God, heisa genius. First the school dance and now this.
“Where’d you get the wine?”
“I have my contacts.” He winks. “And I learned my lesson, by the way. All the food I’ve brought is the most God-awful crap. Pizza slices, crisps, bottles of Coke, chocolate cake. Not a single piece of fruit for the junk-food junkie.”
He smiles. Then, taking a hand from the steering wheel, starts tracing images with his swift expressive fingers. He tells me what will happen tonight. He paints aching pictures with words, with the heavy silences between words, with the sudden flares and then the slow rolling of his fingers. It’s then I realize just how pitiful my imagination is by comparison. The images of us in the belfry become vivid, the voices keener, the promises sweeter, the touching a thousand times more varied. I listen and I watch and my throat runs salty. I hope I can live up to all this.
I can see Ellis is turned on by his own words. His finger flicks to the stereo and he silences George Ezra, something he never does. His tongue moistens his lips. I swallow hard. And now his hand is on my headrest. It’s in my hair. I roll with his touch, my eyes closed, my breath catching. His knuckles trace the contours of my face. His palm presses my chest. I arch my back to meet him and his hand slips under my T-shirt, and all he has to do is brush my nipple and I moan.
His hand is gone.No, you bloody tease!But then it’s back. My right knee…Ellis’s fingers crabbed there and fanning out. It’s a spot that makes me go weak; a place I had no idea about until El found it a month ago. He moves on, slowly, slowly, inside my thigh, a warm hand, pressing and pushing upwards.
“Ellis,” I whisper. “El, I—”
And then his hand whips away, and he screams, and the car screams, and the trees race towards us.
Something had flashed into the road – white on black – a comet streaking across the dark strip of tarmac. People, animals? No idea. Their blur was all I could make out before El wrenched the steering wheel and the car spun ninety degrees, its back wheels shrieking.
The g-force slams me sideways and I bump shoulders with El. He’s straight as an arrow in the driver’s seat, hands cemented to the wheel, foot ramming the brake. His shirtsleeves have hitched up and I can see his beautiful, self-designed tattoos spiralling down his arm.
He grabs the handbrake and wrenches it up. Hey, he’s the master of the handbrake turn, right? But this is too much for the old Nissan. El has ridden his luck with it once too often, maybe, and if it’s heading for the scrapyard, it’s not going alone. A split second later we’re facing the opposite direction, half in the road, half on the forest verge, and my passenger-side wheels are leaving the ground.
What starts as an almost tender motion picks up momentum. All at once, the Nissan hurls itself onto its roof, leaving the road completely and tossing us into the forest. I thrust my hands against the ceiling just as the windscreen buckles and breaks. Glass pixelates, frosts over. My passenger window shatters too, the impact knocking the safety glass into the car. It’s a weirdly soft sort of implosion, a bit like a sudden gale of snow, and I don’t know if it’s the pieces of window or a bit of random junk – loose CDs, pens, books, the little snow globe I gave El the first night we ever spent together, everything’s flying around in this insane vortex – but somehow I’m cut and a flash of blood strikes across my eyes.
The world spins downwards. My body shuttles away from El and hits the passenger door with a dull crack. In the hard flashes that come to me then, I realize I’ve been lucky. If my arm had flailed out of the broken window it would have been crushed as the Nissan tipped over. A rectangle of dewy spring grass fills the window and I crane my neck sideways as we continue to roll. I catch a glimpse of El hanging face down in his seatbelt, cradled there like a fly in a web.
I try to reach for him. He looks so scared. El is hardly ever scared. He reaches out. Then the car is upright again and gravity drops our arms to our sides. Misty through the fractured windscreen, I see the bonnet sheared into something like a mountain range. Smoke hisses from jagged peaks. But the car seems to have stopped moving.This is it, I think.Thank God, it’s over.A few cuts and bruises, maybe a broken bone or two, but in a couple of hours we’ll be sitting up in our adjoining hospital beds, reliving this close call, laughing at mortality. Adjoining beds. I wonder if we can get away with pushing them together when no one’s looking? I almost smile.
I see El take a breath. He’s hurt. But not badly.
Don’t say badly.
And then it’s like that moment when the washing machine fools you. When it’s finished what seems to be the final super-mad spin cycle and starts to whir down, only for it to start up again the second you reach for the door release. I begin to call his name, my blood surging, when El is suddenly thrust against the driver door.
We’re rolling again, picking up speed, going faster if anything. As my seatbelt cuts into my shoulder and my head smacks the ceiling, I see the path we’ve cut through the tall grass, the trail of rubbish and broken belongings we’ve left in our wake. The wine bottle has been thrown clear and is now rolling down the hillside. Except it isn’t quite a hill. We left the road at that part of the forest where the trees are sparsest and the land drifts downwards, sloping its way through a clearing until it reaches a shingled shore.
Hunter’s Lake.
“No!” I scream as this new reality hits me. “NO!”
Because I’m looking over at El and his eyes are shut. Not screwed tight in terror, but loosely lidded, like he’s drifted off to sleep. He is hurt. Badly. Half his face is awash with blood, like a red-lit Phantom of the Opera mask.
“El!” I try to reach him, but the cyclone continues and he’s twisted and dangled in his seatbelt web. “EL, WAKE UP!”
Through my window, then through his as we roll, I see the dark shimmer of the lake. They have punting and pedalos here in the summer. El and I haven’t spent a summer together yet. Messing about on Hunter’s Lake was a tiny part of the plan we made at last night’s picnic. The lake is bigger than I remember. They say a toddler drowned here once. She was chasing a butterfly and her parents weren’t watching. She flew with it right to the end of the diving pier, and then beyond.
I don’t know when we hit the water. Maybe it’s the blood loss, but I pass out for a minute or two. It can’t be much longer than that, because when I come round we’ve finally stopped and we’re upright and the black water is only just beginning to slosh around my ankles. It seeps and gushes through a thousand different openings in the car, big and small, seen and unseen, and I swear it’s laughing at me.
So you thought this wasforever?it chuckles.There is no forever, Dylan. Not for you and him. There never was.
It’s a warm night but the water’s cold and murky and stinks. My skin freezes as it oils its way slowly up my leg, across my knee and along my thigh, moving like an anti-Ellis, its touch intimate and disgusting. I try to free myself but the belt holds me fast. It’s jammed and for some reason I don’t have the strength to unclip it. It’s like my fingers are being worked by some drunk puppeteer. I watch them fumble and paw at the fastening, and all the while I switch my gaze from the creeping water to El and back again.
Ironically, his seatbelt has snapped at the buckle. He’s free, slumped forward over the wheel, unmoving. For twenty heart-stopping seconds I think he’s not breathing. Then he takes a shallow, stuttering inhalation. I shout and plead with him, try to grab something random to throw at him, but my hands won’t do as they’re told and he won’t wake up. Gouts of red that make me shriek drop from his chin into the water. They billow around his waist and send out tentacles towards me.
I turn to the broken window and the shore. We’re within a few breaststrokes of land but Hunter’s Lake is notorious for its deep and sudden plunges, and just as I’m about to cry out for help, the Nissan lurches sideways. The lake bed is a kind of loose black peat that squelches through your toes like sinking sand, clinging to you, trying to claim you. It’s a jealous lake and it wants me and Ellis.
We begin to slide deeper and deeper. El’s side of the car is soon underwater but his window is intact. Fresh springs hiss through the cracks and shower his motionless face, washing it clean of blood. We’re drifting downwards, forty degrees maybe, and the lapping waterline bubbles up to El’s chin. My heart thunders. I thrash the water, rip my hand raw against the belt clip. Still my fingers won’t work properly. I glance right. Black, filthy, frothing water touches that beautiful bottom lip – the lip I used to catch between my teeth, teasing him. The lake quivers there for a moment and then begins to dribble into Ellis’s unresisting mouth.
“No! Please, NO!”
