C.J. Cooke - The Blame Game

‘Yes,’ I say, confused.

‘Why your little girl go out the window?’ He makes a motion with his hand. It takes a second for me to realise he’s demonstrating Saskia being catapulted out of the windscreen of the car.

‘We were wearing seatbelts,’ I say, but my mind turns to the last time we pulled over to let Saskia go to the loo. Did I clip her seatbelt in? She was capable of doing it herself and I usually left her to it, but the rental car was old, a 1999 hatchback with tight, irritating seatbelts that she complained about. Guilt rivets me as I think that I didn’t check it. If I had, she might not be in coma.

‘You were driving, yes?’ he says.

I nod. ‘Yes.’

‘Why your husband not drive?’

‘The other vehicle drove straight into us,’ I say in a brittle voice. ‘It wouldn’t have mattered who was driving. He swerved into our lane, right at the last minute …’

He leans forward across the desk, his hands clasped, and gives me a murky look. ‘You buy drugs here in Belize?’

‘ Drugs? ’

Superintendent Caliz addresses Vanessa in Kriol. She falters, confused.

‘We were told that someone has been arrested,’ Vanessa interrupts, addressing him. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I had thought the police of all people would want to help, that the Superintendent would see the situation for what it is and offer to protect us. Michael lies unconscious in the hospital. Saskia is seventy miles away, in a hospital surrounded by strangers. Reuben and I are completely alone.

‘What’s he saying?’ I ask, and she hesitates before answering me.

‘They’ve arrested the driver of the van that crashed into your car,’ she says slowly.

I take a deep breath. ‘Good.’

But she shakes her head, as though I’ve misunderstood. ‘He is saying the crash was deliberate. The driver says he was paid to do this.’

A noise escapes my mouth. Every suspicion I’ve had has been correct, all my instincts ringing true. Someone was watching us. Someone wants us dead.

‘So, you’re completely sure,’ Vanessa asks me again. ‘No drugs purchased in Mexico. No reason for anyone to try and harm your family.’

‘This has nothing to do with drugs!’ I shout, the strength of my anger surprising everyone in the room, including me. ‘I told you! Someone was watching us at the beach hut and the next day a man crashed into our car. You say you’ve arrested him. Who paid him to crash into our car?’

Superintendent Caliz leans back in his chair, laces his fingers together and barks something in Kriol.

Vanessa processes whatever information he has shared before tilting her head to mine, her brow folded in confusion.

‘What is your husband’s name?’ she asks.

‘Michael,’ I say, confused. ‘Why?’

‘Michael Pengilly?’

‘Yes, Michael. Why? What has that got to do with the man who crashed into us?’

My voice rises again in desperation. She repeats this to Superintendent Caliz, then listens intently as he replies in Kriol. The air is suddenly loud with suspicion and menace. I had expected to feel safe here but instead I feel in even more danger than I did at the hospital.

Vanessa fixes me with a dark stare. She chooses her words carefully. ‘The van driver claims your husband paid him to crash into your car to kill you all and make it look like an accident.’

Her words are like a black hole, sucking me into it cell by cell, until all that’s left of me is a scream.

It’s a shock to the system to be in a car again, right after the crash. I break into a cold sweat as we move through the streets, pushing through crowds of people – donkeys, too, and I swear some guy had an orangutan back there – and then a flood of cars that veer all over the place. The driver tells me there are no road lanes in this town. Looks like there are barely any roads either, at least not of the tarmac variety, despite the fact that there appears to be a car-to-human ratio of eleven-to-one. Dust rises from the tyres, making it impossible to see or breathe. Like driving through a sandstorm. The driver smokes weed, has some funky music playing loudly. He tries to strike up a conversation, asks if I’m a medical student at the hospital. I say yes and try to conceal the lie in my voice.

There’s a white phone charger trailing into the back seat over a couple of Coke cans. It’s a match for my phone. I say, ‘Can I use this?’

‘Yes, of course,’ he says. I plug in my phone and within minutes the screen flashes white. I scroll through my photographs, past videos taken by Reuben. I click on one of them and find it’s of the bookstore, pre-fire. The sight of it pierces me. His face appears large on the screen as he props the phone against the leg of a table, plucks a book off the shelf and then sits on the floor, cross-legged, filming himself reading. A pair of legs appears next to him after a few minutes. I watch as he glances up at whoever’s standing there, then goes back to reading. It must be a customer. She’s carrying a Sainsbury’s shopping bag. She steps over him, like he’s part of the furniture, then turns to him and snaps, ‘Why are you just sitting there in the middle of the floor? Can’t you see people are trying to get past?’

Reuben lifts his head and stares at her blankly before returning to his book.

‘So rude,’ the woman says off-screen, and instantly I feel an old urge to shout, He’s not rude, he’s autistic! Helen and I once said we ought to have that emblazoned on T-shirts and wear them whenever we went out as a family. One day Saskia came home from school and said her teacher had said she was very artistic. Saskia was quick to correct the teacher. ‘I told her that doesn’t mean I’m rude and ignorant, Mummy. Artistic people are just as polite as neuro-typical people. Isn’t that right?’

We had a laugh at that one.

I scroll through his other videos, one of him playing Minecraft, another of him drawing. I know Reuben is an amazing boy. Despite society’s obsession with status, personas, the endless barrage of visual culture, we still place a ludicrous amount of trust in what we see. On the outside my boy isn’t normal, and that’s still a problem. Helen and I vowed a long time ago that we would fight for our children to feel at home in this dying, messed-up world, to find their place in it. We would protect them.

And that’s precisely what I intend to do now.