Laura crouched down, she bit down hard on her lip, she felt a wave of nausea hit her as adrenaline flooded her system, her mouth filling with saliva, heart pumping fit to explode. She grabbed an empty beer bottle lying in the gutter and raised her arm.
A hand grabbed her, pulling her arm sharply back behind her torso. She felt a painful twist at her shoulder and she cried out, dropping the bottle. The hand let go. “What on earth do you think you’re doing?” a woman’s voice asked and Laura turned, left hand rubbing her painful right shoulder, to find she’d been apprehended by the hobbit.
That’s what they called her in the launderette, because she was short and hairy and she looked like she might live in a burrow or a warren or something, although it turned out she actually lived on a boat, which was in itself quite weird.
“Well?” The woman was frowning at her, more confused than angry. Like when her dad got cross with her, only he tried to deny it and said, I’m not angry, chicken, I’m disappointed.
“They won’t let me in,” Laura said limply, the red mist burning off, quick as it had descended. “She won’t let me in, and I didn’t even want to start any trouble, I only wanted to talk to Tania about something, it’s not even anything to do with the shop, it’s not even . . .” Laura stopped talking. It was pointless. All of it, pointless. She sank down onto the edge of the pavement, her knees up under her chin. “I didn’t want to cause any trouble.”
The hobbit leaned heavily on Laura’s shoulder as she sat down at her side. “Well,” she said gruffly, “I’m not certain chucking bottles about is the best way to not cause trouble.” Laura glanced at her and she smiled, baring a mouth full of crooked, yellowing teeth.
“I can’t remember your name,” Laura said.
“Miriam,” the woman replied. She patted Laura on the knee. “I take it you’re not working there any longer? I’d noticed you’d not been around.”
“I got fired,” Laura said miserably. “I didn’t turn up for two shifts on the bounce, and it wasn’t the first time I’d missed, and I didn’t call Maya to tell her, so she missed her grandson’s birthday, which is really shit, but the thing is that I didn’t mean to do it, I didn’t mean any of it. It wasn’t my fault.”
Miriam patted her knee again. “I’m so sorry. That’s horrible. Horrible to lose a job. I know how that feels. Would you like to go somewhere, to drink a cup of tea? I’d like to help you.” Laura shifted away from her slightly. “I’ve had to rely on the kindness of strangers myself, once or twice,” Miriam said. “I know what it’s like. It can be disconcerting at first, can’t it?” Laura nodded. “But I think,” Miriam said, smiling at her benevolently, “I think you’ll find that we’re really quite alike, you and me.”
No we’re fucking not, Laura thought, but she managed not to say anything, because she could see the woman was only trying to be kind.
* * *
“So then four years after I got run over, my mother married the man who knocked me off my bike.” Laura paused, adding milk to the mugs of tea she’d made. She handed the less-chipped mug to Miriam. “It fucks you up, stuff like that, no question. I mean, obviously, being knocked down by a car fucks you physically, it leaves you with pain and scars and all sorts of impairments, doesn’t it?” She gestured downward, to her gammy left leg. “But the other stuff’s worse. The emotional stuff is worse, the mental stuff. That’s what fucks you up for good.”
Miriam sipped her tea and nodded. “I couldn’t agree more,” she said.
“So now,” Laura said, collapsing into her chair, “I do stuff, stupid stuff sometimes, like this morning, or like . . . whenever, and it’s not like I even mean to, or sometimes I do mean to, only it’s like something’s been set in motion and I can’t stop it, and all I can do is react, try and minimize the damage to myself, and sometimes when you do that, you end up damaging other people, but it’s not deliberate. Not premeditated.” The hobbit nodded again. “People scoff, you know? People like my stepmother or my teachers or the police or Maya or whatever, when I say it’s not my fault. They’re like, well, whose fault is it, then?”
* * *
Janine, Laura’s mother, stood in the driveway in front of the house, looking over at the bird feeders in the apple tree. They needed filling up. She wasn’t sure they had any more feed, but she didn’t want to go to the shops now; it had been snowing for a while and the roads would be horrible. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, enjoying the pull of cold air into her lungs and the almost perfect quiet, which was broken suddenly and violently by a squeal of brakes. There followed a long, swooping silence and then a horrible, sickening crack. The drive was about two hundred yards long and tree-lined, and there was a hedge at the edge of the property, so there was no way of seeing what had happened in the road, but Janine knew. She told the police when they came that she just knew something terrible had happened.