Claire Seeber - Never Tell

At bedtime I realised Effie’s efforts at breakfast meant we were out of milk, forcing me to unearth a reluctant James from the studio. Leaving the kids glued to Alice in Wonderland , I drove to the garage at the end of the lane.

Pulling my cardigan over my head, I dashed through the driving rain to the kiosk, plucking a carton of milk from the fridge. As I joined the queue, there was a sudden screech of tyres on wet tarmac and a collective gasp. A small sleek silver sports car had taken the corner too fast, swerving to miss a motorbike, mounting the grass verge outside the garage and coming to a juddering halt inches from the Entry sign.

She looked like the mermaid from Alicia’s book of myths, the young woman who flung herself from the car, and she was wailing. Her soaked green dress flowed round her body like seaweed, her face streaked with black kohl, her long hair dark and tangled under the fluorescence of the petrol station forecourt. The rain drummed down and the queue shifted and muttered as one organism, succumbing en masse to horrified fascination – for a moment, I couldn’t drag my eyes from her either. I stared out of the kiosk window at this beautiful barefoot woman weaving unsteadily between the petrol pumps, the silver Porsche abandoned behind her, driver’s door flung wide. In this light it was hard to see where the rain ended and her tears began.

I looked away, discomfort palpable in my chest, gazing instead at the damp and rather dirty neck in front of me, its owner now halted in her laborious counting out of coppers as she too stared, the silver raindrops on her beanie glistening.

‘She’s pissed out of her head,’ the burly man in the next queue muttered. ‘She don’t know what she’s doing. Look at her.’

‘Someone should call the police,’ an elderly woman said, her whiskers twitching, her face a sagging mask of disapproval above her ill-fitting mac. ‘It’s a disgrace.’

The mermaid raised her face to the heavens and howled into the night, her words incoherent. There was something so primal in her voice that all the little hairs on my arms stood on end. I pulled my old cardigan tight around me and willed the cashier to hurry up.

‘You should call the police. They should, shouldn’t they?’ The man looked to me for approval as he folded his newspaper, but I found that I was speechless, as round-eyed as one of my own children.

When I looked back, the woman was falling. Her hands out before her to meet the ground, she crumpled like a wounded soldier until she was finally on her hands and knees, where she froze for a moment, head bowed. A car behind her sounded its horn irritably.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, pushing past a boy on a mountain bike gawping in the doorway. I hurried across the short distance to where she crouched, attempting now to pull herself up, doubled in half as if in pain.

‘Are you all right?’ I bent beside her. Her eyes seemed blind as she looked up at me.

A black Range Rover pulled up behind the Porsche, bumping up onto the grass, gleaming with rain and polish, braking just in time.

‘I …’ She wiped her face on her arm, smudging the streaming eye make-up further. She seemed slightly delirious.

‘Can you stand?’ I said, offering her my hand, trying quickly to assess what was wrong. ‘Are you ill?’

I was half aware of the Range Rover’s door opening, a tall fair man in a black windcheater jumping down now from the driver’s seat.

‘I – I’m not sure,’ she mumbled. Her hand was ice cold. ‘I don’t feel – I’m not—’

‘Maya,’ the man behind me said.

I turned.

‘Thank you,’ he said to me, but he was looking at her. He spoke with a faint Celtic burr that I couldn’t place. ‘I’ll take over now.’

Our eyes met briefly as I stood too fast, staggering very slightly. He put out a hand to me but I’d regained my balance so he turned back to the girl now, sliding his hand into hers, gently releasing mine. I stepped back. He had her now; supporting her, holding her upright. I thought I could smell lemon sherbet.

‘If you’re all right then …’ I backed away, ‘I’ll just—’

‘We’re fine, really. Thanks a lot.’ The fair man nodded at me. Under the artificial light, his eyes were frighteningly blue, his tousled hair sun-bleached like a surfer’s. ‘Ash is in the car, Maya. He’s been really worried. Let’s get you back home, OK?’ His tone was soothing, like he was coaxing a nervous animal into a cage.

Through the open car door I saw the shadowed passenger lean forward and pull the cigarette lighter from the dashboard. I hesitated for a second, and then I ran back to the kiosk before I got any more wet.

The unnerved cashier was still muttering to her colleague about what to do and the burly man in his smelly red anorak was still loudly demanding someone call the police when another collective groan went up. I turned to see the girl collapse again, and now another man was by her side, dark-skinned like her, dressed in an expensive navy coat. The fair man stepped back.

The dark man pulled her up with gentle force and for a moment she hesitated, pulling away. He said something to her, taking her chin in his hand and making her look at him. Her make-up was streaming down her face in rivulets as she gazed at him, and she seemed to be listening. Eventually she stopped resisting and let herself sink into him, almost gratefully, her face in his shoulder as he guided her towards the big car like a docile child, ensuring she didn’t fall despite stumbling several times.

The girl in front of me had finally pocketed her 10 Rothmans. ‘Blimey,’ she said, pulling her beanie down protectively, ready for the downpour. ‘You don’t see that every day.’

‘You can say that again. Bloody foreigners. Just the milk?’ My cashier held her hand out. ‘Eighty-four pence, please.’

When I looked again, the girl like a maddened mermaid was being swallowed by the Range Rover. The dark man shut the door behind her and turned with a graceful movement to his audience in the kiosk. He smiled politely, bowed his head to us in a courtly gesture. Instinctively I stepped back.

He climbed into the Porsche. With a screech of tyres the Sweeney would have been proud of, both vehicles were quickly swallowed up by the night.

And then I went home, put the milk in the fridge, checked the children, fed the cat and finally went to bed alone again, I found that the woman’s image was imprinted on the back of my lids. And even as I fell into sleep, I couldn’t shake the uncomfortable feeling that the second man, the man called Ash, had been less guiding her towards the vehicle than forcing her.

And there was something else, something deeper down, something clicking, whirring into place, like the levers on a deadlock that are not quite true yet. Images from the day: the mysterious Kattan, the MP’s wife so outraged, James, all newly tense. These images fought something I couldn’t quite access, a memory buried deep. A memory fighting to the surface.

The vague city … veiled in mist … A place much too good for you ever to have much to do with .

Jude the Obscure , Thomas Hardy

In the beginning …

In the beginning there was just me. And then they found me.

Had I known I was being chosen for such immoral ends, I like to think I would have declined the invitation, that I would have made good my escape before it was too late – though I fear that my belief only comes from the beauty of hindsight – and anyway, theory is too hard now to distinguish from fact. But if I had ever guessed it would all end in tragedy and death, I would have stayed at home.

But I didn’t know. I was a true innocent when I began.