Smells like trouble.
The snow.
It’s three in the morning. I’m in the station yard, coiling hose, hands moving with little conscious direction from me as I fumble through the job, fatigue weighing me down, fresh flakes falling at my feet, and though my mind is full of Sab, the air around me thick with damp and diesel, it’s a thought that never quits at this time of year.
They looked sick.
Him and Esme. Another thought I can’t shake, but this one’s not so old. It’s been with me a couple of days, and now I’m counting down the hours to the end of my shift so I can maybe do something with the number I scrawled on my arm as I stalked Sab’s van out of the local ASDA two nights ago.
It’s not on my arm anymore. It washed off after a garage fire late last night. But even if I didn’t have every digit inscribed on my soul, it’s on a scrap of paper in the pump cab where I’ve left my phone too.
Least, I hope it is, or I might fecking die. As it is, I’m still the same irritable melt I’ve been all week, blanking my siblings and Logan, cutting my ma short when she called to see if I liked theitchy as all feck jumper she sent. I feel like my skin doesn’t fit me. Like it’s inside out. Every sight and sound pisses me off, and my crew are getting the brunt of it.
Sonny wanders over to where I’m finishing up with the hose. Watches me drop it over the rim of his tea mug. “The boys are asking me if you got dumped.”
A reasonable question. But it irks me enough to feel like throwing hands. “Don’t you ever shut the fuck up?”
Sonny blinks, caught off guard by the growl in my voice. Then he shrugs. “Fair enough, mate.”
He walks away, and guilt rushes in, barbed and sour. This kid, he’s a good one. And they put him with me because I’m a competent mentor and I’mnice. Jesus, I’ve messed that up too, but unlike the mess I’ve made with Sab, this one is easily fixed.
Apologise.
Make him another cuppa.
Spend some time showing him more than the worst of me?—
The bells go off. And you know, that sound, I’ll hear it in my sleep till the day I snuff it, but sometimes it hits different. Sometimes it thrums through your ribs, straight to your marrow, and youknow, even before the Tannoy crackles.
“RTC—coach versus barrier. Multiple persons. Coach in the water.”
Like every firefighter in the yard, I still for a beat, that engrained urgency taking a second to land.
Then it’s chaos, and we run, grabbing kit, boots thudding the concrete, piling onto the pump as if we’re rolling into Christmas Eve while some poor bastards drown in a freezing river. Because that’s what’s happening—this isn’t a fecking drill, and I shove my gloves where I need them with my mind whirring a hundred miles an hour.
An RTC into water.
InDecember.
Not the first I’ve faced, but it’s been a while, and I already feel the cold seeping into me. The dread as we wade into something that wants to kill us as much as anyone who’s lived through the impact.
Take a chance, Nash told me.
Not sure he had this on his bingo card of wisdom, feck my life.
I propel myself to the engine, Sonny a heartbeat behind me, and clamber into the cab.
We find our seats as the doors slam. Blue lights flare. The engine roars to life, and through the open windows, I scent the same danger in the air as when the snow started in earnest a few hours ago.
I’m not looking forward to being cold and wet.
To contemplating it could be the last thing I ever feel. I need more—I need Sab. And that selfish need, despite the haunting memory of him walking away from me in the supermarket, has me reaching for the phone I left on the rig. Scrabbling for the crumpled slip of paper some big-arsed twat has already sat on.
I grab them both before I can talk myself out of it and shake off the gloves I’ve only managed to get halfway on. My heart hammers worse than any call anticipation I’ve ever had and I catch my reflection in the phone screen.
Wild-eyed.
Unshaven to the limit of regulations.
