Tessa Hadley - Accidents in the Home

They had been playing music on the car stereo; they were all singing along to “Everybody Likes Saturday Night” and “I’m Gonna Mail Myself to You.” Clare had always had a superstitious anxiety about the feel-good exhilaration of music on the car stereo; when she first learned to drive she had vividly imagined how after an accident the music might play on in a kitsch irony over tangled metal and bodies. But this moment of family togetherness had caught her out and she had forgotten to fear it. Also, she was concentrating as well as singing: it was dark and it was raining hard, she had the wipers going at full speed and she was leaning forward over the wheel, frowning ahead to make out the road, a winding country road she had driven only once or twice before. They had not met any other traffic but if they did she would have to reverse, the road was too narrow for two cars to pass. She was thinking that this was an adventure, an adventure they would remember.

The silence after the timing belt went and the car died was an absolute transformation. The girls in the back waited untroubled for her to start up again; but Coco in the front seat suspected disaster at once, and after she turned the ignition to restart and got that dreadful snarled-up grinding noise he was quite certain. He turned his head — which was otherwise always straining in slightly tense eagerness to look ahead, even in the dark — in a quick assessing glance at her, gauging her reaction, probably her competence.

— Hazards on? he suggested lightly.

Clare put her hazard lights on.

— Jesus Christ, she said. I have no idea where we are.

They were nowhere. They were still a long way from the cottage. They had been driving for something like ten minutes since they went through the last village. (Or was it five? Or fifteen?) She hadn’t been aware of any houses at the side of the road since then, she didn’t even really know what landscape she was driving through, only that the road had wound up and then down again and that the tunnel of her headlights on high beam had swung at the turns in the road onto the slick gray trunks of beech hedges, sometimes overgrown into trees. Now she couldn’t see anything beyond the little cell of blinking light around the car, which was filled with slanting pewter-colored needles of rain. They had stopped on a gentle slope, pointing downward.

— We’ll have to call someone, she said. We’ll have to use the mobile phone. We’ll call the AA, or maybe the police. I hope it works here.

Lily, catching on, moaned softly at the idea of the police.

— Lo Batt, Coco said. (She could hear that he said it in the spelling in which it appeared on the little screen of the phone.) Low batteries. I tried to call Granny earlier.

— Now why do you waste it? she spat at him. I told you not to use it precisely because it’s supposed to be for an emergency like this. This is what I keep it for, not for messing about making unnecessary calls.

— I didn’t. It was Lo Batt before I tried. I couldn’t make the call. It needs recharging. You forgot to recharge it.

— It’s always my fucking fault, she said, as if he was a grown-up.

He was adjusting position nervously inside his seat belt, shuffling skinny legs so that he could sit on his hands inserted flat from the sides, staring out ahead through the windscreen again, although there was only the long tunnel of rain splinters to see.

— I’m sorry. I’m just panicking. Trying to think of the sensible thing to do.

They tried the phone but the batteries were down of course. She tried the engine again. Horrible.

— You could put it into gear, Coco suggested. Then let it freewheel down without the engine. We might see a house. We could look out on either side for lights while you steered.

Clare considered this. It sounded like a good idea; it sounded like something Bram might have tried. I can’t, she said. I don’t dare. I don’t know if it would be all right. What if I couldn’t stop it?

He shrugged. Why wouldn’t you be able to stop it? Your brakes wouldn’t stop working, just because you didn’t have the engine on.

— I don’t know. I don’t dare. What if a car came the other way and couldn’t hear us, or I couldn’t stop?

— What if we hit an animal because it didn’t hear us coming? Lily said, panicking. A deer or something?

Coco dropped his head back on the rest and raised his eyes in exasperated incredulity. Oh, Lord! I suppose the woods round here are just packed full of deaf deer.

* * *

CLARE IMAGINED leaving them in the car while she went to look for a house. She imagined herself killed on a road, and her body buffeted around by oblivious traffic in the dark like a sodden doll while the children waited patiently, bravely, passing the hours. (Long ago she had read somewhere about this really happening to someone and had stored it in her archive of horrors.) She imagined coming back to the car with help and, as she turned the corner, seeing a door torn open, the car empty. She imagined how if they all stayed huddled under their duvets waiting for morning in the car, some swift vehicle might come upon them out of the dark without warning and have no time to stop. (In the last moments as the engine died she had managed to steer onto a little verge against a hedge, but more than half of the car still stuck out into the narrow road, and there probably was not room for anything to pass.)

She decided that they must all get out of the car and walk back to the village she thought she remembered driving through; at least she found a good torch (Bram’s) in the glove compartment. It was better opening the car door and standing up in the windy wet night than sitting inside thinking about it. In the few moments while she fished out raincoats, hats, and gloves from the boot, her hair went into soaked quills, piping water down her cheeks; water spattered across the protesting girls when she climbed into the backseat to force Rose’s resistant arms into the sleeves of her coat. She stuffed sweets and drinks into their pockets, found her purse and checkbook, ordered the children out onto the road, left the hazard lights on, and locked the car. Already Lily and Rose were crying at the dark and the rain. Looking behind as they set out she felt a kind of outrage at herself on behalf of righteous motorists: at her car blocking the road, flashing its orange lights (how long would they last?). She felt as if she fled the scene of some error, irresponsibly; as if there must be some superior sane solution that she was incapable of seeing.

* * *

COCO WENT FIRST, with the torch; Lily stumbled after; Clare carried Rose. Water was running in a little stream down the edge of the road where they walked; the night was full of the noise of rushing water. Soon Clare felt the water in her socks inside her boots. It was dark, but once their eyes adjusted they could make out each other’s shapes and the bulk of the hedge against the sky; perhaps there was a moon behind the clouds. Coco and Lily trudged ahead in a mute stoicism. Straggling wet stems from the hedge smacked across them; a bramble ripped Clare’s cheek and then snagged on Rose’s tights. As soon as they were around a bend in the road and out of sight of the lights of the car, Clare was convinced the whole expedition was insane. The village might be five miles away, or ten. There might be a house five hundred yards the other way down the road, its lights hidden by a dip in the land. Rose was so heavy. Clare wondered how long she would be able to carry her: another five minutes, or ten?

She stopped.

— Oh, God, she said. Are we doing the right thing?

Pale blobs of faces turned to look toward her.

— We could have just waited in the car for someone to come along and help us, said Coco.