Nicole
Nicole
The front door slams and then the door to the sitting room flings open.
Nicole looks up, sees Jack’s tear-stained face, leaps up from the sofa. ‘What is it? What’s wrong?’
Jack stares at her, his whole body shaking. Fear thuds in Nicole’s chest and she places her hands either side of her son’s face, tries to make eye contact. ‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’
He shakes his head, tears coursing down his cheeks. ‘I only wanted to talk to her, I just wanted to know what she’d say—’
‘Who? What do you mean?’
‘I just wanted to talk to Isla...’
For a moment, Nicole is confused. ‘ Isla? What did you need to speak to Isla about?’
He looks at her, then averts his eyes.
‘Jack? What’s happened? Please, just tell me.’
He sniffs, tears blotching his cheeks. ‘I just wanted to ask her about it. About Dad.’
He hesitates, and the neurons in Nicole’s brain fire in every direction. ‘What about Dad?’
Jack swallows hard, and she can see his distress.
‘Dad... he... he’s sleeping with her. With Isla.’
It takes a few seconds for Nicole to understand what Jack is saying. ‘Isla? Our Isla? Don’t be ridiculous, of course he’s not.’
Jack shakes his head. ‘I’m not being ridiculous. I saw photos of her. On Dad’s phone—’ He stops abruptly as though a guillotine has sliced through his words.
Thoughts sprint through Nicole’s mind as if in pursuit of a finishing line she cannot see. ‘That doesn’t mean anything, sweetheart. Of course Dad’s got photos of Isla on his phone. I’ve got dozens of Isla – and Clio – on mine.’ She rubs a finger along Jack’s wet cheek, studies his troubled face, wonders if – in spite of her vigilance – she has nonetheless underestimated how upset he has been by his ADHD diagnosis.
Jack wrests himself free from Nicole’s hands, quick breaths juddering in and out of his lungs. ‘You don’t understand. The photos... They weren’t normal. They were...’ He stops, buries his face in his hands, shaking his head as though trying to rid it of whatever thoughts are rampaging through his mind. ‘They were in bed.’
The words buzz in Nicole’s ears like a fly she cannot swat away. It does not make sense. ‘You must be mistaken. Dad wouldn’t... Not with Isla.’
‘I’m not mistaken! I looked up the dates on the photos. It’s been going on for ages .’
It takes a few seconds for the information to sink into Nicole’s head, like water dissolving into caked earth. She feels dizzy, vertiginous, her brain refusing to believe it is true. She cannot comprehend that Andrew would do that, that he would betray her so abominably. That he would betray Abby, or abuse his position with Isla in that way. That he would do something so repugnant, so selfish, so reckless. So completely and egregiously immoral. But then she looks at Jack’s face, sees his angst, knows he would not say something so unutterably awful unless he wholeheartedly believed it to be true.
She thinks about how erratic Andrew’s behaviour has been over the past few months: furtive and tense one moment, animated and exuberant the next. She thinks about how, a few months ago, he began obsessing about his weight, his health, the greying of hair at his temples, and suddenly what Jack is saying does not seem as outlandish as she wishes it to be. Suddenly it seems painfully, horrifically plausible.
‘I only went to talk to her... I wasn’t going to do anything... I didn’t mean it... You’ve got to believe me.’
Jack’s words are garbled, no clear ending of one sentence, no distinct beginning of the next, but the panic in his voice causes a knot to tighten in Nicole’s throat. ‘What are you talking about? What happened?’
‘I didn’t see her... It was an accident... She just ran out into the road... My foot... the accelerator... I don’t know what happened.’
Fears chills Nicole’s blood. ‘Where were you, Jack? What were you doing?’ Suspicions needle their way into her mind but they are too dreadful to contemplate.
And then a story is tumbling from Jack’s lips, amidst the tears and the breathlessness, and he is telling her how he couldn’t stand what his dad had done with Isla, how angry he was, so angry he thought he was going to explode with it – with the secret and the hurt and the certainty that his dad was going to leave them – and he just wasn’t thinking straight, he just couldn’t think clearly. He just had to get out of the house, be somewhere different. He took Nicole’s car, hadn’t even known where he was going, he just needed to do something.
As Nicole tries to compute all this information, she restrains herself from reprimanding him, from asking what on earth he was thinking, driving her car illegally when he doesn’t know how beyond his Saturday go-karting, but she knows this is not the time, knows he is too distraught, that he would not hear her anyway. What she needs to do now is calm him down, elicit from him the story he is struggling to tell.
And then Jack is explaining how he drove to the party – the party that Nathaniel was going to, the party at Meera’s house where he knew Isla would be too – and that he only wanted to talk to her, only wanted to ask her why she had done it, why she had ripped his family apart. He hadn’t meant for it to happen, he thought she was just going to walk along the pavement, he didn’t know she was going to run into the road, that she would run so fast, without any warning. He hadn’t meant to push his foot down on the accelerator, it just slipped, too far, too quickly – the pedal was so different to a go-kart, it felt completely different – and the car went off so fast, he couldn’t control it, it all happened so quickly. And then he panicked, and he didn’t know what to do, he just sat there, shaking, and he couldn’t bear to look, couldn’t bear to get out of the car to see what he’d done, so he put it in reverse, backed away and drove home. And maybe she was okay, maybe Isla was fine, maybe it was just a knock and she got up and went back to the party, he doesn’t know, he just had to get out of there, and now he doesn’t know if he hurt her or not. And Jack is asking Nicole what he’s going to do, what will happen to him, will he go to prison, imploring her to tell him it will be okay, that she believes him, that she believes it was just an accident.
Jack’s teeth are chattering, and Nicole pulls him into her arms, tries to calm him down, struggles to grasp what he has told her.
‘You didn’t see anything? Before you drove away? You didn’t see if Isla was alright?’
Jack shakes his head. ‘She’ll be okay, won’t she?’
Nicole tries to think, to collect her thoughts, but they are like spheres in a pinball machine, ricocheting from one side of her brain to the other.
Glancing down at her watch, she sees it is almost nine-thirty. Nathaniel must still be at Meera’s. The realisation hits her that someone at the party might have seen something, recognised her car. Somebody, right now, might be calling the police to report a hit-and-run.
Something clicks into place inside Nicole’s head: a sense of urgency, of maternal imperative. An ancient, febrile instinct to protect her son.
‘Where’s the car now?’
Jack’s breaths jolt in and out. ‘In the driveway.’
Nicole forces herself to think. ‘Just stay here a moment, okay? Don’t move.’
She waits until Jack has acknowledged her, and then she grabs her phone, heads out into the hallway, through the front door in her bare feet, into the wide sweep of their driveway. Activating the torch on her phone, she bends down, examines the front of the car.
On the right-hand side of the bumper is a deep dent, the metal disfigured, the plastic casing of the light cracked and broken. The damage is too great, surely, to be nothing more than an innocuous tap. And yet, Nicole remembers one time, years ago, when she hit a rabbit late at night on a country road – she hadn’t even been going that fast – and even that had caused a sizeable dent in her bumper.
A dozen possible scenarios play out in her mind.
She imagines calling Nathaniel, asking if he is still at the party, asking if Isla is there, whether she is okay.
She imagines calling Abby, ascertaining whether Isla has come home yet, checking whether she is back safe and sound.
She imagines calling Meera’s house, hoping someone will answer the phone, asking them to go out into the street to see if Isla is there.
But as each option hurtles through her mind, she knows she cannot pursue any of them. Because they all lead to the same inevitable outcome.
They all lead to suspicion. To questions she does not want to answer. To Jack being prosecuted, found guilty, being sent to prison. He has driven illegally, underage. He has hit a pedestrian and left the scene of the incident. It is a catalogue of crimes, and he will surely be punished.
Terror grips her throat, and she knows she cannot allow it to happen. He is only fifteen. He is just a child. He has made a terrible, foolish mistake, a mistake precipitated by his father’s disgusting behaviour. She cannot – will not – allow him to pay for it for the rest of his life.
There is not time, right now, for her to speculate about what may have happened to Isla; all she can do is hope – pray – that she is okay. For now, she must focus on destroying the evidence so that, whatever Isla might say, Nicole can refute it, convince people it is not just untrue but impossible.
Racing back inside the house, she thrusts her feet into a pair of trainers, dashes into the sitting room where Jack is still standing, immobile. ‘The keys, where are the keys?’
Jack stares at her, as if in a daze, and she grabs his arm, tries to keep her voice calm even as hysteria billows in her chest.
‘Where are the keys, Jack? The car keys?’
Something seems to snap awake in him, and he reaches into the pocket of his jeans, pulls out the keys that Nicole had not known, until a few minutes ago, were missing.
‘Come on.’
Clutching hold of Jack’s arm, she leads him through the hallway, collects her house keys from the entrance table, shuffles him out of the front door, closing it behind her. Unlocking the car, she opens the passenger door, bundles Jack inside – Jack, like a little boy, dazed, compliant – fastens his belt around him. She cannot leave him at home alone, not when he is in such a terrible state. She cannot risk Andrew or Nathaniel arriving back and seeing him like that, cannot risk Jack telling anyone else what he has done. She has to protect him, even if that means taking him with her for the task she now faces.
As she passes around the front of the car, she cannot help glancing down again at the bumper, sees the deep indentation, imagines the impact. Forces herself to look away.
Sitting in the driver’s seat, she tells Jack it is going to be okay, that she is going to take care of everything. Jack is silent, unresponsive, and Nicole tells herself that she will manage his shock later, when she can think how best to handle it, but for now she must deal with the immediate urgency in front of them.
Opening Google Maps on her phone, she zooms into her home address, moves out little by little, eyes scanning the streets, an area she knows so well – she has lived in this neighbourhood for almost twenty years – and yet now she cannot think, cannot get her bearings, cannot figure out where to go.
Her eyes dart from one side of the map to the other – north, south, east, west – and she can feel her desperation escalating, can feel the seconds ticking by, knows that time is closing in on her; Nathaniel might soon be home, Andrew might have left the office already, Isla may already be telling people what Jack has done.
And then her eyes land on it – the perfect place – and she jabs a finger at the screen, sees that it is only five minutes’ drive away. She studies the reverse journey on foot, is quoted eighteen minutes but knows they will be able to do it in twelve if they run, which they must, if they stand a chance of getting back before anyone else is home.
Setting the location, she reverses out of the drive, speeds down the road, Jack silent beside her. Thoughts outstrip each other in her mind as she tries to figure out what to do, what to say, how to get Jack out of this.
She does not know how fast she drives, but in what seems like no time at all they are pulling off the main road, towards the industrial estate. Silently, she prays there will be somewhere she can leave the car, somewhere inconspicuous so it will not be discovered immediately. Somewhere that will buy her time, buy Jack an alibi, enable her to strategise their way out of this disaster.
The entrance to the industrial estate appears out of the darkness and she experiences a wave of relief. It is bigger than she’d imagined, enormous in fact; there is a road through the middle with warehouses on either side, each with their own parking lot. But she knows she cannot leave the car in one of those, knows she must find somewhere better to conceal it, somewhere it will not easily be detected.
Next to her, Jack emits a loud sob, and Nicole puts a hand on his thigh, tells him it is going to be okay, drives on through the industrial estate. A clock ticks loudly in her ear, and she knows that time is running out, that she must abandon the vehicle soon, that they must make their way home if they are to stand any chance of arriving before Andrew or Nathaniel.
And then they are at the end of the road, and Nicole fears she has got it all wrong, she has made a bad decision; they should never have come here. She should have spent longer studying the map, finding a better place, but now it is too late, there is no time to search for an alternative, no possibility of travelling somewhere new and still having a chance of reaching home in time.
And then, as her eyes scan the perimeter of the dimly lit industrial estate, she spies a narrow path to her right: an overgrown track adjacent to the final warehouse, trees on one side, a high wall on the other. Without a second thought, she turns into it, edges the car into the confined space beneath the overhanging branches, inches forward until she has reached the end. Quickly, urgently, she instructs Jack to get out of the car, watches as he pushes open the door as far as it will go, stumbles out, closes it behind him. Nicole gets out of her side, squeezes through the narrow gap, looks left and then right, can see nobody around, looks up at the buildings, does not catch sight of any CCTV cameras.
Reaching overhead, she pulls at a branch, tugs it until it breaks free, yanks off another and then another, leans them up against the back of the car, throws them onto its roof, her hands sore, her forehead drenched with sweat. And then she looks at her watch, sees the time – almost a quarter to ten – a fresh injection of adrenaline spiking her blood, and she tells Jack they have to go right away. She grabs his hand, hauls him out of the alleyway, over the uneven ground and the long grass, looks over her shoulder, sees that the car is pitifully camouflaged, that if somebody happens to venture down that track for any reason, they will see it immediately, but it is the best she can do in the time available.
Jack is still shaking, and she tells him that he has to run home with her – that’s all he has to do, just run a mile and a half home – and she will take care of everything. And even though Jack’s eyes are glassy, his expression vacant, he nods, and she tells him she loves him, that it is all going to be okay. And then she holds his hand tightly and together they run through the industrial estate, out onto the street, along the main road towards home.
And all the way, a plan formulates in Nicole’s head, the details slipping and sliding until there is something solid, something that has a chance of being believed, something that may yet save Jack from the fate that otherwise awaits him.
If the house is empty when they get home, she will give Jack temazepam, send him to sleep, render him unconscious from this catastrophe in which they find themselves.
She will wait until somebody notices her car is missing, will feign ignorance, stoke the fire of belief that it has been stolen. She will report it to the police, say that the last time she saw it was when she collected Jack from football practice earlier that evening, that they’d arrived home at seven o’clock – a small dose of the truth to pepper the lies – that it could have been stolen any time since; she wouldn’t have noticed, she had not been out of the house all evening.
When Isla tells people what happened – because Isla will be okay, surely – Nicole will say it’s impossible, that Jack was at home with her all evening, that Isla must be mistaken; perhaps it was Nicole’s car that hit her, but it must have been a stranger driving it. The thought of it, the thought of casting doubt on Isla’s story – Isla, whom she has known since she was born, whom she has loved like a member of her own family – makes her flinch with pre-emptive remorse, but she cannot indulge it. Right now, she can think only about protecting Jack. Because if Jack is discovered to have been driving underage, if he is proven to have hit someone – to have hit the young woman with whom his father has been in a sexual relationship – it may be alleged that he did it on purpose, that he meant to run her over. And Nicole dares not contemplate what the ramifications of such an accusation might be.
Alongside her fear for Jack is her fury with Andrew. Rage for his infidelity, rage that of all the people in the world he chose to seduce, he selected the daughter of their best friend; a teenager who should have been able to trust that a man she’d known since she was born would never exploit her in that way.
Andrew has put their entire family in jeopardy; it is his behaviour, his choices, that have precipitated Jack’s actions tonight. Had Andrew not betrayed them all – had he not been so unscrupulous, so corrupt, so egotistical – none of this would be happening.
But for now, she will feign ignorance, will pretend to know nothing. Because if she does not know about Andrew’s relationship with Isla – if Jack has no knowledge of it either – then there can be no viable link to the accident. There can be no meaningful motive. In concealing her knowledge of Andrew’s betrayal, she will shield Jack from any suspicion of involvement.
Holding on tight to Jack’s hand, her feet pound along the pavement, one in front of the other. That is all she can do for now, put one foot in front of the other. Get Jack home, get him to bed, find them a route out of this labyrinthine nightmare.
The plan goes round and round in her head, and she knows, beyond all reasonable doubt, that she will do everything in her power to protect her son.