We are almost over the hill. The trees on either side bend over backwards to give themselves – and us – some space, some air. Stoned by the heat, Jessie and I let out jungle cries, bird shrieks, monkey calls which Mum and Dad can’t hear. ‘EEEEIIIRRK!’ we scream, competing to split each other’s eardrums. ‘AAAARRCH!’ Then, in unison, as the car reaches the top and we see what lies ahead, only a few yards away: ‘SHHIIITT!’
There is a tree across the road, a big one, big enough to block both sides. Dad hits the brakes, but to those of us poking vulnerably out of the sunroof, it’s clear he hasn’t a hope in hell of stopping. We drop, Jessie and I, but we are not fast enough. We miss the worst option – decapitation – but as we dive back into the inner space of the decelerating car, it punches into the fallen tree, throwing my head against Jessica’s shoulder in a spasm of pain and light.
Not my first thought, but almost my first, is to wonder how Mum is. My head feels mushy, like battered fruit, but only on the inside. I could throw up if it wasn’t for the effort it would take. Jessie is leaning forward, clutching her shoulder, trying to reach between the seats to Mum. Dad, I see in lurid nausea colors as I pick myself up, is conscious but holding his neck at a weird angle and working his jaw as if trying to click something back into place. My own bones all seem to have taken a trip independently of the others.
‘Mum—’ Jessie says, before I can.
‘Sonia,’ Dad says. ‘Christ…’
Her eyes are open. There is a trickle of blood from one corner of her mouth. She is crying through clenched teeth, sobbing hard and long, leaving the tears to run with the blood and sweat.
‘Help me,’ she says, heaving on the seat to raise herself a little.
‘Mum—’ I say.
Then she lunges forward, letting out a scream that scares me shitless. Dad reaches across, but he looks as panicked as I feel.
‘No, leave me,’ she says as he tries to move her. She is panting, whimpering, doglike. ‘Leave me!’ She looks back at Jessie and me. ‘I’m OK.’ She tries to crack a smile, but her face looks swollen and bruised. ‘It’s started. Just give me a minute.’
It takes two hours. Two hours of stuff I know nothing about. Two hours of what sounds like hell. I never knew it was such hard work. Those films they show you, of the hump-bellied woman, legs apart, beaching a gunk-smeared nipper then smiling into camera, don’t show the half of it. It hurts, I see that now. It hurts bad. Coming into this world is clearly on a par with bursting the sound barrier – and if you’re the mother, you are the sound barrier! And there was I thinking it was going to be like Bambi.
It’s complicated by our situation. We are stuck on the road, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, a huge great bloody tree blocking our path, the car knocked about a bit, all of us badly shaken, probably suffering from shock (I know I am), with a woman who is now in the throes of giving birth. It could be worse. It could be raining. Instead, the sun has decided to stir, the birds are screaming blue murder at one another, and already it is so hot that I’ve stowed my damp and fragrant T-shirt in the back of the car.
Jessie and I hang around outside for most of the time. Her shoulder isn’t too bad, though she has some things to say about the rocky consistency of my skull. More seriously, her sunglasses are broken and there is nothing she can do about it. If we ever get to hospital, she’s going to be in trouble.
Dad has already inspected the tree and given up on it. I’m not surprised. It’s an oak and about the size of two London buses laid end-to-end. What’s astounding is what it took to tear this bugger from the earth. A net-work of cracks extends from the crater where its roots used to be, as if the ground suddenly retched and shook and spewed this thing up. It’s the heat, this country can’t take it. Even the land is cracking up.
Mum is grunting powerfully from the car as I stand staring at the roots, watching fleshy, leggy things crawl over the parched fibers, out of their element. My mother’s pain worries me, but what can I do? I’m thinking about football, maybe it’s a reaction, a defense mechanism. There’s been no traffic, not a car on the road as yet, Jessie has gone back to ours to speak to Dad, and I’m thinking about football. I was watching a DVD of the 1986 World Cup before I went to bed this evening – earlier this evening, tonight, whatever, before I got up again for this gig. Not the final, but the crucial England-Argentina quarterfinal, which we fucked up as always. What wankers! We never pull out the stops until it’s too late, no wonder luck and the refs never shine on us. On screen, you can watch and watch Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ goal and, fuck it, you just know that if one of our boys had scored that way, he would have owned up. We’re strong on appearances, we Brits, I think we use it to mask something else – a lack of passion maybe, a deep-seated sneakiness that’s always liked putting the boot in where the bruises won’t show. We should have kicked the Argies anyway.
Jessie comes over. ‘Dad wants us to find a phone and call for an ambulance.’
‘Is Mum all right? Has it happened yet?’
‘Moron. We would have told you.’ Would they? ‘But we ought to get someone here, a doctor or something.’
‘It’s going to be dead easy, finding one of those around here.’
‘Well, let’s try.’
‘We’ll probably meet some nutter who’ll rape us both and bury us in a ditch. Devon’s full of wonderful people.’
But as we turn to go, we hear the first sign of civilization in ages – a lorry straining up the hill behind us, out of sight. Terrified that it’s going to come rolling over the top and straight into our family group, we run to flag it down. It’s moving on overdrive, a massive articulated Eurotruck which makes even the fallen oak look small. We stand in front of it, forcing the driver to stop, almost blown off our feet by the hiss of hydraulic brakes.
The driver gets out, jabbering. He is young, tanned, French, wearing the kind of vest they just don’t sell over here. His companion follows, heavier-set, another Gauloise-smoking-beach-bum-muscle-prick. They both have arms like weightlifters. I can feel Jessie’s hormones humming beside me as she appraises them; I bet the boys are loving the shot of her navel they’re getting where her T-shirt doesn’t meet her jeans.
Jessie’s French is a lot better than mine – I don’t have any – so she takes the lead. Predictably, it’s her they want to speak to anyway. They follow us, prattling and watching her arse quite blatantly in front of me, as we go over the hill back to Mum and Dad.
The one word I recognize as we all come face to face with the tree and the battered Bentley is ‘Merde!’ The lads are clearly impressed. Either they haven’t been listening to Jessie or she’s got something wrong, because when they see Mum lying across the front seats of the car, her bare feet jammed against the doorframe, her sweat-soaked maternity dress barely covering the rain forest between her legs, they actually look embarrassed. Of course, I am too – a bit – and not just because they are here. Mouths which moments before had smirked with Gallic lust suddenly hang open, unsure of the ground rules for this sort of thing in Protestant Britain.
‘I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,’ says my father, who is attending to Mum in much the same manic way he does to the car’s engine when it gives out – without a clue. ‘Any chance you could help?’