03- The Striker Portfolio by Adam Hall

Author:Adam Hall [Hall, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781906288556
Publisher: Ostara Publishing
Published: 2011-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

Page 70

It happens with a lot of people - drivers, airline pilots - and there's nothing they can do about it when there's an enquiry: they just 'don't remember what happened'. It is why Stirling Moss couldn't explain what made him crash. The memory traces need time to consolidate and store experience and if the head gets a blow it's like tapping a bowl of sand just after someone has drawn figures on it with a stick: it smooths over.

She was bathing my hands. I could have done it for myself in the bathroom but she'd got it all set up with towels on the carpet and hot water in the bowl and I didn't stop her because playing dolls would help her to deal with the fright and bewilderment: she'd been dreaming about Paul-Franz being dead and then I'd come through the doorway and fallen flat on my face with delayed shock and it must have been hard for her to take.

'I never see him in a plane or in a wreck or anything. You'd think I would.'

'Yes.'

She had a whole plastic bag of cotton wool and tore bits off it the wrong way, tugging at it and not getting anywhere. 'I see the funeral, men in black with pale faces I can't recognize. It's always a civilian funeral, I suppose because that's the only kind I've ever seen, my mother's, with big black cars and flowers. And all the time I'm thinking about the plane - it's made another widow and this time it's me.'

There had been a boy washing the windscreen of the N.S.U. He'd asked about the engine, if it ran well. The edge of the blank area was somewhere there: at the Esso station.

'You'll mess yourself up, Nitri.'

The water was red-brown in the bowl. She nodded and went to change it. I got up and followed her because this needed an entire bathroom and anyway I wanted to see if anything had happened to my face. But there must have been some kind of memory trace in the subconscious: the moment the N.S.U. had come to rest with the front lodged at an angle between two trees I'd snatched at the buckle and thrown the straps clear, kicking at the driver's door and finding it was jammed solid, dragging myself through the white fragmented windscreen and slitting a shoe on the frame. There was a branch in the way and my coat was catching but I forced myself through the gap with my scalp shrinking and goose-flesh everywhere: there was some kind of fear driving me on, pushing me through a gap that would have been impossibly small if the fear hadn't given me the strength. Not quite fear: a kind of dread.

'I'll make you a tourniquet from something.' The waterspan red in the basin.

Full consciousness hadn't come back until I'd felt the telephone cold in my hand. The concussion would have left me trapped inside the wreck: i t was the dread that had taken over.

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