Chapter 25
Kat is not taking no for an answer.
‘It’s too dark,’ I say. ‘He might not see you.’
She shakes her head. ‘He’s going that slowly.’
Something is making a very unhealthy sound and I’m not sure whether it’s the car or the caravan, a kind of clanking, shrieking sound, amplified with each second as the getup limps closer.
It seems to take an age to get here, and Kat shifts from foot to foot in impatience, waiting until the driver is in sight to start waving her arms around.
She doesn’t just wave, though. She shouts, too, and her shout is a high-pitched screech: ‘STOP! STOP!’
The car squeals to a halt and the driver opens the window.
‘What the hell is this?’
Nobody knows what to say to that, so we stay silent. None of us can form many words anymore, anyway. Even Kat is quiet, spent in her heroic efforts to bring this thing to a stop and get us out of this intolerable situation. I heave myself off the wall and join Kat next to his open window.
‘What do you all think you look like? Granny’s night out gone wrong, is it? Little too much of the sherry and now you’ve got lost? What do you want?’ His shadowed face cuts in a frown so spiky his skin is sliced in ribbons. ‘I don't have time for this. I have to go.’
‘You can’t,’ I say.
‘Yes, I can. Get out of my way.’
‘No,’ Kat says.
He stares her down and she stares back until his eyes drift off to the side, widening and then creasing up into even deeper crevices. ‘Wait, is she okay?’
He’s looking at Barbara, whose face is almost buried between her Bristol Rovers bobble hat and her blanket shroud. She has her hands stuffed inside her dressing gown and she is slumped down as if all of a sudden everything has become too much for her.
‘No,’ Jodie says, ‘she is not okay. We have to get her to the hospital. You have to get her – all of us – to the hospital.’
He has long, ratty, mousy-brown hair tied back in a messy ponytail, thinning on top, and bulbous eyes like a dead fish. He grimaces at us, revealing protruding teeth and a gold incisor.
‘I bleedin’ don’t,’ he says, and starts sliding his window up. It sticks and shudders and he curses.
‘It’s the rat,’ Barbara says, her quivering finger pointing straight at him.
‘I’m out of here,’ he says.
Jodie drags herself out in front of his car and bangs on the windscreen. ‘You. Have. To. Help. Us.’ It’s like she is dredging up some pocket of energy she didn’t know she had and spilling it all out in one great big splurge.
‘No. I. Do. Not.’
Kat steps nearer to him and lowers her face so she’s on a level with him. She flinches a little and I wonder if he has bad breath. ‘Could you at least phone the police for us? Or at least a taxi, or something – anything? Our phones aren’t working.’
He shakes his head. ‘I’m not calling the pigs, or no one else. Get out of my way, you freak.’
‘Can you not take us into town at least, or even the nearest village, if you can’t get us to the hospital?
Then we can get help, and you can get on with your important business.
’ Kat spits the last two words out and his eyes narrow into slits at her.
If slits could still bulge out, that’s his eyes right now.
‘No,’ he shouts. ‘If you don’t get out my way I’m gonna run you over.’ He’s looking at Jodie now, who is still leaning on the centre of his bonnet.
Kat puffs her cheeks out. ‘Listen. Do you want a sick old lady dying on your conscience? Do you? Because that is what is going to happen if you don’t help us.’
His eyes shift sideways.
‘You can fit us all in this thing,’ Kat says. ‘Just drop us somewhere, anywhere that’s not out in the wild like here. By a house or something.’
He chews on his lip and his incisor glints.
He looks at Barbara again. ‘Where am I supposed to put that great big chair thing?’ And then he turns his gaze to Violet, with a slight sneer twisting his mouth, probably at the Dressing Gown of Doom/Spaceman combo. He points to her walking frame. ‘And that piece of crap there?’
‘Well,’ Violet says, her hand skittering to her throat, ‘I never heard such rudeness.’
Kat points to the caravan he’s trailing. ‘Well, you’ve got that great big piece of crap there, haven’t you? I think we can probably get a chair and walker in that thing between us.’
He shakes his head, his lips pulled back from his teeth in a pouty kind of snarl.
‘I’ll do that. Don’t need you lot interfering in my caravan.
’ He crashes his door open and wrenches his bulk out of his beat-up seat, the old fabric torn and faded.
‘I am only doing this for her,’ he says, nodding at Barbara.
‘But I can only take you to the next village. No further. I’m on holiday, and I’m late. ’
‘Holiday?’ Kat mouths at me. I can’t imagine anything much worse than a holiday in a bashed-up old caravan in late November.
‘I’ll have to put the seats down in the back,’ he grumbles, slamming his door closed against the snow and stomping round to the boot. He yanks the seats into place, all the time letting out a stream of obscenities even Kane would pale at.
‘An’ you expect me to just lift that thing into my van?
’ He nods at Barbara’s chair again, his eyes popping even further out.
Maybe they will fall out altogether and lie on his mottled red cheeks, continuing to give out their glares of incredulity and creep around me with that slight lascivious look I’m picking up.
‘We said we’d help,’ Kat says, hopping from one foot to the other. ‘But can we get a move on, please? You need to go on holiday, after all, don’t you?’
I don’t know where she is getting the energy to argue with his level of obnoxious, but inside I’m applauding her and wishing a little bit that I was her.
He huffs like a great whale expelling air through its blowhole.
‘Well, you lot get her sat in the car, then, and I’ll sort this thing out.
And give us that.’ He whips the walker away from Violet who wobbles and teeters and falls against Amina, and drags it over to his caravan, shoving a key into the door and slamming it open.
Kat and I help Barbara into the front seat. She is less sparkly than she was just moments ago, fading by the second. A wave of heat hits us as we open the door, and it feels good. ‘Ah,’ she says. ‘Now we just need a cuppa and everything’ll be right as rain.’
‘Or snow,’ Amina says.
I stash the oxygen cylinder in the footwell next to Barbara and then wheel the chair over to the driver, the wheels that were never meant for anything more than hospital corridors and outdoor concrete walkways faltering on the rough-surfaced road. ‘Here you go.’
He spins round and glares at me. ‘Get out of my way. Get into the car. I’ll do this.’
‘I can lift it up to you,’ I say.
He bares his teeth at me and suddenly his eyes are more than a watery bulge of unpleasantness; now they are terrifying great orbs of menace.
‘Okay. Okay.’ I show him my palms and back away slowly.
I try and see what’s behind him in there, what he’s being so precious about, but it’s in heavy shadow and I can only make out vague shapes.
He steps out of the van and grabs the chair, then tries to shove it in, but it doesn’t want to fit.
With a great deal of drama and huffing and puffing, he pushes it through the door, a little at a time, shouting curses at it and back at us.
I hold out the frog chair, and he snarls so much I feel like his mouth will crack in two.
In the car it is so warm the windows have steamed up.
I clamber into one of the back two seats, with Jodie in the other, and Amina, Violet and Kat in the middle row of three.
We let out a big collective sigh of relief as we sink into the ancient seats, where, despite rusted springs poking up through the tatty fabric, it’s like we’ve suddenly landed in great luxury.
The bulge-eyed man slams the boot down over me and Jodie and we look at each other and giggle.
‘It’s like I’m a kid again,’ Jodie says, ‘sat in my dad’s boot when he had too many of us kids in the car to fit.
That’s before he naffed off and left us all alone with Mum, though. ’
He climbs into the driving seat and thumps his hands down on the wheel. He mutters to himself and does a whole lot of sighing and tutting. ‘Why I agreed to this madness I’ll never know.’
‘Because you have some heart underneath all that lot,’ Kat says.
‘Shut up. Shut the hell up. You’re not making noise in my car, if you want me to take you any further at all.’
Jodie whispers, ‘Your prayers suck, Kat. You pray for rescue and we get Dodgy Caravan Dude after like about half-an-hour waiting.’
‘Yeah,’ Kat says, ‘but he has a seven-seater car.’
Jodie laughs. ‘Touché.’
‘What’s your name, young man?’ Barbara says to Dodgy Caravan Dude. Kat turns to Jodie and me and we splutter.
‘Do you not understand shut up?’
‘Well,’ Barbara says, ‘how rude.’
DCD starts driving painfully slowly up the road.
‘Go faster, man,’ Barbara says, seemingly oblivious to the livid air of rancour pervading the car.
‘Will someone shut her up, or I’ll do it for you.’
‘Barbara, dear,’ Amina says, putting her hands on Barbara’s shoulders, ‘just close your eyes. Have a little sleep while we drive. Let the nice gentleman drive in peace.’
‘Pah,’ Barbara says, but buttons her lips together and closes her eyes, leaning back into the seat.
The warmth of the car begins to lull me back into hope and tiny sparks of energy ping through my body, creeping slowly into my bones and weaving through my mind. I feel sleepy, all of a sudden, but sleepy in a good way, like when I have managed a walk and I feel good for being able to exercise.
I wonder to myself why this car and caravan will not go any faster, but I don’t dare say a thing. I am desperate to get back – Jake might be there by now, turning up for visiting hours at four o’clock, and the staff on the ward will be getting increasingly concerned. If only we could call them.