Lonie55

Audrey left for work earlier than usual. Darkness squatted in the December air, not yielding to daylight. Her head felt top-heavy and face smudged and lined as a charcoal drawing. Houses on either side of the road merged with street lights and shadows. The headlights of the Hillman Imp picked the frost on the road out like mosaics of spun sugar and the tires scrunched on and on chewing mile after mile. At times Audrey’s thoughts wandered so far the world outside was an aquarium filled with the fish like flashing red and orange taillights of other cars. Phil Lynott’s jangling guitar on the radio brought her rudely back to the present placement of her hands on the wheel and the Hillman skidded a little. Thinking was a physical ordeal tugging cruelly on some unused sinew whilst her brain felt like the fluttering wings of a pigeon in a wet cardboard box.

The lorry changing lanes coming out of the Clyde Tunnel and trying to gain traction on the slope at Whiteinch flipped Audrey’s Hillman up in the air like a burger. A Ford Granade and Allegro behind her pushed in like grappling hooks of screeching and scrunching metal. The time for thinking had passed. As Audrey turned over and over the sky grew another colour and the sun a myopic watery eye picked out the trail of debris that stretched from South Street and plugged the two lanes of the tunnel with howls of car horns and bent scattered pins of metal that had been cars.

‘Are you all right little miss?’ A voice sprouted a fireman’s head. His helmet was angled sideways and poked into a tight space where the side window should have been. The car had concertinaed down and landed on its roof. ‘We’ll need to cut you out.’ His voice was light, as if this was an everyday occurrence, like claiming an old tom-cat from a tree.

‘Fuel leak.’ A shout came from behind him.

An explosion like a heated G-force wind passed through Audrey and the car moved crabwise sideways. The fireman was decapitated. His head spun and rolled to a spot in the twisted metal where they were forced to look at each other. It seemed to her that he tried to smile, to reassure her, but it was no good. Black smoke engulfed both of them, filled her lungs so that her twitching ceased and she began to drown, like a fish on dry land.
***

Audrey though she was dreaming when she opened her eyes. Lonie was sitting discretely smoking on one side of her hospital bed, the blue stretch curtains that ran on runners around the bed at his back and an unopened bottle of Lucosade on the bedside cabinet beside him, and mother was sitting straight backed on the side opposite him, with her back to the bed next to them. Lonie’s feet kicked the bin as he stubbed his fag out and tried to smile. He’d smartened himself up. His hair looked shiny and his face shaved clean as a bar of soap. A double-breasted jacket had taken the place of his old coat. Audrey looked up at the cabinet, some kind of rough –neck collar pressing and nipped at her collarbone, but she could smell the roses, and the crimson flame of pursed buds falling out of a clear plastic glass for some reason made her sob.

‘Do you need something darling?’ Grace leaned across and patted her daughters hand and anxiously looked around the row of beds for a nurse.

Audrey clicked her tongue as if practicing before speaking. ‘I’d like some water.’ Her voice sounded croaky, not her own, but she felt hollow, brittle boned and weak. A metal stand stood guard at the side of her bed, with clear plastic bags and plastic line running into her arms felt as if it had been nailed on.

Lonie stood up glad to have something to do with his hands. He found a plastic glass on the top shelf of the cabinet and a beaker of water, with a fumbly plastic lid on it pushed to the back and hidden by the overflow of the curtain. Audrey’s mother watched him pour the water. As he leaned across the bed to let Audrey sip the drink Grace stood up and snatched the plastic glass out of his hand, almost spilling water on the creamy white bed.

‘Oh for goodness sake the water’s got dust in it and it’s warm.’ Grace looked at Lonie as if he were to blame. She took a sip to confirm her suspicions and her nose and mouth shunted together in common disapproval. The glass of tepid water was placed carefully at the foot of Audrey’s bed where it could do no more harm. Her neck turned one way and then the other as she searched for the miscreants of this state of affairs. The heels of her flat black shoes squeaked as she hurried away towards the nursing station in the hallway to complain.

Lonie loomed above Audrey, his pallor pale as the moon and leaned over even more, so she could see his face without having to stretch her neck. He’d sat day after day at the side of Audrey’s bed with this terrible woman, her mother, saying little or nothing and now he felt suddenly as tongue-tied as her daughter. ‘Ah thought you were goin’ to die.’ He looked towards the wedged open double door of the ward behind him and for her mother to appear, before correcting himself. ‘We thought you were going to die.’ There was a lump in his throat. ‘And Ah couldn’t bear that.’ The rustle and bustle behind him alerted him that her mother was back, but he leaned across close enough to kiss and whispered once more ‘Ah couldn’t bear that.’

Lonie squeezed past a curtain rail angled like a trap and a nurse, who looked about thirteen wearing white sandshoes, standing at the foot of the bed. A solemn faced Grace bent to retrieve the offending glass of water and did not waste time looking at him as he left the ward. The disinfected smell of sick people clung to his throat as he made his way towards the lifts on the fourth floor of The Western Infirmary.
***

Audrey was home sitting upstairs in her room, with the bottom window open to let in some air. Craig was knocking blocks of coloured wood together on the carpet and making broom, broom noises. They fitted neatly into a square, but he didn’t seem to mind they wouldn’t. She was better. The doctors said so. At first it had been difficult. Craig had no way of understanding how weary she was. For him it was a holiday and after the first day of false bravado and cheerfulness her mother had let her get on with it. After all he was her imbecile child. In a way that was better. It let her focus on something, someone else. But she was suddenly attacked by the nervousness, the spasm of terror that blighted her life. It was a delicate balance between control and surrender. Her heart raced; her jaw clenched and the fireman’s face was smiling at her and her legs would have given way if she hadn’t been seated. She tried to control her face and lips so she didn’t sob, so that Craig didn’t turn around and start sobbing with her. Her world was the descending passage of a lament and her mouth went from breath to breath. Suddenly she couldn’t help it and she was crying so much that her throat ached. Craig stood by and watched. Then he too was swept up into her arms and joined the maelstrom of living and mourning for a life that had gone.