Tess tottered along on the road, complaining that her feet hurt, although I would have thought the amount of Smirnoff Ice she’d been knocking back all evening would have had an anaesthetising effect.
“You’re worried about ‘em, aren’t you?” Tess said suddenly, a moment of unexpected clarity surfacing.
I turned to stare at her in the gloom but I could barely make out her features. Ahead of us, Paxo must have tripped over something. I heard him swearing amid catcalls and laughter from the others.
“I suppose so,” I said, guarded. “I just wish they’d level with me.”
Tess made a sound that could have been a snort. “I don’t mean that,” she said, her voice blurry at the edges but still laced with a certain cunning. “I mean now. You’re worried about ‘em now ‘cos they’re pissed. Whaddya think they’re gonna do to ya, Charlie?”
I felt a chill prickle across the surface of my skin. I jammed my hands into my pockets and tried not to rub at the goosebumps that had sprung up on my arms.
“I don’t think they’re going to do anything to me,” I said carefully, annoyed at her perception. Annoyed at myself for giving anything away. “I think they’d be mad to try.”
The lights of an approaching car appeared around a bend in the road behind us, throwing drastically elongated shadows onto the road ahead. The boys were twenty metres ahead of us now and I saw them skitter for the sides of the road in the sudden glare.
I glanced back just as the car cleared the last bend. A mistake. His lights were on full beam and my retinas were instantly scorched by them. I ducked my head away quickly.
Something about the engine note was a warning, though. The car was being held in too low a gear and the revs were thrashing, harsh and high, in protest. It was also too far over to the right-hand side of the road.
Much too far.
I yanked my hands out of my pockets and grabbed Tess by one arm, swinging her round straight off her feet. She gave a single outraged squeal as she went airborne, landing with a massive thump further along the grass and tumbling to a halt.
The car shot past, its driver’s side wheels kicking up a blast of gravel from the shoulder where, only moments before, Tess had been walking.
The boys jumped out of the way with shouts and curses, but the car pelted away through the middle of them.
I’d overreached to get to her in time and ended up on my knees. I got my head up fast, but the car was already disappearing and I failed to get any impression of a model or colour, never mind a number plate.
“Fuck me, are you all right?”
Jamie’s voice. Now the lights of the car had gone, it suddenly seemed very dark.
It took a few moments before my eyes began to settle. Then I could just make out William and Daz picking Tess off the floor. She threw herself into Daz’s arms, weeping. He froze for a moment, then closed his arms round her and started making ‘there, there’ noises.
“Crazy bastard,” Paxo said, glaring after the disappearing car. “What the fuck was he trying to do?”
“I would have thought that was pretty obvious,” I said grimly, climbing to my feet and dusting off my hands on the seat of my jeans. “The only question I have is, why?”
Nineteen
Between us, we managed to get Tess on her feet long enough to get her back to the hotel. We staggered in through Reception with her draped between us, still wailing – drunk, scared, and hurt, in equal measure.
In the light she looked terrible. Grass-stained and dishevelled. Somewhere along the way she’d lost a shoe and her shaken lack of co-ordination only accentuated the unevenness of her gait. The grass verge had been stonier than I’d realised when I’d chucked her across it and she now had a long diagonal graze across one knee and scrapes to both palms. Still, it had been a better option than the alternative.
A stick-thin middle-aged woman was working the late stint on the front desk. She took in the state of Tess and skewered the four lads with a long and suspicious glare. I think if I hadn’t been with them she might have seriously considered the possibility that they’d roughed the girl up themselves. She certainly didn’t seem too convinced about their furtive story of a rogue drunk driver, despite the fact that it was close to the truth.
“I’ve got a first-aid kit in my tank bag,” I said. “Come up to my room, Tess, and we’ll get you cleaned up.”
She took little coaxing, nodding tearfully with her lips pressed tight together like a child promised a lollipop in return for being a big brave girl. She leaned on a table long enough to toe off her other shoe, abandoning it where it landed, and trailed after me.
As we reached the bottom tread of the staircase I paused and looked back, letting her go on ahead. The four of them were still standing in the reception area, stiff shouldered with delayed shock.
“Another close one, Daz?” I murmured.
For a moment his eyes met mine, haunted, then he flicked them away and his expression shifted into devil- may-care so comprehensively that I could almost have imagined the other.
“Bar’s still open,” he said, defiant. “Anyone fancy another beer?”
***
“I never wanted to be here, y’know.”
I glanced up in surprise at Tess’s sudden statement as I dumped another piece of TCP-sodden cotton wool into the rubbish bin. She was perched on the edge of the second bed in my room, having sat down with
