, stitched hand and the scream in his head that no one else could hear.
Chapter 12
THE JOURNEY home was somehow worse than the drive to the hospital – the dark dread of imagining Mo injured having been replaced by the muddy confusion of him being missing. Nihal concentrated on his driving, very aware of the traffic and of the shocking normality of an ordinary Sunday taking place outside the thin shell of their car. Shazia was silent, her face turned away from him, staring out of the window. He knew what she was doing: she was looking for Mo. Illogical as it was, he ‘got’ that she was trying to spot their son at bus stops and amongst the people out walking in the cold sunshine. Her felt her body tense when they saw a young lad with dark hair waiting to cross at the lights on the high street. Even as they approached home, and the number of pedestrians thinned to near zero, she didn’t come back to him. She remained rigid with concentration, her shoulders tight.
As they turned into their road Shazia suddenly shouted, ‘No!’, causing Nihal to brake and stall.
‘What?’
She turned to him. ‘We can’t go home. We have to check.’
‘Check what?’
‘That’s he’s not still there.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Nihal restarted the car and drove the last few feet to their house. They parked up. This simple act seemed to tip Shazia over the edge.
‘Nihal! No! We can’t just go home and sit there waiting. We have to go and make sure that he’s not still there. They could’ve missed him.’
Realisation dawned. Nihal looked at his wife. ‘You want to go to the crash site?’
‘Yes. We have to. We have to make sure.’
‘Shazia. That doesn’t make any sense. He won’t be there. We should do what the officer said – go in, wait for him to come home.’
But Shazia simply stared at him, the look in her eyes steely.
Reluctantly, Nihal put the car back into drive and pulled away from the house.
They parked on Brayton Road and walked to the ring road.
It felt such a strange thing to do, to go looking for a Mo in full view of the passing traffic, but Shazia was adamant.
The scars in the verge were visible from quite a distance away, the muddy car tracks looked black against the grass. Both Nihal and Shazia shuddered to think of the car leaving the road and literally ploughing its way into the wall. The blue-and-white police tape twisted in the breeze. By unspoken agreement, they didn’t go up to the actual site of the impact. Instead they paced beside the road, looking for anywhere that a hurt, confused or concussed Mo could have crawled away to. That’s what Shazia was thinking: that he had somehow got out of the car after the crash and slunk away like an injured animal. It made no sense to Nihal, but there again, he couldn’t come up with any credible, alternative explanation for where their son was and why he hadn’t been in touch with them. Mo had been seen getting into the car. The officer had confirmed that much.
They weren’t the only ones on the side on the road. At regular intervals small knots of people arrived, many of them teenagers. Nihal watched as they bowed their heads for a few seconds, in actual prayer or just as a sign of respect, then stood with their arms linked around each other, staring at the physical scars left by the accident. The solidarity of friendship. As the cars whooshed by, the exhaust-laden air was filled with the sound of their whispered speculation.
Shazia and Nihal made three passes of the verge. It was pointless and upsetting, but when he suggested they return home, Shazia point-blank refused. She was not done searching, not yet. Mo had to be out there somewhere. It was their job to look. So, for no rational reason that Nihal could discern – other than Shazia’s maternal compunction to keep going – they left the ring road and made their way along to the park. Once there, they proceeded to conduct a bizarre version of hide-and-seek, looking behind trees and under bushes, for a child who was long gone.
Chapter 13
WHEREVER PETE went, he couldn’t relax. The front of the house was the worst – obviously – as the windows provided a clear view of the crash site, but even in the back room he felt uneasy, unable to settle. He was clear-sighted enough to know that his restlessness was caused by lack of sleep and adrenaline, but this sudden self-consciousness in his own home was unnerving.
He’d called into work as soon as the gym had opened and explained, very briefly, why he couldn’t come in. When Ellen started asking questions, he’d somewhat brusquely cut her off, saying that he’d see her on Monday morning as normal; and to get Rhys, the deputy manager, to call him if he needed anything. After Pete got off the phone, he ran a bath, wanting to be clean. He lay in the tub for a long time, poaching his tired body, watching the condensation trickle down the walls into the grubby grout. The previous night’s events jittered through his mind like one of the cartoon flicker-books he used to make when he was a kid; isolated images that, when strung together, created a jerky story that unfolded at double speed. In reality, each moment had felt painfully long.
He only got out of the bath when the tank could no longer yield any more hot water. Body scoured and hair washed, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, he went downstairs and put some washing in the machine. He watched it swish around for a few minutes, the detergent lifting the grass and bloodstains out from his once-favourite pair of trackie bottoms. He made a coffee – drank it; made toast – left it. He had no idea what to do with himself. Pete was not used to having time on his hands, especially at the weekend. Sundays were one of their busiest days, with people swimming or treadmilling off the excesses of the night before. For the first time in Pete’s life the quiet and his own company, which he usually cherished, felt like a pressure.