The Black Mile

A Road Home The carrier bag had split before they reached the end of Gill’s drive, and Molly was blaming the cake. ‘It wasn't the cake's fault,’ Alison said. She had one hand on the wheel and the other tucked beneath the bag while Molly attempted to retrieve a plastic tub that had wedged itself between the passenger seat and the door. ‘It's a bag from the greengrocer. It's been in the boot for about three years.’ ‘So you admit it's your fault.’ ‘I admit that the bag has had a long and useful life.’ ‘And now it's dead.’ ‘If you could get your feet out of the way, we might give it a decent burial.’ Molly sat back with the tub and opened it a fraction. A pale line of icing had spread across the inside of the lid. She considered the damage with the dispassionate attention she reserved for other people's mistakes. ‘Auntie Gill put it in upside down.’ ‘She was trying to be nice.’ ‘She could have been nice the right way up.’ Alison reached over to turn down the heater, which had been blasting at her left knee since the car started. Molly had put it on full when they came out of Gill's house, saying she was freezing, then taken her coat off before they'd reached the roundabout. The Mercedes was old enough for most of its minor faults to have become family habits. The passenger-side heater was one. The window that needed a second press was another. Molly maintained a private inventory and updated it whenever Alison mentioned how much cheaper the car had been than anything sensible. They left forty minutes later than Alison had planned. Gill's birthday lunch had turned into a birthday afternoon, then the business of clearing plates, finding somebody's mislaid handbag and listening to Gill's neighbour explain her dispute with the local council. Alison had come to this last conversation out of politeness and become trapped in it through a professional reflex. She worked in housing repairs; once people found that out, they assumed she could personally arrange anything from a new boiler to the removal of a fox from an attic. Molly had been waiting in the hall with her trainers on for almost half an hour. She'd announced three separate departure times, each later than the last, before putting her headphones in and giving up. ‘You told her to write everything down,’ Molly said, turning the icing-smeared lid over in her hands. ‘And take photographs of the damp. And find out whose fence it was. You basically gave her homework.’ ‘It'll be more useful than shouting at the council on the phone. Anyway, I thought you weren't listening.’ ‘She was standing in front of the loo. I couldn't get past her.’ That, Alison thought, was fair. The neighbour had planted herself directly outside the downstairs bathroom, refusing all attempts to be moved towards the kitchen. Alison had eventually drawn a plan of two adjoining gardens on the back of a supermarket receipt, which Molly now seemed likely to raise in evidence against her for several weeks. They joined the bypass past a closed garden centre and a row of houses where televisions showed blue through the downstairs curtains. On the other side of the road the last shops were closing. A young man in a takeaway uniform stood beside a moped and ate chips from a cardboard tray, watching the traffic without any evident intention of joining it. Alison checked the time. Twenty-one oh two. If they took the dual carriageway, they'd be home just after ten. Molly would complain about being tired in the morning, then watch videos under her duvet until half past eleven. Alison knew this because she had been fourteen once, and because the narrow blue stripe of light below Molly's bedroom door had become one of the house's more reliable fixtures. ‘Have you told Dad what time you'll be there tomorrow?’ Alison asked. ‘I sent him a message at lunch. You can check if you want.’ Molly found it on her phone and held the screen across the centre console. Alison was watching a van edge into her lane without indicating. ‘I believe you. I'm driving.’ ‘I have documentary evidence.’ Molly made another attempt to show her the message, then dropped the phone into her lap when the van finally moved away. ‘Save it for when you're accused of something more serious than being organised.’ Alison smiled and let the van pull well ahead before she changed lanes. At Gill's house Molly had spent most of the afternoon in the kitchen with two older cousins, laughing at something on their phones and occasionally coming through to take crisps from a bowl. When Alison joined them, the conversation had changed in the immediate, unsubtle way it did with teenagers. She'd pretended not to notice and gone to find another plate. It was getting more difficult to tell when Molly wanted company. Sometimes she'd sit on the end of Alison's bed and talk for twenty minutes about some complicated social quarrel at school, speaking so quickly that names and alliances became impossible to follow. Other times she'd emerge for breakfast, say she was fine, and remain fine with such conspicuous determination that Alison knew not to press. They were better at each other in the car, perhaps because there was nowhere else to go and nobody was obliged to make eye contact. Molly put the cake on the narrow parcel shelf behind the seats. The car had a soft top with a cloudy plastic rear window, and Alison had spent a whole summer threatening to have it replaced. They'd driven with the roof down on the way to Gill's, because the afternoon had been unexpectedly bright. For the return trip she'd raised it before leaving the driveway, much to Molly's relief. October evenings were not the place for romantic motoring, whatever the magazine photographs suggested. ‘How was Liv?’ Alison asked. ‘Did she sort things out with that girl from Friday?’ ‘Mostly. I didn't get involved because she asked me not to, and then she wanted to know why I wasn't getting involved.’ Molly stretched out one leg and examined a brown stain on the toe of her trainer. ‘I wouldn't ask. She's fed up with everybody asking.’ ‘Fair enough.’ Alison let a gap open between their car and the lorry ahead. It was only after they'd gone under a bridge that Molly spoke again. ‘Also, she says you have to stop calling her Olivia.’ ‘It is her name.’ ‘Her mother can call her that. She has a licence.’ Molly was still studying her trainer, but Alison could see her trying not to smile. ‘What happened to mine?’ ‘Revoked ages ago.’ Alison shook her head. She wasn't sure whether Molly had invented the licence or repeated something genuinely said between the cousins; both were possible. They passed the last illuminated petrol station before the turn-off. There was a queue at the pumps and a man holding a diesel nozzle with the impatient expression of somebody who had been promised an early evening at home. The satnav suggested a shorter route. The blue line left the bypass, cut across a few miles of smaller roads and rejoined the main road on the far side of a village. Alison had ignored it on the outward journey, unwilling to trust an unfamiliar shortcut when they were already running late. Now the screen claimed it would save fourteen minutes. ‘It's trying to send us through the woods,’ Alison said. She waited for the screen to settle, but it continued to insist that the shorter route would save fourteen minutes. ‘Probably because there's traffic,’ Molly said, leaning in to see the map. There was, according to the red markings on the map, a lengthy stretch of slow moving vehicles ahead. Alison had heard an announcement about overnight roadworks on the local radio earlier in the week, though she couldn't remember where. Molly enlarged the screen with two fingers. ‘It's a proper road, look. It comes out at the roundabout near home.’ Molly traced the line with one finger. ‘Three miles from home,’ Alison corrected her. ‘And it hasn't got a road number.’ ‘It's got tarmac, though. Which is usually enough for a road.’ Molly pinched the map wider. ‘It's a mile through the trees, then a right by a petrol station. There you go. Civilisation.’ Alison glanced down. The road was labelled as a minor public highway, a thin grey strand between patches of woodland. The route was roughly straight and didn't look complicated. She'd grown up driving roads like it with her father, who liked being able to stop for tractors and tell her which fields had belonged to whom before the new estates appeared. Her confidence in their geography had not survived the advent of smartphones, but she'd retained the habit of imagining that any road on a map would eventually lead somewhere sensible. ‘What if it turns out to be one of those little tracks where you have to reverse two miles because somebody's got a horsebox?’ ‘Then I'll film it for the family chat,’ Molly said. ‘Gill would love that.’ ‘Your aunt would send six thumbs-up emojis and ask whether we'd had tea.’ Alison waited for a gap in the traffic, still undecided about the turn. Molly made a noise of agreement. She had already begun composing a message to Liv about the birthday cake and seemed content to let the navigation do the rest. Alison took the turning. The road narrowed gradually, with a few houses at first and then a pair of farm entrances separated by a field. There were fewer streetlights. She dipped her headlights for an oncoming car, then passed a pub with a closed kitchen and several people standing beneath its porch, smoking. Beyond the pub, the last houses gave way to woodland. A green sign named a place Alison didn't recognise; there was a smaller brown sign with a white walking symbol, and a timber barrier beside a gravel entrance to a forest track. ‘Can you check that we're still on the right one?’ Alison asked. ‘Yes.’ ‘You haven't looked.’ ‘Because I was looking ten seconds ago.’ Molly tilted the screen towards her. ‘Right down here. No turns. Then petrol station.’ The Mercedes wasn't an elegant car in the way people expected when they heard the badge. It was nearly as old as Molly, its silver paint had been polished past the point of hiding the stone chips, and the passenger seat still had a faint circular mark from the time Alison had left a takeaway coffee on it during an emergency stop. She'd bought it second-hand two years earlier after deciding that, for once, she would get something she wanted before talking herself out of it. The roof had leaked during the first heavy rain. Molly had found the whole thing hysterically funny and made her buy a pack of towels to keep in the boot. Alison liked the way it moved over uneven roads, its weight and faintly old-fashioned steering. Driving it still felt like a treat, which had been the point of buying it. ‘Dad said the car was making a noise when he moved it the other week,’ Molly said. She gave the glovebox a light tap with the heel of her hand, as though the offending noise might come from there. ‘When did he move it?’ ‘When he dropped my bag off. You'd left it across the drive.’ ‘It squeaks when it's cold. It's done it since I bought it.’ Alison didn't much like finding out that her ex-husband had moved the Mercedes without asking, but there was little point raising that with Molly. ‘He said you should get it checked.’ ‘He says that about everything I own that has wheels.’ ‘He was right about the washing machine.’ ‘The washing machine doesn't have wheels.’ ‘It did when it started moving across the kitchen.’ Alison laughed. The incident with the washing machine had involved a collapsed foot and a flooded utility room, and Molly had treated it as proof of the unreliability of all adults for much of the previous winter. Alison had eventually told her to stop discussing it with visitors. A stand of tall pines closed over the road. Their trunks were so straight and closely planted that the headlamps lit them in pale, repeating columns. The verge was narrow, broken in places by drainage ditches. A white-painted field gate appeared on the left, then fell behind them. The road surface had been patched, and the steering wheel gave a brief shiver as the tyres crossed the joins. Molly's phone lit up with a new message. She typed a reply, held the phone up towards the windscreen to see if it would send, and put it on her thigh when it didn't. ‘Signal's rubbish.’ Molly tipped the phone towards the side window, waited and tried once more before putting it down. ‘We're in the middle of the trees. It'll come back.’ ‘You say that like you know.’ ‘I know trees don't go on for ever.’ Alison checked the empty road in her mirror. ‘You'll be saying the same thing when you're learning to drive.’ ‘When I'm driving, you're going to sit there telling me to slow down.’ ‘Almost certainly.’ The road bent gently right. An old reflector post leaned towards the ditch, its white surface muddy and the red panel cracked across the middle. Alison made a mental note to slow for the next bend. Fallen leaves had collected where the tarmac met the verge, the damp ones flattened into dark paste. The heater blew too hot against her hand, and she adjusted it again. ‘How much further?’ she asked. Molly checked. ‘About a mile before the station.’ ‘Good.’ ‘I hope it's got a toilet.’ ‘You went at Gill's.’ ‘Yes, before the neighbour made me stand there for forty minutes.’ Alison reached for the indicator when the road briefly widened at another forestry entrance, then realised there was no turn to take and let her hand fall back to the wheel. Molly caught the movement and smiled to herself. The music had stopped when Alison disconnected her phone at Gill's and she hadn't bothered putting it back on. Molly began humming a song Alison didn't recognise, stopped to look up a lyric, and discovered that she still couldn't send a message. She put the phone away and settled deeper into the seat. They went on between the trees, arguing mildly about whether Gill had actually turned fifty-five or fifty-six, and whether an upside-down slice of birthday cake could be improved by eating it from the bottom.