I was sitting on a rug a little distance from them, reading one of my A-level texts. I had no interest in their whispered conversation about some boy in their class, but they were twelve years old and I wasn’t letting them out of my sight. Hannah was too much of a show-off to be responsible for her own safety. She didn’t understand the slimness of life; the consequences of a twelve-year-old’s bravado.
It was a warm day, the sky carrying thin twists of cloud, and I felt about as peaceful as I was capable of feeling back then. Until I heard the sound of a car, thumping and buzzing with overamplified music. I looked up and my heart lifted and sank. Bradley had called earlier, wanting me to drive over to pick him up. His car wouldn’t start, he’d said, could I come and get him? Maybe lend him some money to fix it?
No, I’d said to both. I was looking after two twelve-year-old girls; plus he already owed me seventy pounds. ‘Borrowed Greggsy’s new car,’ he said now, ambling towards me with a rare smile. ‘Seeing as you were too lame to help me out.’ He looked at Hannah and Alex with interest. ‘All right, girls?’
‘Hi,’ they said, goggling at him.
‘Since when did Greggsy drive a car like that?’ I asked. It was a BMW. Souped up, just how Bradley and Greggsy liked their cars, but a Beamer all the same.
‘He came into a bit of money.’ Bradley tapped his nose.
Hannah looked excited. ‘Did it fall off the back of a lorry?’
Bradley laughed. ‘No, mate. It’s legit.’
He couldn’t sit still for very long. After about ten minutes on the blanket he suggested we go ‘for a race’ in our cars.
‘No way,’ I said. ‘Not with the girls.’ I’d been in a race with him once before: Bradley versus Greggsy back and forth on the Ebley bypass late at night. It had been the most frightening twenty minutes of my life. When it had come to an end, in the new Sainsbury’s car park, my head had flopped down onto my chest and I had cried. They’d laughed at me. Mandy, too, even though she’d been just as scared.
Hannah and Alex, however, teetering on the wobbly diving board into adolescence, thought it was a great idea. ‘Yeah, let’s go for a race,’ they said, as if it were a little sports car Dad had lent me, not a banger with a one-litre engine and a head gasket whose days were numbered.
They went on and on, Hannah and Alex, Bradley riding on their coattails. It’s not the M-fucking-five, Sare. It’s just a shit little road going nowhere. Alex kept flicking her blonde hair over her shoulder and Hannah copied her, only she was less convincing.
My need to protect Hannah had not dwindled as the years had passed. If anything, it had strengthened as she’d transitioned from fearless child to swaggering girl. So I refused. Again and again. Bradley got more irritable; I got more stressed. Neither of us was used to me saying no.
But then the matter was taken out of my hands. Hannah, giggling, ran over to Bradley’s passenger door and got inside. Bradley ran round to the driver’s seat, quick as a wink. I started shouting at them, but nobody heard me because the car Bradley had borrowed had a dual exhaust and he was roaring the engine. He shot off towards Frampton and my stomach spilled out through my legs.
‘Hannah!’ I shouted. I ran towards my own car, Alex behind me.
‘Shit!’ she breathed. She sounded impressed and frightened. ‘They’ve gone!’
I made her do up her seatbelt. I told her she shouldn’t be swearing. I prayed.
‘And off we went,’ I said, coming to a halt on the boardwalk.
Eddie turned away from me and stared out to sea, hands jammed in his pockets.
‘You were on the village green because you’d just been walking along Broad Ride,’ I said. ‘Weren’t you? The day we met. You were there for exactly the same reason as me.’
He nodded.
‘It was the first time I’d been up there on the anniversary of her death.’ His voice was tight, bound securely to prevent collapse. ‘Normally I’d spend it with Mum, who’d just go through old photo albums and cry. But that day I just . . . I just couldn’t do it. I wanted to be out there, in the sunshine, thinking good things about my little sister.’
Me. I’d done this. Me and my weakness, my monstrous stupidity.
‘I walk along there every year on the second of June,’ I told him. I wanted to fold myself around him, absorb his pain somehow. ‘I go there, rather than up to the main road, because Broad Ride was their kingdom that afternoon. They had nail varnish and magazines and not a care in the world. That’s the bit I fly back to remember. ’
Eddie looked briefly at me. ‘What magazines? Do you remember? What nail varnish? What were they eating?’
‘It was Mizz ,’ I said quietly. Of course I remembered. That day had been playing out in my head my entire adult life. ‘They’d borrowed my nail varnish. I’d got it free with a magazine; it was called Sugar Bliss. We had Linda McCartney sausage rolls, because they were both having a vegetarian phase. Cheese-and-onion crisps and a tub of fruit salad. Only Alex had smuggled in some sweets.’
I remembered it as if it were yesterday; the wasps hovering over the fruit, Hannah’s new sunglasses, the swaying shades of green.
‘Skittles,’ Eddie said. ‘I bet she brought Skittles. They were her favourite.’
‘That’s right.’ I couldn’t look at him. ‘Skittles.’
I caught up with them at the main road. Bradley was trying to turn right, towards Stroud, but a succession of cars stuck behind a tractor had held him up.
Stay calm , I told myself, as I got out of the car and jogged up to his passenger door. Just get her out and treat this all as a joke. He’ll be OK if—
Bradley spotted me and quickly turned left instead, engine roaring. I ran back to my car.
‘You can speed up if you want,’ Alex said. Already Bradley’s car was nearly out of sight. ‘You can floor it. I don’t mind.’
‘No. He’ll slow down and wait for me so he can race me. I know what he’s like.’ Blood pounded in my ears. Please, God, let nothing happen to her. Let nothing happen to my little sister. I looked at my speedometer. Fifty-five miles per hour. I slowed down. Then I sped up. I couldn’t stand it .
Alex turned on my stereo. It was a group of American kids, Hanson, singing a silly earworm song called ‘MMMBop’. Nineteen years on I still couldn’t bear to hear it.
After a horrifyingly short time, Bradley was racing back towards us on the other side of the road at sixty, maybe seventy miles per hour. ‘Slow down!’ I yelled, flashing him. He must have U-turned in the road up ahead.
‘Chill!’ Alex said. She flicked her hair nervously. ‘Hannah’s fine!’
Bradley shot past, beeping, and then screeched the car round onto our side of the road. ‘Handbrake turn,’ Alex marvelled. I came almost to a stop, watching them in my rear-view mirror. I barely breathed until they had straightened out and were driving behind us again. I could see her there, in his front seat, a whole head shorter than him. A little girl, for Christ’s sake.
She stared straight ahead. Hannah was only that still when she was afraid.
‘How do you know what a handbrake turn is?’ I heard myself ask. I was driving slowly, my hazard lights on. Please stop. Give me my sister back. I wound down the window and pointed frantically towards the verge.
‘My brother told me,’ Alex said. ‘He’s at university.’
For a moment I felt angry that her brother – some idiot – thought it was clever to teach his little sister about handbrake turns. But then Bradley dipped back so he could roar up behind us, screeching on his brakes at the last minute. I gasped. He did it again. And again, and again. I tried several times to stop, but each time I did, he tried to overtake me. So I continued driving, just like he wanted me to. I couldn’t let him fire off ahead with my sister again.
He carried on like that until we started to approach the dip in the road, not far from the Sapperton junction and the woods. But by then he must have become bored, because he didn’t stop when he revved up into the back of my car; he hit it. Gently, but still hard enough to make me panic. I’d only had a licence three weeks.