‘Shit,’ Alex said, only more quietly than before. She was still trying to look excited, but it was obvious she was afraid. Her slender fingers were closed tight around the old grey webbing of the seatbelt.
We descended into the dip, Bradley flashing and beeping on my tail. He was laughing. And then – even though we were heading down into a blind bend – he pulled out to overtake.
Everything seemed to hang like a droplet on a tap, ready to fall and smash.
A car came round the bend on the other side, just as I knew it would.
Bradley was nearly level with me. There was no way they could avoid crashing.
My sister. Hannah.
My emergency-response system took over at that point, I told the police afterwards. I knew that because what happened next was not a matter of choice; it was simply what happened. My brain instructed my arms to swerve the car left, and the car swerved left.
If you lose control of your car, never aim for a tree , Dad had told me when he taught me to drive. Always aim for a wall or a fence. They’ll give way. A tree won’t.
And the tree did not give way, when the passenger side of the car – the side containing sweet little Alex Wallace with her blonde flicky hair and her Skittles and her blobby nail varnish – slammed into it.
The tree didn’t give way, but Alex did .
I forced myself to look at Eddie, but he was still facing away from me, looking out to sea. The shining globe of a tear tracked slowly down his face and he brushed it away, pinching the top of his nose again. But after a few seconds he let his hand fall, and with it tears. He stood and cried, this big, kind man, and I felt it more strongly than I had done in years. That loathing of myself, that desperation to do something, change things, and the subsequent despair that I could not. Time had marched on, leaving Alex behind. Leaving Eddie in small pieces, my sister unable to forgive me.
‘I spent years wondering what I’d do if I met you,’ Eddie said eventually. He wiped at his eyes with his forearms, turned to face me. ‘I hated you. I couldn’t believe that scumbag went to jail and you didn’t.’
I nodded, because I hated myself, too.
‘I asked why they weren’t punishing me,’ I said uselessly. ‘But they kept on saying I didn’t do anything illegal. I wasn’t driving recklessly.’
‘I remember. Our family liaison officer had to explain it to us.’ Eddie’s voice was flat. ‘It made no sense to my mother.’
I closed my eyes, because I knew what he was going to say next.
‘All I know is that you chose to save your sister, and because of that, mine died.’
I wrapped my arms around myself. ‘That wasn’t the choice I made,’ I whispered. Tears blocked my airways. ‘That was not the conscious choice that I made, Eddie.’
He sighed. ‘Maybe not. But it’s what happened.’
The police came to the hospital. The BMW had been stolen, they said.
Why had I accepted what he’d told me? Why had I ever listened to anything he had said? A sick panic washed over me at the thought of all I’d given this man. My virginity. My heart. My self-respect. And now the life of a young girl. My sister’s best friend.
A witness had seen the driver running across fields, away from the accident. Who was he?
‘Who was he?’ Dad repeated, confused. He was sitting by my bed, holding my hand. Mum was on the other side, a human shield between the police and her daughter. ‘Who was he, Sarah?’
‘My boyfriend. Bradley.’
‘Your what?’ Dad was even more perplexed. ‘You had a boyfriend? But how long for? Why didn’t you tell us?’
And I turned my head and cried into the pillow, because it was so obvious now. So obvious that Bradley was a vile human being – had always been a vile human being – and so obvious that, deep down, under those tightly folded layers of adolescent insecurity, I’d known.
My actions might have saved my little sister from death, but they failed to protect her from harm. Bradley had swerved into the space I’d created, ramming Hannah’s side of the stolen car into the back of mine. Hannah had two operations in two days. She was in the ward on the floor above mine, concussed, badly injured and, for the first time in her twelve years, silent.
Bradley, whose name I gave to the police, was nowhere to be found. ‘Try Greggsy’s,’ I told them, and he was arrested soon after.
After I was discharged, I sat by Hannah’s bed every day for two weeks until she was free to go. I didn’t go to school; I barely went home. I remembered almost nothing, other than the quiet beep of machines and the hum of a busy paediatrics ward. The fear when one of Hannah’s machines made a strange noise; the guilt like a blowtorch to my chest. Mostly she slept; sometimes she cried and told me she hated me.
The police insisted there were no charges to bring against me, no matter how determined Alex’s family were to see me punished. The guilt grew stronger. I testified against Bradley at Gloucester Crown Court and was reprimanded because I begged the judge to try me, too.
I didn’t know Alex’s family. Mum and Dad had almost always ferried her to and from playdates at our house because – as Mum put it – ‘Alex’s mother struggles sometimes.’ She had since had a full mental breakdown, they said in court. Not only that but she had been single since Alex was young, so her son had had to drop out of university to look after her. Neither of them made it to court.
Someone in the jury looked at me then. A woman, probably Mum’s age, who could imagine what it must be like to lose a child. She looked straight at me and her face said, That’s your fault, too, you little bitch. That’s your fault, too.
Carole Wallace managed to call us three times before the psychiatric nurses realized she wasn’t calling her son and revoked her telephone access. I was a murderer, she said, once to Dad, twice to our answerphone. Our neighbours stopped inviting Mum and Dad round for dinner, or talking when they came past. They didn’t blame me, I don’t think; they simply had no idea what to say to any of us. ‘Sometimes the elephant is just too big for the room,’ Dad said.
Hannah refused to sit at a table with me. People stared at my parents in the supermarket. Alex’s photo continued to appear in the local press. I went back to school, but within hours I knew I was finished there. People were whispering. Claire said I should have been done for manslaughter. Mandy was not talking to me at all, because I’d sent the police after Greggsy’s cousin. Even some of the teachers couldn’t quite look me in the eye.
That night Mum and Dad sat me down and told me they were putting the house on the market. How would I feel about moving to Leicestershire? Mum had grown up in Leicestershire. ‘We could all do with a fresh start, couldn’t we?’ she asked. Her face was translucent with worry and exhaustion. ‘I’m sure we’d be able to find somewhere for you to carry on your A levels.’
Mum was a teacher. She knew that was impossible. It was only then that I realized quite how desperate she was.
I went upstairs and called Tommy, and flew to LA the very next day.
I went so that Alex’s family could grieve in peace, without the risk of ever having to run into me. I went so that my parents wouldn’t have to move halfway across the country, so they’d have a chance at starting over without the titanic shadow of their daughter looming over everything. I went to find sanctuary in a place where nobody would know what I’d done, where I wouldn’t be That Girl.
But most of all I went to LA to become the sort of woman I wished I had been the day I’d met Bradley. Strong, sure of myself, afraid of nobody. Never, ever, ever afraid to say no.
Eddie and I were drawing close to Venice now, the boardwalk snaking past shops and stalls peddling cheap gifts and henna tattoos. Music boomed out of a speaker somewhere; homeless people slept under palm trees. I gave a couple of dollars to a man with a rucksack full of patches. Eddie watched me with a blank face. ‘I need to sit down,’ he said. ‘I need to eat something.’
We sat outside a bar, where we were the focus of a madwoman with a parrot and a roaming accordionist. Eddie had no answers to the madwoman’s questions and just gazed blankly at the busker as he swayed around us.