Doug Johnstone: Hit and run

They shouldn’t have been going this way. Billy wasn’t even sure where they were. He definitely shouldn’t have been driving. He’d lost count of the number of beetroot schnapps he’d downed. That was the problem with free drink. And the pills Charlie gave them. What were they again? Charlie liked to throw medical names around to seem clever — Zetran, Pervitin, Oramorph. They sounded like aliens from an obscure sci-fi movie.

Whatever the pills were, they were kicking in now. He felt a rush, his eyeballs throbbing, pulse hard in his throat. The tips of his fingers on the steering wheel tingled like after a snowball fight. The left side of his face was numb. He glanced at Zoe in the passenger seat. Beautiful, cool Zoe. Black fringe, pale skin, hippie-chic dress. She reached over and squeezed his thigh and it felt like her fingers were moulding the clay of his leg, squeezing down to the bone beneath.

He tried to concentrate on driving. Where the hell were they? Which way was home? It wasn’t easy to focus with Charlie yammering away in the back.

‘Beetroot schnapps, honest to fuck.’ Charlie slapped the back of Billy’s seat.

‘I know,’ Zoe said, shaking her head. ‘Awful.’

Billy belched and tasted rancid earthiness in his mouth. He pictured the blood-red shot glasses clustered on trays, sexy Aryan models handing them out. Some expensive re-branding of an Austrian peasant drink in an ultra-cool warehouse in Leith. It was nuts the freebies Zoe got through her work.

They never usually went out in Leith, they were Southside these days. They’d staggered out of the glass and concrete box fifteen minutes ago and looked at the wasteland around them. They were lost. The guy on the door warned them police were doing random drink-drive stops on Leith Walk and the Bridges, and they should go a different way.

How had Billy ended up behind the wheel? He looked round the car. Zoe’s head was wobbling and her eyelids flickered. Charlie was blethering loudly to himself, smacking the roof of the Micra to emphasise his point. His thick arms were tense and his eyes wild.

Billy saw a roundabout ahead and crunched the gears.

‘Hey, watch Mum’s car, Bro.’ Charlie ruffled Billy’s hair. Billy hated it when he did that. They still called it Mum’s car, even though she’d been dead five years.

He took the roundabout too fast, swerving in an arc then heading straight on, jostling them all in their seats. They drove past a pond. He realised where they were. A ruined chapel loomed over them on the left, the well-manicured lawn of Holyrood Park on the other side. They’d be home in a few minutes. Up Queen’s Drive, hang a couple of rights past the Commie Pool and they’d be in Rankeillor Street in no time.

The dashboard clock said 2.37 a.m. The streets were empty. Edinburgh in July, the majority of students had fucked off and the festival pricks were yet to arrive.

Charlie’s fist thudded on his shoulder as they approached another roundabout.

‘Hey, Bro, when are you gonna start getting sweet freebies like your lady here?’

Charlie had already mentioned this several times tonight in the warehouse bar. Either he didn’t remember or he didn’t give a shit and was just on the wind-up.

‘Well?’

Billy felt like sighing but laughed instead. Must be the chemicals slewing through his blood cells and synapses.

‘Crime reporting isn’t the heady heights of lifestyle journalism.’ Billy couldn’t help himself, his voice made sarcastic quote marks around the last two words.

‘Hey.’ Zoe swayed round to punch him on the arm. ‘I didn’t see you refusing any beetroot schnapps earlier.’

‘Yeah, or my fucking pills,’ Charlie said.

Another freebie, somehow liberated from the ERI where Charlie worked.

Billy shook his head. ‘The only freebie I’m likely to get is an invite to a crime scene.’

‘That would be cool,’ Charlie shouted, bouncing in the back seat. He put on a thick accent. ‘There’s been a murder.’

Since Billy started a month ago, it had been constant jibes about Taggart and Rebus. The truth of trainee crime reporting so far was astonishingly mundane, but Billy liked the methodical clarity of the work, trying to create order from the mess of real life.

They were climbing a slope now, Salisbury Crags towering on the left, trees lining the road on the other side. It felt like the countryside. Houses and shops and pubs were two minutes away, but it seemed like the middle of nowhere.

‘Hey, check out the stars,’ Charlie said, leaning forward.

‘Hey, check out the stars,’ Zoe repeated in a stoner voice.

Charlie laughed. ‘Fuck you, droopy drawers.’

‘Fuck you right back.’ Zoe threw him a flirty look.

Billy felt a rush of chemical love for his girlfriend and brother, the drugs thrusting his feelings into the stratosphere. They were a regular Three Musketeers, one for all, and all for one.

Zoe craned her neck to look through the windscreen. ‘Actually, that is kind of beautiful.’

Billy laughed. ‘Jesus, what was in those pills?’

‘Better if you don’t know,’ Charlie said. He liked to be secretive about the drugs he pilfered from A amp;E cabinets, but Billy trusted him. Charlie was his big brother after all, the one person supposed to look after him. Charlie wouldn’t let him come to any harm.

Anyway, the pills they took were pretty predictable. Uppers to get the night going, opiates, benzodiazepines or barbiturates to come down. Judging by the buzz, they were on something speedy, maybe MDMA as well. Methamphetamine and mephedrone?

Charlie was looking out his passenger window now, trees blurring past, his face pointing up. ‘Seriously, that sky is fucking amazing. You gotta check it out, Bro.’

Zoe laughed and looked at Billy and he smiled back at her. The road bent round in a slow curve as they climbed the hill. Billy leaned forward so his chin was almost touching the steering wheel and gazed upwards.

The moon hung there, surrounded by a whirl of stars, needles of light puncturing the deep violet sky. The Crags to their left were like a rocket launch pad jutting into the expanse of glimmering life.

Billy turned his head to look the other way. There was an almighty jolt in the car and a monstrous crashing noise, something solid and heavy smashing into metal and glass, followed by a ripple of sound across their roof and the weighty thunk of whatever it was landing on the road behind them.

Billy lunged for the brake. His left temple cracked against the windscreen and his chest pressed into the steering wheel. The car glided for a moment, its nose pointing towards an embankment and a small copse of trees, then it righted itself in a screech of brakes and the crunch of tyres on tarmac. The car lurched to a stop and Billy was thudded into his seat as the engine stalled.

The smell of burning brake pads and rubber. The tick and creak of the engine.

Billy felt a bursting pain above his left eye, and a deeper, pulsing ache through his neck and shoulders. His fingers and toes were fizzing. He rubbed his temple and felt a thick lump under the skin. He cricked his neck and a blade of pain shot through his upper body.

He looked round. Zoe had both hands pressed against the dashboard, her eyes closed.

‘You OK?’ he said.

She nodded.

He tried to clear his head. He removed Zoe’s hands from the dashboard and felt her body relax a little. She turned to him, her eyes slits.

‘You sure you’re all right?’

She nodded again.

Billy turned to the back of the car, his neck aching. Charlie was sprawled across the seats. No seat belt on. Lucky he hadn’t been sitting forward. He was righting himself in a flustered mess of limbs.