Jude felt a bit tipsy herself. Liam had drunk a lot, too, and taken who knew what else? But it was only a short journey. A few large drops of rain landed on the windscreen. She put a hand up to touch his face and felt his lips smile.

Then: “Fuck,” he said, or shouted.

Because there was a sharp bend in the road but the car sped onward, off the road, toward the tree. Terrible slow motion. Terrible clarity of disaster, and a world that would never be the same again.

A scream ripped through the air.

Jude couldn’t tell which way her body was facing. Her head rang with pain, one side, then the other. Yolanda was sobbing wildly in the back. Benny wasn’t saying anything at all.

“Are you hurt?” said Liam urgently in the darkness.

“I can’t see.” Jude put up a hand and found her face, which was warm and sticky. “I’m bleeding,” she said.

“Can you get out of the car?” said Liam.

“I don’t know. Yolanda? Benny? Are you okay? What’s happened? What’s going to happen?”

Liam climbed out, came round to her side, helped her out too. She couldn’t stand, her legs were shaking too much, and he sat her on the grass bank. She could make out his pale face. He returned for Yolanda, who stumbled away from the car and was violently sick on the road. Jude heard the splatter of vomit.

It started to rain. She heard Liam talking to Benny.

“Is he breathing?”

“Yeah, he’s breathing. He needs help, though. I’ll make a call.”

“Do you have to?”

Liam squatted beside her and wiped the blood from her face with the hem of his T-shirt. He seemed remarkably calm, almost nonchalant. “It’ll be all right.”

Tears and rain were stinging her face. Her tongue was swollen in her mouth. “This is a nightmare.”

Liam was talking into his phone. How could he be so calm? Jude leaned forward and cradled her face in her hands. She heard Yolanda sobbing and the wind blowing in the trees and somewhere an owl out there in the wet darkness.

Then from far off a siren.

The ambulance arrived first and, a few minutes later, a police car, then another, blue lights flashing on woods and on the car’s bonnet buried in the tree, on the pale scared faces of its four passengers. The paramedics lifted Benny onto a stretcher and he opened his eyes at last.

“Get off, will you?” he said. “What’s going on?”

A woman bent over Jude speaking in a kind voice, but Jude couldn’t make out the words. There was a roaring in her head. But she heard the words a police officer spoke to Liam, asking if it was his car.