Fiona McFarlane: The High Places: Stories

‘What’s wrong with this cat?’ said David.

‘Urinary tract.’

‘I know that. But what’s wrong with it?’

Sarah grew defensive on behalf of Sheba.

‘He can’t help it.’

‘Why call a tomcat Sheba?’

‘They let their kid name it,’ said Sarah. ‘It’s the name of a brand of cat food. It uses real cuts of meat rather than by-products.’

‘Crazy.’

‘Don’t,’ said Sarah.

‘It’s crazy. It’s like your mum naming your brother Leslie and your dad doing nothing to stop it.’

‘It’s a family name. It’s a boy’s name! And I don’t want to think about my mother. Right now I’m pretending she doesn’t exist. I left my phone at home,’ said Sarah. ‘If she calls, I don’t want to tell her we’re married, and I don’t want not to have told her.’

‘So just don’t answer.’

‘I’d have to answer. I couldn’t not answer. And then — you know.’ She spread her hands in order to indicate her predicament and returned them to the steering wheel.

‘Then — disaster.’

She hit at him with her left hand.

‘Watch the road!’ he said, laughing. She watched the road.

‘My first drive since getting married,’ she said.

‘First this, first that,’ he said.

A car pulled out of a dark side road and turned directly in front of them. Sarah veered to the left but still met the back corner of this car; trees moved in front of the windscreen, tyres made a long noise against the road, Sarah and David jolted over the grass and stones of the verge, they hit a low wooden fence and felt the engine splutter and stall. And as this took place they were aware of something more urgent occurring behind them: the spin of the other car, its dive into a roadside tree. Sarah and David remained still for a moment, preparing for an impact that didn’t come.

‘Fuck,’ said Sarah, looking back down the dim road. The muted lights of tiny Cambridge hung orange at the bottom of the sky behind them. The car radio continued to play.

‘You’re all right?’ asked David, but that was obvious. He opened his door and stepped out. The other car reminded him of a cartoon dog, excessively punched, whose nose has folded into its face for a brief and hilarious moment before relaxing out again, essentially unhurt. He watched Sarah run toward the car and ran after her. The driver’s door had opened in the crash and the driver sat, his legs pinioned, his right arm hanging, and his head turned away as if he were embarrassed to have been found in this position. He wasn’t moving.

‘He’s not dead,’ said Sarah, but couldn’t have explained why she was so sure.

She knelt beside the car and held the man’s wrist, and when she released it she wiped her fingers against her skirt. David leaned against the tree and passed his hand across his face. He felt the air press in around him and he wanted somehow to press it back. Sarah had found the man’s wallet on the front passenger seat.

‘His whole name is just three first names,’ she said, inspecting his licence. ‘Ralph Walter Ronald. He’s eighty.’

Sarah looked carefully at this Mr Ronald, acknowledging his age and misfortune. She felt that his awkward name had lifted him out of a time in which she’d played no part and deposited him here, in his crushed car.

‘We need to call someone,’ she said.

‘No phone,’ said David.

‘Where’s yours?’

‘In my suit, probably.’

‘Shit!’

‘You left yours too,’ said David.

‘Deliberately,’ said Sarah.

‘Which way to the nearest house?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Forward or back?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘This is your drive to work. You drive this way almost every day.’

‘It’s dark. I haven’t been paying attention.’

‘All right, all right,’ said David. He realised he was pulling at the roots of his hair. People really do that, then, he thought, in a crisis — pull their hair. ‘I’ll try the car. It seems like ages since we saw a house.’

‘Nothing in England is ever far apart.’

It began to rain, very lightly. The rain seemed to rise out of the ground and lift up into their faces, a cheerful mist.

‘All right, try the car,’ said Sarah. ‘I’ll sit with him. His car won’t blow up, will it? Or is that just in movies?’

‘It would have blown up by now. Wouldn’t it?’

They stood helpless in their combined ignorance, considering Mr Ronald’s car and Mr Ronald trapped within it. The passenger seat was whole and healthy, although the accordion-fold of the front of the car left no leg room. Sarah brushed glass from the seat and slid in beside Mr Ronald, tucking her legs beneath her.

David crossed to their car with mid-city caution. It wouldn’t start; it would never start when he was late for a seminar or a critical train, it required tender solicitations after particularly steep hills. Of course it wouldn’t start now, when his need was desperate. Perhaps it was finally beyond repair — and then there would be the panic of finding money for a new car. David tried again. It wouldn’t start and wouldn’t start. He ran back to Sarah.

‘No good,’ he said. ‘Fuck it. I’ll run. I’m sure I’ll find someone. Another car.’

‘Go forward, not back,’ said Sarah. ‘I think there’s a petrol station. God, I have no idea of distances on foot.’

‘Sweetheart,’ David said, leaning farther into Mr Ronald’s car, ‘it wasn’t your fault.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘It was his fucking fault. But, darling, I’m a little drunk.’

She watched him comprehend this. He was drunker than she was. His eyes filled briefly. There was a scar above his right eye, half hidden in the eyebrow, left by childhood chickenpox. He often walked through their apartment on his toes, adding to his height, bending down over her as she lay on the couch. He would put his head on her stomach and look up at her face, and when he did this he reminded her of an ostrich.

‘I’ll be back soon,’ he said. ‘It’s going to be all right, and I love you. Don’t be scared.’

He bent down to kiss her, bent his long, beautiful bird neck, then began to run.

Sarah looked at Mr Ronald. He wore corduroy trousers and a neat shirt, a woollen vest, and bulky glasses over thick eyebrows. He lay with his head thrown back and to the side, facing Sarah, and his facial expression was bemused and acquiescing. She felt again at his wrist. His legs were caught up with the buckled car and it was impossible to tell what damage had been done. She sat on her side, looking into his face, and felt the faint breath that hung around his mouth. It smelled like a doctor’s waiting room: just-extinguished cigarettes and something human rising up through disinfectant. She heard David try the car again, and she heard the car fail. Then his footsteps on the road. Then nothing. Sarah felt loneliness fall over her, and fear.

‘The Queen of Sheba,’ she said.

(Sheba paused in his tiger-walk, his head lifted toward the surgery door, waiting. No one came through the door, and he dropped his head again, letting out a low small sound that startled the macaws opposite into frantic cries.)

Sarah was married and no one knew but herself and David, Robbie and Clare. Her mother didn’t know. She wondered now about the secrecy — how childish it seemed. They only wanted privacy. They wanted a new visa for Sarah, and they didn’t want to bother about the fuss that went with weddings. The last of the gin wound itself up against the side of Sarah’s head that tilted against the seat; it hung there in a vapour, then seemed to drain away. Mr Ronald’s burnt breath came in little gusts against her face. Was he breathing more, or less? Sarah pulled the door behind her as far as it would go in order to feel safe, and to guard against the slight chill in the wind. This is summer, she thought. You wait for it all year, shoulders pushed up against the cold and the dark, and this is your gift: the sun and the bells, the smoke over Jesus Green, geese on the river. A midday wedding. A cat’s catheter and Mr Ronald by the side of the road.