A note from the publisher

For Leeza, without whom Benjamin Tate would have lived and died in a long-forgotten short story.

PROLOGUE

There is a boy on a bench. The bench is beside a park and there is a skittish breeze blowing. It is poking about at the dropped and fallen things; litter and dry leaves. There is a girl sitting beside the boy. He is talking to her but he doesn’t believe what he is saying. He is only saying it because he thinks he should. But he doesn’t believe what he is saying and is starting to waver. She would only have to look at him. But she does not look at him. She looks at her phone and begins deleting all his pictures. It is 3.37pm.

A mile away there is a mother with a pushchair walking along the pavement. She is wearing stockings and a short skirt. An hour ago she was outside a door. She had rested her forehead and knuckles against it and couldn’t decide whether to go in or not. The child in the pushchair is wriggling. Something sharp is jabbing in her back and she keeps shifting in her seat. It is making it difficult for her mother to walk in a straight line, and she thinks vaguely of shopping trolleys.

Between her and the park there is a roundabout. Three roads lead into it. It used to be a quiet part of town with very few cars, but the town has grown quickly in recent years and the roundabout is always busy now. Local residents have argued for a pedestrian crossing, but there isn’t one yet.

The boy is still talking to the girl, but she decides now that she has heard enough and stands up and walks away. The boy watches her. How she fills her jeans. Even now he can’t help looking. I’m doing the right thing, he thinks, this is the right decision. He watches her until she crests a grassy slope and then vanishes behind it and then he watches the empty space where she was. He is a runner. He could catch up to her very easily if he wanted. But he stands up and walks to the car park. He will think back to this moment many times. He will think if he’d acted differently none of the bad things that are about to happen would have happened. It is 3.52pm.

The mother with the pushchair is two hundred yards from the roundabout. She is walking very slowly. She is still thinking about that door and the decision she made. She doesn’t know if she is happy or not. She doesn’t know if she is good or not. She thinks by now she should know fundamental things like this. ‘Sit still,’ she says to the top of her daughter’s head. Her daughter has blonde hair. It coils at the end like a ribbon drawn over a blade. Neither she nor her husband are blonde and she wonders if her hair will darken as she gets older. 3.58pm.

The boy is in his car now. He is driving along the road that leads to the roundabout. The park is on his right. There is a line of tall trees between the road and the park and the sun is low behind them, casting shadows like corpses across the asphalt. It’s his mother’s fault. She made him do this. He decides suddenly that he hates his mother and finds comfort in having somewhere to direct his anger. ‘I hate you,’ he shouts at the windscreen. He bangs the steering wheel and the car veers across the lines. A yellow car coming towards him takes evasive action. ‘I hate you,’ he shouts again. His anger is turning to rage and the rage is pressing down on his foot. 4.03pm.

The mother’s phone vibrates in her pocket and she takes it out to read the message. ‘It hurts, Mummy,’ the child says. It is the corner of a milk carton sticking out the top of a shopping bag in the hold beneath her. But the child doesn’t know that. She knows only that something is hurting her and she can’t get away from it. She shifts again and the rubber wheels of the pushchair splay outwards and it jars to a halt. Her mother is still looking at her phone and bumps into the back of it. ‘Ruby! Can you just sit still!’ She puts her phone away and immediately feels it vibrate again. She tries to ignore it but knowing there is another message makes her anxious. She begins to walk quicker. She is one hundred yards from the roundabout.

There is a bus stop just before the roundabout. The bus is late today and there are more people waiting than usual. They will be the nearest witnesses. Some will remain frozen to the spot, others will rush instinctively towards where the noise came from.

The boy’s car is off-white. He knows he is driving too fast but he is nineteen and he is upset. He is thinking of the girl and their last time. He is approaching the roundabout now. He can see it just in front of him. There are no cars there for once so he will just glide into it and let the curve slingshot him round.

The mother is also at the roundabout. Her phone keeps vibrating and the child is still squirming. She feels like she might scream. She closes her eyes but keeps walking. She feels the pushchair jolt and lurch as a wheel tips into the gutter. The child falls to the right and would have toppled out were she not strapped in.

The boy is still thinking about their last time when the kerb breaks free from the pavement and rushes at him. It moves much faster than he expects. He brakes hard and yanks at the steering wheel but his two-tonne car is an unstoppable force and won’t stop. A shape appears in front of him, an object seemingly conjured out of thin air. It flashes on the windscreen and then his momentum carries him right through it. The mother gasps. She pulls back on the handles, but the handles are no longer there. 4.07pm.

The people at the bus stop hear the sound. It is violent and sudden. It rips up the street and makes heads turn towards it. One of the men at the bus stop drops into a crouch. He is a veteran and loud bangs always startle him.

The car is not moving now. The only thing moving is a tiny plastic boot hanging from the rear-view mirror. It is swinging excitedly, toe-poking the cracked windscreen. Tap, tap, tap it goes against the glass. The boy – his name is Benjamin Tate – is sitting in his car and looking at the buckled bonnet in front of him. He doesn’t feel any pain. He takes the car out of gear and lifts the handbrake, and then reaches up and stills the plastic boot.

The mother with the pushchair no longer has the pushchair. She is sitting down on the pavement. Or has been thrown down. About five yards away there is a mess of fabric and plastic and steel. From somewhere within it a thin white liquid is seeping over the road in jagged streams. That is the milk. The mother begins crawling towards it. 4.08pm.

Nearby someone is crying. It is a child. Her eyes have been covered by an adult’s hands but she is still crying. The man at the bus stop who had crouched down is now running towards the roundabout. He is not looking at the steaming car, but the broken things left in its wake. He is unsure what he will do when he gets there.

Benjamin Tate gets out of his car and then falls immediately to the ground. His right kneecap has been split in two by the back of the ignition key and a bone in his lower leg has broken through the skin. It looks like the bottom of an upturned tree. He notices this objectively but still feels no pain and begins climbing to his feet again.

The girl who had been sitting on the bench is called Madeline. She has reached where she is going now. She doesn’t call it home. She opens the front door quietly and tiptoes up the stairs. She wants to slip into her room unnoticed and pull the covers up over her head. And that’s all she wants.

Not far away a woman is sitting at her kitchen table waiting for her son to return. She would like to talk to him about things but it has been difficult lately. She has written him a letter instead and placed it on his pillow. She is waiting for him to get home and read it.

It is remarkable how quickly a crowd gathers. In the coming days people who weren’t there will say they were and the stories told will all be different. It will be a conversation piece and then it will be nothing at all. There are paramedics at the scene now. They are moving about in their dark-green uniforms quickly but without panic. One of them places a tentative hand on the mother’s shoulder but the mother, crouched over and holding a bundle of something in her arms, doesn’t notice. Two police officers are talking to bystanders and two more are laying down cones. The sun is still shining. It glistens on the back of a tinfoil blanket and a magpie twitches its black-mirror eyes.

Benjamin Tate is no longer beside his white car. He has been lifted onto a stretcher and a face is leaning over and looking down at him. He watches the mouth move and notices randomly that the tongue is pierced. His eyes close and almost immediately he becomes aware that the pain has started now. It is astonishing pain, it is almost beyond pain and it blocks everything else out. Without warning he is sick all over himself but not all the sick leaves his mouth and he splutters and chokes. When he opens his eyes again he is in an ambulance and there is a needle in his arm. The pierced tongue is still there, clicking against teeth. He begins to feel a black creeping thing move through his body. The pain starts to fade and when he realises this he experiences relief like he’s never known. His mother is there too. Where has she come from? He doesn’t care. He doesn’t hate her really. He vomits again. Everything will be all right. She will take him away from… from what? He has a vague sense of something awful having happened but it’s beyond his grasp. The black creeping thing is moving all through him now. He feels his mother’s hand on his brow. She is young, hardly older than he is, and that doesn’t seem strange to him. She is rocking him. He is so light. The curtains of his room flutter in the night breeze. A lamp glows weakly in the corner. It is late. She looks tired, his mother. He is tired also. He will sleep. The black creeping thing fills him up. 4.46pm.

The mother with the pushchair is also in an ambulance. She is sitting motionless, staring at the opposite wall with a blanket over her shoulders. A woman who is trained in these things is talking to her quietly. Outside, a cloud bank is forming on the horizon. The sun drops behind it and the air around the roundabout cools. Goosebumps on arms. A hush descends. On the road a blanket is placed over something before it is scooped up and carried away. Whatever is left behind, whatever essence remains there on the stained ground, is taken by the wind.

Between 5pm and 6pm 13,026 phone calls are made by residents of the town. Of these, 13,024 are insignificant. But the other two are not insignificant and the people who receive them are forever changed.

The woman who was sitting at the kitchen table – she is Benjamin Tate’s mother – is still there. The last of the day is fading but she has not got up to turn the light on. Nothing moves. When the phone rings it startles the room. She listens for a few minutes and afterwards she remains at the table a little longer, as still as she had been before. She stands up abruptly. She goes to search for her husband. When she finds him she talks in one long rush. Their life as they knew it is over. 5.13pm.

On the outskirts of the town another man is driving home. His mind has shut down. He couldn’t understand what his wife was saying at first. ‘Calm down,’ he said, ‘speak slower.’ But eventually he was made to understand and his mind shut down. His colleagues should not have let him drive. They realise this now. In the coming months their awkwardness around him will become unbearable. He will learn that grief sits on your face like a disfigurement and people don’t want to look at it.

10.56pm. The storm that has been threatening has finally arrived. It soaks the pavements and floods the park. The roundabout is deserted now. The emergency vehicles have gone. The crowds and the cones have gone. Rain glistens in the glare of streetlights shining down into empty spaces. But in the morning the traffic will return. The people will be back. And all will be as it was.

PART 1

CHAPTER ONE

At first he ran because the older boys chased him, then he ran because he liked it, then he ran because he was the best. He rose while the house still slept and put his trainers on; pale early morning light through the window, a low, heavy sky over wet grass. He breathed deeply as he walked down the path, filling his lungs with new air. The letter was still on the windowsill in his room. It had arrived three days earlier and he’d opened it not knowing what he wanted it to say. Either way it would be bad news. Big things have a way of smashing up little things. His future was a big thing. His current whims were little things. He shook the night’s stiffness out of his legs and then began, a few short strides to ease into it, stepping over snails inching hazardously across the pavement. The street was empty. The only sound was his light step. He thought about the letter. It was only fourteen lines long. What would she say? She hadn’t seen it yet. Like him, she’d been waiting for it.

The world was his own at that time of the morning. He passed the closed curtains, the parked cars, the handmade banner on the door saying, ‘Welcome home, Daddy’, each letter a different colour. In the silent gardens spider webs wet with dew hung like fine lace between branches and over low bushes. He moved onto the hump in the middle of the road. His arms swung loose at his sides. Tap-tap, tap-tap. He turned into the park. How many times had he done this, how many laps? By now he knew each swell, each dip where ice would gather on winter nights. He passed under the arch of oak trees. He passed the croquet lawn and the cracked cement of what had once been a tennis court. He passed the playground where he met her.

‘I know you,’ she had said to him then. It was two years ago. She was sitting on a swing, rocking gently back and forth below trees full of summer. The toes of her boots bounced over the ground as they dragged.

‘Do you?’ he asked.

‘Well, I don’t know you. But I’ve seen you before.’

‘I’ve seen you, too.’ They had actually gone to the same school, though he doubted she’d have noticed him. She was one of those girls who boys like him stared at from afar, who entertained wicked thoughts about and blushed wildly at even a hint of contact, no matter how meaningless or impersonal. He was terrified of her really, of all girls, but her especially. He recalled the litany of stories that circulated through the corridors, the things they said she did at the sorts of parties boys like him only heard about afterwards. He didn’t believe all of them, was even too innocent still to understand all of them. What did those words mean? What acts, specifically, did they signify? She was dressed now all in black; black jeans and a heavy black jumper that drowned her slight frame. He thought how out of place she looked, amidst the climbing frame and the slide and the seesaws.

‘Don’t you get bored?’ she asked him. He glanced at her quickly, nonplussed. She looked over his shoulder to the fields behind him. ‘I’ve seen you. Just running round and round?’

‘Oh. I guess I do. Sometimes.’

‘Why don’t you stop then? And don’t just stand there, you’re making me uncomfortable. Sit.’

‘I’m going to America on an athletics scholarship. I’m good enough. I’m not going yet, I’m still too young, but when I’m older I’m going.’

Had he really told her then, before he even knew her name? Surely, he wasn’t so bold or so boastful. The American Dream, that’s what his mother had called it once, lamely, he thought, but that’s what he now called it as well. It was something private, a treasure he kept hidden in his pocket. He took it out sometimes, when no one was around, to examine it, to hold it up to the light and roll in between thumb and forefinger until it reflected his best face back at him. It never failed to excite him, to restore him somehow. It was his secret superpower.

He heard his voice telling her how often he ran, and how far and how fast. He told her about some of the races he’d already won and would still win.

‘It’s not easy to get one, a place I mean, but I will.’

Suddenly he faltered. The sun was glaring at him from up high. It made him sweat. Wasn’t she hot? Maybe it wasn’t the sun making him sweat. He remembered her lips, how they pursed around the cigarette, how her cheeks hollowed as she sucked hard. He remembered the smoke filling the cave of her mouth before the wind reached in and scooped it away.

‘I actually believe you,’ she said. He was still looking at her mouth.

He turned past the car park and floated down the gentle slope that led over the path he’d arrived on. The footprints of his first lap were pressed into the grass in front of him, running away into the distance like the tracks of a faster rival. He remembered his first race. The thrill of flowing around the bend, slipping round shoulder after shoulder. The ease of it: the school, then the club, then the county – they hadn’t found anyone who could beat him. He looped again around the croquet lawn, the tennis court. He was gaining speed. His stride was lengthening, his lungs were opening. He was running fast. He could always tell. It felt like it was someone else then. The cool air rushed over his hot skin. He passed the playground where he met her.

‘Come,’ she’d said to him late one night, closing the door silently behind them. It was their first night, or his first night, at least. ‘But be quiet.’ He remembered standing motionless on the rug for what seemed like ages, peering out blindly until black shapes and objects began to emerge blacker than the blackness behind them. He followed her as she picked her way between them. His heart was drumming heavily beneath his ribcage. He could make out a table, a bookcase, the large, lighter rectangle of the French doors behind their blinds. The click of his step softened as he crossed a carpet. ‘Be careful here,’ she whispered, before descending a wooden staircase that creaked beneath her weight. He followed cautiously, hands tracing the walls, feeling the lip of each stair with the soles of his shoes. Suddenly a light was switched on and he found himself standing in a sparse basement. There was a dartboard and a chalk line scratched on the cement floor, a threadbare couch, a picture of an old sailing ship behind a glass frame. The artist had painted it small, a tiny, vulnerable thing ill-equipped to cross the vast ocean in front of it. He sympathised.

She walked past him and opened a small fridge humming to itself against the wall. She took out a bottle of water and gulped thirstily before holding it out towards him. He shook his head and she had another mouthful before putting it back. He wondered how such a small frame could absorb so much. She seemed unaffected, undiminished. He didn’t know how he’d got there. In one swift movement, she pulled her vest over her head.

She. She is Madeline. She is red fingernails and tight vests. She is purple hair matching purple boots. She is loud music and strange parties and sweat in dark corners of dark rooms. When she was sixteen she and some friends had a competition to see how many boys they could sleep with in a single summer. Madeline’s number was twenty-three. Or that was the number she told them. It was half the real number, but it was more than enough. Of course, she knew what people thought. She thought it herself. And it was all true. Yet here she was again. He was a little timid for her liking, a little young in manner. He stood there gazing at the canvas like he’d never seen a painting before. But she’d always liked the name Ben. Had she had a Ben before? She couldn’t recall. She hadn’t always known names. She took a step towards him.