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‘Was that drive before or after the fire?’ I ask.
‘After, I think. I’m not sure. My memories are all jumbled up.’
‘Mine too,’ I tell her. ‘A jigsaw I can’t fit together.’
I’d been doing a jigsaw that morning. Parliament Hill broken into a thousand pieces, a birthday present from Grandad and Nanna G. To improve patience and concentration, she’d written in the card, her penmanship perfect, unlike mine which has always been an illegible scrawl.
‘Just what you always wanted, eh Soph?’ Matty teased as I tore off the wrapping.
The pieces were so small it had taken me over an hour just to do the corners.
‘How about taking a break, pumpkin? Come for a drive with me, leave your mother to her funny Sad Tent book.’
‘Marquis de Sade,’ my mother corrected with an exaggerated eye roll. ‘And it’s not funny, it’s a classic.’
She was always reading ‘classics’, nine times out of ten with a pen in her hand to underline key passages.
‘Tent, marquee. What’s the difference?’
‘You might know if you ever picked up anything longer than a newspaper.’
‘Yeah, all right. Let’s go,’ I told Matty. ‘It’s a bit stuffy in here.’
He laughed.
‘Scat the pair of you,’ my mother said.
‘Where to?’ I asked, settling into the passenger seat.
I didn’t buckle up. It wasn’t yet law to wear seat belts.
Matty started the ignition, revved twice.
‘Would you listen to her roar? Ready for some fun, Soph?’
I started to answer, some quip about this being a Mini not a Ferrari, when he tore away from the curb, accelerating down the hill at such speed my stomach was left at the top, my body flung smack into the dash.
‘Jesus, Matty! What the hell!’
It was like he didn’t hear me. His eyes were glazed, fixed dead ahead. His hands rigid on the wheel. Faster and faster we went, the speedometer arcing around like a pole-vaulting Olympian.
‘Slow down!’
I clung to the door handle; my knuckles bone white, my spine pinned to the seat as though bound by invisible ropes. In my ears, the thunderclap of my heart.
Matty flicked me a quick look, the corners of his mouth twitching upwards.
‘Not scared are you, pumpkin?’
A challenge not a question. Before I could answer, he was jerking the wheel sharply to the left and then back to the right, sending the car drunkenly from one side of the road to the other, throwing me with it.
‘It’s rollercoaster time!’
‘Look out!’
A little old woman with a cane was hobbling along a pedestrian crossing– three, two, one metres from the bonnet. She glanced up, mouth slackening. Frozen to the spot.
Matty didn’t brake, just spun the car in a hundred-and-eighty-degree turn, slamming my head into the door. The impact reverberated through my skull, spots dancing in front of my eyes. My very brain seemed to throb.
