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Back Driving in the Dark Save as PDF
Chapters (27)
  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. One
  4. Two
  5. Three
  6. Four
  7. Five
  8. Six
  9. Seven
  10. Eight
  11. Nine
  12. Ten
  13. Eleven
  14. Twelve
  15. Thirteen
  16. Fourteen
  17. Fifteen
  18. Sixteen
  19. Seventeen
  20. Eighteen
  21. Nineteen
  22. Twenty
  23. Twenty-one
  24. Twenty-two
  25. Twenty-three
  26. Twenty-four
  27. About the Author

There was a silence. She squeezed out the sponge, thoroughly, and put it back in its plastic holder. This was the moment for me to tell her about Edward, but I couldn’t. She would get the wrong idea, just as Eleni did; just as that bloke Eric did, years before. I put away the tea cup. She would think I was like Reg—a dirty bugger.

She peeled off her rubber gloves and laid them on the windowsill to dry. The sun had come out.

‘She’d bought an old van, goodness know how,’ she said. ‘An old banger. The morning after we’d had words, she packed up her stuff, and the children’s stuff, and she was off to join her sisters.’

‘Sisters?’ I stared at her. ‘She had sisters?’

‘Not that sort of sisters, silly billy.’ She pulled a face. She looked better now; her colour had returned to normal. ‘Her sort of sisters.’

‘The sisters at Greenham. You know. Those women.’ She untied her apron and hung it up. ‘The women at Greenham Common.’

Sixteen

Sixteen

‘I used to go camping with my Dad,’ I said. ‘To give my mother a break. We had this tent for two, and I mean two. Not like these through-lounges they have now, and these perspex windows and car ports and roof extensions—’

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Hilda.

‘Well, anyway. We went to the woods outside Eastbourne, where the trees run down to the sea. Funny how it’s always sunny, isn’t it, when you’re young? He made me a bow and arrow, it’s not willow you should use, it’s hazel. Begging Barry’s pardon.’ I paused. ‘We’d walk for miles, and then he’d sit and do the crossword while I climbed the trees, and he’d be whistling.’

‘Probably because he’d got away from your Mum.’

‘That’s not true!’

‘What makes you so sure?’

‘Hilda, I was their son!’

Her needles clicked. ‘My parents hate each other’s guts.’

‘Don’t say that!’

‘Why not? They only stick together because they were too cowardly to leave each other, and now they’re too old.’ She sniffed. ‘He only speaks when he wants her to pass the ketchup.’

‘How terrible.’

‘You don’t think it’s terrible, when you’re little,’ she said. ‘Me and my brothers didn’t. You think it’s normal.’

Trees lined the road. The sun had come out. As we drove past, the sunshine flashed between their trunks, on-off, on-off, like morse code. I was deaf to their messages. I fixed my thoughts on my father, whistling in the woods.