‘This is ridiculous, Dolly. I can do it, Shirley can do it — so what’s the point in all three of us running up and down time and time again just because you can’t do it. You’re the only one holding us up. Take a rest and then try it again on your own.’
Dolly walked away, hands on hips, head down. She was pushing herself to breaking point, but she refused to give in. Reaching the rusty Morris, Dolly held up her hand, indicating to Bella that she was ready to go again.
Bella crossed her fingers. ‘Come on, Dolly. You can do it,’ she whispered. Dolly dropped her hand and started to run.
This time she was on target for the time limit, but it was awful to watch the veins standing out on her neck, her arms flailing at her side. Just a few yards before the finishing line, her body caved in. Her legs started to buckle under her as she forced herself on. She flung herself toward the finishing line then collapsed in a heap, her breath forced out in noisy, heaving, rasping sighs. On her hands and knees in the sand, she just managed to wheeze, ‘Get this off me, Bella!’
Bella quickly lifted the heavy rucksack from Dolly’s back. Linda smirked and shook her head smugly. Shirley looked daggers at her, and knelt beside Dolly.
‘It’s no good, Dolly,’ she whispered. ‘You can’t make the run.’
Gradually, Dolly’s breathing slowed and settled. She gave one final heavy sigh and got herself to her feet. She picked up the rucksack and handed it to Bella, who gave Dolly the stopwatch. Bella stripped off her bike leathers to reveal a pair of running shorts underneath. Heaving one rucksack on her back, she took Shirley’s rucksack in her hand and strolled off down the beach.
‘Just watch her go,’ Linda bragged. ‘She used to run for her school.’
Shirley could have hit her; sometimes Linda was really evil. Dolly said nothing as she watched how effortlessly Bella walked with the weight on her back.
Back at the Morris, Bella emptied Shirley’s rucksacks of sandbags onto the picnic blanket; she’d need these when Dolly was timing her. Picking up the chainsaw, she tested the engine, starting and restarting it. Satisfied Linda hadn’t damaged it, she got into the wrecked Morris Minor, rucksack on her back and chainsaw in her hand.
The second Bella jumped out of the car, Dolly started the stopwatch.
They watched in silence as Bella started the saw with one pull of the cord and cut a hole in the car door large enough for a shotgun to be pushed through. Bella then ran to the picnic blanket and lifted the sandbags, pacing the time it would take for her to fill Linda’s rucksack, then Shirley’s. She was like a machine. When Bella set off down the beach, Linda couldn’t control her excitement any longer. She began jumping up and down, waving her arms in the air.
‘Go, girl! GO! GO! GO!’ Linda screamed.
Dolly’s eyes flickered between Bella and the stopwatch. Bella ran toward them in long easy strides, as if the weight on her back had no effect at all.
Dolly didn’t have to give the actual time because it was obvious Bella was by far the quickest. While Shirley and Linda hugged Bella, Dolly walked back up the beach toward the Morris alone.
‘Let’s do the whole thing now,’ she called back them, and whistled to Wolf, who was rolling in a dead seagull.
They spent another hour running through the plan before calling it a day. While Dolly packed up the picnic hamper, Bella and Linda carried the chainsaw and rucksacks back up to the boot of her Merc. Shirley emptied the sand from the pillowcases and watched Dolly from the corner of her eye. Dolly’s lips were pursed tight and she seemed still to be seething at her own inability to keep up with the rest of them. Shirley had tried a big, consoling smile, but her split lip opened up again and anyway, Dolly had just ignored her. She was a tough old bird. Her own weakness in the face of Tony Fisher’s assault was playing on Shirley’s mind. I was pathetic, she thought angrily. But I won’t be anymore...
The final rehearsal run had been the slickest yet and well under time. Dolly’s decision to reorder the roles, with her now driving the blocking van up front, Bella back on the chainsaw and Linda driving the transit van behind, turned out to be absolutely the right thing to do and played to everyone’s strengths. They’d finished the day on a high, tired, filthy, achy, but invigorated. For the first time it seemed real, very real. As Shirley cleared the beach of their debris, she picked up one of the driftwood shotguns and smiled. Checking Dolly’s back was turned, she held the ‘gun’ in position one last time before throwing it into the dunes.
Dolly hadn’t cared about the decision she’d had to make about driving the lead van, but she did mind failing in front of her girls. They looked to her for guidance, for stability and for leadership and she had to maintain that role; there was no way they could think she was weak in any way.
Linda and Bella were almost at the bottom of the steps by the time Shirley and Dolly were packed up and ready to go. As Dolly looked at her three girls, she spotted the not-so-subtle sideways glance that Linda gave the others. While they no longer seemed to doubt that they could do this, by the way they looked at her, Dolly could see that it was her they doubted now.
She picked up the sledgehammer. ‘I never practiced my bit, did I?’ she said cheerfully. Standing a couple of feet from the Morris, legs apart, hands firmly gripping the handle, Dolly swung the hammer. The veins stood out on her neck and she let rip; not exactly a scream, but a weird guttural roar right from her belly. She let the hammer go and it flew through the air before smashing through the Morris’s windscreen, shattering it into a thousand pieces. Beads of glass flew backward, sprinkling over the back seats. For a second or two, the inside of the car looked like a snow-globe and it was almost beautiful to watch.
As the sledgehammer landed on the back seat, the three women gasped in shock.
‘Oh, my God!’ Linda spoke for all of them. ‘It’s like the first time you hear your mum say “fuck”!’
Dolly looked at them with an impish grin. ‘I know my strengths. And I know yours,’ she said. She turned serious. ‘We’ve got this, girls. We’ve bloody well got this.’ And then she said something that brought a lump to even Linda’s throat:
‘I won’t let you down.’
Now, Dolly saw no doubt in their eyes at all; only respect. They knew she could lead and she knew they’d follow.
By Harry’s third run, it was clear that he was holding them up. He simply wasn’t fast enough and, no matter how many times he tried, he wasn’t getting any faster.
No one said a single word as Harry thought through his options. His face was tight with anger and his jaw muscles twitched erratically. His anger was directed at himself, they could all see that, so they respectfully gave him the time and space he needed. Eventually, Harry handed his rucksack to Jimmy.
‘Lemme see you run, kid,’ he said.
As the sweat trickled down Harry’s bright-red face, Jimmy completed the run in a spectacularly fast time. In Harry’s younger days that run would have been a piece of cake, but he was smart enough to know where his team’s strengths lay — and his wasn’t running; not anymore.
‘Back to your start positions,’ Harry ordered. ‘I’m gonna time the whole thing.’