Cath Staincliffe - Split Second

Outside it was snowing again, fat flakes pirouetting in the street lights, settling and turning red on the front lawn.

Louise

When her phone went, Louise didn’t recognize the number. She wondered if it was someone from the agency. It was late, but not impossible: some of the work was respite care, staying with people whose regular carers needed a break, most often elderly people with dementia, and on rare occasions the agency worker allocated would have a problem and need replacing.

‘Hello?’

Ruby came downstairs in her pyjamas.

‘Who am I speaking to, please?’ a woman asked.

Louise was suspicious, some sort of spam call maybe, but she replied anyway, watching Ruby put her homework back in her school bag. ‘Louise Murray.’

‘You’re related to Luke Murray?’

Her blood ran cold. ‘Yes. His mum.’

‘This is Manchester Royal Infirmary. Luke was involved in an incident earlier this evening.’ Louise felt the slap of shock, a thump in her guts that forced her to step back, murmuring, ‘Oh no, no.’

She saw Ruby turn and freeze, alarm enlarging her eyes.

Luke! Oh, God. ‘Is he all right?’ Dread flared through her.

‘He’s stable,’ the woman said, and went on to give her instructions as the pressure built in Louise’s chest, making it hard to breathe, hard to concentrate.

‘I’ll come now, yes.’ She ended the call, her hand shaking. Panic fluttering at her back like wings.

‘Mum?’

‘It’s the hospital. Luke’s there. Get your coat.’ Ruby nodded, fled.

‘Please,’ Louise prayed, ‘please, please let him be all right.’

The car door was frozen, the key wouldn’t turn.

The de-icer was inside the car, so she hurried to fetch the kettle and ran hot water over the lock. The metal made a chinking sound.

It worked, and she got the de-icer and the plastic scraper and scoured away at the ice on the windscreen, her breath great puffs of mist. Beneath her feet the grass verge was lumpy, unyielding. Everything was frozen solid, brilliant and brittle.

They drove through the snow. The middle of the main road was clear, but everything else, the pavements, hedges, roofs and trees, was smothered in a layer of white. Smudging the edges.

Ruby spoke. ‘What happened?’

‘They didn’t say, just that he was stable.’

‘Maybe there was an accident? Like a crash?’

Incident , Louise thought, they said incident . ‘I don’t know, love.’ Thinking only that he was hurt, whatever it was, he was hurt. Alcoholic poisoning? Drinking himself stupid. Would that be an incident? Or if he’d been messing with drugs. Something else reckless? Trespassing on the railway line. He wasn’t a bad kid, not nasty, just daft at times, taking risks. Better lately, though, much better. That didn’t matter, not now. All that mattered was getting there. Make him better, make it better. She wouldn’t let herself imagine how he might be injured, fought against the pictures rearing up inside her head. Not going there. Just do this, just get through this.

He’d always been a handful; the number of times she’d been summoned into school: Luke giving cheek, Luke not showing up. He was bright and bored. He couldn’t wait to leave. She’d been the same at that age. She had tried talking to him about A levels or doing a BTEC. Something to give him a chance of a decent job, not end up like her in the poverty trap, no qualifications, everything a struggle.

‘No way,’ he’d said. And she knew there was no shifting him. Stubborn as a mule, never knew when to back down or back off. Could be a good quality at times, that persistence, but at others he’d back himself into a corner and brick it up.

Days later he came in from town, put a pizza in the oven and announced that he wanted to join the army.

Over my dead body, Louise swore to herself. She hadn’t spent sixteen years raising him to have him go off and get blown to bits by a roadside bomb in a godforsaken desert. ‘Thought you didn’t like people bossing you about,’ she’d said. ‘That’s all you get in the army: rules and regulations.’

‘So?’

‘C’mon, Luke, you’re not exactly hot on authority, are you?’

‘What you saying?’ He was truculent, ready for an argument. ‘Someone’s got to fight for their country.’

She stifled a sigh, didn’t want to alienate him, wondered where the sudden interest in soldiering had come from. ‘What’s the attraction?’

‘Best training in the world, isn’t it?’

Then what? Kill people, be killed. Eight years ago, Louise had dragged him on the anti-Iraq war march, him and Ruby both. He’d loved it, shouted himself hoarse, enjoying the novelty of mass protest, the whiff of disobedience, transgression, marching down the middle of the road between the police lines, waving the flag he’d made. Ruby had cried, fearful that planes would come and bomb them any minute. Not understanding that this was a war where only the children of the ‘enemy’ would lose life and limb. An unequal and illegal war fought for duplicitous reasons.

‘Grandad was in the army,’ he said. Meaning Louise’s grandad, his great-grandad.

‘That was different, he was called up. He’d not have wanted you fighting in Afghanistan. He was a communist, I’ve told you that. He’d have known exactly what it was down to: oil and economics.’

While Louise’s mother had been roaming the world entertaining passengers in her glittery gowns and long black gloves, Louise and her dad Phil had lived with her grandparents. Grandad was a docker, a union man and a lifelong Party member. The only paper that came into the house was the Morning Star . Louise’s dad was a liberal, if pressed. Wishy-washy, according to Grandad. The house rang with political arguments and debates. Louise got dragged along to fund-raisers for Cuba and Angola, or commandeered by her grandad to give out leaflets for pickets during the miners’ strike, but once grown, she’d never joined a party or got involved. Her political activity ran to voting every election, paying union dues, even though the agency wasn’t unionized, attending the occasional demonstration and peeling racist stickers off lamp posts.

Maybe the army thing was a reaction against her and her views. Luke rebelling, thinking of something to put her back up. She decided not to give him any more ammunition. ‘Okay,’ she said steadily, ‘how about this – you still want to join up in a year’s time and you can go.’

He frowned at her, wary. ‘Why wait?’

‘You’re only sixteen, you’ll need my consent if you’re under eighteen, but I’d like you to give something else a go first.’

‘Such as?’ He leaned back on the chair, rocking it on its back legs, arms folded.

‘A trade – you choose.’

‘Not college,’ he insisted.

‘An apprenticeship. You’d be earning. There’s usually day release.’

‘What?’

‘You do a day a week at college, the rest on the job.’

‘You just don’t want me to join the army,’ he objected.

‘No, I don’t.’ She kept her voice level. ‘But I can’t stop you, once you’re old enough. People die, Luke, they get injured, lose limbs; or they get stressed out, can’t settle again. Why would I want that for you?’

‘I won’t change my mind,’ he said, his eyes fixing on hers. His lovely fine brown eyes

She nodded. ‘But give it till your next birthday. I’ll ask around, see if anyone knows anyone.’ She waited, tense. Hoping to God she could find an opening. Half the kids in Manchester were on the dole, a lost generation, they were saying. What would Grandad make of this? Cameron and cronies finishing Thatcher’s job. Privatizing everything that moved, dismantling the public services, the NHS, crushing the north, where no one ever voted Tory, penalizing the poor.